Tag Archive | morepls: fulfillment

Unwelcome Guests – a story of Baram’s House Elves/Addergoole for the Giraffe Bingo Call Card

Jan4

To [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt to my Orig_fic Bingo card; this fills the “Unwelcome Guest” square.

Baram and his family are part of the “Baram’s House Elves” sub-series of the Addergoole ‘verse, which can be found here; Baram is also a background character in Addergoole.

There wasn’t so much a war anymore, as far as they could tell.

They didn’t get any TV anymore, local or cable or anything else. The radio they heard these days was sporadic at best, and there would be weeks where there wasn’t anything at all.

But they hadn’t seen a returned god in several months, they hadn’t seen an army soldier in the last month, and they hadn’t seen another Ellehemaei in a couple weeks. They had gotten a couple human refugees – they were a standing house with a standing wall and hedge, burning lights and smoke in the chimney – but the girls fed and equipped them and sent them on their way, if they were over eighteen, and added them to the child collection, otherwise.

Baram liked it that way. He liked the quiet, and he’d found that he didn’t mind all the kids around. Liked them, actually, if he was going to be honest… and he had space in his head to be honest, now.

(Which might have been because of the children, actually, something else he said only in his own head.)

There wasn’t so much of a war anymore… but there wans’t so much of a world anymore, either. That bothered the girls, Baram’s angels, and it bothered the children, but it didn’t really bug Baram all that much. He had his family, he had his house, and nobody bothered them here.

“Boss! Someone’s at the door!” Alkyone’s voice echoed through the house. “Trouble, I think.”

“Trouble.” Baram liked his armchair. It was soft, and comfortable, and normal. But he levered himself out of it before he was finished saying Trouble? “Kids?”

“Got ’em.” Viatrix slapped the Swish-boy on the ass. “Aloysius, get the kids and take them down to the safe room.”

“Yes ma’am.” Jaelie’s boy did have some use, at least in a pinch.

“Sword.” It wasn’t the first time they’d had unwanted guests. Baram took the sword from Viatrix’s hand. “Jacket.” He shrugged it on. He was tough, all the way through, but there were things, they’d found, for which it didn’t hurt to have an extra level of protection. “Stake.” They weren’t vampire hunters… but they’d hunted vampires. “Okay. Door.”

Via swung the door open… and Baram shifted the sword into a guard position.

“Oh, come on, is that any way to greet an old classmate?” Ardell and Delaney stood on his stoop, leaning on each other’s shoulders and looking like they’d stepped out of a leather magazine.

Barm shifted his feet a bit further apart. “Yes.”

Continued: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/675139.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/628825.html. You can comment here or there.

Positions A through “Speak,” a drabble of Addergoole post-apoc

Nov10

After Present.

Um, this was supposed to be kink but turned out to be a little disturbing.

Post-apoc Addergoole, Mike VanderLinden

“Kneel.”

The boy fell to his knees, looking at the floor. His face wasn’t so much slack as it was carefully without expression. The only way Mike could find anything in him was to read his emotions.

“Good boy. Pose A.”

With just as little expression, he shifted his body, arms folded behind his back, forehead down to the ground. It rose his ass up in the air beautifully. Mike had used that, on occasion, over the last couple weeks.

“That’s a good boy. Fours, Pose B.”

As if he was doing a dance, the boy – Laudanum, he had a name, and it would do Mike good to remember it – shifted his ass um, his hands to the ground, until he was straight-backed and perfectly posed in that position.

“Stand on your head.” Mike was feeling a little bit silly.

Laudanum was not. He kicked his feet up, over, caught himself on the wall and managed a nearly-perfect handstand.

“You’re a very good boy. Come down, and at ease.” It was easy to say at ease. There was something about Laudanum that made it a lot harder to be at ease. “Come down.” Mike patted her lap, and, obediently, as always, the boy pillowed his head there. “You’re a lovely boy.”

The boy said nothing.

“Speak freely.”

“Mistress?” He tilted his head to look at her. “Thank you, Mistress, but… freely? About what? I don’t know what you’d want me to speak on. I don’t know what would make you happy.”

