three sentence fic!
Time for a roundup of what I have so far, I think!
[Narnia, Susan/Lune, if you are with me I go with joy to my rest]
"He's been calling for the Queen that was, Your Highness, and now for Queen Susan - he wants them to wait for him to catch up."
"Susan, love, don't leave again," the king gasped feverishly.
Oh, Aravis thought, squeezing Cor's hand where it rests on Lune's death-bed, so Corin was right, after all.
[Elementary, Joan Watson, the day my body caught fire the woodland darkened]
She knows the burn of losing someone for whom you are responsible. She thinks she knows what Sherlock feels when he can't stop until he's found a killer, no matter how closed the case.
The day she takes her first case on her own, a case everyone else has forgotten, she learns a new kind of fire has been smoldering inside her.
[anyone, anyone, "the truth is this: / my love for you / is the only empire i will ever build"]
"Why do you stay in Rome, Cesare?" Lucrezia asks one night, all innocent eyes and tousled hair. "By now you could have been an emperor."
"But you are in Rome, my love."
[Narnia, Susan Pevensie, here we are in the waiting room of the world]
"Well," she says, attempting to shake water off and finding herself quite dry. The wood is silent and still but humming with altogether too much emotion for her to categorize. "This is new."
[Supernatural, Cassie Robinson, investigative reporting disguised as fiction]
"Are you Cassie Robinson? Ohmigosh I love all your books, my favorite is the one about the ghost and her mortal lover, where do you get your ideas?"
The fan is young, bright-eyed, and clutching an omnibus of her best-selling hunting novels. Cassie smiles, and signs a book, and remembers why she does this.
[Supernatural, anybody, the Old Gods still breathe]
They think the world's most beloved, most feared, most powerful gods are dead at the hands of an upstart Word. And - technically - those bodies were more manifestation than vessel. But across the world prayers are still answered, curses set, cycles of birth and death and rebirth continue playing out as they always have.
[Bond-Skyfall/Harry Potter: M; Minerva McGonagall; civilian casaulties, collateral damage]
"It happens, we both know that; we've just got to go on anyhow."
"It shouldn't have to happen."
"We both know that, too - biscuit?"
[Downton Abbey/Narnia, the Crawley sisters go to Narnia]
They are Queens, all three of them, queens without husbands or parents or primogeniture, before they even realize how natural and strange this is. "She's so much happier here, have you noticed?" Edith asks Sybil, watching Mary greet petitioners one day. Sybil smiles, and if she's noticed the same thing about Edith, and about herself, well - there's no one here to defend their happiness to, and so she laughs and goes with Edith to visit the Trees.
[Narnia, Susan/Lucy, laughter]
Susan unpins her hair and tucks up her dress and sprints after Lucy into the summer grasses, tackling her sister to the ground with very little dignity and no shame. Lucy retaliates with kissing and tickling, and Susan throws her head back, baring her neck and belly in the manner of their favorite subjects. Lucy kisses her again, more deliberately and with greater abandon, and their laughter rises to the sun.
[Narnia, Lucy/Sea Girl, "among mortal women, know this / from every care / you could release me"]
Lucy sinks down, down, and this water is salty but the fisherdess' arms are the sweetest thing. She has been a queen, and a schoolgirl, a conqueror and an adventurer, but this is the most true. The Sea-Girl's lips collide with hers, another pair of lungs breathing air into hers, and she knows she will likely drown one day, but until then she will not give up this release.
[and then it kept happening]
They think themselves something out of a fairy tale, or a creation story. Land and sea and sky, twisting together, reveling in each other, loving and merging. They become the horizon, indistinguishable where they meet, melting, evaporating, refusing to wholly let go even when they are torn apart by worlds and time.
Some people say it is all part of Queen Lucy's myth, that she sang songs to the stars - so we came up with a star-girl; and she sailed and swam - so we came up with a sea-girl. Lucy hears the stories in True Narnia, realizes this is why people like Tirian and those generations look at her the way they do. It makes her laugh, because in True Narnia she and her girlfriends are inseparable, and none of them are more than they are.
