[Fic] Three Sentence Ficathon 2021 fills, part nine
Batch the ninth. :)
All prompts drawn from the current iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon (post one and post two), hosted by the wonderful
rthstewart. The ficathon closes to new prompts tonight, but you can continue filling prompts and commenting on other people's fills for as long as you like!
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49. For
paxilam: any, any, not answering the phone, written 2/23/21
Go to Voicemail (250 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives
-----
After his ordeal with Prentiss, Martin makes a point of answering his phone on the first ring and immediately replying to all texts; he winds up fielding a number of junk calls and disrupting his sleep schedule (insofar as he has a sleep schedule, here on the too-small cot in the document storage room, jolting awake at every creak of floorboard or groan of piping), but it's worth it to feel connected, to know that no supernatural creature will have another chance to impersonate him.
"That was one of the most suspicious things about you," Jon tells him much later; "It's not normal to be instantly available at all hours of the day and night, and naturally I jumped to incoherent conspiracy theories rather than the much more obvious and plausible answer that it was a trauma response -- the irony, of course, being that my paranoia was also a trauma response, and so we made each other steadily more upset rather than trying to support each other, or reach out to Tim."
"And when I stopped answering my phone altogether?" Martin asks. "Was that also suspicious?"
Jon shrugs, lightly, as if his isolation when he woke from his coma hardly mattered. "No, because by then I knew you -- I wished you would change your mind, of course, and I thought you were taking a terrible risk for a highly uncertain return, but you've let me run off halfcocked into all kinds of peril; how could I trust you any less?"
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50. For
sawthefaeriequeen: Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, Janet and Tina, they develop their own roommate in-joke, written 2/24/21
It's All Greek to Me (710 words)
Obviously this is not a 3-sentence fill. *headdesk*
-----
Janet was thoroughly surprised when she passed behind Tina's desk, caught an accidental glimpse of the book her roommate was reading, and saw a layout familiar to any student of Classics: neat lines of Greek letters split into anachronistic paragraphs, with an English translation on the facing page. Instinctively, she attempted her own translation, only to grind to a halt when the text seemed to be something about folding a cloth to carry boiled water. Surely that couldn't be right.
Janet glanced toward the English page for clarification, but Tina shut the book and looked up with a tentative smile.
"I'm taking a class on medical history, for a general education requirement," she said -- at which point Janet realized she had vocalized her confusion and felt obscurely embarrassed, both to be caught reading over Tina's shoulder and to be tripped up by what felt like her own area of expertise.
"We've spent nearly two weeks on Hippocrates and Galen," Tina continued. "They were very wrong about all kinds of things, but not about everything, and it's interesting to learn what's changed and what's stayed the same about a doctor's job. My other classes aren't too heavy this term, so I thought I'd see if the Classics collection had any of their works. It turns out nobody knows if any of Hippocrates's own writing survived, but there's a whole collection of things associated with him."
"Why the bilingual edition, though?" Janet asked. "I didn't think you were interested in learning Greek."
"I thought about it," Tina said, surprising Janet once again. "There's heaps of Greek and Latin in medical jargon. But I decided it was easier to memorize as I go than try to squeeze a Classics minor around all my other classes -- besides, it doesn't seem worthwhile to slog through acres of Greek plays and Latin poetry in order to understand why otitis media means an inner ear infection."
Janet took a moment to parse the phrase -- ōtós for ear (Greek); itis for... hmm... arthritis, bursitis, tonsillitis, so that must have something to do with infection or inflammation (she would guess the suffix had Greek somewhere in its ancestry); media for middle (Latin) -- and winced. "I can tell you why for free. It's because mashing Greek and Latin together like that makes my ears ache."
Tina blinked, then gurgled with laughter. "It does sound awful, doesn't it? If I say you have an earache, you think it's nothing to worry about, but if I say you have an acute case of otitis media, that sounds like you're halfway to death."
"I shall not die of consumption, nor of a broken heart," Janet said in fainting tones, pressing the back of one hand against her forehead. "No, my fate is crueler yet. The dread otitis media shall drag me from this cold and heartless world." She swooned onto Molly's bed, expiring in a fit of melodrama.
Then she cracked one eye open to make sure Tina wasn't choking on her own laughter.
