'She Dreams in Color, She Dreams in Red,' Part 3 (A Collection of FiveSentenceFic drabbles)
Any and all productive critiques are welcome/encouraged!
All are from Table One of 5sentence_fics
Table one, Prompt #1 'Melts in the Mouth'
In the early dawn after a battle, Rachel's kisses were filled with urgency, and they came so rushed together Tobias sometimes felt like an anchor struggling to hold a ship in port during a tropical thunderstorm.
During the nights, Rachel tasted of spices- exotic, somewhat scary, intense. He felt her mouth smile most often during these as she threaded her fingers through his human hair and made a willing slave of him with their chains.
Some mornings her mouth teased his with flavors he had nearly forgotten, especially the first day he was brave enough to lean over and kiss the maple syrup off the surprised quirk in the cornor of her mouth.
But occasional days even warrior princess Rachel was sweet, tender, soft- these kisses melted together in a way that stretched one moment into two hours.
Table one, Prompt #3 'Pin drop
Time slowed at the end for her, and it took the reverberation of the chaos around her to wake her from the momentary silence and anchor Rachel back in her finale. The faces on the screen in front of her blurred between blinks of her damp lashes. A strange sound choked and caught on its way out of her throat. Not quite a sob, not a last heartfelt, Oscar- worthy scripted last line, not even her signature fearless laugh.
And then-
Table one, Prompt #10 ‘Morning dip’
The morning after David reentered her life for the final time, Rachel snuck out of the house before sunrise. Grabbing her little used bike from the garage, she headed for the beach; somehow she couldn’t bring herself to morph anything small helpless yet.
By the time the sun peaked over the horizon and streaked its rays east to the shoreline, Rachel was in over her knees in cold ocean water. Crisp morning air and the lapping of the waves induced a temporary calmness over the looped chaos from her mind.
She cried for David for the last time there, and never mentioned him again.
Table one, Prompt #4 ‘Measure of a Man’
Rachel respected her cousin. She rarely agreed with Jake’s need to listen to Cassie’s morality or Marco’s cautious planning, but she followed him in part because he alone seemed to know the best way to take the strengths of the various Animorphs and masterfully play them for the greater good.
Even before they were players in this vast game between chaos and order, Jake had always been the serious, calm supervisor of even their most innocent playground games. She never saw Jake as being in Tom’s shadow, but the ties between the two were too strong for anyone to ignore.
So when he asked her to perform her final reckless duty, part of Rachel worried more about breaking his heart then her own.
Table one, Prompt #12 'Paper weight'
He kept photos of both of them near him for the rest of his life- Tom, relaxed in a senior picture that had to be reprinted after the destruction of the Berenson home that hung from the wall of his living room positioned just where the sun would spotlight on it in the morning.
The photo of Rachel, however, was less publicly displayed. A candid shot Marco had snapped one afternoon midway through the war; his beautiful cousin was perched laughing behind Jake on a hay bale in Cassie’s barn with one steadying hand on his back.
This framed memory sat jauntily on his bedroom desk and kept important papers blowing away in sudden gusts.