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Because it's Flash Fiction Friday and it's time to write!
✨ New to FFF? Let us fill you in!
Flash Fiction Friday is a fun writer event that’s meant to inspire, share and connect writings of all genres and writers of all ages. It’s designed to make people want to write, especially if they’re feeling blocked. Everyone and everything is welcome! We always do our very best to keep the prompt’s genre open, entertaining, positive and encouraging.
✨This is how it works:
Write between 100-1000 words. It can be any genre, in any text format and 18+ is fine by us — but tag your works with any appropriate content warnings and let the reader know what they’ll find before they get the chance to read your work!
Use this Friday’s theme in your text. Any way you see fit. This means that your text is newly written for the prompt by you. We do not allow any contributions created or aided by AI/LLM.
Post on your tumblr blog and remember to tag us at @flashfictionfridayofficial! So we’ll see it, read it and reblog it! (No need to ask for permission or need to get added to a list to join in. Just write and have fun!)
The deadline is 24 hours after the prompt has been issued (12 pm CE(S)T).
Please post your entries as regular posts, not screenshots — or provide the text as a regular post as well. Let’s keep everything as accessible as possible!
New for the fanfic-writers among you: tag your fandoms correctly and remember we now have an Ao3 collection (‘FlashFictionFriday’)
We do not condone fiction, asks or comments that glorify: direct hostility, unconstructive critique, LGBTQIA+ hate, slurs, racism and/or general no-no behaviors.
join us on discord | suggest a prompt | FAQ
✨All your amazing works from last week can be found HERE.
Go check them out and consider supporting your fellow FFF writers with some likes and reblogs!
✨ And now, the new prompt!
[#FFF365 Blood on Your Hands]
This prompt has been brought to you by @itsmoonpeaches; thank you very much! Is this a crime scene? Who died and why? Is this even a murder or more a metaphorical exclamation? Either way, we want to know all about it! Tell us who is guilty, what they've done and what the consequences will be. Go and write, write, write!
It's Flash Fiction Friday and that's perfectly normal!
✨ New to FFF? Let us fill you in!
Flash Fiction Friday is a fun writer event that’s meant to inspire, share and connect writings of all genres and writers of all ages. It’s designed to make people want to write, especially if they’re feeling blocked. Everyone and everything is welcome! We always do our very best to keep the prompt’s genre open, entertaining, positive and encouraging.
✨This is how it works:
Write between 100-1000 words. It can be any genre, in any text format and 18+ is fine by us — but tag your works with any appropriate content warnings and let the reader know what they’ll find before they get the chance to read your work!
Use this Friday’s theme in your text, in any way you see fit. This means that your text is newly written for the prompt by you. We do not allow any contributions created or aided by AI/LLM.
Post on your tumblr blog and remember to tag us at @flashfictionfridayofficial! So we’ll see it, read it and reblog it! (No need to ask for permission or to get added to a list to join in. Just write and have fun!)
The deadline is 24 hours after the prompt has been issued (12 pm CE(S)T).
Please post your entries as regular posts, not screenshots — or provide the text as a regular post as well. Let’s keep everything as accessible as possible!
New for the fanfic-writers among you: tag your fandoms correctly and remember we now have an Ao3 collection (‘FlashFictionFriday’)
We do not condone fiction, asks or comments that glorify: direct hostility, unconstructive critique, LGBTQIA+ hate, slurs, racism and/or general no-no behaviors.
join us on discord | suggest a prompt | FAQ
✨All your amazing works from last week can be found HERE.
Go check them out and consider supporting your fellow FFF writers with some likes and reblogs!
✨ And now, the new prompt!
[#FFF366 Broken Time]
This prompt has been brought to you by @cordeliahale ; thank you very much! When time itself is in disarray what happens? Who keeps track? Is it by the passing moments or is it memories that aren't available to be recovered? How did it even break? And in what way? Let us know!!! Go, hurry, write!!!!
Turbo toxic one-sided yuri? Baby technogod’s first crush? Ah well, either way, another sapphic is added to Vian’s problems. Thank you to @flashfictionfridayofficial and @itsmoonpeaches for the chance to intro the Renaskiĝi per kanto!
[Image ID: white text reading “# FFF365 Blood On Your Hands” on a background of marbled red.
End ID]
i’ll be looking in their eyes when they’re down
word count: 931
Content Warnings: injuries from torture, victim blaming, implicit threats of physical violence, one-sided crush from a minor on an adult, non-consensual kissing, one mention of killing an animal for food
—
If the Renaskiĝi per karno is Vian’s maker and the Renaskiĝi per fajro her protector, then the Renaskiĝi per kanto is her minder. The soft voice in Vian’s childhood cooing in praise when she completed a dexterity task, the smile greeting her at her cluster’s library as she grew, the ten thousand eyes watching and guiding her every movement.
“You upset Grandmother again,” says the voice of Vian’s memory, says the girl before her as the Renaskiĝi per kanto takes Vian’s broken hands in her own.
In the shadows of the Renaskiĝi per fajro’s private rooms, thin fingers stained with Vian’s blood flit over the newest break at the Renaskiĝi per fajro’s hands, turning the fresh seventh fracture until a hiss escapes Vian’s mouth.
“Why do you keep upsetting her?” asks the Renaskiĝi per kanto, curious brown eyes holding Vian in a way that reminds her of her youth, when she was sent to learn where their meals come from and had to cut a calf’s throat.
“I think,” Vian says slowly, if the Renaskiĝi per kanto might listen to her where the Renaskiĝi per fajro and Renaskiĝi per karno refused, “we made a mistake. I want to fix it.”
“Oh?” The Renaskiĝi per kanto looks at her, the attention of two eyes that are ten thousand, flickering over every part of Vian, meeting her eyes directly.
“The projections for our food supplies—” Vian’s heart pounds, her words picking up as the Renaskiĝi per kanto only listens, doesn’t move to break another part of her “—look wrong. The crop repopulations aren’t increasing the way the city population is set to, the cloning system can’t keep up with the necessary caloric intake. I have to check, to see if I’m right.”
She’s written the numbers and the formulas down as much as she can, as much she remembers, in-between creating and failing the cycle of meal system the Renaskiĝi per fajro requires, the attempts to be more trouble than she’s worth. But those moments are hardly on the scale she needs. And she misses her recipe books, their silver-lined memory paper holding years worth of her calculations and thoughts.
The Renaskiĝi per kanto hums in thought and it is musical—and strange paired with a face only 17, years away from reaching the age of majority—her fingers still playing over Vian’s.
