Feel free to request fic at anytime, and/or an official appearance at your birthday party for the low fee of $800.
“You bought a what, York?”“A greyhound, man.”
Carolina pinned the phone between her shoulder and her ear as she paced around the kitchen table. “We already have Albany! This house isn’t big enough!”
This is perfect thank you I love it <333333
Especially “She’ll be fast, like you. She’ll need some adjustment to the real world after living in competition, but I think we can help her with that”
and the rest of it, all of it.
You can feel the axe like it’s still lodged in your heart, gristle and pinch, tendrils clogging up your breathing. Fear, mostly, and pain after, although the pain would be less without the fear. He’s saying your name, over and over still the code name you gave him to suggest trust. You tune him out.
Ohhhh god why. This also fills in gaps. Thank you. And also what the hell stop being awesome at writing
Directly inspired by “plot twist: Church is actually a ghost” and Assassin’s Creed without the science fiction.
Leonard L. Church died for this war, but it goes on without him.
He comes to understand the inside of the walls and the grainy darkness there, and to look more slowly at the gray metal bases. (“Understand”, for Leonard Church, means “barely tolerate”.) Everything becomes very temporary. Clothes and bottles and ammunition left on the floor feel so unimportant that they flicker like a time-lapse video. Maybe he is losing time. He isn’t sure. He just knows that he hasn’t gotten what he needs yet, and that that need changes over time – often it is Tex that he needs, and other times it is to even the teams. Either way, he needs the base to even out something, so he stays around.
He gets to know the place differently, and better than he ever has. Along with the thickness of the walls he learns where the most dust settles and where people tend to trip. He finds new drafts, and mutters aloud to himself that since ghosts are supposed to make cold patches in the air, why does he also have to walk through them himself?
Death was a quick crunching sound, the worst he’s ever heard. Coming back was the slowest, coldest thing in the world.
Everyone should read this. It’s eerie and sad and funny and delicious. The perfect accompaniment to any meal.
“I think they’re watching us, Wash. I don’t know where the cameras are, but they must be.”
“Here? Now?” He’s sitting on the edge of her bed with his shirt hanging on by one sleeve and his first thought is to pull it back over his head. Instead, she takes it from him and tosses it away.
“No. Probably not. But out in the training floor, in the mess…everywhere.”
“We’re training then. They’re supposed to be.”
“When we’re active, yeah.” She slides her legs onto the bed, her skin smooth and pale. She looks up at him from under her lashes, looking falsely defenseless: she’s like a knife sheathed, sharp iron under soft leather. “But I’m starting to think the numbers on the board don’t just tally our kills and our times. They change between missions too. He’s looking at what we do socially, where we do…I don’t know, Wash. Maybe this is all a big psych test.”
The first thing he thinks is “That sounds like science fiction,” and because he knows she’ll get the reference he says it. He makes it sound consoling.
She looks over at him, eyes bright and her hair falling across her cheek in thin waterfall strands. “We live on a spaceship, dear,” she says, and leans forward to kiss his cheek.
This is adorable and great dialogue and “she’s like a knife sheathed” and yes good
(2 a.m)
He has trouble sleeping. There are monsters under the bed, and he’s just so afraid.
(metaphor)
The army is not poetic, it is not symbolic, it is nothing but itself, or maybe life is symbolic of the army.
(sky)
He grips the side of the seat the first time the ship blasts off; the recruits next to him don’t notice.
(degrees)
The Mother of Invention is the largest ship he’s ever been on, and the way he can walk for ten minutes and not see the stars disorients and amazes him.
(tragedy)
They give him a name. “Aw man, I wanted a cool state.”
“Names don’t matter, man.”
“What did you get?”
“New York.”
Reeberry asked: Wash/CT (of course): “and I’m cold/yes I’m cold/but not as cold as you are/i love the sound of you walking away/you walking away”
A lot of words tended to catch in her throat - words like I’m leaving you and I can’t do this any more could not be said in front of him, too tangled and complicated by memory for simple explanation. Instead she found herself growing more distant and moving slower around him. He came to her in armor processing with his hair bleached from whatever York put in the shower, befuddled and fastidious, and she just looked at him. She gave him vacant eyes, eyes that told him she was still somewhere looking at that board. Her face flushed just to see him dressed in all of his armor but the chest piece, that lying forgotten somewhere with baffled techs. They first locked eyes in this room. They first escaped together to find out how their new bodies worked - not new-minted but fresh-scarred and pale from the armor, plates and pieces set aside just as fascinating as his hands. The wonder of it did not decrease with time, the thrill was still there -
But she looked at him pawing through his hair and drawing out the syllables of York’s name and she thought that this was not a family she could be part of any more. She had decided to leave it. Her heart had already gone.
mumblybee asked you:“My friend is gone/ He ran away /But I can tell you/ I love him each day. /Though we have sparred /Wrestled, and raged / I can tell you / I love him each day.” - Sufjan Stevens, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!”
