3 Sentence Ficathon Fills (all the rest)
Finally, at long last, here is the second half of fills I wrote for the 3 Sentence Ficathon! It ended a week ago, but I've been swamped with RL things, so I'm posting them a little late.
Thanks so much to the wonderful
rthstewart for running and hosting the ficathon! It was an incredible amount of fun!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Another Thing Coming Undone (I Won't Run) (Buffy, Willow or Buffy/Oz, I fought the war/ But the war won't/ Stop for the love of God)
"I'm just so tired of fighting and never winning," Willow sighed quietly, looking down at where her fingers tangled with Oz's, continuing "I'm tired of wars that don't end and of funerals for Slayers and I'm tired of nothing ever changing."
"We could run away," Oz responded after a moment, but they both knew that they could never escape to a life of more than blood and death, that this war would follow them (had followed them to Tibet and to Scotland and every place in between), and that they would never be able to escape the futile, devastating struggle, the way Oz could never escape his wolf and Willow could never escape her own darkness.
"Maybe one day," Willow smiled weakly, leaning her forehead against Oz's, and wistfully imagined a day when she and Oz could escape this bloody existence, when they could run away together; she kissed him softly and whispered, "I always wanted to see the world with you."
Drive Me Crazy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander/Anya, proper driving lessons)
"Xander, I am not a child," Anya snapped, clutching the steering wheel as if she was ready to rip it from the dashboard and beat Xander over the head with it, "I understand that green is go and red is stop and yellow doesn't actually mean go faster."
"Sorry, sorry!" Xander cried, shrinking back against the passenger side window, "I just want to be sure you're safe, Ahn, I don't want anything happening to you."
"Oh, well, I suppose that's okay then," Anya smiled, trying not to look too pleased when Xander's words really gave her that bizarrely warm feeling she associated with Xander and happiness and being ridiculously, humanly in love, "Now, which one of these tiny levers makes the car start?"
(I'm Gonna) Leave My Body (Any, any, till human voices wake us, and we drown)
They run as wolves for two months, and Willow sees the world with a startling clarity through wolf eyes (and smells it oh so sharply through her wolf nose) that's so different than the hazy, fuzzy mess of colors and emotions and fears that shaped the world she saw when she was just a human girl, holding tight to her werewolf boy and running from demons in a town full of cemeteries. Oz had never told her that being a wolf could taste like freedom on her tongue (sharp and sweet like mountain air and rabbit blood and water bubbling from the ground) but she can tell he tastes it too, as they run wild in the mountains and forests and rocky fields of the open, unsettled West, together (with human minds and wolf paws) in a way that they never were when he was her werewolf and she was his witch.
But then, after two months of winter fur and startled snowshoe hares and mountains that are empty except for thick white snow and two ginger wolves running through it, spring comes, and people with it, and now there are human shapes and human voices where there hadn't been any before; Willow realizes that she cannot be a girl and a wolf, so she howls at the waning moon and learns what Oz has known for years, that this taste she has grown so addicted to is not freedom, but wildness, and she loses pale, long-fingered human hands and reading Kurt Vonnegut in bed and falling in love with Oz as she drowns in that wildness and becomes more wolf than girl.
Welcome Distraction (Any, Any/Any, you ruin everything in the nicest way)
"Hey, you!" Willow grinned, dropping a kiss on Oz's head and plopping down to sit beside him on the school lawn. Oz startled slightly, hiding his surprise well, and turned away from his tattered notebook (pages covered in sloping lines of lyrics that weren't fitting together just right and scratched out chords that didn't sound right), as Willow gasped, "Oh, did I ruin your concentration?"
"For the better," Oz shrugged, turning away from his uncooperative song to give its inspiration a kiss, whispering in her ear, "I'd much rather concentrate on you, anyways."
Willow Rosenberg and the Sorting Ceremony (Any, Any, Hogwarts AU)
Willow's knees shook so hard she thought she might collapse with each step, and every pair of eyes in the room (from Buffy, the nice, blonde girl from behind her in line to Headmaster Giles, smiling kindly through his silver wire glasses) burnt into her as she approached Professor Maclay and the ragged hat (which looked big enough to swallow her head whole) she held as if it were a holy relic.<
"You're a tricky one," the Sorting Hat whispered in Willow's ear, in a voice like a snake slipping through dry grass, once Professor Maclay had nestled it upon her head, "because you could go oh so many ways with that brain of yours, Miss Rosenberg."
