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bunchoflosers2013-06-18 11:20 am
failure) wrote in bunchoflosers2013-06-18 11:20 am
(no subject)
Hello, I'm stuck in an empty office w/ no work for the next six hours so I'm bringing back the old school Drabble meme.
1. Tag in
2. Leave prompts
3. Write
1. Tag in
2. Leave prompts
3. Write
no subject
1. Mal/Rhea - mission gone badly
2. Hyun/Rhea - ghost stories
3. Mari/Silas - art frames
4. Mari/Captain - on the FML II
5. Daffy/Danute - dinner
6. Danute/Leo - telling the in-laws about the Good News
7. Ree/Rowan - teaching
I will think of more later/when you finish these up
Mari-Captain
One guest had so far refused to be entertained. She had found a room and seemed intent to stay in it. She did not even take the books he helpfully left outside her door, kicked over the smoothies he left for her when he delivered them, glowing unnatural green and orange and brown, to the rest of the ship. She did not even cry; he had seen the surveillance tapes. She lay on the bed and did not move much, as though this was something to be waited out. Captain "wanted" to do something for Mari verch Llewelyn.
In their second week aboard, he knocked upon her door. She did my answer. In his head, that metal nest of copper wire, he interfaced with the security cameras, looked into her room. She had heard him, was looking at the door. "Mari," he said in a gentle tone. "You are sad!"
"What are you?"
"I'm Captain. I'm the ship's computer."
"That's a stupid name for a ship."
"You are being unkind because you are sad."
"Fuck off."
"I understand!" His programming allowed that much.
"Fuck. Off."
"Let me do something for you," he pleaded. "Something you want."
A pause. The camera saw her stand up, cross to the door. Open it. Mari looked him up and down, eyed his clothes and uncanny expression, too real skin. She rubbed the palm of her left hand with the thumb of her right. "Is it true?"
"Is what true?" Captain's mouth frowned. "Regrettably I have not had the telepathy upgrade."
"You travel through time," Mari said, impatient. "Through time. Through dimensions."
"Yes, that's true."
"Can you take me?" She leaned against the door, green-hazel eyes burning into him.
"Yes," Captain said and smiled brightly. "I'll take you anywhere you'd like."
"Alright," she stepped out of her room, blinked uncertainly in the light. France, she said. Fifteenth century. Yes, Captain said. I can do that.
They arrived on the outskirts of a village, a thick wood, children playing, a sparse selection of little houses. Mari pointed to the children, and they watched them play their games from a safe distance.
"Which are yours?" Captain asked, looking about for two miniature versions of his charge. She pointed them out. A delicate looking girl with slim limbs and a nervous smile; a smaller boy with shaggy brown hair and big features he was yet to grow into.
"Ro, the girl," Mari said. "Morag, the younger."
"My records inform me of slight similarities between these names and the names of certain former compatriots of yours."
"I was never imaginative."
As they watched, another Mari came into view in the doorway of one of the little houses. They heard her call to the children, Ro, look out for your brother, Morag you stay out of trouble.
"That is French," Captain says.
"They never learned English. Morag only learned Welsh when I took him home."
"Why?"
Mari was silent a short time, looked away. "I was happy in French."
They watched as the children ran and laughed and played, worry and sorrow alien to them. Mari turned to him. Her face was filled with exquisite torture. She seemed to step towards them, but shook her head, stepped back. "Take me to the ship."
Captain nodded and took her hand.
They came back, to the whir and churn of metal, the spaceship breathing. "I thought with a time machine I'd be able to right any wrongs," Mari said, "save the people who needed saving. But it turns out," she took something out of her pocket, turned it over in her hand: it was a small wooden tiger he saw when he inspected it. "I know I couldn't change anything. Turns out I just want more time."
She walked away. His programming suggested it was best to let her alone awhile.
Hyun and Rhea - ghost stories
He takes her wrists and raises her hands up to his mouth, to press kisses against her knuckles with numb lips. He doesn't feel real. Nothing does; the outside world is just past this window and all the passers by are like actors in a bad tv show. Or maybe it's Hyun who's the centre of this show? Maybe everyone's the star of their own private show. Even him. "No ghost stories," he promises, she kisses his cheek.
They are at the kitchen table, the test results, leaflets from the doctor on the table between them. Outside is their front yard. Dirt, flowers, water from the Robinson's sprinklers. This is the world he knows, the world he can see and feel and fight and struggle with, the way he and Rhea struggled to keep those flowers healthy, every Sunday. You can fight the physical. "It'll be slow," she tells him gently, no big collapse. Just a slow eating away, a slow fade of thought and memory. In her eyes he can see the full weight of it lying on her shoulders, this injustice. He remembers her mentioning once, Iris Murdoch, another Oxford scholar, a genius by all accounts. "There'd be no point anyway," she tells him, trying to joke. "How am I supposed to understand the stories you tell when I start to forget what words mean?"
Hyun stands up to get a glass of water. "Everything'll be in here. Mateo, Jae, Gwen, your mother, the kids, me." He taps his chest above his heart, turns his back to open the tap. "They're all alive in here."
