(no subject)
Cleaning out the LJ. I write everything in the LJ client update window and store it as a private post, so my whole writing life is in one LJ or the other. This is unfinished stuff from various points in the spring/summer of 2005. Separate pieces are separated by horizontal bars.
Draft of Sasuke, Naruto, and Itachi fic for fable. Final version here.
Sasuke had lost his virginity to Sakura. First kiss with Naruto -- if that counted as a kiss -- and first time with Sakura against the back of a maintenance shed in the fields out on the edge of Leaf Village.
Itachi still had his. He'd killed all of his friends before they got that far.
...
It was raining for the third time that day, and by now, the water had soaked through the Sasuke's raincoat. The water didn't roll off anymore; it didn't get soaked up by his clothes. He was thoroughly saturated, and the stuff just went straight through to his skin, was rolling in little rivers running down his spine and streaming over his shoulders, and he was pretty sure that Itachi was just as damp as he was, but he refused to look.
Neither of them had spoken for the whole time that they'd been out in the field, and well, it certainly hadn't hurt Kabuto's spirits. He was as damp and hungry and cold as they were, but still chattering about this or that. The sky. The weather. A bird that he had seen three days ago. Noodles of a type that he was very fond of and hadn't had recently becaue Orochimaru hadn't sen him out on a mision.
There was water streaming down the front of Kabuto's glasses. Sasuke didn't think that Kabuto could even see three feet in front of him, let alone all the way down to the expansion colony village that they were watching.
I have no idea where this was supposed to go. NONE. Wednesday April 20, 2005
Eyelids are, ironically enough, the thinnest skin that you have on your face. Wizard tatooists have to slip a little bit mermaid scale soaked in soothing solution under the eyelids of wizards who are getting things put on there
Apple trees come up every spring around the Weasley cottage -- Mrs. Weasley used to rotate them in from beyond the chicken coops when the came into bloom because they were so pretty, and after a a decade or two of this, the trees started wandering in on their own. One mornign, the front yard would be weedy with occaisional burned-out patches from the twins's more spectacular failures; the next morning, there'd be clouds of white outside every window. Mrs. Weasley would have to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to coax the trees away from the house and not stick their branches into the windows or try to find their way into the cellar.
Various drafts of a Sirius/James fic for kay_taylor. Final version here.
Sirius signed the final papers for the house at nine in the morning. By nine fifteen, he had finished moving -- all he had to do was tuck his new Nimbus 670 under one elbow, pick up one end of his Hogwarts trunk, and then walk through the doorway with James, who had the other end of the trunk.
***
"Does your family know where you are?"
"If they do, it's not because I told them."
"We got a box of dead rats by post today. Delivered by a flock of crows and addressed to you, care of us. Lucky Mum checked it before she touched it because there were poison maggots all in the rats."
***
[housewarming gifts. Pettigrew baking lumpy cookies. Remus not able to come and visit because of family circumstances that they later realize are because of Minsitry clampdown since some wizarding lady got attacked in the dark on a night when the moon wasn't even full.]
***
[Harry visiting after Sirius died]. A few lumpy uneaten cookies, and house still sealed tight underneath a preservation charm left over from the estate agent. [something] sill in their packaging in the corner, a mess of clothes and pillows in a corner that seemed to have been a bed for a while, the words TOUJOURS IMPURS scrawled in charcoal from the shutup fireplace right over the toilet, and a dusty mirror standing in the middle of the kitchen. When Harry brushed enough dust off of the surface so that it could see him, the thing sighed and said, "Oh, you again. Don't you sleep here."
When Sirius came into his inheritance from Uncle Alphonse at the age of sixteen, the first thing he did was buy out half of Honeydukes in one swoop.
After that, he bought himself a Nimbus 670, skipped class, and spent the large part of a school afternoon whizzing around the Quidditch pitch, trying the thing out. Allowance money was hard to come by, after all, if everyone in your family hated you so much that, at family dinners, you had to get up and walk around the table to the butter dish everytime you wanted butter for your roll because nobody would pass you anything, and even if they did pass it to you, you didn't dare have any because they might have poisoned it or charmed it to turn into a Spiny Venom Worm inside your mouth.
With the large part of the remainder, Sirius bought a house in Ottery St. Catchpole. The place was selected almost entirely because of its proximity to James's.
Post-HBP fic. Tom Riddle. 07/18/2005. Quote is from Anne Sexton. I think this was supposed to be about what a sneaky old bastard Dumbledore was and how he might be lying to us all/himself.
God dressed up like an old man
staggering out of His shoes.
It is a strange thing to sit at one of the best schools of its kind in the world and know that the only person at that school, the only person sitting in the assembled hall and eating off golden plates underneath a magic sky -- the only person out of the assembled multitides who is your intellectual and magical equal is also the one person in whom you have absolutely no faith.
***
The first time you met Tom, he was an orphan. He had a room alone; he sat on his bed, and you set fire to his wardrobe. Everything he owned, as well as everything he had stolen, was in that wardrobe. You told him that this sort of thing would not be tolerated, and for a moment, at the beginning, you thought that it might be possible that he had turned a new leaf. You had shown him something that was more powerful and important than himself. He would be different here.
You remembered the wild look of joy on his face at the orphanage, the one that made him look almost bestial despite the small mouth and elegant features. The next time you see him again, it's from the teacher's dais during the Sorting Ceremony. He has just been put into Slytherin, as you suspected he would, and you are pleased to see that he looks mildly elated. Happy, but not overly so. Receiving congratulations with a broad smile and a small boy and almost jigging with delight because he had gotten into his first-choice House, but that was expected. Entirely normal.