“Do you remember when…”
“Don’t talk to me.” Wash clutched the rifle closer to his chest. “We’re not friends.”
CT sat on her knees on the sand. She’d just dropped when he told her to sit, and didn’t think to care how. When the armor started to pinch at her knees and her skin tingled she’d shift around. Right now her defiance was in every part of her, and because like him she put the greatest stock in unwritten rules she defied by the book: straight back, narrowed eyes, bent knees to show she was persecuted and in need of defiance. “Do you remember back when I made a bet with York and won you — ”
“I’ve gotten good at memory since we last saw each other.” His voice was bitter and narrow.
“You’re talking about the AI,” she fired back. “I’m talking about you.”
“You saw how we were when we got the AI.” He looked away for a moment, then back, remembering that he was supposed to be her captor.
“I heard about it.”
“From the man you were talking to on the video the day that I caught you.”
“You don’t even know it was a man.”
“I…just thought it was.”
You were afraid that he was, she thought. You thought you’d lost me in every way you could.
Auuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh
this came out wonderfully
yeahthatsaword asked you:Well im a horrible dancer I ain’t gonna lie but i’ll be damned if that means that I ain’t gonna try/ And I’m a shitty romancer baby ain’t gonna lie but I’ll be damned if that means that I ain’t gonna try Wash/CT (go figure)
They were both late for different reasons. He was late because he was precisely on time; the instructor simply started when she had a decent group of people present, which in this case was five. Wash then arrived, with military precision, to find five Freelancers and one dance instructor touching their toes on the floor.
Wash hesitated at the doorway, his hands swinging loosely at his sides, and began to feel that he should be touching his toes too.
Unexpectedly, Connie’s brown hair appeared in his peripheral vision. He looked over at her. Like the rest, she was dressed in her black under-armor.
“You’re late too?” He whispered, feeling both surprised and relieved.
“No.” She stared into the room. “I’m exactly on time.”
“That’s right!”
“Also I don’t want to do this.”
The instructor noticed them then. “Come in, come in!” She had slate gray hair that seemed to defy gravity, poofing out to either side. She hurriedly pointed them toward the other Freelancers. Wash flopped onto the floor next to York.
“I don’t…want…to do this.”
York kept staring straight ahead. “It’s like football players, you know…they do ballet.”
“This isn’t ballet. We had a briefing about this. It’s…like…jazzercise.”
“I think it’s just called jazz.”
Wash said, “We’re not football players.”
They would play a game sometimes, when she was out of a mood (not in one: sharpness and snappishness and fear were the rule, not the exception, for her). She would turn their lives into a fairy tale and he would tell her the ways it wouldn’t work.
I love this. I would count the ways, but I’m kind of half-dead right now from interviewing with eighty billion different people and also not sleeping very much.
HOWEVER
I love this. A lot.
“You turned off the gravity?”
York leaned back in the hospital bed. He didn’t hurt, despite Wash’s occasional frenzied glances at the chart on the table just inside the door. York just needed to be checked after an accidental spacing, which had left him shaken, and, now, mostly bored.
York was pretty sure Wash was beginning to regret that York didn’t have an injury slowing him down right now, seeing as the banter had started at the speed of light.
“I was rushed!” Wash protested. “We were in the middle of a firefight!”
“You turned off the gravity, man.”
“At least I did my half of the infiltration.”
York raised a hand. “Now hold on. You’re going to blame me for…” He lowered his voice. “D tossing me out the window?”
“Um, maybe.”
“You turned off the —”
“It was an unfamiliar system!”
York chose not to mention that most of the systems they worked on were unfamiliar, and how he specifically had been unfamiliar with the first-hand effects of a grenade to the face, and would Wash like to hear about that. But he refrained, because CT had left that morning. York thought she was selfish, traitorous, and a lot of other words he wasn’t going to call her in front of Wash, but that wouldn’t help.
