Tag Archive | perk: donor

Donor Perk – Dragons Next Door: Ketchup

Aug4

anke requested some more of the “Hostage Situation” drabble (LJ). This takes place immediately after that story.

Dragons Next Door Landing Page (and on LJ)

“It’s a human.”

Staring at my oldest child, I sank down onto the couch. Slowly, as if I was a thousand years old, and carefully, as if I or the couch might shatter at too rough an impact. Blindly, I felt for their hands, all the while chiding myself.

How can I pretend to be this enlightened soul, this all-creatures-in-one-neighborhood advocate, and then be so much more horrified when the monster on TV is of my species?

“Human?” I heard myself say, despite the screaming of my internal censor. “They’re sure?”

“Stands upright, two legs, two arms, generally human-shaped and sized.” My oldest child is not known for tact or empathy; then again, it may simply be that teenagers in general cannot handle these things. “Yeah,” came the clarification, before my aggrieved sigh could become an actual complaint. “Human. As far as the news is telling us, garden-variety white-bread normal sort of human.”

“Normal,” my husband coughed. “There is nothing normal about this.”

Handwave. “You know. Not a Special Projects sort, not a White Tower sort. Doesn’t go zzzapp with his fingers. Just… appears to be holding hostages in case he gets the munchies.”

My husband was, by this point, nearly out of his seat. I sensed the breaking point was close; soon, it would either devolve into a fight, or he would stalk out angrily. With that going on downtown, he’d end up beelining there, retired or no. And this one looked bad.

“All right.” I set one hand on my husband’s knee, one on my child’s. “Start at the beginning.”

Sage took a deep breath, pulling himself back from that place. “It’s been on for about twenty minutes. The first they showed was a scrying of the inside of the bank, and then that went black, and they went to this footage.” He gestured at the TV, where police and reporters loitered around the bank as if waiting for someone to give them orders.

Jin picked up the thread, sounding, for once, almost like a kid again. “The scrying was pretty bad. He had the bank manager stretched over the marble counter, backwards, like an Aztec altar. Everyone else was hogtied, and he’d gotten apples somewhere…”

“There’s no trace of magic about it,” Sage continued. Knowing him, he hadn’t taken the TV’s word for that, either. “No accomplices. One corpse already – the security guard. I used to work with him, when I was on the force.”

“Eviscerated,” Jin murmured, and then, with a note of beginning hysteria, “ketchup.”

I gave Sage a look: do something. There was a time for territorial disputes, and a time to be a parent. With an eyeroll: duh, he moved around me to pull our oldest into a tight hug.

“The police will come up with something,” he murmured reassuringly, “or we will, for them. Someone always does.”

Next: Salt

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Phoenix Trees

Jul7

From dailyprompt: “like a phoenix from the ashes;”

Planners’verse, before the Event.

“…and, when the world has fallen, we will rise!” Adrian pounded his fist on the table. He’d always fancied himself an orator, and even in his nineties, his voice was still strong. “We will rise, like a phoenix from the ashes.”

“No,” Jasmine snapped. “Not like a phoenix.” The table of geriatric leaders fell silent at her rudeness; into the gap they left, she plowed on. “Phoenixes rise the same as they died. They don’t change, they don’t evolve. And they’re mythical. No. Let’s plan to rise changed but whole, a seed of a new world, the core and the nutrients needed to grow into something completely different.”

Across the table, Oliver coughed. “It seems like you’re putting a lot of weight on a metaphor, Jasmine. It’s just a way of speaking.”

“The way we speak of something informs our thoughts on it, as you should damn well know, Oliver Hannaford.”

Next to Oliver, Geoffrey cackled. “She’s got you there, Hannaford.”

“Damnit, Red, don’t encourage her, she’ll just keep going.” The days when Geoffrey had any hair, much less the red hair of his childhood, were long gone, but they’d all known each other at least that long. Nicknames stuck, just like old mindsets and old habits. Jasmine coughed, hoping she could use this old habit to her advantage for once.

