Dollhouse fic: Carved in Ink (pg)
Title: Carved in Ink
Author: SabaceanBabe
Rating: PG
Word count: 281
Focus: Paul Ballard
Spoilers: mainly for Epitaph One
Disclaimer: It all belongs to Joss, as far as I'm concerned, I'm just borrowing.
Author's note: thank you, grav_ity, for the speedy beta. This is written for carpenyx for the occasion of her birthday. She wanted the mood to be "nostalgia" and her prompt was "a picture is worth a thousand words." I got to pick the fandom.
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He pulled on a pair of jeans, old and worn but clean, ignoring the sting of the fabric against the raw tattoo at the small of his back. A tattoo that read “Paul Ballard - I am not a Cylon.” It wasn’t the standard script, but if you couldn’t have a little bit of humor at the end of the world, when could you have it?
Something crackled in his back pocket as he zipped his fly and, frowning, he reached in and pulled out a photograph, one that had obviously been through the wash. Wrinkled and split, looking more like fabric itself than something printed on heavy duty photographic paper, Caroline’s image in black and white looked out at him. He ran a fingertip lightly over her smile.
“I never thought I’d miss searching for you,” he whispered to the girl in the photograph. It had been so much easier then; compared to the here and now, everything then was sane and made sense.
“Paul, did you say something?” He looked over at Echo, at Caroline, the two of them merged into one and that much stronger for it. “Get a shirt on. We need to get out of here.” The urgency in her voice warred in him with the relaxed and smiling young woman in the picture until the urgency won out. The sound of gunfire in the street below might have had something to do with that, too.
He slipped the photograph back into his pocket, pulled a t-shirt over his head and shrugged into his old field jacket. “Let’s go.” He grabbed the sawed-off shotgun she held out to him and they headed together out into the unknown.
Author: SabaceanBabe
Rating: PG
Word count: 281
Focus: Paul Ballard
Spoilers: mainly for Epitaph One
Disclaimer: It all belongs to Joss, as far as I'm concerned, I'm just borrowing.
Author's note: thank you, grav_ity, for the speedy beta. This is written for carpenyx for the occasion of her birthday. She wanted the mood to be "nostalgia" and her prompt was "a picture is worth a thousand words." I got to pick the fandom.
--------------------------
He pulled on a pair of jeans, old and worn but clean, ignoring the sting of the fabric against the raw tattoo at the small of his back. A tattoo that read “Paul Ballard - I am not a Cylon.” It wasn’t the standard script, but if you couldn’t have a little bit of humor at the end of the world, when could you have it?
Something crackled in his back pocket as he zipped his fly and, frowning, he reached in and pulled out a photograph, one that had obviously been through the wash. Wrinkled and split, looking more like fabric itself than something printed on heavy duty photographic paper, Caroline’s image in black and white looked out at him. He ran a fingertip lightly over her smile.
“I never thought I’d miss searching for you,” he whispered to the girl in the photograph. It had been so much easier then; compared to the here and now, everything then was sane and made sense.
“Paul, did you say something?” He looked over at Echo, at Caroline, the two of them merged into one and that much stronger for it. “Get a shirt on. We need to get out of here.” The urgency in her voice warred in him with the relaxed and smiling young woman in the picture until the urgency won out. The sound of gunfire in the street below might have had something to do with that, too.
He slipped the photograph back into his pocket, pulled a t-shirt over his head and shrugged into his old field jacket. “Let’s go.” He grabbed the sawed-off shotgun she held out to him and they headed together out into the unknown.