do you think she knows it's a circle?
Author: C
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 2,322
Story / World: post-Amethyst Sky Jaime
Title: do you think she knows it's a circle?
Counts for the Summer Challenge? IT HAD BETTER.
Prompts: Toasted Almond [29 // icing on the cake].
Characters: {highlight to read} Fei Amber Belaqua, Jaime Zie Mendoza, Eleanor.
Toppings / Extras / Other: Prompt from Rika [awake and unafraid / asleep or dead]. Butterscotch.
Notes: This has not had a direct sequel yet, mostly because no one will actually tell me what happened and the suggestions are kind of - uncouth. Eheh. Yes. As always, rikaprompts aren't a RaTs thing, I just don't want to forget.
I'm told that if you put someone through enough stress the peripherals drop away. They stop caring about, say - first it's I shouldn't do this, I'll beat up this textbook and it's the beginning of year so I don't want a messy textbook, and then it's screw the textbook that was a good use too, but if I throw myself to one side I'm going to wreck my leg so bad; and then it's oh gods oh dead abandoned gods I am going to die (how can I temporarily avoid dying at any cost no really I don't want to die).
So I'm told; I guess I'm not human.
“Amber!” I shrieked. Not that I could really spare enough breath to shriek properly - my lungs hurt and my legs seemed to be on fire even without taking into account all the jumping - but I did my best and hopefully the fact that Amber seemed to hear me just fine had nothing to do with her light, lingering fingerprints in my mind.
“Yes?” She didn't seem winded or anything - very unfair - and was running more or less next to me with little to no effort, but she was also holding her hands up - palm first, I don't know if that matters, probably she thought it mattered and so it mattered to her and that was enough - in front of her, sparking pale green magic off her skin like static, clearing our way through.
Hence all the jumping.
“If I - what the hell - if - if I - look, I - I need you to promise me something!” The next body I jumped over, I landed in a way that folded my ankle to one side and something felt like it popped a bit. Well. A lot. Because I am utterly amazing, I did not scream.
“You aren't going to die,” she said, then, with barely a change of tone, “Ah, you bastard” (I assumed she meant that towards one of the zombie-like people in our path) and flicked her hands out. They dropped like stones in water, all of them, heavy and undeniable but slower than normal, and inside my head I groaned. More jumping. Yay.
“That's not - what I - meant,” I snarled. My glasses were sliding down my nose - I needed a strap for them or something, surely I could hook one to my earrings if I was, later, alive enough to bother - and for the moment it took to shove them back up, my eyes closed reflexively, I was stumbling and blind. So when I was about to fall over an unconscious guy nearly - much like most human beings, come to think - twice the size of me, something unceremoniously grabbed the back of my shirt and held me a foot above the ground, twisting the collar of my shirt up into my throat but with rapid forward movement added in for free. Apparently a Fei can pay as much (that is, none at all) attention to the laws of physics as my cousin.
“You're surprisingly heavy for being so small,” Amber observed, very mild. A glance to one side proved that she looked pretty much the same - one hand out, one arm disappearing in my peripheral vision, green static on her skin and occasionally stinging my back, with the addition of a feral sort of grin and a twitch in her eye I may have been imagining.
I flailed around for words, but only for a moment. “You're surprisingly holding me up with one hand for a half-human,” I ended up with, although it was somewhat weak. Also “ow”.
“And you are still heavy,” she put in, “but I can go faster if I don't have to stay by you, so - I'm going to drop you and slow down, possibly in an order you'd prefer. Get on my back then, it'll be easier for both of us, okay?”
“What the hell,” I started, and then she dropped me.
That gave us a lot of stumbling and whirling my arms and, once my balance went completely, a messy flying roll, all on my shoulders like you're never supposed to do according to Narcy, just contorted as best I could manage to protect my glasses.
It hurt, which is probably why Narcissa was so adamant about never doing it. It hurt quite a lot.
Once I was bipedal again - say thirty seconds of hopping along later - I took a flying leap at Amber, wrapped my arms around her neck before I could object to myself about it, and probably knocked the wind out of her but badly. This time, as I tried to figure out, first, how not to fall off and, second, how my legs might help with that first thing without making my face burst into flame from suddenly noticed embarrassment, I even pretty much cared.
As if nothing had happened and I wasn't clinging to my probably third-greatest enemy (she'd been demoted pretty rapidly during recent events) in a fashion best described as kind of desperate, now, I went on, “The thing I need you to promise me is you'll not let anything happen to my glasses. And you'll get them to Mayra.”
