Archive | August 13, 2011

Yet more kissing!

Aug13

[personal profile] lilfluff requested Jas-who-will-be-a-boy/Rin or Girey in the kissing meme.

Notes: “Tuathan” is what the Cali royalty call themselves. Girey’s language is not actually Italian, but it’s within close enough that Jas could pick out basic words.

Not canon

Jas knew better.

There were rooms in the sub-sub-sub-basement sections of the Agency where you just didn’t go, and there were rooms where, when you had to clean something, you cleaned very carefully only where you were told to, and didn’t cross the blue lines.

You never crossed the blue lines.

This time, well, the blue line had been under something, and s/he’d moved it (Jas was still coming to terms with pronouns. Everyone here, even the cats who knew better, treated him like a boy. But there was still the little voice in the back of his/her head saying that wasn’t quite right. Yet. Yet?). Jas had moved the box, because it needed to be cleaned.

He was pretty sure he hadn’t tripped, but the next thing he knew, he was falling through a bright blue doorway…

…and landing in the middle of a campfire. He yelped, and stumbled backwards…

…into the arms of the most beautiful non-Tuathan woman he had ever seen. Heart pounding, ass mildly scorched, and still smelling slightly of cleaning products, Jas did the only thing that came to mind.

He kissed her.

He knew the logistics, of course. He’d kissed other slaves, in the barracks, boys and girls, and Lords had kissed her, once or twice, before she shifted to boy’s livery. He knew what he was doing, and, it seemed, so did the woman.

It lasted about three heartbeats before the man, chains jangling, yanked him away. “You came through there?” he asked, in heavily-accented Italian. Jas, now even more disoriented, nodded. The doorway was about four feet up in the air, shining bright blue.

“Go home,” the man grunted, and threw Jas through the doorway.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/109247.html. You can comment here or there.

Bowen, expanded.

Aug13

Yesterday, I posted a piece on Bowen over 6 years, in response to rix_scaedu‘s prompt “Fridmar and Bowen…” in this flash-fiction meme (LJ).

It didn’t feel like enough, but it was already over 250 (270, not counting date/time tags).

Then Rix sponsored more.

This is the whole story again; the new part is the 300 words in the middle.

Year Five, Week Six
Bowen sat uncomfortably in his Mentor’s office, fiddling with his collar. He had orders about what he could say and couldn’t, but going up against the edge of his orders was sometimes enough; his face twisted and his ears went flat, and people seemed to understand what that meant.

“There’s got to be a way,” he said quietly, not quite begging. Professor Fridmar shook his head slowly.

“Being Ellehemaei about being strong,” he said, in his thick Russian accent. “What doesn’t kill you, et cetera. Find ways to be stronger.”

Year Seven, Week Eight
Professor Fridmar frowned over steepled fingers at Bowen. “Shira has been talking to me.” His tone suggested he didn’t like Professor Pelletier talking to him about anything; Bowen could already guess what this was about.

“Yeah?” Never show your cards.

“She says Adannaya has seemed strange lately. The girl is not complaining…” His look said what they both knew, that Ada wasn’t going to say anything against Bowen. “But Shira does not think she is happy.”

Bowen met his Mentor’s gaze evenly. “What doesn’t kill you, et cetera,” he quoted.

Year Seven, Week Eight, Three hours later
Fridmar had let him go. What was he going to do?

He lay in bed next to Adannaya, tracing fingers over her fear-rigid body. Her face was blank, eyes closed. “The Professors say you’re unhappy.”

She shuddered, swallowing a sob. “I didn’t say anything. I swear.”

I didn’t say anything, Aggie. I didn’t ask for any help. His remembered shudder echoed Adannaya’s. “I know you didn’t. I ordered you not to.”

I know you didn’t tell them anything, Bowen. You’re a good boy. You wouldn’t want people to think ill of me.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

Year Seven, Week Eight, Saturday
Bowen was a bit surprised to find cy’ree-mate Penny knocking on his door, but not at all surprised to find she was carrying food. “Ada’s seemed off her feed in the Dining Hall. I thought my shepherd’s pie might cheer her up.”

He eyed the tasty-smelling pastry. “No mutton?”

“No mutton. May I come in?”

He couldn’t turn her down; she’d know something was up. And the pie smelled very good. “Come on,” he grunted unwillingly. “Ada’s in the bathroom.”

“Crying.” She set the pie down in the kitchenette and began serving it out.

“What? No…”

“She’s always crying, Bowen.”

Year Seven, Week Nine, Sunday
Reheated shepherd’s pie made a decent breakfast. Bowen sat watching Adannaya, struggling with himself.

“You’re mine,” he rumbled, as much telling his suddenly-guilty conscience as her. She twitched, and nodded.

“I know,” she whispered, setting her spoon down.

“I can do what I want with you. No one will stop me.” Aggie had cut his tail off, starved him. Nobody had stopped her.

“I know.” Her voice was flat.

He took a deep breath. Power was strength. Power wasn’t kicking rabbits.

“That doesn’t mean I ought to.” He watched her jerk as if he’d hit her. “Or will. I’m sorry.”

