Diwali
[image of small tealights in coloured holders on a table]
Happy Diwali, flist. May it be full of light and promise.
I don't have much of a celebration planned this year - quite by coincidence, dinner with friends tomorrow night, and I shall take sweets in for my colleagues - so here's something for y'all. Four little stories, each on a general theme. Enjoy, and pretend there are sweeties.
mysterious ways
M*A*S*H, gen. Mulcahy, Hawkeye & co.
Mulcahy's heard confession, in Korea. He's done the last rites over bodies still warm and red on the inside. He's done Methodist and Presbyterian and Southern Baptist, he's requisitioned incense for the Orthodox. On a night he doesn't remember very well, when the sound of shelling was raising dust around his feet, he took two dictionaries and a great deal of care to say kaddish for the dead.
Jewish soldiers lay stones on the graves of their brothers; Christians lay flowers. No one knows what to do about Henry Blake, spinning deep and dark in the Sea of Japan. There's only the work he would have wanted them to keep doing, and the gin he would have wanted them to drink.
After a week Mulcahy comes in to the Swamp after dark and lights candles in triplicate, on every surface, propped in bedpans, mounted on the stove, dripping wax down the sides of the still. Before he goes, he pauses in the doorway.
Radar murmurs, "Choppers" in his sleep, and Hawkeye wakes up.
There's no sound but the sound of breathing. The three of them sit, boy, bear and grieving agnostic, wide-eyed in the light.
watch
Discworld, gen, Carrot, Angua and Vimes.
It turned out there was more to it than the regulation breastplate, bell, helmet, and sword.
"Sir," said Carrot very earnestly, "it's in the Watch rules. It's also in the Laws and Ordinances of Ankh-Morpork."
"Oh, well," Angua had said, "if it's in the Laws and Ordinances it must be true." Carrot wondered on occasion if she didn't take the texts of the city quite seriously.
"Carrot, is this important?" Commander Vimes was asking. "Not only has the Guild of Alchemists had another mishap this morning, the Guild of Exotic Dancers insisted on having their annual parade yesterday evening and we're still sorting out the traffic accidents."
"Yes, sir."
"Furthermore, I believe young Gneiss is in the cells again and informed Sergeant Detritus that, and I quote, his mother was an ore, and while of course Detritus would never sink to discourse with a common criminal the sergeant's wife happened to be on the premises and took, ah, umbrage."
"I believe trolls invest a great deal of importance in sedimentary genealogy, sir," Carrot said earnestly. "But, sir, this is important."
"Go on, Captain."
"It seems as though the Watch have not been providing their new recruits with all the equipment they're entitled to. They also should get a lamp, sir."
"A lamp?"
"For the forehead," Carrot said, gesturing. "Like dwarves use down the mines."
"I see. Traffic accidents, Carrot," Vimes said, and got up to leave.
"They could have been prevented!" Carrot insisted. "If there had been watchmen properly equipped! A watchman should light the way, sir!"
Vimes paused at the stop of the stairs. "Just so, Captain Carrot," he said, seriously. "Discuss it with me later today."
"Yes, sir," Carrot said, and followed him down to the cells.
emergency
Sports Night, gen, Dana, Dan, ensemble.
Dana's just getting back into the office from her five pm lunch when every light in the building goes out. For a dizzy moment she watches it pass through the city, the window lights they can see across the block dying in great waves of blackness. Something inside her stomach does a little flip. There's a moment of total silence, and nothing to see but emergency lighting glowing green near the doorways.
"Everyone okay?" Dana calls, and hears answering, reassuring murmurs. They're all fine. She's breathing in, she's breathing out.
There's a sudden whoosh and tiny roar of flame, and Dana's not going to even ask why Jeremy has matches in his desk drawer.
"Hey, you look kinda like Bela Lugosi all lit up like that," Natalie's saying, and Jeremy hisses as the flames touch his fingers. Dana keeps on moving.
Somehow, she finds her way through to the back office, feeling for where she knows the door must be. Inside, the light from Dan's battery-operated laptop illuminates the sandwich he's got halfway to his mouth like he's waiting on permission from someone.
"So," he says, "is this going to be, like, a problem?"
"Yes, Danny," Dana tells him. "Seeing as how we broadcast a live sports show and all."
"We could give up and go home," Casey says, from somewhere on the other side of room.
"No elevators. Unless you wanna try going down twenty-seven flights of stairs without a light."
"Hey, Dana, no offence, but you're being kinda ratty."
"This is not something that comes up very often, seeing as how I am a grown woman who produces the third-highest rated sports show on television, but I, ah. I don't like the dark."
"That's okay," Dan says, and turns the glare of the laptop on her. "It's not like I need to write my script right now."
"Danny," she says, quietly, "can I, just, be here a while?"
"Hey, sure," Dan says, all gentleness, which unaccountably makes her feel a little sniffly. "Casey's gonna go check on Isaac. You stay here with me, we can braid each other's hair."
"Over your dead body," she says, and she stays.
night driving
X-Men: First Class, gen, Charles & Erik.
Charles doesn't do well among large crowds of people. He doesn't say so, but Erik's aware of the change, the flickering at the edges of him, the loss of control. In Delhi, where there are enough people to hang off the roofs of train cars and ride five astride a Vespa, Charles has been a little overwrought and a little giggly, polyglot one moment and confused the next, garrulous, taciturn, terrified, elated, brimming with thoughts that aren't his.
Erik makes sure to do all the driving and waits for it to pass, as all things do. There's a mutant somewhere up in the foothills of the Himalayas, and it's getting late as they're driving north of the city, darkness falling without preamble or twilight. Along the road there are lights - tealights and kerosene lanterns, candles placed around roadside shrines - and above them there are fireworks, explosions of pink and green and crimson. It's beautiful, alien, outside of Erik's experience as almost nothing is. Charles shifts suddenly and murmurs something under his breath.
"What is it?" Erik asks quietly, almost reaching for the German of his childhood.
"Peace," Charles says, eyes closed, and they go on, and they go on, towards whoever's waiting for them, towards the light all the way before them.
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