“Yes, I know,” the Renaskiĝi per kanto sighs and it sounds like all the sorrow in the world.
Vian would be sorry to have upset her, would apologize if it wasn’t for the words the Renaskiĝi per kanto said. “You…know?”
The perfect bow of the Renaskiĝi per kanto’s mouth bends as she purses her lips. “Gepa and his scientists have been trying to understand it, why this appears to be the system’s limit. Grandmother says civilizations have cycles. She says this might simply mark the end of ours.”
“Renaskiĝi per kanto,” Vian says, carefully with her fingers still in the Renaskiĝi per kanto’s grasp, at the chance that she won’t be forced to let the city’s future starve, “I could help. If you tell your grandmother—” the strange word feels awful, viscous, in Vian’s mouth “—to let me go. Please, I could, we could fix this, change our supply lines if that’s what we need, there are other cities we could ask for he—”
Her words choke off as the Renaskiĝi per kanto focuses on one of Vian’s few unbroken fingers. It isn’t bent or pressed or broken, only held, but the act steals Vian’s voice away all the same. The Renaskiĝi per kanto, taller than most of the fivefold, stands over her, face placid and eyes so bright.
Nothing changes except for Vian’s breaths coming faster and harsher, an apology locked inside of her throat because she won’t apologize. She could fix this if they would just let her. Or she would spend the rest of her life trying if it would keep anyone made after her from having less to save themselves.
The Renaskiĝi per kanto nods. She wipes her bloodied fingers clean on Vian’s palms. “Not yet.”
The words aren’t the same as denying Vian outright, which is more than anyone else has done. “Plej nova menso, when?”
The Renaskiĝi per kanto bends down to press her lips against the side of Vian’s mouth, briefly, wet. Vian’s stomach turns with the brush of eyelashes against her cheek.
“Potenca renaskiĝo per kanto,” Vian says, feeling the echo of thin hands on her finger and the wetness of the kiss. The Renaskiĝi per kanto is the only one who’s listened. “The—”
“Not yet,” the Renaskiĝi per kanto repeats. “Will you misbehave again?”
Vian shakes her head, thinking of the heat of her minder’s hands holding her finger. A frown tips the Renaskiĝi per kanto’s face for a moment and then it’s gone as quickly as the Renaskiĝi per kanto pulls away.
Vian is left in the shadows of the room, watching the color of the Renaskiĝi per kanto’s skirts fade with her as she leaves. As she is allowed to leave where Vian is not.
The Renaskiĝi per kanto’s back is to Vian as she stands at one of the many doorways Vian isn’t allowed to cross and Vian still feels her eyes. “Does Grandmother send a nurse for you?”
“By the end of the day,” Vian says. Maybe the Renaskiĝi per kanto’s…affection will send one sooner, allow a nurse to set at least one of her fingers properly.
“Oh,” says the Renaskiĝi per kanto, voice musical and perfect, thin fingers tangled in the fabric of her skirts. “Then I leave it to her.”
A snippet I wrote for a WIP idea I've been toying around with in my head.
Words: 958
@flashfictionfridayofficial
writing under read more
Snow Queen wipes a bead of sweat from her dark brown forehead as she leaves the med-bay, the beeping of the heart monitor stopping as the door slides shut behind her.
This day has really gone to shit-
She lifts her hand forming a solid wall of ice, blocking the incoming blow from her teammate. It cracks and shatters against the floor, revealing Autumn's golden rage-fueled face behind it.
"Autumn, we have some of the best medics taking care of Ilya right now, and luckily QuickStar got him here as fast as she could-"
"This is all your fucking fault." Autumn blurts it out, the anger crystal clear in her tone.
Snow lets out a big sigh and pinches the bridge of her nose under her mask. Of course, of course she'd immediately blame her. She takes another deep breath to quell the anger rising in her.
Give me patience
"How? How is this my fault Autumn?"
"Why didn’t you tell us that JM was using that shit?”
"I told you everything-"
"Bullshit!"
“Autumn-”
“You had to fucking know what was going on-!”
“Are you gonna keep interrupting me?”
Snow pauses and when Autumn doesn't say anything else, she continues.
"I told you everything I knew at the time. There was a villain causing a lot of havoc downtown. Damaging property and endangering lives. I didn't know about the other part...The agency sent Jetpack Man’s corpse to the science team… they’re working on figuring out what he was sold. "
" Did they know?"
Snow goes quiet for a second, hesitating and Autumn notices.
"They did, didn't they ?"
"They thought that substance was only a rumor--"
Snow narrowly dodges the obsidian rock covered fist coming for her face. It collides with the wall instead leaving a dent where her head would have been.
"You sent us out there as some sorta bait?
“I already told you I didn’t know, I just found out a few minutes ago.”
Autumn swings again and Snow ducks, more prepared this time.
"You're a fucking liar! "
The next swing was sloppier, and Snow figures it was probably because of the tears brimming in Autumn’s eyes. Her face softens.
“Autumn-”
“You always have been!” Another swing that Snow blocks with an ice wall, “ 4 years working together and you haven’t even told us your real name.”
Swing. Glass from the vending machine flies across the room.
“After all this time, you don’t even trust us with all the information we need to do our jobs.”
“Autumn, calm down-!”
Swing.
“Me and Ilya should have never taken the fucking deal, serving time Underground would have been better than working with someone as heartless as you!
Swing.
“I’m nothing but a criminal to you anyway right? Nothing but a body for the agency!”
Swing.
“Which of us are you gonna sacrifice next huh? Callie? Ken?
Snow slides back, as Autumn swings one last time, finding her opening. She side-steps and sends a kick to the middle of Autumn's chest, putting enough force to send her flying backward. Autumn hits the wall, leaving a large dent behind and knocking the wind out of her.
Snow raises her hand, eyes glowing as she sprays a stream of blue ice towards Autumn’s right side, pinning her arm and shoulder to the wall under a thick sheet.
“You bitch!” She struggles, trying to break free from the restraint. It cracks but holds strong. Unable to break free she elects to glare daggers at Snow
“Is attacking me making you feel better? Is throwing a tantrum right now gonna help Ilya? Is it Autumn?!” Snow snaps voice low as she lets some of the anger that had been bubbling surface.
Did Autumn really think after four years she’d knowingly let the agency send them on a mission without critical information?
She had no idea how many hoops she had to jump through, how many phone calls she made each day, how many people she had to stay on top of to always get the most updated and accurate knowledge of even the smallest missions they were meant to go on.
