Some fanfic
Jun. 3rd, 2006 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eye_of_a_catBecause it's far too hot to get any work done, I've spent the past few days re-reading about half an Internet worth of bookmarked fanfic. It reminded me that I still had these lying around unfinished from something I was trying a while ago. So, with some final dusting to get them up to shape: four fandoms, four ficlets, all beginning with the same line. Anna Sheridan, Simon and River Tam, Leia Organa, and, er, BSG weirdness. (I don't think anything here would be rated above PG.)
~*~
Z Minus
It's the light she sees first. White-cold, and spreading over them like fire, it doesn't belong in a place like this. She watches it turn the city's soft shadows into blades of light and dark as John looks back, looks away, stares down into the chasm ahead of him; it's glowing on his skin as it bleaches hers, and still she can't place it, still she can't understand what it means. Not until the dome above them shatters, and he falls.
Eight seconds before, she told him she was dead. No revelation here - he'd told Morden and Justin already, as certain as though it was his to decide. Which it was, after all. Put aside the body that still walks and speaks and breathes, the mind that remembers every last thing, because he knew all that already and still he let her go for the sake of two scars on her neck and something invisible in her eyes. His wife was dead. So why not let him hear it in her own voice?
(Not that he couldn't have turned back, even then. Not that she wouldn't have loved him. No-one ever said he didn't have a choice.)
Ten hours before was the White Star, with a sickly Vorlon light that pulsed and ached behind her eyes. Morden warned her she'd feel it, but not like this; she wanted to scream, to tear the damn ship apart with her hands, pulling through wires and shattering metal until it let her be. But he couldn't see it, and even if she showed him everything she'd been shown - wars and angels and burning ships, Earth's sunlight glinting off Minbari armour and his hands on someone else's skin - he wouldn't understand.
Ten hours before he'd fallen where she couldn't reach, and that ship came down in fire to kill anything left, he kissed his own tears from her face and told her he'd missed her so much that some nights he couldn't breathe. Ten hours before she'd lost him, she curled around him like wires, hands and arms and fingers splayed out over bare skin, and felt the traces of everything he'd done and everything he'd done it for scattered over his body like that pale, aching light.
"I meant it," he'd said. "What I said before - about you, about what I'd have done -"
"I know," she'd said, and heard anyway what he wouldn't have told her. Anything, anything that wasn't this Shadow-wife come back to tear apart everything he believed with every breath she still took. Anything, but not this.
Three days before, he'd pushed her away. Not hard, not angry, just one hand on her shoulder holding her apart from him. "Did they hurt you? Will they?"
"No," she'd told him. "They're not what you think."
But it wasn't his thoughts alone. Vorlons and Minbari, civil wars on Earth, that old, stubborn line about always finishing fights you didn't start - they knew him, and they knew him well enough to make him wish, just for a moment, that she'd said otherwise.
So there was a choice, at the end. His, not hers; she'd already chosen cities older than myths, ships that held her and sang to her, more than she could ever describe. But she couldn't choose for him, in that moment before she spoke, when he still stood scared and injured between her and a fall into nothing. She could have given him freedom, but she knew now that he'd never have asked. All he wanted - more than her, more than life - was for the woman walking towards him to not be his Anna.
And she could give him that.
~*~
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
It's the light she sees first. Every time, the same. He can clear all the blades and needles out of sight, promise her nothing will hurt, walk her down to the infirmary as she babbles about integral functions and apples in the distant, laughing way that turns his blood cold, but the moment that light falls onto her skin she's gone. It used to scare him when he couldn't predict her, watching her slip into psychosis with no warning at all; now he can measure that journey in footsteps, and nothing about it is any better.
Of course, he's dealt with patients like River before. He reminds himself of this occasionally, when he's oh, say, trying to convince his crazy sister not to tear pipes off the wall, and it's some kind of comfort. Working in trauma he was always spared the slow, dragging hell of recovery, but he knows damage doesn't wear off with the anaesthetic. For every shattered bone he's dug out of blood and muscle and every heartbeat he's shocked back into rhythm, someone's spent day after day after endless day in physio or speech therapy, staring at dull white walls and believing it's forever. What happened to River was no less horrific than whatever brought those people to his operating table, even if most of her scars aren't physical, and at least she can walk or talk normally, if your definition of 'normal' isn't too particular. But he still can't look at this terrified child, all sweat and panic and frightened hands digging into her own skin, and see his sister. Not with the same eyes.
