Drabbles galore!
st_aurafina and I have been in a bit of a creative slump, writing-wise, though we did make some great art-quilts, and planned a project for 2007. To get the writing mojo working in time for yuletide, we had a drabble-a-thon over the last few days. We selected 20 words from an old encyclopedia (via the 10th-word-on-the-page technique), and 20 characters we find interesting and both know. Then we pulled out the D&D dice and randomly assigned ourselves a word and a character each, then got to work, ten times over. It's an ex-drabble-ganza!
Spoilers only where indicated - most of the drabbles are not issue/episode/novel specific. All rated G, all gen, all 100 words except for two that just wouldn't be cut down that far.
Early: Lisa Cuddy (House)
"He's logging his clinic hours early, before any patients arrive," the nurse shrugged. Her message was clear: what was Cuddy going to do about it?
At 4:55 AM, House limped blithely into the clinic, to be met by the glazed stares and alcoholic reek of a dozen shabby men.
"House!" Cuddy chirped, appearing from behind a column, "The Goodwill Community Shelter is having a scabies outbreak, and I volunteered your diagnostic services." She smiled at the men. "Mr Brown, please follow Doctor House."
With a cheery wave, she clicked away down the corridor. No-one gets up earlier than Lisa Cuddy.
***
Long: Mundungus Fletcher (Harry Potter)
Mundungus had literally reached the end of his rope. Suspended deep inside a coin-rich wishing well, he had lost his grip and dangled by one foot, his wand unreachable.
He was entertaining himself with morbid thoughts of little children scared away by his dangling skeleton when he spotted a glowing feather drifting towards him.
"Grab hold!"
That sounded too hearty for a vengeful Auror. Mundungus obeyed and the feather lifted him up to safety. Strangely enough, his rescuer was his old headmaster, Dumbledore.
Mundungus muttered thanks, but Dumbledore only smiled.
"Why, Mundungus, I'm only here to give you more rope."
***
Mathematics: Inara Serra (Firefly)
When Inara was too small to sit at table without a cushion to boost her, she learned to use an abacus. She sat primly, flicking the beads along the wire, first in play and then in determined study, calculating the secrets of the universe.
Years later, Inara stood on her balcony, not needing to flick beads to calculate the trajectories for the Browncoat ships that fell burning through the atmosphere. Cries of pity came from her House, but Inara shivered with rage at the infinite possibilities those ships had abandoned. Her calculations stilled; her desire leapt free into the void.
***
Great: Minerva McGonagall (Harry Potter)
No-one had expected Minerva, upon leaving school, to travel abroad to study curse-breaking. The first morning, she pulled on her linen robes and apparated into the scorching desert.
Before the Great Pyramid, Minerva transfigured: Egyptian curses were unlikely to hurt the sacred cat. Her feline vision was more alert to moving objects than still, but even so, the enormous pyramid seemed to vanish into the landscape: man-made, but too immense to comprehend or destroy. Everything that Tom, back in England, was trying to be.
Flicking her tail, she slipped into a crack between two stones, padding downwards into the dark.
***
Emperor: Barbara Gordon (DC) (200 words)
"I don't know how you deal with being online all the time." Dinah propped a hip on Barbara's desk.
"Why? Because of the perverts?"
"Nah, you can send them packing in a nanosecond. I mean, there's no laws. If someone steals a car, I can give them to the cops. It's not a great system, but there is a system. Online, unless your hacker is, I don't know, robbing banks, or defacing a big company, what can you do? Even then, they're way ahead of the law."
Barbara laughed. "They're not ahead of their peers. All communities are self-policing - the more anarchic the community, the heavier the pressure to conform."
"You're saying we should leave people to look after themselves? Batman would have kittens."
"Then I'd be asking Catwoman some very serious questions," Barbara deadpanned. "No, I'm saying that humans like order and seek to impose it."
"It doesn't seem to be working too well around here."
"Big city. Exponentially larger difficulties in organising your neighbourhood, and no commonality of purpose."
"So, you're online all the time because the internet's better organised?"
"No. I'm online because the net doesn't need superheroes, and maybe, one day, we won't need them either."
***
Habit: Mickey Smith (Doctor Who)
It sounded like truck brakes, or a fat man wheezing in his ear. Once, he hears the noise, but it's just a heavy chain winding onto the back of a truck. He stays until the truck drives off and there's no blue box behind it.
Distant police sirens make him jumpy, but he tells himself it's the Doppler effect - yeah, he looked it up - not the blue box appearing somewhere unreachable. Jackie says - not to him - that she's even heard Rose's voice. Mickey hasn't. He's not listening for messages from the dead.
