Three Sentence Ficathon
I write Narnia fics now? Okay, apparently so. I did also write some Firefly, Doctor Who, X Men First Class, Fringe, and Sherlock. Phew! My prompt fills from the Three Sentence Ficathon 2011:
Narnia, any, what if a Talking Beast is born intelligent but unable to speak?
He can't speak because he can't hear; doesn't know what words and meanings sound like. He can see perfectly fine though. He can see his mother defending him to the herd, can see her as she petitions a king to grant him status, can see the shapes she carves in the earth and paints in glorious colour, the shapes that show what words and meanings look like.
adventure/fantasy genre (Narnia), trains, take you anywhere
Trains can take you anywhere: to school, on shopping trips, on holiday, evacuation, Narnia, back home. The problem is though that by going to somewhere you’re always moving away from somewhere else, always leaving somewhere and someone behind.
Susan rests her head on the cool glass of the window and closes her eyes against the rain obscuring the view, against the voice next to her commenting softly that it always rains at funerals, wishing that the journey would last forever because then she’d never be to or from at all.
Narnia/Who, Susan/The Doctor, "This is the last stop."
Susan is a traveller not because she likes going to new places but because she never wants to stop, never wants to settle, never fits in anywhere. The Doctor understands, another old soul who has lost everything, but there comes a point when time wins out, when he’s useless in the face of her old age, and travelling can’t solve anything (if it ever has).
This is the last stop he tells her and Where do you want to go? and she knows what he means (that she won’t survive another trip through the vortex) and what he’s offering (a place to rest), but she has no answer, because even the TARDIS can’t go to where (to with whom) Susan’s heart lies.
Narnia, Peter and Edmund, fondness for knives, after Narnia.
Knives are a comfort, held in the hand, even if they’re so much lighter than a sword. Peter and Edmund eye each other over the dinning table, watching each others grip, and sneak the cutlery out into the garden to challenge each other to knife throwing and flipping and other such contests, always driving each other on.
Neither of them are as good as Lucy though, who was after all given a knife for Christmas.
Firefly, Mal/River, can't get you out of my head
He’s seen her naked, he’s seen her crazy, he’s seen her laugh, cry, throw up, but until he saw her fighting like it was a dance, making violence beautiful as if a god could condone it, until then she’d been easy to put aside. Now she dances through his head and his thoughts and he can’t shake her out, this young woman with her hands wrapped around the controls of his ship and her mind wrapped around all within.
“And her heart,” she says to him softly, eyes fixed on the stars ahead, “because love is needed.”
X-Men First Class, Darwin, like a beacon calling me home
He adapts, always and to any situation, and he doesn't mind really, easy in his own skin (or whatever he has at the time), forcing himself to fit in.
This, though, this is belonging without a need to change at all. This is laughter, the flutter of wings, the light of someone else's power, calling him somewhere that he could call home.
Chronicles of Narnia, Susan & Edmund, if I only could make a deal with god, and get him to swap our places
“She made a choice.”
She did, to make the best of what she was left with and she’ll have to chose that again, he knows, their Susan, if she’s to carry on without them and that isn’t just as he knows it and has been named.
“I’ve made worse.”
Narnia, Peter, he was getting too old for this
He can feel Edmund’s back warm against his own, Lucy is tucked up under his chin with her hair tickling his nose, and Susan sleeps on the other side of Lucy, an arm stretched out across them all, just touching Edmund.
They’re too old for this really - they’re monarchs - but still they all end up in Peter’s bed, just like they always did when they would whisper in the darkness about monsters under the bed and bullies at school, the fear of bombs and losing their parents, the strangeness of evacuation and other things kept silent in the light of day, but they’re in a new country now and the old fears are far away.
There are new fears though and war, it seems, is inescapable - they’ve fought and killed here, watched people die - and the older Peter gets the more that he feels the need for this, the more that he can’t sleep without knowing that they’re together and safe, however much he tells himself that really he’s doing this for the others and that he’s old enough to cope with the dark on his own.
Narnia, Edmund, spymaster
Edmund understands how people lie, bone-deep he knows it, another land he once walked between England and Narnia, and he can trace the tales they weave in the shift of their eyes, their feet, their hands, in their actions and the pattern of their lives, and the whys of what they do. He understands how words can be manipulated, to hurt or to hinder, to trick and trip-up, the taste of a language of falsities sugar-sweet on his tongue and the consequences bitter in the aftermath.
