Ten Short RvB Fics!

So I did this meme! Fics vary wildly but all are rated PGish with, y’know, the usual amount of cursing.

1. Write down the names of 10 characters.
2. Write a fic of fifteen words or less for every prompt, using the characters determined by the numbers. Do NOT read the prompts before you do step 1. (I totally did way more than 15 words for each prompt. More like 100 or so per prompt.)

1. York

2. Carolina

3. North

4. Connie

5. Wash

6. South

7. The Coffee Guy

8. Maine

9. Wyoming

10. Tex

First Time: 4 and 6 (Connie and South)

            Connie eyed the other two female recruits. The redhead seemed unconcerned with introductions; she was instead studying a manual intensely. They’d all been given one when they were officially inducted into the program. Connie held hers loosely in one hand.  The other woman, the one with choppy blond hair and these eerily light blue eyes, had shoved the manual haphazardly into her jeans pocket.

            “I’m South,” offered the blonde when she saw Connie looking.

            “South what?” Connie replied, and that was when things started to go sour.

Angst, 7 (Coffee Guy)

            Steve had always wanted to be a barista. His parents were underwhelmed and told him all the time that he ought to do something more useful with his life, but Steve never paid them any mind. He spent hours and hours experimenting with milk froth and sugar and different types of roasts, figuring out how to make the Perfect Latte. So what if he wasn’t solving world hunger or that whole war thing with the aliens or whatever? He was proud to be the best damn barista at Starbucks.

            He was so good, in fact, that they’d wasted no time in promoting him to their alternate location, Spacebucks. Steve couldn’t help but smile to himself as he set down the hall to deliver two beautiful mugs of coffee. After this, he was gonna write a letter to his mom and dad about his promotion to space barista. They’d have to be proud now.

AU, 1 and 8 (York and Maine)

            “Hey, buddy,” called York, giving Maine – or the Meta, or whatever he was now – a sardonic little wave. His other hand gripped tight to his pistol. “Nice to see you’re still rampaging around.”

            Maine-the-Meta turned slowly toward him, and Delta let out a stream of warnings so fast they were nearly incoherent.

            “York, fucking shoot him already,” Wash growled over the radio from wherever it was he’d taken cover.

            “Well that isn’t very nice, Wash,” York drawled, taking a step back as the Meta took one forward. “You’re ruining the class reunion.”

Drabble: Sigma and the Cat

One day York carries a cat into Maine and Wash’s room. It’s scrawny and scruffed up and purring pretty loud, like a miniature Warthog motor. Maine watches as York hands it to Wash, who takes it on reflex because that’s what you do when York hands you something, even if it might be a bomb.

            The cat is not a bomb. Wash had been hunched over reading a moment before (he reads all the manuals and then he explains them to Maine because Maine didn’t like to read things before and Sigma makes it even worse now). But now he is sitting straight up, and though the blue Epsilon-light is rolling over his shoulders, Wash’s eyes are clear and his voice is solid as he informs York, “This is against protocol.”

            York shrugs and Delta, glowing quiet-green, rises and falls with his shoulders. “He jumped into the Falcon. Figured he deserves some respect for that.” He reaches over and scratches the cat behind the ears.

            Maine watches as Sigma takes the cat’s curved tail and turns the image into spirals that loop endlessly in on themselves, and whispers weird almost-words, things-that-try-to-be-words, and they loop endlessly too. (Later, Sigma gets a better handle on words. Sigma is the one who carves, “WE ARE THE META.” Sigma knows Greek so he thinks it’s funny, but nobody else really gets the joke.)

Suddenly Maine feels lonely. There aren’t enough people in the room. (Almost, Sigma corrects, there are almost enough, but they don’t have all the pieces yet for the fourth. And Maine doesn’t answer because he doesn’t really get it; he just knows that Sigma likes to put things together.) York is still there, responding mildly as Wash tries to argue with him and the cat curls up in Wash’s lap and Wash’s voice sort of falls flat as his hands go stroking across gray-striped fur. Epsilon flickers a little.

“You can keep him in here, if you guys want,” York says. “North helped me make a litterbox.” He doesn’t look at Maine, just Wash, because everyone’s looking at Wash lately, because Wash lately is weird and doesn’t make sense when he talks and Wash never doesn’t make sense when he talks. Wash explains the manuals.

“Cats,” says Epsilon suddenly, musingly. Maine waits for the torrent of words-wrapped-around-words that is supposed to come now, but Epsilon stays quiet. Sigma does not; Sigma lists other words for ‘cat’ and then says, Tiger, and then, burning bright. And then he is making up words again and Maine can barely hear Wash, who is talking back to Epsilon and sounding kind of desperate like he does when a mission’s going bad.

“What, did you have one?” Wash asks.

“Cats,” replies Epsilon. “No. There were never any cats.”

Wash looks stunned by the resulting silence and York smiles like he’s won something. York is always winning things. Except he lost his eye, but Maine’s pretty sure that was just Tex. Everybody lost something to Tex. Like their numbers, on the board. Sigma doesn’t always know what to do with numbers, so sometimes Maine just counts things. Now he counts the footsteps coming down the hall toward the door to his room.

“York,” says a voice when the footsteps stop and Maine has to find another thing to count. The voice is Carolina, he thinks, but it’s hard to hear through the fuzziness of Sigma stacking sounds on top of sounds, because he’s making up a song, or something. “York, where is it? I told you, you can’t keep animals on the ship.”

York looks at Wash, who’s petting the cat with a look of confused wonder on his face, and then he reluctantly steps outside the door and then Sigma gets curious so he goes a little quiet, and Maine listens as Carolina starts to argue with him. York never really argues back to anybody.

“If the Director finds out, you’ll –”

 “Carolina,” says York steadily. “Come look at him.”

Maine doesn’t see what looking at the cat is going to do. Carolina doesn’t get ruffled by normal girl stuff like cute animals, and besides the cat looks ugly and mangy anyway. But when Carolina comes into the room and looks at Wash petting the cat, the angry lines on her face kind of relax.

“Pet therapy,” says York, quietly. And Sigma is inspired again. Maine listens as he begins to invent new animals.