“It was not an order, Laudanum.” She stroked his hair. “It was an offer. To speak about whatever pleased you.”

The boy pursed his lips. A moment later, and clearly, even without her power, obviously uncomfortable, he tried something else. His voice, she noted, cracked. It usually did, actually.

“I prefer to remain quiet, Mistress. It… it pleases me to be quiet.”

And there, there was what made it hard to be at ease.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/598068.html. You can comment here or there.

Uncle, a story of the fae apoc for the What I Want Call

Aug27

For [personal profile] rix_scaedu‘s donation and prompt.

“Bobby. Dolores. Jorge. Ryuu. Come here.“ Bruce stood on his porch and looked out at the yard. “Cherry. Kikyo. What part of here don’t you understand?”

“Sorry, Uncle Bruce!” The ragged chorus preceded the children to the porch. Bruce counted noses: One, two, three, four, five. “Where’s Kikyo?”

“She was playing with the kittens.” Dolores and Kikyo were cousin-twins, born within a day of each other from two of Bruce’s sisters. They were generally inseparable.

“Then go get her. Whatever she’s doing.” Kittens wasn’t something that would generally keep the kids from lunch. “Bobby, go with your sister.”

“But…”

“Go. If anything’s weird, scream.” They knew that; that was drill. But Bruce still repeated it every chance he got. “Jorge, Ryuu, Cherry, come on in and wash up. Your mothers will be…”

A scream cut him off, one scream, two screams. Two. Not three. “Ryuu. Drill two. NOW.” Bruce was running before he finished the sentence, but he muttered a quick Working, enough to see that his nephew was doing as he’d said, gathering the younger children and getting them into the center room.

The barn was too far away. The defenses covered the barn too, of course, but a barn was not the most secure structure on which to hang that sort of thing. There were always holes. And they were supposed to be safe out here, out in the middle of nowhere…

The kids were still screaming. Two screams, still, two voices, not three. Bruce loaded up every attack spell he could spit out under his breath and woke up the farm’s overall defenses. Why wasn’t Kikyo screaming? Why wasn’t she making any noise?

He didn’t waste breath on swearing, but he did plenty of cursing in the silence of his mind. He should have gone himself, damnit. He should have known something was wrong with Kikyo didn’t show right away. He should have had the defenses up all the time.

The defenses themselves attracted attention; that was why they were mostly engage-in-crisis things. But he could have, if he’d spent enough time on it, come up with something passive that kept people away. He could have come up with a better alarm system. He could have…

In the barn, his oldest nephew was holding off an intruder with a pitchfork. The intruder was… was something, Bruce could tell that much. Humanoid, naked, with canted animal ears and a snakelike pattern over its skin. It was crouched over Kikyo, who was wrapped around her kittens.

Most of her kittens. A bloody tail on the ground suggested there was one less cat around than there had been. “Behind you, Bobby. Steady. Steady.” The boy was only ten. But he was a strong kid, and he took his responsibilities seriously. Bruce grabbed a spear off the wall and began circling.
The intruder was probably-male, although the long, matted hair made it hard to tell. It covered almost everything. “You need to let my niece go and leave. You need to leave now, alone, and never return.”

Level voice was the key. Level voice, strong voice. The creature tracked his movements but said nothing.

“Back away from the girl and leave.”

“Uncle Bruce?” Kikyo’s voice was weak but firm. “Uncle Bruce, he hurt Toby. I forgot to scream, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Kiya. Get away from him now, okay?”

“But my kittens. I can’t leave my kittens here.”

Screw the kittens. “Kiya, I’ll do my best to protect the kittens, but I promised your mother I’d take care of you. This is not taking care of you.”

“He’s scared, Uncle Bruce.” Dolores had a knack for not being seen. Now she was standing right next to Bruce, between him and her brother. “He’s like the raccoon the other week. He doesn’t know what’s going on.”

Bruce brought his attention back to the creature’s eyes. There was no comprehension there, none, just fear and worry.

“Damnit.”

“Uncle Bruce?”