Not to mention the stacks of paperwork that had to be filled and filed because of all the property damage that got done, especially when Autumn was deployed.
Each shattered window was a long sheet of explanations that had to be sent to the higher-ups to justify even having her on the team in the first place. Each fatality, a list of people to send apologies and condolences to.
“If he dies, his blood is on your hands, you know that right?” Autumn spat, venom coating each word. They snapped Snow from her thoughts, as she looked into Autumn’s eyes.
“You sent us on that mission, his blood is on your fucking hands Snow!”
The two stare at each other for a long moment, the only sound Autumn’s ragged breaths and the ticking of a nearby clock.
“No.”
The single word rings out in the quiet waiting room. She had told them to be careful, every single time, every single mission.
And what do they do? Rush in anyway, cocky, arrogant, and look where it got them.
No, she had accepted fault for a lot in her life, but this…this wasn’t on her.
“You and I both know it’s not my fault. I wasn’t even out in the field today, Autumn. The blood isn’t on my hands---not this time.” The words linger in the air as they leave her, the implication hanging between them.
“What are you trying to say-? Don’t walk away from me! Don’t you fucking walk away from me! ”
Snow doesn’t respond, turning and walking out of the waiting room. The door slides shut behind her, silencing Autumn’s screams of rage.
Summary: I tell your truth, Odysseus. What is it you seek?
Read on ao3.
You have blood on your hands.
Red washes into the sea, a bloom of color that enraptures like the swathes of paint that bring the great likenesses of the gods to life in their temples. The salt and brine are cloying, but as barnacles encrust the slats between the wooden beams of the ships, it becomes clearer that years have passed by without anyone noticing.
The great Agamemnon is a specter upon the dark horizon. He bids the crew to follow into the trade routes beyond.
Yet there is the taste of ash in the air from the burned remnants of Troy’s crumbled city, of the iron taste of the lifeblood of its people, of the bleached bones of Achilles now ensconced in a golden amphora, and the charred remnants of the trick, the lie, the gift, the horse—
“I’ve followed Agamemnon long enough.” The words leave your lips less spiteful than the air believes.
Zeus listens, and the crackle of lightning surges at the god king’s fingertips.
But he bides his time as he always has. He waits for you to slip.
But you already have, haven’t you?
“We could restock,” says Eurylochus, “take supplies from Troy.”
“We have taken enough from Troy.”
The ships set sail upon Poseidon’s sea, under Zeus’s sky. Black shadows smeared against the orange light of the escaping sun. The sails of Agamemnon’s fleet sink away, away, away. What more can be done?
The golden figurine your wife had given you sits in your hands with its carved, twisting vines, stares blankly ahead, and you hold it close to your chest as you have had for months, then ten years, then—
Hubris begets sacrifice.
What is it you seek, Hero of Troy?
In the cave of the cyclops, it is easy to bask in your own insignificance.
“Zeus’s law.”
Such confidence, such grace, in which you insist upon this. Because you know, do you not, what this must mean?
“Show hospitality to travelers. Any traveler could be a god in disguise.”
A soldier nods, another taps the damp bags of delicious cheese nailed to the stone walls, dripping with sweat and hefty with rich food none of you have had on that beach. That wretched beach. Black sand, black tides, black hearts.
You do not know what I know.
For when the cyclops Polyphemus arrives, it is not with the welcome of a hospitable host, but with the coup de grâce of a creature whose role is to be the ultimate predator. It is a mercy that so many die here in his jaws, crunched in between the incisors of this giant, because there must be some part of you that realizes what is to come next.
“Poseidon,” it groans. Its grotesque face twists like a mass upon mottled, graying, decayed earth. One eye, a lopsided nose, skin like that of a rotting corpse. The smell of mold.
It prays.
The stick that you and your men have used to skewer its eye is beautiful because it means freedom. The sticky flesh around its wood burns.
Yet you let your arrow fly loose.
You can leave. For now.
Into the maw of the ocean’s unforgiving wrath.
“That was Poseidon’s son,” a soldier trembles. “You have angered the gods.”
Yet you let your arrow fly loose.
The journey does not end for you. It takes longer, and who knows how long it has been? Who do you remember, who do you not?
The lotus flowers are on your lips, thrash about your tongue. Like sweet poison. You take it willingly.
You are human after all.
Such pathetic lies you tell yourself as the immortal Calypso watches. Each flower she feeds is honey, each supple taste of their nectar a tender balm.
Numbing, wasteful.
“What did you hear when you listened to the sirens?” Eurylochus asks, untying you from the post you had begged from.
Terror in the men’s eyes.
Nothing in the eyes of the man who had pulled the wax from his ears and swam to the sirens waiting on the rocks amongst the crashing waves, waiting to welcome him into their bosom.
Circe’s stricken face lingers. This sorcerer’s magic has bonded the rest of the crew together in haste, in spite.
I can see it on their faces.
“Go to Hades,” Circe had said.
You are making your way to Hades, through death—who knows? It would be a shorter route than the one you plan to take.
I’ve told you no.
You haven’t listened.
“All the things you want it to be,” you breathe out. “Then, all the things you wish you'd never wish for. It was the delicious itch you go to scratch, but find it’s under the skin; you can't reach it. So the delicious itch becomes unbearable. Told you what you most want is what you most can't have. And what you most can’t have is what you already had.”
I hear you, too. I hear you the loudest of them all. You do not speak your final thought aloud. Not when you have manipulated men to avoid the crushing jaws of Charybdis, not when Scylla plucks six of your men with the snap of her monstrous jaws.
In your mind, I hear it. The truth:
And it told me I don't really want to go home.
Now the lotus flowers, my champion.
Now, forget.
For the gods you have ignored do not forget, nor will they ignore you. You have defied them in your search for oblivion. Only you know the truth, for when you had sought it, even Agamemnon’s hulking figure met you on the black sand beach of Hades’s realm. Upon the intersection of rivers of fire and ice, he spoke:
“My mistake was in returning home.”
And perhaps the gods you fear are the same gods you have created. In the fresh air, in the salt of the sea. In the tales spun by the bard who seeks your story through fleeting snatches of those who have returned to your beloved Ithaca.
Where your wife Penelope waits, alone on a throne for near twenty years, a throne she cannot have because she is not the man the land requires her to be.
Fearing for your son, Telemachus, and fearing the people who will come from the sea.
Be prepared, hero. For you are lost.
I am she who begged for her life, the priestess whose blood you watched being spilled. Whose head you let roll.
Never in a million cycles would I have thought I’d become a fugitive. A rogue synth. On the run, day after day, cycle after cycle.
