In which fannish brain was excessively fannish
Apparently my brain is making up for lost time for lo! I wrote a lot of stuff today. Huzzah for having a 3-day weekend and thus time to catch up with folks who live in woefully far away timezones!
Title: Vin & the Train
Characters/Pairing: Vin, with brief cameos by Ezra and JD
Rating: Gen
Summary: Vin's sure Josiah didn't build the Iron Horse just so they could go hijack a train.
Notes: From this picture prompt.
Vin and the train
There was a moment right after Ezra'd explained the plan and JD was about to start explaining how the infernal thing worked when Vin actually thought about saying no. It was insane, this thing they were asking him to do, and a part of him was actually somewhat insulted that they'd been so sure he'd go along with this without reservation, without complaint, without even a raised eyebrow at the nature of this act - sure he'd done some things that ain't what one could rightly call legal, but there was a difference between doing a little cattle rustling and, well, this. Cattle rustling could get a man shot, sure, but Ezra's plan involved hijacking a damn train and that was the sort of thing got a man hanged - never mind that the folks on the train had just kidnapped a man and damn near killed three others.
'Sides, he reckoned that hijacking a train weren't what Josiah imagined when he'd built the Iron Horse.
Still, Vin thought, looking at JD trying to explain how to work the Iron Horse with his busted arms and bloodied head, wounds courtesy of the men who'd snatched Josiah, I reckon he ain't gonna mind much one way or t'other.
"Ok," he said, interrupting JD's spiel about the proper way to do somethin' or other, "I s'pose it makes sense that we gotta use this damn thing 'cause those bastards got themselves a train that don't need tracks to run, but I don't get why I gotta be the one ridin' it."
"You're the only one who's willin' to use the gun," JD said, then raised one bandaged hand sheepishly. "Well, only one who c'n use it right now."
"Hell," Vin said. "Guess I'm gonna go steal a train."
+++
In some ways, Vin hated the horse. It weren't nothin' like the way Chris hated the horse - that was snobbery, pure and simple, and the Iron Horse was sounder than some of the screws Vin'd ridden in his time. The problem with the horse was that it didn't run like a horse - too smooth, too even, with no fighting of the bit and no stomping and starting and orneriness - and Vin had spent most of his life in a saddle, so bein' on a thing that looked and acted like a horse and yet didn't really move like one made him feel all off balance and uncertain, like he was standing on shifting sand. It didn't help matters that the thing responded to every damn twitch and clutch of his legs like a real horse, turning this way and that without the slightest need for the reins. Pressure plates in the sides, or some such thing, JD had said, and Vin ended up galloping the thing two miles East before he got the measure of it down. Still, he was used to it now, and to the speed and the way the fall of each heavy hoof thundered through both the earth and his body; used, too, to the heat that he could feel radiating from beneath the heavy leather saddle - the one that weren't built like any saddle Vin had ever known before, with no cantle to speak of and shaped like a dove's wing, all swooping ovals - and through the stiff leather armor and the stench of the smoke that billowed out from the thing's nostrils.
In the distance he could see the curl of smoke from the trackless railroad rising stark against the bleached-blue sky. They weren't all too far from where he was now, and Vin knew that even if the train didn't need no tracks to run, it was still a train, still too big for most of the passes across the Sangre de Cristo, which meant they'd be runnin' across the desert for a good long while. Still, they looked to be running North, and fast too, which meant Vin'd need to put on some speed if he intended to catch them before they hit Colorado and were out of the lands he knew almost as well as his own skin.
A part of him - the part that wasn't occupied with the knowledge that there was a giant ball of fire roaring directly beneath his balls and he never did get a straight answer out of JD if the horse was gonna blow up or not - was, quite frankly, thrilled at the chance to go faster, to go farther, to fiddle with the lever thing-y and feel the ground surge away below him. Hell, if he were being honest with himself, he probably would've gotten on the horse without the complications of Josiah's kidnapping, just to see how fast and far he could go before the thing broke; it weren't just the guns that captivated him.
"Ok, fella," he said to the horse, "let's fly."