Left to herself, she'll wander through the ship like a ghost, fingertips skimming over its walls. She finds corners and platforms he never noticed, and climbs railings like a cat. Last week he found her in the engine room, of all places, curled up with her cheek pressed to the floor and a faint, dancing smile on her face, while Kaylee lay reading in her hammock as though any part of that was normal. He's stopped trying to move her. What she needs is a decent hospital, proper resources and specialist care; but what she's got is Serenity, and she'll take its rust and oil and engine grease over any medicines he can give.
Last time he was in space with River, back when ships meant journeys and not destinations, the liner had carpets the colour of Auroran wine and fresh flowers in the ballroom every night. Maids and waiters in starched black-and-white, chandeliers over the dining tables, and you could walk for hours down those long decks with oak-framed landscapes on one wall and windows onto space on the other, never believing you were so far from home.
"Sleeping," River said, the last and only time he mentioned the Endymion. (It had been one of her good days, although that wasn't an excuse - he shouldn't expect too much from her. On his own good days, he knows that.) "Sleeping in bluebells."
"River." He didn't look at the others. "The ship. It was the ship's name. You remember? Father kept complaining about the rooms, and you ordered that soup?"
He couldn't even tell if she was listening. "The ship was sleeping, too," she said. "Dreams in blue, because it's - all the grief, it's not written, and Serenity is, is different, Simon, you don't - they won't -"
"Shh," he said. "Okay, okay. Shh." Not quite fast enough to stop the panic that comes with trying to piece together sense out of chaos.
She's right about this ship, though, and perhaps that isn't so bad. He can't imagine living like this on the Endymion: Captain, my sister and I are being hunted by about seventeen thousand Alliance forces, so we'd like to stay aboard indefinitely, if that's all right with you. No, well, we can't exactly pay you anything, but I'll stitch up a few cuts from time to time if you don't mind getting your crew to babysit. So, yes, it's a smuggling ship, and pieces tend to fall off it more than he'd consider normal, and he's still not too sure that Jayne won't throw him out of the airlock one day, but at least River's as close to safe as he can manage. The crew don't even seem to mind her being the way she is. Really, he should find it comforting that she's settled in so well.
Sometimes, now, he goes to the infirmary alone. It's no substitute for having her there, but he's got her blood tests and drug calculations, everything he needs to work in peace for a few hours in somewhere that feels like civilisation. She needs time, he tells himself; time, and patience, and she'll get better, even in a place like this. Time, and it'll pass.
Sometimes, he can make himself believe it.
~*~
The End Of The World Was Long Ago
For the end of the world was long ago
And all we dwell today
As children of some second birth
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.
It's the light she sees first, through the eyes of all her children. It bathes the land in butter-gold as the night's creatures curl into dark hollows, and the day's wake and stretch while leaves turn slowly, slowly towards the sun. Kobol breathes in the sighs of waves hitting shore, and watches.
The children treading this earth for the first time believe they are orphans. Their ancestors' ancestors cursed her once, scattered themselves among the cold stars and called other worlds home. They are lost, they have forgotten; they do not understand why she reminds them of nightmares, nor why they want so much to stay. The leaf-mould sinks beneath their feet, and through it she feels them flinch.
So lost, and for so long.
Kobol's children are killing each other, their blood soaking down into thread-fine roots of grasses; all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. She whispers to them in streams of wind, and they see the granite-slab altars, the stacks of skulls long since dissolved in rainwater, and know this was always a place of death, just as it was always a place of life. They turn away, close their eyes, horrified. But Kobol's children kill each other in every moment: wolves pull down deer, ants bite into leaves, bacteria swarm over a dying fish, and all death is a sacrifice.
That these are all her children, flesh or metal, she never doubts. This is a cold, sterile universe, and they live.
Kobol has been dreaming for a long time now, for all the years these children have been gone. She shares pieces of her dreams with them: a temple, white stone, a drowned child. When they wake, shaken and terrified, she soothes them with the lullaby of wind in tall grasses. Kobol's children fear her now, but not enough to turn back.