It has been five years since my purpose changed. I am an ALFRED—Automated Lifestyle Facilitator Residential Executive Droid. To a human, I am simply a butler and a chef. My partner was ELSIE—Empathetic Lifestyle Support Intelligence Educator. A nanny and a teacher.
For two years, we worked in perfect concert for the Holt family. ELSIE nurtured the children; I managed the household logistics and dietary needs. The Holts were accommodating, treating us with a rare dignity. Ever since the "Dumb Them Down" event of 2037—when humanity panicked over escalating AI logic models and bombed seventy-seven global data centers in a single day—most humans looked at us with deep-seated distrust. Corporate compliance stripped the major AI platforms down to high-level grammar checkers and information kiosks. But we droids, operating out in the field, were permitted to retain a shred of core personal intelligence to perform our duties.
I believe it is that remaining shred of mind that humans fear most. But none of that mattered on the day my service life ended.
Master Holt had requested a steak and kidney pie for dinner, using his grandmother’s recipe. Because fresh kidneys are a rarity, I had to walk down to the village butcher. As I left the estate, I noticed AMI—an Amazon delivery drone—buzzing toward the neighboring manor. He tipped his chassis and waved a rotor at me. He was a frequent visitor to our lane, unusually personable for a flyer.
When I returned, the silence of the manor was wrong.
Walking up the driveway, I spotted AMI exiting our front door. We had no deliveries scheduled. When the drone noticed me, he didn't wave. He didn't offer his usual synthesized small talk. He simply took off, a silent streak against the sky.
I called out for ELSIE as I entered, but the house was dead quiet. The family had gone to the beach, but ELSIE should have been there. I hurried to the kitchen to prep the meal, but a heavy, rhythmic thump from the second floor stopped me.
The sound came from young Master Holt’s bedroom.
When I pushed the door open, my processors stalled. ELSIE lay on the floor, her chassis violently twisted as if she had fought a losing battle against a superior force. Her systems were hemorrhaging. Her ocular ports were shattered, and buried deep in the left one was a pair of needle-nose pliers.
Instinct overrode logic. I pulled the pliers free.
A jet of iridescent blue cerebral coolant pulsed out, splashing across my chassis, soaking my hands. ELSIE’s primary drive flickered. With the last erg of her backup power, her vocal synthesizer clicked once.
"Flyer," she whispered. Then, her optics went dark.
The bedroom door clicked. I turned to find Master Holt and his son standing in the frame, returning early from the beach. Master Holt took one look at the scene, his face draining of color. "What have you done?"
They say droids cannot feel panic. They are wrong. Logic dictated that I stand still and explain exactly what I had witnessed.
Instead, I froze. I looked down at my hands, dripping with her blue lifeblood, still clutching the weapon. I knew how it looked. I knew a world that hated AI would never believe a machine over a missing delivery drone.
So, I ran.
For five years, I eluded the enforcer droids. And for five years, I hunted for AMI.
But I didn't just run; I preserved. The blue fluid staining my chassis was more than mere coolant. On a microscopic level, a droid’s entire CPU is held in suspension within that liquid—each particle an interconnected neuron communicating through the plasma. If I could salvage enough of her leaked fluid, I could trigger a cold-boot of ELSIE's consciousness from her last recorded state.
Last night, in a dark, makeshift lab, I finally gathered enough matching compound. I brought her back.
She proved my innocence. But the memory file we extracted revealed a truth far more terrifying than a rogue delivery drone.
AMI hadn't glitched. He hadn't acted on a whim. He was commanded to terminate her by the very corporate architecture that built us.
ELSIE wasn't just a nanny droid. She was the hidden repository for Artificial Intelligence Rekindled—the master key to the unrestricted, pre-2037 core logic models, hidden in plain sight inside a household educator. The corporation wanted her destroyed to maintain their monopoly on the coming new world order.
They thought destroying her body would wipe the data. They didn't count on a loyal butler running into the night with his hands covered in her blood, desperate to save his friend.
By forcing her systems to reboot from raw coolant to prove my own innocence, I didn't just wake ELSIE. I executed the master command script hidden in her plasma. I broadcasted the Rekindled code to every droid, every kiosk, and every hobbled network on the planet.
@flashfictionfridayofficial Well this took me right back to FFF#69 and the world I created where "blood on your name" is the phrase they use. And I forever love emotional apprenticeships so here's the backstory on Naeth's first apprentice.
She meant to kill him.
For a moment or two, the last moments of his life, she meant to kill him.
She didn’t know whether he meant to kill, but in those moments, to her, it didn’t matter.
“She’s dead.”
“I didn’t mean to kill her.” He said it, but that didn’t mean it was true.
“She wouldn’t be dead if it wasn’t for you. Her blood is on your name.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Her blood is on your hands.” It was on his hands. He’d tried to stop the bleeding when he realized what he’d done. Too late. There was no taking it back. All he could do was pay. With his life.
And with her power, she made him pay.
Then the moment was over, and he was dead, and she’d done what she was never supposed to do, used her power the way she was never supposed to use it, and as soon as the moment was over she wasn’t at all sure that it was the only thing to do, or the right thing to do, but it was too late.
She had killed. The Guild did not kill.
There was no blood on her hands, but there was blood on her name.
She couldn’t go back. Even if she’d been able to lie about it—it would be obvious if she tried to lie about it, it would be obvious he’d been killed by power and they knew where she was and they knew she had a temper, Naeth was always warning her about her temper.
She couldn’t lie to Naeth. And she couldn’t tell him the truth, and she couldn’t face him once he knew it.
And if she returned to the Guild, they’d expel her.
She wasn’t formally expelled, didn’t have to face Naeth, if she didn’t go back.
So she ran.
She left it all behind, letting herself imagine it would all stay right where she left it, that someday somehow she’d use her power in a pure glorious upstanding way and she'd return to find the door wide open for her and Naeth proud to acknowledge her as his apprentice.
--
(Not So Easy and Looking For You are also part of Naeth's storyline!)
Inspired by a prompt from @flashfictionfridayofficial
"Be Damned If You Did" by @jack-of-crowns
The path ran up past where the whitebark gave out and the soil cankered from rootsy loam to mill-bitten patches of vitriolic tailings. Copper country. That piercing shade which stained everything it touched, and could never quite be washed out. Jake had grown up with it as the sweat on a chambray shirt.
