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That trick-or-treat meme!
You know the drill! Prompt me, and I'll write a snippet of fic for your candy bag. (Y'all should know the fandoms I write in now, and if you want an original snippet, I'll be happy to provide.)
Additionally, as I'm now staying with the former editor of a podcast, I have access to a fancy microphone which is no longer being used in the household. So if you'd like me to read something – say, up to 500 words? Flashfic, snippets of fic, my fic, your fic, poetry from around the web, Shakespearean monologues – you may request those, too!
Additionally, as I'm now staying with the former editor of a podcast, I have access to a fancy microphone which is no longer being used in the household. So if you'd like me to read something – say, up to 500 words? Flashfic, snippets of fic, my fic, your fic, poetry from around the web, Shakespearean monologues – you may request those, too!
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Anything Sam.
:)
If you insist on something less vague, then Sam and something creepy through the Stargate
Alien will-o'-the-wisps!
Then again. The boles of the trees were bone-white, but whenever she was't looking at them, Sam would swear they were dark, in deep shadow. The sunlight streaming through was the bright yellow-white light of any number of worlds, but if she closed her eyes for a second, Sam would swear it was pure white and pale, like movie-set moonlight. It was day, and she could feel the warmth of day dappling her shoulders. But she had a feeling that when she went back to Earth, sat at her computer, started to write this up, it would slip out of her fingers that it was night, cold, hard to see.
That was enough to unsettle her.
A few times, Teal'c had stopped, pressed his fingers into the ground, frowned. When Colonel O'Neill had asked him what was up, he'd seemed unable to give an answer that satisfied himself. But Sam felt it too – she wanted to lop off the branch of one of these trees, examine the grain, feel it between her fingers. She wanted to know precisely how real this place was, because it felt like smoke and mirrors. Like they were being drawn in somewhere, with an illusion carefully painted over the real world.
But the MALP had sent back the right images, and the UAV had sent back the right data, and her handheld read the energy signature holding steady not too much farther in front of them. And yes, they'd encountered planets with illusions that could fool the MALP at least, but constantly questioning reality wasn't good for anyone's sanity. You had to take it on faith that you'd end up where you thought you were going – and if that faith was scaffolded by skepticism here and there, well, that was just part of the bargain or exploration.
After a few more steps, it was Daniel who stopped, turning to the rest of them. The Colonel looked over with Please, Daniel, feel free to explain expression, and Sam looked, keeping half her attention on the handheld. Just in case it would stutter, shift, slip up.
"We've been walking for a while," he pointed out.
"That's the job description," the Colonel crabbed. "Go to new and interesting planets, walk places, get shot at."
Daniel gave on that entirely, and turned to her instead. "Sam. When the UAV picked up that signal, about how far was it?"
"About a mile from the 'gate, as the crow flies," Sam said, and she could see where he was going. "But we haven't been going in a straight path. And–"
The terrain has slowed us down, she would have said, but she couldn't remember anything more than the occasional root, the thorny bush to step around. They hadn't been going down crags or crossing streams. And thinking back, she couldn't remember an obstacle that'd blocked their path or diverted it. Just... the trees, and the undergrowth, and the scuffling of animals she could hear but never saw.
"We have not been going in a straight path," Teal'c confirmed. "Major Carter. We have always progressed directly toward the reading?"
Sam turned, scanning the area. The reading remained solidly... where it was, where it had been this whole time. Where it seemed to have been.
"Yes," she said – she let her mouth let out the word. Her attention was elsewhere. "I'm not picking up the MALP."
The Colonel cursed, and his hand hit his pocket. A second later out came the compass and the aerial photo – folded, with creases interrupting the ink – the MALP had snapped. Not much topography there; thick forest, a clearing around the Stargate, no indication of anything that could be seen beneath the leaf cover where the energy signature had come from. As maps went, it was fairly useless.
Sam pulled out her own compass. This place had a magnetic field, a magnetic north; her compass aligned itself to it with no problem. Which didn't tell her much.
Daniel cleared his throat. "All right," he said. "...how far is the signature? Sam?"
"Third of a mile," Sam answered. Close enough to suggest that they'd get there soon enough. Far enough that they'd need to walk a little bit, yet. There was something psychologically suggestive about that.
"Are you sure?" Daniel asked.
She'd been keeping an eye on direction this whole time, glancing at the distance as a point of curiosity. Apparently not a point which stuck in her head. She couldn't remember any milestones they'd passed.
