comment_fic 826-830: HL, TW, original, SN
Title: endless (and the rain keeps on)
Fandom: Highlander
Disclaimer: not my characters
Warnings: talk of the apocalypse and civil war
Pairings: none
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 285
Point of view: third
Prompt: any, any,
Oh simple thing, where have you gone?
I'm getting old and I need someone to rely on
In a thousand years, after the end has come and gone, still, he will be there standing.
A thousand years ago, after the end had come and gone, still, he was there standing.
That is eternity, child, and you still don't know what it means.
.
In the sludge and the rain, alone, he knelt and breathed. He breathed and breathed and breathed, the freshest air the world ever knew, and it was good, and it was enough.
In the sludge and the rain, before anything else had a mind to think, he stood and stared at what no one had ever seen.
In the sludge and the rain, he learned to walk and he learned to run.
In the sludge and the rain, he was alive.
.
Things are ended, now. Things are ended again. His friends have turned their backs and blood runs in the streets, as civil war divides the world.
Again, he thinks. Because civil war always divides the world eventually.
.
It is lonesome thing, having no one to rely on. No one to trust. Never has he trusted anyone, and his caution has always proven to be necessary, because everyone wants him for his knowledge, for his skill - not for him, the man who once knelt in sludge and rain, knowing what it was to be alive.
It is a lonesome thing, his existence, but still - alive is better than not, and there is no one with the skill to end him.
He stands in the middle of the apocalypse, as he had stood in the middle of the others, and he knows there will be more.
He turns his face up to the sky and feels the rain.
Title: A cold wind's whispering
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Disclaimer: not my characters; title from The Civil Wars
Warnings: AU during season 2; major character death; violence; an epic backstory I barely go into; I haven't seen any of season 3
Pairings: Peter/Stiles, Mama Stilinski/Sheriff, mentions of Allison/Scott, onesided Peter/Mama Stilinski
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 1805
Point of view: third
Prompt: Any, any,
Don't you fret my dear
It'll all be over soon
I'll be waiting here
For you
(Kingdom Come, The Civil Wars)
"They don't understand, you know," the boy tells him. "They think you're some sort of monster."
He laughs. "Of course I am. You're the only one who doesn't believe it."
The boy's smiling. "I'm not afraid of you," he says.
The wolf growls and growls, but the boy never stops smiling.
.
"Where's Stiles?" the Sheriff shouts. "Stiles! Where's my son?"
No one answers because no one knew he was missing.
The pack tears Beacon Hills apart looking, but they never find him.
.
It was scary, a little, at first, because the last time he saw Peter Hale, Stiles might've had a part of setting him on fire.
"So, you're alive now," he had said, ignoring the way he could feel his heart pounding - excitement, not terror, and Peter definitely knew, because he was looking at Stiles like Stiles was a particularly interesting thing.
"And unfortunately no longer an alpha," Peter said. "So that offer I made last time is off the table until we find one."
"I'm not helping you kill Derek," Stiles had declared, standing up straight.
Peter just kept looking at him. "Even at the expense of your own life?" he'd asked, smiling in a way that showed all his teeth and wasn't actually a smile.
"Yeah," Stiles had said. "Even at the expense of my own."
"You really are fascinating, Stiles," he said. "Let's go."
.
They had to deal with Gerard Argent, and convince Allison that Derek didn't kill her mother, and try to save or kill Jackson, whichever took the least time.
When everything was finally dealt with, the trail -if there ever had been one - was long cold.
Of course, Scott told the Sheriff everything, and he really was his son's father; he wasted no time freaking out, he just got right to work.
But they didn't know who had Stiles, or why, and the next threat popped up without giving them the time they needed to search.
.
Peter is the only constant. He doesn't stop Stiles from interacting with anyone he wants to talk to, but he's always there, waiting.
Stiles could call his dad or Scott. He could run away.
But he still doesn't know how Peter's back, and Peter lets little bits of information out now and then, and that mountain ash Deaton gave him is only the start.
"Your imagination is your greatest asset, Stiles," Peter told him, smiling an actual smile. "If you can imagine it, you can do it." He shrugged. "Deaton's good, but he's bound by rules that can't even touch you. You'll never get more from him than you already have."