You were patting yourself on the back, and then, you saw him flash a look onto the dais. It took him a moment to find you on the dais, but when he did, he made sure you saw it: that same wild, bestial joy as before, but this time, with an even greater degree of triumph because he knew that he had just fooled you.
It had, indeed, only been for a moment, but Tom Riddle had nevertheless beaten you.
***
"You are the linguist on the staff, I hear? Mermish, Trollish, Veela?"
"Yes."
"Are you interested in learning Parseltongue? I heard that you were, and I have a native Parseltongue speaker in my classes -- he's a member of my little club."
"Really, Slughorn."
"I think you have him, too. You know Tom Riddle? He gave us a demonstration the other day. I'm sure that he'd be happy to give you pointers."
***
Tom never challenged you in class. For one thing, you were one of the few Professors at Hogwarts who knew your field as well as he knew. For another, he was always very respectful to teachers in public, even the ones that he couldn't respect or the ones that didn't have anything to teach him. He knew that teachers gossiped behind staff room doors.
However, unlike those classes where he had no respect for the professor, he paid strict attention to you. He took remarkable notes. In the later years, you came to realize that he hated you, loathed you, thought you were weak, and yet he paid rapt attention in your class. He received an Outstanding in it for his OWLs, of course, and when it came time for his NEWTs, there wasn't even a question. He would take the highest marks because he remembered every word that you had ever said in class over the course of the seven years, and he had also researched every word that you said so that he knew not only the background and the theory underlying the techniques you taught, but he understood them, could use them, could have debated you on them in a way that only one or two wizards on the face of the Earth could and done it in a wide selection choice of languages to boot.
Even in places where Slughorn might see it, he named your class as his favorite at Hogwarts.
You taught Transfigurations.
In retrospect, this should have been a hint of what was to come, but it is also true that, in your opinion, Tom Riddle was what he was long before he came to Hogwarts.
***
"Are you studying Parseltongue, Professor Dumbledore? I don't know if you know, but I speak it fairly well, and Professor Slughorn mentioned that you were studying it."
"That's quite all right, Tom. I suspect I will muddle through despite myself."
***
[Hagrid. Establishing a weird sort of bond: Tom asks Dumbledore during the panic because he is the one professor that Tom can trust to tell him information, to be capable of knowing what's going on. Dumbledore still not really trusting Tom at all]
***
[Questions about restrospect and its distorting events -- Dumbledore knows now that he should never have trusted Riddle even a little, but are all of these things that he remembers actually true? Casting doubt on Dumbledore as a narrator. ]
***
[Utter gibberish: later turns out the Ministry made a recording of Riddle talking to snakes. Example of native accent, etc. Turns out not to be parseltongue at all, but only gibberish.
***
The competition was not entirely one-sided. You were the lone holdout among the teaching staff. He could never persuade you to like him; you always kept nce, after you'd revealed in some passing comment to the class that you knew Mermish, he wrote an entire examination paper in a phonetic version that he'd managed to work out himself. [assistants less bright than himself: something longbottom, something something. Minerva not being quite smart enough -- Dumbledore's arrogance. ]
***
[suspicions]
***
[Researching the twelve uses of dragon's blood. Recording for the Ministry: parseltongue all wrong. moment of weakness]
***
[Inheriting the office from Dippet. The empty office. blank slate. start anew, but no. Year You looked up charismatic, dark-haired boy who was gifted at everything he tried]
This is probably the weirdest of the lot. Outline fic that I got the idea for from two_if_by_sea.
Why Percy Weasley Hates Harry Potter (Outline for Future Position Paper)
I. History
A. Destruction follows in Potter's wake. The Ministry's primary job is to maintain the stability of Wizarding Society.
1. See: Ministry destruction (see later point)
2. See: Rise of family
B. Potter is
II. People
- love for ginny
teaching ginny how to write cursive
ginny internship
B. Quidditch. There was, originally, money for only one family friend to come along. Mr. Weasley owled Percy five weeks before the tournament, one week before they collected Harry, and asked if Percy would be going with Mr. Crouch.
1. Percy does nto fly well.
2.
C. Family, again.Four days after the death of Dumbledore, he walked into the Ministry particularly early to get a head start on the paperwork that had been generated by that, and one of the secretaries (see below) called out and told him, as he passed, him that she was really terribly sorry. Belton Mitlurk's intern told him the same thing next to the Copy Sprite Room. Percy didn't figure out what was going on until Gawain stopped him and told him that he was so, so, so terribly sorry about all o fhits.
Percy blinked at him. What had happened?
Bertholdt looked back, mouth open. "I'm so sorry," he said, this time sounding even fainter. "They haven't told you, have they?"
Percy began to snap and bristle. He had things to do. He had places to go. What did people mean by constantly offering their condolences? Were they mocking him?
And then, Bertholdt tapped the folder he was holding. Percy looked down. The cover of the folder bore Bertholdt's department name in bright red ink: DEPARTMENT OF NON-HUMAN CONTROL.
"Your brother," Bertholdt said, kind as any man who spends all his time wrestling hags, giants, and centaurs into obedience. "He came in to be registered yesterday for lycanthropy.
III. Places
- two places that are ruined for him: the kitchen and the ministry
- the ministry: this should be obvious. destroying it. falling asleep in the kitchen, next to the stove, with the clock ticking above him like a steady heart. head on a book, and his father coming back and being like !!! he can read that already
- the ministry quill - learning to write in the kitchen with a special quill
- the birds! the penguins
- going hungry in his flat: folding recipes with his molly
- the final scene with scrimegeour and the family clock
Attempt at The New X-Men Emma/Jean for stoptocheer. Ideas housed from all over, including eponis's Snape/Remus fic, and the Phoenix arc of X-men. As I put it in the original post, "I steal from the rich and give to the mentally impoverished -- ie, ME. :|." Titled Even the Lonely Dream. Subtitle: IT'S A RHODFIC IN THE PAST TENSE.
