[Fic] Three Sentence Ficathon 2021 fills, part twelve
Batch the twelfth. :)
All prompts drawn from the 2021 iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon (post one and post two), hosted by the wonderful
rthstewart. The ficathon is now closed to new prompts, but you can continue filling prompts and commenting on other people's fills for as long as you like!
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67. For anonymous: Any, any, a goddess made of starlight and shadows, written 3/31/21
Creator of the Stars of Night (95 words)
Fandom = The Silmarillion
-----
It is easy to forget, when faced with her glory, that Varda is not only a goddess of light. She who wrought the stars and set them on high as a comfort and a warning, she whose sight is keen, whose mind is clear, whose purpose adamant, she whose touch destroys evil, is too vast for light alone to encompass the truth of her being, no more than the brilliance of her stars can encompass the whole of the sky.
You must always remember that for the stars to shine, there must first be dark.
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68. For
notapaladin: Any, any/any, daemon AU, written 5/19/21
Sense of Self (1,845 words)
Fandom = The Murderbot Diaries
-----
Humans and augmented humans tend to assume that constructs have daemons because we straddle the line between true sentience and a bunch of pre-programmed subroutines mindlessly following orders (not that humans are as clearly on one side of that line as they like to think), but it has nothing to do with intelligence levels. It's just that we have a lot of organic parts mostly made from human genetic material, and where you have life composed of human DNA, you eventually get a daemon.
It's even odds whether the fact that our daemons never settle makes humans and augmented humans more or less uncomfortable around us. On the one hand, that kind of flexibility is unnatural for anyone with an adult-sized body, which makes us seem less relatable. On the other hand, humans tend to react negatively to the idea of juvenile humans (or their equivalents of other species) either killing or being killed. This is probably why it's company policy for SecUnits keep our daemons small and hidden within our armor -- unless we're in active combat, in which case there's a short list of approved battle forms.
We do settle sometimes, of course. Even governor modules and memory wipes can't always stop us from developing a sense of self stable enough to coax a daemon into a single form.
This is the second most common reason SecUnits are junked and recycled.
(The first is damage beyond budget projections -- in other words, if we get trashed too thoroughly to repair without eating into an acceptable profit margin. Nobody cares about the source of the damage. The result is the same if you heroically save your clients or if the clients shoot you themselves because they're bored or stressed and decide you make a good emotional receptacle.)
I don't know what the rules are for ComfortUnits. They might get a pass if they settle as something cute and fluffy. Or maybe not. Maybe it's more important to be able to project whatever image their clients want than to have anything we can call our own.
When I hacked my governor module, I was worried about more than just being caught. Nobody tells SecUnits what can trigger a daemon to settle. (The only exception is if our clients include a lot of potentially traumatized juvenile humans, in which case there is one carefully vague education module. I dug it up after hacking my governor module, and it's just as shitty as the company's other products.) I'd never rescued any juvenile humans, so I had no way of knowing whether the hack might cause my daemon to give me away.
I was probably lucky that I had so little idea what to do after my hack worked that I just kept doing my job for another 35,000+ hours. It turns out that freedom isn't a defining moment if you don't have the context to understand it.
(Or the context to feel it, Mobile One wants me to add. Mobile One is a security leak, only partially mitigated by the unreliability of its data analysis.)
It's also against company policy for constructs to name our daemons, but you can't augment a daemon. (There are generations of experiments to back that up. Ask me how I know. Actually, on second thought, don't.) Some settled daemons can use interfaces, but obviously that's not relevant for SecUnits.
This means that hardcoded feed addresses, which are the usual name equivalent for constructs working together, aren't an option. Pronouns get confusing without firm referents, and saying "Long-string-of-code's daemon" both wastes time and risks reminding both us and the supervisors that we have daemons in the first place, which makes us dangerously close to humans and augmented humans. So we give our daemons names that sound like drones or tools and the supervisors mostly don't notice -- or at least pretend not to notice, unless they want an excuse to punish someone.
