[Fic] Three Sentence Ficathon Fills, part 1 -- various fandoms
It occurs to me that I never got around to pimping the current iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon. So here, have a banner!
I have written a few things over the past few days, and will now crosspost them here for indexing purposes. :-)
---------------------------------------------
1. Doctordolly, Narnia, Edmund's encounter with the White Witch turns him into a mage
What Might Have Been, What May Yet Be (425 words)
As you can see, this is somewhat longer than three sentences. Oops?
-----
No one save Aslan knew what had become of the Witch's stone knife, nor the hilt of her wand, but Edmund kept the upper portion; she had bequeathed it to him when she rammed it through a gap in his armor, drenched its carvings in his blood, and so it was his, a poor cousin to the gifts his siblings had received, but his all the same. It felt right and necessary in his hand the way his borrowed sword had not, and sometimes a shivery, silver spark leapt from its tip when he touched the night-black stone, as if he were a battery that brought it to life.
He had eaten the Witch's food, gone willingly into her service. Had she left some trace of herself behind? Had he broken or woken something best left undisturbed inside himself? If he kept the wand, did that make him corrupt, mean he had learned nothing from his trials?
"You have been touched by the Deep Magic, and few emerge unchanged from such an encounter," Aslan said when Edmund took his worries to the Lion the night before the coronation. "Whether the change is for good or for ill is in your hands. All gifts are granted for a purpose, but you are not obligated to accept. Your choice is yours alone."
Edmund held the shattered wand before him, resting on his open palms. "I don't want to be like her," he said. "Her magic was wrong. What she did with it was wrong. But Lucy's cordial and Susan's horn are good, so there must be ways to use magic better. And if we'd had someone to fight with spells as well as swords, we might have ended the battle sooner, with fewer deaths. Mightn't we?"
Aslan's mane smelled warm and sweet as he walked beside Edmund through the corridors of Cair Paravel. "You cannot change what might have been, child, only what may yet be."
Edmund thought about that for a minute. Then he closed his right hand around the wand. "I accept the gift."
Aslan stopped as they reached a turn in the corridor and placed one heavy, velvet paw on Edmund's shoulder. "So be it. Magic is a hard and dangerous road, but it need not be lonely, nor need the journey end in despair. Bear your power well, Edmund Pevensie."
Edmund stood tall under Aslan's regard, trying his best to live up to what the Lion saw in him. "Thank you, sir," he said. "I will."
And so he did.
---------------
2. silvr_dagger, Star Trek AOS, Uhura/Gaila, lost in translation.
Body Language (The Scent of Home) (180 words)
"You're learning Orion awfully fast for a Terran," Gaila says, reveling in the taste of her birth language on her tongue and lips, the easy slide of muscles and skin now that she's not regimenting herself into the postures and gestures other species are least likely to find unsettling, "even if your accent's hilarious."
"What's wrong with my accent?" Nyota asks, mimicking Gaila's vocal patterns and inflections perfectly; she even does a passable job with her face and shoulders and hands, though her kinesthetic inflections are all High House pride and precision, not Gaila's looser tech gang dialect.
Sister/lover/mine, sweet/silly/adorable, cuddle you, lazy pleasure, Gaila says in pheromones as she tackles Nyota to her bed and grins down at her alien sister; she breathes in, rolls Nyota's scent across her tongue as it changes from fierce concentration to surprise and tangy, alien lust, both contradicting the careful softness of her limbs and the blankness of her face because she doesn't know what her own body is saying; and she says aloud, "Nothing you can fix," before cutting off Nyota's protest with a kiss.
---------------
3. scripps, Star Trek AOS, Gaila/Jim, she's more adventurous than him which he loves.
Stranger in a Strange Land (200 words)
What most humans tend to overlook -- because they have the option of overlooking it, because it's a human tendency to assume that the way the world happens to be at the moment is the way it obviously must and should be -- is that Starfleet is, at its base, a human institution: human majority, human organizational rules, structures built on human blueprints, environmental parameters set to human standards, etcetera ad nauseum... which makes sense since Starfleet was a human idea that the other Federation founders agreed to more from a spirit of indulgence than any driving enthusiasm of their own, but still: it all defaults to human.