“I might,” she admitted, her tone softening. Suzanna and Eugenia gave her sharp looks, but she knew what she was doing. She wasn’t senile yet. “I know I can go on and on, gentlemen, when I get excited. And it’s not all that good for me to get excited anymore.” But she could see in their eyes that at least a couple of them remembered when she’d been a lot more exciting. “I’m just worried, you know. About the grandchildren.”

Bless her heart, Suzanna picked up the cue. “It won’t be in our time, you know,” she agreed, shifting her body posture so you could almost see a crocheted shawl draped around her bony shoulders. She made it sound believable, even though the optimistic projections put the catastrophic even in their children’s time and the pessimistic ones had it well within what was left of the Elder’s collective dotage. “It will be our grandchildren that have to pick up the pieces. And, really, if the world has gotten bad enough that it falls apart, why would we want to bring it back just the same?” She plowed on over the objection Oliver was thinking of making. “We have a chance to rebuild.”

“To redecorate,” Eugenia picked up.

“To remake the world as we want it,” Jasmine finished. She could see the light shining in the men’s eyes. Adrian nodded slowly, coughed, and looked back down at his notes.

“…and, when the world has fallen,” he restarted, ramping back up like a champion, “we will rise, the seeds we have planted growing into a new world, a better world. We will rise like a mighty oak.”

Jasmine folded her hands over her stomach and smiled.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/71486.html. You can comment here or there.

Kinkbingo: Sense-Dep. Cali Harem: awakening

Jun20

[community profile] kink_bingo – N-1 – Sensory Deprivation – from my card.

Triggery, possibly: captivity, dubious-consent, sensory deprivation, kidnapping, bondage.

The world had been hazy for a while, it seemed, like he was floating, drunk, on a salty ocean. Stephen opened his eyes, slowly, wondering how he’d gotten here, and, more dimly, wondering where here was.

Nothing. He closed his eyes and opened them again, the haziness vanishing

Still nothing. Darkness, enveloping and complete. He blinked, wondering if he was dreaming, but he could still see nothing at all.

He wriggled, trying to sit up, and found that he was held down somehow, a pressure against his entire body that gave just a bit, a couple inches, then sprang back, pushing him back against… against, it seemed, nothing. He opened his mouth to yell and found that it was already open, blocked with something that had no taste and enough give to not be uncomfortable, but filled his whole mouth, pressing his tongue against the bottom of his mouth.

He shouted against the gag anyway, and heard nothing. Panicking, he struggled, and found that he couldn’t even really feel the substance he was laying in. They had taken everything from him except his fear. He struggled more, fighting, grunting against the gag although he couldn’t hear the sounds he made, pushing upwards although it did no good, kicking and fighting against an enemy that was implacable and intangible.

It was exhausting, and he was tired already, his shoulders and thighs sore. He welcomed the soreness, tried to work those parts more, just to feel something, but he had no energy at all. Enervated, he flopped back into nothingness.

Then, as he lay in the nothingness, his throat closing with panic, he felt something. Fingers? Fingers, maybe, wrapped around his shaft. Massaging, working upwards, convincing his organ into an erection. His whole body was focused on that. He couldn’t get away, and wasn’t sure he wanted to; if all he could feel was a lessening pain in his back and a hand around his cock, he would take what sensation he could get.

The hand was supplemented by a tongue, licking around the head, expertly finding every nerve ending. He moaned silently, trying to lift his hips up: more. More, please. The tongue vanished, and then the hand.

He could feel cold air across the moistness on his cock, and then an even colder feeling: something hard and chilly around the base of his shaft, around his scrotum, pressing against his hardness, holding it firm. The tongue came back then, licking, biting, teasing, and bringing him right to the edge.

Just when he thought he would burst with it, die with it, the mouth and hand went away, the cold breeze, the pressure, leaving him laying in nothingness with his organ throbbing against the implacable steel, trapped, nothing to do, nothing to feel except the pressure of his need.

He whimpered, although he couldn’t hear it, a low, keening sound, and lifted his hips against his bonds, trying to force out words he couldn’t hear anyway, trying to plead with the unseen hand, the unseen tongue.


Tir na Cali: Cali has a landing page (Lj Link.)

The harem triptych begins with
Gifted, continues on to
Keyed Up, and ends with
Restraint.

This story is a prelude to that triptych.

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