Mobile One settled after I saved Mensah from the GrayCris assassins on Preservation Station.
To be slightly more accurate, Mobile One settled after I didn't kill the assassins' handler.
I still don't know why that, of all experiences, is what tipped me over the edge into some new existential level of self-knowledge or whatever exactly it is that makes daemons settle. But Mobile One has been a small avian ever since.
I didn't research the species. That would have been too much of something. (Mobile One could probably tell you what exactly I mean by 'something,' but I don't advise asking.)
I couldn't stop myself from wondering, though. Once I got halfway through constructing a feed search query before my performance reliability started dropping and Mobile One grabbed a bit of my hair and yanked it out by the roots.
(Occasionally I think I should undo the code that makes my hair longer than factory standard. Mobile One refuses to let me act on that impulse.)
In the end, Ratthi did the research for me. He and Aasia like that sort of social trivia and pseudo patterns, and I think they noticed I was avoiding the issue.
Apparently Mobile One settled as an old Earth species called a red-backed shrike.
"It took us a while to be sure," Ratthi told me, one hand stroking Aasia's scaled head as she eyed Mobile One with a considering air, "because the plumage pattern is unusual. Mobile One's eye band and general coloration is typical of male birds, but its chest mottling is typical of females."
(I had to excuse myself to experience an emotion at that point. Mobile One ran its beak through my hair and hummed a bit of the Sanctuary Moon season three opening credits music, even though it prefers the clearly inferior version from season five.)
Ratthi sent me a small file of text, images, and video about shrikes, which I skimmed later that cycle. This is why I can tell you that shrikes are territorial and migratory songbirds. They're also predators that are known to impale dead prey on twigs and thorns for storage, and sometimes to give poisons in the prey's body time to chemically degrade. That behavior implies more forethought and a better risk assessment module than I have. Mobile One says that's because it got all the common sense between us.
Mobile One also says that considering how much we love drones, it should have known we'd settle as some kind of avian.
(I don't love drones. I just think they're extremely useful, especially in situations where the local systems are unreliable, nonexistent, or I've been forbidden to access them for stupid reasons. I refuse to have emotions about disposable tools.)
(Yes, I know that's hypocritical.)
(Mobile One has already said everything you're probably thinking. I've chosen to use my freedom to ignore it.)
It's strange to have a settled daemon. On the one hand, it's easier to pass for an augmented human. That can be useful. On the other hand, I don't especially like passing for an augmented human. On the third hand, Mobile One is still small enough to fit inside standard armor or the small carrying case SecUnits are allotted for our daemons when in a uniform. That can also be useful in the Corporation Rim. On the fourth hand--
On the fourth hand, having a settled daemon makes humans and augmented humans act like they know things about me. Personal things. Things I might prefer to remain private.
ART asked me once, not long after the mess with BarishEstranza and the alien remnants and the kidnapping, if I'd choose (Would have chosen? Would go back and re-choose? Tenses are strange) not to settle, if that had been an option. I had to stop and think about the question for nearly a minute.
ART doesn't have a daemon, of course. Like I said, daemons aren't related to intelligence or sentience. It's about human genetic material. Bots have no organic parts, so no bots have daemons. (Some like to build sub-programs to act as something vaguely analogous, but really those are more like pets than another part of yourself.)
So it was a weird question, because if you have a daemon, you know settling isn't something anyone can choose or not choose. Maybe you can affect what you settle as, by pushing hard to emphasize some aspect of your personality and backburner other aspects, but there are no guarantees and that kind of metal restructuring is tricky even for constructs who have access to our internal programming.
(Mobile One wants me to add that it's probably harder for constructs because we don't make use of trained professional mind engineers. Mobile One clearly hasn't spent enough time reviewing the ways various therapy programs are mismatched to the structure of construct consciousness.)
Do I miss the flexibility? Yes, sometimes. Do I miss being the same as all other SecUnits? Sometimes. (You may have noticed I have complicated feelings about being seen, and about being a person.) But do I wish Mobile One hadn't settled? No.