What she feels from them is loss, and the shock of that loss still sharp broken pieces inside them. Anger, for their dead worlds, no less than it ever was. And fear. Always, fear. They do not think of themselves as her children, now; they believe their worlds were the only worlds, and their loss was the only loss, and they fear her without knowing why.
In their own dreams, they remember pieces of stories and no more. To them, their war and their exile were the story itself; they never think of they, themselves, as a forgotten epilogue. But Kobol remembers the Twelve, the wars, the struggling gods, and watches these children try to make sense out of the fragments left. Their war was her war, long ago, although they believe it immediate and theirs alone. All of this has happened before.
Feeling them move across the land, she knows she will guide them. They have some of the pieces, after all, and although they still lift the rain-drenched pages of a holy book from the ground, believing its words are more than words without this earth to sink into, it will be enough. She will show them Athena's tomb, and the arrow of Apollo, and for moments - days, maybe - they will feel her stories with her.
Days. Maybe. Until the cold of space swallows them again, and they forget.
Kobol will watch them leave the way she watched them return, with the patience of millennia. Long, long years are still to pass before her children come home.
~*~
In Memoriam
It's the light she sees first. Only the flicker of a screen that catches her eye for a moment, but it's enough.
When Leia was very young, and her world ended at the grey walls circling the palace gardens, hunger and terror simply didn't exist. She knew the words, but the words were empty. Her life was good, then, and safe, and quiet - even the sounds of a galaxy tearing itself into bloody pieces couldn't reach a royal nursery.
Not hers, at least.
If the room hadn't been empty, she wouldn't have stopped and she wouldn't have noticed. On most days she'd never have been alone, there or anywhere else. But today, as it happens (and why? She can't remember now - a game, maybe, hiding from her nurses), there's no-one else around. Just one half-curious girl, curling her toes into the thick weave of the carpet, and the woman talking.
Of course, it wouldn't have lasted. Her parents didn't idealise naivety any more than she does, and no-one could have grown up in a political family without learning. It wouldn't have lasted, and regardless of what she remembers, it's unlikely she was ever completely ignorant then; surely they couldn't have given up discussing politics over dinner for a week, never mind her whole childhood? But it's easiest to remember a revelation, and this one was hers.
The woman continues to speak, as oblivious of Leia's attention as she is to the cameras fixed on her oddly-painted face. Leia recognises the surroundings (the Senate chambers) and a few of her longer words (government, Palpatine), but it's the woman's voice that holds her still. She's asking for something, and whatever it is must be the only thing in the galaxy worth wanting.
She doesn't remember the year she first saw the clip, although it must have been early in the Empire's time if the networks were still showing it. (They stopped soon after the Merrol riots; suggestions were made.) The second time was in a damp-smelling bunker on a Rebellion outpost somewhere that time and hot water forgot, long after the palace on Alderaan was gone. She knew who the woman was by then, and she herself was a former senator and wanted criminal, a world away from that little girl seeing the clip for the first time. Still, as she sat cross-legged on a floor thick with oil and grime, breathing in the stink of unwashed sweat from all the people packed around her, she watched the same way she had as a child.
There's anger, too, in the woman's voice (and Leia hears 'massacre' and 'atrocity', and knows she wouldn't have understood either, no matter what she remembers). Real anger under the calm words. Leia realises that these are demands she's making, not requests, and realises for the first time that the galaxy around her is suffering. Things must change, the woman says. Leia finds herself agreeing.
She'd replayed that memory a hundred times since Endor, trying on Luke's insistence to pin down what he called Force-sensitivity and what she just called recognition. And maybe it was neither; how many adopted children imagine their birth parents in every exciting face they see, anyway? All she remembered was knowing, and she supposed the mechanics of that were open to speculation.
And there's something else. Leia doesn't truly understand the problem, nor the solution the woman demands, but she understands that it won't happen. Through all her passion, there's a resignation in the woman's words; a tired sadness, as if she's already seen her defeat. Leia, not accustomed to losing, feels a thin flicker of defiance run down her own spine. With the confidence of a child, she knows that when she takes this woman's place in the Senate, she won't give up.