"It's what my equipment is reading," she said. Answered, no. I'm not sure. Why didn't I notice this before now?
Except she had – they all had. Hence the pensive silence. But something about this place had wrapped itself around them and convinced them it wasn't worth bringing it up. Look: the sun was so warm and reassuring, and the air was cool and had no sense of menace. Everything was just as it should be, wasn't it?
Sam closed her eyes for a moment, counted primes to twenty-three. "All right," she said. "I think we have a problem."
Re: Alien will-o'-the-wisps!
I LOVE her equivalent of counting to ten. That is SO SAM.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. And now, of course, I will be nagging you to finish it. Because we wants more, yes we do, my precious.
Thank you. :)
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It takes three weeks for Governor Mitchell to agree to meet them, which starts rumors circulating among his aides in the know. That pleases Jack. Rumors, he can work with.
As it is, the Governor invites them to his own house and Jack walks in like he owns it, with the Winter Soldier stepping after him in military style. And maybe Governor Mitchell was hoping for a home-field advantage but Jack knows the look to give him, and the posture to assume, and the Soldier standing at ready next to him blows down the last of the Governor's attempts at taking control of the situation. He crumples before the first word.
"I'd heard rumors that–" the Governor says, and makes a weak gesture toward the weapon walking by Jack's side. Like he's afraid to say a name. "Well."
"That he was lost?" Jack fills in. "You of all people should know not to believe everything people say. Especially people who might not be trusted with all the information."
Governor Mitchell bites his tongue and doesn't answer the things he must be thinking: that the people he hears from are people he'd assumed to be at the very top, and either Jack is lying, or Jack is more terrifying than he thought possible. And Jack does have the advantage of the Winter Soldier at his side.
"Yes," the Governor says. And then, "Please. How can I serve Hydra?"
They always get there sooner or later.
Walking out of the house fifteen minutes later, Jack has another bit of power in his proverbial pockets. And no, he might not be ruling Hydra anytime in the next year or two, but he'll get there if no one else stamps them out first. He's got time.
And plenty of inclination – because Jack knows where he was in World War Two, and knows what side he was on, and he has more than his own expectations to live up to. Cut off the Nazi head and Hydra still slithers on, and Jack could be above all of this but he's as balls-deep in it as he ever is. Yeah, he might be a manipulative sumbitch of Agency torturer scum, fallen from every grace he's had the chance to reach for, but give him a few years and his own skills and he will take these people apart like he took apart Torchwood, turn them to his own aims – to the protection of Earth – without them knowing what hit them. There's more than one way to stamp out the enemy threat.
Anyway, sitting on the sidelines isn't in his nature.
It's not until they've turned a corner and Jack's grabbed his companion's arm and teleported them away that Bucky asks, "How did you do that?" His voice has gone all flat. That way it does. Bucky does't trust Jack as far as he could throw him – which is pretty far, even if Jack doesn't know that from experience (yet) – but he follows Jack anyway. He's aware of the game being played, but apparently that awareness makes it all right. Or makes it something he needs to drink down like medicine. Or disassemble like an unexploded bomb.
"Lots of practice," Jack says. They're in the abandoned condominium building they've made their own, out in the middle of economic-crash nowhere, and Jack shrugs and walks to the window, leans into the wall behind it. Bucky's eyes track him.
"He followed your commands," Bucky says.
Jack gives him a sidelong smile. Yes, and it's interesting that Bucky noticed it – interesting and telling. Jack never voiced a command that most people would recognize as such. But he'd wanted something out of that encounter, and he got it. "You knew what I was when you picked me up."
Bucky frowns. Like he gets that Jack's talking past him – doesn't get the metaphor, gets that there is one, gets that Jack likes doing this, likes slipping words around his ears he doesn't understand. But that's part of the game. Has been since they met.
Which, oh, was a language game itself, wasn't it? Both of them dealing cards face-up. Bloody confessions deployed like executive orders.
No names, just then – just raw truth, and somewhere in it, the piece of hardly-decommissioned weaponry had attached himself to the hardly-retired compliance officer, and off they'd went. Jack primed to use people, Bucky primed to be used. Jack'd wound up calling him Yasha at first – seemed right, for some reason; flecks of a Russian accent when he mutters to himself, flecks of a Soviet sensibility when he considers things, and there's that star on his arm – until he actually asked, haltingly, if Jack could call him Bucky. Amended almost immediately to Buck. Very nearly amended to never mind. Forget it except that Jack had skewered him with a look and held him there and then reached back into the conversation and said "Bucky. Okay," with a kind of firm holding-on, because people like Yasha didn't come up with names for themselves like Bucky without a story behind them.
