Archives

In the Storm

Jul6

From dailyprompt: “waking to a storm.”

Facets of Dusk (LJ Link), Part one of a small series or long short story.

Cole woke to a storm, thunder booming close by, lightening flashing through the blinds. He checked his cues before he moved: the sheathed antler-handle knife hanging off the bed, the tall blue vase sitting on the nightstand, the sheets, also blue, and the painting on the ceiling. His bed, his home, his world. No other permutation or variation he’d encountered had this specific set of things.

Home. Right. And alone in the bed, because tomorrow they were out again, and he needed to not wake up with his arm draped over a teammate somewhere unless he’d meant to do it. But it was just barely ten in the evening, according to his clock, (like the knife and the vase, a souvenir from another world, its workings more reliable than a battery when he spent more time gone than home). He had twelve hours until he had to report.

He contemplated the slim phone with its thick list of numbers, the rotary phone next to it, the drawer in his nightstand where he kept a stash of condoms and other necessities. Not tonight. Not and risk leaving someone sleeping in his apartment, or risk sneaking out like a thief in the morning. Anyone he could call deserved breakfast, and probably lunch and dinner, too.

Bar it was, then. He knew a few around here, and they knew him, but with the storm attacking the night sky, there was only one that seemed appropriate. He showered off the grit and dust of downtime, dressed, and headed through the rain to Any Port in a Storm.

The bar was quiet tonight – a Wednesday – with only a few regulars around, the rain keeping out all but the diehards. No college pickups here, no travelers relaxing after their business, although the stranger in the corner booth might be looking for a friend. Cole plopped down at the bar, and waited for Susie to bring him the usual.

“Been a while,” she murmured. “There were some folks in looking for you last week.”

“Knee-breakers or tax-takers?” And how the hell had they found his favorite hideout? There was more than Susie’s accounting to account for his cash-only business here.

“Neither. Law-makers, maybe?” she hazarded. “Or, you know, profs. They really looked like profs, and gave a couple of the juniors a panic.”

“Heh. Whatcha tell them?” He paid for the drink and the information with a folded bill.

“Cole who? No, we heat with oil.” She affected her pretty-ditz expression and, dutifully, he chuckled.

“Thanks, Suze.”

“Yeah, well, you pay the rent. Someone here tonight, though, didn’t ask for you, but she’s looking for something.”

“Oddly, I don’t owe anyone money right now.” In this world.

“Honey, she doesn’t look like the sort you pay, and I’ve never known you to pay for it anyway. She’s wearing at least three concealed weapons, five if you count the cleavage.”

“Oh lucky day.” He downed the drink and overpaid for another one. “Let’s see who she is, shall we?”

“You have fun with that. I’m going to hold the bar down so it doesn’t walk off.” She leaned her massive tits on the polished wood by way of demonstration; Cole patted the top of the left affectionately (in bed, she called one Suzie and the other Kwoozie) and took his drink and himself further into the dark ships’ boards of the Storm.

Ed, the insurance saleman. Mindy, his on-again-off-again mistress. The stranger with the expensive suit and the cheap phone – yep, not touching that one. A biker with three empty glasses and a half-full basket of nachos. None of them even looked at him. He wasn’t who they were here for.

The burgundy-red on white of spilled wine over marble caught his eye, gleaming even redder in the dim stained-glass-filtered light. Cole’s fingers tightened on his glass, and he nearly turned and left. He had to work tomorrow; he didn’t want to be working tonight.

She noticed him, of course, before he could leave. That was one of her skills. Xenia looked up from her tall, foamy glass of beer and waved at him, the languid way a cat’s tail waves warning. He waved back, a half-hearted three-fingered sort of thing, and joined her at her table.

“Tracked me down.”

“I do that.” Entirely unrepentant. “I wanted to see you.”

“There’s work tomorrow.”

“There’s always work. I wanted to see you in your element.”

“So you’re saying work isn’t my element. What, I’m out of place in the team I lead?”

She grinned at him and leaned over the table, like she was sharing some sort of big secret with him, her small tits peeking out of the top of her tank top, and whispered, “at work, you are the team, Cole. I just wanted to watch you at play.”

 

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/70421.html. You can comment here or there.

30Days: Falling Falling Falling Down

Jun29

Day 21 of 30 days of Fiction:”23) Prompt: falling”

Another snippet of Facets of Dusk. 🙂

It was Xenia’s turn to hold Alexa’s hand, although they arranged such things without ever speaking about it. The world they were leaving was too unpleasant, too cold, for Josie to be any use at all, so she came in near the end, buffering Aerich and Alexa, focusing on his turmoil to avoid thinking too hard about her own.