“We cannot bring home a feral Ellehemaei.”

“But the raccoon…”

“This one will do a lot more than tip over the garbage. He’s already … hurt… a kitten. And he hurt Kikyo.”

“I’m not hurt, Uncle Bruce.” Kikyo peeked up at him over the kittens. “He didn’t hurt me. Just Toby, because Toby bit him.”

“See?” Before he could stop her – before it would have occurred to her that she’d do such a thing – Dolores had wrapped her arms around the creature’s neck. “We can keep him, right?”

No Keep, damnit, no… Bruce moved very slowly towards the creature. The creature, in return, held up both hands. Its eyes were on Bruce, not on the girl hanging from its neck. “Kikyo, take the kittens and go behind Bobby. Now.”

“Come on, Kiya.” Bobby reached out his hands, responding to the tone in Bruce’s voice. “Over here. Hand me the funny striped one. And the pink one.”

“He’s not pink.” When she stood up, Bruce could see the angry red marks on her face and arm. The thing had pushed her aside, then, or she’d tripped. No claw marks, and everything seemed to be working properly.

That was longer than he wanted to look away. Bruce looked over, to see the creature was tracking Kikyo’s movements as well.

“Come on, Uncle Bruce. We can’t just throw him away. Can we keep him?”

Keep again. Bruce sighed. “Deborah, it’s not an animal. It’s a person, a feral Ellehemaei. It could do a lot of damage. And, what’s more, you can’t put people in cages the way we did with the raccoon.”

“Keep.” The creature’s voice was thin and reedy, unused-sounding. It knelt, carefully, one hand hovering near Deborah. Again, its eyes were on Bruce. “Keba oronto apestla tauon. Sa’…?”

Bruce sighed. Those words couldn’t easily be denied. I am under your Name. Sir…? “Uncle Bear.” His sisters hadn’t exactly Named him, but they’d certainly helped. “You are under my name, jae’…”

The creature shrugged. The children watched, until Kikyo offered, solemnly, “Bjorn.”

“You are under my name, jae’Bjorn. Come with me.” And here was hoping the thing knew more than those words, or this was going to be difficult.

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1113051.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/566245.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Crew

Aug8

In continuation of the second story here from over a year ago.

Ib woke not in pain. He woke not aching everywhere, not unable to move. He woke.

He woke, which meant he wasn’t dead. That in itself was a bit of a shocker. The last time he’d had a beat-down like this – close to this, there hadn’t been as much bone-snapping that time – he’d ended up in the hospital for weeks and in agony for months.

Today, he had a little pain in his lungs and his throat was a bit raw. That… that was not how this worked.

He looked up at the big guy in the doorway. Baram looked sort of like unfinished clay, like someone had lumped him together and then forgotten to glaze or bake him. He also looked like anyone going through the door would have to go straight through him. The doctor would have had to go through him to get to Ib; maybe she’d gone through the wall. That seemed like the safer option.

Ib had more important questions at the moment. He squeaked, cleared his throat, and tried again. “Why?”

Baram’s brow furrowed. “Mine. Not theirs.”

Oh. Ib swallowed. Well, if that was the price he had to pay… “Y-“

“What he means-” Rozen somehow shouldered the bigger guy aside. Ib had never been so grateful for an interruption. “-is that he considers you crew, and doesn’t like other people fucking with his friends.”

“Oh.” Friends. These were the sort of friends that you wanted, in a place where people randomly tried to break all your bones.

“I mean, if you want to Belong to him, I’m sure he won’t object. It might be a little awkward, and I don’t think he’s all that into guys.”

“No, no, that’s all right.” Ib cleared his throat, and found he could speak without squeaking if he spoke very slowly. “Thanks.”

“Crew.” Baram thumped his chest with his fist.

“Crew.” Rozen, unsurprisingly, was smirking.

“Crew.” Ib found himself smiling, too. Crew.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/560519.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

More Please: Kit Town Maybe? A continuation of Tir na Cali

Mar23

After Down in Kitty Town and Entering Kitty Town.

