Pretty good year
Here's a round-up for fic excerpts, both those that are finished and those yet to come. :)
In chronological order, here are the fics I wrote this year...
The Geek Rock Series: Chapter 3 (The Lone Gunmen, WIP)
Frohike liked to imagine that nothing could surprise him anymore and, mostly, he was right. But then there were days... Like today, just for example. It was a Thursday, and he seemed to remember a wise man somewhere once saying that nobody ever got the hang of Thursdays.
“My hand to God, Jimmy,” he was saying, after having to talk down a particularly cranky Langly -- cranky because Jimmy had woken them, in Langly's words, 'near the crack of dawn', “I wonder sometimes what goes through that head of yours.”
“It's nine-thirty,” Jimmy pointed out, not appearing fazed in the least. “Most normal people are at work by now.”
Chocolate (SG-1, ficlet)
They were at a Red Robin near the mall. Teal’c stared at the electric blue margarita the server had just set down in front of him, frowning slightly. It had a pink umbrella stuck through a pineapple wedge on the rim of the glass. Mitchell’s drink, on the other hand, looked like nothing so much as a chocolate milkshake, complete with whipped cream and a cherry on top.
“It’s not a milkshake.” he said, “It’s a Bailey’s chocolate shake. That’s entirely different.”
“Oh, entirely,” Daniel said, staring at the laminated menu; there was dried ketchup on one corner. He looked up the server who was looming over him impatiently. “Maybe just… I don’t know… a beer? A normal one? Without a fancy glass or a stupid name?”
Teal’c abandoned his margarita and picked at the basket of mozzarella sticks in the center of the table. “I am not sure I understand this place.”
Unintentional (Dr. Who, ficlet)
It’s like trying to turn the Titanic. An apt metaphor, considering.
He mentions the ship, that it will be in Southampton when they get there, trying to steer the conversation into safer waters. (Another metaphor, or maybe a pun, depending on your point of view.) Rose jokes that the Titanic would be his idea of a holiday, and he assures her (despite the looks she and Jack are giving one another across the table) that he has absolutely no intention of having anything to do with it.
So what happens later is entirely unintentional. Mostly. Mostly unintentional.
Definitely not planned, at any rate.
Lovers (SG-1, ficlet)
It’s not planned. She’s mostly given up on dating. She still feels the pull of the traditional, though, or maybe it’s just a biological urge. Either way, when Cam stops by her office -- fresh from the funeral of yet another friend who died in the desert without ever knowing where the real war was being fought -- and asks her if she wants to get a drink, it’s a whole lot easier to say yes than it would have been ten years ago.
He’s in his dress blues, with fine lines around his eyes and mouth that hadn’t been there the day before. She has a sudden, possibly self-destructive urge to kiss him hard enough break the tension, to smooth those lines away.
“Sure. Why not?” she says, and grabs her jacket.
Momentous (Dr. Who, ficlet)
When he rescues her (he always rescues her), he grips her chin in one hand and looks at her with something like accusation on his face.
“I’ve risked worlds for you,” he says, a little too intensely.
There isn’t a little boy born who wouldn’t tear the world apart to save his mummy.
Quixotic (Hercule Poirot, ficlet)
Poirot had endured his share of difficulties with banks in the past. Banks were insufferable, bureaucratic agencies, with a level of disinterest and ineptitude sufficient to drive even an average man to distraction.
Poirot, of course, was far from an average man.
And so he was explaining carefully and precisely to the teller why he had been obliged to leave his tisane half-finished and come to the bank himself.
"I send to you my secretary Miss Lemon. Nothing. Then I send my estimable colleague, Captain Hastings -- a most, I must stress, agreeable soul -- and, mademoiselle, he comes back to me cursing your name."
The girl just blinked at him. She was wearing far too much rouge.
I Slept With Someone In Fall Out Boy And All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me (One Tree Hill)
They were in Portland the next time Jake called. The band was doing an acoustic set at this tiny club that looked like it had probably been a Howard Johnson’s at some point in the not-so-distant past.
