My mouth tastes of ginger and mango.

[taennyn]

In other news, I think I need

sparks!

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Edit: Since LJ no longer allows us to have comment titles at all, here's what's been done so far. :)

Wild Roses:
Cat's eyes, or something else, in the verge of a darkening forest. - early Trickwood Unification, Geoffrey, Hernén, several wolves
new and interesting ways to give yourself a headache -

Comments

[taennyn]

never got around to fixing that - Swallow's Tale 3 + 1 period, Helena, Taarstad, Sascha, 2/2

After a second, the stall door slid aside. When Sascha padded in, he half turned, looked up at the door. "What was that?" he asked, and for the first time she'd seen, the kid didn't flinch when someone asked him a question.

"It's an imported design," he said, pointing upwards, "an old one, the stable probably got it cheap because we keep finding problems with them."

He grinned. Helena blinked. Felt a curl of heat in her gut, just a flash before she suppressed it, as the kid added "Looks like they never got around to fixing this one. I swapped out the leads so the security feed's looking at that empty stall next to us."

Sascha grunted interested surprise, then glanced down at the kid, grinning himself. "That all you can do?"

"I didn't want to see if we could teach it to ignore we're on the stable's coils without asking someone," the kid replied wryly. She blinked again, decades of soldiering flaring in her head. Five minutes ago, she'd have bet money he wouldn't survive soldiering, even the comparatively gentle version of throwing in a rider in with an infantry unit to see if he'd survive being an officer. Would have dismissed him as too young, too skittish, unable to mesh with the unit . .

And since when were they a unit? Lightning saints, she should have knifed Sascha the first time he brought back something they hadn't asked for.

Should have, hadn't. Hell, trusted his judgment these days. Not just to do with Swallow. That had been easy. He knew horses, knew where they broke, where they frayed, and she could trust him to hobble a horse while she went for the crew and the Captain went for the leader, for all he wasn't a soldier.

Refusing to think about what they might have accomplished if he had been, she tuned back into the conversation to find that Siberian bastard laughing. After a cold flare of rage that he was laughing at her, she realised he was laughing at something she'd missed the kid saying, because he waved a hand up at the door and asked "Do that a lot?"

The kid sobered, lifted a palm, turned it back down, pushed it away from himself. "I always wanted to ride--I used to watch what people did in my home stable." His mouth quirked, and she was absolutely certain he still hadn't seen her crouched beneath the belly of the horse, watching them. "I taught that trick, a couple times. There was a rider out from Riga who'd never run into a stable as old as ours. He gave me some of his training books, and I taught him how to break our stall doors." Another smile, this one visibly wry. "It seemed like a good trade at the time."

[billradish]

The inside of her head is so neat, the way it notates and marks things, and occasionally backtracks and goes ARGH at itself.

[taennyn]

All second thoughts or all direct action, she doesn't seem to have much of an in-between mode.