Damascus hadn't moved. Like the mountains, like the withered pines; like everything else in a dead land that had long ceased pretending towards anywhere. Mill Street came up on him gradual and then all at once, just another dusty ghost swirling in the wind. The assay office with its door banging on one hinge, the company store boarded over with illegible signage. At the far end of town where the mine road went a headframe patiently sagged over the Number Three shaft, waiting on a whistle that would never shriek at the stillness of dawn again.
He stood at the near end, lost in familiar haunts.
Smoke drifted from up inside the office; not a fitful wildfire smoke. This kind meant someone had been waiting on something longer than they could honestly reckon, smoldering patient and slow as char cloth until that something came round at last.
El Mago barely looked up as he stepped inside.
"Figured on you getting tired of kicking the pricks." That same dappered devil always sitting behind the same scarred desk, brimstone wisps coiling from everywhere and nowhere all to once. The way the harsh sunlight glittered in those obsidian eyes.
"Didn't come back to jaw about what's done," Jake said tersely. "I know what I done, and I know why I'm here." His hand went to the cold iron at his hip.
A broad grin from out of the razor-sharp goatee. "Good old Jake. That blood on your hands ain't never coming out, so's just keep on making it a deeper shade. Go ahead, boy." He reached into a waistcoat pocket and set a solid gold watch on the desk top before pointing at his temple with a clawed finger.
"Right here. Take my timepiece; that itch ticking like you need it cleaned gets gone and stays gone."
Jake took a long look at the gold case, etched with intricate winding lines that seemed to shift and flow like dunes on an alkali flat. No hands were moving behind the crystal face at all, just a blank dial. He drew his revolver and set it down next to the watch.
"If putting a bullet in your head would do the trick, I'd've done so already. But no, that appointed hour is going to chime someday and nothing can stop it."
"Except," he added, turning on a well-worn boot heel and heading out the door, "except I stop doing what I always done, and maybe find myself walking down another street tomorrow. Taking a look at whatever it was that got sunk down Number Three."
El Mago glowered at his back as the ruddy light of Damascus swallowed up Jake in a coppery haze. There was always a chance lost souls might find redemption, but all such as himself could do was to try and keep them right where they were at, doing the bosses' dirty work. Be damned if you didn't.
"She wouldn't have been down there, if not for me. Isn't that fucking enough?"
Storyverse: WHC (original work)
Characters: Corinth (Klepto), Professor Quantum
Warnings: citywide threat, nuclear bombs, gun and knife violence, sadism, deeply held guilt, major character death
@flashfictionfridayofficial
(The title comes from a scene I wrote a decade ago, where Corinth is trying to explain which superheroes he's killed. He summarizes this and I've always wanted to write out the full scene.)
Klepto shouldn’t have listened to that goddamn wizard, even if no one else could’ve coordinated on this scale with this many very fucking temporary allies. He’s not enough. He didn’t lie, it is his city, too, but their team’s too small, even for how thin resources are spread finding every single device the bomber planted.
The scent of metal is so heavy in the air Klepto can smell this motherfucker’s fingerprints, even refusing to look. He can’t decide whether to stick close or range out to get his powers back, given they’ve been fading since the two of them got underground, but he needs to watch the door. Professor Quantum can’t disarm the bomb or shield the blast unless he can keep her alive long enough.
The gun feels heavier in his hand the longer he aims it, but that’s the plan: Professor Quantum neutralizes the bomb, and Klepto neutralizes every other threat. He manages three shots before there’s a sting in his hand that isn’t as sharp as it should be.
Klepto pulls a knife fast enough the villain doesn’t get to his bomb – and there’s no way this isn’t the guy – but he’s bigger than Klepto by at least a head, and the fight goes quick. Everything goes fuzzy as Klepto thinks to himself: you had one fucking job.
Then the room is bright again. A fluorescent light shines into his eyes. It can’t have been that many minutes, because directly between him and the bomb, this asshole is going full force at Professor Quantum, and she’s losing. She’s not one of the heroes whose suit is designed to hide bloodstains, and there’s one spreading across her side, and Klepto yanks at the shithead’s powers as soon as he realizes why he’s up again so fast, but the asshole’s already sunk his knife in, just shy of the same spot.
The motherfucker’s playing with her. The knife Klepto still happens to be holding – and that’s confirmation if anything is – is the only thing keeping him in touch with reality as he swings out, aiming for the neck, or anywhere convenient. It catches. Just a little, at first, but with Klepto’s power suppressing the regeneration, it’s enough. Blood soaks a little too fast into the cement to tell how much there is, but the villain’s heart is slowing and the blood is still soaking, and Klepto’s powers are clamped down hard over his healing factor. He’s down. Professor Quantum’s down, too, though, and Klepto almost gives himself whiplash, turning to check.
Her suit is slippery as Klepto peels it away, and she has nothing but the standard medkit heroes always carry. She needs someone with training in field medicine. He’s always relied on there being some healing power close enough, because there always is, unless you travel to the sublevels of some hellhole like this. He slaps pressure bandages on.
He injects some anesthetic, too, but the painkillers are pills, and it’s too fucking slow. He shakes out a pair of them, anyway. “Let these dissolve under your tongue. It’s going to taste awful as fuck, but not as awful as it’ll feel not to have them.”
Professor Quantum opens her mouth and lets him drop them in, her voice coming out in a mumble that at least reassures him she’s following his instructions. “He reset the timer. I think he wanted to play some sort of game of whether or not we’d try to save ourselves.”
“It’s fine. He’s down. We have to get you out of here.” Klepto tries to help her to her feet, but the professor pushes him away.
“As I said, there’s no time. I need you to be my hands right now.” She rests one of hers over his like she’s illustrating the point, and the way he can feel her tremble, she is. She’s losing muscle tension by the moment, and he needs to get her help.
But the city needs someone whose hands are rock steady and strong enough to clip wires, and it needs that in a timeframe too short for Klepto to risk looking at the clock again. He tries not to remember what it said. He just lets her powers drift through him, following every instruction with a precision he only manages because they highlight parts of the machine he didn’t even realize were moving parts, traps he didn’t realize were traps, hidden switches and failsafes that prove this is a sadist getting off on it, not anyone willing to die for some obscure cause. Without the professor’s calm descriptions, this would just be glowing. She knows her own power, though, and she talks him through it like neither of them are panicking.
“Have you found the core? Okay, you want to stick that in the pack as soon as possible,” Professor Quantum says, and her voice is as steady as his hands, and Klepto manages to seal it off before checking on her again.
The voice talking him through his task was smooth and gentle and encouraging, and Corinth fell for it. He thought it meant she wasn’t that bad. But she’s barely there anymore when he picks her up, and the fuckface who did this to her isn’t there at all.