Pete was onstage, singing about angels with broken wings, and she knew the song was about her.
“Jake?” she said, stepping through the front door and out into the foggy night. The club was on the east bank of the river, just blocks from one of the city’s busiest bridges. Cars zoomed past, their headlights reflecting in the standing pools on water on the street.
“Peyton-“
“What…?”
“I got full custody of Jenny,” he said, and hung up before she had a chance to speak.
It started to drizzle.
Mysteries (SG-1)
The leaves are dying when Daniel brings Vala home.
They’re both a little thinner, a little greyer, a little more lined around the eyes. Her hand in his is bony, clawlike, and she holds him too tightly. Sam exclaims softly when she hugs him and says she can feel his ribs, even through the fabric of the flak jacket someone drapes around him.
It’s been months, but feels more like years.
It’s colder on Earth than it had been on Sahal. He can feel the damp creeping into his bones, making him creak like an old man. It’s as though whatever technique, whatever power (he will not call it magic) the Ori used to age the child aged him as well. He looks at Vala’s face, drawn and dark in the fluorescent lights of the base, and he thinks maybe it aged her, too.
Or maybe that’s just what grief looks like. He’d forgotten, but he remembers now.
Dreamwalk Blue: The Solitude Sessions (Harry Potter, WIP)
There were white tigers in Metis’ head and sharp-beaked blackbirds in her hair.
Tom saw snakes, though he shakily assured her that none of what they were seeing was actually real. It certainly felt real, but she believed simply because Tom said it was so. He also said that it would pass soon, and that things would be as they once were.
That last part she didn’t believe, simply because she knew better.
She caught sight of herself in the mirror one muggy afternoon, rain threatening on the unfamiliar horizon. Her hair clung around her face in damp strands, her skin pale and her eyes wide and dark. She’d aged ten years, a hundred, a thousand. She didn’t know herself anymore.
Night was full or terrors during those first few weeks. Birds tore at her flesh, her face, her belly, waking her from sleep in sobs and wails the pillow couldn’t muffle.
“I’m going to die.”
Tom held her head and said, “Not yet, and not like this.”
And some fics I am currently working on...
Percy Weasley: Rogue Demon Hunter, Episode 6 (Harry Potter)
"Where are you off to?" said a voice from the vague darkness of the kitchen.
Ginny jumped nearly a foot in the air.
"What?!"
"I said," Harry leaned forward, out of the gloomy shadows, "where are you going?"
"I'm, um, just going out for a little while."
"Where, Ginny? Are you seeing Dean? Kingsley?" He paused for dramatic effect. "Percy?"
Busted. She was going to kill Hermione.
"What would make you suggest that?"
"Don't play dumb, Gin. You're terrible at it."
Ginny blinked. "No, I'm not."
Dreamwalk Blue: The Solitude Sessions (Harry Potter)
England was rainy, grey and slightly disappointing upon their return.
It was the second week of September and they’d arrived two days earlier at Southampton. No one met them at the dock - not that June had really expected anyone to - and Hayden had hired a car to take them back to London.
“Might as well end this adventure in style,” he’d said, heaving her steamer trunk into the boot himself. “Unless you’d rather just disappear with a wink and a pop...?”
“Not at all. Let’s make a proper end of it.”
The truth was, now that they were back, she wasn’t really in any sort of hurry to be home.
But eventually they had arrived home, with rain falling outside and the lights somewhat suspiciously low inside Hayden’s townhouse.
"More brandy?" he asked, waving the decanter in her general direction.
"No, Hayden, thank you."
"Marry me?"
"No, Hayden, but thank you," she said placidly, taking a sip from her glass.
“Next Tuesday, then?”
“Next Tuesday,” she agreed. “Assuming, of course, that you still want to ask.”
“Anything could happen, of course. But I’m rather sure I will want to ask.”
