30 questions fic meme, day 29: teasers!
29 - What is your current project or projects?
There are, hm, let's say five. I feel like sharing today, so some of the teasers are in the 300-500 word range.
Awaiting final beta and fixing and a smidge more writing, there's the Vorkosigan/Doctor Who crossover sequel to Signals That Sound in the Dark.
In which Aral Vorkosigan meets Amy Pond:
It was taller than a man, and nearly half as wide as it was tall. There was writing near the top in printed Barrayaran Cyrillic. The words were in English: POLICE BOX.
Aral had crossed half the distance between the groundcar and the blue box when a door was flung open and a young woman stepped out in a rush of copper hair and bare coltish legs.
Aral stopped, stunned--Jack had said he, surely. Jack had said it was a man who belonged with the blue box, a man with two hearts.
The red-haired girl was easily as tall as Cordelia, but much younger. She came to an instant, wide-eyed halt when she saw Aral and the men flanking him. Aral watched as her eyes darted around, no doubt taking in the rest of his inner perimeter and the street which was empty but for his own vehicle.
Aral limited his own gaze to a quick survey. She was dressed Betan-style, for hot weather and loose standards, in a shirt that covered her arms to the wrist but a skirt that left her legs bare halfway up her thighs. Her hair fell down around her shoulders in soft waves.
She stood framed in the doorway of the blue box like a deer poised for flight. In an accent Aral could have sworn was straight out of the hill-country, her voice high and strained, she called out, "Doctor!"
A man stuck his head out of the door just behind her. He had long untidy hair, mousy brown, and his eyes swept smoothly over the scene outside the box.
"Would you look at that," he said, seeming entirely unsurprised. "Pond, you've stopped traffic."
Then there are the two I am midway through the actual writing of.
One is a not-wolf-verse Generation Kill story of which this snippet is almost but not quite entirely unrepresentative.
After this there's a lot more misery, but I like this bit:
"My parents continue to be confused by Ray," Brad said, looking back toward his phone. Nate watched the line of his throat and the curve of his shoulder. "I mentioned his girlfriend the first time I brought him over, but he asked to see my baby pictures anyway."
Brad looked at Nate again and flashed a smile. "Ray, of course, delights in sowing discord wherever he goes."
Nate had no trouble parsing what Brad had just said, and wasn't even surprised by it. This was Brad, after all. "So if you took a guy to your parents' house and didn't mention his girlfriend...."
"He's definitely getting shown the baby pictures," Brad said, his expression turning serious. "I can make up a girlfriend for you if you want one, Nate. The baby pictures go on for a while, and she always includes the hilarious saga of how they put together a bris on three days' notice."
"And your parents will know," Nate said, because every once in a while, when it was just the two of them, somebody had to ask. Or tell.
Brad nodded. "They know. And they understand that I'm safer--we're safer--if they never say what it is they know."
Nate nodded back, assimilating, and Brad quirked a smile and said, "I guess you had a tearful heart-to-heart with your parents at some point and now they've got a rainbow sticker on the back of their Volvo?"
Nate felt himself flush.
Brad raised his eyebrows.
Nate shrugged. "There was never anyone worth telling them about. And if I could--if they didn't have to know, I didn't want to upset them. Worry them. They would have worried about me."
Brad's eyebrows did not come down.
"Will worry about me," Nate corrected himself. "And you. When I tell them. Right now, if you want."
Brad rolled his eyes and caught Nate's wrist as he reached for his phone.
"It can wait a week, Nate," Brad said.
Nate flexed his fingers but didn't try to break Brad's grip. "I don't want a girlfriend."
Brad grinned and tugged him closer.
"Good," Brad muttered against Nate's lips. "Because I was going to make her such a--"
Nate didn't let him finish that thought.
The other one I'm writing is mostly about all the sex Aral and Cordelia don't have before they get married, because I have thought about this and they really never had time for any. So really it's about a lot of things including Aral during the week of the green silk room, wishing he were somewhere else.
Not anywhere else. He has a destination in mind:
Aral simply stood on the doorstep of the Betan Embassy without doing anything, waiting to see who jumped first. It was well past ordinary business hours, and he shouldn't go ringing their bell and bothering some Betan civil servant just to play out his own half-suicidal half-romantic half-witted gesture to the hilt.
The door opened, startling him. On the other side was a tall young man who looked athletic without being soldierly. He was wearing a thick, fluffy sweater and a brightly-colored cloth wrapped around his waist--too smooth for a towel, too small for a sheet. Aral found himself staring, trying to make it out.