Gaila isn't human.
Jim didn't join Starfleet until Pike dared him, too busy clinging to his bitterness and curdled anger, but Gaila left everything behind -- her language, her culture, her planet, her species -- and plunged headfirst into the unknown without so much as a backward glance; she lives every day among aliens who reduce her to a stereotype yet holds onto herself, her goals, and her sheer joy in life; and Jim hopes someday he'll learn to chase his own dreams with half the grace and courage she shares so freely with anyone who has the sense to ask.
---------------
4. silvr_dagger, Star Trek AOS, Mirror!Gaila/Mirror!Uhura, plotting the revolution
Reign in Hell (240 words)
"Do you think Spock...?" Nyota asks one day as she shucks her skirt and jewelry (but not her knives) in the physical privacy of Gaila's cabin -- no one wants to violate an Orion woman's lair, not and wind up another slave on Gaila's chemical string -- and wonders what insult the captain will use to make her pay for her latest, bloody refusal of his attentions, and how long before she has him at her mercy.
"He'd join us for the push, but not for the follow-through," Gaila says, looking up from the phaser she's sabotaging and running her eyes along Nyota's body with an appreciative smile; she sets her work aside and stands, equally naked and equally armed (though less visibly) and adds, "He wants justice, not power, the poor deluded fool."
Nyota sighs, because idealists are too dangerous to leave alive and free and there goes her half-formed plan of getting Spock to serve as a figurehead in the transitional period once she and Gaila kill Kirk and his faction, until they gather enough support and inspire enough mimics to force the Empire to recognize their authority despite their gender; but she opens her arms to trace razor nails along Gaila's sides, pulls her into the refresher to shield their words with water, and opens Gaila's lips with a kiss, sharing the trace of Kirk's blood still caught on her teeth and tongue.
It tastes of treason.
---------------
5.
jjhunter, Any Batman-related canon, Barbara Gordon, book cart drill team
Don't Try This at Home (150 words)
I'm not sure what canon this is exactly -- maybe comics before the New 52 reboot?
-----
"First to shelve three carts -- accurately, and without disturbing or disrupting the patrons -- wins one snark-free night to be cashed in at your discretion," Barbara said, eyeing Dick, Tim, Cass, Steph, and Damien with her best stern librarian expression, cultivated through years of dealing with difficult patrons and Bruce (mostly Bruce).
"I still want to know how you got permission for this," Damien grumbled as he looked over his first cart: assorted YA fiction, mostly, with a sprinkling of adult fiction and children's nonfiction, because it was no fun if the carts came pre-sorted.
"The inner mysteries of the librarians' cult are forbidden to outsiders," Barbara said, "so unless you have a Masters in Library Science you've somehow managed to keep secret from my all-seeing eye..." -- Dick grinned and subtly shook his head behind Damien's back -- "then stop trying to distract me and get ready, get set, GO!"
---------------
6. And a continuation of the above, upon discovering the true meaning of book cart drill team:
jjhunter, Book Cart Drill Team -- Further Proof That Librarians Kick Ass
The Stories I Could Tell... (100 words exactly)
"Teamwork, coordination, silly costumes, opportunity for terrible puns and other forms of questionable humor -- what are you objecting to?" Barbara asked, blinking innocently up at her makeshift family as she ticked off the benefits of book cart drill on her fingers.
"I think I speak for us all when I say, the part where you want us to dance with shelving carts, which, seriously, in what universe is that ever going to be relevant to our lives?" Steph said.
Barbara grinned, but Dick had a hand over her mouth before she could say more than, "Funny you should ask."
---------------------------------------------
The final ficlet is slightly modified from the version posted at the ficathon, since I realized trimming five words could produce a strict-form drabble and I like strict-form drabbles.