In some ways, our life would have been simpler. Humans like things that fit into tidy categories. SecUnits blur a lot of categories, so staying within even one mental box -- that SecUnit daemons are unsettled -- might have helped. On the other hand, a person that looks superficially like an adult augmented human but whose daemon isn't settled blurs other categories that set off a lot of subconscious pattern-recognition alarms in human minds.
And ultimately, Mobile One likes being a shrike. I still don't know what I think about shrikes, but I like the way Mobile One feels about being settled. I like that this is one solid thing nobody can take away from us, no matter what happens to my code or my organic parts.
I think that's why the company disassembles us if we settle. They can't afford for us to realize we're people.
(The Corporation Rim can't even afford for humans to realize that they're people. If bots and constructs started acting like people, who knows what ideas contract laborers might get.)
ART said that was an interesting set of data points.
I asked if it was planning to write a paper.
It said Three and I weren't a large enough sample size to prove anything.
The normal interpretation of that statement would be that ART isn't planning to write a paper. But I know ART pretty well by now (Mobile One says we're friends. I still don't like using that word.) and I calculate at least an 84% probability that it wants to collect more rogue SecUnits, wait until they settle (or fail to settle, I guess, since this is ART and it always wants to start from first principles), and add them to its dataset.
That these collection efforts will cause problems for the corporations that own the SecUnits in question is completely tangential to the spirit of scientific inquiry, of course.
(If you believe that, I have a mining colony I'd like to sell you, complete with all its indentures.)
I think Mobile One and I wouldn't mind helping out.
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69. For
rthstewart: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, any, reclaiming the narrative, written 5/26/21
Take a Third Option (310 words)
-----
"Want, take, have," Faith told Buffy back in the day, before the murder and torture and betrayal and all that -- and the thing is, the thing it took her a year in prison to sort out, piecing herself together without the pressure to play to or against anyone else's expectations (turns out, you beat a couple assholes up the first week in gen pop and treat the guards like part of the machinery, and most people are real quick to leave you alone), is this: she wasn't wrong.
Yeah, she fucked up the execution (turns out, just 'cause nobody ever respected her boundaries wasn't a reason to ignore everyone else's in turn; that's just passing on the trauma and pretending it's cool), but the core of it, the raw, bloody, beating heart that screamed her right to have desires -- to want sex, power, respect, love, life -- isn't dirty or shameful or whatever the fuck society feeds girls from babies to grandmas, all those lies about nurture and purity and selflessness until you start to think, fuck it, if wanting makes you evil, then why not be evil -- at least then you can be yourself instead of a shadow of all the people pressed around you, hungry, trying to hack off bits of your self and your soul until you fit their pet narrative.
Turns out, femme fatale is just as much somebody else's story as chaste heroine -- that old Madonna/whore thing Giles mentioned once to Wesley when they didn't realize Faith was in earshot, where you can be good or you can want things, but never both together -- and Faith is done with playing that game; when she gets out, she'll be more thoughtful with her methods (turns out, sometimes if you ask, people will even give you stuff without threats or bribes), but what she wants, she'll win.
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70. For anonymous: Any, any, a singing bird will come, written 5/26/21
A Wilderness in the Heart (195 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives
-----
When Agnes is young, it's easy to keep herself open to the voice of her god: to build her heart into a bonfire, to scour away doubt, to drown her very self in the task she was born to complete.
But as the years wear on, as Gertrude's web binds her and the Cult of Lightless Flame splinters around her, Agnes finds certainty hard to hold: the fire fades, the sandstorm stills, the flood ebbs, and Agnes watches the strange green shoots of new thoughts sprout first into weeds (hastily yanked and scorched) and then into moss, thickets, trees -- a thorny forest of questions and yearning.
When she meets Jack Barnabas, she realizes that for all her changes, for all the greenery choking her heart, her soul's landscape is still barren -- no birds have come to build their nests and sing -- and try as she might, she can never outrun the inferno whose embers crackle within her bones; happiness is not within her reach.