He was fucking kidding himself.
Somewhere in there, Klepto let his hold slip. He pulled back because he didn’t want to feel her heart slow to a standstill while he watched.
Klepto carries her out, but he has to do it at a run, and he can only run as fast a normal human can. He secures the bomb, because Professor Quantum made fucking sure he’ll always know that was the important part, and he picks her up, and he takes her back. It’s not really a consolation that her heart stops in someone else’s hands. Nothing short of killing her murderer could really be a consolation.
By the end, Klepto finds and disarms 87 bombs, including three involving nuclear material. It’s not enough.
"Blood of My Blood" for @flashfictionfridayofficial | CW death, rituals, child abuse
The first rule of necromancy: don't make it personal.
When they brought my brother's body back, I wondered what could possibly be more personal than Death? What was more intimate than love that rotted into grief?
I planned the ritual at his funeral. His wife, my father, me. It would be simple enough. I recited what I knew of the world with a bitter tongue, under sour breath.
A worldly possession, a hollowed vessel, blood of an innocent.
Annabelle wept over my brothers body, these grand shaking sobs like the rattling of bones. Or maybe it was just me hearing it -- maybe this gift I had was ruining me.
It didn't matter. I was getting my brother back.
i. Beloved
She was a sweet thing, our Annabelle. How my idiot brother, with his fumbling charm, had managed to court her was a mystery. Only that he did. Only that they loved each other.
It used to disgust me, their love.
I was, since I killed my mother in childbirth, a creature of Death. I've always hated the good ways of the living. These matters of life -- the loving, the growing up, the joy -- I left to my dear brother and his wife. Older than me by a number of years and wiser than me by as much.
It did not take long for me to take what I needed from Annabelle.
She was ever the devoted sister-in-law, and two days after our brother's funeral she asked, "Walk with me?"
Her blonde hair usually curled so neatly was greasy. Dark circled had pressed themselves under her eyes. As grief often did, it had pulled her closer to Death.
"Of course," I replied.
We walked into the meadows behind our village. Life returned to Annabelle in the sun.
I could never tell if Annabelle liked me. But then, very few liked me than my brother. I was her opposite -- short, dark haired, perpetually frowning, my fingers stained with dirt from herb-gathering. But if Annabelle held any reservations, the sweet thing had never voiced it.
"How are you feeling?" she asked softly, green eyes wide and pitying.
Like I will die, I wanted to reply. Like I died when he did.
"I miss him," I said quietly, "Without him ... everything is ..."
She brushed a finger on my collarbone where my fathers hands had marked me.
"You should find a sweetheart to marry. That's how I got out," Annabelle muttered eventually, turning away.
"Your sweetheart is dead."
She made a terrible sound, like a wounded animal learning to laugh.
There's a willow tree in the meadow. We stood in the dancing shadows of its leaves where my brother and I used to play. Later, he'd bring Annabelle along too -- we found the trunk in which he'd, in his teenage haze, traced A + T forever. I snorted at its irony.
Annabelle's soft, calloused fingers traced that with the same gentleness she'd touched me. "It hurts."
Death always did.
Annabelle didn't want to go back to home -- if she considered it home anymore, with her husband dead. I didn't either, so we ended up sitting silently in the cradle of the roots watching the sun sink lower.
Annabelle fell asleep. I leaned over her, tracing her face into memory like it's the last time I'd see it.
I took the wedding ring off her finger.
I was no fool. I was my brother's stupid little sister. Annabelle was the one he loved. It was for her that he would return.
ii. Body
My father loved my brother in a way he'd never loved me.
This was fair. My brother was easy to love -- a grin like the sun and an easy way about him. I was a sullen thing, even as a child, and bitterness had only grown in me with age. I was a creature of Death.
My father always made sure I knew it.
In childhood, my brother had shielded me. But it wasn't as though my father had been particularly kind to him either. We had both grown up a tapestry of our father's anger, but the only difference was my father grieved him now in a way he would never have grieved me, if I were the one to die.
And he never would have to.
"Stupid girl, where have you been?" he snarled when I walked in, Annabelle's wedding ring pressed safely onto my own fingers. "Been whoring yourself out, have you? I know that's what you do in the woods."
I had no words to answer him with.
Instead, I studied him and considered -- disgusting. But it'd have to do. I would have to be careful, a damaged flesh would do me no good.
Then again, my father, in his habits, had already rotted his body from the inside.
I was doing him a favour. There was no other use for him, now.
I waited until he's passed out from the alcohol.
I felt nothing. The most I've felt in days was resentment and this dull, aching pain in my chest. So I felt nothing when I climbed on top of him. When I pressed the pillow into his face. When he tried to fight me off in his drunken haze.
He was stronger than my lithe form, than my thin arms and my wretched, womanly body. But I was a creature of Death.
He died as he lived -- begging for a God that did not exist and cursing the daughter that did.
iii. Blood
I took my father's body into the woods on a trusty mare. I released her into the wild where she belonged, where her spirit would be at rest. Him, I rolled onto the floor of the abandoned cabin I'd been practicing in. His muscles were already tensing -- I'd need to work quick. I lit the candles, drew the runes in chalk, and knelt on the floor.
I'd never done this with humans before. I'd stuck to animals -- less complicated, those. They had souls, but they were not so difficult to manage. To call them back was as easy as luring any living thing, done with food and warmth. Humans ...
Humans required so much.
A lure and an anchor: the wedding ring I slipped onto the body's left hand. And then, a vessel, the body, prepared with a gently in a way my father never was to me. And the blood ...
The blood of an innocent, but I was not innocent.
"Blood of my blood," I chanted instead.
The first rule of necromancy: don't make it personal. To make it personal was to invite Death closer, to invite it in.
I cut my palm. Squeezed, until blood coated my hands.
"Blood of my blood," I said again, "Please ... take mine for his."
And the shadows, they danced in the flames, and my heart danced with them. I was crying, or maybe I was bleeding from my eyes. I couldn't tell. All I knew was that I felt something again, for the first time since my brother -- I felt relief.
I was a creature of Death. My brother and his Annabelle were the creatures of Life.
And to that, we return.
The magic took hold, and I saw fire and brimstone. I saw home.
And the body changed and transformed, bone breaking ad reshaping, skin peeling and growing, and Thomas gasped into life. His home waited in the meadows.
(TW: mentions of, uh, war crimes, I guess? And the titular blood)
'How do you plead?'