And he suspects that Bucky doesn't know that story. That he's trying to fit into the name like a snake crawling back into a skin. He suspects that chopping off that -y was an attempt to make it somewhat more serious, because Bucky's entire mode of being at the moment is pensive and serious, but that chopping that y just made it fit worse. Jack should know. It's not like he hasn't got his own collection of names that don't fit right.
(Jack being one of them. Fits like a too-stiff suit. He can feel the air between his skin and all the expectation that name carries with it. But all the other names available – John, Jarec, that other name he left behind on Boe-Shayne – they all hurt just a little bit more.)
Bucky is still working out where Jack is leading him, Jack suspects. Maybe he just knows it's somewhere new – somewhere that isn't a rehash of his Winter Soldier past or the other past he can't get his tongue around.
"I don't understand," he says, at length.
Jack leaves the window. Comes over and puts a hand on the back of Bucky's head, then drops it. "Down dog," he says – not a directive but a label, a reminder. He has a feeling that Bucky's been the down dog for a long time, now, maybe as long as it's been since he lost that name.
Bucky doesn't feel like a down-dog name. It reminds Jack of the old Agency saw, actually, the one that almost translates into English: that there are three types of people like Jack; the bucks, the boars, and the bitches. Jack was always a buck. Ready to tangle antlers, none too worried if he took a fall or two. All in sport, right?
But Bucky's eyes are blazing, frustration and anger and unease all battering at the corners of his self-control. That involuntary self-control. One of these days Jack's going to see that self-control shattered from within, and that will be fun – even if ends with him dying messily, as happens, some days.
But until then, and probably even through then, he's still the up dog here. And that's the difference between them. They're both broken, they've both been broken, and mucked about with, and reshaped into weapons, but Jack was left his agency (and ironic, that; the Agency left him that agency) and Bucky was never meant to be anything more than a tool.
That will change.
Bucky's already feeling his way around it. Watching Jack, measuring out the cadence and the word choice and the coaxing, coercing call to compliance which is just about everything Jack says, these days. Jack could have been an instructor in the Agency, if he'd stuck around for it. And the first thing the instructors do is break all the students.
Well. Bucky's already broken. So this is the hard part – putting him back together again.
"Up," he says, though it's tucked beneath his breath. Where Bucky can hear it, but understand that it's not quite meant for him – not entirely, not yet. A covenant between them.
Then Jack turns back to the window, brings up his wrist, queues up his notes on just how the power of Hydra is to fall into his hands. All he needs now is to know what's next.
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I love this. I love this to sad and pathetic extents The boys being fucked up and broken and navigation this and I love it so stupidly much. <3333
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If not, hm. Diana and Halloween traditions?
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Diana has been watching the girl with the fox face and the bouquet of tails the entire time they've been here, and she still can't see how the costume is stitched together.
Across from her, Christie is fiddling with the radio, though mostly what comes out is static. A few times she hits on someone that sounds like a talk-radio host, but smilier and bubblier, and switches away from it even though he and a few dusty strains of country music are the only things they can get out here, and Christie has never been a fan of country. Neither has Diana. But at least Christie seems to be happy out here.
Which, how that came about was one day Christie says "There's this carnival outside of my hometown. It's kind of a Halloween tradition – you know, it comes by, it gets advertised on the radio, but no one ever goes? Well," and she flips her hair back, carefully careless, though Diana's a good enough cold reader to know she's not feeling that way, "I was kinda thinking that, you know, we could, this year."
Carnivals are not Diana's thing. But Christie is, and Christie has followed her up from DC to NYC on a favor, and so Diana takes a week's vacation and drives sixteen-hour days with Christie down long flat interstates. So here they are. Sitting at a picnic table that's been set up with an overhopeful dozen more under a series of shade canopies in a stretch of desert that makes Diana think that Christie's childhood must have been stunningly unlike her own.
"It'll liven up once it gets dark," Christie reassures her. The girl in the fox costume comes by and pours them more to drink – some form of alcohol that tastes almost exactly like roses.