Despair feeds the god she no longer wants to serve; better to lay herself waste and let something new, something stronger, take root in her ashes and struggle towards the sun.
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71. For anonymous: Any, any, nectarines, written 5/27/21
All Summer in a Bite (180 words)
Fandom = Chronicles of Narnia
-----
Calavar was not peach country -- land good for horses was generally poor for orchards, and vice versa -- but Mezreel claimed all fruits among its thousand delights, and while Aravis would personally contest the quality of their figs and dates, none could truthfully speak against their plums and pears, apples and cherries, their pomegranates and nectarines.
One of her earliest memories was the flash of midsummer sun on her brother's knife, slicing through the delicate, already-bruising skin of a firm, white nectarine and his deft fingers holding out a slice for her own clumsy, plump-fleshed hands to grasp; the juice burst sweet and tart over her tongue like a dream she had forgotten and would yearn for from that day forward.
Archenland was not peach country either, but an esplanade on a south-facing wall, netting and heated stones to guard against late spring frost, bone meal and eggshells kneaded into soil, and a certain amount of bloody-minded faith won her and Cor peaches two years out of three, and her children grew with the taste of summer dreams upon their lips.
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72. For
notapaladin: Any, any, a broken crown for a broken throne, written 5/27/21
Final Tithe (90 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives
-----
King of a ruined world? Why so you shall become, but your throne will be the threads of the trap that binds you helpless as your doom approaches, step by step from the pitiless north; and your crown will be the certainty of death: at first the barest drop dyeing the flood of others' fears, but waxing, ever waxing, until the multitudinous seas run incarnadine with your oldest terror come home to roost.
Enjoy it, Jonah Magnus, in the sliver of thought that remains to you before your self-wrought End.
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And that's as many as I wrote last year, though spread out over a significantly longer period.
I may keep going -- these are nice finger exercises when I don't have the brain to work on anything longer or more complicated.
I should probably also get started on cross-posting them to AO3. *sigh* 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 2021 iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon (post one and post two), hosted by the wonderful
rthstewart. The ficathon is now closed to new prompts, but you can continue filling prompts and commenting on other people's fills for as long as you like!
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
67. For anonymous: Any, any, a goddess made of starlight and shadows, written 3/31/21
Creator of the Stars of Night (95 words)
Fandom = The Silmarillion
-----
It is easy to forget, when faced with her glory, that Varda is not only a goddess of light. She who wrought the stars and set them on high as a comfort and a warning, she whose sight is keen, whose mind is clear, whose purpose adamant, she whose touch destroys evil, is too vast for light alone to encompass the truth of her being, no more than the brilliance of her stars can encompass the whole of the sky.
You must always remember that for the stars to shine, there must first be dark.
---------------
---------------
68. For
notapaladin: Any, any/any, daemon AU, written 5/19/21
Sense of Self (1,845 words)
Fandom = The Murderbot Diaries
-----
Humans and augmented humans tend to assume that constructs have daemons because we straddle the line between true sentience and a bunch of pre-programmed subroutines mindlessly following orders (not that humans are as clearly on one side of that line as they like to think), but it has nothing to do with intelligence levels. It's just that we have a lot of organic parts mostly made from human genetic material, and where you have life composed of human DNA, you eventually get a daemon.
It's even odds whether the fact that our daemons never settle makes humans and augmented humans more or less uncomfortable around us. On the one hand, that kind of flexibility is unnatural for anyone with an adult-sized body, which makes us seem less relatable. On the other hand, humans tend to react negatively to the idea of juvenile humans (or their equivalents of other species) either killing or being killed. This is probably why it's company policy for SecUnits keep our daemons small and hidden within our armor -- unless we're in active combat, in which case there's a short list of approved battle forms.
We do settle sometimes, of course. Even governor modules and memory wipes can't always stop us from developing a sense of self stable enough to coax a daemon into a single form.
This is the second most common reason SecUnits are junked and recycled.