+++
Vin caught the train three miles from the territorial border, eyes stinging from the wind and tears streaming down his cheeks and soaking into the bandana he'd wrapped around his mouth. The horse wasn't big enough to force the train aside, though it was a damn sight faster, but the gun was. True, the recoil nearly knocked him off the horse and he almost got impaled by some shrapnel (and he was relatively certain that if he fell now at the speeds they were going Nathan'd be patching up more than some bruises and scrapes) but that wasn't as important as the fact that the train swerved and slowed just enough to give him time to leap from the horse into the cab where three men lay dazed and bleeding.
"Hands up!" he said in a voice that he knew was too loud.
"You idiot," the man with the bleeding scalp wound said. "You have any idea who you're robbing?"
"Ain't no robbery," Vin said, grinning widely as the distant sounds of some other folks having a really bad day reached him from further down the train. "This here is a rescue."
Title: Grimm's Fairytales
Characters/Pairing: Nathan
Rating: Gen
Notes: From the prompt: Nathan, OW, the first book he ever owned.
Nathan, OW, first book he ever owned
Nathan buys the book in Richmond, part of a lot being sold by an old white widow woman - her husband was a doctor, her only son died at Gettysburg, and though she looks at Nathan with contempt she still takes his money. It's a thick volume with faded gold lettering on the spine that looks like it belongs with Cooper's Practice of Surgery and Barclay's A Manual of Medical Diagnosis. But the title on this book is Grimm's Fairytales, and there's nothing about doctoring or surgery or treatment or cure to be found anywhere within the confines of its cracked leather covers and broken spine. For a moment he's sorely tempted to go back to the widow woman, to scorn her for thinking him an idiot and a fool and an uppity slave that she can trick by selling him something that looks like it could be truth but isn't. But he's too battle weary to fight the war all over again and besides, he has a certain fondness for the brothers Grimm. He thinks it's fitting, in a way, that their book should be one of the first he buys as a freeman considering it was the first book he owned as a slave - a copy as old as this one, though more battered, the castings off of the young master, thrown out in the trash once its replacement had come in. Though even that's a fairytale because he'd owned it the same way he'd owned the clothes on his back and the shack he and his father slept in, which is to say he hadn't owned it at all.
Still, for five glorious days when he'd been 12, he'd owned this book, with its missing pages and mysterious stains, and it'd hurt more to have it taken away than the beating he got when the overseers found him reading it.
Well, no one'll ever be able to take this one away from him now - he owns it, just like he owns his bag and clothes and shoes and freedom, and no matter how ragged it gets, he knows he'll never, ever, throw it away.
Title: All In Favor
Characters/Pairing: Chris
Rating: Gen
Notes: I asked
randi2204 to prompt me and she wanted to know how the ban against artificial life in Galatea in Bronze (with gears) got passed.
Chris and the referendum
Chris hesitates at the door to the Clarion, and takes stock of what he's about to do. In some ways he finds Mary as exasperating and infuriating as Josiah - they're both too stubborn and dead set on what they see as right by half, and the fact that the both of them love to work in loud, noisy, and dirty spaces don't hurt the resemblance any - and he ain't entirely sure Mary'll be on board with what he's about to offer. He knows he can pull it off without Mary's help - knows that this is something the whole damn town is behind - but he ain't the best at pretty words, not like Josiah and Ezra, and he needs the pretty words right now, needs a way to say his piece such that it won't be the final straw that breaks Josiah; he knows Josiah's feelin' awful low right now, guilty as all heck because of the way his horse damn near killed JD, and speaking about his damn crows again, and if he says his piece the way he'd normally say it, he knows Josiah'll take that as the sign that he needs to leave town for good. And maybe there are some folks that'd like to see Josiah's back, but Chris ain't one of 'em. All he wants is a warning - heck, five minutes would do - before Josiah blows up the town; and maybe if JD weren't laid up in Nathan's clinic, pale as a ghost and babbling fevered nonsense, he'd be standing in front of JD's door and browbeating the kid into doing his goddamn job. But he can't do that to a sick man, and besides he's got a sneaking suspicion that in JD's mind he is doing his job - only what JD thinks his job should be and what the rest of them think it is ain't rightly aligned no more.