The big man was warm. Warmer than a human. Rrrina settled in his arms, since she couldn’t get away anyway, and sniffed him as surreptitiously as she could.

He smelled, under everything, of a bit of musk. Like holding her was making something happen in his pants. Like… She twisted upwards to peer at his face. “Skin job.”

She was quiet about it. She didn’t want to make him angry: he wasn’t wearing a collar and she was; he was bigger than her and clearly stronger; and he smelled like a tom cat that wanted to mate. Every instinct she had told her not to piss him off.

Still, he pulled her tighter against his chest, squishing her in all sorts of nearly-uncomfortable manners. “What did you say, little kitty?” His hiss was warm and angry in her ear.

She peeked up at him. “You’re a skin job.” Her ears were raked back but she kept her voice as quiet as she could. “You look human, but you’re cat.”

“Technically leopard. You’re good, little kitten. You’re going to be really useful.”

“I’m good at being useful.” The well-trained answer slipped out of her mouth, followed by a soft mewl. “But then he sold me. Are you… “

“Shh, little one. We’re almost there. Then you will understand it all.”

Rrrina fell quiet again. He smelled nice. Too nice; her body wanted him, and she wasn’t in a position to do anything at all about it. And then he slipped a hood over her face and not only could she not see anything, she couldn’t even smell anything.

She started with “hey!” and ended with a long hiss. The hood stank of menthol, like a cough drop factory. “Hey,” she repeated.

“Shh. This part’s a secret, little kitten.” He pulled the hood tight, and she could no longer hear much of anything, either. It sounded like he said “sit tight.”

Not that she had any choice.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/496067.html. You can comment here or there.

Present

Mar12

There were things Mike expected to come home to during the summer.

Students, sometimes – the trusted ones, with the invitation to his public home areas.

Desserts and other treats.

Once in a while, a co-worker, who needed stress relief or a shoulder or just wanted to hang out.

Flowers, some times, when said stress relief, etc., had been very appreciated.

What Mike did not expect to find – on the floor, just inside the doorway – was a boi. Specifically, a boy, bound in iron ankle and wrist and collared in the same. A naked boy, kneeling on the tile of the entryway. With a tag attached to the collar.

Mike knelt down on the tile. He contemplated Masking, but, though the boy looked human, he was in the middle of the Village. Humans didn’t come here.

Michelle,

The name was a cue. Before the boy lifted his head, Mike shifted into a female form, wishing – for at least the twenty thousandth time – that she was any good at all with shaping Unutu.

I found this on my rounds. I have no idea what to do about him. As soon as you sign this paper, he’s yours.

Treat him well, Michelle. And don’t Keep him for too long.

Luca

Beneath his signature was a scribbled transfer of Ownership. Attached to the note was a pen.

“Laudanum, hrrm?”

The boy did not look up. Mike ignored ethics and dipped into probably-Laudanum’s emotions. She had to have some idea what was going on before she signed this.

Worry. Worry, want, anticipation, anticipation, anticipation! Worry, concern.

No fear. And the impatient anticipation smelled to Mike like arousal. “Well, then.” She signed the paper. “Laudanum, you’re mine.”

He didn’t speak, yet. Was he mute? Had Luca ordered him into silence? “Speak.”

The boy’s voice was rough, as if unused for a long time. “I’m yours.” Only then did he look up, his astonishingly green eyes meeting Mike’s. “Mistress.”

Luca did give her the most awesome presents.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/491930.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Shades, a story of #Addergoole yr17 for the Giraffe Call

Feb20

To [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt.
Addergoole has a landing page here

It was the easy joke that Abrelle was cold. Ha, ha. Snake, cold-blooded. Emotionally frigid. She’d gotten through three years of Addergoole without making very many friends; her former Keeper’s crew sufficed for companionship and back-watching, and her former Keeper had taken care of the first of her required two children for her.

It was the easy joke that she was cold, and she preferred it like that. If nobody thought she had emotions, nobody would try to get in. If nobody tried to get in (The way her former Keeper had. The way their child had) then nobody could hurt her again.