(The first is damage beyond budget projections -- in other words, if we get trashed too thoroughly to repair without eating into an acceptable profit margin. Nobody cares about the source of the damage. The result is the same if you heroically save your clients or if the clients shoot you themselves because they're bored or stressed and decide you make a good emotional receptacle.)
I don't know what the rules are for ComfortUnits. They might get a pass if they settle as something cute and fluffy. Or maybe not. Maybe it's more important to be able to project whatever image their clients want than to have anything we can call our own.
When I hacked my governor module, I was worried about more than just being caught. Nobody tells SecUnits what can trigger a daemon to settle. (The only exception is if our clients include a lot of potentially traumatized juvenile humans, in which case there is one carefully vague education module. I dug it up after hacking my governor module, and it's just as shitty as the company's other products.) I'd never rescued any juvenile humans, so I had no way of knowing whether the hack might cause my daemon to give me away.
I was probably lucky that I had so little idea what to do after my hack worked that I just kept doing my job for another 35,000+ hours. It turns out that freedom isn't a defining moment if you don't have the context to understand it.
(Or the context to feel it, Mobile One wants me to add. Mobile One is a security leak, only partially mitigated by the unreliability of its data analysis.)
It's also against company policy for constructs to name our daemons, but you can't augment a daemon. (There are generations of experiments to back that up. Ask me how I know. Actually, on second thought, don't.) Some settled daemons can use interfaces, but obviously that's not relevant for SecUnits.
This means that hardcoded feed addresses, which are the usual name equivalent for constructs working together, aren't an option. Pronouns get confusing without firm referents, and saying "Long-string-of-code's daemon" both wastes time and risks reminding both us and the supervisors that we have daemons in the first place, which makes us dangerously close to humans and augmented humans. So we give our daemons names that sound like drones or tools and the supervisors mostly don't notice -- or at least pretend not to notice, unless they want an excuse to punish someone.
Mobile One settled after I saved Mensah from the GrayCris assassins on Preservation Station.
To be slightly more accurate, Mobile One settled after I didn't kill the assassins' handler.
I still don't know why that, of all experiences, is what tipped me over the edge into some new existential level of self-knowledge or whatever exactly it is that makes daemons settle. But Mobile One has been a small avian ever since.
I didn't research the species. That would have been too much of something. (Mobile One could probably tell you what exactly I mean by 'something,' but I don't advise asking.)
I couldn't stop myself from wondering, though. Once I got halfway through constructing a feed search query before my performance reliability started dropping and Mobile One grabbed a bit of my hair and yanked it out by the roots.
(Occasionally I think I should undo the code that makes my hair longer than factory standard. Mobile One refuses to let me act on that impulse.)
In the end, Ratthi did the research for me. He and Aasia like that sort of social trivia and pseudo patterns, and I think they noticed I was avoiding the issue.
Apparently Mobile One settled as an old Earth species called a red-backed shrike.
"It took us a while to be sure," Ratthi told me, one hand stroking Aasia's scaled head as she eyed Mobile One with a considering air, "because the plumage pattern is unusual. Mobile One's eye band and general coloration is typical of male birds, but its chest mottling is typical of females."
(I had to excuse myself to experience an emotion at that point. Mobile One ran its beak through my hair and hummed a bit of the Sanctuary Moon season three opening credits music, even though it prefers the clearly inferior version from season five.)
Ratthi sent me a small file of text, images, and video about shrikes, which I skimmed later that cycle. This is why I can tell you that shrikes are territorial and migratory songbirds. They're also predators that are known to impale dead prey on twigs and thorns for storage, and sometimes to give poisons in the prey's body time to chemically degrade. That behavior implies more forethought and a better risk assessment module than I have. Mobile One says that's because it got all the common sense between us.
Mobile One also says that considering how much we love drones, it should have known we'd settle as some kind of avian.
(I don't love drones. I just think they're extremely useful, especially in situations where the local systems are unreliable, nonexistent, or I've been forbidden to access them for stupid reasons. I refuse to have emotions about disposable tools.)