Cole stepped through the mist, so comforting and incongruous inside the steel doorway, vanished into its embrace one limb at a time, until his hand jerked out of her grasp. Unbalanced (some would say she always was, but what did they know?), Josie tumbled after him, Aerich nearly atop her.

And they fell, nothing around them but grey storm clouds and one perplexed bird. There had to be a door; that was how the whole system worked. A door in the middle of thin air? She twisted to look up, trusting her teammates to manage the problem of landing.

Through the clouds, she could barely make out the darker grey of stone. A balcony? She moved the wind, carefully, not wanting to impact the climate more than she had to.

Next to her, still holding her wrist in his dry, firm grip, Aerich chanted, drawing glyphs in the air with his free hand. Below her, Cole swore, the sort of calm, rhythmic swearing that meant he had a plan and was working on it.

And stretching up above them all, taller, it seemed, than the skyscraper they’d stepped out of, was the ruin of an ancient tower, grey stone spiraling into the clouds.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/66437.html. You can comment here or there.

30daysmeme, Last in Line (Facets of Dusk)

Jun23

Day 17 of 30 days of Fiction: “17) Write a scene with a character in a foreign land, unable to speak the local language.”

Another snippet of Facets of Dusk, and prompted in part by an icon of [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s and her request.

Once Alexa opened them, the doorway-portals lasted between 3.5 seconds and 7.2 seconds, with no apparent correlation to the technology level of either the host world or the receiving world.

Peter had taken lately to being the last one through. It allowed him to time the doors, for one, and it meant he had neither Cole nor Aerich at his back, factors he considered very important to his continued survival. It also allowed him the longest time to observe the portals.

He stepped through this one as the edges began to blur (5.9 seconds), Josie’s braid having long since vanished into the swirling grey, and turned to observe it as it closed.

The lightning flashes were new; he took down a note. It looked like a thunderstorm, contained in what, from this side, appeared to be an ancient stone doorway.

He frowned at the doorway even as he took more notes and aimed what the rest of the team insisted on calling a tricorder at the opening. The stone was mortared over recently; this wasn’t, here, a ruin. Where had that daft woman brought them this time?

The tricorder beeped the end of its readings as the portal folded in on itself, and Peter pocketed it before it could be noticed by the locals. Locals, right. He had to catch up with the team, before they found the local population. They had to have gone down the stairs; the portal was theonly other viable direction.

He turned to look for them, and found himself looking at the top of a woman’s head. Not one of the team; the sunny-blonde curls didn’t match any of them. She stepped back to look at him more clearly, frowning challengingly.

“£œþëg?” she demanded. “ψówæt!”

Peter blinked at her, finally noticing the thin gold diadem in her hair. “Ah…”

Where were his linguists when he needed them?

My current fund-raising goals:
art for two upcoming e-books, and bedroom carpet for our new-house-to-be.

Donating gets you access to special donor-only posts! Every $4 gets you one month of access.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/63569.html. You can comment here or there.

Intro – Alexa

Jun15

Alexa had spent more time in the Doorways than anyone else she knew, more than, as far as they could tell, anyone in their world, possibly in any world. She was, much to Aerich’s continual annoyance, the resident expert on the things. And yet, every time they went through one, she had to swallow a surge of panic.

They held hands when they went through the Doorways. Roping off would be too obvious if, as they often did, they landed in the middle of a population center. But Alexa wasn’t certain that they would all end up at the same place otherwise, and Aerich couldn’t say yay or nay to that with any certainty, so they held hands.

They made sure it was Cole, or Josie or Xenia, who held Alexa’s hand – her left; she Opened with her right – and kept Aerich on the other end of the chain. And they all pretended they couldn’t tell she was white-knuckled, palms-sweaty, clinging to that hand for dear life until they were all through the Doorway.

She was grateful for the fiction. It allowed her to hold her head high and walk tall into strange worlds, to maintain the cool, perfect Lady Diplomat façade that had held her so well for so long. It allowed her to lie with her body, and smile, and act as if nothing had changed.

Everything had, of course, changed. Since the day she’d stormed out of Aerich’s house and ended up in the desert, both her public persona and her internal self had taken a bit of a beating. The Lady Diplomat, Alexa Bianchi, darling of the US Foreign Services, was missing, presumed dead. While the team had thoughtfully provided her a new set of credentials, as far as their homeworld was concerned, she no longer existed.

And in something closer to reality, Alexa herself wasn’t totally certain of her status, or, on bad days, of her existence. She tried not to think about that, though, as much as she could avoid it. She had a job to do. They all had jobs to do.

They had made it through the Doorway, intact, safe, and not falling through mid-air. She felt the hard soles of her boots click on pavement, took in a lungful of sooty air, and, with the rest of the team, took quick assessment of their surroundings.