"Mister Larabee!" Mary says, startling him from his thoughts. She shuffles some papers on her desk, and the suspicious bastard in him wants to know exactly what she thinks she's hiding from him. "What can I do for you today?"
"Mary," Chris says. He hooks his thumbs into his belt and wishes for his cheroot. "You got a minute?"
"For you?" Mary says, the newshound gleam in her eye. "I've got all the time in the world."
Title: Behind the Grain Exchange
Characters/Pairing: Chris/Ezra
Notes: For the dual prompts: "Chris can't keep his hands off Ezra" and "almost discovered behind the grain exchange".
Chris & Ezra, can't keep his hands off/almost caught behind the grain exchange
The minute Judge Travis banged down his gavel and said the court was in recess, Chris grabbed Ezra and dragged him outside and into the alley behind the grain exchange.
"Chris, this is hardly the place," Ezra began to say, but Chris wasn't in the mood for coy teasing right now - he needed to touch Ezra, needed to undo the perfectly pressed and razor-sharp edge of Ezra's trousers, rumple and muss the white linen shirt, leave him looking debauched and unkempt and as out of control as he made Chris feel.
"You know how hard it was to wait 'til the judge called a recess?" Chris said as he undid the bottom buttons of Ezra's vest. "Goddamn it, Ezra, I had to sit on my hands to keep 'em from reaching out to you."
Ezra chuckled, low and darkly amused, but Chris could hear his drawl fraying at the edges like a piece of old cotton on the verge of rending. "Well, I reckon if you did, you would have been held in contempt, and not just by the court."
"Wouldn't be the first time," Chris replied, wiggling his hand down further into Ezra's pants, past the silken underthings that always drove him mad; but then again, everything about Ezra drove him mad these days.
"Yes, but," Ezra said, but Chris had his hand down underneath all the layers, now, and around Ezra's cock, and he squeezed, just a little, just enough to make Ezra stop talking, make his eyes flutter shut and a flush rise up over his fine, fair cheeks.
"God, Ezra," Chris growled, voice too thick with want and need to be anything but harsh, anything but low and animal; a poor release to the frustration that had been building ever since Ezra took the stand. "Why've you gotta be such a damn tease?"
"Tease, Mister Larabee?" Ezra said, voice even more frayed now. "I was merely - ah - presenting evidence-"
"Talkin' circles, more like, and damn near got yourself thrown in jail too-"
"-doing my civic duty-"
"Jesus, Ezra, don't you ever just-"
"-and you, oh Christ." Ezra licked his lips and tilted his head back, exposing that long line of throat at last; Chris knew that it'd taste like sandalwood and musk and the faintest traces of soap, and he wanted to taste that so badly right now. But he wanted more to see Ezra become undone, to lose every last trace of the polished persona he hid behind.
Behind him, the door to the grain exchange banged open and Chris growled and pressed Ezra deeper into the alley, boxed him in. Over the noise of the town filing inside, he heard Judge Travis say, "Court is back in session."
"Chris," Ezra said, but it wasn't the breathy, wrung out way that Chris had hoped Ezra would be calling out his name. "You can't expect me to testify like this."
"You can be a little late," Chris said. "Can't start the trial again without you."
"They'll find us." Ezra grabbed his wrists, pulled gently until Chris released his almost desperate grasp.
"For fuck's sake," Chris said. He sighed as he stepped back, sighed further as he saw that all his hard work at mussing Ezra was already disappearing, the cracks in the polished shield already knitting together until nothing about Ezra could even suggest at fraying, at undoing.
"I shan't be much longer," Ezra said, smoothing down the front of his vest. "And in the meantime-"
"Yeah?"
"In the meantime, I suggest you take up knitting, so as to occupy those empty hands."
