All we need is ice cream and a gun

Prompt me

2011-02-12T13:12:32Z

What I want to write: Bones/Lost Girl fic in which Hodgins and Dyson are sullen genius siblings who fight crime.

What I really need to write: anything that might give me even the slightest idea of what to do for spacebigbang.

To this end: it's commentfic season! I am accepting any and all space-themed prompts. Any of my fandoms, any pairing, and scenario, as long as it's taking place in a galaxy far, far away or up a Jeffries tube or in a dead satellite orbiting a sun.

Go!

Rough list of fandoms: Star Trek TOS/Reboot, Inception, bandom, Merlin, Bones, Lost Girl, Whoverse, Dollhouse, several others I can never remember when I list them. Throw in a name and I'll give it a go.

This is why capitalism always wins

2011-01-06T19:58:35Z

I'm having the shittiest week at work and I have to turn nine pages of non-sequential ramblings on a subject I don't understand into four pages of copy by tomorrow morning, but I own a lamp that looks like a house when you put a book on it (see point three here), so it is ALL FINE.

normalhumanbein @ 2011-01-05T19:16:00

2011-01-05T19:16:46Z

spacebigbang
to infinity and beyond...

You'd think at this point I'd have learned that deadlines and challenges do not make me write more, but no, I'm still flogging the bigbang horse. (The awesome and enticing challenge this time being that they'll take original fic too, and I really need to get on that).

Maybe it's just catharsis...

2011-01-04T22:12:08Z

Things which I like on the internet:

1) This awesome letter Gene Roddenberry wrote to his agent after The Cage was rejected, in which he talks a lot about how he really, truly wants to make everyone realise that science fiction is a thing of wonder and beauty, but will settle for making them think it's kind of okay if it means he gets to have dinner with his kids and knock off early on Fridays.

1a) The 19th and 20th Century Correspondance Pool. Why yes, I am one of those creepy people who reads your post if you leave it open.

2) Someoneelsewillputitback.com. As a person who routinely gets halfway through shopping, realises she's forgotten her purse, stashes her shopping on an out-of-the-way shelf, runs home for her purse and then tries to retrieve the hidden shopping without anyone seeing her and thinking she's a loon who collects other people's warm milk for kicks, it's statistically inevitable that I will end up on this website. And whatever they caption me with will probably be true.

3) This.

You?

Fic: Put these words in your mouth

2010-12-20T23:34:46Z

Put these words in your mouth
ST:XI
Kirk/McCoy preslash
PG-13
2,500 words
Warnings for angst, poor structural integrity, language, a running joke about shooting people in the ass and the abuse of half of a mattress.
For the space_wrapped prompt: "Post-apocalyptic Christmas - keeping the festive spirit alive, even though 90% of the population isn't."

The man standing in front of Jim’s door differs from what Jim would consider a traditional Christmas Miracle in several key ways. Namely:

1) He’s naked.

2) He’s bloody.

3) He’s pissing through Jim’s letterbox.

But he’s human and alive and saying something to Jim that isn’t “get out of here before I suck your eyeballs out of your skull and feed them to the sand rats,” which makes him pretty much unique among the life forms Jim’s encountered in the last eighteen months.

“You’re gonna shoot me, I’d be grateful for some pants first,” the Miracle says. “You can have ‘em back soon as I’m cold.”

Jim realises he still has his plasma rifle raised to his shoulder. It occurs to him, dimly, that being presented with your very own Christmas Miracle only to shoot it in its bare, bony ass could probably be construed as ungrateful, and then, even more dimly, that he’s finally lost his mind.

“I’m Kirk,” he tells the Miracle. “My name’s Jim Kirk.”

“Hooray for you.” The miraculous bag of bones finishes pissing and kicks sand over the damp patch at the bottom of Jim’s door, still studiously not raising his eyes from the ground, like he thinks looking directly at Jim’s rifle will make it go off.

“I’m not gonna shoot you,” Jim tries. It comes out more like a question than he means it to. “You wanna trade something or something?”

The Miracle does look up, then. “Kid,” he says, staring at Jim like he’s grown a second head, “I got three cracked ribs, two broken fingers and a partridge in a pear tree. All of it’s yours if you want it. If you don’t, either shoot me or get out of my goddamn way.”

This is the most anyone has said to Jim without opening fire on him since the settlers on the other side of the city made it clear they didn’t want his company, maybe since the search party sent up from Farragut Camp accused him of murdering himself, stealing his own clothing and impersonating Jim Kirk for his own nefarious purposes.

The urge to pull the Miracle close and check he’s real is suddenly embarrassingly strong; Jim wants to see if he’s as much a sack of burnt up bones as he looks, see if he still smells like the antiseptic cities to the south or if he’s picked up the salt-dirt smell of the desert already. He can’t have been out here that long, Jim reasons, not if he’d been dumb enough to try and talk to the settlers. He can’t know much and he doesn’t have anything and Jim could help him, help ease those bones, maybe, a little, if he would just -

He doesn’t realise he’s moved forward until Bones steps back. “Hey, hey, no, no, it’s okay. It’s okay, I’m not, this isn’t, um. I’m on my own.” Seventy-five percent of the population of the Academy of the United Federation of Cartographers once voted Jim Best Public Speaker and Most Likely to Succeed. He’s almost glad they aren’t around to see this pathetic display of neediness and mute panic. Almost. “I’m from the Federation.”

He shrugs off his jacket and tosses it over to Bones, who has continued to edge incrementally backwards. “See that insignia? Means I’m from the Enterprise unit. We get sent out to –”

“Risk your damn fool necks is what you’re sent out to do,” Bones grouses, but he puts the jacket on, apparently convinced that Jim isn’t the kind of lunatic who’d kill a Fed and then dress up in his clothes and wander round the desert. Jim brightens a little.

“You’ve heard of us!”

“I’ve heard you’re insane.”

Jim gives his best reassuring smile. Bones shivers.

*

Jim doesn’t actually remember the attack. He used to pretend to a lot as a child, before his friends got old enough to figure out that being born in space made him too young to remember anything that happened there, but all he really knows is that aliens arrived, his dad died, half the world vanished under a blanket of white noise and then the aliens disappeared again, like they’d showed up just to fuck with his family.

(Tangentially: Jim’s pretty sure he saw an alien once, nearly two years back, when he broke protocol and headed off into the White alone to try and find Riley’s body. It flickered in and out of view on the horizon, the only dark shape in a endlessly bright, endlessly featureless landscape, and it’d taken Jim three days to remember what they told you in Basic about how seeing aliens was one of the first signs that you’d spent too long in the White and needed to rock on back to Base Camp.

Jim had dutifully attempted to rock on back but had somehow ended up here, on the south side of a city not even the settlers remember the name of, hoping the radiation doesn’t kill him before he manages to reboot his Compass and find his way back to where he’s actually meant to be.)

Leonard’s memories of that time are a little clearer, though they’re still mostly of a bright light on the horizon and a horrible noise always being in the air, like everyone was driving through a tunnel with the radio real loud, right up until his mama wrapped him up in most of the clothes he owned and bundled him out of the house and into the endless line of people trekking south, where it was supposed to be safe.

(Somewhat less tangentially: Leonard’s not from a rich family but the kind that’s valuable in a crisis, and he made it through the exodus and the aftermath well enough to wind up with a wife and a child and more than most folks, right up until his wife went a little crazy and took off with some hair-brained cult that swore blind the aliens had opened up some kind of door on Paradise right there in that burnt, bright space where the Midwest used to be and took their daughter to walk through it, at which point Leonard took off into the White after them with pretty much the clothes on his back, a fifth of strong liquor and a firm conviction that he was gonna cold clock anyone who tried to get between him and his baby girl.

He doesn’t remember where his clothes went.

He refuses to even think that he’s seen an alien.

He’s not entirely sure everyone else can still hear the terrible radio noise.)

*

Jim doesn’t use the top two floors of the house because – well, he probably started avoiding them when the settlers still looked for him most nights, but at this point it’s mostly habit. Still, the rooms he’s got set up in the basement are pretty neat, he thinks, apart from the strange green patch growing on the far wall, and he doesn’t like the way Bones is staring around him like it’s the weirdest thing he’s ever seen.

“This isn’t the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen,” Jim tells him.

“It might be.”

“Yeah right. You just walked in out of the White.”

“Is that a Christmas tree? With starships on it?”

“They’re salt cellars,” Jim explains, with pride, before realising that probably makes him sound insane. “I’m not insane. The tree was just in here, and my Mom – this one year I made her buy a whole set of starship-shaped tree ornaments because I was obsessed with the ‘fleet as a kid, and then she cried all Christmas because my dad died in the attack and after that she wouldn’t take them down, and -” It strikes Jim that this may not exactly be helping his cause. “I just don’t want you to think you’re about to take drugs off a crazy person.”