“Carriage,” Josie warned, and they stepped back out of the road as the brass-and-iron contraption- not, technically, a carriage, but calling it a car would be entirely inaccurate – clattered by in an amazingly tuneful ringing of pipes.

“Steam and soot,” Aerich commented, brushing off his sleeves. “You take us to the most lovely places, Alexa.”


We met Cole from the Facets of Dusk team two weeks ago, and now we meet Alexa. Stay tuned for more!!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/57932.html. You can comment here or there.

The Uniform

Jun5

Rating: PG-13 for sexual innuendo

It wasn’t his uniform, but it fit him, and it felt good.

Cole straightened the sleeves – powder blue. Who put their military officers in powder blue? – and checked the set of the jacket in his reflection in a car window, then set off down the street. It took only a couple steps to get back into the proper cadence, and not even that long to get the posture right. He’d been out of uniform for a couple years, sure, but the Air Force never really left you.

Their salutes were a bit strange here, but he’d watched officers and enlisted grunts interact for half an hour before he stole the uniform. It wasn’t hard to imitate the gesture, which the academic sorts had mentioned was Roman-esque; the attitude he didn’t have to fake. As long as he didn’t run into anyone who knew the officer he was pretending to be, he should be fine. Of course, in a city as crawling with military as this one, that wasn’t a very safe bet. He rounded the corner, intent on his destination, and nearly bumped into another powder blue uniform.

“Sir.” The pretty blonde with one bar less than him and a chin you could cut cheese with knocked off her salute with just a bit too much precision. Cole had seen that before, although never from the receiving end. In the Home world, soldiers didn’t do that sort of thing to men, at least not tall, strong-looking men.

Here, though. He saluted her back with exact precision. “Lieutenant,” he nodded brusquely. “What’s the situation in the Northwest Quadrant?”

The Northwest Quadrant was on fire; as far as they could tell, the whole damn quarter of the city had decided to riot at once. But she was coming from that direction, and her uniform showed wear on the cuffs and a long seared mark along one side.

“Under control. Sir.” There was a suggestion to the “sir” this time, like she had an idea how he’d earned his rank. Well. “I was sent back to barracks to R&R,” she continued, “but the barracks are on the other side of a line of fighting right now.”

It wasn’t, exactly, a question. She was eyeing his very clean jacket, which fit him like it had been tailored. His very clean hair and face, not even bothering to hide the question: do you deserve to wear the uniform?

Even though it was a stolen jacket, with a borrowed rank, in a world not his own, the accusation rankled. He smiled back at her with an expression borrowed from a female commanding officer, one that was full of suggestion. “There’s a place right around the corner where you could bunk down for a bit. You look like you’ve seen quite a bit of action.”

She stood a little straighter, surreptitiously straightening her own sleeves. “Sir?” One eyebrow rose the tiniest bit, asking did you just proposition me?

“I’ve got your back, Lieutenant,” he answered, poker-face. With luck, he might get her front, too.

“Well, sir,” she shrugged, tugging at the bottom hem of her jacket. “I could use some time off my feet.”

“I hear you,” he nodded sympathetically. “This way then, Lieu…”

“Jaxine,” she interrupted. His back to her, Cole smirked.

“This way, Jaxine.” The hidey-hole had probably been a pretty decent one-bedroom walk-up before the city had been occupied; it still had, now, passable running water and a one-burner propane stove. Cole had been hiding out here for a few days, working on a story; the rest of the team was three floors up, in a decent place with good curtains.

“Not bad,” the blonde acknowledged grudgingly. “You guys at the top get all the nice stuff. Our bunk’s a basement parking garage.”

“Rank, privileges, yadda, yadda,” he shrugged, hoping he wasn’t giving himself away. “The shower even works.”

“Are you saying I need a shower, sir?”

“Cole.” Deliberately, he took off his jacket and folded it over a chair, the only chair left in the apartment. “There’s also a bed.”

“Mm.” She paced the apartment, threw the deadbolt, and checked the windows, the closet, and the bedrooms. “One bed.” She took off her jacket and draped it beside his on the chair.

“One shower,” he countered, as he undid the first button of his shirt.

“Five hours till I have to be back on duty.” She undid her top button, and raised him a second button.

“Then,” he stepped forward and unbuckled her belt. The patent was still stiff and shiny, the buckle new. “I’ll make sure you get some sleep. Lieutenant.”

She reached for his belt, smirked, and switched her grip. Used to unbuckling women’s belts? “Or at least some horizontal time. Cole.”

[community profile] kink_bingo prompt B-1 from my card, “Uniforms/military kink.”

Cole is from the upcoming setting, Facets of Dusk. Stay tuned for more!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/50919.html. You can comment here or there.