"I shouldn't laugh, I really shouldn't," Tina gasped. "Ear infections killed hundreds or thousands of children a year before antibiotics and modern treatments. They can still cause all kinds of problems. But oh goodness, can you imagine how undignified a death that would be for someone our age?"
"I can think of a few people I wouldn't mind inflicting an earache on," Janet said as she rolled upright and crossed her legs, still perched on Molly's bed. "Some people could do with a bit less dignity." Or at least could do with a problem they couldn't blithely (or haughtily) ignore, the way all the Classics lot seemed to do with any form of social awkwardness.
You couldn't politely evade or intimidate an ear infection.
"Yes," Tina said, with an expression on her face that said she was thinking along similar lines. "Perhaps we can ask the ghost to curse them with earaches. I'd like to see them herbal remedy their way out of that."
This time it was Janet's turn to laugh.
When they saw Thomas, Nick, and Robin across the room at dinner that evening, Janet leaned over to Tina and whispered, "Otitis media upon their houses, unto seven generations."
They never did manage to satisfactorily explain the joke to Molly.
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51. For
sholio: MCU, any, superpower swap, written 2/27/21
Mirror, Mirror (340 words)
This is more of a skill swap than a power swap, but I figure if building flying armor counts as a superpower, Natasha and Clint's skillsets should as well. :)
-----
The Red Room had a specific ideal to which they trained their agents -- deceptively lovely, flexible, able to wear any mask and get close enough to kiss a target and steal his secrets as well as his life -- but while Natasha excelled enough to live, that pattern always felt like somebody else's coat, too baggy in the shoulders and tight around the waist. She prefers to work from a distance and in the shadows; steal impersonal documents, snap photos, plant microphones; send an autographed bullet from half a mile away. The idea of touching other people's skin, feeling their breath against her ear, makes her own skin crawl like the memory of a dozen spiders wandering over her while she lay paralyzed and desperate not to scream, and it's a rare person who can pass unharmed through the sphere of empty space she carves around herself with her dead-eyed stare.
The US Army was much more interested in snipers than infiltrators, but sometimes what you want isn't what you need, and Clint's always been personable when he puts his mind to it, not to mention good with accents and languages and mirroring what other people project onto him; you pick up those tricks pretty quick as a runaway, and even more so in the entertainment business. He's still a sniper on paper, but the moment he catches wind of SHIELD sending out feelers, he makes a play for a different line of work -- something where he can look the people he kills in the eye and know that they have a faint chance of turning the tables, walking away while he bleeds out on the floor. It's probably just as unethical to betray a cultivated trust, but he's been doing that for most of his life and it's a rare person who can coax him to peel off his masks and show the awkward, half-forgotten shape of his true self.
They make an odd pair, the sniper and the seducer, but nobody at SHIELD would dare to pull them apart.
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52. For
wingedflight: Narnia/The Magnus Archives, any, the entities in Narnia, written 2/28/21
A Century of Fear (295 words)
-----
1. Vast
Narnia is not a large land, but the shroud of Winter smothers the landscape, blurs landmarks into a sweeping sameness: a blank canvas of white-gray-black that deceives the eye and spreads out to, so far as anyone can know, the uttermost bounds of the world -- and perhaps even beyond, out past the Western mountains and the Eastern sea until a body could travel a thousand years and still never find a day of summer sun, for the Winter admits no truth but its own immutable nature, and flattens all attempts at defiance to mere blots on the purity of its expanse.
-----
2. Buried
Petrification should stop the mind along with the body, yet those who feel the tight embrace of stone close in around them, driving inward like a vice, could tell you otherwise if they still had breath and space to speak; instead they stand silent in the crushing prison of their own forms, squeezed tighter and tighter until it seems they must explode under the pressure of their own transformed skin and muscle and bone... and yet there is always another notch to tighten, and never the release of death or sleep.
-----
3. Corruption
Collaboration is the law of the land, a sick fever that floods communities like clockwork as neighbor sells out neighbor for a scrap of food or a brief reprieve from violence; to love your family, to do right by them, you must do wrong by others, and that truth gnaws both inward through the soul and outward through the fragile bonds of care and trust that bind downtrodden Narnians together, until no one can look upon those they love, those for whom they sold their self-respect, without a hot rush of shame and revulsion clogging their throats and coating their teeth with bile.