Puting three omega-level telepaths in the same house is practically a guarantee that somebody's dreams are going to start walking the corridor.
No matter how much they bitch about sound, no matter how much time they spend with their earplugs in and buffing their telepathic walls until everything goes shiny, there's a part of them that wants to talk and listen and be close to people. Put three telepaths, each of whom is capable of convicing, in the space of about thirty seconds, a squadron of hard Marine lifers, Semper Fi's, into taking up tapdancing and cheese sampling -- take three of them. Make one of them a lifelong student of the other. Make one of them be in love with the other's husband.
As Logan would put it, you don't even need a nose to tell that's gonna stink. In this case, you don't even need the Phoenix Force creeping around in the shadows to tell that it's all going to go to hell eventually.
***
[somebody, presumably not Mr. Clean in a Wheelchair] wakes up with singed hair, the smell of charcoal on her fingertips, and she can't explain one.
And OK. I have no memory of writing over two thousand words of what would probably have been a 5K+ AU far future fic about SUPERMAN of all things, and I could damn well have actually c/p'd this in from somebody. Seriously. If I've stolen somebody else's stuff, tell me, and I'll wipe this off the face of existence.
Version that seemed to be the closest to what I'd decided as final: After Bruce died, Superman had been listed as one of the executors of the will, and he was given the charge of helping dispose of Wayne Mansion. Neither Dick nor Tim wanted to live there, so they had movers clean out the house, and then Superman came and worked with them to split up what was left in the caves underneath. The computers, the cars, the memorabilia. He ran the TNT into the caverns under the house when it was time to collapse them. In something of a similar fashion, but not really, when Lois was almost dead from Alzheimer's. She had forgotten how to swallow and breathe, so she wasn't in any condition to talk about how she wanted her remains to be taken care of. He defied the wishes written out in the will she'd made at the beginning of her illness to be buried in a plot that she had bought for both of them.
She'd known it was going to be empty for a long time, if not forever, but she had apparently insisted on it. She had apparently told her lawyer that it was her way of saying sorry for how her marriage ended, and the headstones got carved three years into her Alzheimer's, but Clark had her buried next to her parents anyway because he didn't want her to be lonely.
Clark buried Lois in the ground, but when it was Superman's turn to bury his dead, he gave Kara burial in space by gathering up her ashes, sealing them in a titanium case, taking them out beyond the atmosphere and throwing it as hard as he could back in the direction of the Krypton.
After he put them out there, he stayed in space a little longer, alternately watching Earth and looking at the stars. There was light out there, and it was Lois's grave, the collapsed parts of the Wayne Mansion underneath him. Kara was somewhere out near the stars, too.
He stayed there for a long time, and then he turned around and flew back down to Earth to help with an avalanche in the Causcaus Mountains -- when Kara slept, she became what she dreamed she was. Similarly, Clark, too, became what he dreamed, gotten what he had most desperately wanted. When he was growing up in Kanasas, he had unconsciously made himself grow at Earth age. He had become a child, a teenager, then an adult. Now, he had, again, become what he most desperately wanted.
He had become the guardian of Earth. He had found something that would not die so long as he was alive.
Mess of cut scenes: The telekinesis, strangely enough, extended no further. Kara could only remake the molecules of her own body -- even if she swallowed the item, as long as they didn't bear her DNA, she couldn't reshape it, as she found out this one time she was eating popcorn at the Fortress of Solitude while watching a movie, and she choked on a kernel.
[inset cuddly bits with watching movies with Kara at the Kents house in Smallville]
***
[Insert some pretext about riding in the back of the Wayne limo. Both Clark's parents are dead now and have been dead for some time -- the house where they'd watched movies has more or less ground, and they had to sell the land to pay the after-death taxes. It's hard being an honest superhero. Wayne offering to help, but Superman turning him down (??)
Kara stretched out in one of the seats of the side of the limo, dead asleep and shifting through various forms while she dreams. Superman, wearing his Clark Kent face, watches her from his seat.
Windows are tinted so that nobody can see in. Bulletproof. Bombproof. Wayne watches Superman. Wayne offers to help Lois. ]
***
Clark, on the other hand, grew up at the regular human rate. He was strong for a toddler, but he was still clumsy. He still had to go through puberty. He still had to suffer through trying to grow a dirtache and embarassing hormones and arms that had muscles that looked about as impressive as raisins arranged on a tree branch even though he could lift a car over his head the way most kids picked up their backpacks -- it was perfectly normal stuff. He developed in the normal course of things, and it never occurred to the Kents to worry about their boy maybe growing at a different rate than all the other kids in school.
This was Kansas, after all. Boys grew up big and strong. Maybe Clark aged a little slower once he hit adulthood, but that wasn't anything to worry about, either. He'd was just going to have to start dying his hair eventually.
Some years later, when the Alzheimer's had deepened, Waynetech's therapy had been unsuccessful, and Lois had apparently regressed past the stage when she remembered divorcing Clark when she found out -- post-wedding -- that he was Superman and thus became willing to see him:
"I brought you flowers."
"What did you do this time, Smallville? Did you steal my source again? Can I expect Perry to be calling me up in fifteen minutes, telling me that I've been bumped off the page for your boring article about grass growing or puppies being saved?"
"It's nothing. Just enjoy the flowers."