No one suspects a King of Narnia, and certainly not the one called Just, to be the spymaster of the realm, but to his brother and sisters there is no one more suited to the task than Edmund, who understands so truly, and whom they trust so well.
Doctor Who/Fringe, any, count the stars one by one
There’s a strange man lying face up in the middle of the path - strange because that’s what he’s doing - and Donna is walking around him, a comment about nutters on the tip of her tongue, but there’s something that stops her - maybe the goodwill she’s had since she got married, won the lottery, and started travelling; maybe the something to do with the experience of travelling itself; maybe the white coat the man’s wearing, like he’s a doctor, a professional, and could be hurt; maybe.
“You all right, mate?” she asks, bending down to look at his weathered face, and he smiles up at her and says, “I was counting the stars, because they all disappeared once you know and I was wondering if any were missing, but it’s rather hard to tell.”
“Seem fine to me,” says Donna, tilting her head back to do a brief bit of stargazing of her own, and they do seem fine, all present and correct, and as star-y as ever they were.
Doctor Who/Fringe, Donna, Walter would be able to fix her mind in a jiffy
“Walter,” says Peter, shaking his head, “it isn’t polite to ask people if you can play with their brains,” and he gives Donna a smile that says don’t mind the crazy man, he’s harmless which isn’t fooling her in the slightest.
“But she doesn’t know what she’s missing!” says Walter, looking rather sad, although that’s possibly at the lost opportunity to play mad scientist and not necessarily over the (apparently offensive) state of her brain.
Donna looks at him for a long moment, looks at him properly, this mad man who seems so certain, and let’s her thoughts dance around the edges of the fuzzy spaces in her mind before saying, “All right then, if you’re so smart, show me.”
Narnia, Susan & Lucy, they were so very different
Older and younger, tall and short, pretty and plain: so many binaries that they were described in, as if you could paint a true picture of a person by referring to someone else, by comparison. They’d talked about how envious they often were of each other and at the end of the day they were both Queens, both women who had travelled to another land and grown old before their years; different again though in how they handled the return, Lucy promised the dream again and living in hope of it long after that promise had been fulfilled and passed, whilst Susan made the best of being barred and living in the reality of what was left.
Susan wonders then if this is her punishment, for making the best instead of dreaming of better, to have every comparison taken away, nothing left that can truly be without her measure.
Doctor Who/Sherlock, the Doctor and Sherlock Holmes, so a Time Lord and a consulting detective walk into a bar
Sherlock is in a rush, as ever, so he walks into the bar right on the heels of another man, which turns out to be a painful mistake when the other man stops dead just inside the doorway instead of walking into the bar, which is the point of the exercise, and Sherlock stumbles into him, cracking his skull against the other fellow’s.
“Sorry,” the idiot says, spinning around and grabbing Sherlock’s arm to stop him from falling, “I was just looking…for a friend of mine.”
“Female, blond hair, somewhat inebriated, been travelling with you for at least six months and you hope that she stays for longer, because you think of her as more than a friend, and dancing on the bar with the American right in front of you,” says Sherlock, shaking off the man’s help, “shouldn’t be difficult to spot.”
Firefly, River and Wash, she gets ahold of his dinosaurs
The crazy new girl, that they’ve technically had all along but only recently unboxed, is curled up in the co-pilot’s chair messing with his dinosaurs when Wash walks into the bridge and he wants to complain, because they’re his and being possessive isn’t a crime, but he doesn’t.
She’s got the Diplodocus in her lap with the curve of its neck embracing the curve of her knee, his Triceratops next to it so that her lap is full, and she’s cradling the Stegosaurus whilst carefully cleaning between its back plates with the cuff of her - well, Inara’s - robe, following the edge of the sleeve with her fingers, caressing the plastic; makes him wonder about touch and being boxed away from it and when she holds the Stegosaurus up to her ear as he walks in - as if it’s telling her secrets other than just that he finds it difficult to wash mechanical grease off his hands properly and gets it everywhere, including sometimes on his dinosaurs - it makes him remember just how many secrets they’ve been told, times when it’s just him, them, and the vastness of space and having a them is important.
He places a hand on her shoulder in a friendly fashion and when she freezes he leaves it there, reaches over to pick up the Triceratops and starts talking about its large head and tiny brain, carries on talking even after she’s relaxed, her head tilted back and fascinated eyes fixed on his face.