~

The 17th Cohort kids were freaked out. Nobody blamed them, really: even the 14th Cohort were a little twitchy; even the teachers were a little twitchy. The Gods were coming back. The fairies were turning out to be real.

They almost cancelled Hell Night. By sworn agreement of all the Crews, they kept the hazing ritual low-key and far more mellow than any of them could ever remember.

It didn’t stop them from Keeping people, of course. Many of them – Abrelle included, of course – still needed to finish their graduation requirements. Not a one of them thought that the return of mysterious Gods would get them out of Regine’s schemes. And, while the safety of the wards seemed a little more inviting, the world wasn’t that bad yet, and none of them wanted to be trapped in the school any longer than they had to be.

~

Abrelle grabbed Kevin through the simple expedient of a couple Intinn workings and one good snare trap, a trick her crew-mate Gillian had used to good effect three years running. He fought, which she expected, kicked and spat, which she didn’t fault him for, swore, and dangling upside down from her trap, grew claws and tried to rip her face open, which she hadn’t quite been expecting.

She wrapped his claws in mittens, carried him to the Doctor’s, and gave him just enough orders to keep him from hurting himself or her too much.

That set the tone for their first month together. Kevin fought, spat, kicked, swore, complained, and then would settle down for several hours, sometimes because Abrelle restrained him, sometimes because he ran out of fire. Abrelle didn’t mind. She found she liked it; actually – not the fire, but the time afterwards, when he would lay down next to her, his head on her lap, and twitch until the last of the anger had left him.

~

She’d had to restrain him this time, or chosen to; she found she liked it, and so sometimes took the opportunity to do so when it wasn’t entirely necessary.

She ran her fingers through his copper curls while he twitched. They were so soft, so fun to pet, although he rarely tolerated the attention. She couldn’t remember ever enjoying touching someone like this before.

As the twitching slowed, he opened his eyes. “You never get angry, no matter how much I yell.”

It was a common complaint. She had no better answer than the one she had given him every other time. “I’m very hard to piss off.”

“They say you’re cold, you know.”

“I know that’s what they say. The whole snake thing.”

“I don’t think it’s that.” His teal eyes met her colorless ones. “I don’t think you’re cold.”

For some reason, she found that made her smile. “No?” Against his fire, she was certainly a little chilly.

“No.” His shoulder jerked as he pulled against the bindings wrapped around him. “Damnit. I’ll behave.” His cheeks colored a little. “Please?”

That was unusual, and Abrelle was reluctant to indulge him. He had said please, however, so she unwound the restraints.

His hand shot out, and for a second, she thought he would hit her. Instead, he stroked the edge of her hair, and then, cautiously, the root. “Ever since I met you, your hair’s been white. I thought it was part of your Change.”

“It is.” A strange feeling settled in her stomach. “Why?”

“Your roots. They’re turning blue.”

“Blue?” That was new. They’d never turned blue before. She peered over him at the mirror. The deep royal blue had, indeed, stained her roots. “It’s a mood ring.” She didn’t quite tell him, so much as she told the mirror.

“But your hair is always white.”

“Usually, now.” She caught his wrist, and watched the blue in her hair deepen.

“So what’s blue?”

“I…” The pink tinging the tips of her hair she knew. That was mild embarrassment. “I think it might be love.”

She grabbed his other wrist before he could freak out too badly, and they both watched as the blue seeped down her hair.

Next: Shifting

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/480486.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Love Meme Answers 5: Baram/Rozen, Ib/Baram, Fridmar/Delaney

Apr9

For the meme I posted Wednesday night here and here (feel free to leave pairings now if you want; I’m having fun.

“Come on, man.” Rozen grabbed Baram by the arm. “Party tonight.”

“Party? It’s Tues…” He shut up, but not before he saw the look the bigger guy shot him. “Right. Party. Whose place?”

“Ardell’s. His Keptie seems to like cuddling with you.”

“No-one likes cuddling with me.”

“Hey, man, Annie’s not bad, and everyone knows you’re not as rough as you look.” Rozen punched his shoulder. “You’ll do fine. You always do.”

more here: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/493490.html

(Year 2)
Shad and Meshach had Ib up against the wall and were doing their best to break every bone in his body one at a time. Every time he tried to get away, one of them muttered in his ear, and he found himself squirming in pain, his feet rooted to the ground.