Bones gives him a long, level and surprisingly believing look. “My six-year-old hates starships,” he says, eventually.

“Smart kid.”

Bones relaxes infinitesimally at that, enough to accept Jim’s offer of pants and five minutes with a medkit, anyhow, but not enough to talk or eat or tell Jim anything about the outside world other than it’s still there and it still sucks. The conversation goes something like this:

“Where’d you come from?”

“Georgia.”

“Where’d you hit the White?”

Bones shrugs.

“How long had you been walking before you got here?”

Bones shrugs.

“My equipment’s fucked, I keep trying to fix it so I can start up or head back, but until I do I’ve got no way of knowing whether I’m going forwards or back.”

“I’m going forwards.”

“You shouldn’t.”

Bones shrugs.

“You’ll die.”

Bones shrugs.

“My partner, Gary Mitchell, he died.”

Bones looks sad.

“You can stay a couple of days at least, get rested up.”

“I’m going forwards.”

“Where did you come in from?”

“Georgia.”

“No, but where did you first hit the White?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m trying to get my equipment fixed. I’ve managed to find some parts from things left in the other houses but shit, the radiation screws with everything.”

Bones shrugs.

“My partner, Gary, I don’t even know where he died.”

Bones looks sad.

“You could stay a couple of days, if you need to rest up.”

Bones raises an eyebrow.

Jim laughs.

Bones raises the eyebrow further.

“But seriously,” Jim says, “how long were you walking before you got here? If you give me a rough idea, I can maybe figure out where we’d be on a C-23 map - ”

It goes on for longer than Jim would care to admit and is, embarrassingly, his most satisfying conversational experience in recent memory. When Bones is finally persuaded to bed down on half a mattress in the back corner of the basement, Jim heads out on night patrol almost dizzy with humiliation and glee.

*

By the time Jim gets back from night patrol, Bones is gone.

So are the pants he borrowed, and most of Jim’s emergency stash of medical supplies.

The good news is that everything’s too tidy for him to have been killed or kidnapped; the bad news is that that means that Jim’s Christmas Miracle was a lying, scheming son of a bitch and Jim should have shot him in his bare ass when the opportunity presented itself.

How the desire to retroactively shoot Bones leads to Jim frantically dry-humping the mattress he slept on isn’t something Jim can really explain. To be honest, he’s not really aware of it until he’s got one hand down his pants and his face shoved into one sleeve of the jacket Bones borrowed, grunting his way to an orgasm that leaves him feeling sticky and stupid and alone.

Bones is probably sitting up with the settlers, laughing at him.

Fuck, Bones probably is a settler. He’s probably been here longer than Jim has.

Jim lets himself waste thirty minutes of his life wondering how long he’d last if he marched into the settlers’ camp with a gun, then goes to sleep. There’ll be no-one out in the heat of the afternoon, and then he can go scavenging for something that can fix this. Maybe fix his Compass, finally. Maybe get the fuck out of here.

*

He doesn’t go scavenging, in the end. Instead, he:
• checks the security systems and the water level
• stares at a protein pack for seven minutes
• decides to forgo eating in favour of doing the horizontal tango with his half-a-mattress twice more
• eats the protein pack anyway
• adds more notes to the map he’s building of whatever city this used to be, even though at this point it’s so finely detailed he’s struggling for space
• zones out staring at his bald aluminium Christmas tree, wondering what the fuck happened to his brother and where his mom’s gone and when exactly he got so soft and useless
• has a weird moment where he thinks he can hear Pike barking instructions like he wants to nail them to the inside of Jim’s skull one word at a time before he realises
• no, that’s the sound of the alarm on Nth Street going haywire, and
• picks up his rifle, flicks off the safety and heads out to shoot Bones in the ass.

He finds Bones standing in the middle of Nth Street, holding a plate and looking for all the world like he knows he’s going to be shot in the ass and has made his peace with that. “Look, kid –”

“I’m going to shoot you in the ass,” Jim informs him.

“And that’s fair. But I really think you should come inside first.”

“Excuse me?” There is no way Bones can know about the entire shirt-mattress episode. No way at all. That cannot possibly be what he means. Jim’s cock twitches hopefully anyway, just to let him know that it still exists and approves.

“I’m a doctor, okay? I’m a doctor, and from what I’ve seen they don’t have one, and I figured I’d get more out’ve ‘em than you could.” He looks sad again, like he didn’t want to admit that to Jim’s face. “Most of your stuff’s still in here.”

He slides the remains of Jim’s medkit across to him, and yeah, fine, it’s intact, and there are ration packs in it again and some ragtag bits of circuitry that look shit but might not be, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t shooting anyone anymore. “What you got there?”

Now it’s Bones’ turn to look embarrassed. He gestures vaguely with the plate, like that might prompt it to explain itself. “It’s a plate.”

“You traded my med supplies for a plate?”

“No, I, uh. I found this one. I was just – ” Bones glances sidelong at some squat wreck of a house at the end of the street. Jim braces himself for an ambush, but all he gets is Bones looking sheepish again and saying, “Would you have dinner with me? I’d like to have dinner with you. What with it being the holiday, and you not shooting me in the ass.”

“You’re wearing my pants,” Jim says, but he follows Bones in anyway.

Inside the house is... kind of a shambles, actually. Something black and foul-smelling squats in the middle of a table – Jim’s pretty sure it’s a mixture of protein supplement and cactus flesh, which Bones obviously hasn’t been told is fucking hideous and to be eaten only after your partner – and the table has been covered with crockery that Bones seems to have put together with spit and prayer over the course of a morning.

In front of one seat is a small stack of ammo wrapped in what Jim thinks for a split second is ribbon, before he realises that it’s actually a strip torn from the hem of the pants he strongly suspects he's never getting back. There's a string of tiny lights hooked up to a car battery and looped round nails in the walls. They’re the shape of starships, and they look like something Jim’s mom would have humoured him with when he was five.

He can’t breathe round the lump in his throat.

“I can’t stay here,” Bones is saying, and he sounds like he can’t really breathe, either. “And I don’t know if I could talk you into leaving, but I need to find my daughter, so. Thank you for not shooting me, and for letting me fix up my fingers. It was good to know you, Jim Kirk. Merry Christmas."

And then Bones smiles, kind of.

It’s terrifying.

It’s the best thing Jim’s seen in years.

I ATEN'T DEAD

2010-11-19T22:35:41Z

...just in case you were wondering.

[insert standard I-hate-my-job rant here]

[insert standard I'm-dropping-out-of-inception_bang self-flagellation here]

[insert I-saw-Mark-Watson-he-isso-lovely flailing here]

AND NOW SLEEP. OH GOD I AM SO OLD AND TIRED AND OLD.

normalhumanbein @ 2010-10-02T13:49:00

2010-10-02T12:49:05Z

Things I learned about last night: in ~~some parts of Romania~~ an apparently ficititious country the guy who gave the talk I went to made up, there's a folk belief that if you're walking through a forest and see a blue light, you should stop and dig under it, because there will be treasure.

Things rubynye has linked to this morning: NASA's The Universe Is Cooler Than You photo of the day, which looks like this.

I. I just. How many space madness fics can one person have outlined at once, feasibly?

This passage from Dracula is not helping:

"The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear. The driver, however, was not in the least disturbed. He kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.

Suddenly, away on our left I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment. He at once checked the horses, and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer. But while I wondered, the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly, and now looking back, it is like a sort of awful nightmare. Once the flame appeared so near the road, that even in the darkness around us I could watch the driver's motions. He went rapidly to where the blue flame arose, it must have been very faint, for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at all, and gathering a few stones, formed them into some device.

Once there appeared a strange optical effect. When he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same."

SHUT UP BRAIN, SHUT UP. There will be no insane space vampire fic. NONE.

Without meaning to sound creepy...

2010-09-20T17:43:38Z

...I just want to crawl inside cold_clarity's brain, seriously.

There is more delicious post-pandemic MCR fic here.

Fic: When you want to feel like you're good enough [MCR, pretty much everyone, R]

2010-09-19T23:50:28Z

So cold_clarity saw the new MCR video and told me the greatest AU idea in the history of recorded time.

I hijacked it and added conjunctions and frottage.

Such is life.

When you want to feel like you're good enough (the sex lives of the bombsite boys)
Frank/Gerard, Ray/Gerard, some Ray/Frank, Mikey/Gerard if you squint and are that way inclined.
R
~2,000 words.

Ray and Gerard are fifteen and bored and living in a community that’s largely populated by post-pandemic mutants. What happens between them is occasional and inevitable and doesn’t get mentioned much.

