Fluffy Promptables
Jun. 24th, 2014 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scribblemynameWe're prompting fluffy, lighthearted stuff of any variety, no canon/pairing/character information required, though permitted.
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Ficlet: Fair's Fair [3/3]
Date: 2014-06-25 06:31 pm (UTC)At the end of a job well done, perpetrators put away and paperwork filed, Mira finally allowed herself to sit down in the conference room next to Cate’s desk and snag a spoonful of Cate’s ice cream. “I owe myself a long hot shower.”
Cate batted at Mira’s hand and snatched back her ice cream. “Get your own.”
“Before a trip to the store.” Mira rooted around in her purse and pulled out a coin. “One more bite?”
Cate rolled her eyes but nodded.
They nibbled in silence for a minute, then Cate stuck out her hand with an even-toned, “Congratulations.”
“On?” Mira’s eyebrow came up.
“On an excellent court-admissable read.” Not a small feat where special abilities in law enforcement were highly regulated.
Mira set down the food and reached out to shake Cate’s hand. For a moment, the world slipped sideways and she was a little girl screaming in the dark at the voices of dying children in her head, she was a little girl learning to hit and fight and tumble and shoot, she was a young girl with a mind too powerful for any other telepath to overcome, she was a young girl confiscating scientific research and burning down the illegal lab where they experimented on children, she was a teenager breaking prisoners of war out of enemy lockdown, she was a young woman flying a jet over an ocean, she was a fathomless mind networking with more than a thousand trained operatives to take down the Thorn Republic government that had enslaved them all, she was a woman learning to cook and laugh with Ilsa, she was a woman falling in love.
With a sudden gasp, Mira pulled away and tried to process the memories tumbling through her as if they were her own. She had never had a read as complete as that one.
“Fair’s fair,” Cate said softly, eyes dark with some sort of feeling Mira was too reeling to make sense of.
She did make sense of one thing though. She looked down at this woman who saw her for exactly who she was and considered Mira her friend. #
Re: Ficlet: Fair's Fair [3/3]
Date: 2014-06-25 06:51 pm (UTC)They're not really the ones I would have thought about for this prompt, not ones I really hoped to see, but they do have a... unique friendship.
Re: Ficlet: Fair's Fair [3/3]
Date: 2014-06-25 06:55 pm (UTC)Anyone particular you DID want to see?
Re: Ficlet: Fair's Fair [3/3]
Date: 2014-06-25 07:06 pm (UTC)Re: Ficlet: Fair's Fair [3/3]
Date: 2014-06-25 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-26 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-26 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-26 01:29 am (UTC)So I got the wrong idea about it, but it seemed like if she wasn't willing to share it, it wasn't the equal footing that love should have.
I did say it was a bad idea for it to be about Shift, though, and I think it still is because I never have your characters right.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-26 03:22 am (UTC)I'll unpack a little.
Shift dislikes being forced to baseline physical form because seriously, that hampers her flexibility in combat and comfort and can cause serious issues if she had weapons stored in her flesh because they suddenly become weapons in her flesh. Yeah, bad idea and way to get injured.
Shift has been everybody from the behavioral side with Kilter. He is seriously attracted to her baseline fierceness and hates himself for that fact. They both know this.
Shift's daughter LOVES Shift's physical ability and loves for Shift to "look like her," so Shift often humors her.
Shift also protects her daughter by being a wholly different person in the way she interacts with her daughter.
She does friendships and I actually want to do this ficlet. Kilter and her love/hate each other in a complicated way, but they are definitely equals. The ONLY reason Shift got promoted over him was because he could never command her, but he could sit on her as her second.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-26 04:06 am (UTC)I'm so tired of getting it all wrong.
If you want to do the fic, then you can. I regret bringing it up, though, because clearly the reasoning behind me thinking I wanted to see it was wrong.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-26 04:24 am (UTC)She's a character who could stand to learn more about herself too.
And that is true. I leave fanficcer type icebergs. I don't do it on purpose to frustrate people; it's just something I love. I actually like hearing various interpretations. I just don't canonize them.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-26 04:52 am (UTC)I kind of think she needs to learn more about who she is when she's not being what Thorn made her into. It would be a start toward putting it behind her, maybe. Then again, I really don't know Shift at all, so... *shrugs*
Fic: 5 People Who Have Seen Shift’s Baseline and 1 Who Hasn’t [1/3]
Date: 2014-06-26 06:11 pm (UTC)“Who are you really?” Janine demanded at last, utterly flustered, hands lifting in frustration toward her hair but diverting before she could do anything with them.
Shift watched her and almost shifted to match her sister’s form and actions. She wanted to taste that normalcy that couldn’t even understand someone like Shift. She wondered what she would have been like if her parents had raised her to be a human instead of the Projects raising her to be a weapon.
“Meaning?” she asked, boredom infusing her tone as she arched a brow. The game wasn’t as fun with someone like Janine, not when there was legitimate sting and little interest, but Shift didn’t really ever stop playing.
Janine didn’t immediately answer, perhaps uncertain of what to say. It would fit with how the rest of the evening had gone—dinner, meeting the family, having a stranger expect to be friends and sisters without any history or affection between them. Shift had followed Janine upstairs to room out of a vague dutiful urge to at least last the whole night.
Shift stretched and uncurled off the bed with a simple ripple of abdominal muscles, crunch and lift. She walked over to one wall and crossed her arms as she examined pictures of two tiny children hugging, napping, or playing together. “This us?”
A pause, then a sigh breathed out into the room. “Yeah.”
Shift turned and leaned one hip against the desk.
“You’re everybody and nobody, and I don’t understand you at all,” Janine answered dully. There were unshed tears glittering in her eyes.
