crossover fic 2
Two more drabbles for the characters crossover meme. Although they're more ficlets than drabbles. For some reason I couldn't help myself from rambling on.
Felix Gaeta and Sol Star for sarkastic (BSG/Deadwood)
Your old friends, what friends you had, no longer even acknowledge you. They stop and swerve to avoid you before glowering at your back. Some spit on the ground when you walk through the ramshackle camp that is New Caprica - your dream, once, still hilariously posturing as a city. The hostility of strangers is hard enough to take; the dead, accusing eyes of old comrades is like poison in your heart.
The crops won’t take to the arid soil here, but at least since the cylon arrived no one has had to die because of starvation. (They die quicker, from other things.) You sign your traitor’s name for consignments of rice, sugar, corn - and coffee, a luxury reserved for Friends of the Cylon Occupation, most especially Gaius Baltar. Don’t ask where the cylon get these things. The person who organises the transfer of essential supplies is human. A small, efficient man with soulful eyes and a neat beard. He takes the clipboard from your hands; the provisions are secure for another week. Then he offers you the first smile you’ve received all day. One collaborator to another, he seems to say with a tiny bob of his dark head.
You find out, back on Galactica, that he was a community leader from Picon, that he took in children orphaned during the resistance, and that he lived with a beautiful woman who wasn’t his wife because none of the priests of his outsider’s religion had survived the First Exodus, and it wouldn’t have mattered even if one did because the woman he lived with was a gentile. All this you know because you went up and stood next to her at the memorial service, the one held for those that Roslin’s general pardon came too late to save. He was a good man, my Sol, she wept into your shoulder. My soul my soul. I know he was, you told her, because you’re still alive. One collaborator to another.
Havelock Vetinari and James Norrington for floweringjudas (Discworld/PotC)
They had gone to school together, but were never exactly what you might call chums. They greeted one another cordially when cordiality was called for, studied together in the library, but not regularly, and more or less kept out of one another’s way the rest of the time. Not avoiding each other publicly like Selachii and Venturi, who were immediately at one another’s jugulars with razor-quick politeness when forced into close proximity; and not like they were rivals, either, because Havelock had never considered anybody a rival in all his life, and James, though exceptionally good at some of his lessons, such as roof-top climbing and some forms of armed melee, was never deluded into thinking that he was all that cut out to be an assassin - perfectly respectable a profession though it was, of course. In any case, James was gone before the fourth year was out, staying just long enough in the city for his noble mother’s funeral, to go back to the sea that he’d been reared upon.
All of which is to say that when Havelock became Patrician of Ankh Morpork and all Her foreign assets some twelve years after, and began patiently setting upon the task of discovering just how far things had been allowed to slip under old Mad Snapcase, he was almost halfway through a report, dated three years ago, from the governor of some barely civilised island outpost, rimwards by way of Genua, before he realised that the name of the young military officer whose promotion the letter concerned was known to him. Havelock penned a short letter that was sent off the same day. Five weeks later, he had his reply from James.
Potius sero quam numquam. I was afraid that you had forgotten about what was said over our books all those years ago; or worse, that you thought my hopes for you foolish, the empty words of a smitten child, and not the wishes of any loyal and devoted citizen. My own talents, such as I have, are at your and Ankh Morpork’s disposal. You are still familiar with your Tacticus? Of course you are. I would wish you luck, but I know you do not need it.
10 November 2006
Felix Gaeta and Sol Star for sarkastic (BSG/Deadwood)
Your old friends, what friends you had, no longer even acknowledge you. They stop and swerve to avoid you before glowering at your back. Some spit on the ground when you walk through the ramshackle camp that is New Caprica - your dream, once, still hilariously posturing as a city. The hostility of strangers is hard enough to take; the dead, accusing eyes of old comrades is like poison in your heart.
The crops won’t take to the arid soil here, but at least since the cylon arrived no one has had to die because of starvation. (They die quicker, from other things.) You sign your traitor’s name for consignments of rice, sugar, corn - and coffee, a luxury reserved for Friends of the Cylon Occupation, most especially Gaius Baltar. Don’t ask where the cylon get these things. The person who organises the transfer of essential supplies is human. A small, efficient man with soulful eyes and a neat beard. He takes the clipboard from your hands; the provisions are secure for another week. Then he offers you the first smile you’ve received all day. One collaborator to another, he seems to say with a tiny bob of his dark head.
You find out, back on Galactica, that he was a community leader from Picon, that he took in children orphaned during the resistance, and that he lived with a beautiful woman who wasn’t his wife because none of the priests of his outsider’s religion had survived the First Exodus, and it wouldn’t have mattered even if one did because the woman he lived with was a gentile. All this you know because you went up and stood next to her at the memorial service, the one held for those that Roslin’s general pardon came too late to save. He was a good man, my Sol, she wept into your shoulder. My soul my soul. I know he was, you told her, because you’re still alive. One collaborator to another.
Havelock Vetinari and James Norrington for floweringjudas (Discworld/PotC)
They had gone to school together, but were never exactly what you might call chums. They greeted one another cordially when cordiality was called for, studied together in the library, but not regularly, and more or less kept out of one another’s way the rest of the time. Not avoiding each other publicly like Selachii and Venturi, who were immediately at one another’s jugulars with razor-quick politeness when forced into close proximity; and not like they were rivals, either, because Havelock had never considered anybody a rival in all his life, and James, though exceptionally good at some of his lessons, such as roof-top climbing and some forms of armed melee, was never deluded into thinking that he was all that cut out to be an assassin - perfectly respectable a profession though it was, of course. In any case, James was gone before the fourth year was out, staying just long enough in the city for his noble mother’s funeral, to go back to the sea that he’d been reared upon.
All of which is to say that when Havelock became Patrician of Ankh Morpork and all Her foreign assets some twelve years after, and began patiently setting upon the task of discovering just how far things had been allowed to slip under old Mad Snapcase, he was almost halfway through a report, dated three years ago, from the governor of some barely civilised island outpost, rimwards by way of Genua, before he realised that the name of the young military officer whose promotion the letter concerned was known to him. Havelock penned a short letter that was sent off the same day. Five weeks later, he had his reply from James.
Potius sero quam numquam. I was afraid that you had forgotten about what was said over our books all those years ago; or worse, that you thought my hopes for you foolish, the empty words of a smitten child, and not the wishes of any loyal and devoted citizen. My own talents, such as I have, are at your and Ankh Morpork’s disposal. You are still familiar with your Tacticus? Of course you are. I would wish you luck, but I know you do not need it.
10 November 2006