The clip didn't last long. A few minutes, at most.
But that's enough.
~*~
Note: The title of the BSG ficlet, and the lines at the beginning, are from G. K. Chesterton's 'The Ballad of the White Horse' (where 'the end of the world' is the fall of the Roman empire).
Z Minus
It's the light she sees first. White-cold, and spreading over them like fire, it doesn't belong in a place like this. She watches it turn the city's soft shadows into blades of light and dark as John looks back, looks away, stares down into the chasm ahead of him; it's glowing on his skin as it bleaches hers, and still she can't place it, still she can't understand what it means. Not until the dome above them shatters, and he falls.
Eight seconds before, she told him she was dead. No revelation here - he'd told Morden and Justin already, as certain as though it was his to decide. Which it was, after all. Put aside the body that still walks and speaks and breathes, the mind that remembers every last thing, because he knew all that already and still he let her go for the sake of two scars on her neck and something invisible in her eyes. His wife was dead. So why not let him hear it in her own voice?
(Not that he couldn't have turned back, even then. Not that she wouldn't have loved him. No-one ever said he didn't have a choice.)
Ten hours before was the White Star, with a sickly Vorlon light that pulsed and ached behind her eyes. Morden warned her she'd feel it, but not like this; she wanted to scream, to tear the damn ship apart with her hands, pulling through wires and shattering metal until it let her be. But he couldn't see it, and even if she showed him everything she'd been shown - wars and angels and burning ships, Earth's sunlight glinting off Minbari armour and his hands on someone else's skin - he wouldn't understand.
Ten hours before he'd fallen where she couldn't reach, and that ship came down in fire to kill anything left, he kissed his own tears from her face and told her he'd missed her so much that some nights he couldn't breathe. Ten hours before she'd lost him, she curled around him like wires, hands and arms and fingers splayed out over bare skin, and felt the traces of everything he'd done and everything he'd done it for scattered over his body like that pale, aching light.
"I meant it," he'd said. "What I said before - about you, about what I'd have done -"
"I know," she'd said, and heard anyway what he wouldn't have told her. Anything, anything that wasn't this Shadow-wife come back to tear apart everything he believed with every breath she still took. Anything, but not this.
Three days before, he'd pushed her away. Not hard, not angry, just one hand on her shoulder holding her apart from him. "Did they hurt you? Will they?"
"No," she'd told him. "They're not what you think."
But it wasn't his thoughts alone. Vorlons and Minbari, civil wars on Earth, that old, stubborn line about always finishing fights you didn't start - they knew him, and they knew him well enough to make him wish, just for a moment, that she'd said otherwise.
So there was a choice, at the end. His, not hers; she'd already chosen cities older than myths, ships that held her and sang to her, more than she could ever describe. But she couldn't choose for him, in that moment before she spoke, when he still stood scared and injured between her and a fall into nothing. She could have given him freedom, but she knew now that he'd never have asked. All he wanted - more than her, more than life - was for the woman walking towards him to not be his Anna.
And she could give him that.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
It's the light she sees first. Every time, the same. He can clear all the blades and needles out of sight, promise her nothing will hurt, walk her down to the infirmary as she babbles about integral functions and apples in the distant, laughing way that turns his blood cold, but the moment that light falls onto her skin she's gone. It used to scare him when he couldn't predict her, watching her slip into psychosis with no warning at all; now he can measure that journey in footsteps, and nothing about it is any better.
Of course, he's dealt with patients like River before. He reminds himself of this occasionally, when he's oh, say, trying to convince his crazy sister not to tear pipes off the wall, and it's some kind of comfort. Working in trauma he was always spared the slow, dragging hell of recovery, but he knows damage doesn't wear off with the anaesthetic. For every shattered bone he's dug out of blood and muscle and every heartbeat he's shocked back into rhythm, someone's spent day after day after endless day in physio or speech therapy, staring at dull white walls and believing it's forever. What happened to River was no less horrific than whatever brought those people to his operating table, even if most of her scars aren't physical, and at least she can walk or talk normally, if your definition of 'normal' isn't too particular. But he still can't look at this terrified child, all sweat and panic and frightened hands digging into her own skin, and see his sister. Not with the same eyes.