"And I suppose you can teach me?" Stiles had asked, watching ash flow around his hand in a pattern he told it to.
Peter's smile became a toothy smirk. "I resurrected myself while most wolves can't even do the simplest spell. You and I - we're something new, Stiles, something no one's ever seen before."
Stiles glanced up at him. "I guess I can hang out for a while," he said.
So, yeah. He's learning all sorts of things that nobody in Beacon Hills can offer him, and Peter's barely frightening at all anymore, and while he misses his dad, it's not like anyone else will even notice he's gone.
.
They survive by the skin of their teeth.
The Argents are long gone from Beacon Hills, run out by the Sheriff after he learned everything.
Scott kills one of the twins and becomes an alpha. Isaac is almost beaten to death until Boyd and Erica tag-team the alpha choking him. Lydia lights another on fire from the inside out, and Jackson is gutted protecting her but they get him to Deaton in time.
They survive, but they have to rest and heal before they can keep searching, and there is no trail at all.
.
"So, you're like, a supernatural detective or assassin or something?" Stiles asks around the straw of his milkshake.
"Or something," Peter says, primly wiping ketchup from the side of his mouth with a napkin.
"That's so cool," Stiles says, noisily sucking up more of the dregs of his shake. He glances up in time to see Peter watching him. Peter meets his eyes for a long moment before looking back down at his burger.
Stiles grins, sitting up from his slouch. He's been wondering something since the parking garage, and Peter just answered his question.
"You need a partner?" Stiles asks, because there's nothing left that Peter can really teach him. Stiles surpassed him three months ago.
"I suppose I could do with someone watching my back," Peter says, looking at Stiles again.
.
The day Allison calls to say they've found Stiles is one of the worst of Scott's life.
Because Stiles is with Peter Hale, and they've been hunting hunters, and when Peter killed Allison's dad, Stiles watched, laughing, and Peter's eyes were red as blood.
Stiles has been gone for two years. Scott's missed him every single day.
Allison's sobbing into the phone and Scott has no idea what to say.
.
"Do you want the bite, Stiles?" Peter asks.
Sirens are coming closer. Hunters are lined up outside. They'd have already lit the place on fire, except no sparks are catching, not when Stiles won't let them.
Peter's got eight wolfsbane bullets in him and Stiles never bothered to learn how to heal, and they both know he won't save Peter, not this time.
"I don't suppose you'd give me a quick death?" Peter asks when Stiles doesn't respond.
Stiles reaches over to grip the back of Peter's head and kisses him, long and hard. He's grown in the past two years, taller and broader than Peter. He's grown so much.
Peter's looking at him when Stiles breaks his neck, smiling that same smile.
Stiles doesn't tell him to rest in peace, or that he's sorry, or that he knew Peter had always known it'd end this way. He doesn't say a thing. Instead he lights a fire and burns Peter to ashes in a moment, and then blasts the door off its hinges and tosses the ashes into the waiting hunter's faces.
Wolfsbane isn't just fatal to wolves, Stiles knows.
.
"I don't understand," the Sheriff says, watching Derek and Scott pace around each other, both barely keeping from attacking the other.
"He's not the Stiles we knew," Derek says. "I'm sorry."
The Sheriff looks back down at the computer screen, bright with pictures from a dozen crime scenes.
"Who were they?" he asks.
Both Derek and Scott will pretend they don't see the smile or smell the pride when Scott answers, "Hunters."
.
Lykourgos Piotrek Stilinski stalks back into Beacon Hills five years after he left. The only person he visits is the Sheriff, and the Sheriff gives him a long hug.
"I missed you, kid," the Sheriff says.
"I missed you, too, Dad," Lykourgos says.
"I've been following your work," the Sheriff says over dinner. "You're going by your birth name, now?"
Lykourgos nods. "It didn't make sense before," he shrugs. "Now I find it kinda funny."
The Sheriff chuckles. "Your mother was something else, Stiles. I never could pronounce it."
Lykourgos spends the night and leaves at dawn. There's a hunter three towns over circling a young alpha pair and Lykourgos really hates hunters.
.
A long time ago, Peter Hale and Ylva Vukašin met at Stanford. She was a senior, about to graduate; he was a sophomore and fell totally in love.
