Entries tagged with fic: (various untitled)

My editor-brain has gone to bed without taking my writer-brain with it, which is why I find myself contemplating a White Collar/Briarpatch crossover. (It'd be great. Neal has access to the Briarpatch, and the Light is in some way tied up with Kate, and Peter has no affinity for the Briarpatch at all but manages to find his way in there while searching for Neal and completely refuses to back down for a little thing like being inconceivably in over his head, and hijinks ensue. And Diana somehow ends up completely intimidating all the bears.)

I think this is symptomatic of some kind of weird reaction to writing in a fandom which isn't speculative fiction of any kind. I mean, the great bastions of my fandom work to date have been Final Fantasy VIII, Stargate SG-1, Torchwood/Doctor Who/Life On Mars as one giant amalgam, and a recurring theme of Silent Hill getting into everything. You know, the kind of fandoms where I can go all wacky with time loops and mind control and giant monsters and split threads of causality and stuff, without deviating that far from actual bounds of canon-established reality.

I think my brain just flat-out refuses to accept the real world as a template, and this is why my White Collar WIPs folder consists of a handful of short character studies, a complete re-write of half of Season 2 and all of Season 3, a fic in which Peter is a really atypical guardian angel, a fic that's three AUs that got in a car crash*, and a crossover with Puella Magi Madoka Magica, of all things. (Neal wanders into a Witch's Labyrinth. Hijinks... ensue? None of the main characters get to be magical girls. It's for the best, really.) And it's probably for the best that all the snippets with the White Collar guys having to deal with

damaged_people!Jack Harkness are remaining in the braintic purgatory of my Gmail where they belong.

*Back when I was learning about these things in highschool physics, a perfectly inelastic collision was described as one in which two objects collide, combine their momentum, and continue onward with a shared velocity. When the teacher asked for examples from the class, someone offered up "A guy getting impaled by a charging rhino?" I'm not sure why this popped into my head, other than the fact that the three-AU-pileup in that fic is pretty damn inelastic.

Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm writing this out to Dreamwidth, other than it being late and me not having gotten much sleep and everything seeming like a good idea right now. (But really, Neal-and-the-Briarpatch would just be fun to play with, even if it's not Tim Pratt's Briarpatch. And even if Neal as Br'er Rabbit kinda bucks the whole Neal-as-fox metaphor I have way too much fun poking at.)

Someone please tell me to quit the browser and go to sleep.

Current sleep-deprived typo correction count: 18

Down on the wasteland, barely distinguished from the dry soil around it, there was a dusty-gold body. Timon only noticed when the buzzards descended; they'd been circling for hours now, and the moment the first one dropped down his attention was caught.

"Ey, Pumbaa," he said, tugging on his ride-slash-mount's ears. The warthog pulled his head up, pausing mid-prance. "Over there. Looks like some poor guy didn't make it."

Pumbaa snorted. "Look at 'em, the bullies," he said, nodding toward the carrion birds. "Can't kick a rock without seeing one these days."

"Talk about your bad neighbourhoods," Timon said. "Hey! You know what this calls for...."

"Heh hehh," Pumbaa agreed. Timon leaned down, giving him a good Giddy-up! slap between his eyes.

"Let's get 'em."

-

It would be a mistake to say that the buzzards didn't know what hit them. They were smart birds, if unimaginative; after the third or forth time even they'd put two and two together. Timon and Pumbaa weren't making many friends, but the buzzards had better things to do than pursue the enmity. The flapped away, leaving Team Meerkat-And-Warthog victorious once again.

"I love it!" Pumbaa chortled. "Bowling for buzzards!"

"Gets 'em every time," Timon said, dusting himself off. "Now, let's see what we chased 'em off, maybe give the guy a proper--" He trailed off. "Burial," he finished, staring in confusion at the empty wasteland. "...huh."

He'd never known buzzards to attack empty ground. Maybe they'd been out in the sun too long?

-

It was the contrast that caused Simba to wake.

He'd been thirsty and hot and struggling to breathe the hot air; he was still thirsty but he was colder than he'd ever been, and he was struggling to breathe because the air was full of something that looked like smoke and wasn't smoke.

It was dark, but it wasn't dark like night. It was dark like thunderstorms but the sky was quiet; everything was quiet except for the creaking of dying bushes and the groans of settling skeletons and the scrabbling of rats in the boneyard.

Why was he in the boneyard?--hadn't he made it out?

"Nala!" he called, and that struck him as wrong; he remembered getting out, because Mufasa had come to rescue them. "Dad!" he yelled, and that was wrong too--and as soon as he called, he knew why.

From far away, like an echo or imagined thing, came his father's dying roar. Simba cringed, small and afraid among the dry bones. He was lost here, alone, and the clouds were getting darker. Back the way he must have come, back toward the bluffs that ringed the Pride Lands, all he could see were thick brambles with thorns like reaching claws.

When the roar subsided something else replaced it, something angry and hungry and mercifully far away. "Dad," Simba said again, to the bones, to the fog, to nothing. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

~~BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT YOU DO TO CHARACTERS YOU LIKE. YOU SEND THEM TO SILENT HILL.~~

Absolutely brilliant at 2 AM.

[ficlet][TLK/SH] rionaleonhart started it! (And I'm a sucker for