"You wouldn't bring me flowers unless something was wrong. Here, give me the flow -- what the hell is this card? Why does it say /Happy Anniversary, Lois!/>"
". . . It's our anniversary. Or. Would have been. If. Yes."
"Ew. What? We are so not married. We're not even dating. Hell, I'm not dating anyone. Are you crazy or something? You /are/ crazy, but the flowers are nice."
"Here. Let me steady the vase for yo --"
"The flowers are nice, but you're not getting off. You so stole my source, Smallville. Tell me which one you ruined, and there will only be half-hell to pay."
The last time he had gone to visit her, she had thought they were still married, and she made the nurses change the name on every last one of her charts from her maiden name to her married one. She had gotten furious because she noticed that Clark wasn't wearing his wedding ring
***
The last time Superman saw Batman, Batman was in a wheelchair and drowsing in the sunlight. He had an oxygen tank, a live-in nurse. It all tended to hamper the flying-in-through-the-window-for-drop-by-Sunday-visits thing, so Superman came by regular car, as a regular person -- he'd given up the Clark Kent identity years ago when it'd just gotten too ludicrous to have to dye his hair every omrning and pretend all the other parts of getting old, so he pretended to be the son of an old boarding school classmate of Wayne's, and they sat together for a while before Bruce fell asleep, still breathing, still muttering about detection techniques and urban warfare under his sleep.
***
Superman was, in contrast, with Kara when she died: [insert short techie explanation about some guy calling himself the Sleepmaster and engineering a bioweapon that induced sleep. Idea was that he could rob the city blind while it slept, and Supe fights him and wins, but alas, Kara gets the disease and falls irreversibly asleep. Brain damage.]
shifting underneath the blanket so rapidly that the blanket slid off of her and wouldn't stay tucked, so he went over, smoothed the blanket around her shoulders. He held her while she shifted from old to young to middle-aged almost faster than even Superman's eyes could follow and then back again, and eventually, after another four or five hours of this, while he was still holding the blanket on her, Kara imagined, in some dream, that she was nothing but an armful of ashes.
***
After Bruce died, Superman helped take care of Wayne Mansion. Neither Dick nor Tim wanted to live there, so they had movers clean out the house, and then Superman came and worked with them to split up what was left in the house. The computers, the cars, the memorabilia. He ran the TNT into the caverns under the house when it was time to collapse them, and when Lois was near dying, she'd forgotten how to swallow and breathe, so she wasn't in any condition to talk about how she wanted her remains to be taken care of, so he defied the wishes written out in the will she'd made at the beginning of her illness to be buried in a plot that she had bought for both of them.
She'd known it was going to be empty for a long time, if not forever, but she had apparently insisted on it. She had apparently told her lawyer that it was her way of saying sorry for how her marriage ended, and the headstones got carved three years into her Alzheimer's, but Clark had her buried next to her parents anyway because he didn't want her to be lonely.
Clark buried Lois in the ground, but when it was Superman's turn to bury his dead, he gave Kara burial in space by gathering up her ashes, sealing them in a titanium case, taking them out beyond the atmosphere and throwing it as hard as he could back in the direction of the Krypton.
After he put them out there, he stayed in space a little longer, alternately watching Earth and looking at the stars. There was light out there, and it was Lois's grave, the collapsed parts of the Wayne Mansion underneath him. Kara was somewhere out near the stars, too.
He stayed there for a long time, and then he turned around and flew back down to Earth to help with an avalanche in the Causcaus Mountains because -- well, because when Kara slept, she became what she dreamed she was. Similarly, Clark, too, became what he dreamed, gotten what he had most desperately wanted.
He had become the guardian of Earth. He had found something that would not die so long as he was alive.
when he wasn't being Superman chasing leads and filing reports and eating bad fast food while he was chasing leads and filing reports? Lois Lane used to hit the stairmaster every morning before she came to the office; Clark had a weight bench in his apartment, but it was mostly a prop that he'd picked up in college to keep other people on his residence hall quiet about how he came to have those gorgeous muscles but was never seen within sneezing vicinity of the gym unless he was doing a report for the school newspaper.
After Bruce died, Superman helped take care of Wayne Mansion. Neither Dick nor Tim wanted to live there, so they had movers clean out the house, and then Superman came and worked with them to split up what was left in the house. The computers, the cars, the memorabilia. He ran the TNT into the caverns under the house when it was time to collapse them, and when Lois was near dying, she'd forgotten how to swallow and breathe, so she wasn't in any condition to talk about how she wanted her remains to be taken care of, so he defied the wishes written out in the will she'd made at the beginning of her illness to be buried in a plot that she had bought for both of them.
She'd known it was going to be empty for a long time, if not forever, but she had apparently insisted on it. She had apparently told her lawyer that it was her way of saying sorry for how her marriage ended, and the headstones got carved three years into her Alzheimer's, but Clark had her buried next to her parents anyway because he didn't want her to be lonely.
Clark buried Lois in the ground, but when it was Superman's turn to bury his dead, he gave Kara burial in space by gathering up her ashes, sealing them in a titanium case, taking them out beyond the atmosphere and throwing it as hard as he could back in the direction of the Krypton.
After he put them out there, he stayed in space a little longer, alternately watching Earth and looking at the stars. There was light out there, and it was Lois's grave, the collapsed parts of the Wayne Mansion underneath him. Kara was somewhere out near the stars, too.
He stayed there for a long time, and then he turned around and flew back down to Earth to help with an avalanche in the Causcaus Mountains because -- well, because when Kara slept, she became what she dreamed she was. Similarly, Clark, too, became what he dreamed, gotten what he had most desperately wanted.