(Yes, I know that's hypocritical.)
(Mobile One has already said everything you're probably thinking. I've chosen to use my freedom to ignore it.)
It's strange to have a settled daemon. On the one hand, it's easier to pass for an augmented human. That can be useful. On the other hand, I don't especially like passing for an augmented human. On the third hand, Mobile One is still small enough to fit inside standard armor or the small carrying case SecUnits are allotted for our daemons when in a uniform. That can also be useful in the Corporation Rim. On the fourth hand--
On the fourth hand, having a settled daemon makes humans and augmented humans act like they know things about me. Personal things. Things I might prefer to remain private.
ART asked me once, not long after the mess with BarishEstranza and the alien remnants and the kidnapping, if I'd choose (Would have chosen? Would go back and re-choose? Tenses are strange) not to settle, if that had been an option. I had to stop and think about the question for nearly a minute.
ART doesn't have a daemon, of course. Like I said, daemons aren't related to intelligence or sentience. It's about human genetic material. Bots have no organic parts, so no bots have daemons. (Some like to build sub-programs to act as something vaguely analogous, but really those are more like pets than another part of yourself.)
So it was a weird question, because if you have a daemon, you know settling isn't something anyone can choose or not choose. Maybe you can affect what you settle as, by pushing hard to emphasize some aspect of your personality and backburner other aspects, but there are no guarantees and that kind of metal restructuring is tricky even for constructs who have access to our internal programming.
(Mobile One wants me to add that it's probably harder for constructs because we don't make use of trained professional mind engineers. Mobile One clearly hasn't spent enough time reviewing the ways various therapy programs are mismatched to the structure of construct consciousness.)
Do I miss the flexibility? Yes, sometimes. Do I miss being the same as all other SecUnits? Sometimes. (You may have noticed I have complicated feelings about being seen, and about being a person.) But do I wish Mobile One hadn't settled? No.
In some ways, our life would have been simpler. Humans like things that fit into tidy categories. SecUnits blur a lot of categories, so staying within even one mental box -- that SecUnit daemons are unsettled -- might have helped. On the other hand, a person that looks superficially like an adult augmented human but whose daemon isn't settled blurs other categories that set off a lot of subconscious pattern-recognition alarms in human minds.
And ultimately, Mobile One likes being a shrike. I still don't know what I think about shrikes, but I like the way Mobile One feels about being settled. I like that this is one solid thing nobody can take away from us, no matter what happens to my code or my organic parts.
I think that's why the company disassembles us if we settle. They can't afford for us to realize we're people.
(The Corporation Rim can't even afford for humans to realize that they're people. If bots and constructs started acting like people, who knows what ideas contract laborers might get.)
ART said that was an interesting set of data points.
I asked if it was planning to write a paper.
It said Three and I weren't a large enough sample size to prove anything.
The normal interpretation of that statement would be that ART isn't planning to write a paper. But I know ART pretty well by now (Mobile One says we're friends. I still don't like using that word.) and I calculate at least an 84% probability that it wants to collect more rogue SecUnits, wait until they settle (or fail to settle, I guess, since this is ART and it always wants to start from first principles), and add them to its dataset.
That these collection efforts will cause problems for the corporations that own the SecUnits in question is completely tangential to the spirit of scientific inquiry, of course.
(If you believe that, I have a mining colony I'd like to sell you, complete with all its indentures.)
I think Mobile One and I wouldn't mind helping out.
---------------
---------------
69. For
rthstewart: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, any, reclaiming the narrative, written 5/26/21
Take a Third Option (310 words)
-----
"Want, take, have," Faith told Buffy back in the day, before the murder and torture and betrayal and all that -- and the thing is, the thing it took her a year in prison to sort out, piecing herself together without the pressure to play to or against anyone else's expectations (turns out, you beat a couple assholes up the first week in gen pop and treat the guards like part of the machinery, and most people are real quick to leave you alone), is this: she wasn't wrong.