At that I'm fairly sure Amber choked. The green sparks stuttered out but came back (for the first time I wondered why it didn't hurt me to touch her, actually touch her, like it ought beyond imagining) and she said, incredulous, “What?”
“I don't care,” I informed her curtly, “if I die, although, I mean, not dying would also be neat. But you have to promise me, on your life and your parents and your station and the bubble and - and - and the end of the world, that you will get these glasses back to Mayra or I swear I'll-”
“Okay,” she interrupted me.
“Just 'okay'?” It came out as a vaguely inquisitive snarl. The combination was pretty interesting.
“Yes, then--” Amber jabbed out at a sort of shambling girl and she crumbled slowly to ash and I didn't, actually, immediately think to care “--I do swear, and I take that oath, and that oath is mine and I am keeping it, all right?” Obviously annoyed, then: “But why your fucking glasses?” burst out of her like a confession.
“They're not-” I had to consciously loosen my arms after she took a fall hard and crooked besides; asphyxiating my transport would be bad manners at the very least “--fucking glasses. Just glasses. The next Seer will need them badly.”
“Of course.” I wondered why she was taking everything so calmly, relatively speaking (no thought to myself, of course. I could panic later), and how she wasn't even getting bored or tired. Or both. Also I wondered why it sounded like she was laughing, if just a bit.
And I wondered - “Why doesn't this street end?”
I think, and she might like me to think, that she took the next jump (skinny teenage boy, navy blue shirt with cyan stitching, olive green satchel, feet like shovels) so badly on purpose. My glasses almost jumped off my nose. Certain that I got a good look.
The world was cardboard held together with blue (dark, cold night-sky blue, and it glittered) duct tape.
“It's an illusion?” I yelled, and Amber dropped me. Again. Ow.
“Yeah,” she said, just standing there now, right hand held casually out. “To buy time. Would be to tire me out, too, but, I mean, I'm me.”
“Then--” I noticed there seemed to be no oxygen in my lungs and forced a faux-calm series of inhales and exhales until the panic gave breathing up as a bad sport and started poking around my hands “--why can't you just punch through it?”
Casually (her hand wandered through a series of gestures; only the last motion was one I recognised and the incongruity shocked me into laughter) she said, “Because that could kill you. And it took me a moment to notice. What I was figuring is I'd keep going until she couldn't sustain it in that direction any more and then pull us through.” The sentence had a lift on the end, a nervous not-quite-question.
“Her.” I blinked and some uncharacteristically fuzzy memories wandered into place. “--Blue tape. Eleanor.”
Amber's ongoing waves of magic faltered again, longer this time, still under a second. “Yes.”
Thus distracted, an imaginary drone who'd somehow woken up (and there was a question: had she been killing most of them or just taking them down for a bit?) was able to sneak up and hit her, hard, in the face.
- - -
A Fei has marvellous reflex reactions.
She was disoriented and, imaginary or not, her lip was split open and there was blood dripping from her nose to her chin. He'd hit her twice, fast: one while she didn't know he was there, the other while she was disoriented from that, so quick I could barely see it happen. I remember that she was sort of shoved backwards, that her mouth curled into a snarl (I remember that because you wouldn't, for once, have been able to see the silver in her mouth for the blood, and because her blood was as red as anybody's).
Then she reacted, about when that warning shout I'd been working on was almost on my lips. It wasn't even complicated. Her eyes glazed over with light like someone had put a brand-new leaf over a spotlight; the light filled her mouth, starting with the blood that was already there, and the trails of it turned into liquid light dripping down her chin; the light blasted out of her fingertips, and it took him to pieces. Said pieces were maybe the size of my cranium, cauterized on the edges. They made little wet thumps, falling, and smelled terrible.
I just watched. It was over fast. And, once Amber shut her eyes and her mouth and curled her fingers into nice, safe fists, other than the lumps of dead imaginary guy and the once again red mess on her face nothing might have happened.
Once she'd gotten up and wiped her nose and spit some stuff out, and we were ready to go back to stretching this illusion as far as we could (already cursing the lost time, or at least I knew I was), a slow clap started up behind us.
(Of course Miss Cílnar turned faster than me, but not by much. After all she was wounded, a bit.)