From the beginning, she knew what he was. It wasn't until he brought her home to introduce his best friend (but not mate, because she never felt the same) to his pack that Mama recognized what Ylva was.
It made no difference to Peter, but when he scented that boy in the school with his errant beta, he knew.
Just like he knew there never would've been a fire if Ylva hadn't died six months before, having given too much of herself to the child that shouldn't have survived the near-miscarriage.
Ylva loved a human and married him. But for Peter, she chose Piotrek as her son's middle name and named her best friend as the boy's wolf-father. And for her father, she named him Lykourgos.
If the Argents had known - Kate was too insane to be afraid, and Gerard, but Chris would never have settled his family in Beacon Hills, even to get Derek Hale.
.
"Hey, Catwoman," Lykourgos calls as he drives past the young alphas whose lives he just saved.
"Stiles?!" Erica shouts after him, but Lykourgos turns his music up. He's got places to be, hunters to kill - Stiles was no more than a placeholder, even if it took a wolf who only ever saw his mother instead of him to show him that.
He turned the music up louder and shouted, "Baby, you were born this way!"
.
Werewolves sometimes hunted humans. Hunters always hunted werewolves. And then there were those who some called witches, others called mages, who hunted hunters. No one knew their names, or where they came from, or why they did what they did.
Lykourgos Vukašin was the most powerful of his generation, his daughter of hers, and his grandson of all.
When Peter Hale crawled out his grave, he knew that he had a choice. He could stay in Beacon Hills, see what had happened since his death, focus on small game. Or…
Or he could grab Ylva's child and wipe out all hunters.
It was an easy choice, and the kid was still easy prey. He needed a teacher.
So Peter took him, and Peter trained him, and Peter knew the whole time how it would end - but the boy looked so much like his mother, and Peter left all of his morals and hesitancy in a house on fire.
.
Every Tuesday, Lykourgos calls his father.
Every Tuesday, Derek and Scott listen from the roof.
Every Tuesday, they make plans that never come to fruition, and blame each other for Stiles becoming Lykourgos.
The Sheriff never tells them that Stiles was always Lykourgos - he just needed a spark to light the fire, and Peter Hale gave him that one night in the woods, while two boys too dumb to know better looked for a body.
.
"They don't understand, you know," the boy tells him. "They think you're some sort of monster."
He laughs. "Of course I am. You're the only one who doesn't believe it."
The boy's smiling. "I'm not afraid of you," he says.
The wolf growls and growls, but the boy never stops smiling.
Lykourgos turns away from the mirror, letting the howl fade, and bares his teeth at the hunter. "Hey," he says. "Let's get started."
Note -
I got all these names from the internet, so no guarantees on their actualfax accuracy.
Lykourgos - Greek, wolf-work
Piotrek - Polish, Peter
Ylva - Scandinavian, she-wolf
Vukašin - Serbian, son of wolf
Title: garden-born
Original, gen, PG
150 words
Prompt: Any, any, sometimes, people are worse than demons
"You think I introduced Sin into the world?" the serpent hisses, twining around the tree, flicking that forked tongue to taste the air. "Sin predated me, and shall outlast me."
A thin, high laugh - then the serpent is gone, and the tree. And there is only a man, standing in a dying garden, until his eyes blink open and he realizes it was only a dream.
(Was it? Of course it was.
But he goes walking, in the warm spring rain, and he sees people. For the first time, he sees greed, and arrogance, and rage.
For the first time, he sees monsters crouched in the back of people’s eyes, monsters looking for a reason. Or making one, if a reason doesn’t show up.
For the first time, he realizes how much time he spends afraid.)
There is a serpent, and the serpent is laughing, twined around a tree.
Title: out of the sun
Fandom: Highlander
Disclaimer: not my characters
Warnings: pre-apocalyptic; AU
Pairings: none
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 280
Prompt: Highlander, Methos, Like most things it started in a bar
Like most things, it started in a bar. Kronos had been dead for a year, along with their brothers. MacLeod continued preaching, Joe kept watching and recording, and the world continued to turn.
Small annoyances crept in, Methos dealt with them, and nothing ever changed.
Nothing would ever change again.
Methos was sitting in a bar, drinking swill, listening to a band wail, and Joe was chatting while he poured drinks, and MacLeod was lecturing the boy about something, and Methos realized that the world was long overdue for the cleansing fire.