“York chose not to mention that most of the systems they worked on were unfamiliar, and how he specifically had been unfamiliar with the first-hand effects of a grenade to the face, and would Wash like to hear about that.”
and yes, he does know how to take care of himself…Wash does not seem to though.
mumblybee asked you: “Be fair to me / I may drift a while / Were it up to me, you’d know why” - Beirut, “Port of Call”
“You made me weak.” Tex stalked across the grass, the nubs of her toes digging into the dirt and pulling up patches of grass. Excellent traction. Remember to make Simmons transplant grass later, see if he’ll do it. Sarge looked up from the engine he was tinkering with and met Tex’s gaze.
“What?”
“This body. It’s like a watered-down drink compared to the body I used to have, and you did that on purpose.”
“Maybe,” he mumbled.
“Fix me.”
“Is it just a point a’pride to ya, or is this some dastardly Blue scheme to try and run you in here again to take us out?”
Tex spread her arms. Servos whined a little. Could oil that right up when I try and fix her - no! Resist the Blue scheme! Tex said, “I demand good work. I don’t care about your stupid Blue versus Red battles.”
“Red vs Blue,” he muttered.
Her helmet seemed to glare as it caught the sun, but she just kept going with her thought. “And yeah. Pride.”
Aaaaaaaaahhhhh. I love this. Great ending. The humor/seriousness balance was good, too.
Welcome to Wikipedia Wednesday! Time to write/draw/macaroni-sculpt based on the featured Wikipedia article!
Today’s article is about Louis Slotin, “a Canadian physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project, the secret U.S. program during World War II that developed the atomic…
Lies unbond like atoms.
Breakneck bicycles riding down the fecund fortresses of Spain,
Destroying old wars, replacing new ones
with a future so lived-in that everything is sterile, not untouched but spent
an apocalyptic zeerust event
preventing scars from rising, sieges
from cresting city balustrades. Take the home of the rich,
the poor, without houses
All spaces are agoras. Old wars
no longer apply. Old kinds of wars are gone
as if someone had made them up in the first place.
A divided universe. A verdant castillo.
This is fantastic. I love “Old wars / no longer apply.”
Zen gardens are awesome. Also, one of these days I am going to write a fic about North wandering around in a desert, just for you.nEM
oh my god odghdhgha ;u;;;;; why are you so nice omfg i have good friends
He had been grumbling and stumbling for a while now, clutching the sniper rifle to his chest and feeling it scrape against his armor. He could feel some extra scrape from the sand, and he wasn’t sure how it got onto the top curve of his armor or the bottom square corners of the rifle. It’s not like sand fell from the sky, and North kept his weapons clean just like any Freelancer. He was almost ready to curse the Director for giving him this mission to a freaking desert planet (which were apparently about as common as the sci-fi stories always lead him to believe.)
The Director, though, had told him that a sniper was exactly what the desert needed, and that was true. The Insurrectionist base he was after sat in the middle of a flat plain. The only thing preventing anyone inside it from seeing an approaching enemy was the mirages. So the desert required somebody at a distance. Somebody to slog up just one more dune and prop up a gun that could see through the mirages.
North couldn’t really feel the heat under his armor, but he felt like he should be sweating. He kept looking down, comparing the almost white tan of the sand to the almost tan white of the clouds, then shook his head. He was gonna go crazy in all this heat. Inhospitable was the right word for this place. Why the Innies would want to set up a base here was beyond him. No privacy was worth this. They would have been better off under the sea or something. Or in the north. At least then there’d be penguins to look at.
Happy Trial Tuesday! What is Trial Tuesday? Hop on over here to find out.
So what is the “Object on Your Right” challenge? Well, it’s simple. Look to your right. What’s the closest thing you see? Remember it.
Now, take that thing you saw and be creative. Write…
”an ascent into a world where things get fixed at the end and uncertainty is on purpose.” I love this (the whole thing but that line especially). I’m gonna do mine in a bit.
York wants to know what’s on the other side of that door. Delta doesn’t care - York can feel his not caring in the corner of his head, a cold lack of emotion that he is slowly getting used to. Delta sees friends and enemies alike. He probably would like to go out for a beer…