Despite everything, Mickey has the habit of hope.
***
Relative: Iron Man (Marvel)
It wasn't just the shrapnel: the male half of Tony's family had a long history of weak hearts, dropping dead at an age that Tony is now approaching. He wonders, sometimes, if the alcoholism is inherited, too, but there's no-one left to ask. He has multiplied his father's earnings many times over; he has personally saved more people than his father's landmines killed. Tony tries to be the golden idol of reason and objectivity, but his shadow teems with incomprehensible ghosts.
History is dead and gone, Tony knows, but all his achievements are soaked in the smell of the past.
***
Publish: Psylocke (X-Men) (150 words)
Betsy was suspended from school two weeks before taking her A-levels, and never went back. If they couldn't understand why she would attend an anti-war protest in her school uniform, she wasn't interested in their standards of achievement. Besides, she didn't want to learn. She wanted to fight.
What, exactly, Betsy wanted to fight was more difficult to define. Perenially short of cash - she couldn't tap Brian for money now she was in London - Betsy fell into modelling. It was fun, it paid well, and everyone loved her hair.
One evening, out with friends, she accepted a cigarette from a man she was fairly sure was paparazzi.
"Isn't your hair going to fall out? Always dying it like that?" His voice was snide.
Betsy blew out smoke and laughed. Maybe the best fights would come looking for her.
"I'm a mutant, darling." She turned to go. "You can quote me."
***
Order: Emma Frost (X-Men)
"The boys have respect for me and what I wear, Ms Frost," Sooraya snapped.
"You think they have no respect for me?"
"For you, they have respect. For another woman who buys those clothes, no."
"No-one can buy these clothes, my dear. They're made to order."
Sooraya flapped an impatient hand. "Don't laugh at me."
"Sooraya, whatever your mode of dress means in Afghanistan - obedience, godliness, hides the cellulite, brings out your eyes - it carries a different meaning, here. You and I, we both refuse to show fear. We refuse to conform."
"But then others fear us."
Emma smiled. "Exactly."
***
Soon: Hiro Nakamura (Heroes)
Soon, Hiro will see a nuclear explosion and never let it happen.
Soon, Hiro will survive the blast and travel the murdered city.
Soon, Hiro will befriend a waitress who has never spoken a word of Japanese.
Soon, Hiro will meet that same waitress and they will speak his language.
Soon, Hiro will learn that those painful childhood kendo lessons were not without value.
Soon, Hiro will smile at a dead girl, and she will smile back.
Soon, Hiro will learn that he is imminent, not actual, and perfectionism is not heroism.
One day, Hiro will have to let go.
Spoilers only where indicated - most of the drabbles are not issue/episode/novel specific. All rated G, all gen, all 100 words except for two that just wouldn't be cut down that far.
Early: Lisa Cuddy (House)
"He's logging his clinic hours early, before any patients arrive," the nurse shrugged. Her message was clear: what was Cuddy going to do about it?
At 4:55 AM, House limped blithely into the clinic, to be met by the glazed stares and alcoholic reek of a dozen shabby men.
"House!" Cuddy chirped, appearing from behind a column, "The Goodwill Community Shelter is having a scabies outbreak, and I volunteered your diagnostic services." She smiled at the men. "Mr Brown, please follow Doctor House."
With a cheery wave, she clicked away down the corridor. No-one gets up earlier than Lisa Cuddy.
***
Long: Mundungus Fletcher (Harry Potter)
Mundungus had literally reached the end of his rope. Suspended deep inside a coin-rich wishing well, he had lost his grip and dangled by one foot, his wand unreachable.
He was entertaining himself with morbid thoughts of little children scared away by his dangling skeleton when he spotted a glowing feather drifting towards him.
"Grab hold!"
That sounded too hearty for a vengeful Auror. Mundungus obeyed and the feather lifted him up to safety. Strangely enough, his rescuer was his old headmaster, Dumbledore.
Mundungus muttered thanks, but Dumbledore only smiled.
"Why, Mundungus, I'm only here to give you more rope."
***
Mathematics: Inara Serra (Firefly)
When Inara was too small to sit at table without a cushion to boost her, she learned to use an abacus. She sat primly, flicking the beads along the wire, first in play and then in determined study, calculating the secrets of the universe.
Years later, Inara stood on her balcony, not needing to flick beads to calculate the trajectories for the Browncoat ships that fell burning through the atmosphere. Cries of pity came from her House, but Inara shivered with rage at the infinite possibilities those ships had abandoned. Her calculations stilled; her desire leapt free into the void.
***
Great: Minerva McGonagall (Harry Potter)
No-one had expected Minerva, upon leaving school, to travel abroad to study curse-breaking. The first morning, she pulled on her linen robes and apparated into the scorching desert.
