Tales From An Alternate Reality

Title: Dancing Shoes
Fandom: Traditional Fairytales
Rating: G
Summary: Sweet slumber eludes them all.
Author's Notes: For the writerverse challenge #4 Bingo Table of Doom, this is "Till the Street Lights Came On."

x-x-x-x-x

Spirited away from their beds each night, they slipped through the secret door and down the stairs into the world below.

Whose summons they heeded did not matter, and the lack of wanting changed nothing. Night after night, the princesses made the journey underground, traveling through strange forests and across a river to dance with princes from some unknown other kingdom.

Each day, they were wearier than the last.

Why it began and whether it would end, they did not know. Perhaps some knight or wizard might find them and set things right.

Perhaps that had already happened, and this was the result:

Not the mercy so desperately wished for, but a punishment in the guise of gaiety.


--/--

Title: Gone
Fandom: Original Fiction
Rating: PG
Summary: They never talked about him
Author's Notes: For the writerverse prompt of "Middle Sibling."

x-x-x-x-x

My mother was the youngest in her family—though never the baby, she always insisted. There was no place for "babies" in the house where she grew up. Daniel was the oldest, strong and handsome and able to do nearly anything, or so she said. After Daniel came Peter, but they never talked about him. Mother only knew what Daniel told her, whispered moments years later when no one else could hear.

Are you allowed to miss someone you chose to betray?

It was winter in an already hopeless year when the man came to their door. He was dressed in gray, the color of the sky and of the fields that had lain barren for two full seasons. Grandmother could not offer him meat, for the herd had been sold off bit by bit to keep the family fed. She could not offer him milk, for the cow had run dry before New Year's Day.

The man needed neither food nor drink, he assured her. What he sought instead was a young person to assist him in his home and in his work—someone old enough to be taught and young enough to last. In return, he could offer her payment and the promise of prosperity once more.

My mother was a babe in the cradle, too little to be of use to anyone. The man might have been thinking of Daniel, but Grandmother persuaded him to take Peter instead.

They never saw either of them again.

The winter turned warm that year, rains softening the earth and preparing it for spring. The soil grew fertile, bringing forth the richest crops Grandmother had ever seen. She gathered in a harvest that paid enough to buy food for the next two years, and each year after the promise held until her children were grown and gone and Grandmother herself was finally dead.

She must have missed her son, whose fate she handed over so willingly in the weak light of a cold February afternoon.

But she never said anything about the child who was blood-price for their future, and her children never saw her weep or worry over whatever that poor boy's story might have become.

--/--

Two haiku
For LiveJournal's writerverse



Cleaning
Foreign contamin—
there. And there. Streaks, germs, grime—who?
Walle. Nemesis!


Sea World
Waves whisper wetly
above stillness. Dark kingdoms
rule the depths below.

Title: The Flip Side Of Chaos
Fandom: Die Hard 4
Characters: Matt, John (Gen or Pre-Slash)
Rating: PG
Summary: Matt has had a hell of a couple of days.
Author's Notes: For the writerverse prompt of "random."

x-x-x-x-x

He'd taken a spec-job as a white-hat hacker—it was an opportunity and a challenge. The payoff was winner-takes-all, but Matt was actually that good, so why not? He'd been on the verge of breaking through the last step and claiming victory when he'd had to stop because someone was pounding on the door.

That someone was a beefy cop who'd come looking for Matt for no particularly good reason. That was just about the point when the world exploded, an event Matt honestly had not seen coming at all.

It turned out the cop was one of the good guys—as unbelievable as it was to have both of those ideas exist in the same context. Warlock would have said Matt was the victim of some kind of secret brain implant, except that Warlock had wound up helping them, so that had to prove something.

Maybe it proved Matt had finally had one too many caffeine-fueled all-night coding extravaganzas, and he was actually passed-out on the living room floor,

It didn't feel like that, though. What it felt like was a bullet hole in the knee—a knee that was now the size of a cantaloupe—and the aftermath of a couple of days of being chased and shot at while driving across multiple states in an impossibly convoluted attempt to save the world.

An attempt that had actually worked.

So, in the current version of what seemed to be Matt's new reality, he was lying in a hospital bed waiting for the pain meds to kick in and wondering where the hell he was going to go when the hospital discharged him. His apartment was probably nothing but cinders, and moving back into his parents' place had homicidal implications written all over it. There were aspects of being a hero that definitely sucked.

Matt flipped through TV channels on the remote, bored and restless and thinking that some good news would be nice for a change. He heard a scuffling sound.

"Hey, kid." John McClane came around the corner, his shoulder bandaged and a nurse at his heels who was scolding him to get back in bed.

"Hey," Matt grinned. Of course McClane would be up and running around like he'd barely gotten scratched. The guy probably ate bullets for breakfast.

"I was thinking that you're probably going to need a place to stay when you get out of here. I've got a spare room in my apartment that's there for the taking, if you want."

"That… that'd be great," Matt said. He didn't know whether it was the offer or the morphine, but suddenly his worries just seemed to melt away.

"Terrific," McClane said. "Here's the address. I'm heading there now, but I'll come back and visit if they don't let you out by tomorrow."

"Sure thing," Matt said. "Thanks."

McClane nodded. "Don't mention it."