Chronicles of Narnia, Susan, with a backup makeshift life in waiting
When she returns after the last time, the whistle of the train loud in her ears and filling her head, she wonders if the point of the first return was this: there is a life here for Susan Pevensie, a place in school and a circle of friends, a role as her mother’s eldest daughter, a girl who likes dresses and pretty things, a construction of herself that she can step back into.
The first return to England was a jolting return to childhood and a world that she was no longer used to, but then there was the comforting possibility of going back to Narnia whereas now this is all that she will ever have and at least the jolt is familiar, the unfamiliarity is itself familiar, and she doesn’t have to rebuild herself from the ground up, she’s already done the building once before and she can retreat into it whilst her heart breaks.
Susan stands on the train, sways with its movement, and believes that there is a point and purpose to everything, that they were meant to leave Narnia the first time so that they would one day be ready to leave forever, and she will take the lesson, she will make the most of what she has here, because whilst it is a small something it is still a something; there is still something that she has left.
Sherlock, female!Sherlock, genius
They label her older brother genius, but she’s a difficult, peculiar child; they say that she can’t read, just spends her time in the library pretending to because she’s following and copying her brother, that she’s a mimic and it’s cute when she’s small, but that when Mycroft is old enough for boarding school and leaves home then hopefully she’ll grow out of it.
“Adults are stupid,” she says, sitting cross-legged in her favourite armchair in the library with the comforting weight of an open book in her lap.
“Yes, they are,” Mycroft replies, and he should know, because he’s a genius.
I have also been a very lucky girl when it comes to my prompts getting filled as well. Really, they're all fantastic and I feel spoilt. Take a look at these lovelies:
Firefly, Wash, the first time he flew (two fills!)
Doctor Who, any, the light goes out on the top of the TARDIS (three fills!)
Harry Potter, any + Hogwarts, there are so many secrets (four fills! And then one turned into a back-and-forth thing!)
Narnia/Torchwood, Susan (+/any), Susan works at or gets a job at Torchwood (two fills!)
Torchwood/Narnia, Jack + Peter and or Edmund, Jack comes across the Pevensie lads during the war (all soldiers)
Firefly, any, there are times when it goes smooth, this is just not one of those times (long fill!)
Firefly, any, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
And then this happened from the Doctor Who/Fringe prompts!
EDIT 05/12/11: for more fills both by and for me :)
EDIT 13/12/11: for even more :D
Narnia, any, what if a Talking Beast is born intelligent but unable to speak?
He can't speak because he can't hear; doesn't know what words and meanings sound like. He can see perfectly fine though. He can see his mother defending him to the herd, can see her as she petitions a king to grant him status, can see the shapes she carves in the earth and paints in glorious colour, the shapes that show what words and meanings look like.
adventure/fantasy genre (Narnia), trains, take you anywhere
Trains can take you anywhere: to school, on shopping trips, on holiday, evacuation, Narnia, back home. The problem is though that by going to somewhere you’re always moving away from somewhere else, always leaving somewhere and someone behind.
Susan rests her head on the cool glass of the window and closes her eyes against the rain obscuring the view, against the voice next to her commenting softly that it always rains at funerals, wishing that the journey would last forever because then she’d never be to or from at all.
Narnia/Who, Susan/The Doctor, "This is the last stop."
Susan is a traveller not because she likes going to new places but because she never wants to stop, never wants to settle, never fits in anywhere. The Doctor understands, another old soul who has lost everything, but there comes a point when time wins out, when he’s useless in the face of her old age, and travelling can’t solve anything (if it ever has).
This is the last stop he tells her and Where do you want to go? and she knows what he means (that she won’t survive another trip through the vortex) and what he’s offering (a place to rest), but she has no answer, because even the TARDIS can’t go to where (to with whom) Susan’s heart lies.
Narnia, Peter and Edmund, fondness for knives, after Narnia.
Knives are a comfort, held in the hand, even if they’re so much lighter than a sword. Peter and Edmund eye each other over the dinning table, watching each others grip, and sneak the cutlery out into the garden to challenge each other to knife throwing and flipping and other such contests, always driving each other on.
Neither of them are as good as Lucy though, who was after all given a knife for Christmas.
Firefly, Mal/River, can't get you out of my head
He’s seen her naked, he’s seen her crazy, he’s seen her laugh, cry, throw up, but until he saw her fighting like it was a dance, making violence beautiful as if a god could condone it, until then she’d been easy to put aside. Now she dances through his head and his thoughts and he can’t shake her out, this young woman with her hands wrapped around the controls of his ship and her mind wrapped around all within.
