5 Things Meme—of the Ficlet Variety

[scribblemyname]

This entry is part 44 of 51 in the series 365 Challenge

Gacked from penknife:

You post a topic, list, category, whatever, in comments. (examples: "Five SG-1 Mission Reports That Were Less Than Entirely Truthful", or "Five Times Bruce Banner Lost His Toothbrush," or "Five Ways Nikola Tesla Failed to Take Over the World"). I'll answer with a list of five things.

Ideally fandoms that I know something about, unless you want me to guess, which could be entertaining but probably not the way you want. Or (and preferably) original fiction. All storyworlds on the table, i.e. Seven Days, Kingdoms and Thorn, the Alliance, Vardin, etc.

---

Completed Ficlets & Scenes

Kingdoms and Thorn:

• Rachelle + Justus – Without a Reason
• Shift + Justus + Red Wolf – It's Own Absolution
• Rachelle + Justus – It Came Up
• Rachelle/Justus – Simply Because
• Rachelle + Justus – Defining Love
• Rachelle + Shift + Meld – Playing with Knives
• Killinger + Special Unit ensemble – Technicalities
• Killinger + Special Unit ensemble – Call Me If You Need Me
• Killinger + Special Unit ensemble – Element of Uncertainty
• Marc + Cate – A Simple Question
• Marc + Cate – The Nameless Below
• Killinger + Special Unit ensemble – Tracing Trouble

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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

How about... Dowse and Bleed. Five times Killinger almost called Rachelle, but handled it differently.

[scribblemyname]

I think I love you. :grins:

[scribblemyname]

So brain went fic! vs. ficlet. Do you mind fic vs. the list en brief?

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

Whatever you like! I knew this was plot bunny material, just like the one you left for me. That's probably going to end up as fic(let) too.

Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Technicalities

[scribblemyname]

A/N: Due to the whole nature of the word “ficlet,” I’m condensing this story to get it written. I will later turn these into completely stand-alone pieces.

---

Not many people realized that Ilsa Killinger only called in help from outside the Special Unit when her back was against the wall. Right now though, without some solid admissible evidence to close this case, Ilsa was going to have to let the suspect walk.

She set down the reports she’d been flipping through, searching for something besides an empathic readout to tie the theft to John Harver. “Cate, please tell me you’ve come up with something.”

Cate had been digging through whatever Forensics had managed to dredge up. “It’s a mishmash, and there’s time fades on the genetic material that pretty much removes Harver from the scene a good twenty minutes before the theft occurred.” Cate flipped over another paper, read off the number. “Nothing after that.”

“So we have nothing,” Marc summarized, arms crossed, face unreadable. Ilsa knew he hated when they couldn’t close a case. He held the tracker that kept Harver within their sights until they could arrest him.

Cate looked up. “You want me to call Rachelle?”

“What’s the point of that?” Jarod, their cyberpath, interjected from the back corner where he was busy logging their mountain of evidence into the computer. “It’s the same forensics.”

“Not quite,” Ilsa corrected him. Rachelle was capable of replicating genetic material in her own body and in doing so, also replicating special abilities like Harver’s. From a forensics standpoint, Rachelle could literally recreate events as they had occurred.

Ilsa had walked the scene first as she usually did. A situational empath, she was able to read the entire emotional panorama of a location. She had known from the start that it was Harver, a special-type human registered as being able to control his tangibility: she had formerly arrested him twice for petty thievery. This time though, the charge was larceny. Each incident had larger stakes than the last, and he needed to be stopped before he got out of hand.

She shook her head. “We know he was there.”

Marc leaned forward. “Have we tried a provisional license?”

Jarod scoffed. “Those babies got locked down last month. Empathy is considered ‘too ambiguous.’ It’s all circumstantial now.”

“They’re only issuing provisionals if the empathic read has overwhelming supporting evidence and absolutely no conflicting,” Cate added.

“I hate time fades,” Jarod grumbled. “They get you every time.”

Time fades being measurable had supposedly been a helpful breakthrough, but there were things that could manipulate them. Ilsa frowned and asked Cate, “Would his genetic material disperse at the normal rate if he was intangible when he left it?”

“That’s not something we can determine from forensics,” Cate answered. “It’s phenotype.” The physical expression rather than the genetic.

Rachelle could do it, but still, Ilsa held off on calling. Just a little longer to figure out another way to nail him.

“He’s in a dead zone,” Marc interjected. His gaze stayed on the reader in his hand for a long, tense moment, then, “Somewhere in the Thoroughfares.”