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53. For anonymous: Any, any, starry river of the sky, written 2/28/21
Who Walks Among the Stars (160 words)
Fandom = original
-----
The stars are more of a sea than a river, and more of a marsh than either, but there are channels where light flows swift and deep in and among the darker, drier ground, and those are what travelers follow on the winding paths between the worlds -- unless, of course, they are lucky enough to win the favor of birds and fly swift and true where others walk.
Kemmess steps tentatively from one hillock of dark to the next, testing the depth of the starry stream with the green, sap-sticky length of a broken reed, still glowing faintly with watery light. She has traversed the earth, the moon, and the sun without finding the hidden keep where her beloved has either fled or been imprisoned -- each witness she meets tells a different tale -- but there are whispers of worlds more distant yet in the heavens, and she will walk a thousand years rather than turn back with questions yet unanswered.
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---------------
54. For anonymous: Any, any, silk, sage, silver, written 2/28/21
Sacrifices (150 words)
Fandom = original
-----
Silk: she ties a sash across your eyes, ties your wrists behind your back, ties your ankles as you kneel, ties your tongue with careful stitches to stopper up your sighs; there is no need to silence screams, not when you have come willing to her bed, but the ritual is stern.
Sage: she wafts incense through the air, traces oil across your skin in swirls and angled strokes in the pattern of a language and a script you never learned but now almost understand through touch alone.
Silver: she slides the needle into the softness beneath your skin, sends a rush of snow-melt cold flooding through your veins, a tracery of silver from your fingers to your heart... and when the cold-shock hits, when your pulse skips and stutters, she calls you treasure, calls you sister, calls you goddess, and whispers her eternal thanks as she sheaths her knife.
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I am experiencing a small amount of self-directed annoyance at not completing the same number of fills as last year (when I wrote 72, 12x6 being a tidy and auspicious number), but then I console myself with the knowledge that my life has been significantly more disrupted this year than last year (surgery! church crisis!) and also I am busier at the rental company in my new job than I was in my old job. And 54 fills is not a shabby number by any stretch of the imagination.
Also I have entire pages of the second ficathon post I have not yet perused, so I think I will give myself permission to continue writing fills for at least another week. :)
And now, bed, because my wrist is very sore and I would like to get some sleep. If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
All prompts drawn from the current iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon (post one and post two), hosted by the wonderful
rthstewart. The ficathon closes to new prompts tonight, but you can continue filling prompts and commenting on other people's fills for as long as you like!
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
49. For
paxilam: any, any, not answering the phone, written 2/23/21
Go to Voicemail (250 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives
-----
After his ordeal with Prentiss, Martin makes a point of answering his phone on the first ring and immediately replying to all texts; he winds up fielding a number of junk calls and disrupting his sleep schedule (insofar as he has a sleep schedule, here on the too-small cot in the document storage room, jolting awake at every creak of floorboard or groan of piping), but it's worth it to feel connected, to know that no supernatural creature will have another chance to impersonate him.
"That was one of the most suspicious things about you," Jon tells him much later; "It's not normal to be instantly available at all hours of the day and night, and naturally I jumped to incoherent conspiracy theories rather than the much more obvious and plausible answer that it was a trauma response -- the irony, of course, being that my paranoia was also a trauma response, and so we made each other steadily more upset rather than trying to support each other, or reach out to Tim."
"And when I stopped answering my phone altogether?" Martin asks. "Was that also suspicious?"
Jon shrugs, lightly, as if his isolation when he woke from his coma hardly mattered. "No, because by then I knew you -- I wished you would change your mind, of course, and I thought you were taking a terrible risk for a highly uncertain return, but you've let me run off halfcocked into all kinds of peril; how could I trust you any less?"
---------------
---------------
50. For
sawthefaeriequeen: Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, Janet and Tina, they develop their own roommate in-joke, written 2/24/21
It's All Greek to Me (710 words)
Obviously this is not a 3-sentence fill. *headdesk*
-----
Janet was thoroughly surprised when she passed behind Tina's desk, caught an accidental glimpse of the book her roommate was reading, and saw a layout familiar to any student of Classics: neat lines of Greek letters split into anachronistic paragraphs, with an English translation on the facing page. Instinctively, she attempted her own translation, only to grind to a halt when the text seemed to be something about folding a cloth to carry boiled water. Surely that couldn't be right.
Janet glanced toward the English page for clarification, but Tina shut the book and looked up with a tentative smile.
