It's That Time Again...
Jul. 1st, 2013 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scribblemynameI've been mired in big fics or flexible prompts for a while now. Feeling blah and uncertain which big fic I really want to mire in at the moment. Prompts anyone?
1. Character/Fandom/Original Fiction World
2. Prompt or question of any kind
I'd like to commentfic if you all would be so kind as to help me out? :bats eyelashes:
Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-07-05 05:31 am (UTC)I'm just going to give you this, I'm sure you'll recognize it:
"I got red in my ledger. I'd like to wipe it out."
And I was thinking Kingdoms and Thorn for it, so not very creative there, either, but it's a prompt?
no subject
Date: 2013-07-05 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-06 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-07 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-07 02:38 pm (UTC)Maybe. Sometimes those things run out sooner than expected, though.
Accounting for Redemption [1/2]
Date: 2013-07-07 01:56 pm (UTC)Shift turned, glanced over her shoulder, but finished her own stretches before answering with exaggerated patience. "You're asking the wrong person."
"You have a better idea of who I should ask?" Justus aimed a knife at her heart and threw it. Keep it balanced. Straight follow-through.
"You're the one who believes in God," she pointed out, tossed the knife back over her shoulder straight for his lungs.
His reflexes were good. He caught it. This ws one of the most nerve-wracking forms of practice she had taught him. His own growing ease with what he did on a daily basis bothered him, a lot. He covered it with a shrug that was anything but casual. "Lapsed, remember?"
Shift snorted, caught the knife at her hip, and retorted sharply. "If you didn't believe, you wouldn't be asking me that question."
Justus sighed and admitted, "Maybe I don't believe everything I used to. I can't believe that God wanted me to choose to knowingly do what I do instead of die."
It was weakness, this survival instinct that kept the blood flowing in his veins, that let him learn from the young woman standing halfway across the room on the training mats how to kill, seduce, assassinate, infiltrate, spy. It was his own failure and he couldn't believe anymore in the faith he had learned from his father that this was somehow part of God's sovereign will. This was Justus' own sin and he bore it.
"I just..." He glanced away, then back again, realizing Shift had said nothing. "I don't know what else to believe."
She said nothing, just turned that knife over and over in her hand and he realized suddenly that it was one of her favorites and from his first lesson. She had forced him to plunge that knife into her body and wouldn't let up until he was willing to do it. First blood. Only after, did he learn she'd had Meld on hand to heal her.
"I keep two sets of books," Shift answered abruptly.
She turned the knife around and hurled it toward his gut. He caught it.
Hands free, she gestured with her words. "One is red and one is black. If I ever get an ounce of black in the first book, I see if there's any way I can transfer the balance to the second."
Justus tried to comprehend that. He had only one life to live, one set of deeds and choices for or against his maker.
"Don't you say grace isn't accounted for in works?" She lifted a skeptical brow, eyes scathing.
He nodded but held onto the knife. Make your point, make your point. This held the air of another lesson, something he wasn't sure he wanted to know.
Shift studied him until she realized he wouldn't respond, then her face hardened and he had forgotten she could look so unreservedly deadly and uncaring. "How can I hold my books out to your God and ask Him to wipe out the ledger I've written in blood when I don't regret it?"
Re: Accounting for Redemption [2/2]
Date: 2013-07-07 01:56 pm (UTC)Breath. Breathing. Remember how to breathe. Justus stared at her, caught himself falling out the momentary shock he'd frozen himself in. They all regretted it. They all regretted the monsters they had become. Right?
"What's the second book?" he asked.
She lowered her hands to her sides and stated calmly, "My exception."
He hadn't known she had taken one. Every single member of their team was allowed an exception, one rule or requirement of the government who leashed them that they were allowed to refuse. Sear wouldn't have sex. Meld wouldn't kill in the manner he healed. The Database didn't get assigned to the front-lines unless her leader had no other alternative to mission success. Justus got to say no to a mission assignment if it crossed a line he wouldn't. Each one... He went down the mental list and came to Shift. Shift did every single thing their handlers asked of her. There was no atrocity she wouldn't commit, no horror she flinched at if her handlers ordered her into the field.
"I used to have black in my book," he finally said. I used to live the way I believed. I used to be willing to die for those beliefs. He threw the knife, aim true.
Wrist flicked out, caught it. "I sold my soul to open a second set of books."
Justus hadn't learned to never flinch. "Don't sell your heart to open a third."
The moment between the words stretched out. She tilted her head at him in genuine compassion. "Justus. You're asking the wrong person."
She aimed the knife at his jugular. He caught it.
Re: Accounting for Redemption [2/2]
Date: 2013-07-07 02:37 pm (UTC)The part about the second and third books... Ouch. Very powerful words.
Re: Accounting for Redemption [2/2]
Date: 2013-07-07 02:44 pm (UTC)The part you honed in on: that was exactly what gut-punched me. I still can't believe I write such angst, but I'm glad it did what it was intended to.
Counting Heartbeats [1/?]
Date: 2013-07-07 04:06 pm (UTC)D— it. She hated that it was the first one she didn't share with Watcher.