Had that been what Kronos wanted? At the time, it had seemed mad - but that was because it was Kronos' plan, and the four of them knew that Methos needed to plan things. But he had only taken Kronos' blueprints and refined them.
He should have scrapped the whole thing and built something new.
But no, he thinks, fingers tightening on the bottle. He'd still been blinded by MacLeod.
His brothers are dead. He sets down the bottle and tilts his head, covertly studying the righteous child who dared defy the ancients.
Why, he thinks, did I turn on my brothers for this child? He cannot remember.
How long has it been since fire cleansed the world? So much is corrupt and stagnant.
Oh, my brothers, forgive me, he pleads, standing and striding to the door. In your honor, I will ride again. He pauses, glancing back at Joe, at MacLeod and his boy, at the mortals who had no idea of the god in their midst. For you, Kronos, out of the sun once more.
.
It starts in a bar.
It does not end there.
Title: and this is just right
Disclaimer: my characters in a world that is not
Warnings: creepy; mentions of blood and violence
Pairings: none
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 210
Point of view: third
Prompt: Supernatural, any demon, picking out a meatsuit
Mustn't be too old, or too short, or too pretty, or too hideous. Any of those draws attention, and mustn't draw attention until the time is right.
Mustn’t have too much family; mustn’t have too little. Maybe a few siblings, the better to get lost in the shuffle, or maybe no siblings at all so that no one notices when things go slightly off.
Mustn’t be too loud or too quiet; mustn’t have friends.
Perhaps a job; perhaps not. What is the endgame this time?
This time, there is a shadow blending in on a tree branch, on the far side of the playground.
This time, the endgame is to sow as much horror as possible in as short a time as possible.
This time, the meatsuit is a pretty little cherub, beloved darling of the town.
This time, a shadow whispers, don’t you want to play? in little Annie’s ear, and little Annie’s curls bounce as she nods her head, giggling with her new friend, and when little Annie turns, her eyes are as black as her new kitten’s fur.
That evening, the massacre in the heart of America makes the news on every channel, and little Annie no longer has a kitten to cuddle until she sleeps.
Fandom: Highlander
Disclaimer: not my characters
Warnings: talk of the apocalypse and civil war
Pairings: none
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 285
Point of view: third
Prompt: any, any,
Oh simple thing, where have you gone?
I'm getting old and I need someone to rely on
In a thousand years, after the end has come and gone, still, he will be there standing.
A thousand years ago, after the end had come and gone, still, he was there standing.
That is eternity, child, and you still don't know what it means.
.
In the sludge and the rain, alone, he knelt and breathed. He breathed and breathed and breathed, the freshest air the world ever knew, and it was good, and it was enough.
In the sludge and the rain, before anything else had a mind to think, he stood and stared at what no one had ever seen.
In the sludge and the rain, he learned to walk and he learned to run.
In the sludge and the rain, he was alive.
.
Things are ended, now. Things are ended again. His friends have turned their backs and blood runs in the streets, as civil war divides the world.
Again, he thinks. Because civil war always divides the world eventually.
.
It is lonesome thing, having no one to rely on. No one to trust. Never has he trusted anyone, and his caution has always proven to be necessary, because everyone wants him for his knowledge, for his skill - not for him, the man who once knelt in sludge and rain, knowing what it was to be alive.
It is a lonesome thing, his existence, but still - alive is better than not, and there is no one with the skill to end him.
He stands in the middle of the apocalypse, as he had stood in the middle of the others, and he knows there will be more.
He turns his face up to the sky and feels the rain.
Title: A cold wind's whispering
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Disclaimer: not my characters; title from The Civil Wars
Warnings: AU during season 2; major character death; violence; an epic backstory I barely go into; I haven't seen any of season 3
Pairings: Peter/Stiles, Mama Stilinski/Sheriff, mentions of Allison/Scott, onesided Peter/Mama Stilinski
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 1805
Point of view: third
Prompt: Any, any,
Don't you fret my dear
It'll all be over soon
I'll be waiting here
For you
(Kingdom Come, The Civil Wars)
"They don't understand, you know," the boy tells him. "They think you're some sort of monster."