Logic said the woman clapping (blue hat, blue jacket, blue jeans, white shirt, wide grin; her eyes were mismatched and the colours of insanity, and said colours in this case were silver and blue, black and gold, in the wrong places) was Eleanor. The rest of me immediately started panicking because I couldn't place my memories of her on any sort of time line; nor could I figure out how we'd gotten here.
For contrast, Amber reacted by walking forward and slapping her very hard.
'A slap' always sounds like it should be mild, by the way. Annoying, but not like it's going to bruise even (all right, unless you bruise like me, and in that case all bets are off). But I'd call your attention - please - to the fact that Amber can run holding me up in the air, a fact that I am intimately familiar with. I saw Eleanor's face cave in on one side, jaw and cheekbone folding inwards, her skull suddenly rearranged into an alien geometry that made my own face ache.
The sound was horrible, crunchy and with metallic edges.
Somehow, impossibly, Eleanor caught herself; she didn't fall, and when she straightened up her smile was just the same and her mangled face was slowly but visibly moving back to normal. Then she shook her head, and there was static in coloured bars across her face, and when it was gone she was pretty and fierce and whole again.
Still crazy, though.
Amber watched, arms crossed, and said “Stop this, Eleanor.” The words were harmless; the voice with which she wielded them was something that went through my head like a spear when I heard it, rolled in my ears like thunder and drums afterward. It hurt exactly as sound shouldn't, also entirely unlike a brick to the head - not too loud, but too everything else, and nowhere near safe or Cold and not meant for me and it hurt and-
And then we woke up.
- - -
I had to pick myself up off the floor, pretty much (grey concrete, I'd scraped my hands and shins and cheek on it, probably, falling), every inch towards standing up a trial instead of easy once I got my balance. My ears were ringing, loud and deep and oddly clean, like real bells.
There were two things I noticed immediately, or at least once I'd figured out that sitting up was as far as it seemed likely as I'd go. One was that we were enclosed in a huge, elaborate circle, mostly in pale pink chalk; the other that Amber was walking decisively towards the first line of it.
When she got there she smacked right into an invisible wall, forehead-first; around her, suddenly, there was cartoonish-looking lightning, star-white and night-sky blue, wrapping around her like a barbed wire fence in love.
She screamed, and it raked my ears and the sky.
(Oh, right. A third thing I noticed: we were on a roof.)
To which I said: “What, can't you see the circle?”
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 2,322
Story / World: post-Amethyst Sky Jaime
Title: do you think she knows it's a circle?
Counts for the Summer Challenge? IT HAD BETTER.
Prompts: Toasted Almond [29 // icing on the cake].
Characters: {highlight to read} Fei Amber Belaqua, Jaime Zie Mendoza, Eleanor.
Toppings / Extras / Other: Prompt from Rika [awake and unafraid / asleep or dead]. Butterscotch.
Notes: This has not had a direct sequel yet, mostly because no one will actually tell me what happened and the suggestions are kind of - uncouth. Eheh. Yes. As always, rikaprompts aren't a RaTs thing, I just don't want to forget.
I'm told that if you put someone through enough stress the peripherals drop away. They stop caring about, say - first it's I shouldn't do this, I'll beat up this textbook and it's the beginning of year so I don't want a messy textbook, and then it's screw the textbook that was a good use too, but if I throw myself to one side I'm going to wreck my leg so bad; and then it's oh gods oh dead abandoned gods I am going to die (how can I temporarily avoid dying at any cost no really I don't want to die).
So I'm told; I guess I'm not human.
“Amber!” I shrieked. Not that I could really spare enough breath to shriek properly - my lungs hurt and my legs seemed to be on fire even without taking into account all the jumping - but I did my best and hopefully the fact that Amber seemed to hear me just fine had nothing to do with her light, lingering fingerprints in my mind.
“Yes?” She didn't seem winded or anything - very unfair - and was running more or less next to me with little to no effort, but she was also holding her hands up - palm first, I don't know if that matters, probably she thought it mattered and so it mattered to her and that was enough - in front of her, sparking pale green magic off her skin like static, clearing our way through.
Hence all the jumping.
“If I - what the hell - if - if I - look, I - I need you to promise me something!” The next body I jumped over, I landed in a way that folded my ankle to one side and something felt like it popped a bit. Well. A lot. Because I am utterly amazing, I did not scream.
“You aren't going to die,” she said, then, with barely a change of tone, “Ah, you bastard” (I assumed she meant that towards one of the zombie-like people in our path) and flicked her hands out. They dropped like stones in water, all of them, heavy and undeniable but slower than normal, and inside my head I groaned. More jumping. Yay.