He had become the guardian of Earth. He had found something that would not die so long as he was alive.
Draft of Sasuke, Naruto, and Itachi fic for fable. Final version here.
Sasuke had lost his virginity to Sakura. First kiss with Naruto -- if that counted as a kiss -- and first time with Sakura against the back of a maintenance shed in the fields out on the edge of Leaf Village.
Itachi still had his. He'd killed all of his friends before they got that far.
...
It was raining for the third time that day, and by now, the water had soaked through the Sasuke's raincoat. The water didn't roll off anymore; it didn't get soaked up by his clothes. He was thoroughly saturated, and the stuff just went straight through to his skin, was rolling in little rivers running down his spine and streaming over his shoulders, and he was pretty sure that Itachi was just as damp as he was, but he refused to look.
Neither of them had spoken for the whole time that they'd been out in the field, and well, it certainly hadn't hurt Kabuto's spirits. He was as damp and hungry and cold as they were, but still chattering about this or that. The sky. The weather. A bird that he had seen three days ago. Noodles of a type that he was very fond of and hadn't had recently becaue Orochimaru hadn't sen him out on a mision.
There was water streaming down the front of Kabuto's glasses. Sasuke didn't think that Kabuto could even see three feet in front of him, let alone all the way down to the expansion colony village that they were watching.
I have no idea where this was supposed to go. NONE. Wednesday April 20, 2005
Eyelids are, ironically enough, the thinnest skin that you have on your face. Wizard tatooists have to slip a little bit mermaid scale soaked in soothing solution under the eyelids of wizards who are getting things put on there
Apple trees come up every spring around the Weasley cottage -- Mrs. Weasley used to rotate them in from beyond the chicken coops when the came into bloom because they were so pretty, and after a a decade or two of this, the trees started wandering in on their own. One mornign, the front yard would be weedy with occaisional burned-out patches from the twins's more spectacular failures; the next morning, there'd be clouds of white outside every window. Mrs. Weasley would have to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to coax the trees away from the house and not stick their branches into the windows or try to find their way into the cellar.
Various drafts of a Sirius/James fic for kay_taylor. Final version here.
Sirius signed the final papers for the house at nine in the morning. By nine fifteen, he had finished moving -- all he had to do was tuck his new Nimbus 670 under one elbow, pick up one end of his Hogwarts trunk, and then walk through the doorway with James, who had the other end of the trunk.
***
"Does your family know where you are?"
"If they do, it's not because I told them."
"We got a box of dead rats by post today. Delivered by a flock of crows and addressed to you, care of us. Lucky Mum checked it before she touched it because there were poison maggots all in the rats."
***
[housewarming gifts. Pettigrew baking lumpy cookies. Remus not able to come and visit because of family circumstances that they later realize are because of Minsitry clampdown since some wizarding lady got attacked in the dark on a night when the moon wasn't even full.]
***
[Harry visiting after Sirius died]. A few lumpy uneaten cookies, and house still sealed tight underneath a preservation charm left over from the estate agent. [something] sill in their packaging in the corner, a mess of clothes and pillows in a corner that seemed to have been a bed for a while, the words TOUJOURS IMPURS scrawled in charcoal from the shutup fireplace right over the toilet, and a dusty mirror standing in the middle of the kitchen. When Harry brushed enough dust off of the surface so that it could see him, the thing sighed and said, "Oh, you again. Don't you sleep here."
When Sirius came into his inheritance from Uncle Alphonse at the age of sixteen, the first thing he did was buy out half of Honeydukes in one swoop.
After that, he bought himself a Nimbus 670, skipped class, and spent the large part of a school afternoon whizzing around the Quidditch pitch, trying the thing out. Allowance money was hard to come by, after all, if everyone in your family hated you so much that, at family dinners, you had to get up and walk around the table to the butter dish everytime you wanted butter for your roll because nobody would pass you anything, and even if they did pass it to you, you didn't dare have any because they might have poisoned it or charmed it to turn into a Spiny Venom Worm inside your mouth.
With the large part of the remainder, Sirius bought a house in Ottery St. Catchpole. The place was selected almost entirely because of its proximity to James's.
Post-HBP fic. Tom Riddle. 07/18/2005. Quote is from Anne Sexton. I think this was supposed to be about what a sneaky old bastard Dumbledore was and how he might be lying to us all/himself.
God dressed up like an old man
staggering out of His shoes.
It is a strange thing to sit at one of the best schools of its kind in the world and know that the only person at that school, the only person sitting in the assembled hall and eating off golden plates underneath a magic sky -- the only person out of the assembled multitides who is your intellectual and magical equal is also the one person in whom you have absolutely no faith.
***
The first time you met Tom, he was an orphan. He had a room alone; he sat on his bed, and you set fire to his wardrobe. Everything he owned, as well as everything he had stolen, was in that wardrobe. You told him that this sort of thing would not be tolerated, and for a moment, at the beginning, you thought that it might be possible that he had turned a new leaf. You had shown him something that was more powerful and important than himself. He would be different here.
You remembered the wild look of joy on his face at the orphanage, the one that made him look almost bestial despite the small mouth and elegant features. The next time you see him again, it's from the teacher's dais during the Sorting Ceremony. He has just been put into Slytherin, as you suspected he would, and you are pleased to see that he looks mildly elated. Happy, but not overly so. Receiving congratulations with a broad smile and a small boy and almost jigging with delight because he had gotten into his first-choice House, but that was expected. Entirely normal.