Still in the heart of the city and not outside of Kishet or the Special Unit’s jurisdiction. Ilsa took a breath. It still meant they were running out of time before he ran. She ran a hand through her hair and her mind through any loopholes in the law she could think of.

Empathy was too ambiguous, but not telepathy. It was getting the warrant that was the issue, but…

“Jarod.” The snap had come back to Ilsa’s voice and the entire team looked up at her, knowing she had thought of something. “Get him listed as a potential witness and match it against a list of everyone who was in the building from twenty-one minutes before the theft. Then request telepathic warrants for all parties who were there any time within an hour before or after. Marc.” Ilsa turned to her operative with the most straight-up cop experience. “Get him in here as a witness.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

#

Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Technicalities

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

Ilsa's a great character, I love this deeper look at the way she functions and the very ordered way in which she makes decisions. She's so hard-boiled, but so precise! Thank you. ♥

Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Technicalities

[thecatisacritic.livejournal.com]

I remember when you first posted a bit of "Dowse and Bleed" you said you'd never done a detective story, so I figured I'd tell you this came off very much like a procedural detective piece, with scifi elements.

Kingdoms and Thorn Snippet: Call Me If You Need Me

[scribblemyname]

A/N: I sense the impending doom of several full-length short stories/novelettes, but for the moment, have a snippet that fits the prompt. :grins:

---

"Cate," Ilsa said slowly, "exactly how much experience does your contact have with cold data?"

Cate was busy marking off clincher cases, essentially the stack of reports from other law enforcement departments in the city on how they had handled anyone that turned out to be a special-type human. Cate's job was to ensure the Unit didn't have to bat cleanup behind them.

At Ilsa's question, she sat up and her eyes unfocused for a moment. "My contact?"

Marc commented from his own stack of paperwork, "The processor."

"Rachelle?" Cate made a point of focusing in on Ilsa, who nodded. "How cold? What kind of data?" she promptly returned.

"I have a dimensional empathic signature and no forensics obtainable by normal means."

Cate blanched.

Marc looked up with interest. "Been walking the city again?"

Jarod cursed impressively. "Please let me know when you're going to do that. I need to get reads when they're still fresh."

Ilsa nodded acknowledgement to the cyberpathic tech but kept her gaze trained steadily on Cate.

Cate started shaking her head. "No go. Rachelle can't read a dimensional already walki— Wait. What kind of dimensional?"

"Interfacing." Interfacers were able to create a parallel universe, dimension, whatever you wanted to call it, and still interface with normal reality. The category was broad enough to include several varieties of intangibles as well as most time-manipulators.

"No," Cate stated with finality. "Rachelle can't read that. There isn't genetic data."

Ilsa tightened her mouth into a line, but nodded as she sorted mentally through her own resources. "Jarod. I'm telling you that I'm going to do that."

A stream of low grumbling, but he packed up his bag and his portable computer as Marc holstered his gun and raised his brows questioningly at Cate.

"Call me if you need me," she said sweetly, flashing a brilliant grin, then went back to frowning over her clinchers.

Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Snippet: Call Me If You Need Me

[thecatisacritic.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Interesting type of case. That would be a snippet worth going longer with.

Also interesting is Ilsa's habit of walking the city. That needs more exploration as well.

Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Snippet: Call Me If You Need Me

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

I like this. I keep seeing Ilsa as something like Joan Allen's Pamela Lundy in the Bourne films. I could be completely wrong, but she strikes me as having the same kind of dedication, determination, persistence, and focus.

I also really like the potential with the interfacers. That's... really something.

Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Element of Uncertainty

[scribblemyname]

A/N: So again, the whole enchilada later.

---

Ilsa Killinger crouched over the end of the blood trail, waiting for something to trigger or flood over her empathic senses.

It didn't.

She frowned and straightened, then cast a glance Cate's way. Cate was leaning in the doorway into the cordoned office space, her arms crossed and eyes unfocused as she scoured the building for relevant mental data.

Marc Rede walked in past Cate. Ilsa had given him the task of herding out the workers and interviewing them. "No one reports witnessing the scene," he said. "The office manager clocked in ten minutes ago, saw the blood, and immediately called law enforcement." Who contacted the Special Unit due to a simultaneously received complaint by a special-type human that he had been accosted by a co-worker.

Ilsa nodded. "Thank you, Marc."