“And her heart,” she says to him softly, eyes fixed on the stars ahead, “because love is needed.”
X-Men First Class, Darwin, like a beacon calling me home
He adapts, always and to any situation, and he doesn't mind really, easy in his own skin (or whatever he has at the time), forcing himself to fit in.
This, though, this is belonging without a need to change at all. This is laughter, the flutter of wings, the light of someone else's power, calling him somewhere that he could call home.
Chronicles of Narnia, Susan & Edmund, if I only could make a deal with god, and get him to swap our places
“She made a choice.”
She did, to make the best of what she was left with and she’ll have to chose that again, he knows, their Susan, if she’s to carry on without them and that isn’t just as he knows it and has been named.
“I’ve made worse.”
Narnia, Peter, he was getting too old for this
He can feel Edmund’s back warm against his own, Lucy is tucked up under his chin with her hair tickling his nose, and Susan sleeps on the other side of Lucy, an arm stretched out across them all, just touching Edmund.
They’re too old for this really - they’re monarchs - but still they all end up in Peter’s bed, just like they always did when they would whisper in the darkness about monsters under the bed and bullies at school, the fear of bombs and losing their parents, the strangeness of evacuation and other things kept silent in the light of day, but they’re in a new country now and the old fears are far away.
There are new fears though and war, it seems, is inescapable - they’ve fought and killed here, watched people die - and the older Peter gets the more that he feels the need for this, the more that he can’t sleep without knowing that they’re together and safe, however much he tells himself that really he’s doing this for the others and that he’s old enough to cope with the dark on his own.
Narnia, Edmund, spymaster
Edmund understands how people lie, bone-deep he knows it, another land he once walked between England and Narnia, and he can trace the tales they weave in the shift of their eyes, their feet, their hands, in their actions and the pattern of their lives, and the whys of what they do. He understands how words can be manipulated, to hurt or to hinder, to trick and trip-up, the taste of a language of falsities sugar-sweet on his tongue and the consequences bitter in the aftermath.
No one suspects a King of Narnia, and certainly not the one called Just, to be the spymaster of the realm, but to his brother and sisters there is no one more suited to the task than Edmund, who understands so truly, and whom they trust so well.
Doctor Who/Fringe, any, count the stars one by one
There’s a strange man lying face up in the middle of the path - strange because that’s what he’s doing - and Donna is walking around him, a comment about nutters on the tip of her tongue, but there’s something that stops her - maybe the goodwill she’s had since she got married, won the lottery, and started travelling; maybe the something to do with the experience of travelling itself; maybe the white coat the man’s wearing, like he’s a doctor, a professional, and could be hurt; maybe.
“You all right, mate?” she asks, bending down to look at his weathered face, and he smiles up at her and says, “I was counting the stars, because they all disappeared once you know and I was wondering if any were missing, but it’s rather hard to tell.”
“Seem fine to me,” says Donna, tilting her head back to do a brief bit of stargazing of her own, and they do seem fine, all present and correct, and as star-y as ever they were.
Doctor Who/Fringe, Donna, Walter would be able to fix her mind in a jiffy
“Walter,” says Peter, shaking his head, “it isn’t polite to ask people if you can play with their brains,” and he gives Donna a smile that says don’t mind the crazy man, he’s harmless which isn’t fooling her in the slightest.
“But she doesn’t know what she’s missing!” says Walter, looking rather sad, although that’s possibly at the lost opportunity to play mad scientist and not necessarily over the (apparently offensive) state of her brain.
Donna looks at him for a long moment, looks at him properly, this mad man who seems so certain, and let’s her thoughts dance around the edges of the fuzzy spaces in her mind before saying, “All right then, if you’re so smart, show me.”
Narnia, Susan & Lucy, they were so very different
Older and younger, tall and short, pretty and plain: so many binaries that they were described in, as if you could paint a true picture of a person by referring to someone else, by comparison. They’d talked about how envious they often were of each other and at the end of the day they were both Queens, both women who had travelled to another land and grown old before their years; different again though in how they handled the return, Lucy promised the dream again and living in hope of it long after that promise had been fulfilled and passed, whilst Susan made the best of being barred and living in the reality of what was left.
Susan wonders then if this is her punishment, for making the best instead of dreaming of better, to have every comparison taken away, nothing left that can truly be without her measure.
