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time and time again
Ugh. Today was crammed full of more shit than I had previously thought it was possible for a day to be...crammed.
(Don't you just love those sentences that you get lost in because by the time you reach the end you've forgotten what the beginning was?)
I need a punching bag. In the absence of such:
Leave me a drabble of backstory. It can be about anyone -- one of your characters, one of mine, someone else's, no-one's. Anyone. Then I'll write one for you.
If you want to request a character for your return drabble, that'd be helpful. Any pokes in the direction of Lucifer or Galahad will be jumped upon enthusiastically :D
Ashie and I are bringing the boys into Milliways. We're crazy, but we're kind of looking forward to our coordinating timezones. Seeing as how we live in the same city and everything.
(Don't you just love those sentences that you get lost in because by the time you reach the end you've forgotten what the beginning was?)
I need a punching bag. In the absence of such:
Leave me a drabble of backstory. It can be about anyone -- one of your characters, one of mine, someone else's, no-one's. Anyone. Then I'll write one for you.
If you want to request a character for your return drabble, that'd be helpful. Any pokes in the direction of Lucifer or Galahad will be jumped upon enthusiastically :D
Ashie and I are bringing the boys into Milliways. We're crazy, but we're kind of looking forward to our coordinating timezones. Seeing as how we live in the same city and everything.
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It's morning. His red wings are furled under the light mist of a Mediterranean rain.
The hot sun has yet to rise in the summer's heavy eastern air. He's smoking a cigarette he bummed off a gypsy boy who'd kill himself later that day by walking straight into the sea.
Summer is a good time for suicide. The lethargy of the heat stretches flat across the streets. The city suffocates under the dream-like bake and brawl of the long August days. Disconsolate streetwalkers slump in the cooler corners of the Barri Gotic, and businessmen in their high offices stare out the windows and think, and think...
Two nights ago he slept with a man who'd tried to slit his wrists three times. The scars were like new lifelines running up from the roots of his delicate hands. Lucifer told him tender lies in Catalan, and made love to him, and left before the morning came, looking back once at the lovely arch of the man's neck and imagining the rope that would snap it before the week's end.
Even the word is cool to the taste. Suicide. Precise and clinical. Isolate. Aloof. The sibilants run together like the sluice of arctic rivers: sudden, and icy, and strange. It's the coldest word in any language, and in the leaden heat of the morning light it tastes clean.
Lucifer smiles and stretches, langorously.
The sun rises over Barcelona.
It's going to be a scorching day.
*********************************************
[Um. I disturb myself, a little. If you want to write Lucifer in return, I would love that. Or I'm always interested in your take on Hob, if you'd like to complete the reversal.]
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And they would sell their soul for a song.
Rome, eighteen-sixteen. Lucifer sat in a badly-lit room, his back resting against a low wooden bed. One ink-stained hand running distractedly through his hair – long, this century, down past his shoulders in a sheet of black silk. Lucifer closed his eyes and hummed, enjoying the lazy summer, the cellist’s fingers against his head, and the knowledge that he was the centre of this young man’s world for the while.
The musician on the bed sat with crossed legs, sheets of scribbled music strewn haphazard over the sheets. He wrote with bright eyes, the notes falling from his pen. Occasionally he would sing a snatch of music, and sometimes it blended unconsciously into the melody that the devil at his feet was humming.
A month or so later Lucifer sat in the great concert hall, just another well-dressed man with dark skin and dark eyes and a musical Italian voice. He sat and watched fluid silhouettes of people in the light flickering off the lid of the piano, and listened without expression to the sound of his laughter dancing across the silver flutes. Listened to his fingers tapping through the timpani and the rough glorious feeling of his hair through someone’s fingers drawn out by twenty violin bows moving in unison.
Rossini flicked his baton, and a single clarinet played the ancient music of the angels in a mocking minor key.
~
[Find the overture to The Barber Of Seville. Listen to it. It’s so Lucifer.]