Left to herself, she'll wander through the ship like a ghost, fingertips skimming over its walls. She finds corners and platforms he never noticed, and climbs railings like a cat. Last week he found her in the engine room, of all places, curled up with her cheek pressed to the floor and a faint, dancing smile on her face, while Kaylee lay reading in her hammock as though any part of that was normal. He's stopped trying to move her. What she needs is a decent hospital, proper resources and specialist care; but what she's got is Serenity, and she'll take its rust and oil and engine grease over any medicines he can give.
Last time he was in space with River, back when ships meant journeys and not destinations, the liner had carpets the colour of Auroran wine and fresh flowers in the ballroom every night. Maids and waiters in starched black-and-white, chandeliers over the dining tables, and you could walk for hours down those long decks with oak-framed landscapes on one wall and windows onto space on the other, never believing you were so far from home.
"Sleeping," River said, the last and only time he mentioned the Endymion. (It had been one of her good days, although that wasn't an excuse - he shouldn't expect too much from her. On his own good days, he knows that.) "Sleeping in bluebells."
"River." He didn't look at the others. "The ship. It was the ship's name. You remember? Father kept complaining about the rooms, and you ordered that soup?"
He couldn't even tell if she was listening. "The ship was sleeping, too," she said. "Dreams in blue, because it's - all the grief, it's not written, and Serenity is, is different, Simon, you don't - they won't -"
"Shh," he said. "Okay, okay. Shh." Not quite fast enough to stop the panic that comes with trying to piece together sense out of chaos.
She's right about this ship, though, and perhaps that isn't so bad. He can't imagine living like this on the Endymion: Captain, my sister and I are being hunted by about seventeen thousand Alliance forces, so we'd like to stay aboard indefinitely, if that's all right with you. No, well, we can't exactly pay you anything, but I'll stitch up a few cuts from time to time if you don't mind getting your crew to babysit. So, yes, it's a smuggling ship, and pieces tend to fall off it more than he'd consider normal, and he's still not too sure that Jayne won't throw him out of the airlock one day, but at least River's as close to safe as he can manage. The crew don't even seem to mind her being the way she is. Really, he should find it comforting that she's settled in so well.
Sometimes, now, he goes to the infirmary alone. It's no substitute for having her there, but he's got her blood tests and drug calculations, everything he needs to work in peace for a few hours in somewhere that feels like civilisation. She needs time, he tells himself; time, and patience, and she'll get better, even in a place like this. Time, and it'll pass.
Sometimes, he can make himself believe it.
The End Of The World Was Long Ago
For the end of the world was long ago
And all we dwell today
As children of some second birth
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.
It's the light she sees first, through the eyes of all her children. It bathes the land in butter-gold as the night's creatures curl into dark hollows, and the day's wake and stretch while leaves turn slowly, slowly towards the sun. Kobol breathes in the sighs of waves hitting shore, and watches.
The children treading this earth for the first time believe they are orphans. Their ancestors' ancestors cursed her once, scattered themselves among the cold stars and called other worlds home. They are lost, they have forgotten; they do not understand why she reminds them of nightmares, nor why they want so much to stay. The leaf-mould sinks beneath their feet, and through it she feels them flinch.
So lost, and for so long.
Kobol's children are killing each other, their blood soaking down into thread-fine roots of grasses; all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. She whispers to them in streams of wind, and they see the granite-slab altars, the stacks of skulls long since dissolved in rainwater, and know this was always a place of death, just as it was always a place of life. They turn away, close their eyes, horrified. But Kobol's children kill each other in every moment: wolves pull down deer, ants bite into leaves, bacteria swarm over a dying fish, and all death is a sacrifice.
That these are all her children, flesh or metal, she never doubts. This is a cold, sterile universe, and they live.
Kobol has been dreaming for a long time now, for all the years these children have been gone. She shares pieces of her dreams with them: a temple, white stone, a drowned child. When they wake, shaken and terrified, she soothes them with the lullaby of wind in tall grasses. Kobol's children fear her now, but not enough to turn back.
What she feels from them is loss, and the shock of that loss still sharp broken pieces inside them. Anger, for their dead worlds, no less than it ever was. And fear. Always, fear. They do not think of themselves as her children, now; they believe their worlds were the only worlds, and their loss was the only loss, and they fear her without knowing why.