Yeah, she fucked up the execution (turns out, just 'cause nobody ever respected her boundaries wasn't a reason to ignore everyone else's in turn; that's just passing on the trauma and pretending it's cool), but the core of it, the raw, bloody, beating heart that screamed her right to have desires -- to want sex, power, respect, love, life -- isn't dirty or shameful or whatever the fuck society feeds girls from babies to grandmas, all those lies about nurture and purity and selflessness until you start to think, fuck it, if wanting makes you evil, then why not be evil -- at least then you can be yourself instead of a shadow of all the people pressed around you, hungry, trying to hack off bits of your self and your soul until you fit their pet narrative.
Turns out, femme fatale is just as much somebody else's story as chaste heroine -- that old Madonna/whore thing Giles mentioned once to Wesley when they didn't realize Faith was in earshot, where you can be good or you can want things, but never both together -- and Faith is done with playing that game; when she gets out, she'll be more thoughtful with her methods (turns out, sometimes if you ask, people will even give you stuff without threats or bribes), but what she wants, she'll win.
---------------
---------------
70. For anonymous: Any, any, a singing bird will come, written 5/26/21
A Wilderness in the Heart (195 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives
-----
When Agnes is young, it's easy to keep herself open to the voice of her god: to build her heart into a bonfire, to scour away doubt, to drown her very self in the task she was born to complete.
But as the years wear on, as Gertrude's web binds her and the Cult of Lightless Flame splinters around her, Agnes finds certainty hard to hold: the fire fades, the sandstorm stills, the flood ebbs, and Agnes watches the strange green shoots of new thoughts sprout first into weeds (hastily yanked and scorched) and then into moss, thickets, trees -- a thorny forest of questions and yearning.
When she meets Jack Barnabas, she realizes that for all her changes, for all the greenery choking her heart, her soul's landscape is still barren -- no birds have come to build their nests and sing -- and try as she might, she can never outrun the inferno whose embers crackle within her bones; happiness is not within her reach.
Despair feeds the god she no longer wants to serve; better to lay herself waste and let something new, something stronger, take root in her ashes and struggle towards the sun.
---------------
---------------
71. For anonymous: Any, any, nectarines, written 5/27/21
All Summer in a Bite (180 words)
Fandom = Chronicles of Narnia
-----
Calavar was not peach country -- land good for horses was generally poor for orchards, and vice versa -- but Mezreel claimed all fruits among its thousand delights, and while Aravis would personally contest the quality of their figs and dates, none could truthfully speak against their plums and pears, apples and cherries, their pomegranates and nectarines.
One of her earliest memories was the flash of midsummer sun on her brother's knife, slicing through the delicate, already-bruising skin of a firm, white nectarine and his deft fingers holding out a slice for her own clumsy, plump-fleshed hands to grasp; the juice burst sweet and tart over her tongue like a dream she had forgotten and would yearn for from that day forward.
Archenland was not peach country either, but an esplanade on a south-facing wall, netting and heated stones to guard against late spring frost, bone meal and eggshells kneaded into soil, and a certain amount of bloody-minded faith won her and Cor peaches two years out of three, and her children grew with the taste of summer dreams upon their lips.
---------------
---------------
72. For
notapaladin: Any, any, a broken crown for a broken throne, written 5/27/21
Final Tithe (90 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives
-----
King of a ruined world? Why so you shall become, but your throne will be the threads of the trap that binds you helpless as your doom approaches, step by step from the pitiless north; and your crown will be the certainty of death: at first the barest drop dyeing the flood of others' fears, but waxing, ever waxing, until the multitudinous seas run incarnadine with your oldest terror come home to roost.
Enjoy it, Jonah Magnus, in the sliver of thought that remains to you before your self-wrought End.
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
And that's as many as I wrote last year, though spread out over a significantly longer period.
I may keep going -- these are nice finger exercises when I don't have the brain to work on anything longer or more complicated.
I should probably also get started on cross-posting them to AO3. *sigh* If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)