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---
Thom sat patiently, his hands folded neatly in his lap. A man with earnest, watery eyes babbled at him from behind a desk; Thom paid him no mind. He eyed the Initiate's orange robes and ran his fingers ponderously over his fresh-shorn scalp.
"I don't understand," the man was saying. "Just last week you were our top pupil, and now . . . " He gestured helplessly. "Thom, this morning you took twenty minutes to light a fire."
Thom focused on his teaching-master abruptly, fully aware of the strange intensity of his violet-eyed gaze; he was pleased to see the old man flinch. He hunched his shoulders, ducked his head and let his eyes flick down to his feet, counting. One, two . . .
When he looked up, he was biting his lower lip. "I suppose," he paused, looking tearful, and went on, stumbling over the words in a broken rush. "I suppose I must have forgotten." Thom leaned forward, his voice pleading. "It . . . it will come back to me, won't it, Master?" He swallowed. "You'll help me?"
The man looked stricken. Thom resisted the urge to snicker, and thought:
That's right. Look at him, the poor lad. He's only a boy, and so little, so thin. As for the things you've heard about his father, well, isn't that what you'd say? Followed, of course, by a polite-but-damning pause.
You had best be kind to him. No-one else is, and children need love, don't they? Besides, it must be hard, losing the last thing you had going for you.
He emphasized the thought with a hint of Gifted suggestion for good measure, and he nodded at all the right places in his teacher's speech.
The case of the young Lord Thom of Trebond's sudden fall from grace was explained in a number of ways, but the most common rationalization was this: previous instruction had given him a head start; he was an early bloomer; he never had any real potential; he was slow; he was stupid; it was unfortunate, but it couldn't be helped.
No-one ever thought to suspect him of temporary self-sabotage.
Thom made sure of that.
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~*~*~*~
The first time Raphael can really remember being especially interested in Michael was during the first year of their existence. It had been a hot day, he recalled, and Vidar had given him a popsicle. Possibly to shut him up, Raphael thought; Vidar didn't really understand the young angel in his care, but that was okay. Raphael didn't really expect him too.
Besides, it was a nice popsicle.
Raphael had been sitting on the edge of a pond dangling his feet in the water, watching the sunlight sparkle off its surface and the reflection of the trees waver in its depths. It'd make a nice painting, he realised, and thought that maybe he'd sketch it later. He didn't really feel like moving for the moment.
Half asleep and basking in the warmth, it had been understandably a shock when a ball of mischief and energy crashed into his back, sending the two of them splashing into the pond in a tangle of limbs. Raphael’s squawk of indignation hadn’t been so embarrassing at the time, but… retrospectively, Raphael winced, he was such a wuss.
“Hi!”
Michael seemed wholly unconcerned by the fact that he was sitting neck deep in cold muddy water. Raphael was somewhat more bothered by the situation, partially because his hair was plastered across his face and he’d swallowed some pond water.
“I was bored,” Michael added by way of explanation, manic grin causing the quieter and more withdrawn boy to fear for his safety. “By the way, your hair looks funny!”
He didn’t wait for Raphael to respond, instead pouncing with a gleeful yell and dunking his companion under the surface. It descended into an all-out water fight cross wrestle, and that had been the first time Raphael had learned to have fun. Coincidentally, it was also the first of many consequent times that he began to build up an aversion to having his hair messed with.
With a wry grin, Raphael remembered the shy boy he had once been and the troublemaker who had become his best friend. How things did change.
Still, he thought that maybe the younger Michael would have been proud of what an apt purveyor of mischief Raphael had become.
~*~*~*~
Is the happy fluff I promised you yesterday, sort of. ^~
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POPSICLE.no subject
I thought you'd appreciate that. *smirk*no subject
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The warrior was dressed in black and grey, with a sword belted to his waist because he felt naked without it. He was a young man, maybe only twenty-four, but the scar that ran across his jawline made him seem older.
He did not belong here.
His little son, dressed in monk’s robes with his thick sandy hair tonsured and serious voice explaining to his father about Easter, did belong.
