(no subject)
So I seem to post a lot more when I have something to moan about, don't I? Today I've felt vaguely sick all day, like I was going to throw up - I really almost did around breakfast, had to leave and almost threw up. I think I've just swallowed too much of my own guck from this week's cold, which I'm sure is too much information for you lot, sorry! I'd probably feel better if I DID throw up, to tell you the truth, but I'm not going to force it. I spent today reading and lolling around trying not to do too much, which was nice, but the day went far too quickly, as Sunday always does.
You said you'd like to hear more about my everyday life - well, for today, that's above - and also more of my writing, original and fanfic, so I thought I'd haul out a couple of old things I'm not working on at the moment. I'd give you Mourning Tree snippets, but it's sort of my current baby - if if I'm not actually working on it - and I don't want to put it up on the net all exposed right now. Maybe another time.
I ran, and where the pads of my feet hit the snow great billows of powdery white sprayed up around me, like running in a minefield blindfolded; ahead, my prey panted as it ran, horrendous-sounding gasps for breath that froze the throat from the inside out and making it painful to breathe. There was blood on the snow, and it was my doing, and it was good.
Coiling the muscles in my legs, I paused only for a millisecond before the leap that took me over the log and barrelling into the deer, claws extending to sink deep into heaving flesh and -
“Fwah! Urgh!” I woke up with a mouthful of loose fur and gagged, scraping it from my tongue with my fingernails and shoving the stifling bedclothes away from my shoulders so I could prop myself up on my elbows and try not to retch. “Urgh, that is disgusting.”
Next to me Rajah opened one great, gorgeous eye and blinked exquisitely slowly, yawning to show me the pink inside of his mouth. Getting up was not on his agenda, I could see that.
“You horrible, disgusting, gorgeous creature,” I said, rolling over to wrap an arm around his middle and snuggle my face into the hollow of his shoulder. The tiger gave a deep and rumbling purr from within his great barrel chest and the muscles shifted liquidly under his skin, and it was wonderful, until my alarm clock went off fifteen minutes later and we had to get up.
“Come on, you lazy thing, shift your bones.”
(You have to get up and get ready for work. I am ready to go when you are. Wake me up then.)
Of course, Rajah didn’t say that aloud; tigers don’t have the vocal cords to even attempt human speech. It was more a series of images and impressions, really, that I interpreted into words. Tigers don’t think in words.
“I hate you,” I said, and heaved myself out from under the covers, pulling my long hair out of my face with my hands and wishing for a scrunchie.
(You love me.)
“I hate Mondays,” I muttered, and went into the bathroom to shower.
My usual breakfast involves me, a bowl of cereal, a bottle of milk and a spoon. Rajah doesn’t eat breakfast, but he does eat dinner, and that’s usually an enormous hunk of horsemeat, either a leg or half a ribcage, whichever comes to hand first. I have two freezers, one upright with shelves and one lengthways without, because chunks of horse don’t fit on shelves. I also have to leave it to defrost all day while we’re at work, because it doesn’t fit in the microwave. I am not buying a horse-sized microwave.
(We’re going to be late.) Not that Rajah cared much about time, really, but he knew I did, so he told me anyway. He’d become aware of it since we’d connected with each other, or at least aware of it as more than sunrise to sunset to sunrise. He padded out of the bedroom and over to where I sat at the table reading the newspaper, and butted his head against my free hand where it sat lax in my lap. I scratched hard behind his ear, deep into the thicker ruff of fur around his neck, and sighed, then got up and put my bowl in the sink to wash up later. “Let’s go, then. Just let me grab my bag.”
Getting around London is hard when you have a tiger in tow. It’s not like you can take him on the Tube, for example - the trains are crowded enough already without a two hundred pound Siberian tiger on board (and that’s discounting the screaming); there’s no car that he’ll fit in easily that’s within my price range. I thought about buying a van, but in the end I just moved closer to the station so we could walk there in the mornings. Let the department pick up the tab when they had to shift me and Rajah to a scene. They sure as hell didn’t pay me enough.
Outside, Rajah tilted his face to the sky and sighed, the cool breeze shifting moisture gently across his face and ruffling his fine fur. I dug my right hand into the hair of his ruff as we walked along, sifting the hair through my fingers. His head comes up to my shoulder, practically, his shoulders to my waist, and his paws are the size of dinner plates. Rajah is two hundred pounds of predator, and when he walks along the street with me everyone knows it, from dogs to cats to mothers who haul their protesting children away when they reach out to stroke him.
He looked up at me and smiled his tiger smile, and I shifted my bag on my shoulder and breathed in the fresh air.
“Izzy!”
Rajah and I both tensed up, but for very different reasons. He has always been jealous of David. As for me… well, I’m in love with him.
“Hi,” David said cheerfully as he stepped up onto the pavement beside me, remote locking his car where he’d parked across the street before tucking his keys into his jacket pocket. “Hi, Rajah. How are you today?”
“We’re good,” I said, easing myself away from where his shoulder brushed my own as his arm swung. I moved my hand to hold onto the strap of my shoulder bag, which kept it out of the way of temptation. It was easier not to give in than it had used to be. “You?”