[Narnia, Susan, and you're as loyal as your faith will let you be]
She cannot pray - she never had to in Narnia, finds no use for it here. Churches and temples are lovely, sweet houses or bastions of power, but they are cold and empty no matter how much incense is burned or how many bodies bend and bow.
Susan sits in her room at night, with pictures of her family, and looks at four glowing rings on the floor of a bookshelf, and remembers.
[Greek mythology, Penelope & Clytemnestra, diplomatic relations]
The message, woven in bumps and slurs, comes with a shipment of goods from Ithaca to Mycenae, in a chest of textile samples sent directly to Queen Clytemnestra.
So the war proceeds apace, Cousin, and our husbands will not return for some years yet, by my reckoning. We must ensure our mutual survival in the meantime.
[and continued]
Helen was the beauty of the family, yes. But she was not the only swan-born of the house of Leda, and it was Clytemnestra to whom Penelope had always turned for advice on matters of beauty and seduction and love. It was Clytemnestra who winked from across the room when Odysseus announced that he was giving up his suit of Helen, that he had a different wife in mind.
[Greek mythology, Hermione and Helen, the mother she does not know]
Her Aunt Clytemnestra is not a warm woman, and Hermione is not Iphigenia, but they have muddled along well enough for these ten years. She mostly thinks of herself as motherless, anyway - she has a few memories of Helen, a bright peripheral presence who may or may not have loved her, against years of hearing about the Spartan traitor-whore; it's not easy to determine what she should believe about her mother, so she has given up trying.
This woman who stands before her, renamed her mother and her father's wife and the queen of Sparta, does not look particularly broken, or ruined, or beautiful.
[The Tempest, Prospero and Miranda, her father's daughter, OR; The Tempest (2010 film), Prospera and Miranda, her mother's daughter]
Miranda has studied her father's knowledge for years, openly and in secret - not just Prospero's books but her clothing, her dresses and pants and crowns, the heeled boots that give her height, the staff that plants her solidly to the ground and reaches up to the sky. Prospero is a good father, and a better teacher. When the strange sea-soaked boy washes up onto their shores, Miranda knows exactly what to do.
[Narnia, Lucy, anger]
They do not understand, not one of them, even as Narnians creep fearfully out of hiding and Telmarines burn through the forests. They squabble over who knows best while her people, endangered by hope, continue to die.
Lucy takes up her knife and goes out to fight.
[Till We Have Faces, Psyche and Orual, the gods were in the wrong]
This worship they demand, this sacrifice, cannot hold. Choice is the purest benediction, and Orual does not choose to give up her sister to a cold illusion, and that choice is as sacred as Psyche's body laid out on a mountain.
"Light the lamp," she urges her sister, and she knows that if the gods want to keep their hold on the world, they will accept whatever she chooses to give them.
[Greek Mythology, Andromache & Cassandra, how the Trojans win the war]
Andromache stares at her sister - always more than just by marriage - and tries to understand. Cassandra is clearly not insane - none of the others even think that, they just talk as if she is, and ignore her as if she is - and Andromache can't think of any particular reason not to listen to the younger woman's warnings. The fatherless babe on her hip coos a little in sleep, and she narrows her whole self until she is an arrowpoint of will, and asks Cassandra, "Tell me what we do."
[The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, Smoking Jacket & Gleam & Key, the loyal ones who wait behind]
They are useful, and they like being useful, and they would never presume to be the same as the Beings among September's companions. They pride themselves on being there when she needs them, and that is that. It doesn't hurt to be left to wait for when they are needed next - not much.
[Greek mythology, Cassandra, the end of the world]
Cassandra stares out from the walls, her watch lonely even amidst the crowd, as the chariot stirs dust toward Troy. Her vision sharpens until she can see the blood gasping from her brother's wounds, can see all the way to his spirit sinking into the dust of the land he loved, can see the cold fields of Hades that are her future. The city in flames creeps across her eyes, but this is not the first time she has watched the world end, and as she begins to wail she prays for it to finally happen.