"I'm taking a class on medical history, for a general education requirement," she said -- at which point Janet realized she had vocalized her confusion and felt obscurely embarrassed, both to be caught reading over Tina's shoulder and to be tripped up by what felt like her own area of expertise.
"We've spent nearly two weeks on Hippocrates and Galen," Tina continued. "They were very wrong about all kinds of things, but not about everything, and it's interesting to learn what's changed and what's stayed the same about a doctor's job. My other classes aren't too heavy this term, so I thought I'd see if the Classics collection had any of their works. It turns out nobody knows if any of Hippocrates's own writing survived, but there's a whole collection of things associated with him."
"Why the bilingual edition, though?" Janet asked. "I didn't think you were interested in learning Greek."
"I thought about it," Tina said, surprising Janet once again. "There's heaps of Greek and Latin in medical jargon. But I decided it was easier to memorize as I go than try to squeeze a Classics minor around all my other classes -- besides, it doesn't seem worthwhile to slog through acres of Greek plays and Latin poetry in order to understand why otitis media means an inner ear infection."
Janet took a moment to parse the phrase -- ōtós for ear (Greek); itis for... hmm... arthritis, bursitis, tonsillitis, so that must have something to do with infection or inflammation (she would guess the suffix had Greek somewhere in its ancestry); media for middle (Latin) -- and winced. "I can tell you why for free. It's because mashing Greek and Latin together like that makes my ears ache."
Tina blinked, then gurgled with laughter. "It does sound awful, doesn't it? If I say you have an earache, you think it's nothing to worry about, but if I say you have an acute case of otitis media, that sounds like you're halfway to death."
"I shall not die of consumption, nor of a broken heart," Janet said in fainting tones, pressing the back of one hand against her forehead. "No, my fate is crueler yet. The dread otitis media shall drag me from this cold and heartless world." She swooned onto Molly's bed, expiring in a fit of melodrama.
Then she cracked one eye open to make sure Tina wasn't choking on her own laughter.
"I shouldn't laugh, I really shouldn't," Tina gasped. "Ear infections killed hundreds or thousands of children a year before antibiotics and modern treatments. They can still cause all kinds of problems. But oh goodness, can you imagine how undignified a death that would be for someone our age?"
"I can think of a few people I wouldn't mind inflicting an earache on," Janet said as she rolled upright and crossed her legs, still perched on Molly's bed. "Some people could do with a bit less dignity." Or at least could do with a problem they couldn't blithely (or haughtily) ignore, the way all the Classics lot seemed to do with any form of social awkwardness.
You couldn't politely evade or intimidate an ear infection.
"Yes," Tina said, with an expression on her face that said she was thinking along similar lines. "Perhaps we can ask the ghost to curse them with earaches. I'd like to see them herbal remedy their way out of that."
This time it was Janet's turn to laugh.
When they saw Thomas, Nick, and Robin across the room at dinner that evening, Janet leaned over to Tina and whispered, "Otitis media upon their houses, unto seven generations."
They never did manage to satisfactorily explain the joke to Molly.
---------------
---------------
51. For
sholio: MCU, any, superpower swap, written 2/27/21
Mirror, Mirror (340 words)
This is more of a skill swap than a power swap, but I figure if building flying armor counts as a superpower, Natasha and Clint's skillsets should as well. :)
-----
The Red Room had a specific ideal to which they trained their agents -- deceptively lovely, flexible, able to wear any mask and get close enough to kiss a target and steal his secrets as well as his life -- but while Natasha excelled enough to live, that pattern always felt like somebody else's coat, too baggy in the shoulders and tight around the waist. She prefers to work from a distance and in the shadows; steal impersonal documents, snap photos, plant microphones; send an autographed bullet from half a mile away. The idea of touching other people's skin, feeling their breath against her ear, makes her own skin crawl like the memory of a dozen spiders wandering over her while she lay paralyzed and desperate not to scream, and it's a rare person who can pass unharmed through the sphere of empty space she carves around herself with her dead-eyed stare.