*

Mikey ends up in the hospital like this:

Gerard comes home one day when he’s sixteen to find a good haul in the yard. It’s nearly a full shopping cart of mostly-working electronics, traps and plates and navs and more. The rest of the caravan have ventured out of their trailers to look at it, admiringly, from a safe not-gonna-steal-from-you-no-way distance. Gerard drops his bike and whoops, helmet only halfway off by the time he gets inside, voice muffled when he calls out, “You guys are like fucking wizards. Where did you find all that shit?”

“Language,” his mother snaps.

His father is at the table up front, making the most of the last light as he fidgets with the wires of a Hospital-grade bear trap. “Holy shit,” Gerard breathes. “Is that - ?”

“It was at the yard. Greys must not have known what it was.”

“Holy shit.”

“Language.”

“Where’s Mikey? Hey, Mikeski!” Mikey is twelve and doesn’t have a scavenger’s eye yet, is constantly pissed that he never manages to find anything good.

“Gerard!” his mother shrieks, and it’s then that he notices how strained her voice is, how high and rough, how she has her hand covering her mouth like she doesn’t way to speak.

“Greys,” his father says. “At the junk site. There were –”

“You sold him,” Gerard hears himself say, because this is bullshit, this is such fucking bullshit.

“There were Greys at the junk site,” his father repeats. “I couldn’t, and they – ”

“You sold him,” Gerard shots, because no, no way, if there had been Greys at the junk site there’s be Greys here now. They follow, they fight, they don’t like giving up what’s theirs.

“They gutted him. Right in front of me, they –” his father sobs, a torn wet sound in his chest and Gerard wants to punch him in the face, wants to break his father’s skull open with his helmet because they sold him, they sold him, they gave him to the Doctors and –

“I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t.”

There would never be that much of the good stuff at a junk site. There’s barely that much of the good stuff in a torched clinic.

“Get infected,” Gerard hears himself say. “Get infected, and get fucked. I hope you both die.”

And then he leaves home.

Home drives away two nights later, the entire caravan roaring and spluttering away into the night, and Gerard is halfway glad that they made up his mind for him.

*

Frank and Gerard are go to check out the gas station while Mikey and Ray keep the van at the kind of distance that means only two of them can possibly die at once.

It looks dead, but then so does everywhere and so do Greys, and just because the pumps are sitting empty, even the pools where the hoses have been pulled out dry, doesn’t mean there isn’t something in there that something else’ll kill them for.

They’re rounding the corner of the carwash when Frank swears and tackles him with enough force that he tastes dirt and feels his gun spin away from him.

“Pick it up,” Frank hisses. “Fuck, fuck, pick it up, there’s one in there.”

Gerard’s gun is back in his hand before he really thinks of moving. “It’s real?”

“It’s real.”

“You sure?”

“Jesus, Way, I’m sure. I heard it move.”

“Fuck.”

Frank pulls his revolver, which is a rusted piece of shit most useful as a bludgeon. Gerard takes a breath and reminds himself that neither of them have a huge amount worth living for. They cut across the last of the lot and slide in under the ledge of the cashier’s bulletproof bubble. “You charged?” Frank asks.

Gerard nods. “There anything in that?”

Frank grins. “Only one way to find out, right?”

Well, no, Gerard wants to say, you could just look, but then the doors open and Frank’s screaming and firing and the Grey by the paperback stand is lunging forward with an unholy shriek despite the four holes in its chest and Gerard can do nothing but charge in and open fire on it too, in the hope that a laser will pierce its posthuman hide.

It does.

It doesn’t do much to stop another one leaping over the register and sinking its claws into his fucking face, though.

He falls back into a rack of something sharp and the gun goes, he doesn’t know where the gun goes, he just keeps kicking and kicking and digging his thumbs into the suppurating sores that should be its eyes until Frank stops laughing long enough to throw his whole body at the thing and knock it on its back long enough to shoot it in the head.

It doesn’t bleed much, Gerard notes, absently. It must have been an old one. “You could’ve done that faster,” is what he says. He can’t feel his face or catch his breath or trust his knees to hold him if he tries to move, so he just stays slumped there against the bumper bags of processed foods as Frank settles himself down, knees bracketing Gerard’s hips and says, “Could’ve done it slower too, pretty boy, and then where would you be?”

One of his nails traces a gouge in Gerard’s cheek. “You’re gonna turn into one.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s okay,” Frank says, cupping Gerard’s face, pressing hard against the set of symmetrical cuts. “I’m gonna turn into one, too. From the medicine.” He smiles, not unkindly. “Mikey’s gonna.”

Gerard’s had enough, then; goes to push him off but Frank’s surprisingly fucking dense for a half-starved midget and Gerard can’t get the sick shaking feeling out of his arms and all that happens is that Frank hitches himself up closer, gets one of Gerard’s hands under his knee and holds the other, his free hand slotting itself under Gerard’s jaw and clamping down, hard. “Hey, hey, shh, it’s okay. It’s okay. Nobody cares. Nobody cares.”

Gerard tries to twist his way out from under, grunts with the effort of trying to make his muscles do something, but they’re watery and limp and Frank slams his head back against the rack so hard his ears ring.

“Nobody gives a fuck,” Frank tells him.

“I – ”

“Nobody gives a fuck. I want you to say it.” He rocks up against Gerard’s stomach and Gerard can feel that he’s already hard, feels his own dick twitch in response, thinks, there has to be a healthier way for us to do this.

“Nobody gives a fuck,” he says. “Nobody’s coming. Nobody cares.”

Frank tightens his grip and ruts harder against him.

*

Frank ends up in the hospital like this:

He’s driving his dead cousin’s pickup down Route 447 when some asshole rams him from behind and the gun on the passenger seat slides heavily into the footwell.

There’s a bang and a sickening swerve as one of the back tyres goes, and Frank’s brain switches to a litany of motherfucker, motherfucker, holy mother of fucking fuck because if they’re shooting at the truck they don’t want the truck and if they don’t want the truck they’re Doctors and fuck and fuck and fuck.

Another bang, another swerve, and a vehicle pulls up alongside him. He tries to get back under control enough to run them off but the truck’s going on two rims and won’t cooperate, the back end swaying wildly when he needs it to plough into this tinted-windows asshole.

The next shot goes through the hood, and for a glorious moment Frank thinks that God loves him and they’re all going to die in a fire.

He doesn’t. They don’t. He wakes up in wires.

*

“I know what you’re worried about,” Mikey says, softly, and Gerard looks up because it’s rare enough that Mikey says anything, even now.

“I’m not worried.”

“You’re so worried.”

Gerard shrugs, goes back to killing the last of the fire.

“You wanna see it?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Mikey pulls his expression – he only has one, which he uses at different levels of intensity for each emotion, like he doesn’t remember variety. “Frank tells everyone.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Frank should be in a rubber room.”

“I want you to see it.”

“There’ll be nothing there.”

“No,” Mikey says, firmer, and that there’s anything in his voice at all is enough to make Gerard say yes, yes, okay, anything. So Mikey shrugs of his jacket and his shirt and peels off the wifebeater under them, stands with it looped inside out over his elbows, staring at his feet like they’re suddenly the key to the cure. “Come and take a look.”

Gerard suddenly really does not want to. He is suddenly, sickeningly unsure. “There’s nothing there.”

“I know what’s there,” Mikey grinds out, sharp. “I want you to come and look at it. Please.”

Gerard edges toward him, takes sick, guilty steps around his baby brother because this is all his fault for not finding him fast enough, for not getting to him first, for going fucking joyriding while he parents sold their youngest son for a cart full of techy shit. He closes his eyes.

“You’re –”

“Look.”

So he does. He opens his eyes and he stares at Mikey’s back and he takes in the grey sores on his shoulders, the patches of soft, sunken skin with their angry red rims, and something inside him breaks. “Get it off,” he says. “Get it off. Get it off.”

And then he’s clawing at the skin over Mikey’s shoulder blades, digging his nails in and chanting no, no, no like that makes any fucking difference, and Mikey is saying, “It’s the cure,” his voice perfectly even like his brother isn’t tearing a layer of skin off of him. “It’s a cure. You don’t get sick, but some people –” he shudders and swallows and Gerard stops, panting. “Sometime people turn.”

“I’m so sorry,” Gerard tells him, because how can he not. Mikey is turning and Mikey is dying and Mikey is bleeding from red welts across his dead grey back and all Gerard has ever done has hurt him and let him be hurt. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, let me –” He unwinds Mikey’s wifebeater from his arms and begins pulling it to strips. “We’re going to fix this,” he says, trying to keep to sick shudder out of his voice. “You’re my brother and I love you and we will fix this.” He runs a hand over the torn, dead skin, and feels Mikey relax for the first time in a year.

*

The plan Ray comes up with is like this:

“I’ve got a laser,” he says. “I find it down at Shackleton’s. It’s pretty beat up, but it charges okay.”

And about two weeks later he says, “Do you know there’s a hospital in Patterson?”