Word counts, however, are not really the point of this ficathon. The game is structure, not length, and I failed the three-sentence restriction on two of six ficlets -- cheerfully and unrepentently for the magic!Edmund prompt, but only after much wailing and gnashing of teeth for the Mirrorverse prompt. For me and this particular set of rules, though, 67% is a pretty good success rate. I will take it.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
I have written a few things over the past few days, and will now crosspost them here for indexing purposes. :-)
---------------------------------------------
1. Doctordolly, Narnia, Edmund's encounter with the White Witch turns him into a mage
What Might Have Been, What May Yet Be (425 words)
As you can see, this is somewhat longer than three sentences. Oops?
-----
No one save Aslan knew what had become of the Witch's stone knife, nor the hilt of her wand, but Edmund kept the upper portion; she had bequeathed it to him when she rammed it through a gap in his armor, drenched its carvings in his blood, and so it was his, a poor cousin to the gifts his siblings had received, but his all the same. It felt right and necessary in his hand the way his borrowed sword had not, and sometimes a shivery, silver spark leapt from its tip when he touched the night-black stone, as if he were a battery that brought it to life.
He had eaten the Witch's food, gone willingly into her service. Had she left some trace of herself behind? Had he broken or woken something best left undisturbed inside himself? If he kept the wand, did that make him corrupt, mean he had learned nothing from his trials?
"You have been touched by the Deep Magic, and few emerge unchanged from such an encounter," Aslan said when Edmund took his worries to the Lion the night before the coronation. "Whether the change is for good or for ill is in your hands. All gifts are granted for a purpose, but you are not obligated to accept. Your choice is yours alone."
Edmund held the shattered wand before him, resting on his open palms. "I don't want to be like her," he said. "Her magic was wrong. What she did with it was wrong. But Lucy's cordial and Susan's horn are good, so there must be ways to use magic better. And if we'd had someone to fight with spells as well as swords, we might have ended the battle sooner, with fewer deaths. Mightn't we?"
Aslan's mane smelled warm and sweet as he walked beside Edmund through the corridors of Cair Paravel. "You cannot change what might have been, child, only what may yet be."
Edmund thought about that for a minute. Then he closed his right hand around the wand. "I accept the gift."
Aslan stopped as they reached a turn in the corridor and placed one heavy, velvet paw on Edmund's shoulder. "So be it. Magic is a hard and dangerous road, but it need not be lonely, nor need the journey end in despair. Bear your power well, Edmund Pevensie."
Edmund stood tall under Aslan's regard, trying his best to live up to what the Lion saw in him. "Thank you, sir," he said. "I will."
And so he did.
---------------
2. silvr_dagger, Star Trek AOS, Uhura/Gaila, lost in translation.
Body Language (The Scent of Home) (180 words)
"You're learning Orion awfully fast for a Terran," Gaila says, reveling in the taste of her birth language on her tongue and lips, the easy slide of muscles and skin now that she's not regimenting herself into the postures and gestures other species are least likely to find unsettling, "even if your accent's hilarious."
"What's wrong with my accent?" Nyota asks, mimicking Gaila's vocal patterns and inflections perfectly; she even does a passable job with her face and shoulders and hands, though her kinesthetic inflections are all High House pride and precision, not Gaila's looser tech gang dialect.
Sister/lover/mine, sweet/silly/adorable, cuddle you, lazy pleasure, Gaila says in pheromones as she tackles Nyota to her bed and grins down at her alien sister; she breathes in, rolls Nyota's scent across her tongue as it changes from fierce concentration to surprise and tangy, alien lust, both contradicting the careful softness of her limbs and the blankness of her face because she doesn't know what her own body is saying; and she says aloud, "Nothing you can fix," before cutting off Nyota's protest with a kiss.
---------------
3. scripps, Star Trek AOS, Gaila/Jim, she's more adventurous than him which he loves.
Stranger in a Strange Land (200 words)
What most humans tend to overlook -- because they have the option of overlooking it, because it's a human tendency to assume that the way the world happens to be at the moment is the way it obviously must and should be -- is that Starfleet is, at its base, a human institution: human majority, human organizational rules, structures built on human blueprints, environmental parameters set to human standards, etcetera ad nauseum... which makes sense since Starfleet was a human idea that the other Federation founders agreed to more from a spirit of indulgence than any driving enthusiasm of their own, but still: it all defaults to human.