He shouldn’t have had too.
“Ala.” His son’s dark blue eyes, so much like his mother’s, stare up expectantly at Lancelot’s face. “I-“
“You’ll like Easter.” Ala says eagerly, jumping in at his father’s pause. “We go down into the village and-and-and there’s a fair on the day after and we get to-“
“I can’t be there.”
After a while, the little boy says ‘oh’.
The young warrior had had a dream once, and it did not involve his only child being in a monastery. No, it had included a farm and siblings for Ala and…it didn’t matter now, of course. Not with Ettarde dead and buried for seven winters. And Lancelot, shocked and grieving with a newborn baby on his hands and in a strange country, had given him over to the monks here.
At the time, it had seemed like a good idea. An army was no place for a child to grow up, and the monastery was safe and at least Ala would learn how to read and write…
“Next year, I promise, Galahad.” Looking at his son’s face, scrunched up with the effort not to cry and utterly miserable, with his little hands clenched, Lance kisses his forehead gently, and bolts.
…that’s what Lancelot had told himself, anyway. Now he isn’t so sure.
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He rested his chin on his hand, trying to look absorbed and thoughtful rather than bored out of his wits. His gaze flicked absently to Gwen, who was obviously as bored as he but hiding it behind a polite smile, to his father, to Lancelot. The king’s Champion was shifting in his seat, looking...nervous? Mordred’s dull interest in proceedings perked up a little.
And fifteen minutes later, when the source of Lancelot’s anxiety walked quietly out to stand in front of the king and pledge his allegiance, Mordred’s full interest returned in a flood of curiosity and desire. Galahad du Lac’s voice was soft and smooth with the smallest trace of a French accent as he made his oath, and his eyes were shielded as they roamed across Mordred’s face without pause, one more new person in this sea of polite hostility.
Mordred felt rather than saw his father’s flash of keen betrayal, felt the cold curtain of regality drop between him and his Champion. But he saw the look on Lancelot’s face as he looked at his son, and the naked indifference bordering on dislike took him aback. Mordred knew what it was to receive that look from a father. One son had come between Arthur and Lancelot already. Two was going to be...interesting.
What are you hiding, pretty one?
A pair of dark eyes fixed on the perfect, blank face of the golden boy, and Mordred Pendragon made a promise to himself.
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*wipes tears of laughter from her eyes*SO Mordred. So utterly, utterly Mordred...
Thank you, Frar. I write Galahad, you write Mordred. Maybe I should write Mordred so you write Galahad. Hmm.
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Most people, after all, didn’t see ghosts.
And that’s what Mordred supposed he was now. He had thought about it a lot over the last millennia and a half or so, and even discussed it with the others. When they were awake, that is.
Time hadn’t been kind to the warriors, and Fate had been cruel. Valhalla might have been eagerly looked forward to by those blond frat boys, but Avalon was a prison. It lacked the finality of heaven and hell, and there was nothing to do but wait.
For what, no one knew. A final battle, against Britain’s greatest threat? Mordred had considered waking them all up for World War Two, and then decided against it. Tanks and bombs that could kill a city had no place in the mindset of a Dark Age king and his men; besides, there was nothing they could do against the battle that the world was losing anyway. Hollywood had proven that, multiple times. He shuddered to remember the last movie that he had in appeared in- a ghastly number called ‘Excalibur’.
His shoulder-blades tingled, and Mordred turned around. He meet the large eyes of a child, clinging to her mother’s hand. Smiling, the prince gave her a salute and settled back against the cold iron of the bench. Large, blue eyes in a perfect face framed by blonde hair…
He remembered now, where he had picked up smoking. From a British solider, in the trenches of World War One. A young, pretty solider with the hint of a French accent and large, blue eyes and sandy hair.
Dead, of course. Put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t that he couldn’t face the killing, just that he grew tired of living.
I really did love you
Sighing, Mordred looked up at the sky, and waited for it to rain. It would suit the mood, after all, and he had never been able to find Galahad.