Matt watched him go, as the nurse followed behind and tried to persuade McClane to at least stay at the hospital overnight.

The apartment was gone—and everything in it—and life was kind of a mess right now. Still, in spite of everything, Matt felt pretty good.

He'd helped John McClane save the world today. After that, everything else seemed easy.


--//--

Title: Stakeout Serenade
Fandom: Battle Creek
Author: HalfshellVenus
Characters: Milt, Russ (Gen or pre-Slash)
Rating: PG
Summary: When it comes to Russ, Milt is always going to poke the bear.
Author's Notes: For writerverse, and the prompt of "Watching the Stars."

x-x-x-x-x

"This street is so dark, you can see all kinds of stars," Milt said.

"Just as long as Joe Garrett can't see us," Russ said. "This Bureau truck is pretty conspicuous. Should've taken my car."

"Your car has junk food wrappers in it," Milt said.

"Sometimes." Russ squinted at the bushes lining the front of the house they had under surveillance. "I cleaned it."

"Did you now?" Milt smiled like he'd won something, and Russ wanted to slug him. "Still, it's great to have these big windows on a night like this, for the view. You used to be a poet—I'll bet you wrote something about stars, once."

Russ scowled into his coffee cup. "God, not that again."

Milt gestured out toward the night. "It's a shame, really. If you'd lived someplace like New York or California, maybe you'd have had someone to encourage your talents."

"Maybe I would have had a teacher who could keep her mouth shut," Russ muttered

( Read more... )

Title: In Focus
Fandom: The Bridge (U.S.)
Author: HalfshellVenus
Characters: Sonya, Marco (Gen)
Rating: PG
Summary: Somewhere inside an avalanche of details lies the truth.
Author's Notes: For writerverse, and the prompt of "There’s a thousand little things to rub the dust from off my wings”.
Also a Yuletide NY's Resolutions offering for i_am_girlfriday, whose request led to this fandom.

x-x-x-x-x

Three emails already this morning, and they were not replies to anything Sonya had sent. Sonya did not like random emails or random events, and this was three of them. That usually meant people wanting something, and she would have to read and read the messages to figure out what it was, and whether it was the same as what those people actually said.

She had never been good at that.

( Read more... )

Title: When The Leaving Won't Last
Fandom: Justified
Author: HalfshellVenus
Characters: Raylan, Boyd (Gen or Pre-Slash)
Rating: PG
Summary: Boyd Crowder smiled like he knew a little too much.
Author's Notes: For writerverse, and the prompt of "Kiss With A Fist."

x-x-x-x-x

Boyd Crowder smiled like he knew a little too much, and the problem, Raylan thought, was that he probably did.

It was why Raylan hated coming home to Harlan.

He had chased criminals from one state to the next, but the challenge was minor compared to what Raylan was used to. Harlan bred its own kind of cunning, the casual wiles and misdirection of moonshine kingdoms and hillbilly racketeering. Boyd had learned its tainted craft at the cradle, though he'd tried once or twice to refuse it. Raylan had broken so far away from it all that he'd landed on the other side, and now he and Boyd were at odds more often than not. It was a battle the two of them might never finish.

Boyd turned up far too often during Raylan's local investigations, and might just as easily lie to him as find some reason to help. Half the time, Raylan wanted to punch that grin off Boyd's face, but then Boyd would say his name with that honey-butter ease that seemed to steal all sense from Raylan's head. The way Boyd said his name felt more like home than anything Raylan knew.

In those moments, Raylan thought Boyd really did know too much, or that at least he knew something Raylan hadn't yet found the words to explain.

All the vows he'd ever made about Harlan and Boyd Crowder never seemed to account for the fact that Raylan still hadn't found a way to leave.


----- fin -----

Title: The Apprentice
Fandom: Original Ficiton
Author: HalfshellVenus
Rating: PG
Summary: The terms of this agreement were not entirely clear.
Author's Notes: For the writerverse prompt of "Mysterious Books."

x-x-x-x-x

"What are these tomes, marked with symbols rather than words?"

The old man speaks over his shoulder, carefully freeing papers from years of dust. "Ancient texts. Many were passed down by the previous inhabitant of this tower."

I pull one off the shelf, peering inside. The pages are just as incomprehensible, filled with lines of strange shapes and the occasional drawing. One picture depicts the unmerciful abuse of a toad.

"Unhand that book!" the old man says.

I drop it, unsettled by the unholy gleam in his eyes. My heart beats like a trapped bird, driving me toward the stairs, but the door will not open no matter how desperately I try.

The old man laughs behind me, raising gooseflesh on my skin.

The door, I realize, is now locked.


----- fin -----

Title: In Sheep's Clothing
Author: HalfshellVenus
Characters: Michael, Lincoln (Gen)
Rating: G
Summary (Pre-Series): Opportunities are not always equal.
Author's Notes: For my prisonbreak100 table ("Strangers") and writerverse ("The Interview")

x-x-x-x-x

The parlor-like front room of the Stevenson Children's Home was a lie. It was semi-fancy and meant to be welcoming, but that was for the outside world to see. The rest of the facility was as institutional as any inner-city orphanage or prison could be.

Michael had been to that room exactly twice.

( Read more... )