He laughs. "Of course I am. You're the only one who doesn't believe it."
The boy's smiling. "I'm not afraid of you," he says.
The wolf growls and growls, but the boy never stops smiling.
.
"Where's Stiles?" the Sheriff shouts. "Stiles! Where's my son?"
No one answers because no one knew he was missing.
The pack tears Beacon Hills apart looking, but they never find him.
.
It was scary, a little, at first, because the last time he saw Peter Hale, Stiles might've had a part of setting him on fire.
"So, you're alive now," he had said, ignoring the way he could feel his heart pounding - excitement, not terror, and Peter definitely knew, because he was looking at Stiles like Stiles was a particularly interesting thing.
"And unfortunately no longer an alpha," Peter said. "So that offer I made last time is off the table until we find one."
"I'm not helping you kill Derek," Stiles had declared, standing up straight.
Peter just kept looking at him. "Even at the expense of your own life?" he'd asked, smiling in a way that showed all his teeth and wasn't actually a smile.
"Yeah," Stiles had said. "Even at the expense of my own."
"You really are fascinating, Stiles," he said. "Let's go."
.
They had to deal with Gerard Argent, and convince Allison that Derek didn't kill her mother, and try to save or kill Jackson, whichever took the least time.
When everything was finally dealt with, the trail -if there ever had been one - was long cold.
Of course, Scott told the Sheriff everything, and he really was his son's father; he wasted no time freaking out, he just got right to work.
But they didn't know who had Stiles, or why, and the next threat popped up without giving them the time they needed to search.
.
Peter is the only constant. He doesn't stop Stiles from interacting with anyone he wants to talk to, but he's always there, waiting.
Stiles could call his dad or Scott. He could run away.
But he still doesn't know how Peter's back, and Peter lets little bits of information out now and then, and that mountain ash Deaton gave him is only the start.
"Your imagination is your greatest asset, Stiles," Peter told him, smiling an actual smile. "If you can imagine it, you can do it." He shrugged. "Deaton's good, but he's bound by rules that can't even touch you. You'll never get more from him than you already have."
"And I suppose you can teach me?" Stiles had asked, watching ash flow around his hand in a pattern he told it to.
Peter's smile became a toothy smirk. "I resurrected myself while most wolves can't even do the simplest spell. You and I - we're something new, Stiles, something no one's ever seen before."
Stiles glanced up at him. "I guess I can hang out for a while," he said.
So, yeah. He's learning all sorts of things that nobody in Beacon Hills can offer him, and Peter's barely frightening at all anymore, and while he misses his dad, it's not like anyone else will even notice he's gone.
.
They survive by the skin of their teeth.
The Argents are long gone from Beacon Hills, run out by the Sheriff after he learned everything.
Scott kills one of the twins and becomes an alpha. Isaac is almost beaten to death until Boyd and Erica tag-team the alpha choking him. Lydia lights another on fire from the inside out, and Jackson is gutted protecting her but they get him to Deaton in time.
They survive, but they have to rest and heal before they can keep searching, and there is no trail at all.
.
"So, you're like, a supernatural detective or assassin or something?" Stiles asks around the straw of his milkshake.
"Or something," Peter says, primly wiping ketchup from the side of his mouth with a napkin.
"That's so cool," Stiles says, noisily sucking up more of the dregs of his shake. He glances up in time to see Peter watching him. Peter meets his eyes for a long moment before looking back down at his burger.
Stiles grins, sitting up from his slouch. He's been wondering something since the parking garage, and Peter just answered his question.
"You need a partner?" Stiles asks, because there's nothing left that Peter can really teach him. Stiles surpassed him three months ago.
"I suppose I could do with someone watching my back," Peter says, looking at Stiles again.
.
The day Allison calls to say they've found Stiles is one of the worst of Scott's life.
Because Stiles is with Peter Hale, and they've been hunting hunters, and when Peter killed Allison's dad, Stiles watched, laughing, and Peter's eyes were red as blood.
Stiles has been gone for two years. Scott's missed him every single day.
Allison's sobbing into the phone and Scott has no idea what to say.
.
"Do you want the bite, Stiles?" Peter asks.
Sirens are coming closer. Hunters are lined up outside. They'd have already lit the place on fire, except no sparks are catching, not when Stiles won't let them.