It was an unpleasant sort of puzzle. Jarod's initial sweep had been problematic. Security cameras within a twenty minute window were too fuzzy to make out more than some sort of altercation. Who was doing what to whom was unclear.

"Cate."

The telepath's clear-eyed stare came into focus for a moment and settled on Ilsa.

"Tell Jarod to determine who had access to the security cameras and how they were tampered with."

Marc's brows came up. "Small order," he commented wryly.

Ilsa gave him a bland, implacable expression. Cate shrugged and passed along the order telepathically, then grinned at Ilsa to let her know how well Jarod had taken it—not at all.

"Anything useful?" Ilsa asked.

"Not sure." Cate blew out a sigh. "I'm getting interference of some kind. I'm hearing top thoughts on maybe half the people in the building, but I can't seem to see what's blocking me."

"A telepath, a cyberpath..." Marc scowled. "A regular shifter."

Cate made a small sound of derision. "It's not a shifter."

Ilsa decided not to add empath to the list. She just shook her head and returned to reading the report in her hand: a complaint filed by a registered special-type human, Edrick Myers, with natural regenerative ability.

Her phone rang and she glanced down to fish it out of her coat pocket. "Killinger."

It was the nearby Trenton Hospital. They exchanged what few formalities were necessary to establish identity, then, "The blood test was a match with Myers."

Ilsa processed that. It had been possible that Myers was lying and had accosted his co-worker instead. "Have the results sent over to the Center for possical analysis," she decided abruptly. It was also possible he was lying that his special ability was regeneration.

A hesitation on the other end. "You are aware that could take weeks?" the woman asked, clearly taken aback.

"I am aware."

The woman cleared her throat. "Yes, ma'am. I've put in the request."

"Thank you." Ilsa hung up the phone and looked at the others, waiting for her. "Marc, Cate. Take everything we have back to the Unit. I need to pay a visit to the hospital."

---

Edrick was shaky but stable as the nurse bandaged his bloody arm. "I'll regenerate, so I'll be okay. Just..." He shuddered.

Ilsa nodded and touched his shoulder. "You let me know if you remember anything else."

"I will." He nodded. "Thank you." That sincere gratitude on his face belonged there.

But when Ilsa's hand came away, she was still unable to feel him.

Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Element of Uncertainty [2/2]

[scribblemyname]

---

"It smells," Marc told her bluntly as they went over their reports later. "Whoever did this knows treaty law, knows who is on the Special Unit, and knows how to block out every single one of us. We need to bring in somebody he doesn't know."

Cate rubbed her temples as if nursing a large headache.

Ilsa felt like imitating the gesture. "You think it was a setup?"

"I think," Marc replied, "that Myers wants to collect liability insurance."

"I know a couple people I could call," Cate offered.

Ilsa acknowledged that with a look. "Your most versatile?"

"That would be Rachelle, hands down." Cate smiled tightly. "DNA doesn't lie."

It was tempting, so tempting, but Ilsa looked away. The view from the Special Unit's office was not a particularly good one, but enough sky was visible through the window to give Ilsa room to think. As Marc so directly pointed out, this whole situation 'smelled.'

"Everything from the cyberpathic end checks out," Jarod admitted. "I commandeered the tapes and they aren't showing any tampering, just a fuzzy spot."

"Alibis?" Ilsa asked automatically, glancing at Marc.

"Phillips claims he was working at his desk and saw and heard nothing," Marc answered. "He also claims he didn't do it."

"No surprise there," Cate commented.

Nobody answered that.

Cate leaned back in her chair. "Look, if you don't know it already, most specials have more than one ability."

That got everyone's attention.

Marc was the first to speak with a harsh, irritated, "That's not what's been told."

Cate gave him an amused glance. "How were teams supposed to plan their escape if they didn't keep secrets?" She blew out a sigh, all serious again, and locked gazes with Ilsa. "I've got nothing valuable here, but point is, regenerative's always have something different than straight-up self-healing. All we've got to do is hold up this case until the possical analysis comes back and tells us exactly what his genes are packing. I'm with Rede. It's a setup."

"He'd also get a wrist-slap for registration fraud," Jarod pointed out.

Ilsa nodded. "Get Cate a warrant for a telepathic questioning of the two parties, then tie up this case until then."

Jarod saluted. "Ma'am, yes, ma'am."

Cate shook her head at him.

Marc flipped through his notes and handed Cate what she would need to know.

Ilsa noticed Jarod go over later to quietly ask Cate something. She deliberately stayed out of hearing range but had little doubt he was wondering how many abilities he had and didn't know about.

