Tag Archive | prompt: 15minfic

15-Minute Ficlet: Constraint

Feb15

From Ty’s prompt here, “Yearning.” Probably faeapoc.

The yearning was nearly unbearable.

It had been nearly a week since she’d seen him, since she’d felt his touch, heard his voice, since she’d breathed in his scent, tasted his skin.

She didn’t know when he’d be back. “I’ll be gone as little time as I can manage,” he’d told her. “Stay inside unless you have to go out.” The directive had left her an uncomfortable amount of leeway; she’d gotten unused to making decisions, content to allow him to steer

She’d been fine for a few days. She’d lazed in the sun as it shone through the living room windows, re-read some old books and one she hadn’t seen before, tucked away under his bed but not all that hidden, not hidden enough to suggest that she shouldn’t read it. She tidied up and cooked herself treats that he didn’t like and sprawled across his bed at night.

The nights were bad, though. She was used to his presence right there beside her, his body pressed against hers. She stayed up until she was exhausted, reading, until her body demanded sleep, and then it was ragged, uneven, unhappy sleep, hag-ridden with nightmares.

She took to napping through the day in the sunlight, reading through the night or prowling the house. There was no phone, no internet, no TV, but there were books, and she found a notebook and a pen and started doodling.

She’d always had idle time while he was at work, but there were chores, laundry and dinner and picking up, and there was knowing he’d be home. Her evenings had always been filled with him; now they were filled with nothing but her own thoughts.

More days passed. There was food to last a month, and she had little appetite. She re-read her books, and wrote notes to herself that turned into drawings and stories. She played in his weight-room; he’d never expressly forbidden her to go in there, after all. She played in the basement and tidied his tools. She thought, and as the days went on, she thought more.

The yearning was still there, but she was learning to bear it. He’d left her with so little, a few books, some food, and some orders that barely constrained her. He’d left her to fend for herself, who had sold herself for comfort. She read another book, and wrote herself some more notes.

“Stay inside unless you have to go out.” The directive, the only one he’d left, gave her quite a bit of leeway. She stared at the door on the fourteenth day of his absence, and decided she had to leave.

Drakeathon 2/19-2/20/11

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/6623.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute Ficlet: Anger

Feb4

Originally posted here, in repsonse to the prompt:

“Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before – it takes something from him.”

I think it’s Tir na Cali –> Catpeople, but I’m not certain.

The rage was never as solid as it was that Wednesday, never as hot, never as silent.

The worst of it, for me, was knowing that no-one else would either see it nor care if they did. Anger, from one such as me, was /cute/, was adorable, pat-head and chuckle, like a kitten whose teeth aren’t a threat yet. No-one cared when I was angry, no one feared, no one worried.

I wanted them to worry, to quake, to run, but I’d learned to smile through the anger. I had learned, since my anger caused only amusement, to not give them the pleasure of being amused at my expense on top of whatever insult had angered me.

So I smiled. I smiled so they couldn’t see the teeth that their science had made sharp; I smiled so they couldn’t see the anger that they had bred, all unknowing, into me, the rage that demanded that I kill or be killed. I bowed, so very low, and I smiled, so very sweetly, and I did not acknowledge the insults with anything louder than a “yes, sir.”

That is what they expected, was it not? They expected a cute and defanged little pet, someone who would purr in their laps, someone who would snuggle against them and keep their bed warm, who would make cute little noises on cue. They had trained me for that. They had trained me to be domestic; they had forgotten, if they ever knew, that they had also bred me to be feral.

Though the smiles, through the bows, through the trained-animal dances that they put me through, through the day and into the night, the rage sustained me. Through the morning and the next day of the same. It had been, after all, a very great insult, and it would take a long time for the rage to build properly, while I bowed, while I danced, while I smiled.

When I slipped into his bed that next night, when my claws opened his belly from ribs to hip, I could see the surprise in his eyes as he gurgled out his last. I could see his confusion, that his good little pet had rebelled. That his kitten had claws that could rend flesh. That my anger was not to be head-patted and brushed off.

I left with his blood still wet on my claws, to find a master who would put no other pretty little thing before me.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/4344.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute Ficlet: Passing

Feb3

Originally posted here, in response to the photo prompt

Passing

They’d gotten out.

