Fic: Dark Side of the Planet, Eight Below
Title: Dark Side of the Planet
Fandom/Characters: Eight Below, ensemble
Word Count: 472
Prompt: 3/6/07 wind for fic_15
Rating: G
Dr. Davis McClaren thinks in rocks.
"They're solid," he tells his wife, watching her tilt her head and study him like she studies murderers and death row inmates, trying to wrap them up in a neat package with a little bow and realizing they're anything but and all her book-knowledge isn't going to let her learn people. She practices on him all the time. "They don't change. They'll wait for us, when everything else fails."
He thinks in sediment and limestone and porous sand, flowing through his brain and reaching for the stars.
Nothing he has ever studied prepares him for Antarctica.
It is tempting to believe one is at the beginning or the end of the world, with nothing but the most primitive of maps and communication over huge ridges of white, air-brushed like frosting on the cake that Davis can't wait to get his hands on. Stockholm Syndrome stops being something highlighted on his wife's vocabulary list and becomes reality. It's just the six of them, and the eight dogs, alone in the world filled with ice and rocks and wind racing across the desert.
Davis loves it.
Up until he almost dies.
"That had never been part of the plan," he tells his investors, and they laugh, limited imaginations stretching to provide even this, skulls as thick an impenetrable as fossils.
In the back of the room, Jerry Shepard listens to him speak with eyes like blue-skinned ghosts, face sunk and hallow like midsummer's night, and despite the bright museum lights and his expensive suit, a shiver races down Davis's spine. He sees Eve turn around, sees her brows crease.
"Who did he lose?" she whispers to him later, dropping her wedding ring into her glass with her dentures and sliding between the covers.
"Everything," Davis replies, holding up Eric's drawing of the eight sled dogs. He owes them his life.
He came from earth and to earth he would return, and he never thought that the only reason he was still walking and talking aliens and outer space meteorites would be because of a bunch of over-fluffy, blue-eyed dogs. Flesh and bone, calcium and iron and raw power, raw devotion and he never saw that in his rocks, there at the end of the world.
He turns in his seat there at the beginning of everything with cheeks wind-chapped, watches Jerry pull Katie close and kiss her, watches Shadow lurch forward to lick both of them, turning it into a pseudo three-way French kiss that Davis hasn't seen attempted since eighth grade. He doesn't smile, because his love and his gratitude isn't as deep-rooted as Jerry's is, doesn't date back to prehistoric times. Stockholm Syndrome and Pavlov's dogs, this is Antarctica.
He doesn't think he will ever forget that Jerry Shepard has his dogs's eyes, blue as ice.
Fandom/Characters: Eight Below, ensemble
Word Count: 472
Prompt: 3/6/07 wind for fic_15
Rating: G
Dr. Davis McClaren thinks in rocks.
"They're solid," he tells his wife, watching her tilt her head and study him like she studies murderers and death row inmates, trying to wrap them up in a neat package with a little bow and realizing they're anything but and all her book-knowledge isn't going to let her learn people. She practices on him all the time. "They don't change. They'll wait for us, when everything else fails."
He thinks in sediment and limestone and porous sand, flowing through his brain and reaching for the stars.
Nothing he has ever studied prepares him for Antarctica.
It is tempting to believe one is at the beginning or the end of the world, with nothing but the most primitive of maps and communication over huge ridges of white, air-brushed like frosting on the cake that Davis can't wait to get his hands on. Stockholm Syndrome stops being something highlighted on his wife's vocabulary list and becomes reality. It's just the six of them, and the eight dogs, alone in the world filled with ice and rocks and wind racing across the desert.
Davis loves it.
Up until he almost dies.
"That had never been part of the plan," he tells his investors, and they laugh, limited imaginations stretching to provide even this, skulls as thick an impenetrable as fossils.
In the back of the room, Jerry Shepard listens to him speak with eyes like blue-skinned ghosts, face sunk and hallow like midsummer's night, and despite the bright museum lights and his expensive suit, a shiver races down Davis's spine. He sees Eve turn around, sees her brows crease.
"Who did he lose?" she whispers to him later, dropping her wedding ring into her glass with her dentures and sliding between the covers.
"Everything," Davis replies, holding up Eric's drawing of the eight sled dogs. He owes them his life.
He came from earth and to earth he would return, and he never thought that the only reason he was still walking and talking aliens and outer space meteorites would be because of a bunch of over-fluffy, blue-eyed dogs. Flesh and bone, calcium and iron and raw power, raw devotion and he never saw that in his rocks, there at the end of the world.
He turns in his seat there at the beginning of everything with cheeks wind-chapped, watches Jerry pull Katie close and kiss her, watches Shadow lurch forward to lick both of them, turning it into a pseudo three-way French kiss that Davis hasn't seen attempted since eighth grade. He doesn't smile, because his love and his gratitude isn't as deep-rooted as Jerry's is, doesn't date back to prehistoric times. Stockholm Syndrome and Pavlov's dogs, this is Antarctica.
He doesn't think he will ever forget that Jerry Shepard has his dogs's eyes, blue as ice.