In their own dreams, they remember pieces of stories and no more. To them, their war and their exile were the story itself; they never think of they, themselves, as a forgotten epilogue. But Kobol remembers the Twelve, the wars, the struggling gods, and watches these children try to make sense out of the fragments left. Their war was her war, long ago, although they believe it immediate and theirs alone. All of this has happened before.
Feeling them move across the land, she knows she will guide them. They have some of the pieces, after all, and although they still lift the rain-drenched pages of a holy book from the ground, believing its words are more than words without this earth to sink into, it will be enough. She will show them Athena's tomb, and the arrow of Apollo, and for moments - days, maybe - they will feel her stories with her.
Days. Maybe. Until the cold of space swallows them again, and they forget.
Kobol will watch them leave the way she watched them return, with the patience of millennia. Long, long years are still to pass before her children come home.
In Memoriam
It's the light she sees first. Only the flicker of a screen that catches her eye for a moment, but it's enough.
When Leia was very young, and her world ended at the grey walls circling the palace gardens, hunger and terror simply didn't exist. She knew the words, but the words were empty. Her life was good, then, and safe, and quiet - even the sounds of a galaxy tearing itself into bloody pieces couldn't reach a royal nursery.
Not hers, at least.
If the room hadn't been empty, she wouldn't have stopped and she wouldn't have noticed. On most days she'd never have been alone, there or anywhere else. But today, as it happens (and why? She can't remember now - a game, maybe, hiding from her nurses), there's no-one else around. Just one half-curious girl, curling her toes into the thick weave of the carpet, and the woman talking.
Of course, it wouldn't have lasted. Her parents didn't idealise naivety any more than she does, and no-one could have grown up in a political family without learning. It wouldn't have lasted, and regardless of what she remembers, it's unlikely she was ever completely ignorant then; surely they couldn't have given up discussing politics over dinner for a week, never mind her whole childhood? But it's easiest to remember a revelation, and this one was hers.
The woman continues to speak, as oblivious of Leia's attention as she is to the cameras fixed on her oddly-painted face. Leia recognises the surroundings (the Senate chambers) and a few of her longer words (government, Palpatine), but it's the woman's voice that holds her still. She's asking for something, and whatever it is must be the only thing in the galaxy worth wanting.
She doesn't remember the year she first saw the clip, although it must have been early in the Empire's time if the networks were still showing it. (They stopped soon after the Merrol riots; suggestions were made.) The second time was in a damp-smelling bunker on a Rebellion outpost somewhere that time and hot water forgot, long after the palace on Alderaan was gone. She knew who the woman was by then, and she herself was a former senator and wanted criminal, a world away from that little girl seeing the clip for the first time. Still, as she sat cross-legged on a floor thick with oil and grime, breathing in the stink of unwashed sweat from all the people packed around her, she watched the same way she had as a child.
There's anger, too, in the woman's voice (and Leia hears 'massacre' and 'atrocity', and knows she wouldn't have understood either, no matter what she remembers). Real anger under the calm words. Leia realises that these are demands she's making, not requests, and realises for the first time that the galaxy around her is suffering. Things must change, the woman says. Leia finds herself agreeing.
She'd replayed that memory a hundred times since Endor, trying on Luke's insistence to pin down what he called Force-sensitivity and what she just called recognition. And maybe it was neither; how many adopted children imagine their birth parents in every exciting face they see, anyway? All she remembered was knowing, and she supposed the mechanics of that were open to speculation.
And there's something else. Leia doesn't truly understand the problem, nor the solution the woman demands, but she understands that it won't happen. Through all her passion, there's a resignation in the woman's words; a tired sadness, as if she's already seen her defeat. Leia, not accustomed to losing, feels a thin flicker of defiance run down her own spine. With the confidence of a child, she knows that when she takes this woman's place in the Senate, she won't give up.
The clip didn't last long. A few minutes, at most.
But that's enough.
Note: The title of the BSG ficlet, and the lines at the beginning, are from G. K. Chesterton's 'The Ballad of the White Horse' (where 'the end of the world' is the fall of the Roman empire).