The US Army was much more interested in snipers than infiltrators, but sometimes what you want isn't what you need, and Clint's always been personable when he puts his mind to it, not to mention good with accents and languages and mirroring what other people project onto him; you pick up those tricks pretty quick as a runaway, and even more so in the entertainment business. He's still a sniper on paper, but the moment he catches wind of SHIELD sending out feelers, he makes a play for a different line of work -- something where he can look the people he kills in the eye and know that they have a faint chance of turning the tables, walking away while he bleeds out on the floor. It's probably just as unethical to betray a cultivated trust, but he's been doing that for most of his life and it's a rare person who can coax him to peel off his masks and show the awkward, half-forgotten shape of his true self.
They make an odd pair, the sniper and the seducer, but nobody at SHIELD would dare to pull them apart.
---------------
---------------
52. For
wingedflight: Narnia/The Magnus Archives, any, the entities in Narnia, written 2/28/21
A Century of Fear (295 words)
-----
1. Vast
Narnia is not a large land, but the shroud of Winter smothers the landscape, blurs landmarks into a sweeping sameness: a blank canvas of white-gray-black that deceives the eye and spreads out to, so far as anyone can know, the uttermost bounds of the world -- and perhaps even beyond, out past the Western mountains and the Eastern sea until a body could travel a thousand years and still never find a day of summer sun, for the Winter admits no truth but its own immutable nature, and flattens all attempts at defiance to mere blots on the purity of its expanse.
-----
2. Buried
Petrification should stop the mind along with the body, yet those who feel the tight embrace of stone close in around them, driving inward like a vice, could tell you otherwise if they still had breath and space to speak; instead they stand silent in the crushing prison of their own forms, squeezed tighter and tighter until it seems they must explode under the pressure of their own transformed skin and muscle and bone... and yet there is always another notch to tighten, and never the release of death or sleep.
-----
3. Corruption
Collaboration is the law of the land, a sick fever that floods communities like clockwork as neighbor sells out neighbor for a scrap of food or a brief reprieve from violence; to love your family, to do right by them, you must do wrong by others, and that truth gnaws both inward through the soul and outward through the fragile bonds of care and trust that bind downtrodden Narnians together, until no one can look upon those they love, those for whom they sold their self-respect, without a hot rush of shame and revulsion clogging their throats and coating their teeth with bile.
---------------
---------------
53. For anonymous: Any, any, starry river of the sky, written 2/28/21
Who Walks Among the Stars (160 words)
Fandom = original
-----
The stars are more of a sea than a river, and more of a marsh than either, but there are channels where light flows swift and deep in and among the darker, drier ground, and those are what travelers follow on the winding paths between the worlds -- unless, of course, they are lucky enough to win the favor of birds and fly swift and true where others walk.
Kemmess steps tentatively from one hillock of dark to the next, testing the depth of the starry stream with the green, sap-sticky length of a broken reed, still glowing faintly with watery light. She has traversed the earth, the moon, and the sun without finding the hidden keep where her beloved has either fled or been imprisoned -- each witness she meets tells a different tale -- but there are whispers of worlds more distant yet in the heavens, and she will walk a thousand years rather than turn back with questions yet unanswered.
---------------
---------------
54. For anonymous: Any, any, silk, sage, silver, written 2/28/21
Sacrifices (150 words)
Fandom = original
-----
Silk: she ties a sash across your eyes, ties your wrists behind your back, ties your ankles as you kneel, ties your tongue with careful stitches to stopper up your sighs; there is no need to silence screams, not when you have come willing to her bed, but the ritual is stern.
Sage: she wafts incense through the air, traces oil across your skin in swirls and angled strokes in the pattern of a language and a script you never learned but now almost understand through touch alone.
Silver: she slides the needle into the softness beneath your skin, sends a rush of snow-melt cold flooding through your veins, a tracery of silver from your fingers to your heart... and when the cold-shock hits, when your pulse skips and stutters, she calls you treasure, calls you sister, calls you goddess, and whispers her eternal thanks as she sheaths her knife.
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
I am experiencing a small amount of self-directed annoyance at not completing the same number of fills as last year (when I wrote 72, 12x6 being a tidy and auspicious number), but then I console myself with the knowledge that my life has been significantly more disrupted this year than last year (surgery! church crisis!) and also I am busier at the rental company in my new job than I was in my old job. And 54 fills is not a shabby number by any stretch of the imagination.
Also I have entire pages of the second ficathon post I have not yet perused, so I think I will give myself permission to continue writing fills for at least another week. :)
And now, bed, because my wrist is very sore and I would like to get some sleep. If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)