"I'm up here," the young man said, sounding amused and, oh, just like her. Aral jerked his gaze up to the young man's face, wondering how he could possibly feel homesick for a foreign accent. It had been an even more terrible idea to come here than he'd thought, and he wasn't even drunk.
"I know, I know," the young man said. "You're not embarrassed, you're just laconic. No need to say a word, sir, just let me get a packet."
Aral did not say a word, wondering what cue he'd missed--what cue he'd given, all unawares, and all too aware that there must surely be a scope-sight on the chest of the young man who sounded so much like her, just waiting for one of them to say the wrong word, make the wrong gesture.
The young man disappeared briefly--to safety, but if Aral warned him away surely that would alert his watcher--and returned, as promised, holding a sealed, unlabeled packet, big enough to hold a sheaf of flimsies. He offered it and Aral took it automatically; something shifted inside, smaller and denser than flimsies. A book disc.
"That's a printout of the checklist, up to date as of this year, plus a disc with all the explanations and diagrams," the young man said briskly, while Aral wondered distantly if it looked like he had just scored some sort of intelligence coup--surely they would not imagine he was such an idiot as to accept a bribe in this manner. "And before you ask, no, Embassy staff do not give live demonstrations."
The young man looked Aral up and down pointedly and added, "Usually we don't, anyway. Come back with flowers and a dinner reservation and I might be persuaded."
Aral realized he was being flirted with and mocked at the same time, and wondered if the ImpSec agent could see that as well. Inexplicable as it was, it might be the only way to keep them both safe from his idiocy. Aral tucked the packet under one arm, placed his hand on his heart, and made a courtly bow straight out of a melodrama, surely visible to the man lurking somewhere behind him.
"Thank you for giving me hope," he said solemnly, and then turned on his heel and walked away. No one intercepted him. He never spotted his tail.
And, since I've done a bit of writing on each of them, I suppose I can also consider the two Next Things to be also current projects.
The stuff I've got for the next Generation Kill wolf-verse story is pretty rough and will probably change a lot, but this bit should stay pretty much the same.
How Nate Met Brad:
Nate pushed up onto all fours and looked around Bo--he couldn't see over her without pushing himself upright--toward the entrance door. A recon Marine he recognized was standing there--wolfless, which cut out half the features Nate would usually use to identify a Marine. It took Nate a few seconds to come up with a name.
"Sergeant Colbert," Nate said aloud, because he might be on all fours, naked and hard and panting with adrenaline and unrelieved lust, his cheek pressed to Bo's shoulder like a kid with a puppy, but he was still a Marine officer.
Colbert just nodded and stepped about six inches inside, pulling the entrance door shut behind him. The exit door closed, shutting out the smell of the gray wolf--though his blood was still spattered across the floor, and it would take the air-recycling a while to filter the smell of his musk completely out of the heat-shack.
Bo relaxed instantly with the intruder gone, and went back to pacing restlessly and feeling horny--which was how they'd already spent the last several hours--just as if those five minutes hadn't happened. Nate tipped sideways and managed to end up sitting in a position that sort of halfway shielded his dick from Colbert's eyes, although he was on watch at the heat-shack and had probably seen it all before. Had certainly done it all before, though on the other side of the equation.
"You all right, sir?" Colbert said. "Do you need a corpsman?"
Nate shook his head. "I aborted for their safety, not ours."
Colbert looked over at Bo, and Nate was suddenly overwhelmed with the taste of blood in her mouth. Without following Colbert's gaze he knew she'd just ostentatiously licked blood from her muzzle, showing off. Colbert smiled a little and nodded to her, and then looked back to Nate.
"I can see you've got all the help you need, sir," he said, and with a last nod he headed toward the exit door.
And last and least-written but by no means least in any other sense, the next story in The World That You Need, which I have been in the process of circling back around to write since ... last November.
In which Arkady is having a difficult day:
Cordelia stepped into Second Rec thinking to find it empty, but the receiving room was occupied by one uniformed lieutenant, standing very straight with his forehead against the wall and his hands clasped at the small of his back.
"Arkady?"
He whirled around to face her, and Cordelia worriedly scanned his face. Even aside from the red pressure-mark left by leaning against the wall, his face was set in unusual, tense lines. And then there was the fact that he was, after all, hiding in the second receiving room with his face to the wall.
This entry was originally posted at http://dira.dreamwidth.org/588378.html. There are currently
comments there.