You were patting yourself on the back, and then, you saw him flash a look onto the dais. It took him a moment to find you on the dais, but when he did, he made sure you saw it: that same wild, bestial joy as before, but this time, with an even greater degree of triumph because he knew that he had just fooled you.
It had, indeed, only been for a moment, but Tom Riddle had nevertheless beaten you.
***
"You are the linguist on the staff, I hear? Mermish, Trollish, Veela?"
"Yes."
"Are you interested in learning Parseltongue? I heard that you were, and I have a native Parseltongue speaker in my classes -- he's a member of my little club."
"Really, Slughorn."
"I think you have him, too. You know Tom Riddle? He gave us a demonstration the other day. I'm sure that he'd be happy to give you pointers."
***
Tom never challenged you in class. For one thing, you were one of the few Professors at Hogwarts who knew your field as well as he knew. For another, he was always very respectful to teachers in public, even the ones that he couldn't respect or the ones that didn't have anything to teach him. He knew that teachers gossiped behind staff room doors.
However, unlike those classes where he had no respect for the professor, he paid strict attention to you. He took remarkable notes. In the later years, you came to realize that he hated you, loathed you, thought you were weak, and yet he paid rapt attention in your class. He received an Outstanding in it for his OWLs, of course, and when it came time for his NEWTs, there wasn't even a question. He would take the highest marks because he remembered every word that you had ever said in class over the course of the seven years, and he had also researched every word that you said so that he knew not only the background and the theory underlying the techniques you taught, but he understood them, could use them, could have debated you on them in a way that only one or two wizards on the face of the Earth could and done it in a wide selection choice of languages to boot.
Even in places where Slughorn might see it, he named your class as his favorite at Hogwarts.
You taught Transfigurations.
In retrospect, this should have been a hint of what was to come, but it is also true that, in your opinion, Tom Riddle was what he was long before he came to Hogwarts.
***
"Are you studying Parseltongue, Professor Dumbledore? I don't know if you know, but I speak it fairly well, and Professor Slughorn mentioned that you were studying it."
"That's quite all right, Tom. I suspect I will muddle through despite myself."
***
[Hagrid. Establishing a weird sort of bond: Tom asks Dumbledore during the panic because he is the one professor that Tom can trust to tell him information, to be capable of knowing what's going on. Dumbledore still not really trusting Tom at all]
***
[Questions about restrospect and its distorting events -- Dumbledore knows now that he should never have trusted Riddle even a little, but are all of these things that he remembers actually true? Casting doubt on Dumbledore as a narrator. ]
***
[Utter gibberish: later turns out the Ministry made a recording of Riddle talking to snakes. Example of native accent, etc. Turns out not to be parseltongue at all, but only gibberish.
***
The competition was not entirely one-sided. You were the lone holdout among the teaching staff. He could never persuade you to like him; you always kept nce, after you'd revealed in some passing comment to the class that you knew Mermish, he wrote an entire examination paper in a phonetic version that he'd managed to work out himself. [assistants less bright than himself: something longbottom, something something. Minerva not being quite smart enough -- Dumbledore's arrogance. ]
***
[suspicions]
***
[Researching the twelve uses of dragon's blood. Recording for the Ministry: parseltongue all wrong. moment of weakness]
***
[Inheriting the office from Dippet. The empty office. blank slate. start anew, but no. Year You looked up charismatic, dark-haired boy who was gifted at everything he tried]
This is probably the weirdest of the lot. Outline fic that I got the idea for from two_if_by_sea.
Why Percy Weasley Hates Harry Potter (Outline for Future Position Paper)
I. History
A. Destruction follows in Potter's wake. The Ministry's primary job is to maintain the stability of Wizarding Society.
1. See: Ministry destruction (see later point)
2. See: Rise of family
B. Potter is
II. People
- love for ginny
teaching ginny how to write cursive
ginny internship
B. Quidditch. There was, originally, money for only one family friend to come along. Mr. Weasley owled Percy five weeks before the tournament, one week before they collected Harry, and asked if Percy would be going with Mr. Crouch.
1. Percy does nto fly well.
2.
C. Family, again.Four days after the death of Dumbledore, he walked into the Ministry particularly early to get a head start on the paperwork that had been generated by that, and one of the secretaries (see below) called out and told him, as he passed, him that she was really terribly sorry. Belton Mitlurk's intern told him the same thing next to the Copy Sprite Room. Percy didn't figure out what was going on until Gawain stopped him and told him that he was so, so, so terribly sorry about all o fhits.
Percy blinked at him. What had happened?
Bertholdt looked back, mouth open. "I'm so sorry," he said, this time sounding even fainter. "They haven't told you, have they?"
Percy began to snap and bristle. He had things to do. He had places to go. What did people mean by constantly offering their condolences? Were they mocking him?
And then, Bertholdt tapped the folder he was holding. Percy looked down. The cover of the folder bore Bertholdt's department name in bright red ink: DEPARTMENT OF NON-HUMAN CONTROL.
"Your brother," Bertholdt said, kind as any man who spends all his time wrestling hags, giants, and centaurs into obedience. "He came in to be registered yesterday for lycanthropy.
III. Places
- two places that are ruined for him: the kitchen and the ministry
- the ministry: this should be obvious. destroying it. falling asleep in the kitchen, next to the stove, with the clock ticking above him like a steady heart. head on a book, and his father coming back and being like !!! he can read that already
- the ministry quill - learning to write in the kitchen with a special quill
- the birds! the penguins
- going hungry in his flat: folding recipes with his molly
- the final scene with scrimegeour and the family clock
Attempt at The New X-Men Emma/Jean for stoptocheer. Ideas housed from all over, including eponis's Snape/Remus fic, and the Phoenix arc of X-men. As I put it in the original post, "I steal from the rich and give to the mentally impoverished -- ie, ME. :|." Titled Even the Lonely Dream. Subtitle: IT'S A RHODFIC IN THE PAST TENSE.