Peter's got eight wolfsbane bullets in him and Stiles never bothered to learn how to heal, and they both know he won't save Peter, not this time.
"I don't suppose you'd give me a quick death?" Peter asks when Stiles doesn't respond.
Stiles reaches over to grip the back of Peter's head and kisses him, long and hard. He's grown in the past two years, taller and broader than Peter. He's grown so much.
Peter's looking at him when Stiles breaks his neck, smiling that same smile.
Stiles doesn't tell him to rest in peace, or that he's sorry, or that he knew Peter had always known it'd end this way. He doesn't say a thing. Instead he lights a fire and burns Peter to ashes in a moment, and then blasts the door off its hinges and tosses the ashes into the waiting hunter's faces.
Wolfsbane isn't just fatal to wolves, Stiles knows.
.
"I don't understand," the Sheriff says, watching Derek and Scott pace around each other, both barely keeping from attacking the other.
"He's not the Stiles we knew," Derek says. "I'm sorry."
The Sheriff looks back down at the computer screen, bright with pictures from a dozen crime scenes.
"Who were they?" he asks.
Both Derek and Scott will pretend they don't see the smile or smell the pride when Scott answers, "Hunters."
.
Lykourgos Piotrek Stilinski stalks back into Beacon Hills five years after he left. The only person he visits is the Sheriff, and the Sheriff gives him a long hug.
"I missed you, kid," the Sheriff says.
"I missed you, too, Dad," Lykourgos says.
"I've been following your work," the Sheriff says over dinner. "You're going by your birth name, now?"
Lykourgos nods. "It didn't make sense before," he shrugs. "Now I find it kinda funny."
The Sheriff chuckles. "Your mother was something else, Stiles. I never could pronounce it."
Lykourgos spends the night and leaves at dawn. There's a hunter three towns over circling a young alpha pair and Lykourgos really hates hunters.
.
A long time ago, Peter Hale and Ylva Vukašin met at Stanford. She was a senior, about to graduate; he was a sophomore and fell totally in love.
From the beginning, she knew what he was. It wasn't until he brought her home to introduce his best friend (but not mate, because she never felt the same) to his pack that Mama recognized what Ylva was.
It made no difference to Peter, but when he scented that boy in the school with his errant beta, he knew.
Just like he knew there never would've been a fire if Ylva hadn't died six months before, having given too much of herself to the child that shouldn't have survived the near-miscarriage.
Ylva loved a human and married him. But for Peter, she chose Piotrek as her son's middle name and named her best friend as the boy's wolf-father. And for her father, she named him Lykourgos.
If the Argents had known - Kate was too insane to be afraid, and Gerard, but Chris would never have settled his family in Beacon Hills, even to get Derek Hale.
.
"Hey, Catwoman," Lykourgos calls as he drives past the young alphas whose lives he just saved.
"Stiles?!" Erica shouts after him, but Lykourgos turns his music up. He's got places to be, hunters to kill - Stiles was no more than a placeholder, even if it took a wolf who only ever saw his mother instead of him to show him that.
He turned the music up louder and shouted, "Baby, you were born this way!"
.
Werewolves sometimes hunted humans. Hunters always hunted werewolves. And then there were those who some called witches, others called mages, who hunted hunters. No one knew their names, or where they came from, or why they did what they did.
Lykourgos Vukašin was the most powerful of his generation, his daughter of hers, and his grandson of all.
When Peter Hale crawled out his grave, he knew that he had a choice. He could stay in Beacon Hills, see what had happened since his death, focus on small game. Or…
Or he could grab Ylva's child and wipe out all hunters.
It was an easy choice, and the kid was still easy prey. He needed a teacher.
So Peter took him, and Peter trained him, and Peter knew the whole time how it would end - but the boy looked so much like his mother, and Peter left all of his morals and hesitancy in a house on fire.
.
Every Tuesday, Lykourgos calls his father.
Every Tuesday, Derek and Scott listen from the roof.
Every Tuesday, they make plans that never come to fruition, and blame each other for Stiles becoming Lykourgos.
The Sheriff never tells them that Stiles was always Lykourgos - he just needed a spark to light the fire, and Peter Hale gave him that one night in the woods, while two boys too dumb to know better looked for a body.