There are, hm, let's say five. I feel like sharing today, so some of the teasers are in the 300-500 word range.
Awaiting final beta and fixing and a smidge more writing, there's the Vorkosigan/Doctor Who crossover sequel to Signals That Sound in the Dark.
In which Aral Vorkosigan meets Amy Pond:
It was taller than a man, and nearly half as wide as it was tall. There was writing near the top in printed Barrayaran Cyrillic. The words were in English: POLICE BOX.
Aral had crossed half the distance between the groundcar and the blue box when a door was flung open and a young woman stepped out in a rush of copper hair and bare coltish legs.
Aral stopped, stunned--Jack had said he, surely. Jack had said it was a man who belonged with the blue box, a man with two hearts.
The red-haired girl was easily as tall as Cordelia, but much younger. She came to an instant, wide-eyed halt when she saw Aral and the men flanking him. Aral watched as her eyes darted around, no doubt taking in the rest of his inner perimeter and the street which was empty but for his own vehicle.
Aral limited his own gaze to a quick survey. She was dressed Betan-style, for hot weather and loose standards, in a shirt that covered her arms to the wrist but a skirt that left her legs bare halfway up her thighs. Her hair fell down around her shoulders in soft waves.
She stood framed in the doorway of the blue box like a deer poised for flight. In an accent Aral could have sworn was straight out of the hill-country, her voice high and strained, she called out, "Doctor!"
A man stuck his head out of the door just behind her. He had long untidy hair, mousy brown, and his eyes swept smoothly over the scene outside the box.
"Would you look at that," he said, seeming entirely unsurprised. "Pond, you've stopped traffic."
Then there are the two I am midway through the actual writing of.
One is a not-wolf-verse Generation Kill story of which this snippet is almost but not quite entirely unrepresentative.
After this there's a lot more misery, but I like this bit:
"My parents continue to be confused by Ray," Brad said, looking back toward his phone. Nate watched the line of his throat and the curve of his shoulder. "I mentioned his girlfriend the first time I brought him over, but he asked to see my baby pictures anyway."
Brad looked at Nate again and flashed a smile. "Ray, of course, delights in sowing discord wherever he goes."
Nate had no trouble parsing what Brad had just said, and wasn't even surprised by it. This was Brad, after all. "So if you took a guy to your parents' house and didn't mention his girlfriend...."
"He's definitely getting shown the baby pictures," Brad said, his expression turning serious. "I can make up a girlfriend for you if you want one, Nate. The baby pictures go on for a while, and she always includes the hilarious saga of how they put together a bris on three days' notice."
"And your parents will know," Nate said, because every once in a while, when it was just the two of them, somebody had to ask. Or tell.
Brad nodded. "They know. And they understand that I'm safer--we're safer--if they never say what it is they know."
Nate nodded back, assimilating, and Brad quirked a smile and said, "I guess you had a tearful heart-to-heart with your parents at some point and now they've got a rainbow sticker on the back of their Volvo?"
Nate felt himself flush.
Brad raised his eyebrows.
Nate shrugged. "There was never anyone worth telling them about. And if I could--if they didn't have to know, I didn't want to upset them. Worry them. They would have worried about me."
Brad's eyebrows did not come down.
"Will worry about me," Nate corrected himself. "And you. When I tell them. Right now, if you want."
Brad rolled his eyes and caught Nate's wrist as he reached for his phone.
"It can wait a week, Nate," Brad said.
Nate flexed his fingers but didn't try to break Brad's grip. "I don't want a girlfriend."
Brad grinned and tugged him closer.
"Good," Brad muttered against Nate's lips. "Because I was going to make her such a--"
Nate didn't let him finish that thought.
The other one I'm writing is mostly about all the sex Aral and Cordelia don't have before they get married, because I have thought about this and they really never had time for any. So really it's about a lot of things including Aral during the week of the green silk room, wishing he were somewhere else.
Not anywhere else. He has a destination in mind:
Aral simply stood on the doorstep of the Betan Embassy without doing anything, waiting to see who jumped first. It was well past ordinary business hours, and he shouldn't go ringing their bell and bothering some Betan civil servant just to play out his own half-suicidal half-romantic half-witted gesture to the hilt.
The door opened, startling him. On the other side was a tall young man who looked athletic without being soldierly. He was wearing a thick, fluffy sweater and a brightly-colored cloth wrapped around his waist--too smooth for a towel, too small for a sheet. Aral found himself staring, trying to make it out.