And it works largely because Doctors don’t expect people to be suicidally fucking stupid unless they’re on the inside of a research facility.

*

The thing Frank likes about Ray is that he’ll pretty much do anything you tell him, as long as you sound like you know what you’re doing.

*

The plan Gerard comes up with is like this:

“I want to go home,” he says one night, lips soft against Ray’s shoulder. “I need to see my mom and dad.”

Ray cocks his head. Gerard has never expressed any wish to see his parents, except about ranting about how much he wanted to watch them rot in a camp.

“I want them to meet Mikey again. I want to show them.”

“They isolated?”

Gerard shakes his head. “Amos Caravan, last I heard.”

Ray sighs. Sometimes he’s the rational one. Sometimes he’s the one who finds them enough ammo to halt a caravan, take a trailer hostage and force a very sick couple to see their very sick son.

“Give me a week,” he says, and feels Gerard smile.

"Well I looked at her face, and I knew she'd changed..."

2010-09-19T10:28:25Z

Gacked from ruedifference

1. Turn on your MP3 Player
2. Set to shuffle
3. The third song is your zombie apocalypse battle anthem!

...and it's The Ex by Billy Talent. Because what's the zombie apocalypse but an excuse to decapitate the girl that broke your heart?

I'm initiating the Vegas protocol

2010-09-01T17:54:50Z

Please, please never crosspost any of my entries or comments to any other site ever. Ever. Please.

It's relatively clean and you don't have to pay for slugfeed.

2010-08-31T14:28:43Z

Staring at this icon for prolonged periods of time and debating the relative merits of a fic about the advent of dreamsharing and its impact on the Terran Empire is not how I planned to spend my afternoon. But.

(Also: I might write my inception_bang fic about the job Eames and Saito have clearly pulled together, based on my medicated reading of the shooting script. And I may have written Arthur/Eames/Sam Bell from Moon. Look, I didn't write for eight months, okay? I take it where I can get it now).

Fic: You've got no faith in medicine [Kirk/McCoy, pre-slash]

2010-08-23T20:28:06Z

Youguysyouguys, I have the internet! And fic! Fic that is part of a sprawling steampunk AU I have in my head but that won't come out (ask me about Christopher Pike's Mechanical Lion Emporium, I dare you), so might not work and is an odd style and basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm nervous about posting this even though I quite like it, and would appreciate your concrit. Okay? Okay.

You've got no faith in medicine
ST:XI
Kirk/McCoy, but gennish
~1,700 words
Warnings: There are a lot of conjunctions in here. And also it was written for the "runaways/orphans" square on my hc_bingo, but does not deal with this in a socially realistic manner (see: steampunk AU).

McCoy remembers standing alongside Pike on the balcony of the airship as it rose over Main Street on Judgement Day. He remembers the crowds cheering and the banners and the radio announcer saying Pike's army of flesh and blood and thoughtless mechanical men had overcome the unnatural children of Khan, remembers thinking that if he'd survived that then he could survive anything, that he would live forever and do nothing but good.

But then he remembers going back to the city and being faced with long lines of people who'd seen newsreels of the things Khan bred; people who ran screaming from their own biology, who'd gotten scared stupid and were looking for possets and leeches and the memory of fucking water, who reeled back in shock at the mention of anything with the slightest hint of Science to it.

And he remembers being tossed out Mayor Rackham's house for attempting to inoculate his daughter, remembers Chris standing on his doorstep later and saying, "Leonard, you're becoming indefensible."

Saying, "The children think you'll cut them open and keep them in jars."

Saying, "I couldn't help you if this went to a jury. You've burned your way through all the good will this city's got."

And then he doesn't remember much for a long while, until Jim.

*

Leonard comes home to find Chris in his best chair, hat on the table and a glass of Leonard's whiskey in his hand. "I won't keep you," he says.

Leonard weighs up the likelihood of this being a crisis against the likelihood that Chris is just a cryptic bastard who likes to mess with his head. "Is there any point me taking off my shoes?"

Chris smiles as far as his face can. Leonard wants to ask him to sit further from the fire, somewhere where the shadows don't catch the side of his scars like that, because it's taking Leonard a few decades longer to get used to them than he expected. "The young man who does you favours is waiting."

"He doesn't do me any kind of favour. He's nothing but a pain in my goddamn neck."

"Of course he does. You were a closet Scientist. Now you're just an upstanding citizen with a taste for cheap trade. Think of all the dinner parties you'll be invited back to."

Leonard flinches hard enough at the thought that Chris laughs and drains his whiskey. "I can wait til the morning, if it keeps you respectable."

*

The second time McCoy met Jim, he was very drunk and in his parlour - this was at his old house, which was huger and darker than his current one, and had a sort of opulent smell that he'd liked when he was young but since sickened of. He felt like his hands were an inch away from his body and his head was drifting slowly upward. The people in his parlour were uninvited but concerned, staging some kind of intervention or card game, and Jim had barged through the door and rescued him with an emergency.

He doesn't particularly remember the nature of the emergency itself, just that after there was blood up to his elbows and his head was ringing and Jim was saying, "It's not like anyone else would have even come out," like that somehow made things better.

*

He goes to wash and when he comes back down, Jim's in the pharmacy, dislodging the leeches from the side of their tank with a thermometer. It's the sort of activity Jim likes to test his patience with - if Leonard snarls now, or makes some overly concerned comment about the close resemblance of Jim's face to raw meat, he can kiss goodbye to the kid's company for a while. So instead he slips into the seat under the window and says, "Your hair's gone."

"To a better place," Jim confirms, raising the thermometer to eye level to better observe the writhing of a leech. He looks exhausted and a little unsteady, and Leonard wants to ask him to lie down, to just get some sleep or accept some charity or go and be someone else's problem for a while, but that's not how this works and this is the only way he'll ever get Jim to take anything from him at all, so.

"It's probably being soldered to some high-end robot as we speak."

"Aestheticists don't work nights." Jim's tone is flat and fast, like he's reporting back after scouting Pike's factory. Which is actually a pretty plausible off-night, where Jim's concerned. The leech wriggles its way off the thermometer and back into the water. Jim drops the thermometer after it and then busies himself with his second favourite task: opening and closing each of the store’s glass-fronted cabinets with ever-so-slightly more force than Leonard would tolerate from any other being.

"Did you -"

"Sorry."

"Are you -"

"Yes."

"Was - "

"No." Jim smirks. It looks like it hurts. "You're so predictable."

"You always say that."

"Wow. Did that pass for funny in the old days?"

"Who're you calling old?"

"Uh, maybe the doddering war hero?" Having completed his inspection of the cabinets, Jim returns to the tank. He stoops. He observes. He taps the glass near the thermometer. “Can you still sell that?”

Leonard would like to say, “You can have it,” but he’s not allowed. Jim likes to think he’s being brash or obnoxious or anything other than desperately fucking vulnerable, and Leonard likes to pretend he practices medicine. That’s how their arrangement works. Instead he waits for Jim to reach down into the tank to retrieve it, wrap his fingers round the length of glass just a leech wraps itself tenderly around his wrist, then pull out both hand and thermometer and lurch over to Leonard’s window seat while cursing a blue streak.

“It’ll drop off when it’s done,” Leonard chides, as scripted.

“I don’t want it done,” Jim pouts, prodding ineffectually. “Bones, come on, it’s eating me.”

“Don’t be so sinister.” Leonard prises first one sucker then the other away from the back of Jim’s wrist with a fingernail, flicks the leech to the floor then rubs his thumb over the marks it left behind as if that’ll somehow help. “You need to let me wrap this,” he says, and Jim scowls.

“It’s nothing.”

“It needs to get washed and wrapped, kid. Come on.”

“You just want to take me down to your creepy death basement.”

“Every night in my dreams,” Leonard sighs, careful to sound properly put-upon, “when you’re biddable and never bleed on my good shirts.”

“You don’t have any good shirts.”

Jim is wearing one of Leonard’s old dress shirts. Leonard isn’t sure he owns any others. That they never mention this has somehow become significant, though Leonard never wants to figure quite why, or how.

*

Leonard doesn’t remember the first time he met Jim. He doesn’t know what he did then. He’s worried – deeply worried, in a way that translates easily into being deeply certain – that he did something terrible that Jim misinterpreted; that nothing about the way he was back then could have ever made anyone think he was safe.

But Jim keeps coming back and Leonard keeps looking at the kid’s face and realising, with dismay, that he is not the worst man in the world.

*

Leonard keeps his grip firm on Jim’s forearm while he leads him down to what used to be a surgery, back when people would put up with that kind of thing. Now it’s just the nearest source of soap and water.