And it does. Liven up. The sun sinks red under the horizon and more people come out, in owl masks and mockingbird masks and Regency dresses and a few who must be on stilts, they're so tall, and they're wearing some kind of lit-up mask or something that makes them hard to look at. She doesn't try to look at them long. But she sees them moving about, fixing the lights, hanging lanterns which spit and spark. Some of the bird-masked people take up instruments and Christie grins, grabs Diana's hand, pulls her up like there's about to be a dance floor.
"We're the only ones who didn't bring costumes," Diana says, and Christie just grins wider.
"Doesn't matter." She pulls Diana out onto the sand, and one of the glowing figures affixes a lantern above them – to what, Diana doesn't see. The sparks shower down around them, fat as fireflies. "Come on, Agent Barrigan. May I have this dance?"
"Well, Doctor–," Diana starts, and it's as far as she gets, because the band kicks up, and her feet are moving without her direction. It's the alcohol, maybe; it's the music, maybe; it's the sheer joy from Christie, a joy that carries its own momentum, spinning her around, and she's laughing. They both are laughing. Christie's never said, really, why she never goes home for holidays, why she never stops back from a visit, but here a stone's throw from the town she's never named (and Diana's never given in to the urge to find through the FBI), it's clear she's happy to be anywhere near there.
They dance and the stars come out, and the desert goes dark in all directions. They dance and the band plays without stopping, and Christie's kisses burn under the shattering sparks. Diana holds on and kisses back, and her lips and her tongue feel molten, sliding along Christie's mouth, her jaw, her neck. She holds on, because she has the sense that if she doesn't hold tight, the whole night will dissolve into lanterns and firelight.
She holds on.
But somewhere in the singing and the smoke that wreathes around them she must get lost, because she can remember the music, later, but none of the words, and not how the night ended. Not how they stumbled back to their hotel or tumbled into bed or found their way to sleep and through sleep and back to the morning. She just wakes up there, with roses still on her tongue and the desert light marching in through the blinds, bright and unapologetic even here in fall.
For a while, nursing something that's less of a hangover and more of a comedown, she doesn't want to turn around. There's a half-harbored superstition that either Christie's not there, or that she's there like Eurydice, and looking back to see her face will make her vanish.
But it's just a vague thought, lurking in the last vestiges of sleep. And when Christie makes a noise behind her and nuzzles into Diana's back it feels good, and right, like she's made a choice – like they've both made a choice – to be here.
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Although Petra is terrible at acting relaxed.
Petra had all her attention on the small-scale model that was taking shape under her fingers: chambers and corridors of fractal complexity, energy shaping the smart material as she eked power from of the new generator humming beside her desk. Which meant that she didn't notice, for a few moments, that someone had come into her quarters. And said someone didn't do much to draw attention to himself before sidling up to the other side of her desk, because he didn't seem to believe that the walls and doors actually indicated any sort of separation between their living areas and made himself as home here as he did in his own rooms; it was an oddly Su habit, for someone generally so critical of the Su.
"Busy?" Nash asked, and Petra jumped. A crack of electricity burst out of her hands, carving branching fractals into the smartmat. She looked up sharply, and Nash held up his hands. "Just thought I'd come over for dinner."
Petra stared at him for a moment, then shook her head. "I don't–"
Nash turned, gesturing back to a parcel at the door. Petra followed his gesture with her eyes, and sat for a moment, processing.
Right, she thought; leave it to Nash to be always prepared. Carry everything he'd need for a dinner on his person. At least when he was invading her space for it.
She shook her head, and reached over to shut off the generator so she could think more clearly. Electricity was electricity, and the energy she pulled from the generator shouldn't have felt any different than the electricity gathered from the storms and stored in banks beneath the colony. But it did. It always left her feeling drained and a little fuzzy-headed, and that was almost enough to turn her into a Su traditionalist, insisting that any power that didn't come from storms was anathema.
But this little human artefact was her power, to do with as she wanted, without oversight or approval from the Su hierarchy. And even if that just meant making little models on the abused surface of her desk, that was worth it.
Nash had apparently given up on waiting for a response or an invitation; he'd turned back to pick up the parcel. Then he headed over to the little alcove of food-preparing equipment which never seemed to make it back to his quarters.
"You know," Petra said, "I got the impression from your friends on the ship that natural human law means I do the cooking."
Nash looked unimpressed. So unimpressed, in fact, that Petra couldn't see his expression change at all. "Yeah. The thing is, I don't want to be poisoned."