"I'm up here," the young man said, sounding amused and, oh, just like her. Aral jerked his gaze up to the young man's face, wondering how he could possibly feel homesick for a foreign accent. It had been an even more terrible idea to come here than he'd thought, and he wasn't even drunk.
"I know, I know," the young man said. "You're not embarrassed, you're just laconic. No need to say a word, sir, just let me get a packet."
Aral did not say a word, wondering what cue he'd missed--what cue he'd given, all unawares, and all too aware that there must surely be a scope-sight on the chest of the young man who sounded so much like her, just waiting for one of them to say the wrong word, make the wrong gesture.
The young man disappeared briefly--to safety, but if Aral warned him away surely that would alert his watcher--and returned, as promised, holding a sealed, unlabeled packet, big enough to hold a sheaf of flimsies. He offered it and Aral took it automatically; something shifted inside, smaller and denser than flimsies. A book disc.
"That's a printout of the checklist, up to date as of this year, plus a disc with all the explanations and diagrams," the young man said briskly, while Aral wondered distantly if it looked like he had just scored some sort of intelligence coup--surely they would not imagine he was such an idiot as to accept a bribe in this manner. "And before you ask, no, Embassy staff do not give live demonstrations."
The young man looked Aral up and down pointedly and added, "Usually we don't, anyway. Come back with flowers and a dinner reservation and I might be persuaded."
Aral realized he was being flirted with and mocked at the same time, and wondered if the ImpSec agent could see that as well. Inexplicable as it was, it might be the only way to keep them both safe from his idiocy. Aral tucked the packet under one arm, placed his hand on his heart, and made a courtly bow straight out of a melodrama, surely visible to the man lurking somewhere behind him.
"Thank you for giving me hope," he said solemnly, and then turned on his heel and walked away. No one intercepted him. He never spotted his tail.
And, since I've done a bit of writing on each of them, I suppose I can also consider the two Next Things to be also current projects.
The stuff I've got for the next Generation Kill wolf-verse story is pretty rough and will probably change a lot, but this bit should stay pretty much the same.
How Nate Met Brad:
Nate pushed up onto all fours and looked around Bo--he couldn't see over her without pushing himself upright--toward the entrance door. A recon Marine he recognized was standing there--wolfless, which cut out half the features Nate would usually use to identify a Marine. It took Nate a few seconds to come up with a name.
"Sergeant Colbert," Nate said aloud, because he might be on all fours, naked and hard and panting with adrenaline and unrelieved lust, his cheek pressed to Bo's shoulder like a kid with a puppy, but he was still a Marine officer.
Colbert just nodded and stepped about six inches inside, pulling the entrance door shut behind him. The exit door closed, shutting out the smell of the gray wolf--though his blood was still spattered across the floor, and it would take the air-recycling a while to filter the smell of his musk completely out of the heat-shack.
Bo relaxed instantly with the intruder gone, and went back to pacing restlessly and feeling horny--which was how they'd already spent the last several hours--just as if those five minutes hadn't happened. Nate tipped sideways and managed to end up sitting in a position that sort of halfway shielded his dick from Colbert's eyes, although he was on watch at the heat-shack and had probably seen it all before. Had certainly done it all before, though on the other side of the equation.
"You all right, sir?" Colbert said. "Do you need a corpsman?"
Nate shook his head. "I aborted for their safety, not ours."
Colbert looked over at Bo, and Nate was suddenly overwhelmed with the taste of blood in her mouth. Without following Colbert's gaze he knew she'd just ostentatiously licked blood from her muzzle, showing off. Colbert smiled a little and nodded to her, and then looked back to Nate.
"I can see you've got all the help you need, sir," he said, and with a last nod he headed toward the exit door.
And last and least-written but by no means least in any other sense, the next story in The World That You Need, which I have been in the process of circling back around to write since ... last November.
In which Arkady is having a difficult day:
Cordelia stepped into Second Rec thinking to find it empty, but the receiving room was occupied by one uniformed lieutenant, standing very straight with his forehead against the wall and his hands clasped at the small of his back.
"Arkady?"
He whirled around to face her, and Cordelia worriedly scanned his face. Even aside from the red pressure-mark left by leaning against the wall, his face was set in unusual, tense lines. And then there was the fact that he was, after all, hiding in the second receiving room with his face to the wall.
This entry was originally posted at http://dira.dreamwidth.org/588378.html. There are currently
comments there.