Gaila isn't human.
Jim didn't join Starfleet until Pike dared him, too busy clinging to his bitterness and curdled anger, but Gaila left everything behind -- her language, her culture, her planet, her species -- and plunged headfirst into the unknown without so much as a backward glance; she lives every day among aliens who reduce her to a stereotype yet holds onto herself, her goals, and her sheer joy in life; and Jim hopes someday he'll learn to chase his own dreams with half the grace and courage she shares so freely with anyone who has the sense to ask.
---------------
4. silvr_dagger, Star Trek AOS, Mirror!Gaila/Mirror!Uhura, plotting the revolution
Reign in Hell (240 words)
"Do you think Spock...?" Nyota asks one day as she shucks her skirt and jewelry (but not her knives) in the physical privacy of Gaila's cabin -- no one wants to violate an Orion woman's lair, not and wind up another slave on Gaila's chemical string -- and wonders what insult the captain will use to make her pay for her latest, bloody refusal of his attentions, and how long before she has him at her mercy.
"He'd join us for the push, but not for the follow-through," Gaila says, looking up from the phaser she's sabotaging and running her eyes along Nyota's body with an appreciative smile; she sets her work aside and stands, equally naked and equally armed (though less visibly) and adds, "He wants justice, not power, the poor deluded fool."
Nyota sighs, because idealists are too dangerous to leave alive and free and there goes her half-formed plan of getting Spock to serve as a figurehead in the transitional period once she and Gaila kill Kirk and his faction, until they gather enough support and inspire enough mimics to force the Empire to recognize their authority despite their gender; but she opens her arms to trace razor nails along Gaila's sides, pulls her into the refresher to shield their words with water, and opens Gaila's lips with a kiss, sharing the trace of Kirk's blood still caught on her teeth and tongue.
It tastes of treason.
---------------
5.
jjhunter, Any Batman-related canon, Barbara Gordon, book cart drill team
Don't Try This at Home (150 words)
I'm not sure what canon this is exactly -- maybe comics before the New 52 reboot?
-----
"First to shelve three carts -- accurately, and without disturbing or disrupting the patrons -- wins one snark-free night to be cashed in at your discretion," Barbara said, eyeing Dick, Tim, Cass, Steph, and Damien with her best stern librarian expression, cultivated through years of dealing with difficult patrons and Bruce (mostly Bruce).
"I still want to know how you got permission for this," Damien grumbled as he looked over his first cart: assorted YA fiction, mostly, with a sprinkling of adult fiction and children's nonfiction, because it was no fun if the carts came pre-sorted.
"The inner mysteries of the librarians' cult are forbidden to outsiders," Barbara said, "so unless you have a Masters in Library Science you've somehow managed to keep secret from my all-seeing eye..." -- Dick grinned and subtly shook his head behind Damien's back -- "then stop trying to distract me and get ready, get set, GO!"
---------------
6. And a continuation of the above, upon discovering the true meaning of book cart drill team:
jjhunter, Book Cart Drill Team -- Further Proof That Librarians Kick Ass
The Stories I Could Tell... (100 words exactly)
"Teamwork, coordination, silly costumes, opportunity for terrible puns and other forms of questionable humor -- what are you objecting to?" Barbara asked, blinking innocently up at her makeshift family as she ticked off the benefits of book cart drill on her fingers.
"I think I speak for us all when I say, the part where you want us to dance with shelving carts, which, seriously, in what universe is that ever going to be relevant to our lives?" Steph said.
Barbara grinned, but Dick had a hand over her mouth before she could say more than, "Funny you should ask."
---------------------------------------------
The final ficlet is slightly modified from the version posted at the ficathon, since I realized trimming five words could produce a strict-form drabble and I like strict-form drabbles.
Word counts, however, are not really the point of this ficathon. The game is structure, not length, and I failed the three-sentence restriction on two of six ficlets -- cheerfully and unrepentently for the magic!Edmund prompt, but only after much wailing and gnashing of teeth for the Mirrorverse prompt. For me and this particular set of rules, though, 67% is a pretty good success rate. I will take it.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)