...now all I need to do is actually finish my bingo prompts from LAST year (and possibly get some V/E prompts because I'm in the mood to write them but can't think of anything to write) and I'll be all caught up with, um, something.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth where there are
comments
Title: Vin & the Train
Characters/Pairing: Vin, with brief cameos by Ezra and JD
Rating: Gen
Summary: Vin's sure Josiah didn't build the Iron Horse just so they could go hijack a train.
Notes: From this picture prompt.
Vin and the train
There was a moment right after Ezra'd explained the plan and JD was about to start explaining how the infernal thing worked when Vin actually thought about saying no. It was insane, this thing they were asking him to do, and a part of him was actually somewhat insulted that they'd been so sure he'd go along with this without reservation, without complaint, without even a raised eyebrow at the nature of this act - sure he'd done some things that ain't what one could rightly call legal, but there was a difference between doing a little cattle rustling and, well, this. Cattle rustling could get a man shot, sure, but Ezra's plan involved hijacking a damn train and that was the sort of thing got a man hanged - never mind that the folks on the train had just kidnapped a man and damn near killed three others.
'Sides, he reckoned that hijacking a train weren't what Josiah imagined when he'd built the Iron Horse.
Still, Vin thought, looking at JD trying to explain how to work the Iron Horse with his busted arms and bloodied head, wounds courtesy of the men who'd snatched Josiah, I reckon he ain't gonna mind much one way or t'other.
"Ok," he said, interrupting JD's spiel about the proper way to do somethin' or other, "I s'pose it makes sense that we gotta use this damn thing 'cause those bastards got themselves a train that don't need tracks to run, but I don't get why I gotta be the one ridin' it."
"You're the only one who's willin' to use the gun," JD said, then raised one bandaged hand sheepishly. "Well, only one who c'n use it right now."
"Hell," Vin said. "Guess I'm gonna go steal a train."
+++
In some ways, Vin hated the horse. It weren't nothin' like the way Chris hated the horse - that was snobbery, pure and simple, and the Iron Horse was sounder than some of the screws Vin'd ridden in his time. The problem with the horse was that it didn't run like a horse - too smooth, too even, with no fighting of the bit and no stomping and starting and orneriness - and Vin had spent most of his life in a saddle, so bein' on a thing that looked and acted like a horse and yet didn't really move like one made him feel all off balance and uncertain, like he was standing on shifting sand. It didn't help matters that the thing responded to every damn twitch and clutch of his legs like a real horse, turning this way and that without the slightest need for the reins. Pressure plates in the sides, or some such thing, JD had said, and Vin ended up galloping the thing two miles East before he got the measure of it down. Still, he was used to it now, and to the speed and the way the fall of each heavy hoof thundered through both the earth and his body; used, too, to the heat that he could feel radiating from beneath the heavy leather saddle - the one that weren't built like any saddle Vin had ever known before, with no cantle to speak of and shaped like a dove's wing, all swooping ovals - and through the stiff leather armor and the stench of the smoke that billowed out from the thing's nostrils.
In the distance he could see the curl of smoke from the trackless railroad rising stark against the bleached-blue sky. They weren't all too far from where he was now, and Vin knew that even if the train didn't need no tracks to run, it was still a train, still too big for most of the passes across the Sangre de Cristo, which meant they'd be runnin' across the desert for a good long while. Still, they looked to be running North, and fast too, which meant Vin'd need to put on some speed if he intended to catch them before they hit Colorado and were out of the lands he knew almost as well as his own skin.
A part of him - the part that wasn't occupied with the knowledge that there was a giant ball of fire roaring directly beneath his balls and he never did get a straight answer out of JD if the horse was gonna blow up or not - was, quite frankly, thrilled at the chance to go faster, to go farther, to fiddle with the lever thing-y and feel the ground surge away below him. Hell, if he were being honest with himself, he probably would've gotten on the horse without the complications of Josiah's kidnapping, just to see how fast and far he could go before the thing broke; it weren't just the guns that captivated him.
"Ok, fella," he said to the horse, "let's fly."