Before the Great Pyramid, Minerva transfigured: Egyptian curses were unlikely to hurt the sacred cat. Her feline vision was more alert to moving objects than still, but even so, the enormous pyramid seemed to vanish into the landscape: man-made, but too immense to comprehend or destroy. Everything that Tom, back in England, was trying to be.
Flicking her tail, she slipped into a crack between two stones, padding downwards into the dark.
***
Emperor: Barbara Gordon (DC) (200 words)
"I don't know how you deal with being online all the time." Dinah propped a hip on Barbara's desk.
"Why? Because of the perverts?"
"Nah, you can send them packing in a nanosecond. I mean, there's no laws. If someone steals a car, I can give them to the cops. It's not a great system, but there is a system. Online, unless your hacker is, I don't know, robbing banks, or defacing a big company, what can you do? Even then, they're way ahead of the law."
Barbara laughed. "They're not ahead of their peers. All communities are self-policing - the more anarchic the community, the heavier the pressure to conform."
"You're saying we should leave people to look after themselves? Batman would have kittens."
"Then I'd be asking Catwoman some very serious questions," Barbara deadpanned. "No, I'm saying that humans like order and seek to impose it."
"It doesn't seem to be working too well around here."
"Big city. Exponentially larger difficulties in organising your neighbourhood, and no commonality of purpose."
"So, you're online all the time because the internet's better organised?"
"No. I'm online because the net doesn't need superheroes, and maybe, one day, we won't need them either."
***
Habit: Mickey Smith (Doctor Who)
It sounded like truck brakes, or a fat man wheezing in his ear. Once, he hears the noise, but it's just a heavy chain winding onto the back of a truck. He stays until the truck drives off and there's no blue box behind it.
Distant police sirens make him jumpy, but he tells himself it's the Doppler effect - yeah, he looked it up - not the blue box appearing somewhere unreachable. Jackie says - not to him - that she's even heard Rose's voice. Mickey hasn't. He's not listening for messages from the dead.
Despite everything, Mickey has the habit of hope.
***
Relative: Iron Man (Marvel)
It wasn't just the shrapnel: the male half of Tony's family had a long history of weak hearts, dropping dead at an age that Tony is now approaching. He wonders, sometimes, if the alcoholism is inherited, too, but there's no-one left to ask. He has multiplied his father's earnings many times over; he has personally saved more people than his father's landmines killed. Tony tries to be the golden idol of reason and objectivity, but his shadow teems with incomprehensible ghosts.
History is dead and gone, Tony knows, but all his achievements are soaked in the smell of the past.
***
Publish: Psylocke (X-Men) (150 words)
Betsy was suspended from school two weeks before taking her A-levels, and never went back. If they couldn't understand why she would attend an anti-war protest in her school uniform, she wasn't interested in their standards of achievement. Besides, she didn't want to learn. She wanted to fight.
What, exactly, Betsy wanted to fight was more difficult to define. Perenially short of cash - she couldn't tap Brian for money now she was in London - Betsy fell into modelling. It was fun, it paid well, and everyone loved her hair.
One evening, out with friends, she accepted a cigarette from a man she was fairly sure was paparazzi.
"Isn't your hair going to fall out? Always dying it like that?" His voice was snide.
Betsy blew out smoke and laughed. Maybe the best fights would come looking for her.
"I'm a mutant, darling." She turned to go. "You can quote me."
***
Order: Emma Frost (X-Men)
"The boys have respect for me and what I wear, Ms Frost," Sooraya snapped.
"You think they have no respect for me?"
"For you, they have respect. For another woman who buys those clothes, no."
"No-one can buy these clothes, my dear. They're made to order."
Sooraya flapped an impatient hand. "Don't laugh at me."
"Sooraya, whatever your mode of dress means in Afghanistan - obedience, godliness, hides the cellulite, brings out your eyes - it carries a different meaning, here. You and I, we both refuse to show fear. We refuse to conform."
"But then others fear us."
Emma smiled. "Exactly."
***
Soon: Hiro Nakamura (Heroes)
Soon, Hiro will see a nuclear explosion and never let it happen.
Soon, Hiro will survive the blast and travel the murdered city.
Soon, Hiro will befriend a waitress who has never spoken a word of Japanese.
Soon, Hiro will meet that same waitress and they will speak his language.
Soon, Hiro will learn that those painful childhood kendo lessons were not without value.
Soon, Hiro will smile at a dead girl, and she will smile back.
Soon, Hiro will learn that he is imminent, not actual, and perfectionism is not heroism.
One day, Hiro will have to let go.