Doctor Who/Sherlock, the Doctor and Sherlock Holmes, so a Time Lord and a consulting detective walk into a bar
Sherlock is in a rush, as ever, so he walks into the bar right on the heels of another man, which turns out to be a painful mistake when the other man stops dead just inside the doorway instead of walking into the bar, which is the point of the exercise, and Sherlock stumbles into him, cracking his skull against the other fellow’s.
“Sorry,” the idiot says, spinning around and grabbing Sherlock’s arm to stop him from falling, “I was just looking…for a friend of mine.”
“Female, blond hair, somewhat inebriated, been travelling with you for at least six months and you hope that she stays for longer, because you think of her as more than a friend, and dancing on the bar with the American right in front of you,” says Sherlock, shaking off the man’s help, “shouldn’t be difficult to spot.”
Firefly, River and Wash, she gets ahold of his dinosaurs
The crazy new girl, that they’ve technically had all along but only recently unboxed, is curled up in the co-pilot’s chair messing with his dinosaurs when Wash walks into the bridge and he wants to complain, because they’re his and being possessive isn’t a crime, but he doesn’t.
She’s got the Diplodocus in her lap with the curve of its neck embracing the curve of her knee, his Triceratops next to it so that her lap is full, and she’s cradling the Stegosaurus whilst carefully cleaning between its back plates with the cuff of her - well, Inara’s - robe, following the edge of the sleeve with her fingers, caressing the plastic; makes him wonder about touch and being boxed away from it and when she holds the Stegosaurus up to her ear as he walks in - as if it’s telling her secrets other than just that he finds it difficult to wash mechanical grease off his hands properly and gets it everywhere, including sometimes on his dinosaurs - it makes him remember just how many secrets they’ve been told, times when it’s just him, them, and the vastness of space and having a them is important.
He places a hand on her shoulder in a friendly fashion and when she freezes he leaves it there, reaches over to pick up the Triceratops and starts talking about its large head and tiny brain, carries on talking even after she’s relaxed, her head tilted back and fascinated eyes fixed on his face.
Chronicles of Narnia, Susan, with a backup makeshift life in waiting
When she returns after the last time, the whistle of the train loud in her ears and filling her head, she wonders if the point of the first return was this: there is a life here for Susan Pevensie, a place in school and a circle of friends, a role as her mother’s eldest daughter, a girl who likes dresses and pretty things, a construction of herself that she can step back into.
The first return to England was a jolting return to childhood and a world that she was no longer used to, but then there was the comforting possibility of going back to Narnia whereas now this is all that she will ever have and at least the jolt is familiar, the unfamiliarity is itself familiar, and she doesn’t have to rebuild herself from the ground up, she’s already done the building once before and she can retreat into it whilst her heart breaks.
Susan stands on the train, sways with its movement, and believes that there is a point and purpose to everything, that they were meant to leave Narnia the first time so that they would one day be ready to leave forever, and she will take the lesson, she will make the most of what she has here, because whilst it is a small something it is still a something; there is still something that she has left.
Sherlock, female!Sherlock, genius
They label her older brother genius, but she’s a difficult, peculiar child; they say that she can’t read, just spends her time in the library pretending to because she’s following and copying her brother, that she’s a mimic and it’s cute when she’s small, but that when Mycroft is old enough for boarding school and leaves home then hopefully she’ll grow out of it.
“Adults are stupid,” she says, sitting cross-legged in her favourite armchair in the library with the comforting weight of an open book in her lap.
“Yes, they are,” Mycroft replies, and he should know, because he’s a genius.
I have also been a very lucky girl when it comes to my prompts getting filled as well. Really, they're all fantastic and I feel spoilt. Take a look at these lovelies:
Firefly, Wash, the first time he flew (two fills!)
Doctor Who, any, the light goes out on the top of the TARDIS (three fills!)
Harry Potter, any + Hogwarts, there are so many secrets (four fills! And then one turned into a back-and-forth thing!)
Narnia/Torchwood, Susan (+/any), Susan works at or gets a job at Torchwood (two fills!)
Torchwood/Narnia, Jack + Peter and or Edmund, Jack comes across the Pevensie lads during the war (all soldiers)
Firefly, any, there are times when it goes smooth, this is just not one of those times (long fill!)
Firefly, any, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
And then this happened from the Doctor Who/Fringe prompts!
EDIT 05/12/11: for more fills both by and for me :)
EDIT 13/12/11: for even more :D