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.
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.