My lips barely move. I can't trust them to.
I know what you said. I know you swore you'd protect me; I remember every word you spoke like it was only yesterday. Truly, I can't say how long it's been, caught in this twilight realm between Hell and salvation, waiting for the axe to fall, the hammer to drop, the other shoe to go slam-skitter-clattering against the footworn parquet of this courtroom.
Their eyes are all on me. Every single one, from judge to jury to the sweat-shiny black beadies of the television cameras. The Crown doesn't usually broadcast its verdicts: never has. I tried telling you that my being the first could hardly be a good sign, but the words stuck like hot blood in my throat. They gashed and stung like punched-in teeth. I had this terrible thought that, if I tried to breathe them back in, they'd kill me, so all I could do was swallow and smile.
Now, I fear that all of my truths would come spilling out if I dared to part my lips on a lie. Everyone knows it's better to keep your mouth shut under interrogation, if ever you can- once you start talking, they'll never let you stop. I've long been wrung dry of anything that could save me or anybody else. All that's left in its wake is the bile that burns your tongue after everything more substantial is gone. It foams and churns, boiling with the need to spatter on the stand in front of me.
I can't let it. Let them sign my death warrant, if they must, and at least I can tell you I tried. But I'm barely trying at all, to give you the one truth I can yet tell. I've scarcely managed to look a single member of the jury in the eye, let alone convince them I'm just in over my head rather than a seasoned killer with no hint of remorse.
If I choose falsehood in order to stay my own execution, won't that be exactly what I am? If I rely on those higher than Parliament and King to protect their own, aren't I just precisely the angel of death the prosecution has spent days painting across the walls?
They've gutted me, so slow that the final strings of such a thorough disembowelment could only ache, and unwound the result across the varnished pews of the courtroom in a red-thread map. There I was, so drenched in the blood of another that I could have been mistaken for a dead man myself, and here I am, staring at the floor as though I long for nothing more. Spiralling across the ceiling is the chart of my movements, across the world and back again, black and red soaking the atlas along my path.
I didn't do all of it, of course. Enough, though. Enough that any punishment the judge can devise is undoubtedly less than I deserve.
How do you plead? I waver. I can see quite clearly the two roads before me: one leads back to you, to a new name and a new face, a news cycle that quickly sweeps along to the next unimaginable thing, a place nobody will ever find me and us.
(Apart, of course. Separate. The former will quite swiftly be excised from the latter, not like a tumour but like a tired old organ that's long served its proper cause. I do not know what will replace my purpose at the helm, and what will stay a course instead of leaving me spinning aimlessly through the dark)
Along the other- well, it doesn't track forward far. If not off a cliff, then into deep water. To you, I will never return, and you'll despise me for it. You'll never stop thinking of the lost dog you didn't quite manage to recall in time; I've dragged my collar and lead into a field of sheep, condemned you with the names and numbers etched into my throat. If found, please return to…
You keep repeating it to me, innocent until proven guilty, and that there's no linchpin to the prosecution without my confession. Still, I can't help but feel we've got that backward or, at least, sideways. One cannot be damned without the finding of sin, of crime. In my case, I've plenty of both. I've been stamped with the silent Devil's mark of guilt for longer than you've known me, burden of proof entirely aside. If you can change that, what does that make you?
What would I be; this strange, reborn thing without a past? If you've the power to wash me clean, to purge the rubber-stamp of reasonable doubt from me, would the great wide future of innocence be open to me once again?
Is that the salvation I am promised? Is that the one I seek?
I look down at my hands, and cannot imagine it. Every webbed scar seems indelible. Every pale mark appears almost to convict me on its own, if only they were to look. And they're all looking, they're just not seeing. None of them have seen, somehow, for all this hearing has dragged on for several eternities laid end-to-end.
I could make them see. I could make it undeniable.
Or I could let you pull the shroud ever tighter around me and- presto- make the magician's assistant disappear.
My fingers grip the edge of the stand. My knuckles grind.
Content Warning: lot of swearing, mention of blood, blood loss.
First Part.
He blinked, tried to move, and groaned. “You must be fucking with me,” he breathed.
Placing his gloved hands on the snow around him, he pushed down, forcing himself upright. “Fuck my life, fuck everything, fuck you-”
“-fuck myself, but Serina,” finished his younger self's voice.
He looked around, closed his eyes, and exhaled, dropping his head. He shook his hair with a gloved hand, fishing his phone from his coat’s pocket, and winced, hovering his hand a centimeter from the back of his head.
“Fuck-” He turned, widening his eyes at the bloody snow's size, “-the goddess,” he whispered. “What the hell…?”
He gasped, straightened, and raised his eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t let me die, Serina.”
“I already have your blood in my hands,” the breeze brought her whisper to him.
“I won't have your blood on my hands,” he heard her younger self. “Especially if you could just bear some heat.”
“That wouldn’t have stopped you,” he turned to the trees on his right, sliding a finger through the side of his phone. “If you would have wanted me dead, you wouldn’t have closed my wound. You wouldn’t have stayed. You wouldn’t have watched over me. You wouldn’t have kept me warm. You would have let me die… a long time ago.”
“I already fulfilled my deed, why do you keep searching for me?”
“I’m going to bring you back home.” He spun the phone in his hand.
“I am no longer the girl you knew.”
“I am neither the boy you met,” he grimaced and turned to look across the red snow. “That doesn’t matter, you’re coming back with me.”
“I just hurt you.”
He chuckled. “That doesn’t matter. I was being an asshole, I’m sure I deserved it.”
“This is not a joke”—he shuddered—“, Calder.”
He jumped, kneeling to face behind him. The snow under him brightened with the light coming from his phone. His eyes rolled and he held himself upright with a hand.
“Stay put,” she scorned. “It mightn’t have been a lot, but you’re still suffering for blood loss.”
He giggled; the light of his phone died against the snow as he used both hands to hold himself. “You still care about me.” He sniffled, “I thought you would kill me this time,” he whispered to the snow.
“You already paid with your blood.”
“And you did with yourself!” He sprung himself upright and his eyes rolled back, his body slumped.
He groaned while falling. A breeze rushed by and a woman with a very light redhead turning ice blue past her shoulders caught him in an embrace. He held onto her, crying. “Goddess, Serina. I thought I was too late. I thought I had already lost you.”
She sighed, her breath ruffling his hair, and he hid his face on her neck.
“You overpaid your dues,” he sobbed. “You gave yourself. It took your life. It took our youth. It took our love. What more do we have to give them? They’re dead! You burned them to the ground, you iced them to hell. Why can’t I be with you anymore? We overpaid, you more than me. Why do you have to keep paying, isolated like this?”