“Good, good. Sarah had to get up early today to get ready for an Ofsted inspection, so I was up bright and early this morning and for once I’m awake when I get to work.”
David is friendly, considerate, a great listener, a great cook, and married. Sarah is his beautiful, talented, kind, and utterly perfect wife. I can’t even hate her. And she and David are perfect together, they really are. From the very first moment I met him it was clear how much he loved her. How much he loves her.
I hate myself, sometimes, for being so stupid.
Hi. My name is Isabel Greene, and I am really, really stupid.
We walked into the station chatting about the little everyday things, Rajah padding along beside me; the movie on tv the night before, Joan in Homicide’s birthday coming up, that sort of thing. Through the doors by reception, down the hallway to the third intersection and then left into the FAUNA division.
For those of you who don’t know, because a lot of people don’t, FAUNA actually stands for Federation of Asters Under National Authority. It does not stand for Fuck All U Normals Association. Just because we can do things most people can’t doesn’t mean we’re all power-crazed jerks. Though a lot of the Element guys… well. The pyrokinetics think they’re hot stuff, and the aerokinetics are real windbags. (Sorry, very old Aster joke.) FAUNA’s not just a law enforcement agency - there are divisions in all sorts of places, from engineering to medicine to search and rescue. Those Asters who choose not to work directly for the government are registered just the same as those who do, on the FLORA database. You get tax breaks for registering. It’s not like some of the Eastern European countries where you have to wear an identity bracelet so people know you’re an Aster, it’s not mandatory. But pretty much everyone registers.
~~~~~~~~~
I stumbled bleary-eyed into the kitchen without bothering to turn on the light and lurched to the fridge, pulling open the door and blinking against the brightness while grabbing without looking for the nearest bottle of milk. Dumping it on the work-surface I started making myself some tea, banging around the cupboards while my pyjama bottoms hung loosely from my hips and trying to stifle yawns with the back of my hand.
“You’re so human,” Hess breathed from the table behind me, his voice stunned, and I jumped as though stung by a bee, glaring around at him in a sort of squint because I wasn’t wearing my glasses.
“I am not,” I said, turning back around to pour the boiled water into my mug. “I’ve just been here a long time, that’s all. After a while you acclimatise.”
I could hear Hess shaking his head, the long bronze tresses of his hair shifting over his shoulders. “You’ve gone native, Camory.”
I turned with my mug and sighed, rubbing a hand across my eyes and feeling branded. “I’ve been in this body for sixty-three years, Hess. I got tired of trying to be something I no longer was. You’ve seen the scars on my back.”
His lips pinched together, the pressure forcing the blood out to make them pale. “They had no right. He has no right.”
I smiled, but there was no happiness in it. “What you learn from the humans over time, Hess, is that here, might makes right.”
You said you'd like to hear more about my everyday life - well, for today, that's above - and also more of my writing, original and fanfic, so I thought I'd haul out a couple of old things I'm not working on at the moment. I'd give you Mourning Tree snippets, but it's sort of my current baby - if if I'm not actually working on it - and I don't want to put it up on the net all exposed right now. Maybe another time.
I ran, and where the pads of my feet hit the snow great billows of powdery white sprayed up around me, like running in a minefield blindfolded; ahead, my prey panted as it ran, horrendous-sounding gasps for breath that froze the throat from the inside out and making it painful to breathe. There was blood on the snow, and it was my doing, and it was good.
Coiling the muscles in my legs, I paused only for a millisecond before the leap that took me over the log and barrelling into the deer, claws extending to sink deep into heaving flesh and -
“Fwah! Urgh!” I woke up with a mouthful of loose fur and gagged, scraping it from my tongue with my fingernails and shoving the stifling bedclothes away from my shoulders so I could prop myself up on my elbows and try not to retch. “Urgh, that is disgusting.”
Next to me Rajah opened one great, gorgeous eye and blinked exquisitely slowly, yawning to show me the pink inside of his mouth. Getting up was not on his agenda, I could see that.
“You horrible, disgusting, gorgeous creature,” I said, rolling over to wrap an arm around his middle and snuggle my face into the hollow of his shoulder. The tiger gave a deep and rumbling purr from within his great barrel chest and the muscles shifted liquidly under his skin, and it was wonderful, until my alarm clock went off fifteen minutes later and we had to get up.
“Come on, you lazy thing, shift your bones.”
(You have to get up and get ready for work. I am ready to go when you are. Wake me up then.)
Of course, Rajah didn’t say that aloud; tigers don’t have the vocal cords to even attempt human speech. It was more a series of images and impressions, really, that I interpreted into words. Tigers don’t think in words.
“I hate you,” I said, and heaved myself out from under the covers, pulling my long hair out of my face with my hands and wishing for a scrunchie.
(You love me.)
“I hate Mondays,” I muttered, and went into the bathroom to shower.
