Three Untitled Ficlets
What I've written today for df-prompt.
Fandom: Company (musical)
Character/Pairing: Amy, Amy/Paul
Rating: G
“Paul, where’s that file?”
“What file?”
“The one I put down on the counter just yesterday evening when I came back from work. Oh, Paul, what did you do with it? Did you move it? You must have moved it. I know I didn’t move it - once I’d gotten home I didn’t want to look at the thing again, let alone touch it. It must have been you. Oh, why do you always move my things, Paul? You know that I can’t stand it, you know that I just can’t function if you keep moving things all the time. You do, I’ve seen you. And then you say that you’re cleaning, but you can’t just come in here and move around things and say you’re cleaning, I just can’t handle it. My analyst says that I need a stable environment, that it helps me function. So you can’t move my things around, it could just make me break down one day. Just one morning, while you’re eating your eggs, I won’t be able to find my keys and I’ll hyperventilate and fall over. Oh! This file, I have to find it, if I don’t find it my boss will just go crazy - she does that sometimes, you know, goes crazy - she’ll go crazy because these papers just have to be sent back to the client today, and so then I’ll get fired, and I won’t be able to pay my half of the rent, and I won’t be able to stand the shame of it, so I’ll just have to go live in the streets and beg for change or become a street musician. Or something. And then I’ll get hypothermia, and I’ll die. And then it’ll all be your fault because you moved the file.”
“Here it is. It was on the counter, under the catalogs.”
“Oh! You’re so good Paul, thank you. I love you.”
“I love you too, Amy.”
Fandom: Arthurian Legend
Character/Pairing: Morgan le Fay
Rating: PG
Fine then, I’ll tell you the truth.
Truth: I spent my adolescence teaching myself about potions and poisons, mixing concoctions and feeding them to small animals.
Truth: I have committed the sin of adultery so many times that I haven’t bothered to keep count.
Truth: I have devoted my life to ruining and, eventually, ending that of my younger brother and his arrogant advisor, Merlin.
Truth: I am one of the most despised women in the land.
What harm then do slanders do me? Some of them, I believe, I started myself, whispers in the ears of those likely to pass on the stories. I have no interest in maintaining a reputation that would, at the heart of it, be false, or in being thought the hero of this tale. Perhaps I believe my cause just, but, at the heart of it, I don’t care whether anyone else does, unless I happen to need their aid. I am perfectly content to play the villain in the fairy tale of Arthur’s reign, the wicked sorceress in rubies and dark velvet. Far better to be that than vague Nimue, fading into the mists of the lake with which she will ever be identified. My name will be remembered, a tale to frighten children and beguile men, and, if I succeed in my purpose, then the tales told of me shall be the greatest slander in all of history.
Say what you will. I revel in it.
Fandom: Lestat (musical)
Character/Pairing: Gabrielle, Lestat, possible implied Lestat/Gabrielle
Rating: PG
At first, she detests the last child, just as she detested all the others. Of course, no one knows that she detested any of them - there was no one to confide such feelings in, and she knew, in any case, that to detest a child of your own flesh and blood was some sort of incontrovertible crime, one that she should not admit to. But she was always so tired after the births, and weak, and sick, and completely unlike herself. And the children themselves seemed hardly to be people at all, just little crying creatures hungering for sustenance from her own body.
She thought, many times as her older sons grew up, that she could perhaps have loved them, were they something more than the brutes their father wanted them to be. But, of course, none of them were, and, by the time of her last pregnancy, she had resigned herself to a seemingly endless number of rambunctious, boorish children, each one a new reason for her to barricade herself in her rooms for as long as she could.
And then Lestat surprises her. He grows up confident, self possessed, thoughtful, with all Gabrielle’s dreams of a life beyond their decrepit castle, and with her same fair hair. She watches him become more and more like what she couldn’t be, and she invites him into her rooms, from which the Marquis has ever been forbidden. She reads aloud to him, stories from her far away land of Italy, stories of Paris and London and the practically mythical New World. She watches him, cares for him, and eventually manages to forget that her handsome Lestat, her beautiful boy, was ever the screaming vulnerable thing she detested.