Petra growled, just a little, down in her throat. "Storms, Nash, I'm not going to poison you."
"No," Nash said, peeled open the parcel with a pointed look in her direction. "You wouldn't intentionally poison me. Important distinction."
Petra's hand moved over the model, and she almost wiped it clean. Then she moved her hand away. After six models in this vein already, she might as well admit that it wasn't a passing preoccupation, and that she would be returning to it.
"Besides," Nash said. "You have enough on your mind."
"I have nothing on my mind," Petra said, flattening her hand on the desk. The model and its lightning scar sat uneasily in the corner of her vision. "No projects. No plans. Nothing."
Nash set aside a smaller parcel of something vibrantly green, and turned to face her. "You know," he said, almost conversationally, "you're allowed to miss her."
All the muscles of Petra's back went stiff.
Then she took a deep breath, relaxing those muscles one by one. They didn't make it all the way to relaxed, but it was better than nothing. "What is this? The Nash Carder Psychology Dinner Hour?"
"There's a name I hadn't considered," Nash said. "Stop deflecting."
"I miss her," Petra said, every word crisp like a join between two hallways. "This is not news."
Nash watched her, just a second or two too long for Petra to think Nash believed her. Then he shrugged – an easy, careless shrug of one shoulder; patent Nash, the same thing he did when he was acting like he didn't care about something – and turned back to his food. Pulled some kind of old Earth-pattern knife out to chop it. "Heard from her?"
"I assume," Petra said, "her attention is elsewhere." She paused for a moment, turned back to the model colony. "Mine would be."
Really, hers already was. A whole colony away.
Nash had spent more time in the human history of this place than Petra had. He'd have a better idea if, when the ship first arrived, they'd found more than one set of signals from the ruined surface; if they'd had any idea that they were making a choice when they brought the ship down. So far as Petra knew, there had been one known colony, and only one. Humans on this planet lived in the slowly-sprawling network of tunnels and modules and corridors that they only knew as the Colony, and any further Su civilization had vanished in the same ecological disaster that had rendered life outside the colony impossible.
But of course, the Su were resilient. Not terribly adaptive, but as adaptive as they needed to be. And the Su, upon learning that there was another colony close enough to make contact with, hadn't batted an eyelid – not that they had eyelids. They'd simply moved on with the business at hand.
Which, of course, because it was the Su, was a hierarchical dispute.
So now Petra knew that a hierarchical dispute was the closest the Su came to outright war. And of course, they needed Fathers there as a show of might and influence, and of course, Ilen wasn't just a strong Father in her own right but an example of what the Fathers of this colony could do. And of course, Petra wasn't about to say anything and put her head on the chopping block. She wasn't a complete idiot.
Nash, though, didn't really care about the Su's good graces – at least, not beyond keeping them at a point where they decided not to kill him. "On Su business," he said, though he said it in the direction of the food. "I bet she'd take time out to hear from you."
Petra growled, back in her throat. That was the problem with Nash: after all this time, he still made those distinctions. "Su business is human business," she said. "And human business is Su business, and I'm not going to distract her from either one. Storm and blast. You want to think about what's going to happen if the other colony comes out dominant? A whole superior politics that's never dealt with humans before?"
Nash shrugged. "I assume they'd just delegate human-handling to their new underclass," he said. "And our Su would be the ants that tended the aphids."
Petra stared at him.
After a moment Nash realized what the awkward silence was this time, and said "...Earth insects. I'll explain later."
"You need to stop applying Earth logic to our situations," Petra grumbled. "That's how bombs start going off."
"And you need to eat," Nash said, failing to rise to the bait. He opened a bulb of some liquid and dumped it into one of his inscrutable devices, which hissed and sent up a billow of steam. Petra shifted marginally further away from it in her chair. Nash picked the whole thing up and carried it, still steaming, and without any regard for the logic of scalding liquids, straight to her desk. Then he dropped a spoon into it with a look of triumph, and said, "So eat."
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I'm so glad you came back to fill this prompt, because it is really lovely to get a bit more of them!
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Because she should've been in the show, but instead they decided to go with creepy Hathor instead. D:
(Tammuz shenanigans optional.)
Also, I feel compelled to add that here is a great place to find information on her (and other Mesopotamian gods).
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Lies, or maybe honesty. And Breaux.
NO WAIT. Are there any deals a demon won't make? (Not can't, but wont'.)