“That's not - what I - meant,” I snarled. My glasses were sliding down my nose - I needed a strap for them or something, surely I could hook one to my earrings if I was, later, alive enough to bother - and for the moment it took to shove them back up, my eyes closed reflexively, I was stumbling and blind. So when I was about to fall over an unconscious guy nearly - much like most human beings, come to think - twice the size of me, something unceremoniously grabbed the back of my shirt and held me a foot above the ground, twisting the collar of my shirt up into my throat but with rapid forward movement added in for free. Apparently a Fei can pay as much (that is, none at all) attention to the laws of physics as my cousin.
“You're surprisingly heavy for being so small,” Amber observed, very mild. A glance to one side proved that she looked pretty much the same - one hand out, one arm disappearing in my peripheral vision, green static on her skin and occasionally stinging my back, with the addition of a feral sort of grin and a twitch in her eye I may have been imagining.
I flailed around for words, but only for a moment. “You're surprisingly holding me up with one hand for a half-human,” I ended up with, although it was somewhat weak. Also “ow”.
“And you are still heavy,” she put in, “but I can go faster if I don't have to stay by you, so - I'm going to drop you and slow down, possibly in an order you'd prefer. Get on my back then, it'll be easier for both of us, okay?”
“What the hell,” I started, and then she dropped me.
That gave us a lot of stumbling and whirling my arms and, once my balance went completely, a messy flying roll, all on my shoulders like you're never supposed to do according to Narcy, just contorted as best I could manage to protect my glasses.
It hurt, which is probably why Narcissa was so adamant about never doing it. It hurt quite a lot.
Once I was bipedal again - say thirty seconds of hopping along later - I took a flying leap at Amber, wrapped my arms around her neck before I could object to myself about it, and probably knocked the wind out of her but badly. This time, as I tried to figure out, first, how not to fall off and, second, how my legs might help with that first thing without making my face burst into flame from suddenly noticed embarrassment, I even pretty much cared.
As if nothing had happened and I wasn't clinging to my probably third-greatest enemy (she'd been demoted pretty rapidly during recent events) in a fashion best described as kind of desperate, now, I went on, “The thing I need you to promise me is you'll not let anything happen to my glasses. And you'll get them to Mayra.”
At that I'm fairly sure Amber choked. The green sparks stuttered out but came back (for the first time I wondered why it didn't hurt me to touch her, actually touch her, like it ought beyond imagining) and she said, incredulous, “What?”
“I don't care,” I informed her curtly, “if I die, although, I mean, not dying would also be neat. But you have to promise me, on your life and your parents and your station and the bubble and - and - and the end of the world, that you will get these glasses back to Mayra or I swear I'll-”
“Okay,” she interrupted me.
“Just 'okay'?” It came out as a vaguely inquisitive snarl. The combination was pretty interesting.
“Yes, then--” Amber jabbed out at a sort of shambling girl and she crumbled slowly to ash and I didn't, actually, immediately think to care “--I do swear, and I take that oath, and that oath is mine and I am keeping it, all right?” Obviously annoyed, then: “But why your fucking glasses?” burst out of her like a confession.
“They're not-” I had to consciously loosen my arms after she took a fall hard and crooked besides; asphyxiating my transport would be bad manners at the very least “--fucking glasses. Just glasses. The next Seer will need them badly.”
“Of course.” I wondered why she was taking everything so calmly, relatively speaking (no thought to myself, of course. I could panic later), and how she wasn't even getting bored or tired. Or both. Also I wondered why it sounded like she was laughing, if just a bit.
And I wondered - “Why doesn't this street end?”
I think, and she might like me to think, that she took the next jump (skinny teenage boy, navy blue shirt with cyan stitching, olive green satchel, feet like shovels) so badly on purpose. My glasses almost jumped off my nose. Certain that I got a good look.
The world was cardboard held together with blue (dark, cold night-sky blue, and it glittered) duct tape.
“It's an illusion?” I yelled, and Amber dropped me. Again. Ow.
“Yeah,” she said, just standing there now, right hand held casually out. “To buy time. Would be to tire me out, too, but, I mean, I'm me.”
“Then--” I noticed there seemed to be no oxygen in my lungs and forced a faux-calm series of inhales and exhales until the panic gave breathing up as a bad sport and started poking around my hands “--why can't you just punch through it?”