[Narnia, Susan/Lune, if you are with me I go with joy to my rest]
"He's been calling for the Queen that was, Your Highness, and now for Queen Susan - he wants them to wait for him to catch up."
"Susan, love, don't leave again," the king gasped feverishly.
Oh, Aravis thought, squeezing Cor's hand where it rests on Lune's death-bed, so Corin was right, after all.
[Elementary, Joan Watson, the day my body caught fire the woodland darkened]
She knows the burn of losing someone for whom you are responsible. She thinks she knows what Sherlock feels when he can't stop until he's found a killer, no matter how closed the case.
The day she takes her first case on her own, a case everyone else has forgotten, she learns a new kind of fire has been smoldering inside her.
[anyone, anyone, "the truth is this: / my love for you / is the only empire i will ever build"]
"Why do you stay in Rome, Cesare?" Lucrezia asks one night, all innocent eyes and tousled hair. "By now you could have been an emperor."
"But you are in Rome, my love."
[Narnia, Susan Pevensie, here we are in the waiting room of the world]
"Well," she says, attempting to shake water off and finding herself quite dry. The wood is silent and still but humming with altogether too much emotion for her to categorize. "This is new."
[Supernatural, Cassie Robinson, investigative reporting disguised as fiction]
"Are you Cassie Robinson? Ohmigosh I love all your books, my favorite is the one about the ghost and her mortal lover, where do you get your ideas?"
The fan is young, bright-eyed, and clutching an omnibus of her best-selling hunting novels. Cassie smiles, and signs a book, and remembers why she does this.
[Supernatural, anybody, the Old Gods still breathe]
They think the world's most beloved, most feared, most powerful gods are dead at the hands of an upstart Word. And - technically - those bodies were more manifestation than vessel. But across the world prayers are still answered, curses set, cycles of birth and death and rebirth continue playing out as they always have.
[Bond-Skyfall/Harry Potter: M; Minerva McGonagall; civilian casaulties, collateral damage]
"It happens, we both know that; we've just got to go on anyhow."
"It shouldn't have to happen."
"We both know that, too - biscuit?"
[Downton Abbey/Narnia, the Crawley sisters go to Narnia]
They are Queens, all three of them, queens without husbands or parents or primogeniture, before they even realize how natural and strange this is. "She's so much happier here, have you noticed?" Edith asks Sybil, watching Mary greet petitioners one day. Sybil smiles, and if she's noticed the same thing about Edith, and about herself, well - there's no one here to defend their happiness to, and so she laughs and goes with Edith to visit the Trees.
[Narnia, Susan/Lucy, laughter]
Susan unpins her hair and tucks up her dress and sprints after Lucy into the summer grasses, tackling her sister to the ground with very little dignity and no shame. Lucy retaliates with kissing and tickling, and Susan throws her head back, baring her neck and belly in the manner of their favorite subjects. Lucy kisses her again, more deliberately and with greater abandon, and their laughter rises to the sun.
[Narnia, Lucy/Sea Girl, "among mortal women, know this / from every care / you could release me"]
Lucy sinks down, down, and this water is salty but the fisherdess' arms are the sweetest thing. She has been a queen, and a schoolgirl, a conqueror and an adventurer, but this is the most true. The Sea-Girl's lips collide with hers, another pair of lungs breathing air into hers, and she knows she will likely drown one day, but until then she will not give up this release.
[and then it kept happening]
They think themselves something out of a fairy tale, or a creation story. Land and sea and sky, twisting together, reveling in each other, loving and merging. They become the horizon, indistinguishable where they meet, melting, evaporating, refusing to wholly let go even when they are torn apart by worlds and time.
Some people say it is all part of Queen Lucy's myth, that she sang songs to the stars - so we came up with a star-girl; and she sailed and swam - so we came up with a sea-girl. Lucy hears the stories in True Narnia, realizes this is why people like Tirian and those generations look at her the way they do. It makes her laugh, because in True Narnia she and her girlfriends are inseparable, and none of them are more than they are.