---

"Immune."

Ilsa was not sure what to make of that, but Marc was scowling darkly at the file in the middle of the conference room table.

Cate tossed her hair in disgust. "Wouldn't have mattered if we brought in Rachelle or anyone else with that ability."

"Never heard of that before." Jarod furrowed his brow. "Is it even possible?"

"Possible or not, we're dealing with it," Marc pointed out.

Cate shook her head. "I'd never heard of it, but the genes work." She tacked on under her breath, "Apparently."

Ilsa took a deep breath. "This doesn't cover the matter of the cameras."

Jarod snapped out of his trance. "We've questioned all the security guards."

"But not when they'd been quarantined from Mr. Immune," Cate said heatedly. "I'd say we need to put him in holding for three days then run our interviews again."

Ilsa raised her eyebrows. "That might be difficult in light of the law."

"No." Cate's face went unreadable, then lawyerly thoughtful. It still seemed disconcerting how much control Cate had over her facial expressions. "There's an applicable law for a holding warrant to prevent contamination of evidence. I'll pull the clauses for Jarod."

Marc stared at Cate as if trying to read how in their work Cate knew law the way she did, but Ilsa simply nodded.

"Thank you, Cate."

"Great," Jarod griped. "More work for me."

"It's your job," Cate pointed out, rolling her eyes. "Get used to it."

They got back to work.

#

Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [1/?]

[scribblemyname]

A/N: So this sucker’s going to sprawl when I get it to the editing room. I can feel it. In the meantime, here’s your fourth because you said you were good with four and after how this one sprawled already, I’m grateful to stop before my brain is mush again. :grins:

---

Cate wrapped up inputting the evening’s reports into the computer and paused to pull her hair back to one side and look over her shoulder at Ilsa Killinger, head of the Special Unit, buried in research.

Marc Rede had left for the evening, taking beat through the Lower Kingdoms, not highly recommended on a bad day, but sometimes Cate thought he just needed to do it. He had never been less than cop.

Jarod Walters, their cyberpath tech, had about fried his brain sending it through a cyberpath-created and enforced security system it would take a tracer to breach—something Jarod couldn’t pretend to be. Tracers were sometimes cyberpaths, sometimes not, but they were the best at manipulating records and databases and had security authorization even the highest ranking military officer did not have. He was holding an icepack on his head, avoiding all further use of his ability, and muttering darkly that he was reduced to typing in his own reports.

Ilsa Killinger kept working. Her head shifted back and forth with her eye motion, a certain sign of her weariness. She flipped pages, dug through other stacks of files, pulled over her computer to add another query to her panel. She had stopped sipping coffee from her now-drained mug about an hour ago—getting off time.

The Special Unit had its fingers in every case related to special-type humans, but they didn’t know the first thing about stopping a rogue tracer. Cate knew tracers, several of them, but to try head-on tracer on tracer went beyond investigation and into war. Ilsa, Cate, and even Marc with storm-clouds brewing in his eyes knew war.

There wasn’t room for Cate here and now to help, so she stood and tossed her hair back over her shoulders, gathered her artifacts, and dropped her own take-out coffee cup into the wastebasket.

“Hitting the sack?” Jarod asked.

Cate glanced over the conference table at the other half of the room. Ilsa did not look up.

She shrugged, casual and indifferent facade. Something told her somewhere inside she would have to stop pretending eventually or she wouldn’t know herself from the masks, but today was not the day she heeded her own warnings. She was hitting the kingdoms.

Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [2/?]

[scribblemyname]

---

Cate was not a tracer. Computers hated her so she bought the simplest of interfaces, a breed just shy of childproof. She wasn’t stupid, though for years she had thought that was the problem. Her telepathic fields interfered with electronics and under prolonged exposure could make them go haywire. That limited her options to those their own cyberpath, Jarod, wouldn’t use.

It left her the kingdoms.

Kishet was a kingdoms city—two hundred and fifty square miles of human architecture clashing with human change. Once the sprawling, haphazard metropolis of the Thorn Republic, grown over the top of three old townships, now it was the crown of the kingdoms: a wealth of districts and burros, counties and neighborhoods—nations.

She stretched out her mind, skimming the top of an ocean of thought, the dull roar of an endless crowd. Second nature to her, she sought out the tangles, knots of computer-like thinking—“Rachelle,” she politely greeted—then isolated them on her mindscape of Kishet. Fifteen. Kick Rachelle off her list, the former team operative who often consulted for the Special Unit and had tracer expertise herself. That left fourteen cyberpaths.