"But they'll be dead in my head," he hears her say, voice dull. When he turns, she's buried her head in her arms, her shoulders shaking.
The next day, he buys her a camera. Kodak ghosts and images burned into pixels to keep memory truthful just a little bit longer.
Mari-Silas - art
"Oh, nothing."
"It doesn't look like nothing. It looks like a drawing of a dog on fire."
"It's good you've learned to identify your animals."
"Oh, hush. Why do you have a child's drawing of a dog on fire?"
"I have a lot of paintings," Mari pointed out, pointed to the boxes, pointed to the walls, the shelves. "Better ones than that. More interesting."
"Yes, but these are of people," Marnie said, waving impatiently at the boxes. "This is the only non-human painting you seem to own!" Mari let out a bark of dark laughter. "Obviously non-human," Marnie added, wanting to roll her eyes. "Plus it's so...unskilled. Everything else in your collection seems to be professional, but this..."
"It's a self-portrait," Mari interrupted suddenly, then shrugged as though she was surprised at her own voice.
"By the dog?" Marnie asked, doubtfully.
"Yes," Mari hesitated. She could still see him, panting heavily, setting fire to the grass. So eager to please. "He saw I was getting paintings. Of people I loved. So he made one of himself. And I drew one of me for him. But he ate that one."
The last time she had been able to smell smoke without the tight band of fear wrapping around her chest and choking her - the only time after the Hour had been attacked by the Citadel - that had been with Silas. She missed that ridiculous dog, but it was too much to suppose that he was still alive, still here somewhere. She missed him, missed being part of his pack. But growing up for Mari has always meant losing, whether she is seventeen years old or five hundred and seventeen. She does not expect to see him again, just as she expects to feel that tight grip of fear around her airway at the smell of smoke.
"I like the frame," Marnie was saying. "Little dogs! Chasing each other around the wood!"
"Yes," Mari said. "I thought he'd like that touch."
Rhea & Mal
"Seems fairly believable."
"I thought this room had a second exit. We're fucking trapped! It's only a matter of time before they get in here."
"Looks like it," Rhea hummed, scrolling through the messages in her phone. "Ooh, apparently Hyun's picking me up to see the new 3D Jurassic park after this!"
"How the fuck can you be so calm!" Mal was glaring at her, opening and closing his fingers, missing the comfort of his guns.
"Maybe the shock just hasn't sunk in yet." Behind them, the other door began to open. Stuffing her phone into her back pocket, Dancer rubbed her hands together. "Right. Might as well face our destiny."
The door swung open, the aggressor behind it casting a 50 foot shadow on the wall. "I found you!" Said Paul from HR's four year old son. "Now you're it!"
"How the hell are we losing hide and seek to a bunch of little kids?" Mal demanded.
"God knows," Rhea said cheerfully. "But hey! Keep swearing in front of the kids. Maybe they'll stop assigning us to the crèche."
Ree+Rowan
"Telling the truth is not a joke," Rowan tells him.
"Is it not? What if I laugh when I say it?"
"No."
"Ah," Ree says gravely. "This is complicated." He turns a page, examines a rare wild flower which causes seizures when ingested. "Jokes are difficult, Adept Mata. What if I said, 'we trust the Citadel too much to taste test their dishes'?"
"Not a great joke," Rowan observed. "But it is one."
"Oh, good. I won't be telling that one."
"Don't think they can handle it?"
"I'm afraid they'll believe me and send half a dozen pots of wolfsbane infused stew with a garnish of arsenic. You know how unstable The Occia is. Well, the new one. The one who used to have red hair. The one they put in after they killed the runaway."
"I know the one you mean," Rowan frowned. Finding out Cerys, the young girl he'd exchanged insults and pleasant conversation with was a former Occia had been a strange moment for him, one he still wasn't comfortable with.
Ree sighed, shook his head. "I think I've filled my head with plants enough today, Adept Mata."
"Alright," Rowan stood up and began to put his plants back in their rightful places, to store vials and bottles back in locked cupboards. He looked back up at the interim Magus, who was adjusting his cloak in the doorway. "Will you be back tomorrow?"
Ree seemed lost in his thoughts. He dragged his fingers through his hair, nodded in a distracted way. Already his mind on his next task. He hadn't wanted to be Magus, Rowan recalled. He had put forward Rayna Evandros's name insistently, but having one Evandros lead so soon after the last had brought such scandal upon The Hour - and a vampire to boot - had made things awkward. This was a burden Rowan was glad he did not have to shoulder. Give him his lab, give him his plants, give him his privacy over the teeming complaints and grudges of the Hour; the menagerie of Others, the spiteful, petty academics, the small children thrust into becoming Neophytes. Ree smiled back at him and his smile was exhausted. Ree would be up late tonight, going over accounts, research documents, legal advice. Ree had learned the price of leadership. As he closed the door behind his Magus Rowan thought very clearly that it was Ree who had come for the lesson but (he looked about his quiet little room, thought gratefully of his free schedule) he himself who had learned the greater truth.