Casually (her hand wandered through a series of gestures; only the last motion was one I recognised and the incongruity shocked me into laughter) she said, “Because that could kill you. And it took me a moment to notice. What I was figuring is I'd keep going until she couldn't sustain it in that direction any more and then pull us through.” The sentence had a lift on the end, a nervous not-quite-question.
“Her.” I blinked and some uncharacteristically fuzzy memories wandered into place. “--Blue tape. Eleanor.”
Amber's ongoing waves of magic faltered again, longer this time, still under a second. “Yes.”
Thus distracted, an imaginary drone who'd somehow woken up (and there was a question: had she been killing most of them or just taking them down for a bit?) was able to sneak up and hit her, hard, in the face.
- - -
A Fei has marvellous reflex reactions.
She was disoriented and, imaginary or not, her lip was split open and there was blood dripping from her nose to her chin. He'd hit her twice, fast: one while she didn't know he was there, the other while she was disoriented from that, so quick I could barely see it happen. I remember that she was sort of shoved backwards, that her mouth curled into a snarl (I remember that because you wouldn't, for once, have been able to see the silver in her mouth for the blood, and because her blood was as red as anybody's).
Then she reacted, about when that warning shout I'd been working on was almost on my lips. It wasn't even complicated. Her eyes glazed over with light like someone had put a brand-new leaf over a spotlight; the light filled her mouth, starting with the blood that was already there, and the trails of it turned into liquid light dripping down her chin; the light blasted out of her fingertips, and it took him to pieces. Said pieces were maybe the size of my cranium, cauterized on the edges. They made little wet thumps, falling, and smelled terrible.
I just watched. It was over fast. And, once Amber shut her eyes and her mouth and curled her fingers into nice, safe fists, other than the lumps of dead imaginary guy and the once again red mess on her face nothing might have happened.
Once she'd gotten up and wiped her nose and spit some stuff out, and we were ready to go back to stretching this illusion as far as we could (already cursing the lost time, or at least I knew I was), a slow clap started up behind us.
(Of course Miss Cílnar turned faster than me, but not by much. After all she was wounded, a bit.)
Logic said the woman clapping (blue hat, blue jacket, blue jeans, white shirt, wide grin; her eyes were mismatched and the colours of insanity, and said colours in this case were silver and blue, black and gold, in the wrong places) was Eleanor. The rest of me immediately started panicking because I couldn't place my memories of her on any sort of time line; nor could I figure out how we'd gotten here.
For contrast, Amber reacted by walking forward and slapping her very hard.
'A slap' always sounds like it should be mild, by the way. Annoying, but not like it's going to bruise even (all right, unless you bruise like me, and in that case all bets are off). But I'd call your attention - please - to the fact that Amber can run holding me up in the air, a fact that I am intimately familiar with. I saw Eleanor's face cave in on one side, jaw and cheekbone folding inwards, her skull suddenly rearranged into an alien geometry that made my own face ache.
The sound was horrible, crunchy and with metallic edges.
Somehow, impossibly, Eleanor caught herself; she didn't fall, and when she straightened up her smile was just the same and her mangled face was slowly but visibly moving back to normal. Then she shook her head, and there was static in coloured bars across her face, and when it was gone she was pretty and fierce and whole again.
Still crazy, though.
Amber watched, arms crossed, and said “Stop this, Eleanor.” The words were harmless; the voice with which she wielded them was something that went through my head like a spear when I heard it, rolled in my ears like thunder and drums afterward. It hurt exactly as sound shouldn't, also entirely unlike a brick to the head - not too loud, but too everything else, and nowhere near safe or Cold and not meant for me and it hurt and-
And then we woke up.
- - -
I had to pick myself up off the floor, pretty much (grey concrete, I'd scraped my hands and shins and cheek on it, probably, falling), every inch towards standing up a trial instead of easy once I got my balance. My ears were ringing, loud and deep and oddly clean, like real bells.
There were two things I noticed immediately, or at least once I'd figured out that sitting up was as far as it seemed likely as I'd go. One was that we were enclosed in a huge, elaborate circle, mostly in pale pink chalk; the other that Amber was walking decisively towards the first line of it.
When she got there she smacked right into an invisible wall, forehead-first; around her, suddenly, there was cartoonish-looking lightning, star-white and night-sky blue, wrapping around her like a barbed wire fence in love.
She screamed, and it raked my ears and the sky.
(Oh, right. A third thing I noticed: we were on a roof.)
To which I said: “What, can't you see the circle?”