Hovering at the edge of power, tension blossoming at the boundaries of her mental reach, Cate knew she had choices. She could fall back into herself, plot out her suspects on a map, and deliver it to Ilsa. She could maintain this harsh edge of tension like an ever-moving guidance system and walk the map herself.

“The things I do for family,” she murmured to herself and began to walk.

---

Late at night in the dark office of the Special Unit and Ilsa Killinger was still hitting the books at the conference table. She shouldn't have been, of course. She should have been at home in bed with her head on her husband Hasheni's shoulder, but try telling that to the unstoppable force that was Killinger. Cate didn't bother as she stepped into the dim light of Jarod's desklamp that Killinger had relocated to beside her.

"Hey," the younger woman said. She tossed a manila file folder with a slap onto the table and pulled up a chair to plunk both elbows on the table and lean her chin on folded hands. She ignored the mild pain from a handful of bruises she had gotten while on her tour.

Neither spoke for long minutes, though Ilsa did finally reach out with a weary sigh and draw the folder toward her to flip it open. Reading brought another frown to Killinger 's face. Cate waited quietly.

It was comfortable between them, this silence. Killinger was enough of a mentor to Cate with enough of genuine affection for their relationship to become almost familial. It was why Cate was willing to come bearing gifts in the middle of the night and wait patiently to try and smooth that worried frown from Killinger’s face.

"What do you think of this?" Killinger asked quietly.

Cate shrugged. She hadn’t formed an opinion yet of the thin sheet of information she had nearly paid her life and limb to retrieve. It was enough to wrangle her way into a vigilante kingdom and locate some kind of evidence of a cyberpath tampering with city systems.

Medical wards were tied together by their own computer system. Law enforcement systems within the city mostly talked to each other due to treaty law, though not all. Transportation was locked down by the Thoroughfares but also talked to medical systems and law enforcement tracking. It would take a tracer to start pulling the hijinks that had begun to turn up, but what Cate had found were a cyberpath maintaining that work and an energist maintaining the cyberpath in a basement in the Silent Kingdom. Little surprise on location. Silent Kingdom was the one kingdom within the city where vigilantism was permitted but traditional law enforcement bodies were not.

But Killinger was patient. She waited until Cate was willing to venture, “The tracer’s probably not a cyberpath.”

Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [3/?]

[scribblemyname]

“How does that work exactly?” Killinger said evenly.

Cate held up her wrist. “Cyberpathic technology. It’s a bracelet of sorts with a cable or wireless connection. Team operatives have implants.”

Killinger winced at that.

Cate dropped her hands to the table, still folded. “You want to bring in a tracer? Only a tracer can trace another tracer.” Rachelle’s mind had been clear of pain and eight times out of ten, she was willing to help when Cate asked.

“I was hoping not to.” Killinger closed the file folder and sighed heavily. None of them wanted war or its casualties. “The Special Unit is not supposed to deal with former operatives.”

Cate started to speak, stopped herself, and forced herself to think it over first. Too many little things wrong with all of this. The tracer was testing their power and using non-operatives to do it. She had run through her mental files: she had never seen that cyberpath and energist before.

“They’re not an operative.” She threw it out there bald and let Killinger make of it what she would. “Operatives know exactly what they are capable of.”

Killinger’s brow straightened out. There were implications in that statement, and neither woman missed them. “The Republic?” she asked quietly.

Cate tilted her head thoughtfully, then shrugged. “I’m no cyberpath, but if Jarod’s done icing his head yet, I did manage to throw everything I had through their computer.”

It took Killinger a moment to catch that, then for Cate to grin at her. Side effects sometimes had their upside.

---

“How did you do that?” Jarod demanded as he worked furiously through security codes not boosted by a maintaining computer. “I worked at this, and I’m a cyberpath and you just waltz in there—”

“Walters.” Cate grinned over his head at Rede. A faint smile seemed to catch him by surprise in return.

“Jarod.”

She rolled her eyes and continued, “You just fixed my computer for the tenth time last week.”

“Yeah. So.” His mind was half out of this conversation and completely buried in the machine on his desk.

“So why do you think I fry my own unit?” she asked.

Jarod groaned. “You never told me you had side effects.”

Cate just laughed softly to herself and let him do his job. Jarod was better at it than most people assumed when they met the annoying, do-you-ever-shut-up side of him. Cate had full confidence he would come up with something.

“Okay. I’m in.”

Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [4/4]

[scribblemyname]

Killinger gently gestured Rede and Cate away so she could look over Jarod’s shoulder herself. Countermands to standard schedules and rules layered in underneath with a buried tracer signature.

“Where’s the signature?” Rede asked, looking at Cate. She had mentioned tracer work was always noted at some level.

She leaned over and hit the authorization pad on Jarod’s portable computer.

“Whoa. Didn’t you just fry a computer?” Jarod protested.

Cate silenced him with a glare that was not playful. “Security override, level nineteen.”

Everyone around her sobered. Level nineteen security clearance was generally unheard of.

“Please state voice code,” Jarod’s computer chimed.

Profane thoughts floated off the top of his mind, but he bit his tongue and didn’t speak at the moment of truth.

Cate wanted to cringe at what she gave away next, but she had spent too many years doing whatever she needed to do to get the job done. “Thought, 7.05, security code…” She rattled off the last string of eighteen digits from memory.

“Code accepted.”

Jarod breathed out in relief. “You think you know a girl.”

But there it was, the signature of a tracer.

Cate looked at Ilsa Killinger and grinned. “Think you can do something with that?”

Rede shook his head as if he disliked her choice of words. Killinger simply nodded. And Jarod Walters took his cyberpathic snapshot of his nemesis’ handiwork as he muttered unmentionables about certain telepaths sticking their fingers into his computer.

#

[thecatisacritic.livejournal.com]

Five times Rachelle thought she might be in love with Justus and told herself she wasn't.

(A part of me wants to add a one time she was because that's what those five fics always seem to do, but... I'm not even sure this works because of how Rachelle thinks of herself and love, but... eh... This was the best I could come up with.)

[scribblemyname]

:blinks: I will have to get creative. Even when she does love (and she seriously does love), she really doesn't do in love at all. Can I do the former rather than the latter?

[thecatisacritic.livejournal.com]

Whatever works best. Like I said, I knew it didn't really fit Rachelle. It was just... all I could think of.

Kingdoms & Thorn: 22.02 Without a Reason [1/2]

[scribblemyname]

End of the first quiet summer before everything went out of the frying pan, and it was a good time to gather, all together again for a little while at least, and hold a new bundle of life in their arms, laughing and kissing her and passing her back and forth while the new parents could hardly keep the light of love out of their eyes. Pure unmitigated joy was rare among the teams, but this was a moment joy did not have to share with sorrow or captivity—the first child born to them after the Thorn Rebellion was done and over with, the first child with neither threat nor fear hanging over her pretty, down-soft head.

Rachelle could have been surprised that Wolf and Whisper had invited her team to meet Anya, their first and much-beloved infant daughter, but there was more respect between the two teams than it would at first seem to an outside observer.

She nodded her greetings to Rett upon entering before joining Ashen near the counter, leaning over said counter, and raiding the coffee pot just on the other side.

“Predictable,” Rett commented.

Rachelle shrugged and poured herself a mugful. “Head over heels yet?”

Rett chuckled while Ashen gave them both a puzzled look.

“Cute kid,” he commented, “but I’ve a feeling she’s going to be as stubborn as their parents.”

Rachelle shot him a glance, then looked back to Whisper’s head bent over her daughter and Red Wolf beside her, looking the epitome of extremely nice guy next door. “They’re strong,” she said in an assessing tone. But stubborn?

Mirth sparked in Rett’s eyes. “They’re alphas and I made him leader for a reason.”

A brief knock and the three of them watched one of the girls let Protector and Justus in the front door, both from Rachelle’s team, the first closer to Justus than to her.

Red Wolf nodded curtly. “Justus.”

“Wolf.” Justus nodded as curtly back.

The exchange was less hostile than usual. Amazing how a baby could lower the hackles between two men who had reportedly known each other before. What was it Justus always said? Forgetfulness is its own absolution.

Rachelle watched the interchange intently until Ashen quietly interjected, “I do not understand your relationship with him.”

Re: Kingdoms & Thorn: 22.02 Without a Reason [2/2]

[scribblemyname]

Rett caught in his breath, knowing how loaded that sideways question really was.

“That’s because you’re not general purpose,” Rachelle retorted.

Ashen looked troubled, a fleeting surprised flinch in her gaze. It took a great deal to hurt her, and Rachelle exhaled regret. The two of them got along solely because of their taste in books and their own shut-down ways of coping with the hand they’d been dealt by the Department, but there was respect there and Rachelle hadn’t meant to undermine it.