.
"They don't understand, you know," the boy tells him. "They think you're some sort of monster."
He laughs. "Of course I am. You're the only one who doesn't believe it."
The boy's smiling. "I'm not afraid of you," he says.
The wolf growls and growls, but the boy never stops smiling.
Lykourgos turns away from the mirror, letting the howl fade, and bares his teeth at the hunter. "Hey," he says. "Let's get started."
Note -
I got all these names from the internet, so no guarantees on their actualfax accuracy.
Lykourgos - Greek, wolf-work
Piotrek - Polish, Peter
Ylva - Scandinavian, she-wolf
Vukašin - Serbian, son of wolf
Title: garden-born
Original, gen, PG
150 words
Prompt: Any, any, sometimes, people are worse than demons
"You think I introduced Sin into the world?" the serpent hisses, twining around the tree, flicking that forked tongue to taste the air. "Sin predated me, and shall outlast me."
A thin, high laugh - then the serpent is gone, and the tree. And there is only a man, standing in a dying garden, until his eyes blink open and he realizes it was only a dream.
(Was it? Of course it was.
But he goes walking, in the warm spring rain, and he sees people. For the first time, he sees greed, and arrogance, and rage.
For the first time, he sees monsters crouched in the back of people’s eyes, monsters looking for a reason. Or making one, if a reason doesn’t show up.
For the first time, he realizes how much time he spends afraid.)
There is a serpent, and the serpent is laughing, twined around a tree.
Title: out of the sun
Fandom: Highlander
Disclaimer: not my characters
Warnings: pre-apocalyptic; AU
Pairings: none
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 280
Prompt: Highlander, Methos, Like most things it started in a bar
Like most things, it started in a bar. Kronos had been dead for a year, along with their brothers. MacLeod continued preaching, Joe kept watching and recording, and the world continued to turn.
Small annoyances crept in, Methos dealt with them, and nothing ever changed.
Nothing would ever change again.
Methos was sitting in a bar, drinking swill, listening to a band wail, and Joe was chatting while he poured drinks, and MacLeod was lecturing the boy about something, and Methos realized that the world was long overdue for the cleansing fire.
Had that been what Kronos wanted? At the time, it had seemed mad - but that was because it was Kronos' plan, and the four of them knew that Methos needed to plan things. But he had only taken Kronos' blueprints and refined them.
He should have scrapped the whole thing and built something new.
But no, he thinks, fingers tightening on the bottle. He'd still been blinded by MacLeod.
His brothers are dead. He sets down the bottle and tilts his head, covertly studying the righteous child who dared defy the ancients.
Why, he thinks, did I turn on my brothers for this child? He cannot remember.
How long has it been since fire cleansed the world? So much is corrupt and stagnant.
Oh, my brothers, forgive me, he pleads, standing and striding to the door. In your honor, I will ride again. He pauses, glancing back at Joe, at MacLeod and his boy, at the mortals who had no idea of the god in their midst. For you, Kronos, out of the sun once more.
.
It starts in a bar.
It does not end there.
Title: and this is just right
Disclaimer: my characters in a world that is not
Warnings: creepy; mentions of blood and violence
Pairings: none
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 210
Point of view: third
Prompt: Supernatural, any demon, picking out a meatsuit
Mustn't be too old, or too short, or too pretty, or too hideous. Any of those draws attention, and mustn't draw attention until the time is right.
Mustn’t have too much family; mustn’t have too little. Maybe a few siblings, the better to get lost in the shuffle, or maybe no siblings at all so that no one notices when things go slightly off.
Mustn’t be too loud or too quiet; mustn’t have friends.
Perhaps a job; perhaps not. What is the endgame this time?
This time, there is a shadow blending in on a tree branch, on the far side of the playground.
This time, the endgame is to sow as much horror as possible in as short a time as possible.
This time, the meatsuit is a pretty little cherub, beloved darling of the town.
This time, a shadow whispers, don’t you want to play? in little Annie’s ear, and little Annie’s curls bounce as she nods her head, giggling with her new friend, and when little Annie turns, her eyes are as black as her new kitten’s fur.
That evening, the massacre in the heart of America makes the news on every channel, and little Annie no longer has a kitten to cuddle until she sleeps.