Shift cocked her head and studied the girl. She was pretty, took after their father with her blonde braid and slender features. Her skin was fair enough to pass for white. “You expect me to be that little girl.”
“I expect you to be one person,” Janine countered, a bite under the edge of it.
Shift could taste that. It was something she had in herself. “Ah.” She came over and settled on the edge of the bed again, slightly too close to her sister if the flinch was any indication. “Because I’m sweet with Daddy and quiet and reserved with our mother and all teeth and sharp edges with you.” She grinned. “Compliments of the military. I act to get the reaction I want.”
“Which is?” Janine demanded, crossing her arms. Her jaw tightened and her eyes darkened in anger.
Shift went quiet. She shifted, slipped from the blonde girl-next-door form she’d worn to dinner (everybody loves the blonde) into her own auburn hair the dark shade of their mother’s and the plain, athletic figure, the olive skin, the smattering of freckles. “Don’t expect me to be that little girl.”
Janine’s eyes narrowed.
“That’s what your father expects,” she added. “Jennifer Haller, as if she’d grown up the girl next door.”
“That’s not what I expected,” Janine countered, arms still crossed, a flippancy still guarding her.
Shift conceded with a flick of an eyebrow. “You expected your friend.” She scooted back on the bed, leaving breathing room between them, and leaned back on the headboard. “A friend is someone you choose to be yourself with. I’m a whole lot of masks and a whole lot of different bodies.” She gestured at her baseline form. “So. What do you mean?”
It was honest enough. There was no reason honesty denoted weakness in a world like Shift’s where she knew how to change up the deck any time she disliked her hand.
After a very long quiet, Janine brought out softly, “What kind of a person are you?”
Shift looked at her, having expected anything but that poor choice of words. She chuckled darkly and tipped her head up against the solid wood at her back. “Oh, sister.” Her grin was sharp and amused because she generally found it amusing to be so wrongly estimated. “A bad one.”
Fic: 5 People Who Have Seen Shift’s Baseline and 1 Who Hasn’t [2/3]
Date: 2014-06-26 06:12 pm (UTC)“Who are you, Shift?” Justus asked her once. “Do you even know?”
Shift stretched out, fingertips touching toetips, on the mat. They’d been training, and he was getting better. She had bruises that would smart for days. “I,” she stated quite calmly, “and an empty wound to hold as much of other people’s suffering as I can.”
He stared at her, arms suddenly unsteady holding himself up in the form he’d been practicing. He dropped down to the mat and looked at her intently, as if he could peel up all her molecules with his intuition and see her baseline form.
“Have I ever seen you as you are?” he asked quietly.
She laughed and stood, done stretching. “Now that’s a different question.” She shifted to her natural baseline, dropping knives from wrists into palms as she transitioned, shifting the holster out of her hip last. “Now, Justus, you have seen both.” She shifted again and lunged in a single motion. She disliked ignoring teachable moments.
Shift stared at the woman in the photograph, Tricia Haller, the law enforcement chief at the South Riving Station.
The mantleplace was full of pictures, and Shift read a history there of the woman who had lost her daughter, gotten a divorce, split custody of the younger daughter, and lived the life of a survivor. There was no memory to warm Shift’s heart, but as she stared at the woman she almost looked like, a woman with the kind of strength and fierceness Shift had inherited and that life had wrung out of both of them in ever greater quantities just to keep going, there was something else fluttering inside of Shift than merely memory. She wanted to belong to this woman.
There was no going back. Shift was not so foolish as to think she could gather up some genuine caring depth to soften all the bleeding edges life had worn her down to. But there was forward.
She shifted her body to her own, but slightly more like Tricia: a darker red to her hair, a slightly thicker curve, skin a shade lighter until she looked exactly like herself but also unmistakeably like Tricia’s daughter.
When Tricia finally arrived home from work and saw the intruder in her living room, Shift decided she would keep the form.
“Which one’s the real you?” Elisabeth asked the fifth night from her position snuggled in the bed.
She liked to call out forms and hair colors for Shift to wear, and Shift liked to oblige her.
Shift put her hands on her hips and cocked her head. Playfully. This was all a mask. Loving her daughter, laughing softly, and hugging warmly, those things were real. Being a good mother, that was real. Being a good person? Shift had never been taught how and still could not find the use for it when necessity demanded worse of her. She would never, ever show her daughter the side of herself that was half-monster.
“The real me loves you and would do anything in the world to keep you safe.” Shift smiled softly (again, real) and came forward to tuck Elisabeth in gently and softly kiss her daughter’s forehead. “The real me is whoever I need to be to love you.”
Elisabeth smiled and went to sleep under Shift’s watch, never knowing how utterly true those words were.
Fic: 5 People Who Have Seen Shift’s Baseline and 1 Who Hasn’t [3/3]
Date: 2014-06-26 06:12 pm (UTC)One day, you’ll let down your guard and realize there’s a way to live that isn’t playing with knives.
Kilter’s words echoed in Shift’s head as she lay with her head in Watcher’s lap, choking on her own blood, a gaping wound in her chest as she struggled against her leader’s grasp to get up, to get fighting, to help her teammates.
When? she wondered, anguished. G—, when, Kilter? When would this world be anything but knives?
Shift stepped out of her wedding dress and hung it on a peg behind the bathroom door. She walked out and stood in front of Kilter beside the bed.
No guards, no daggers, no masks of flesh or games tonight. He had finally put aside the soldier inside himself to raise their daughter. She had finally put aside her knives to save herself.
“I chose you,” she said, lips quirking in a smile as she cocked her head at him. It looked playful, but was it? She chose a long time ago to be herself with him and never let him accept less.
He reached up his hand and the world stood still. She reached up hers and her own molecules stood still. Their fingers brushed and there was nothing left between them. #