Year Twelve, October

Bowen was unsurprised to find his old Mentor standing in his living room. They all knew, by now, that the professors stopped in on their former students, “to be sure they were all right.”

Sibil had let him in, pretty, doll-like Sibil, who ran his house. The Professor was sipping the tea Talitha had brought him, and studying the two women thoughtfully. When Bowen walked in with Kate, one bushy eyebrow rose.

Bowen couldn’t help but grin. The girls were happy, with or without orders. “Stronger,” he laughed. “And better.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/109021.html. You can comment here or there.

A Kiss Under Duck-and-Cover, for clare_dragonfly

Aug13

[personal profile] clare_dragonfly requested Theresa/Thomas in the kissing meme.

This comes after Hello and Forbidden.

It came, eventually, the moment she’d been waiting for.
The sirens did it, which meant that, in a manner of speaking, she had the wild tribes to thank. As they had all been drilled, they moved into the nearest interior room, and from there under the big, sturdy desks.

Theresa had been teaching a class, the one class she still taught and one, coincidentally, that Thomas was in. She stepped into the nearby library and slid, with a dexterity she was proud of, considering her advanced years, under the widest desk. She’d been hiding under this particular desk for so long, her teenaged initials were carved into a hidden corner.

And then, just as she was getting comfortable, Thomas slipped under there, smiling wickedly at her, like he knew what she’d been thinking. There was no talking, not with the sirens blaring, but that meant they were in relative privacy.

In relative privacy, in the center of the Library, surrounded by her students. This was madness. She reached for him, ostensibly to tug him further under the desk. Safety first.

He reached for her in return, pushing her academic hood back off her shoulders, his fingers brushing against her bare neck, her cheeks. She hadn’t been touched like this in… too long.

“Too long,” she mouthed, under cover of the sirens.

“I know,” he mouthed back, and kissed her.

Next: Beginning With a Kiss

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/108580.html. You can comment here or there.

Meme! Indulge me?

Aug13

Yoinked from [personal profile] recessional, who stole it from [personal profile] bessemerprocess:


If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach. — Alfred Hitchcock, 1899 – 1980

If I wrote fic/drew art/vidded/folded origami/etc today, the readers/viewers would immediately be looking for… what?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/108449.html. You can comment here or there.

Fiction Sale – continue one of these stories!

Aug13

Many of the stories from the Gender-Funky Giraffe Call for Prompts seem ripe for continuation.

This week, I offer two at a discounted rate: $4 will buy 500 words more on either story, up to $40/50,000 (That’s more than I’ve written on anything but Addergoole).

From cluudle‘s prompt “female unicorn, male virgin:”

Jordan’s older sisters had all, when they were young, old enough to be maidens but still pure, gone down to the river. Each of them, in turn, had received the unicorn’s bloodly blessing, as did every girl of the village, their village and every hamlet along the Pure River. Their blood blessed the fields, kept the water clean despite the factories upstream, kept the crops coming. Their blood made their bellies rise with unicorn babies; there wasn’t a household along the river that didn’t have a white-haired child in their midst.

Every spring, the girls who had come into their womanhood went down to the river. Every spring but this one, when there were no new maidens, no fresh pure blood to shed. The water was beginning to show the taint of the factories; the crops were slow in coming up. And their town had no virgin girls to give.

Girls bleed in the water, men sweat in the fields. So he had always been taught. But there were no girls, and Jordan was still pure. His beloved, Daisy, had died, as girls did, now and then, of the blood she had given to the unicorns and the small child she had born. In her memory, in the need of the fields and his family, the needs of her tiny changeling baby, Jordan went to the river in the moonlight, and knelt before the unicorn he found there.

“Take what you will,” he told the beast – a mare, he saw; weren’t they always stallions? Stallions, to leave their changeling children. “Take what you need.”

From [profile] lilfluf‘s accidental prompt “Royal Reform School:”

The princess Serafina had been kidnapped, and nobody seemed to care.

Indeed, outside of the Princess herself, nobody even seemed to know. There was a TV outside of her prison, and she could hear it prattling about the banal, not-Sera-related news of the day. As far as the morons on TV seemed to think, the Princess was on retreat in the country, relaxing on a horse ranch. That had, indeed, been her plan, a vacation suggested by her mother. But instead, she’d been body-snatched and locked in this barn, with straw on the floors and nothing but a stale bowl of water to drink. She could hear people walking by, talking; she could hear the TV. They seemed immune to her shouting – and to her powers of charm. She kept shouting, anyway.

She’d been there for what she thought was three days when the door finally opened. She flung herself at the large, burly man who walked in, reaching out with her hands and with her power. “Let me out, let me out, send me HOME!,” she screamed – croaked, rather; the water had been gone for a day.

She was so wrapped up in her panicked attack that she barely noticed the collar he locked around her throat until it was closed.

Any other fic written can, of course, be sponsored for continuation at my usual $5/300 word rate. 🙂

For more information, my Donor landing page is here (and on LJ)


We are under $15 from reaching the first incentive goal of $125!
For every $50 from $75 ($125, $175, $225, etc) reached, I will write and post publicly another short story as an expansion of one of the gender-funky drabbles.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/108154.html. You can comment here or there.