Fandom: Company (musical)
Character/Pairing: Amy, Amy/Paul
Rating: G
“Paul, where’s that file?”
“What file?”
“The one I put down on the counter just yesterday evening when I came back from work. Oh, Paul, what did you do with it? Did you move it? You must have moved it. I know I didn’t move it - once I’d gotten home I didn’t want to look at the thing again, let alone touch it. It must have been you. Oh, why do you always move my things, Paul? You know that I can’t stand it, you know that I just can’t function if you keep moving things all the time. You do, I’ve seen you. And then you say that you’re cleaning, but you can’t just come in here and move around things and say you’re cleaning, I just can’t handle it. My analyst says that I need a stable environment, that it helps me function. So you can’t move my things around, it could just make me break down one day. Just one morning, while you’re eating your eggs, I won’t be able to find my keys and I’ll hyperventilate and fall over. Oh! This file, I have to find it, if I don’t find it my boss will just go crazy - she does that sometimes, you know, goes crazy - she’ll go crazy because these papers just have to be sent back to the client today, and so then I’ll get fired, and I won’t be able to pay my half of the rent, and I won’t be able to stand the shame of it, so I’ll just have to go live in the streets and beg for change or become a street musician. Or something. And then I’ll get hypothermia, and I’ll die. And then it’ll all be your fault because you moved the file.”
“Here it is. It was on the counter, under the catalogs.”
“Oh! You’re so good Paul, thank you. I love you.”
“I love you too, Amy.”
Fandom: Arthurian Legend
Character/Pairing: Morgan le Fay
Rating: PG
Fine then, I’ll tell you the truth.
Truth: I spent my adolescence teaching myself about potions and poisons, mixing concoctions and feeding them to small animals.
Truth: I have committed the sin of adultery so many times that I haven’t bothered to keep count.
Truth: I have devoted my life to ruining and, eventually, ending that of my younger brother and his arrogant advisor, Merlin.
Truth: I am one of the most despised women in the land.
What harm then do slanders do me? Some of them, I believe, I started myself, whispers in the ears of those likely to pass on the stories. I have no interest in maintaining a reputation that would, at the heart of it, be false, or in being thought the hero of this tale. Perhaps I believe my cause just, but, at the heart of it, I don’t care whether anyone else does, unless I happen to need their aid. I am perfectly content to play the villain in the fairy tale of Arthur’s reign, the wicked sorceress in rubies and dark velvet. Far better to be that than vague Nimue, fading into the mists of the lake with which she will ever be identified. My name will be remembered, a tale to frighten children and beguile men, and, if I succeed in my purpose, then the tales told of me shall be the greatest slander in all of history.
Say what you will. I revel in it.
Fandom: Lestat (musical)
Character/Pairing: Gabrielle, Lestat, possible implied Lestat/Gabrielle
Rating: PG
At first, she detests the last child, just as she detested all the others. Of course, no one knows that she detested any of them - there was no one to confide such feelings in, and she knew, in any case, that to detest a child of your own flesh and blood was some sort of incontrovertible crime, one that she should not admit to. But she was always so tired after the births, and weak, and sick, and completely unlike herself. And the children themselves seemed hardly to be people at all, just little crying creatures hungering for sustenance from her own body.
She thought, many times as her older sons grew up, that she could perhaps have loved them, were they something more than the brutes their father wanted them to be. But, of course, none of them were, and, by the time of her last pregnancy, she had resigned herself to a seemingly endless number of rambunctious, boorish children, each one a new reason for her to barricade herself in her rooms for as long as she could.
And then Lestat surprises her. He grows up confident, self possessed, thoughtful, with all Gabrielle’s dreams of a life beyond their decrepit castle, and with her same fair hair. She watches him become more and more like what she couldn’t be, and she invites him into her rooms, from which the Marquis has ever been forbidden. She reads aloud to him, stories from her far away land of Italy, stories of Paris and London and the practically mythical New World. She watches him, cares for him, and eventually manages to forget that her handsome Lestat, her beautiful boy, was ever the screaming vulnerable thing she detested.