Hot water washed out the most dirt, but it couldn't clean her soul of blood or wipe away the accounts she kept in her own personal history of horrors. She had walked back after the one vacation they had ever given her—that one opportunity to pretend she was normal, not a killer, not a whore, not a government operative with more atrocities on her hands than any teenager had a right to. Who was she kidding? Nothing about this was right—and they had showed her into the cell where Justus was chained and already bleeding from the beating and bruising they'd given him.
Quick assessment. She'd done this sort of thing too long to be less than quick. He'd been captured roughly four or five days prior and been given barely enough water to keep him alive, little food. Pre-processing. Her stomach clenched. It was illegal to make more special types.
"He's yours if you want him." Chandler nodded in Justus' direction.
Shift hated the team handler with a loathing that only waited to finish him off because Watcher had told her to let him live. Now Shift was team leader. If she killed Chandler, it would come back to haunt her team.
She turned to Justus, took his head in her hands, and yanked it up to look into his eyes.
He was resigned to his own death. She could see his fate written there. But there was strength too.
She had lost her conscience long ago, gave it away with her only child, knowing she would never have the right to say no to what she was asked ever again. Chandler didn't know about Anna, but Shift wasn't about to let him have a reason to look up her exceptions file and decide she wasn't holding up her end of the bargain. And now, Shift knew the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. She'd say there was hope for her yet, but she didn't care about the difference between right and wrong and that's why she recognized this death in the prisoner's eyes.
But she had a heart. She had a heart. And for some d— reason, it was still beating.
She stepped back, straightened, shifted just slightly and put her hand on the cold metal of the gun slung in a holster at the hip of her dress. She was wearing dark auburn hair today, naturally sultry eyes, a thickness of muscle she omitted for her blonde, innocent self. This skin of hers didn't care about the consequences.
"I never lose one of my own," Shift spat out harshly. It was a promise Watcher had made and kept. It was the promise that no matter what it took to keep her people alive, Shift was willing to pay that price.
She saw the flicker of understanding and uncertainty in his eyes.
"Do you want my protection?" It was cruel to ask it of him, ask him to decide between death and becoming a monster, but she had just enough heart left to offer him the choice between a clean conscience and a life beyond this moment, a chance for enough years to eventually find his own absolution for what she would make of him. She would break him, remake him, and turn him into something he'd never want to be if he wanted to live. It was the only path to survival.
His throat worked, raw perhaps from the lack of water, and then finally, slowly, and with too much understanding in those eyes, said, "Yes."
She breathed out normally, suddenly aware she hadn't been. She wouldn't have to add a mercy killing to her sins, just the destruction of a life. She'd done that too many times to count. Shift nodded abruptly to Chandler. "I'll take him."
First blood.
Re: Counting Heartbeats [2/2]
Date: 2013-07-07 04:07 pm (UTC)Shift stepped out of the shower, toweled dry, and shifted her clothes back to strip them off and change.
She carefully undid the security on her top bureau drawer and untaped a picture from under the top of the wood. Flipped it over, looked at it. A brunette toddler, laughing over something her foster father had said. Anna. Beautiful. Shift's only unwitting mistake.
She couldn't regret it. Oh, she could regret finding out about sex the stupid way, regret having gotten pregnant, regret that she'd had to sell her soul to keep this tiny, beautiful daughter of hers innocent and out of the Department which claimed ownership of any children born to operatives. But she couldn't regret that Anna was alive, beautiful, innocent. She couldn't regret that her daughter would never be an operative, that her daughter would never kill, that her daughter would never whore herself out for a country she didn't believe in, that her daughter was Shift's one exception to the rules of the Department and that Shift could never have any other.
How can I hold my books out to your God and ask Him to wipe out the ledger I've written in blood when I don't regret it?" she had asked Justus, her protege, the one person she had trained who wondered if he could ever wash the bloodstains from his own history.
She couldn't. She just... couldn't.
Shift tucked the picture carefully back in its place, smoothing over the tape with her thumb. She redid the security on her drawer, and shifted her gun into its holster, picked up the latest evaluation report on Justus' performance. Excellent. She'd taught him well.
It would take some doing to lessen the weight she'd placed on him when she offered her protection. He honestly considered his unwillingness to die for failure to perform a weakness.
Maybe she had no soul. Justus reminded her she still had a heart and it was beating. Grace, mercy, forgiveness for presumptuous sin—what did she know of that?
Shift left her room and headed down to the base's library to do some research. She had a heart. She could do this for him. She had a heart. And for some d— reason, it was still beating.
Re: Counting Heartbeats [2/2]
Date: 2013-07-08 04:15 am (UTC)I like the repetition of how her heart is still beating.
I'd say a lot more and probably get lost in tangents, but I'm too tired to be coherent, so I will stop there.
Re: Counting Heartbeats [2/2]
Date: 2013-07-08 11:41 pm (UTC)I like when I get to weave in the different things I've heard her say, the understandings that have developed over their history. The Database kept Justus from getting too attached. Shift owned Justus. Justus reminded Shift she had a heart.