Jim sits himself up on what was the operating table in a previous life, and keeps watch while Leonard scrubs off his hands then Jim’s arm, wrapping it in tight coils of gauze. Leonard focuses hard on tying up the bite – far more attention than something so tiny really needs – but the only other option is to look up at Jim and there’s something awestruck in the way Jim watches him, like he’s not sure how this could ever be happening to him, and it makes Leonard’s stomach ache.

By the time the arm’s done, Jim’s half-asleep and pliant enough that Leonard can clean up his face, scrub away the dirt and dried blood and god knows what, check that he hasn’t busted his nose or cracked an eye socket. And by then Jim’s gone from swaying to sleeping, like a dial in him somewhere has been turned down by degrees, and when Leonard hauls himself up onto the table, Jim moulds himself to the curve of his shoulder, soft and heavy. “Tell me about the Airshow,” he says, quietly, inevitably. “Tell me about Pike.”

Leonard knows that Jim lost his father in the war and everything else not long after, that he mostly wants to hear that it was all worth something. So he says things like, “Pike’s a great man,” rather than “Pike is a clever man who photographs heroically,” and “We knew we had right on our side,” rather than “We panicked and ran and panicked and ran and almost died of relief when we heard we were winning.” It’s not a crime to lie to Jim, he figures. Kid’s had enough of life straight in the teeth as it is, doesn’t need any more of it. Not when he’s leaning up against Leonard like he trusts him with everything. Not when this is the one day of Leonard’s week (or month or year or whatever timeframe Jim decides they operate on at any particular time) that he actually gets to feel useful.

“You’d be good in the airshow,” Leonard says eventually, inevitably. He rubs his fingers in circles against the stubble on the back of Jim’s head.

“Hmm,” Jim says sleepily, not really confirming one way or the other what they both know: that Leonard is a liar, that Jim will never get together enough to leave ground, that that’s something Jim knows so well he doesn’t need to hear it.

“Tell me about Judgement Day,” he says, and Leonard thinks of the crowd and the banners and the announcer, and then takes a deep breath and says what he needs to.

normalhumanbein @ 2010-08-14T16:44:00

2010-08-14T15:43:29Z

So, my last "HUZZAH, I HAS AN INTERNET" post was painfully optimistic and I won't be around for a while yet. If you could try not to do anything interesting until the end of next week, that would be awesome. If I owe you a comment or a reply to anything, sorrysorrysorry, I will get back to you ASAP.

In the meantime, if you felt like you maybe wanted to leave a prompt for my inception_bang fic, I WOULD NOT DISCOURAGE YOU.

Hypothetically speaking...

2010-08-10T12:48:23Z

...if I were to be considering signing up for inception_bang, would anyone be willing to beta for me?*

*Things I am bad at include spelling, tense shifts, freaking out in the wee small hours of the morning and deciding to delete entire chapters, Americanisms.

Fic: Changing of the guard [Inception, Eames/Arthur, completely inevitable]

2010-08-10T11:51:45Z

I HAVE THE INTERNET BACK (more or less).

While I was away I:
- moved house
-went to visit ailing relatives
-climbed something very,very steep on the promise of an AMAZING VIEW, which my cameraphone and I completely failed to capture
- saw Inception a socially unacceptable number of times
- wrote this Eames/Arthur fic.

Changing of the guard
Inception
Arthur/Eames, Eames-centric
PG-13
~1,600 words
Warnings for language (do we really still do that?), pretention.

i.
They’re in Madrid, and Eames is leaning against the jamb of the hotel door, legs crossed at the ankle, hat tipped politely, linen suit slowly plastering itself to his back.

“You’ve been looking for me,” he says.

Mal and Cobb give him a glance which is every bit as slow and assessing and their reputation suggested it would be. “You don’t look like Hawthorne,” she says.

“No,” Eames admits, deciding to invite himself to come in and take a seat, as everyone else seems to lack even the most basic manners. “I look like his marginally more talented associate. And I believe your husband dropped this.”

He offers up an American passport bristling with Cobb’s real details, and a smirk.

Mal laughs at that, higher and with less restraint than Eames had expected, and the face he wears with them is fixed.

ii.
They’re in Laos, and Eames is leaning against the jamb of the hotel door while Cobb shoulders his way in, followed by a slick-haired boy who’s sweated his suit three shades darker than it should be.

“Who’s the missus?” he asks, and the boy glares at him with the fury of the frequently emasculated. Eames takes a liking to him immediately. “Enchante, darling,” he says, breaking out the smirk he keeps for Cobb’s people.

It isn’t particularly effective.

iii.
Eames is one of the dream industry’s comets: he hurtles through once in a while, gifting people with brief glimpses of his not-inconsiderable brilliance before whirling away to defraud corporations and forge bank notes and unite expensive works of art with their most affluent admirers.

Arthur is, somewhat disappointingly, one of Cobb’s satellites. Eames isn’t surprised: Cobb arrived on the scene with such a fanfare that he was notorious almost before he collapsed his first vein, and men like that always attract clusters of talented young things who want to become them. Satellites are useful, in their own way – they’re competent enough, and have a tendency to inherit their parent planets’ blind spots, so you don’t have to think of new ways to part them from their rightful cut – but they are, at their most basic level, bad copies, and Eames cannot abide them.

iv.
It’s only halfway through the Takaoka job, when Arthur shoots down a projection from fifty paces with the kind of gritted-teeth determination that comes from forcing oneself to master a skill one finds distasteful, that Eames realises he has been completely and utterly wrong.

It’s an unpleasant sensation, but refreshing nonetheless.

v.
Arthur may not be entirely Cobb’s, but he still plays the part of bright and brilliant boy, scuttling around in the background of Cobb and Mal’s operations like an overpolished cockroach, and Eames suddenly finds himself all fingers and thumbs and big, heavy boots.

He takes Arthur away and presses small, dark bruises into almost-obvious parts of him, and Arthur lets him lets him lets him, until all Eames’ faces are reflected in his shiny cockroach skin.

(This is an exaggeration born of the way Arthur look stretched out and battered and weary and pleading; objectively, Eames tells him little and he tells Eames less. Nevertheless, Eames finds himself tossing Arthur the key he always carries and asking him to “take care of this for me, darling,” confident in the knowledge that Arthur understands that the key is a copy of a copy of a fake but that he must never share that knowledge with anyone, that if Eames ever reaches into his pocket to find that particular key, he will expect Arthur to explain or wake him up).

vi.
Eames keeps his real name in a safety deposit box in Rochdale. Arthur chooses to reveal his at-least-partial knowledge of this fact by turning to Eames and asking, “You were in Druries House at Harrow, right?”

“Only until they spotted the spelling mistake on the cheque,” Eames smiles, and doesn’t talk to him for eight months.

vii.
They’re in Helsinki, and Eames is leaning against the jamb of the hotel door while Dom and Arthur hover in the corridor, looking harried and smelling like the economy section of a Finnair flight.

“Cobb,” he says, tipping his hat and smirking as expected. “Mrs Cobb.”

It’s Dom, rather than Arthur, who punches him in the head.

viii.
“Tell your attack dog I’ll accept the punctured eardrum,” the message on Arthur’s voicemail says, “if he’ll accept that it was an honest mistake. I’d ask you to ring me back, but there’d be no point because I can’t fucking hear.”

ix.
Waking up after work always feels odd to Eames. There’s a second or so when he feels weightless and rested, wants to roll over and tell whoever’s next to him about the utterly bizarre dream he’s just had, then the real-world wave of adrenaline hits him like a punch to the throat and he’s on his feet and going, going, gone.

Except for one occasion when he falls up from the floor of his third year student flat to a military base in Generic East Asia to the hotel room of a hateful man somewhere in Morocco, after which it takes him minutes to remember how to move and days to remember how to hide and he rubs the pad of his thumb raw pressing down on the teeth of his key the entire flight home. When he gets to his safety deposit box he practically buries his head in the draw, clutches the tangible evidence of his existence so hard he almost destroys it.

x.
People in the industry love systems and Eames, comet though he is, is no different: there is a wealth of audio, visual, spatial, geographical and textural information he keeps about his person to remind himself which face he should be wearing at any given time, there are a variety of neutral settings he can choose from should this information appear compromised, there is the key should it appear incomplete.

In the month after Morocco, he makes a point of touching base with all his old contacts, checking every version of him is still there.

“You sound like a man in a decent suit,” Arthur accuses. “What the hell’s happened?”

Eames digs the teeth of the key under his thumbnail. “My dress sense,” he insists, “is impeccable, as is that of all Harrodians.”

Arthur’s laugh is knowing, but somehow not horrifying in the way it was when a bad copy of him was asking questions and breaking digits in a worse copy of Eames’ third year flat (he should have known something was wrong when there was enough visible carpet for him to fall onto it, he should’ve know, he should’ve seen it, how did he not).

“I’m going to be kind and presume that you’re colour blind.”

“Dear boy, you wound me.”