Long Dark Teatime (The Lone Gunmen, post-JTS)
“Now this is how it ought to be done.”
It was the middle of May in the Oregon wine country, the sky blue and perfect above them, the mountains white and hazy above the rolling green horizon. Frohike was stretched out in a folding chaise, wearing aviator shades and holding a pint of crisp lager. A half-eaten cheeseburger dribbled mushrooms and bell peppers onto a plate on their table and the strains of bluesy rock and roll music drifted up from the street below.
“You won’t get any argument from me.”
The tiny college town of McMinnville had several major claims to fame: Linfield College football, Willamette Valley pinot noir and the Hotel Oregon’s annual UFO Festival.
The Hotel Oregon also had quite possibly the most inviting rooftop bar on the West Coast.
“Beer, burgers and alien abduction seminars." Frohike patted his belly. "I think I can die a happy man now.”
"Uh, dude? We're already dead, remember?"
"Only technically."
The Geek Rock Series (The Lone Gunmen)
“The van ran out of gas about six blocks from here, and the house,” he pointed at a piece of yellow paper taped to the door, “the house is condemned. I think the universe may be trying to tell me something.”
“I don't think the universe actually works like that.”
When he looked up, she had tears in her eyes.
“Hey,” he said, reaching out to touch her face, “this is my breakdown.”
The Pop Rock Series (The Lone Gunmen)
His roommate that first year at Iowa State was Jakub Dvoracek, a 6'5”/290 wall of solid muscle at Free Safety. Dvoracek was a Czech farm kid from some tiny burg in western Nebraska, with shoulder-length blond curls that he refused to cut despite exasperated pleas from the coaches.
“It's like Samson,” he said, by way of explanation over dinner one night. “In the Bible. He cut his hair, he lost all his strength.”
“Whatever you say, Sunday School,” one of the senior linemen said, clapping him on the shoulder.
The nickname stuck. Jimmy, predictably, got tagged with '007' and a lot of 'shaken, not stirred' jokes from the sportscasters whenever he'd get hit.
In chronological order, here are the fics I wrote this year...
The Geek Rock Series: Chapter 3 (The Lone Gunmen, WIP)
Frohike liked to imagine that nothing could surprise him anymore and, mostly, he was right. But then there were days... Like today, just for example. It was a Thursday, and he seemed to remember a wise man somewhere once saying that nobody ever got the hang of Thursdays.
“My hand to God, Jimmy,” he was saying, after having to talk down a particularly cranky Langly -- cranky because Jimmy had woken them, in Langly's words, 'near the crack of dawn', “I wonder sometimes what goes through that head of yours.”
“It's nine-thirty,” Jimmy pointed out, not appearing fazed in the least. “Most normal people are at work by now.”
Chocolate (SG-1, ficlet)
They were at a Red Robin near the mall. Teal’c stared at the electric blue margarita the server had just set down in front of him, frowning slightly. It had a pink umbrella stuck through a pineapple wedge on the rim of the glass. Mitchell’s drink, on the other hand, looked like nothing so much as a chocolate milkshake, complete with whipped cream and a cherry on top.
“It’s not a milkshake.” he said, “It’s a Bailey’s chocolate shake. That’s entirely different.”
“Oh, entirely,” Daniel said, staring at the laminated menu; there was dried ketchup on one corner. He looked up the server who was looming over him impatiently. “Maybe just… I don’t know… a beer? A normal one? Without a fancy glass or a stupid name?”
Teal’c abandoned his margarita and picked at the basket of mozzarella sticks in the center of the table. “I am not sure I understand this place.”
Unintentional (Dr. Who, ficlet)
It’s like trying to turn the Titanic. An apt metaphor, considering.
He mentions the ship, that it will be in Southampton when they get there, trying to steer the conversation into safer waters. (Another metaphor, or maybe a pun, depending on your point of view.) Rose jokes that the Titanic would be his idea of a holiday, and he assures her (despite the looks she and Jack are giving one another across the table) that he has absolutely no intention of having anything to do with it.