Rett glanced between Ashen and Rachelle, then excused himself. He did understand and Rachelle couldn’t exactly blame him for making an exit.

Rachelle took another scalding sip of coffee. Most people didn’t understand her team relationships, but they eventually got what they were at least and that, for some reason, they worked for Rachelle and those she was close to.

But Ashen’s response was slow and hesitant, still grappling though she too had been an operative. “You love Meld,” she began leadingly.

“He’s my brother.” Rachelle shrugged. “Justus isn’t.”

Ashen thought about that then asked, “Do you love him?”

Rachelle nearly choked on her coffee. Love Justus? She turned to study him once again from her vantage point. He was holding Anya with an intense look in his eyes of something like longing, something like loss. He had had family once, birth family—brothers and sisters and parents and a plenitude of friends. Now he had a team.

The words were true. Rachelle loved Meld. He was her brother in all but blood, sitting quietly and observantly beside Protector, waiting his turn to hold the baby. She would do anything for him. But Justus... Ever since he moved to Riving and settled in there, cities away from where Rachelle lived, she would not likely go out of her way to to see him without a reason, unless she thought he needed her.

Of course, he did.

“I care about him,” she said abruptly. “He’s my team member.” Never bothered to say, even to herself, just how much.

Ashen’s brow remained furrowed. Rachelle set her mug on the counter and went to the couch where Justus was.

He was reluctant to give up Anya, but let Rachelle hold the tiny little life, that precious girl who didn’t have the weight of their awful, messed up history hanging over her head. Rachelle surprised Justus by settling in beside him and tucking herself under his arm. She snuggled the baby against her and let him feel that sense of belonging again for this one moment.

“I didn’t know you liked children,” Justus commented dryly. The words were laughable. He knew exactly how she felt about children—or almost exactly.

She lifted one shoulder in a semblance of a shrug, a gesture that wouldn’t disturb the sleeping child. “I can take them or leave them,” she said, as she had said about so many things—romance, marriage, children. “But once they’re here, how can you not love them?”

Whisper smiled at the sincerity in Rachelle’s words. Wolf held Whisper in much the way Justus held Rachelle, and nobody commented on the difference.

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Kingdoms & Thorn Commentfic: It Came Up

[scribblemyname]

A/N: Truly fanfic-like. There's no attempt to make this stand alone.

---

It wasn’t something team members did often, stop and evaluate how close they were, but in the constant line of fire, it came up so to speak, and it came up again when the Database was watching through the hacked security cameras as Defender and Sear mowed down a stream of hostiles giving chase to the impossible target of Shift heading for where Kismet would step any moment. It came up when she saw a stray bullet tear into his side, saw him go down—bloodily, felt the cool impassivity of too much experience with this sort of thing and kept doing her job because it was the only way to maybe get him out alive.

Sear’s mouth was moving, and so was her arm as she shoved it under Defender’s, but she couldn’t shoot a semi-automatic with one hand.

Kismet rocked forward slightly, barely more than an intense breath, but waited, waited, watching the computer screen with her.

The Database imagined she could feel the lick of intensifying heat as Sear’s eyes burned darker and redder and hostiles started going down smoldering instead of shot. Shift hit the rendezvous and dove under Sear’s cover.

Kismet’s hands parted, lightning-like streams flickering between her hands, then stepped and a portal opened between the two locations. Shift slid inside and Sear shoved behind her, taking Defender with her. Kismet slammed the portal shut, halving the gun of a hostile that close on their tails.

And suddenly, the Database could move again, could be human, could reach out and check Justus over herself. He was Justus again, not Defender, and breathing ragged blood out of his mouth. She didn’t have time to wait for Meld, so she grabbed the entire lot of healing gifts she had running, chugging through her system, and used them one after another after another. She poured her life into his, she prodded his own body’s regeneration, she knit together the broken blood vessels, the damaged organs—she healed him in a way any one healer never could. Only five seconds after five seconds after five seconds of so many stolen powers lined up in a row, and then he pulled away from her, studying her to make sure she hadn’t compromised her own health.

Shift shoved herself to her feet, satisfied her team member was alive and would be, and ordered the Database, “Work clean-up.”

The Database obeyed. Justus turned away, stood, and did his own clean up.

If the Database was the kind of woman to love a man, she would love him for that, the ability to do what he needed to do. She was the kind of woman to love and sacrifice for her own, but as she glanced over to see Shift handling him, handling her team, she mused to herself briefly that Justus wasn’t hers. He was Shift’s. She couldn’t really say she minded.