“Speaking of wounded,” Arthur says, over-casual, “did you hear about Cutler? Somebody’s taking care of the competition for you.”

Eames thinks of the bad copy in the worse one, and tells himself firmly not to conclude that Arthur is, in fact, taking care of him. “Those who live by the sword die by the sniper rifle,” he says, sagely. “It’s the fashionable way to snuff it.”

Thank you, he doesn’t say. Thank you thank you thank you.

xi.
“I will fuck you right here if that’s what it takes to get you to take off that shirt,” Arthur says, and it crosses Eames’ mind to propose.

xii.
“The new girl,” Eames says, pressing a too-cold foot between Arthur’s calves.

“Ariadne,” Arthur corrects, kicking him.

“Ariadne,” Eames repeats, with the appropriate level of theatricality. “You have to hand it to Cobb, he’s remarkably self-aware.”

Arthur quirks an eyebrow, and Eames thinks of the people who have orbited Cobb and the way their brilliance has bolstered him, the way he deliberately chooses people who buttress his own weak spots, and realises that this is not something Arthur allows himself to notice. “You really are pathetically loyal,” he says, and Arthur takes it for the compliment it is.

xiii.
Cobb strides off through Arrivals and away, and Arthur’s gazed wavers somewhere between pride and bereavement. “Come on,” Eames says, deliberately jolting his shoulder. “I’ve got a suitcase full of sex toys and a wonderful idea for a job in Manilla that I only plan to explain once you can’t move.”

“You’re disgusting,” Arthur says, and follows.

xiii.
Cobb is still a loud man, even with the mental dexterity of blancmange, and when they leave him at the clinic he absolutely screams for them, for his children, for Mal.

“Come away,” Eames says. “Come on, you can’t do anything here, come away.” And Arthur, somewhat terrifyingly, lets Eames loop an arm over his shoulder and lead him out.

xiv.
They’re in Southport of all places, and Eames is lying on his side of the bed, awake because Arthur is too fitful a sleeper, too busy turning everything over in his mind to lie remotely still.

This is the moment when Eames realises that Arthur will not be content to at-least-partially know things about him, that he will want to know what’s in the box even if he would never touch the real key, that there’s a sharpness to him that will make him keep driving at information above all things, even if he no longer really wants to, even if his picking at details pulls the whole apart.

It is also the moment when Eames realises it wouldn’t hurt him much to make it easy.

xv.
“Don’t touch that.”

Arthur’s hand hovers outstretched over the lock pick, fingers spread wide and shaking slightly.

“Is it -?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. Not the key?”

“Key’s on the side.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“Erotic as I usually find your eloquence, dear heart, I’m afraid this time you’ve gone where we linguistic mortals cannot follow.”

Arthur scowls, then smiles slowly, and goes back to wiring charges.

Eames lets his face relax.

So I saw some movie...

2010-07-27T06:12:41Z

BRAIN, STOP IT. We move house in four days and haven't packed yet. This is NOT THE TIME to be telling me to write nothing but creepy Cobb/Eames Eames/Arthur sex cockroach fic. NOT THE TIME

*sigh*

*scribble*

some news, a meme and a question

2010-07-17T14:58:29Z

A HOUSE A HOUSE I HAVE A HOUSE.

Well not so much a house as a flat. And not so much have as can rent. But psh, details. A BOX FOR LIVING, I HAS ONE.

In other news, a meme:

I write like
Ray Bradbury

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

...for Stereo Field.

I write like
Arthur C. Clarke

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

...for And the sky shrugged off her stars.

Speaking of, if I were to write Five Ways That Story Didn't End and One Way It Did, would that be:

a) a terrible idea

b) a good idea

(given that the One Way It Did would be Uhura and Winona-centric?)

How're you?

YOU ARE ALL FIRED

2010-07-07T19:54:44Z

How did I not know Chris Pine was in The Lieutenant of Inishmore? How? Martin McDonagh's entire canon is on heavy rotation in my 'things I recast in my head while waiting for public transport' space and Lieutenant is the one I secretly sometimes look at for Mirror characterisations.

Although not the one I'd immediately recast with Trek characters (The Lonesome West).

Or the one which lends itself most easily to fic (Merlin recast of The Pillowman or Being Human/In Bruges).

...I may have thought about this too much.

This entry was originally posted at http://betweensix.dreamwidth.org/58764.html.

WIP Amnesty

2010-06-20T19:41:18Z

When in Rome, Remember
ST:XI
A post-Dollhouse AU
PG13
Language, violence
~3,200 words
This is the first chapter of an EPIC SPRAWLING AU, the other chapters of which refuse to come together. I'm posting it here in the vague hope of bullying my brain into gear but, as those of you who requested a drabble a decade or so ago will probably have realised, that's unlikely to happen.

Who Knows, Missouri. 2255.149

Jim eases himself back into the cargo van's driver's seat, retrieves his comm from the passenger side footwell and thumbs through his list of contacts while trying desperately to will his hangover into submission. The pounding in his head is so strong that he feels like his eyes should be bleeding, and he's worried that if he looks directly at the glowing blue screen of the comm he might actually be struck blind.

Which, all things considered, wouldn't even be the worst part of his morning.

He scrubs his hands across his face, takes a couple of deep breaths to calm the rolling in his stomach, then risks another peek over the seatbacks.

The crates are still there. All six of them.

"Fuck."

"The code you have requested has not been recognised," his comm tells him, the voice robotic-sounding and eerily polite. "Please disconnect and try again."

"Fuck."

He climbs over the seats and squats down in front of the crates, keys in the combination for the digital lock. How he knows that and not, for example, where the hell he is, well. That's just another of this morning's little mysteries, like the body armour on the front seat that doesn't fit him, or the fact that none of the numbers stored in his comm work. Both of which, in their turn, form part of a larger, more intimidating mystery which Jim has mentally entitled Where The Fuck Did Last Week Go?

He tries the comm again.

"The code you requested has not been recognised," it reminds him. "Please disconnect and try again."

"Fuck."

He opens the lid of the crate and -. Yeah, still there.

"Fuck."

Now, Jim's not exactly a small-time guy, hasn't been for years, but waking up after what he assumes must have been the mother of all benders with six crates of illicit off-world weaponry and no contact is still enough to mess with his head somewhat, especially as he's self-aware enough to know he's neither a reliable nor an obedient drunk and the last time something like this happened, it turned out he'd pre-emptively taken money from five different buyers.

He'd feel a lot better about the entire situation, he thinks, if he could remember the slightest thing about money this time round.

He closes his eyes. Breathes. Presses at the edges of the dark shape in his brain where his memory ought to be, thinking: money. Thinking: contact. Thinking: woods.

Go back to the woods.

And then it doesn't feel like thinking at all.

He drives on autopilot, his body knowing where they need to go far more than his brain does. Buries the crates in a copse about three miles back, drives two hours in the direction that feels furthest from civilisation and then burns the van, the comm and the armour, the pain in his head and the twisting in his gut so intense he can hardly breathe.

He hitches a lift to the next town, then the next, probing the dark shape at the back of his brain for anything like a clear memory of the job, and finding only the sharp, uniform funk of roadside rest stops and snatches of bathroom graffiti. Terra Prime, 4 Luv, for a good time call...

"Where you headed, man?" asks one of the kids who've picked him up. They're breezy-looking roadtripper types, monied and gullible and liable to forget what Jim actually looks like five minutes after he leaves the car, telling their friends about some dangerous-looking drifter with scars on his face and knife in his boot instead.

"Tell you when I get there," Jim says, smiling, his head feeling clearer and lighter the further he goes. The driver answers with a grin that suggests he's nowhere near fit to drive.

"Cool." The word looks like it takes a lot of effort.

When his girlfriend adds, "We're going to Florida?" it seems like a genuine question.

A signpost for the next exit flashes by and something sharp and bright skitters through the edges of Jim's memory. "And I'm going to piss on your upholstery," he announces cheerfully. "Could you pull over?"

At the truck stop, he makes a point of picking through racks of novelty keyrings and shoplifting junk food before heading off to the men's room, with its uniform breezeblock walls, its uniform unwashed stink, its uniform row of stalls with kicked in doors, it's generic graffiti.

Terra Prime.

4 Luv.

There's a number written in slanted black marker underneath the cistern in the next-to-last cubicle. He doesn't recognise it, but he knew where to look for it.

Good enough.

He sweet-talks the girl behind the counter at the refuelling station into letting him use her comm - some bullshit story about a transport leaving without him that she believes because he smiles nice - and punches in what turns out to be the code for some place called the Carrollton Inn, run by a woman who takes one look at his dirt-encrusted shirt, whines nasally at him about personal hygeine for five minutes and then charges him more credits than he'd like to lift for a single room.