Puting three omega-level telepaths in the same house is practically a guarantee that somebody's dreams are going to start walking the corridor.
No matter how much they bitch about sound, no matter how much time they spend with their earplugs in and buffing their telepathic walls until everything goes shiny, there's a part of them that wants to talk and listen and be close to people. Put three telepaths, each of whom is capable of convicing, in the space of about thirty seconds, a squadron of hard Marine lifers, Semper Fi's, into taking up tapdancing and cheese sampling -- take three of them. Make one of them a lifelong student of the other. Make one of them be in love with the other's husband.
As Logan would put it, you don't even need a nose to tell that's gonna stink. In this case, you don't even need the Phoenix Force creeping around in the shadows to tell that it's all going to go to hell eventually.
***
[somebody, presumably not Mr. Clean in a Wheelchair] wakes up with singed hair, the smell of charcoal on her fingertips, and she can't explain one.
And OK. I have no memory of writing over two thousand words of what would probably have been a 5K+ AU far future fic about SUPERMAN of all things, and I could damn well have actually c/p'd this in from somebody. Seriously. If I've stolen somebody else's stuff, tell me, and I'll wipe this off the face of existence.
Version that seemed to be the closest to what I'd decided as final: After Bruce died, Superman had been listed as one of the executors of the will, and he was given the charge of helping dispose of Wayne Mansion. Neither Dick nor Tim wanted to live there, so they had movers clean out the house, and then Superman came and worked with them to split up what was left in the caves underneath. The computers, the cars, the memorabilia. He ran the TNT into the caverns under the house when it was time to collapse them. In something of a similar fashion, but not really, when Lois was almost dead from Alzheimer's. She had forgotten how to swallow and breathe, so she wasn't in any condition to talk about how she wanted her remains to be taken care of. He defied the wishes written out in the will she'd made at the beginning of her illness to be buried in a plot that she had bought for both of them.
She'd known it was going to be empty for a long time, if not forever, but she had apparently insisted on it. She had apparently told her lawyer that it was her way of saying sorry for how her marriage ended, and the headstones got carved three years into her Alzheimer's, but Clark had her buried next to her parents anyway because he didn't want her to be lonely.
Clark buried Lois in the ground, but when it was Superman's turn to bury his dead, he gave Kara burial in space by gathering up her ashes, sealing them in a titanium case, taking them out beyond the atmosphere and throwing it as hard as he could back in the direction of the Krypton.
After he put them out there, he stayed in space a little longer, alternately watching Earth and looking at the stars. There was light out there, and it was Lois's grave, the collapsed parts of the Wayne Mansion underneath him. Kara was somewhere out near the stars, too.
He stayed there for a long time, and then he turned around and flew back down to Earth to help with an avalanche in the Causcaus Mountains -- when Kara slept, she became what she dreamed she was. Similarly, Clark, too, became what he dreamed, gotten what he had most desperately wanted. When he was growing up in Kanasas, he had unconsciously made himself grow at Earth age. He had become a child, a teenager, then an adult. Now, he had, again, become what he most desperately wanted.
He had become the guardian of Earth. He had found something that would not die so long as he was alive.
Mess of cut scenes: The telekinesis, strangely enough, extended no further. Kara could only remake the molecules of her own body -- even if she swallowed the item, as long as they didn't bear her DNA, she couldn't reshape it, as she found out this one time she was eating popcorn at the Fortress of Solitude while watching a movie, and she choked on a kernel.
[inset cuddly bits with watching movies with Kara at the Kents house in Smallville]
***
[Insert some pretext about riding in the back of the Wayne limo. Both Clark's parents are dead now and have been dead for some time -- the house where they'd watched movies has more or less ground, and they had to sell the land to pay the after-death taxes. It's hard being an honest superhero. Wayne offering to help, but Superman turning him down (??)
Kara stretched out in one of the seats of the side of the limo, dead asleep and shifting through various forms while she dreams. Superman, wearing his Clark Kent face, watches her from his seat.
Windows are tinted so that nobody can see in. Bulletproof. Bombproof. Wayne watches Superman. Wayne offers to help Lois. ]
***
Clark, on the other hand, grew up at the regular human rate. He was strong for a toddler, but he was still clumsy. He still had to go through puberty. He still had to suffer through trying to grow a dirtache and embarassing hormones and arms that had muscles that looked about as impressive as raisins arranged on a tree branch even though he could lift a car over his head the way most kids picked up their backpacks -- it was perfectly normal stuff. He developed in the normal course of things, and it never occurred to the Kents to worry about their boy maybe growing at a different rate than all the other kids in school.
This was Kansas, after all. Boys grew up big and strong. Maybe Clark aged a little slower once he hit adulthood, but that wasn't anything to worry about, either. He'd was just going to have to start dying his hair eventually.
Some years later, when the Alzheimer's had deepened, Waynetech's therapy had been unsuccessful, and Lois had apparently regressed past the stage when she remembered divorcing Clark when she found out -- post-wedding -- that he was Superman and thus became willing to see him:
"I brought you flowers."
"What did you do this time, Smallville? Did you steal my source again? Can I expect Perry to be calling me up in fifteen minutes, telling me that I've been bumped off the page for your boring article about grass growing or puppies being saved?"
"It's nothing. Just enjoy the flowers."