Willow took a deep breath, exhaling it just as quickly, and she waited, the Sorting Hat slipping over her eyes and her face whitening so that she was nearly as pale as the Grey Lady, until the Hat cried, in a voice like doors creaking shut, "RAVENCLAW!"
Greek Mythology
Just as One Loves More and More (Will One Love Less and Less) (Greek Mythology, Aeneas/Cassandra, The gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy. -GRR Martin)
Cassandra loved the way she did everything, deeply and widely and with fierce, firm conviction, with everything she had within her to give; she loved as truly and as bravely as the shields and swords of her city, as tenderly as the first spring, as surely and loyally as Troy's strong city walls. This is the way she loved Aeneas, the way she had only ever loved Aeneas (not Apollo, never Apollo); she loved Aeneas in all the ways she knew how to love, with her brave, honest voice and her fierce, loyal heart, with unwavering patience and a devotion fierce enough to dash the hopes of all other men and gods. Cassandra loved Aeneas so deeply and bravely and truly as to make Apollo hate her, but no matter how she shouted and promised and swore, every time she whispered "I love you," Aeneas heard anything but her truth.
Keep the Earth Below My Feet (Greek mythology, Hades/Persephone, modern AU, I'm staring at the asphalt wondering/what's buried underneath)
Persephone is a botanist, he learns over dinner (Jibneh with pomegranate for her and Schwarma for him, at Elysium, the greatest Middle Eastern restaurant he's ever frequented), because she is in love with the sweet, dizzy brightness of spring and she loves to watch the first flowers grow. She smiles brightly, like the world's loveliest sunflower, when she speaks of her job, and he tells her about his work as an archaeologist, as a collector of memories and souls, about how he reaches into the earth to find lost relics and to hear the stories dead men couldn't ever tell again.
He is quickly enraptured by her, by her wheat-gold hair and river blue eyes, by her unconscious, nervous gestures that are quick like startled rabbits and her laugh like early morning birdsong, and so he kisses her, gently, when they part ways at the restraunt's door; her breath tastes like pomegranate and he is certain, irrevocably so, that this will not be their final meeting, that she will return to him once more.
Harry Potter
Maternal Instincts (Harry Potter, Lily Evans (Potter) & James Potter, those who have thrice defied him)
Harry is crying in his crib softly, so softly the brushing of the wind on the roof and the beating of branches against the walls nearly drown out his sobs; Lily will go to him in a second, but for now, she's frozen in place, terrified into inaction by the idea of Voldemort himself hunting them; "We've done all we can, dear," she soothes James, his face frozen in a brittle rictus of fear, and Lily is trying so very hard to keep calm and quiet, so that he doesn't worry any further, "All that's left is to survive, so that we defy him for a fourth time."
Lily is glancing at the staircase out of the corner of her eye, listening to Harry's cries as if a symphony, so absurdly grateful for his existence and so unutterably terrified for his safety, when James says, "Perhaps we should speak further to Dumbledore."
She pauses before answering, and that is when the door bursts open with a sound like cannon fire, and Lily doesn't look, doesn't stop, doesn't even think, running like a bolt of lightning to protect Harry: she grabs Harry tight to her chest and holds him tucked against her until there is a flash of green light and her muscles flow like water as she falls, so that there is nothing left to protect her boy, except the love she left behind in death.
The Hobbit
In the Company of Strangers (The Hobbit, the company, marching songs)
Bilbo is not an adventurer, not the type accustomed to journeys longer than a mid-afternoon stroll to visit the Brandybucks or Tooks on the westerly end of the Shire, but here he is, astride a rather large horse and in the company of strangers. It's altogether unsettling and quite intimidating, journeying with dwarves (and one rather perculiar wizard), because dwarves, with their loud, bellowing voices and their wandering feet, are so very different than hobbits, and Bilbo can scarcely understand them on any count. But then, one dwarf (Kili, perhaps?) begins to sing, in a surprisingly sweet voice that reminds him of when Elder Took would sing ballads at hazy twilight celebrations; he sings a song about the winding, reaching road, and one by one the other dwarves join in, until they all sing the same steady chorus again, and Bilbo tentatively opens his mouth to sing along.