So what happens later is entirely unintentional. Mostly. Mostly unintentional.
Definitely not planned, at any rate.
Lovers (SG-1, ficlet)
It’s not planned. She’s mostly given up on dating. She still feels the pull of the traditional, though, or maybe it’s just a biological urge. Either way, when Cam stops by her office -- fresh from the funeral of yet another friend who died in the desert without ever knowing where the real war was being fought -- and asks her if she wants to get a drink, it’s a whole lot easier to say yes than it would have been ten years ago.
He’s in his dress blues, with fine lines around his eyes and mouth that hadn’t been there the day before. She has a sudden, possibly self-destructive urge to kiss him hard enough break the tension, to smooth those lines away.
“Sure. Why not?” she says, and grabs her jacket.
Momentous (Dr. Who, ficlet)
When he rescues her (he always rescues her), he grips her chin in one hand and looks at her with something like accusation on his face.
“I’ve risked worlds for you,” he says, a little too intensely.
There isn’t a little boy born who wouldn’t tear the world apart to save his mummy.
Quixotic (Hercule Poirot, ficlet)
Poirot had endured his share of difficulties with banks in the past. Banks were insufferable, bureaucratic agencies, with a level of disinterest and ineptitude sufficient to drive even an average man to distraction.
Poirot, of course, was far from an average man.
And so he was explaining carefully and precisely to the teller why he had been obliged to leave his tisane half-finished and come to the bank himself.
"I send to you my secretary Miss Lemon. Nothing. Then I send my estimable colleague, Captain Hastings -- a most, I must stress, agreeable soul -- and, mademoiselle, he comes back to me cursing your name."
The girl just blinked at him. She was wearing far too much rouge.
I Slept With Someone In Fall Out Boy And All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me (One Tree Hill)
They were in Portland the next time Jake called. The band was doing an acoustic set at this tiny club that looked like it had probably been a Howard Johnson’s at some point in the not-so-distant past.
Pete was onstage, singing about angels with broken wings, and she knew the song was about her.
“Jake?” she said, stepping through the front door and out into the foggy night. The club was on the east bank of the river, just blocks from one of the city’s busiest bridges. Cars zoomed past, their headlights reflecting in the standing pools on water on the street.
“Peyton-“
“What…?”
“I got full custody of Jenny,” he said, and hung up before she had a chance to speak.
It started to drizzle.
Mysteries (SG-1)
The leaves are dying when Daniel brings Vala home.
They’re both a little thinner, a little greyer, a little more lined around the eyes. Her hand in his is bony, clawlike, and she holds him too tightly. Sam exclaims softly when she hugs him and says she can feel his ribs, even through the fabric of the flak jacket someone drapes around him.
It’s been months, but feels more like years.
It’s colder on Earth than it had been on Sahal. He can feel the damp creeping into his bones, making him creak like an old man. It’s as though whatever technique, whatever power (he will not call it magic) the Ori used to age the child aged him as well. He looks at Vala’s face, drawn and dark in the fluorescent lights of the base, and he thinks maybe it aged her, too.
Or maybe that’s just what grief looks like. He’d forgotten, but he remembers now.
Dreamwalk Blue: The Solitude Sessions (Harry Potter, WIP)
There were white tigers in Metis’ head and sharp-beaked blackbirds in her hair.
Tom saw snakes, though he shakily assured her that none of what they were seeing was actually real. It certainly felt real, but she believed simply because Tom said it was so. He also said that it would pass soon, and that things would be as they once were.
That last part she didn’t believe, simply because she knew better.
She caught sight of herself in the mirror one muggy afternoon, rain threatening on the unfamiliar horizon. Her hair clung around her face in damp strands, her skin pale and her eyes wide and dark. She’d aged ten years, a hundred, a thousand. She didn’t know herself anymore.