"You wouldn't bring me flowers unless something was wrong. Here, give me the flow -- what the hell is this card? Why does it say /Happy Anniversary, Lois!/>"
". . . It's our anniversary. Or. Would have been. If. Yes."
"Ew. What? We are so not married. We're not even dating. Hell, I'm not dating anyone. Are you crazy or something? You /are/ crazy, but the flowers are nice."
"Here. Let me steady the vase for yo --"
"The flowers are nice, but you're not getting off. You so stole my source, Smallville. Tell me which one you ruined, and there will only be half-hell to pay."
The last time he had gone to visit her, she had thought they were still married, and she made the nurses change the name on every last one of her charts from her maiden name to her married one. She had gotten furious because she noticed that Clark wasn't wearing his wedding ring
***
The last time Superman saw Batman, Batman was in a wheelchair and drowsing in the sunlight. He had an oxygen tank, a live-in nurse. It all tended to hamper the flying-in-through-the-window-for-drop-by-Sunday-visits thing, so Superman came by regular car, as a regular person -- he'd given up the Clark Kent identity years ago when it'd just gotten too ludicrous to have to dye his hair every omrning and pretend all the other parts of getting old, so he pretended to be the son of an old boarding school classmate of Wayne's, and they sat together for a while before Bruce fell asleep, still breathing, still muttering about detection techniques and urban warfare under his sleep.
***
Superman was, in contrast, with Kara when she died: [insert short techie explanation about some guy calling himself the Sleepmaster and engineering a bioweapon that induced sleep. Idea was that he could rob the city blind while it slept, and Supe fights him and wins, but alas, Kara gets the disease and falls irreversibly asleep. Brain damage.]
shifting underneath the blanket so rapidly that the blanket slid off of her and wouldn't stay tucked, so he went over, smoothed the blanket around her shoulders. He held her while she shifted from old to young to middle-aged almost faster than even Superman's eyes could follow and then back again, and eventually, after another four or five hours of this, while he was still holding the blanket on her, Kara imagined, in some dream, that she was nothing but an armful of ashes.
***
After Bruce died, Superman helped take care of Wayne Mansion. Neither Dick nor Tim wanted to live there, so they had movers clean out the house, and then Superman came and worked with them to split up what was left in the house. The computers, the cars, the memorabilia. He ran the TNT into the caverns under the house when it was time to collapse them, and when Lois was near dying, she'd forgotten how to swallow and breathe, so she wasn't in any condition to talk about how she wanted her remains to be taken care of, so he defied the wishes written out in the will she'd made at the beginning of her illness to be buried in a plot that she had bought for both of them.
She'd known it was going to be empty for a long time, if not forever, but she had apparently insisted on it. She had apparently told her lawyer that it was her way of saying sorry for how her marriage ended, and the headstones got carved three years into her Alzheimer's, but Clark had her buried next to her parents anyway because he didn't want her to be lonely.
Clark buried Lois in the ground, but when it was Superman's turn to bury his dead, he gave Kara burial in space by gathering up her ashes, sealing them in a titanium case, taking them out beyond the atmosphere and throwing it as hard as he could back in the direction of the Krypton.
After he put them out there, he stayed in space a little longer, alternately watching Earth and looking at the stars. There was light out there, and it was Lois's grave, the collapsed parts of the Wayne Mansion underneath him. Kara was somewhere out near the stars, too.
He stayed there for a long time, and then he turned around and flew back down to Earth to help with an avalanche in the Causcaus Mountains because -- well, because when Kara slept, she became what she dreamed she was. Similarly, Clark, too, became what he dreamed, gotten what he had most desperately wanted.
He had become the guardian of Earth. He had found something that would not die so long as he was alive.
when he wasn't being Superman chasing leads and filing reports and eating bad fast food while he was chasing leads and filing reports? Lois Lane used to hit the stairmaster every morning before she came to the office; Clark had a weight bench in his apartment, but it was mostly a prop that he'd picked up in college to keep other people on his residence hall quiet about how he came to have those gorgeous muscles but was never seen within sneezing vicinity of the gym unless he was doing a report for the school newspaper.
After Bruce died, Superman helped take care of Wayne Mansion. Neither Dick nor Tim wanted to live there, so they had movers clean out the house, and then Superman came and worked with them to split up what was left in the house. The computers, the cars, the memorabilia. He ran the TNT into the caverns under the house when it was time to collapse them, and when Lois was near dying, she'd forgotten how to swallow and breathe, so she wasn't in any condition to talk about how she wanted her remains to be taken care of, so he defied the wishes written out in the will she'd made at the beginning of her illness to be buried in a plot that she had bought for both of them.
She'd known it was going to be empty for a long time, if not forever, but she had apparently insisted on it. She had apparently told her lawyer that it was her way of saying sorry for how her marriage ended, and the headstones got carved three years into her Alzheimer's, but Clark had her buried next to her parents anyway because he didn't want her to be lonely.
Clark buried Lois in the ground, but when it was Superman's turn to bury his dead, he gave Kara burial in space by gathering up her ashes, sealing them in a titanium case, taking them out beyond the atmosphere and throwing it as hard as he could back in the direction of the Krypton.
After he put them out there, he stayed in space a little longer, alternately watching Earth and looking at the stars. There was light out there, and it was Lois's grave, the collapsed parts of the Wayne Mansion underneath him. Kara was somewhere out near the stars, too.
He stayed there for a long time, and then he turned around and flew back down to Earth to help with an avalanche in the Causcaus Mountains because -- well, because when Kara slept, she became what she dreamed she was. Similarly, Clark, too, became what he dreamed, gotten what he had most desperately wanted.
He had become the guardian of Earth. He had found something that would not die so long as he was alive.