Narnia
Fade Away (Narnia, Susan (+/any), every time we breathe out, we let out a little bit of ourselves/it'd be alright if we could exchange/but you don't want to, and I don't blame you)
Even now, after all the battles they've fought, side by side with bows and swords or turned face to face and hurling words, even after she's fallen half in love with him, Susan sometimes feels like she barely knows Caspian. She has watched sunrise light on his face and she has seen him stand tall in the dead of night, but she knows nothing of the boy he once was or the man he will become; she will be leaving him any day now, and she knows nothing of him that she can take with her back to London, tucked away in her heart. She wants something of this boy king, something she can know, can remember, can hold close like the faded photographic memory of a first love, but after so many years without love, Caspian is terrified of its every sign, so Susan falls through a door in the air, back to London, with nothing more than a quickly fading memory of his smile to keep.
Once Upon a Time
Chronic Recidivism (Once Upon a Time, Graham/Emma - AU)
"Back again, Miss Swan?" Graham laughs, seeing Emma leaning against the jail cell bars with all the casual ease she would slump against a living room wall, grinning at him as if she was the one who'd put him under arrest.
"You know I can't stay away, Sherriff," Emma drawls with a wink, deliberately pulling on the same heart strings she tugs every time he sees her, then, with a low laugh, she asks, "Are you gonna bail me out or am I gonna spend the night here with you?"
"I'm afraid to say you'll be spending the night alone here, Miss Swan," Graham sighs with mock regret that's only half faked, and, that night, as he lies awake, alone in his oversized bed, Graham thinks of Emma's sly cat grin and her quick green eyes and he wishes desperately that things were different, that one day she would find him when there wasn't a set of bars standing between them.
Supernatural
Monochromia (Supernatural, Jo/Adam, a trail for the devil to erase)
Adam had thought that hell would be red, full of fire and brimstone and blood, but instead it's just dead and cold, a world built from cracked bones and grey rocks, with all of the colour leached out. He almost wishes for flames, if only to break up the monotonous grey of the corner of Hell he was thrown in, but instead he finds Jo, with pale white skin and livid red gashes in her flesh, and hair that glows yellow in their grey world, so bright that he imagines it was woven from remembered vestiges of sunlight. She is colour and vitality in the darkness and so he follows where she leads (though he doesn't know where they're headed), leaving behind a trail of brightness in their wake, one that is beautiful and hopeful and good, and he pretends that he doesn't know that the path that will have faded back into the grey, obscured and unfollowable, long before they've reached their journey's end.
Thanks so much to the wonderful
rthstewart for running and hosting the ficathon! It was an incredible amount of fun!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Another Thing Coming Undone (I Won't Run) (Buffy, Willow or Buffy/Oz, I fought the war/ But the war won't/ Stop for the love of God)
"I'm just so tired of fighting and never winning," Willow sighed quietly, looking down at where her fingers tangled with Oz's, continuing "I'm tired of wars that don't end and of funerals for Slayers and I'm tired of nothing ever changing."
"We could run away," Oz responded after a moment, but they both knew that they could never escape to a life of more than blood and death, that this war would follow them (had followed them to Tibet and to Scotland and every place in between), and that they would never be able to escape the futile, devastating struggle, the way Oz could never escape his wolf and Willow could never escape her own darkness.
"Maybe one day," Willow smiled weakly, leaning her forehead against Oz's, and wistfully imagined a day when she and Oz could escape this bloody existence, when they could run away together; she kissed him softly and whispered, "I always wanted to see the world with you."
Drive Me Crazy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander/Anya, proper driving lessons)
"Xander, I am not a child," Anya snapped, clutching the steering wheel as if she was ready to rip it from the dashboard and beat Xander over the head with it, "I understand that green is go and red is stop and yellow doesn't actually mean go faster."
"Sorry, sorry!" Xander cried, shrinking back against the passenger side window, "I just want to be sure you're safe, Ahn, I don't want anything happening to you."
"Oh, well, I suppose that's okay then," Anya smiled, trying not to look too pleased when Xander's words really gave her that bizarrely warm feeling she associated with Xander and happiness and being ridiculously, humanly in love, "Now, which one of these tiny levers makes the car start?"
(I'm Gonna) Leave My Body (Any, any, till human voices wake us, and we drown)
They run as wolves for two months, and Willow sees the world with a startling clarity through wolf eyes (and smells it oh so sharply through her wolf nose) that's so different than the hazy, fuzzy mess of colors and emotions and fears that shaped the world she saw when she was just a human girl, holding tight to her werewolf boy and running from demons in a town full of cemeteries. Oz had never told her that being a wolf could taste like freedom on her tongue (sharp and sweet like mountain air and rabbit blood and water bubbling from the ground) but she can tell he tastes it too, as they run wild in the mountains and forests and rocky fields of the open, unsettled West, together (with human minds and wolf paws) in a way that they never were when he was her werewolf and she was his witch.