My usual breakfast involves me, a bowl of cereal, a bottle of milk and a spoon. Rajah doesn’t eat breakfast, but he does eat dinner, and that’s usually an enormous hunk of horsemeat, either a leg or half a ribcage, whichever comes to hand first. I have two freezers, one upright with shelves and one lengthways without, because chunks of horse don’t fit on shelves. I also have to leave it to defrost all day while we’re at work, because it doesn’t fit in the microwave. I am not buying a horse-sized microwave.
(We’re going to be late.) Not that Rajah cared much about time, really, but he knew I did, so he told me anyway. He’d become aware of it since we’d connected with each other, or at least aware of it as more than sunrise to sunset to sunrise. He padded out of the bedroom and over to where I sat at the table reading the newspaper, and butted his head against my free hand where it sat lax in my lap. I scratched hard behind his ear, deep into the thicker ruff of fur around his neck, and sighed, then got up and put my bowl in the sink to wash up later. “Let’s go, then. Just let me grab my bag.”
Getting around London is hard when you have a tiger in tow. It’s not like you can take him on the Tube, for example - the trains are crowded enough already without a two hundred pound Siberian tiger on board (and that’s discounting the screaming); there’s no car that he’ll fit in easily that’s within my price range. I thought about buying a van, but in the end I just moved closer to the station so we could walk there in the mornings. Let the department pick up the tab when they had to shift me and Rajah to a scene. They sure as hell didn’t pay me enough.
Outside, Rajah tilted his face to the sky and sighed, the cool breeze shifting moisture gently across his face and ruffling his fine fur. I dug my right hand into the hair of his ruff as we walked along, sifting the hair through my fingers. His head comes up to my shoulder, practically, his shoulders to my waist, and his paws are the size of dinner plates. Rajah is two hundred pounds of predator, and when he walks along the street with me everyone knows it, from dogs to cats to mothers who haul their protesting children away when they reach out to stroke him.
He looked up at me and smiled his tiger smile, and I shifted my bag on my shoulder and breathed in the fresh air.
“Izzy!”
Rajah and I both tensed up, but for very different reasons. He has always been jealous of David. As for me… well, I’m in love with him.
“Hi,” David said cheerfully as he stepped up onto the pavement beside me, remote locking his car where he’d parked across the street before tucking his keys into his jacket pocket. “Hi, Rajah. How are you today?”
“We’re good,” I said, easing myself away from where his shoulder brushed my own as his arm swung. I moved my hand to hold onto the strap of my shoulder bag, which kept it out of the way of temptation. It was easier not to give in than it had used to be. “You?”
“Good, good. Sarah had to get up early today to get ready for an Ofsted inspection, so I was up bright and early this morning and for once I’m awake when I get to work.”
David is friendly, considerate, a great listener, a great cook, and married. Sarah is his beautiful, talented, kind, and utterly perfect wife. I can’t even hate her. And she and David are perfect together, they really are. From the very first moment I met him it was clear how much he loved her. How much he loves her.
I hate myself, sometimes, for being so stupid.
Hi. My name is Isabel Greene, and I am really, really stupid.
We walked into the station chatting about the little everyday things, Rajah padding along beside me; the movie on tv the night before, Joan in Homicide’s birthday coming up, that sort of thing. Through the doors by reception, down the hallway to the third intersection and then left into the FAUNA division.
For those of you who don’t know, because a lot of people don’t, FAUNA actually stands for Federation of Asters Under National Authority. It does not stand for Fuck All U Normals Association. Just because we can do things most people can’t doesn’t mean we’re all power-crazed jerks. Though a lot of the Element guys… well. The pyrokinetics think they’re hot stuff, and the aerokinetics are real windbags. (Sorry, very old Aster joke.) FAUNA’s not just a law enforcement agency - there are divisions in all sorts of places, from engineering to medicine to search and rescue. Those Asters who choose not to work directly for the government are registered just the same as those who do, on the FLORA database. You get tax breaks for registering. It’s not like some of the Eastern European countries where you have to wear an identity bracelet so people know you’re an Aster, it’s not mandatory. But pretty much everyone registers.
~~~~~~~~~
I stumbled bleary-eyed into the kitchen without bothering to turn on the light and lurched to the fridge, pulling open the door and blinking against the brightness while grabbing without looking for the nearest bottle of milk. Dumping it on the work-surface I started making myself some tea, banging around the cupboards while my pyjama bottoms hung loosely from my hips and trying to stifle yawns with the back of my hand.
“You’re so human,” Hess breathed from the table behind me, his voice stunned, and I jumped as though stung by a bee, glaring around at him in a sort of squint because I wasn’t wearing my glasses.
“I am not,” I said, turning back around to pour the boiled water into my mug. “I’ve just been here a long time, that’s all. After a while you acclimatise.”
I could hear Hess shaking his head, the long bronze tresses of his hair shifting over his shoulders. “You’ve gone native, Camory.”
I turned with my mug and sighed, rubbing a hand across my eyes and feeling branded. “I’ve been in this body for sixty-three years, Hess. I got tired of trying to be something I no longer was. You’ve seen the scars on my back.”
His lips pinched together, the pressure forcing the blood out to make them pale. “They had no right. He has no right.”
I smiled, but there was no happiness in it. “What you learn from the humans over time, Hess, is that here, might makes right.”