[Narnia, Susan, and you're as loyal as your faith will let you be]
She cannot pray - she never had to in Narnia, finds no use for it here. Churches and temples are lovely, sweet houses or bastions of power, but they are cold and empty no matter how much incense is burned or how many bodies bend and bow.
Susan sits in her room at night, with pictures of her family, and looks at four glowing rings on the floor of a bookshelf, and remembers.
[Greek mythology, Penelope & Clytemnestra, diplomatic relations]
The message, woven in bumps and slurs, comes with a shipment of goods from Ithaca to Mycenae, in a chest of textile samples sent directly to Queen Clytemnestra.
So the war proceeds apace, Cousin, and our husbands will not return for some years yet, by my reckoning. We must ensure our mutual survival in the meantime.
[and continued]
Helen was the beauty of the family, yes. But she was not the only swan-born of the house of Leda, and it was Clytemnestra to whom Penelope had always turned for advice on matters of beauty and seduction and love. It was Clytemnestra who winked from across the room when Odysseus announced that he was giving up his suit of Helen, that he had a different wife in mind.
[Greek mythology, Hermione and Helen, the mother she does not know]
Her Aunt Clytemnestra is not a warm woman, and Hermione is not Iphigenia, but they have muddled along well enough for these ten years. She mostly thinks of herself as motherless, anyway - she has a few memories of Helen, a bright peripheral presence who may or may not have loved her, against years of hearing about the Spartan traitor-whore; it's not easy to determine what she should believe about her mother, so she has given up trying.
This woman who stands before her, renamed her mother and her father's wife and the queen of Sparta, does not look particularly broken, or ruined, or beautiful.
[The Tempest, Prospero and Miranda, her father's daughter, OR; The Tempest (2010 film), Prospera and Miranda, her mother's daughter]
Miranda has studied her father's knowledge for years, openly and in secret - not just Prospero's books but her clothing, her dresses and pants and crowns, the heeled boots that give her height, the staff that plants her solidly to the ground and reaches up to the sky. Prospero is a good father, and a better teacher. When the strange sea-soaked boy washes up onto their shores, Miranda knows exactly what to do.
[Narnia, Lucy, anger]
They do not understand, not one of them, even as Narnians creep fearfully out of hiding and Telmarines burn through the forests. They squabble over who knows best while her people, endangered by hope, continue to die.
Lucy takes up her knife and goes out to fight.
[Till We Have Faces, Psyche and Orual, the gods were in the wrong]
This worship they demand, this sacrifice, cannot hold. Choice is the purest benediction, and Orual does not choose to give up her sister to a cold illusion, and that choice is as sacred as Psyche's body laid out on a mountain.
"Light the lamp," she urges her sister, and she knows that if the gods want to keep their hold on the world, they will accept whatever she chooses to give them.
[Greek Mythology, Andromache & Cassandra, how the Trojans win the war]
Andromache stares at her sister - always more than just by marriage - and tries to understand. Cassandra is clearly not insane - none of the others even think that, they just talk as if she is, and ignore her as if she is - and Andromache can't think of any particular reason not to listen to the younger woman's warnings. The fatherless babe on her hip coos a little in sleep, and she narrows her whole self until she is an arrowpoint of will, and asks Cassandra, "Tell me what we do."
[The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, Smoking Jacket & Gleam & Key, the loyal ones who wait behind]
They are useful, and they like being useful, and they would never presume to be the same as the Beings among September's companions. They pride themselves on being there when she needs them, and that is that. It doesn't hurt to be left to wait for when they are needed next - not much.
[Greek mythology, Cassandra, the end of the world]
Cassandra stares out from the walls, her watch lonely even amidst the crowd, as the chariot stirs dust toward Troy. Her vision sharpens until she can see the blood gasping from her brother's wounds, can see all the way to his spirit sinking into the dust of the land he loved, can see the cold fields of Hades that are her future. The city in flames creeps across her eyes, but this is not the first time she has watched the world end, and as she begins to wail she prays for it to finally happen.