But then, after two months of winter fur and startled snowshoe hares and mountains that are empty except for thick white snow and two ginger wolves running through it, spring comes, and people with it, and now there are human shapes and human voices where there hadn't been any before; Willow realizes that she cannot be a girl and a wolf, so she howls at the waning moon and learns what Oz has known for years, that this taste she has grown so addicted to is not freedom, but wildness, and she loses pale, long-fingered human hands and reading Kurt Vonnegut in bed and falling in love with Oz as she drowns in that wildness and becomes more wolf than girl.
Welcome Distraction (Any, Any/Any, you ruin everything in the nicest way)
"Hey, you!" Willow grinned, dropping a kiss on Oz's head and plopping down to sit beside him on the school lawn. Oz startled slightly, hiding his surprise well, and turned away from his tattered notebook (pages covered in sloping lines of lyrics that weren't fitting together just right and scratched out chords that didn't sound right), as Willow gasped, "Oh, did I ruin your concentration?"
"For the better," Oz shrugged, turning away from his uncooperative song to give its inspiration a kiss, whispering in her ear, "I'd much rather concentrate on you, anyways."
Willow Rosenberg and the Sorting Ceremony (Any, Any, Hogwarts AU)
Willow's knees shook so hard she thought she might collapse with each step, and every pair of eyes in the room (from Buffy, the nice, blonde girl from behind her in line to Headmaster Giles, smiling kindly through his silver wire glasses) burnt into her as she approached Professor Maclay and the ragged hat (which looked big enough to swallow her head whole) she held as if it were a holy relic.<
"You're a tricky one," the Sorting Hat whispered in Willow's ear, in a voice like a snake slipping through dry grass, once Professor Maclay had nestled it upon her head, "because you could go oh so many ways with that brain of yours, Miss Rosenberg."
Willow took a deep breath, exhaling it just as quickly, and she waited, the Sorting Hat slipping over her eyes and her face whitening so that she was nearly as pale as the Grey Lady, until the Hat cried, in a voice like doors creaking shut, "RAVENCLAW!"
Greek Mythology
Just as One Loves More and More (Will One Love Less and Less) (Greek Mythology, Aeneas/Cassandra, The gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy. -GRR Martin)
Cassandra loved the way she did everything, deeply and widely and with fierce, firm conviction, with everything she had within her to give; she loved as truly and as bravely as the shields and swords of her city, as tenderly as the first spring, as surely and loyally as Troy's strong city walls. This is the way she loved Aeneas, the way she had only ever loved Aeneas (not Apollo, never Apollo); she loved Aeneas in all the ways she knew how to love, with her brave, honest voice and her fierce, loyal heart, with unwavering patience and a devotion fierce enough to dash the hopes of all other men and gods. Cassandra loved Aeneas so deeply and bravely and truly as to make Apollo hate her, but no matter how she shouted and promised and swore, every time she whispered "I love you," Aeneas heard anything but her truth.
Keep the Earth Below My Feet (Greek mythology, Hades/Persephone, modern AU, I'm staring at the asphalt wondering/what's buried underneath)
Persephone is a botanist, he learns over dinner (Jibneh with pomegranate for her and Schwarma for him, at Elysium, the greatest Middle Eastern restaurant he's ever frequented), because she is in love with the sweet, dizzy brightness of spring and she loves to watch the first flowers grow. She smiles brightly, like the world's loveliest sunflower, when she speaks of her job, and he tells her about his work as an archaeologist, as a collector of memories and souls, about how he reaches into the earth to find lost relics and to hear the stories dead men couldn't ever tell again.
He is quickly enraptured by her, by her wheat-gold hair and river blue eyes, by her unconscious, nervous gestures that are quick like startled rabbits and her laugh like early morning birdsong, and so he kisses her, gently, when they part ways at the restraunt's door; her breath tastes like pomegranate and he is certain, irrevocably so, that this will not be their final meeting, that she will return to him once more.
