scribblemyname | 5 Things Meme—of the Ficlet Variety

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

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.

#

From:

thecatisacritic.livejournal.com

(I did, actually, like the first attempt, though I didn't have a chance to comment on it before it was gone.)

Meld is a very interesting character. I would like to see more of him.

Shift and Rachelle in the same piece. I like that Meld pointed out that Shift cared about her.

Kind of miss his realization that she will, but this does well to show the interconnection between these four.

From:

scribblemyname

I could hug you. You see me on my worst day and are okay with it. Well, I'll try to work in that scene when I do the book/collection mess that I'm now officially putting off until I got a couple linchpins done to satisfaction.

I'm glad you like him. I made a conscious decision to throw him in there when I realized he'd been mentioned, but you'd never asked about him and he's one of MY favorites, so I thought, I'll see if you do like him.

I think I've got those two successfully separated in my head and I'm glad I finally got the dynamic worked out without having to spell it all out. It's screwed up, to put it mildly, but even they know that.

From:

thecatisacritic.livejournal.com

Well, the same goes for you. How many times have you seen me at my worst?

I was curious about Meld, but he was only someone that was mentioned, so he wasn't one that I knew anything to ask about other than the brother idea... and for some reason, I kept getting the impression he was... dead, so I was a bit afraid to ask.

Yeah, it is. It really makes one want the Department to pay for what they were forced to do to survive.

From:

scribblemyname

Might've been somewhat related to the fact that Meld and Justus aren't particularly close. Oh, they interact, but mostly just when Rachelle's involved. When her body goes haywire, she'll take either of them or Sear, all if she can get them.

From:

thecatisacritic.livejournal.com

She is kind of... the connecting piece, isn't she?

From:

scribblemyname

They all are. It comes back to that whole team members aren't tightly tied to every single other member of the team: their groups are loose around the individual tight relationships.

Meld is extremely close to Shift, Protector, and Rachelle.

Rachelle is close to Justus, Sear, and Kilter.

Justus is close to Shift, Protector, and Rachelle.

Shift is close to Sear, Watcher, and Justus and love/hate with Kilter: she hates to love him.

Sear is close to Shift, Watcher, Rachelle and Kismet.

And so on. I'll stop there because it's frankly too dizzying to try to track relationships outside of the fic. For me anyway. It's in the stories that they are so easy to remember everything about.

From:

thecatisacritic.livejournal.com

Yeah... The connections like that get confusing.

Reminds me of when I had to make graphs for each of the characters in the town I'd created and had all these little scraps of paper to keep track of them.

I think I lost more of those papers than I ever managed to write pieces of the story. That was one of those clear cases of me planning so much that I lost interest in the story, lol.