By the time he hangs up, Jim feels weightless. He knows, in an abstract kind of way, that following an unseeable map to an unfamiliar location provided by an unknowable source who seems to have fucked with his brain is not good. But in a far more real, immediate sense, everything feels okay. Better than okay. He'll hole up at the hotel, comm around until someone asks where the hell the goods are, hand them over and be out of there in a day, two at the outside.

He's Jim Kirk.

He's James fucking Tiberius Kirk.

Everything will be fine.

That itch at the back of his head saying that everything's usually fine because he's a paranoid sociopath with loyalty issues who wouldn't wander into the middle of a setup like this for love nor money? Well. That voice is far off and quiet, and it doesn't feel particularly important that he listen to it right now. What's important is getting the gullible roadtripper kids to turn around and head back to Carrollton. Or at least, that's what feels important until he gets within sight of their transport and his skin is suddenly itching, crawling, until he's sweating bullets and rubbing at his face to try and hold back the bleeding-eyeball pain in his head.

The driver kid: "You got any credits?" His girlfriend: "You okay?"

Jim grits his teeth and tries to get it together enough to make a word instead of a sound. "I'm okay," he says. His vision is shot through with black. His skin is peeling away from him, he can feel it, he can feel -

"Just. Gimme a minute, okay? I'll be back. I'll be right back." He dashes for the bathroom, throws himself into the stall with his number in and empties his stomach into the toilet bowl, his head full of hot, white noise all apart from the dark shape at the back - moving on autopilot, lowering the seat, climbing up, shaking hands on ceiling tiles and then and then and then -

And then -

And -

Did I fall asleep?

For a little while.

Shall I go now?

If you like.

If you like.

If you like.

You do what you fuckin' want, kid. Makes no difference to me.

Jim wakes curled up on the floor of the stall, blood under his nails and a sports bag clutched to his chest.

His head feels gloriously cool and empty, nothing rattling round in there but a kind of drunken, rubbery joy. He lies there for a while, luxuriating in the ease of it, listening to people come in and out, listening to some stoned-sounding kid call a name that sounds vaguely familiar but not enough that he bothers to respond.

When he opens it, the bag is full of clothes, credits, ID which uses unfamiliar aliases.

Again, at the back of his head, the voice asking how?

Again, it hurts to listen to it.

The why of that, Jim files away to think on later, when the idea doesn't make his vision grey out.

The gullible roadtripper kids are gone by the time Jim makes it back to the parking lot, and he winds up catching a ride to Carrollton from some haulage guy who likes Jim's smile so much he wants to see it round his cock, which Jim is okay with insomuch as the whole experience only reaches him in a kind of muted third-person, like a movie watched from another room, which. Okay. Jim's pretty sure sure he wouldn't have agreed to that, usually. He's really pretty fucking certain. This isn't the kind of plan he would have made.

He presses his forehead against the cool glass of the transport window and tries to think over the sharp, dark pounding in his head.

He falls asleep and dreams of a machine that feels like home.

He checks into his motel room, strips the bed, pins the thinnest sheet over the window and props the mattress against it. He turns the holoscreen up as loud as he thinks he can get away with. He hides his credits in the thin gap between the back of the wardrobe and the wall, then strips out of his muddy clothes and sends them to the incinerator. He showers, trying to ignore the itching in the back of his mind that tells him he should be busy.

He spreads out all the documents bearing his face. Anything using a new alias goes to the incinerator. Anything using an old alias goes to the incinerator.

The itch in the back of his head turns into an ache, then blossoms into raw, screeching agony.

Would you like a treatment now?

Ever wanted a massive cranial haemorrage, Ty?

What exactly does DeWitt think you contribute that I couldn't?

Ire. How about it, kid?

Tiberius.

I think I'd like a treatment now.

You've never had a thought in your head.

How essential is ire, realistically?

It powers the air con. Now go play your goddamn computer games and let me work.

Jim wakes up trapped in a tangle of sheets under the bedframe, gripping the lats so hard his knuckles are white and his wrists ache. He spends two days mooching round the motel, watching the receptionist reject multiple comm requests for one of the aliases he burned, followed by eight days half-crazy in his room, the noise at the back of his head louder than the holoscreen. The names of the haulage guy and the roadtripper kid slip out of his memory altogether some time during the night, along with any idea of why he might have needed them in the first place. The week he's lost seems to be slipping further away, taking everything that came before along with it, until he's gritting his teeth against the pain and making himself write out every name, every address, every scrap of his history on the bedsheets and tacking them to the walls, staring at them in the hope that he'll remember a face other than his mother's, his father's, Frank's.

Every time he closes his eyes, he sees Manhattan.

He dreams of a house there and wakes standing. He dreams of it and wakes in the street, blissful.

He crawls back to the room and bites his tongue bloody to keep from screaming.

On the ninth day, he says it aloud for the first time. Tells it to the light fitting, in a voice that he almost doesn't recognise.

"I am not going to Manhattan."

"I am not going to Manhattan until I know what I'm going there for."

"My name is Jim Kirk."

"My name is James Tiberius Kirk."

"I was born in Riverside, Iowa. I am going to Riverside, Iowa. I am not going to Manhattan until I know what I'm going there for."

He takes the bedsheet down from the window, writes down the name of every sure friend, every safe house, every formerly safe house. None of them are in Manhattan. None of them are even close. He goes home.

Riverside, Iowa

Getting to Riverside takes a couple of weeks longer than it should, what with Jim's body wanting to double back on itself every five minutes and the dark shape at the back of his head screaming at him, threatening to rush forward at any minute and push away what remains of his memory (he forgets the route twice and loses three bikes, though he at least remembers how to steal one). He pulls a couple of quick jobs for cash and then a couple more once he realises that work flips some switch or other in his head and lets him focus for a moment, like he's doing what he's built for and not even whatever hideous alien brain parasite must currently be getting fat off his cerebral cortex can stop him, but eventually, finally, he rolls into Riverside.

He remembers Main Street as having a kind of decrepit chocolate box charm, like the disused set of a bad holo from the 2200s, but the road he drives down is all neon advertising and Fed-approved signage, as if two decades have passed without his permission. None of the faces look like they could belong to anyone he remembers from high school. None of the stores are where he expects them to be. The road down to the gorge is gone. He'd be deeply freaked by all of it if he could think clearly enough to be, if his mom and Frank's house wasn't exactly where he expected to find it, looking just as he remembered, but it is. Something in Jim's heart sings at that - stupidly, because this house never brought him anything but trouble. That said, its never subjected him to any kind of surprise, either, and he figures he'll be able to settle down into the warm familiarity of resentment and wait there while he finds out what the hell's wrong with him.

He can picture himself drinking in the horsebox at the back of the disused barn, fifteen all over again.

He can picture Frank still tinkering in the garage, cursing a blue streak at something Jim could fix up in five minutes.

He can picture his mom, somewhere high above and happy, her smile a pixelated video-message blur.

He takes a deep breath, curses under it and starts up the path.

The screen's shut but the door's open, so Jim lets himself in. The inside of the house is dark and dry, the closed drapes making everything look muddy. There's a newsfeed playing in another room and a dog barking out back (did they used to have a dog?), but no real signs of life. "Hello?" he tries. "Mom? Frank?"

He moves through into the living room and flips channels before turning the feed off altogether once its obvious there's not going to be anything about him or his stash of off-planet weapons. "It's Jimmy," he shouts into the quiet, and a thump from upstairs tells him a) someone has finally registered his presence, b) that someone is Frank and c) Frank is not the high-functioning alcoholic he once was. "Shit," is all the comment Jim's gonna waste on that, so he busies himself with opening the drapes and selecting a beer from the wall of booze he finds in the fridge. The dog he could hear before turns out to be a collie, chained up in the back yard and yapping itself crazy. The yard itself has mostly turned into a dustbowl, but there's still the barn in the distance, still the same brokedown bits of machinery scattered around, and the familiarity of it all is like a balm.

There are more thumps from upstairs, the noise of something heavy being moved followed by Jesus son of a bitch, and Jim shuffles reluctantly out into the hallway, leaning around the bottom of the staircase with his beer held out like a peace offering. "Frank?" he calls again. "You okay up there, buddy?"

There's a whistle and a hiss, and then a bullet embeds itself into the plaster six inches shy of Jim's head. "Holy fuck, Frank! It's Jim. Jim Kirk. I used to live here a while back, there was a lady sweet on both of us, spent a lot of time in space. Any of this ringing a bell with you?" He steps around his shattered beer bottle, presses himself up against the railing so he'll be harder to shoot at from the landing and slides up the stairs, slowly. "You alone up there, Frank?"

"How did you find me?"

"What?"

"How did you find me?"

"I grew up here, man, I -"

"No, you fucking didn't. You fucking didn't."

Jim's wavering halfway up the stairs, curiosity coming up against self-preservation. He gets as far as "What are you talking ab -", before Frank rounds the corner at the top of the stairs and levels an antique rifle at his head.