+++
Vin caught the train three miles from the territorial border, eyes stinging from the wind and tears streaming down his cheeks and soaking into the bandana he'd wrapped around his mouth. The horse wasn't big enough to force the train aside, though it was a damn sight faster, but the gun was. True, the recoil nearly knocked him off the horse and he almost got impaled by some shrapnel (and he was relatively certain that if he fell now at the speeds they were going Nathan'd be patching up more than some bruises and scrapes) but that wasn't as important as the fact that the train swerved and slowed just enough to give him time to leap from the horse into the cab where three men lay dazed and bleeding.
"Hands up!" he said in a voice that he knew was too loud.
"You idiot," the man with the bleeding scalp wound said. "You have any idea who you're robbing?"
"Ain't no robbery," Vin said, grinning widely as the distant sounds of some other folks having a really bad day reached him from further down the train. "This here is a rescue."
Title: Grimm's Fairytales
Characters/Pairing: Nathan
Rating: Gen
Notes: From the prompt: Nathan, OW, the first book he ever owned.
Nathan, OW, first book he ever owned
Nathan buys the book in Richmond, part of a lot being sold by an old white widow woman - her husband was a doctor, her only son died at Gettysburg, and though she looks at Nathan with contempt she still takes his money. It's a thick volume with faded gold lettering on the spine that looks like it belongs with Cooper's Practice of Surgery and Barclay's A Manual of Medical Diagnosis. But the title on this book is Grimm's Fairytales, and there's nothing about doctoring or surgery or treatment or cure to be found anywhere within the confines of its cracked leather covers and broken spine. For a moment he's sorely tempted to go back to the widow woman, to scorn her for thinking him an idiot and a fool and an uppity slave that she can trick by selling him something that looks like it could be truth but isn't. But he's too battle weary to fight the war all over again and besides, he has a certain fondness for the brothers Grimm. He thinks it's fitting, in a way, that their book should be one of the first he buys as a freeman considering it was the first book he owned as a slave - a copy as old as this one, though more battered, the castings off of the young master, thrown out in the trash once its replacement had come in. Though even that's a fairytale because he'd owned it the same way he'd owned the clothes on his back and the shack he and his father slept in, which is to say he hadn't owned it at all.
Still, for five glorious days when he'd been 12, he'd owned this book, with its missing pages and mysterious stains, and it'd hurt more to have it taken away than the beating he got when the overseers found him reading it.
Well, no one'll ever be able to take this one away from him now - he owns it, just like he owns his bag and clothes and shoes and freedom, and no matter how ragged it gets, he knows he'll never, ever, throw it away.
Title: All In Favor
Characters/Pairing: Chris
Rating: Gen
Notes: I asked
randi2204 to prompt me and she wanted to know how the ban against artificial life in Galatea in Bronze (with gears) got passed.
Chris and the referendum
Chris hesitates at the door to the Clarion, and takes stock of what he's about to do. In some ways he finds Mary as exasperating and infuriating as Josiah - they're both too stubborn and dead set on what they see as right by half, and the fact that the both of them love to work in loud, noisy, and dirty spaces don't hurt the resemblance any - and he ain't entirely sure Mary'll be on board with what he's about to offer. He knows he can pull it off without Mary's help - knows that this is something the whole damn town is behind - but he ain't the best at pretty words, not like Josiah and Ezra, and he needs the pretty words right now, needs a way to say his piece such that it won't be the final straw that breaks Josiah; he knows Josiah's feelin' awful low right now, guilty as all heck because of the way his horse damn near killed JD, and speaking about his damn crows again, and if he says his piece the way he'd normally say it, he knows Josiah'll take that as the sign that he needs to leave town for good. And maybe there are some folks that'd like to see Josiah's back, but Chris ain't one of 'em. All he wants is a warning - heck, five minutes would do - before Josiah blows up the town; and maybe if JD weren't laid up in Nathan's clinic, pale as a ghost and babbling fevered nonsense, he'd be standing in front of JD's door and browbeating the kid into doing his goddamn job. But he can't do that to a sick man, and besides he's got a sneaking suspicion that in JD's mind he is doing his job - only what JD thinks his job should be and what the rest of them think it is ain't rightly aligned no more.