Night was full or terrors during those first few weeks. Birds tore at her flesh, her face, her belly, waking her from sleep in sobs and wails the pillow couldn’t muffle.
“I’m going to die.”
Tom held her head and said, “Not yet, and not like this.”
And some fics I am currently working on...
Percy Weasley: Rogue Demon Hunter, Episode 6 (Harry Potter)
"Where are you off to?" said a voice from the vague darkness of the kitchen.
Ginny jumped nearly a foot in the air.
"What?!"
"I said," Harry leaned forward, out of the gloomy shadows, "where are you going?"
"I'm, um, just going out for a little while."
"Where, Ginny? Are you seeing Dean? Kingsley?" He paused for dramatic effect. "Percy?"
Busted. She was going to kill Hermione.
"What would make you suggest that?"
"Don't play dumb, Gin. You're terrible at it."
Ginny blinked. "No, I'm not."
Dreamwalk Blue: The Solitude Sessions (Harry Potter)
England was rainy, grey and slightly disappointing upon their return.
It was the second week of September and they’d arrived two days earlier at Southampton. No one met them at the dock - not that June had really expected anyone to - and Hayden had hired a car to take them back to London.
“Might as well end this adventure in style,” he’d said, heaving her steamer trunk into the boot himself. “Unless you’d rather just disappear with a wink and a pop...?”
“Not at all. Let’s make a proper end of it.”
The truth was, now that they were back, she wasn’t really in any sort of hurry to be home.
But eventually they had arrived home, with rain falling outside and the lights somewhat suspiciously low inside Hayden’s townhouse.
"More brandy?" he asked, waving the decanter in her general direction.
"No, Hayden, thank you."
"Marry me?"
"No, Hayden, but thank you," she said placidly, taking a sip from her glass.
“Next Tuesday, then?”
“Next Tuesday,” she agreed. “Assuming, of course, that you still want to ask.”
“Anything could happen, of course. But I’m rather sure I will want to ask.”
Long Dark Teatime (The Lone Gunmen, post-JTS)
“Now this is how it ought to be done.”
It was the middle of May in the Oregon wine country, the sky blue and perfect above them, the mountains white and hazy above the rolling green horizon. Frohike was stretched out in a folding chaise, wearing aviator shades and holding a pint of crisp lager. A half-eaten cheeseburger dribbled mushrooms and bell peppers onto a plate on their table and the strains of bluesy rock and roll music drifted up from the street below.
“You won’t get any argument from me.”
The tiny college town of McMinnville had several major claims to fame: Linfield College football, Willamette Valley pinot noir and the Hotel Oregon’s annual UFO Festival.
The Hotel Oregon also had quite possibly the most inviting rooftop bar on the West Coast.
“Beer, burgers and alien abduction seminars." Frohike patted his belly. "I think I can die a happy man now.”
"Uh, dude? We're already dead, remember?"
"Only technically."
The Geek Rock Series (The Lone Gunmen)
“The van ran out of gas about six blocks from here, and the house,” he pointed at a piece of yellow paper taped to the door, “the house is condemned. I think the universe may be trying to tell me something.”
“I don't think the universe actually works like that.”
When he looked up, she had tears in her eyes.
“Hey,” he said, reaching out to touch her face, “this is my breakdown.”
The Pop Rock Series (The Lone Gunmen)
His roommate that first year at Iowa State was Jakub Dvoracek, a 6'5”/290 wall of solid muscle at Free Safety. Dvoracek was a Czech farm kid from some tiny burg in western Nebraska, with shoulder-length blond curls that he refused to cut despite exasperated pleas from the coaches.
“It's like Samson,” he said, by way of explanation over dinner one night. “In the Bible. He cut his hair, he lost all his strength.”
“Whatever you say, Sunday School,” one of the senior linemen said, clapping him on the shoulder.
The nickname stuck. Jimmy, predictably, got tagged with '007' and a lot of 'shaken, not stirred' jokes from the sportscasters whenever he'd get hit.