“Say you’re hers and it’ll end,” the older of the two whispered. “All you gotta do is say you’re hers.”

“Luke ain’t gonna find you down here, and he hates you anyway, little bastard. Say you’re hers.”

“Trouble?” The rumbling voice was a new one – might be Baram. Ib couldn’t see.

“None of your concern, freak.”

Something happened. Ib was never sure what. But when he woke up, he was in the doctor’s office, Baram was looming in the doorway, and he didn’t belong to Liza.

(2040)

Agmund was hunting.

He’d been hunting for a long time. Other obligations kept getting in the way, but he came back to this one over and over again. This was his failure, this was his mistake. He would fix it.

Meshach had been his Student. Meshach had done this to his daughter. Everything since then – what Ardell had done, what being cy’Valerian had done, what being abandoned by the Thornes had done – came back to Fridmar’s failure as a Mentor and a father.

And now he would resolve that issue.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/318974.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Invisibles

May30

This is the first half of a semi-sequel to Discovery Channel

The supply trucks had stopped coming around the first of the year; the TV broadcasts had more or less stopped around Thanksgiving time, and the radio broadcasts were getting rarer and rarer, so the fae residents-slash-captives of the “voluntary relocation center” (internment camp) didn’t get an explanation as to why they were abandoned; the food just stopped coming.

At first, they assumed that the remnants of the human government were trying to quietly get them rid of, and shrugged philosophically. They’d been expecting that for a while, after all, and they had their gardens and their little farm already. They’d be a bit short on some more exotic foods for a while, but they were magic beings; they’d make do.

Weeks went on, though, and the mood of the guards that still patrolled the halls of their former-high-school prison shifted. They stopped eying their captives with belligerent fear and began eying the livestock in the courtyards and the greenhouse with the overwintered vegetables with obvious hunger. They talked, when they didn’t think any of the internees could hear them, about their hungry families and the paychecks that didn’t come anymore. They talked about how the monsters in here were safer than their own children were.

Finally, Dita, called the Riddle of the Sphinx, who had ended up being their leader by inevitability and force of will, pulled the guards aside and suggested they just move their families into the compound. “They’ll be safe here,” she assured them, “and we have food to spare.”

The guards hemmed and hawed – they were supposed to be guarding the internees, not fraternizing with them, not locking themselves in, too – but their so-very-friendly prisoners had the magic to make food grow faster and produce more than it ought to, and the walls around their internment camp were high and sturdy. In the end, hunger and a continually deteriorating situation outside won over fear. Their guards became their companions, and they locked the gates from the inside.

That had been mid-February. When the flowers started coming up in earnest, some time in early May, radio broadcasts had trickled down to maybe one a week, there was wheat growing on the rooftops, and something was horribly wrong in the halls of their camp.

At first, they thought one of them had gone stir-crazy. They’d been in this prison for over two years now, in conditions that, while not crowded, were nowhere near ideal. That none of them had gone off the deep end yet was more surprising than that someone had finally cracked.

It was a pretty bad crack, too; people went missing, first one, then two more, and then another three. By the time the three had gone missing, the first one to vanish had been discovered, so very very dead, the dismembered, desiccated, mummified parts spread over the playground. It was the sort of death only another one of them could pull off, at least that quickly, that efficiently. They started eyeing each other with distrust, travelling only in groups, and making locks for their doors and walls to put locks in. The barracks became a warren of tiny, dark, locked rooms… and still people vanished.

They had the magic, in their group, to read minds, too, three mind-readers. Dita set her foot down, and the mind-readers read each other’s minds, then set up a double-elimination queue to find their murderer.

Cynthia, the most junior of the mind-readers, tried hard not to think about some of the things she’d found her fellow inmates to be guilty of. Not this string of murders, no – she found not the slightest shred of evidence that anyone here had even witnessed anything related to these deaths. But there was a lot of untidiness in these minds. There were tiny peccadilloes and crimes that would be felonies, if human law still cared about them, guilty consciences and sordid desires. Some of it was really, really creepy.