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Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Simply Because – Spoilers

[scribblemyname]

A/N: So this is kinda your “and one time she did” but still fits the bill of one time she wasn’t in love with Justus.

---

“So when did you fall in love with my brother?” Justus’ younger sister Charity asked.

Rachelle would peg that one at about fourteen or fifteen years old. This was the first time in years that his family was all together under one roof and the first she had ever met them.

Justus glanced quickly at Rachelle.

She gave Charity a somewhat puzzled look, even though a part of her knew that children tended toward that assumption. “I didn’t.”

Joseph, the oldest brother, coughed and nearly lost his coffee. Justus’ parents looked startled. Charity and her two slightly older sisters seemed frozen altogether. The youngest boy, Patrick, screwed up his face in confusion.

“I’m not in love with him,” Rachelle said, amusement slowly taking over the mild surprise at their reactions.

“Then why did you marry him?” Sarah, the oldest sister, asked, thoroughly bewildered.

Rachelle shrugged and met Justus’ even gaze. He hadn’t been taken by surprise. “Because I love him.” It was as simple as that.

#

Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Defining Love

[scribblemyname]

Justus raised his eyebrows at the assignment and the Database snagged it out of his hands to read it.

"We're posing as a married couple?" he repeated the words from the paper. "They do that here?"

The Database's reply was as scathing as her look. "They do everything here. Could've spared me that one."

His face went unreadable and she suddenly realized he had a tell, and those were not acceptable.

"Justus—"

He started right as she did. "Why is that a problem?"

She stared at him.

He shrugged, leaned one arm against the wall as if this was casual. "It's not as if we don't..." His voice trailed off, then he shrugged.

Justus had a problem with most of what they did. He had been raised to be patriotic and believe in the military and defending his country, but that had been with parameters of decency and the Department wasn't known for those. But despite that, he had never had a problem with her. D— it. How had she screwed that up?

"Justus." She reached for him then, caught the back of his neck with her hand, and pulled his head against hers. She held him the same way she held her brother, Meld, when he needed something, anything to hold onto.

"I care about you," she told him. "You're my team member. I care."

She could see the confusion glimmering in his eyes.

His hands tightened on her waist. "What's the difference?" His voice rumbled through her and she realized he understood that she loved Meld.

Let's keep this simple. "What would I say if you asked me to marry you?" It was a question he knew the answer to.

His expression turned incredulous. "Battery Acid," he called her, his favorite handle hold her by. "You are not the marrying type."

She shrugged at that. "If I loved you, Justus, I'd do anything for you." Seeing him sober, she pressed the point. "Anything."

#

Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Playing with Knives

[scribblemyname]

A/N: So I deleted attempt one due to hating it passionately. This one—this one works.

---

“You sure you can handle this?” Shift asked, eyebrow lifting. She hated dumping off the marriage assignment, but she was needed for an assassination overseas.

The Database just gave her a look. “I clean up after you, don’t I?” she said bitingly.

Meld glanced between the two women. They weren’t particularly close, though close enough. Too alike in the way they thought and too unalike in their execution, Shift and the Database worked smoothly together but always with that too easily definable difference of how much they had the taste for blood.

“I’ve got it,” the Database said, voice and expression hard.

Shift nodded in acceptance. “Keep an eye on her, Meld,” she said to him.

The Database’s eyes narrowed at those parting words. He reached out and brushed her arm with the back of his hand.

She cares about you. So much went with that single touch: the reality of the feelings Shift held toward the Database, swirled with the bald problematic nature of this assignment, mixed with his own protectiveness of his chosen sister, and bound up in fragmented memory and thought.

They were playing with knives, all of them, for the sake of survival: Shift reinforcing the conditioning she’d given Justus, binding him to herself and the team with comfort and pleasure and violence, then passing him to the Database to loosen those moorings and keep him anchored and grounded but not to any one individual. The Database watched Meld to keep him from killing himself with healing and supported him when his body wanted to give out, but he watched the Database with equal concern some days. They counted on her dispassion too much. One day, it would stretch too thin.

He held out his hand in peace offering. He held the thought, the feeling, the love until it filled him. I’ll be here.

“I don’t love him,” she said quietly.

He nodded, forced to agree. Right now, what made her practical and clinical and uncaring held thick. But he couldn’t think on that. Not yet.

She twined her fingers with his and squeezed. He felt the echo of himself in her and the softening inside, I know.

#