Harry Potter
Maternal Instincts (Harry Potter, Lily Evans (Potter) & James Potter, those who have thrice defied him)
Harry is crying in his crib softly, so softly the brushing of the wind on the roof and the beating of branches against the walls nearly drown out his sobs; Lily will go to him in a second, but for now, she's frozen in place, terrified into inaction by the idea of Voldemort himself hunting them; "We've done all we can, dear," she soothes James, his face frozen in a brittle rictus of fear, and Lily is trying so very hard to keep calm and quiet, so that he doesn't worry any further, "All that's left is to survive, so that we defy him for a fourth time."
Lily is glancing at the staircase out of the corner of her eye, listening to Harry's cries as if a symphony, so absurdly grateful for his existence and so unutterably terrified for his safety, when James says, "Perhaps we should speak further to Dumbledore."
She pauses before answering, and that is when the door bursts open with a sound like cannon fire, and Lily doesn't look, doesn't stop, doesn't even think, running like a bolt of lightning to protect Harry: she grabs Harry tight to her chest and holds him tucked against her until there is a flash of green light and her muscles flow like water as she falls, so that there is nothing left to protect her boy, except the love she left behind in death.
The Hobbit
In the Company of Strangers (The Hobbit, the company, marching songs)
Bilbo is not an adventurer, not the type accustomed to journeys longer than a mid-afternoon stroll to visit the Brandybucks or Tooks on the westerly end of the Shire, but here he is, astride a rather large horse and in the company of strangers. It's altogether unsettling and quite intimidating, journeying with dwarves (and one rather perculiar wizard), because dwarves, with their loud, bellowing voices and their wandering feet, are so very different than hobbits, and Bilbo can scarcely understand them on any count. But then, one dwarf (Kili, perhaps?) begins to sing, in a surprisingly sweet voice that reminds him of when Elder Took would sing ballads at hazy twilight celebrations; he sings a song about the winding, reaching road, and one by one the other dwarves join in, until they all sing the same steady chorus again, and Bilbo tentatively opens his mouth to sing along.
Narnia
Fade Away (Narnia, Susan (+/any), every time we breathe out, we let out a little bit of ourselves/it'd be alright if we could exchange/but you don't want to, and I don't blame you)
Even now, after all the battles they've fought, side by side with bows and swords or turned face to face and hurling words, even after she's fallen half in love with him, Susan sometimes feels like she barely knows Caspian. She has watched sunrise light on his face and she has seen him stand tall in the dead of night, but she knows nothing of the boy he once was or the man he will become; she will be leaving him any day now, and she knows nothing of him that she can take with her back to London, tucked away in her heart. She wants something of this boy king, something she can know, can remember, can hold close like the faded photographic memory of a first love, but after so many years without love, Caspian is terrified of its every sign, so Susan falls through a door in the air, back to London, with nothing more than a quickly fading memory of his smile to keep.
Once Upon a Time
Chronic Recidivism (Once Upon a Time, Graham/Emma - AU)
"Back again, Miss Swan?" Graham laughs, seeing Emma leaning against the jail cell bars with all the casual ease she would slump against a living room wall, grinning at him as if she was the one who'd put him under arrest.
"You know I can't stay away, Sherriff," Emma drawls with a wink, deliberately pulling on the same heart strings she tugs every time he sees her, then, with a low laugh, she asks, "Are you gonna bail me out or am I gonna spend the night here with you?"
"I'm afraid to say you'll be spending the night alone here, Miss Swan," Graham sighs with mock regret that's only half faked, and, that night, as he lies awake, alone in his oversized bed, Graham thinks of Emma's sly cat grin and her quick green eyes and he wishes desperately that things were different, that one day she would find him when there wasn't a set of bars standing between them.
Supernatural
Monochromia (Supernatural, Jo/Adam, a trail for the devil to erase)
Adam had thought that hell would be red, full of fire and brimstone and blood, but instead it's just dead and cold, a world built from cracked bones and grey rocks, with all of the colour leached out. He almost wishes for flames, if only to break up the monotonous grey of the corner of Hell he was thrown in, but instead he finds Jo, with pale white skin and livid red gashes in her flesh, and hair that glows yellow in their grey world, so bright that he imagines it was woven from remembered vestiges of sunlight. She is colour and vitality in the darkness and so he follows where she leads (though he doesn't know where they're headed), leaving behind a trail of brightness in their wake, one that is beautiful and hopeful and good, and he pretends that he doesn't know that the path that will have faded back into the grey, obscured and unfollowable, long before they've reached their journey's end.