By the time she reached the last person, her friend Aaron, she was ready to destroy large portions of her mind just to get rid of the slimy memories. The walls around their prison had never seemed so constraining. And she had never been less happy to see Aaron.

“How’s it going, Synthie?” He plopped down in the comfy, ratty armchair she was using as an interrogation seat and grinned at her, only the off-skew cant of one ear suggesting he was at all worried.

“Urgh.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I don’t want to know what’s in your brain, Airhead. It had better be just air and stuffing…”

“Or what? You’re too good a person to cut out the parts you don’t like.”

“I swear, if I find anything in your mind that I don’t want to see, Aaron, I’m…”

He was out of his chair with his hand over her mouth before she could finish the sentence. “You know better, Synth… Cynthia,” he whispered urgently, his cobalt-blue eyes staring at her. “You’re tired, and they forgot to feed you, here,” he pressed a cookie into her hand while she stared in worried confusion at him. “You’re not going to like everything in my brain,” he explained quietly, and comprehension finally worked its way through her exhausted mind. She nodded, and he removed his hand.

“Sorry,” she muttered, and devoured the cookie. I swear were words one didn’t say casually; that she’d forgotten enough to slip was an indication of how worn out she was. “Well… let’s hope there’s not too much in there, okay? I really want to bleach my brain out.”

“That bad?” He sounded worried. That, in itself, was worrisome; Aaron never showed concern.

“That bad,” she agreed quietly. “Let me get this over with, please?” There, let him chew on that; she never said please.

“Okay,” he agreed quietly, and leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes. “Do your worst.”

It couldn’t be him. She shouldn’t even look. But what if it was? If she trusted friendship and doomed them all? She closed her eyes, too, pretended this was someone else, and murmured the Working that would let her read his mind.

Don’t let Synthie see what she doesn’t want to see was at the forefront of his mind, fences neatly lined up, pointing her towards hey, about those murders? I didn’t do them. He was anxious, little bits in the back of his mind dancing around. Her threat had worried him; more than that, the drawn, tired way she looked worried him. Is she okay? Is she going to forgive me for…

She knew better, but she poked a little bit, telling herself she needed to find out for certain that he wasn’t the murderer. …forgive me, no, not there, ack, PORN! His mind flashed naked cat-girls in improbable positions, and she reeled backwards, falling off her chair.

“Synth?” She was still far enough inside his consciousness that she could hear his worry and guilt as he scrambled onto the floor next to her. “Synth… Cynthia, damn, sorry, are you okay?” C’mon, be okay. Be okay and don’t poke anymore, please? Stupid murderer. Messing up our friendship.

She shook her head carefully. “Airhead, if you ever assault me with porn again…” She made sure to make the not-a-threat cheerful, and tried to stifle the headache that wanted to leak out.

He flushed. “It’s the mind-blanking technique they taught us, you know… pink horses.”

“Purple elephants,” she nodded, but this time, let the exasperation leak. “Airhead, you’re not supposed to be blocking my mind-reading. You’re supposed to be proving your innocence.”

“Synthie, if you don’t already know I’m innocent, you’re not going to find it in my brain. Look, this was a nice idea, but if it’s not any of us… doesn’t it occur to you that that’s even worse?”

“Worse?” She blinked at him. “Worse than being trapped in her with a monster?”

“That’s how the guards feel all the time, isn’t it? What I mean is… we know each other. We know our flaws and our powers and everything else, every one of us. We’re too close not to. But if something managed to sneak in here with us and remain hidden, except to pop out and kill us…”

“We’re dealing with a completely unknown, invisible enemy.” Cynthia gulped. “Okay. That is pretty bad.” She chewed on her cuticle, nevermind what her mother would say. “Aaron, what do we do about something we can’t see?” Why was she asking him?

“Well,” he mused, “we have to find a way to make the invisible visible.”

dailyprompt ‘making the invisible visible.’

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/47613.html. You can comment here or there.