"Mister Larabee!" Mary says, startling him from his thoughts. She shuffles some papers on her desk, and the suspicious bastard in him wants to know exactly what she thinks she's hiding from him. "What can I do for you today?"
"Mary," Chris says. He hooks his thumbs into his belt and wishes for his cheroot. "You got a minute?"
"For you?" Mary says, the newshound gleam in her eye. "I've got all the time in the world."
Title: Behind the Grain Exchange
Characters/Pairing: Chris/Ezra
Notes: For the dual prompts: "Chris can't keep his hands off Ezra" and "almost discovered behind the grain exchange".
Chris & Ezra, can't keep his hands off/almost caught behind the grain exchange
The minute Judge Travis banged down his gavel and said the court was in recess, Chris grabbed Ezra and dragged him outside and into the alley behind the grain exchange.
"Chris, this is hardly the place," Ezra began to say, but Chris wasn't in the mood for coy teasing right now - he needed to touch Ezra, needed to undo the perfectly pressed and razor-sharp edge of Ezra's trousers, rumple and muss the white linen shirt, leave him looking debauched and unkempt and as out of control as he made Chris feel.
"You know how hard it was to wait 'til the judge called a recess?" Chris said as he undid the bottom buttons of Ezra's vest. "Goddamn it, Ezra, I had to sit on my hands to keep 'em from reaching out to you."
Ezra chuckled, low and darkly amused, but Chris could hear his drawl fraying at the edges like a piece of old cotton on the verge of rending. "Well, I reckon if you did, you would have been held in contempt, and not just by the court."
"Wouldn't be the first time," Chris replied, wiggling his hand down further into Ezra's pants, past the silken underthings that always drove him mad; but then again, everything about Ezra drove him mad these days.
"Yes, but," Ezra said, but Chris had his hand down underneath all the layers, now, and around Ezra's cock, and he squeezed, just a little, just enough to make Ezra stop talking, make his eyes flutter shut and a flush rise up over his fine, fair cheeks.
"God, Ezra," Chris growled, voice too thick with want and need to be anything but harsh, anything but low and animal; a poor release to the frustration that had been building ever since Ezra took the stand. "Why've you gotta be such a damn tease?"
"Tease, Mister Larabee?" Ezra said, voice even more frayed now. "I was merely - ah - presenting evidence-"
"Talkin' circles, more like, and damn near got yourself thrown in jail too-"
"-doing my civic duty-"
"Jesus, Ezra, don't you ever just-"
"-and you, oh Christ." Ezra licked his lips and tilted his head back, exposing that long line of throat at last; Chris knew that it'd taste like sandalwood and musk and the faintest traces of soap, and he wanted to taste that so badly right now. But he wanted more to see Ezra become undone, to lose every last trace of the polished persona he hid behind.
Behind him, the door to the grain exchange banged open and Chris growled and pressed Ezra deeper into the alley, boxed him in. Over the noise of the town filing inside, he heard Judge Travis say, "Court is back in session."
"Chris," Ezra said, but it wasn't the breathy, wrung out way that Chris had hoped Ezra would be calling out his name. "You can't expect me to testify like this."
"You can be a little late," Chris said. "Can't start the trial again without you."
"They'll find us." Ezra grabbed his wrists, pulled gently until Chris released his almost desperate grasp.
"For fuck's sake," Chris said. He sighed as he stepped back, sighed further as he saw that all his hard work at mussing Ezra was already disappearing, the cracks in the polished shield already knitting together until nothing about Ezra could even suggest at fraying, at undoing.
"I shan't be much longer," Ezra said, smoothing down the front of his vest. "And in the meantime-"
"Yeah?"
"In the meantime, I suggest you take up knitting, so as to occupy those empty hands."
...now all I need to do is actually finish my bingo prompts from LAST year (and possibly get some V/E prompts because I'm in the mood to write them but can't think of anything to write) and I'll be all caught up with, um, something.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth where there are
comments