"I want you out of my house."

"Okay, okay," Jim says, backing down, hands on his head like this is some kind of fucked up citizen's arrest. "I'm going, alright? I'm gonna pick up my jacket, and I'm gonna go, okay?"

"I don't know who sent you here, I don't care who sent you here, but you tell them - "

"Nobody sent me."

"Bullshit. You tell them, they keep the hell away from me from now on. My contract's up. I don't want to see you, I don't want to see any of you, I'm not interested in whatever goddamn mental illness Adelle's trying to pass off as a sense of humour, I am out. I don't know how you found my house, but if you come back here, I will shoot you. Do you understand me? Do you understand? Is this getting through your programming?"

"It's Jim," Jim hears himself say. "Your wife's son, Jim. Come on Frank, put it down. I'll go, it's okay, I was just looking for Winona, I'm leaving. But you need to put that thing down, okay?"

Frank's face goes slack and for a moment Jim thinks he's getting somewhere, but then there's the barrel of a gun pressed against the soft flesh on the underside of his jaw, and Frank's whining laughter in his ear. "Winona? You're here for Winona? Wow, they've really fucked you up." There's something terrifyingly sober in Frank's expression, the kind of white hot rage that a person can only muster when they know absolutely that they're in the right. "Whatever kind of mess you are, you're not my problem anymore," he says, "so I'm going to give you til the count of five to get out of my home."

Jim has to have run the better part of two miles by the time he flops down at the side of the road and lets himself shake. He can't stop muttering to himself, a steady stream of fuck, fuck, shit, fuck, and everything looks too big and too bright. He clenches and unclenches his hands. The shaking doesn't stop.

Fuck it, he thinks, and sets out to find a bar he remembers.

Valid until England pull their collective head out of their collective arse (so probably forever)

2010-06-20T16:32:34Z

New Zealand! I am officially transferring my World Cup allegiance to you, here, in full view of the internet, because a) my country's team all clearly have some kind of heavy opiate problem/suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome/have bet huge amounts against themselves and b) you're adorable. Please win.

I TAG YOU ALL

2010-06-11T21:25:33Z

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to the page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4-7 sentences to LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest (unless it's too troublesome to reach and is really heavy. Then go back to step 1).

"Why do some people got everything and I got nothing?" she said. "Why? Why was that?"
"I don't know," I say.
"Show your cock," she says, and dies again.
We stand there looking down at the pile of parts.

This is from George Saunders' short story collection, Pastoralia, which I reread pretty much every time I have a shitty day. It is genius, you guys. The title story will improve your life and make your time on earth richer and more wonderous. Also, the Matches song, "The Barber's Unhappiness", is a re-telling of the final story in the collection, which is pretty much the reason I bought that album, but anyway, rambling.

(For context: the story quoted above is about a male stripper whose aunt comes back from the dead and tries to Set The Family Right, only to decay before she can really acheive anything).

Look what I did!

2010-06-09T19:07:56Z

werewolves: accidental mating for life w/ inappropriate person	stigmata	crucifixion	dungeons	werewolves: separated from the pack
undercover: forced to hurt your partner	muscle strains and spasms	mutation	bodyguards	brain damage
orphans and runaways	undiagnosed, mysterious illness	WILD CARD	coma	hallucinations
accidents	fear of heights	hazing	bruises	unexpected consequences of planned soulbonding
fallen angels	domestic abuse (physical)	captivity	monophobia (fear of being alone)	stalkers / serial killers

Because a) I am a sucker and b) the fact that I never, ever write anymore and have about ten docs full of half-finished stuff I can't even open makes me sad, so the plan is to bash out as many godawful 500-word id fics as possible in the hope that it shakes something loose.

In conclusion: werewolves! serial killers! stigmata! It's like they know me or something.

Recs!

2010-05-29T15:27:03Z

You guys, you guys, mcrnut has done an amazing pencil drawing of SecondCity!Gerard. You all need to go and look over there right now, not least because the post also contains sad lesbian mermaids. How could that not improve your day?

Other things which will improve your day include Common Grounds, possibly most adorable Star Trek AU of our times, in which there are printing presses and poorly-chosen internet dating handles and lots of talk about fonts, which (and I may not have shared this before) is pretty much my favourite thing for attractive people to do. This fic leaves me with a grin on my face so ridiculous and irremovable that I have it bookmarked on my phone and read it on the way into work when I know I'm going to have a horrible day. Reading it feels like getting a kitten implanted in my frontal lobe, except more practical and less medically impossible.

On a less kittenish but no less excellent note, there is Never Seen the Sunrise, which comes with the same torture/angst/general dystopia warnings as 99.9% of everything I have ever recommeneded to anyone ever, but is richer and more lyrical than most of those things and makes itself feel huge in just a couple of thousand words.

This entry was originally posted at http://betweensix.dreamwidth.org/58365.html.

Fic: And you, you vanished

2010-05-22T20:02:25Z

Awkward, not-really-a-fic, mostly written because a) Moon is awesome, b) I need to practise my Sam voice before writing a longer fic and c) this challenge is lovely.

And you, you vanished
Moon
Gen
Written as part of mumblemutter</user>'s video killed the radio star challenge, based on Bonnie Prince Billy's I Gave You.
779 words
PG-13
Major character death; rambling

The good thing about dying is, he won't have to smell every goddamn thing.

It wasn't like he didn't know about smell, it wasn't like he hadn't smelled things, way back when, when it was just him and Five and Five was puking blood into the john for three unholy hours at a pop, but Jesus. There's just a lot of that kind of thing going on. It's not like he ever expected, say, taking the metro at the height of summer to be anything other than a clusterfuck, nasally speaking. It's just that he remembers doing it before, as a boy, pressed into a crowd at thigh height and subjected to that very specific polyester-sweat smell, and that smell - Sam's researched that smell, okay, he's risked many embarrassing arrests in its pursuit - that smell does not exist. It doesn't. There's another one, kind of like it but tangier, which is apparently what everyone on earth who isn't a clone with a defective olfactory memory thinks of as that summer metro suit smell, but that smell? His smell? The one he remembers from going into the city with his mom? That smell does not exist, and neither do about half of the others he thought he remembered, and everything tastes wrong and yeah, okay, now he doesn't have to worry about that anymore.

So that's the good thing about dying.

Also trees.

Trees feel all wrong, and there was this one time when - well, there wasn't that time. But he remembers there being, and he remembers feel of the bark where it bit into his hand while he tried not to crush Betty Kruschenk, but apparently he's remembered it wrong and seriously, now, if there's one thing Sam Bell the Sixth wants people to know and remember about him and his short, largely fictional existence, it is that he fucking hates trees.

And hospitals. Hospitals and trees, he fucking hates.

He goes out into the desert to die because there's not much there, and he hates to admit this, hates to actually put this out there where they might hear it, but Sam Bell wasn't programmed to deal with a lot of things. A lot of situations, sure, but he's a-ok just keeping company with himself and a lot of big shit that doesn't move much.

When James busted him out of the hospital with a wink and a sad-dog smile, he gave Sam a pair of the thickest fucking shades Sam had ever seen. "To hide those baby blues," Jimmy had said, waving a hand at the bloody purple mess under Sam's eyes, but looking out there now, with the sand and the rocks and the darkness of the quarter-inch shades, it's almost like he's home.

Jimmy's an okay guy. Sam probably should've mentioned that, at some point.

He kills the engine and crawls into the backseat. He hipchecks the headrest on his way over, and is so fucking mushy that he feels it bruise, then so fucking angry that he punches the seatback. His nails stay in his palm when he uncurls his fist. He drops them out of the window and then pukes after them, as an afterthought.

He doesn't put the windows up because he doesn't want to know that he isn't that kind of cold, that this is something inside. He kicks the aircon up to ten and takes of his shirt - stubborn as a mule, Tess never called him - and puts it back on after he sees himself, Jesus, he doesn't remember Five bloating up like this, like he was filling up with fluid from the inside.

He remembers Five driving out, though. He shouldn't, they don't, there's no reason for them to work like that, but he remembers Five driving out past the tower with the station's sat phone and he remembers Eve's number and he shouldn't, he doesn't, he can't, but her face was so lovely, so open and soft and like life was all blue skies and roses and he knows that's bullshit, knows Tess took a while to shuttle off but he can feel it, he remembers how she looked like she'd apologise and he just wanted to just cover his face because God, what must he look like?

He hasn't got a cell, this time round.

He had one, but he laked it two states back, just in case.

He's dying and crazy and if he couldn't bring himself to call three years ago he doesn't get to do it now, when he's got half his mind and four of his teeth and six of his goddamn fingernails.

He is fucking sick of waiting.
This entry was originally posted at http://betweensix.dreamwidth.org/57907.html.