Sylvie turned to look one last time at the city. It looked so peaceful and benign in the setting sun, no sign of the hell it had become visible from this distance, nothing but the fence they’d had to get around, the fence that trapped the denizens of the city in there with each other.

She looked up, up, up at the fence, and then back at Jake, sighing softly. If they had gotten out, others would, too. Someone else would be less discreet, and then their captors would know that there were escapees. “We should get going,” she told him. “Before the hunt comes.” They would have to vanish into the world, before they were missed. It was their only hope of salvation, or survival.

He nodded, the ragged mess a gangster had made of his throat having muted him permanently. He took a long look at her paws, all four of them bloody and cracked with the work of digging them out of there, of filling the hole back in, and scooped her up in his arms.

“Ja-ake,” she complained, but she was grateful, and, when he shook his head at her in a silent scold, she fell silent and relaxed in his hold.

The dark had fallen, and nothing human would be within ten miles of the blockaded city. Jake loped off into the dark, Sylvie drowsing in his arms. By the time the sun rose again, they would look like just another couple, somewhere sixty miles away. By the time the jailors started looking for escapees, they’d have become nothing more than two more people out of billions, just a couple of humans in the crowd.

It was a nice dream, at least, and he let her have it, for now, while he ran.

Drake-athon! – Feb. 19th & 20th 2011

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/3780.html. You can comment here or there.

15-Minute Ficlet: Come the Dark

Jan31

Originally posted here, in response to the prompt: “The darkness holding me tightly / Until the sun rises up.” Faint shades of Cali, but rather faint.

Night had never felt so safe as it did in her little cubbyhole, so wrapped-in-cotton, so silent, and so entirely entrapping. Nothing could get to her, locked in her tiny, dark room, in her bunk with no sharp edges. She couldn’t even hurt herself, folded into the pod-bed as she was; there was nothing to use as a weapon, even her fingernails trimmed down, pretty and pink-painted and dull.

It was so soft and so surreal, the sheets so smooth as to have no texture at all, the bed like a hammock, sucking her in, that even emotions couldn’t seem to get through. There was the moment of panic, every time the pod closed, and then nothing but soft, comforting peace. Darkness wrapped around her with soft velvet fingers, and carried her in to sleep.

Only when the sun rose did her pod open, and only when her pod opened did she wake, and only then, with the sunlight trickling in through the windows high above, brushing over the long racks of pods, did she begin to fear again. Only when the overseer came, to hand out the day’s clothing ration, the day’s breakfast, did she find herself allowed to remember where she was, and only as her bare feet hit the cold concrete floor did she recall, for the briefest moment, who she had been before.

The sun may have been her friend, once upon a time, but here, it was an enemy. When the daylight shone, implacable on her chafed and chapped skin, she worked, she and all the others, the others she didn’t dare think too hard about. When the sun was in the sky, there was pain, and fear, and exhaustion that never seemed to end. Only when the darkness wrapped around her was there peace; only when the night held her close could she relax.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/2941.html. You can comment here or there.

A 15-minute ficlet; I blame worldbuilding

Jan28

Posted originally here, in response to Ty’s 15-minute fiction prompt. It’s clearly not complete, but I like its beginning

They followed the newly-named Yarthout River all day, their little craft handling its rapids with a smoothness and ease that surprised Vas. Wisely, he kept his surprise to himself; Malia and Ezra would be unbearable enough about their success without him acknowledging it.

The cliff sides grew lower and lower as the sun, too, sank down, until by late afternoon, they were floating through a meadow of strange blue-flowered grain.

It was dinner-time when they reached the confluence of what he was now thinking of as “their” river and a wider, wilder waterway; Ezra and Paz guided their boat to the V between the two rivers, where the ground raised into a hillock covered in another flowered grain, sprinkled with trees that seemed to be some sort of fruit.

“It seems almost pastoral.” Malia had been saying things like that since they made landfall; Vas did his best to ignore all of it. It was unscientific, for one, and had no place in their research. For another, it set a mood in the party’s mind, coloring the places they studied in insidious ways that would end up skewing their later feasibility reports.

He would have ignored it again, but Paz was getting in on it now. “Not almost, Mal. Look at the way the trees are planted up there. That’s not a random placement.”

He opened his mouth to stop their silliness, but the view over Paz’s shoulder stopped him dead.

“That,” he croaked, “is a wall.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1606.html. You can comment here or there.