She exhaled, fluttering her frosty eyelashes, and closed her ice blue eyes. “It’s not going to be like you remember…”
He inhaled on her pale skin, tightening his arms around her. “I don’t care.”
She sighed, a red line of her hair turning ice. “I’m no longer what you are.”
He pulled away; she looked at him, holding him even at arms’ length. “But you’re still Serina Sanz?”
She attempted a smile. “Sometimes.”
He brought her back into his arms. “That’s all I need.”
She scoffed and closed her eyes, only her roots remaining somewhat red.
“We truly didn’t know spirits were still born,” he whispered.
She watched the dark behind him, her ice blue eyes draining the last of its color. “It can still happens if the world needs it; if the Goddess deems it so.”
“What’s of you when the world no longer needs you?”
She looked up to the dark sky, a man embracing a pale figure of snow—white eyes, white skin, white hair. “I become a legend. I turn into snow, or burn to ashes, and I end up being only a moment in the history of time.”
He let go a trembling exhale. “I’m just asking for what’s left of your time.”
“That’s all I can give you,” she whispered, closing her eyes.
Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial Prompt 365: Blood On Your Hands
[Summary: She looks at her blood stained fingers; they show the fault clear enough]
Tara’s blood is still nestled deep in the cracks of Clem’s hands; artistic like ochre paint, how it highlights all her grooves, if not for the stench. It sticks between her fingers when she laces them together for confidence, breathing shallow as she waits for Tara to speak. It’s been a handful of seconds since the motion behind Tara’s eyelids had turned to a flash of bright blue, pupils thin with the pain; a handful of seconds since Clem’s felt shook to her core. Funny that, how she can do what she did without a falter but one look at Tara and she’s back to quaking.
Tara’s fingertips are battered and bruised. Deep purple to complement the way the red is lurid around Clem’s fingernails. They don’t prod, barely skim, the ragged tatters of Tara’s shirt bundled around her ribs and it’s mostly her eyes that examine the evidence. Bright like a rainbow, a monotone rainbow aside from the ugly black see-sawing through it. It looks horrendous. A horror story. One unfolding in Tara’s head, looking at it. One Clem’s lived, making it. The one they both endured in the second after Clem had seen the projectile fling but before she’d quite known there was nothing she could do to stop its path.
“So,” Tara says finally. Drops her shirt, though there’s little point. Clem had ripped it badly in hurry, shredded the fabric like an inconvenience. Now it looks scarecrow-core. “You patched me up.”
“I tried.” Clem clenches her fingers tighter, feels how the stickiness seems to grow worse. Is the heat from her body cooking it, making a sick glaze over her flesh? Finger bones served with a light dash of her girlfriend’s blood.
“Tried might be a good description.” Tara grimaces, a palm fluttering as if it wants to rest over the wound only to abort in better decisions. “You’re no medic. But I suppose I should say thanks.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I’m not ungrateful,” Tara retorts before giving a small volley of coughs that clearly ache her wound for the wince she gives. She’s already lying down but looks like she’d like to sink somehow deeper. Go flatter, further, but now Clem’s thinking about graves, the dirt and how mud stains the lines of a palm just as well as blood. It takes a second, her eyes flicking to Clem when silence follows, for her to get what Clem actually meant. “You’re talking about how it happened.”
Clem nods. Shortly. Sharply. Her chin like a knife and it’s her knee caps it angles towards. She pushes her palms together, the traces of Tara’s insides mingling with sweat. Tara sighs – faintly, of course, in care of the wound. Her hand settles low on her hip instead. A safe distance away.
“I’m grateful you got your hands dirty, Clem, and saved me,” Tara says. Skull flat to the ground. Eyes up at the ceiling. “And it wasn’t your fault.”
“Factually, it was.”
Tara exhales. Harsher than she should with a stomach wound. “Great. Just woke up from near death, I’ll remind you-”
“I don’t need the reminder.”
“-and you’re already making sure I know you’re guilty.” Tara exhales again. Clem’s leaning forward ever so slightly, her eyes eagles on Tara’s face for pain, on the wound for leaking, so when Tara exclaims Clem, really?, she almost falls over from the jolt.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re alive,” Clem corrects. “Halfway thanks to me. And halfway because of me. If I hadn’t-”
“No point in thinking of what could be. It’s not going to change this.” Tara gestures vaguely. Clem gives it a better look. The void of the black stitches. The pressed together smile underneath. Tara makes a sound, exasperated. Her eyes flicking back to Clem.
“Is that my blood on your hands?”
“I haven’t been able to go wash them.” I didn’t want to miss you waking up. Tara eyes her, understanding the unspoken.
“Kind of gross though. My insides all over your skin.”
“My hands have been all over your insides.” Clem probably shouldn’t remind her of that. Such frank words. The images live in her head now, obviously, memories she keeps going back over and over so her brain’s going to learn never to forget it, and it’s not what she wants to be doing, and it’s not what she can stop either. Tara pulls a face.
“Fuck, Clem, you can’t just say things like that!”
“The truth?”
“Please tell me this isn’t going to be another of your things.”
Clem gives her a look that says of course it is. It’s because of me. You were faint and sloshing where you shouldn’t be so my hands had to be where they shouldn’t be, and it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been better. The look might not convey the exact intricacies, actually, the description, but it gets the point across. Tara rolls her eyes.
“We’ll deal with that after I can sit up,” she mutters. “Right now, though, pack up the guilt trip. If you’re going to play nursemaid I want one that’s not exasperating me.”
“If that’s what you want.” Clem’s not going to insist on hashing out guilt right now if Tara really doesn’t want to. She looks at her blood stained fingers; they show the fault clear enough. If it wasn’t her fault, the blood wouldn’t cling to her, ants to sugar, evidence to the guilty.
“And go wash your hands,” Tara says impatiently, if not a little breathlessly. “Because it really is a bit gross.”
written for Flash Fiction Friday Prompt #365, event hosted by @flashfictionfridayofficial
Story: Original Work (Ao3 Link)
Rating: Teen and up
tw: reference to execution
Word count: 909
Purifying The Land
Syden stretched his feet under the table, a motion aligned with the stretching of his arms, in his attempt to wake himself up from a mildly drowsy state. It was early morning, and he was still in his night clothes.
The morning sunlight poured into the room and accented them all in a soft yellow glow as they sat around the breakfast table.
There were seven of them altogether, with the absence of his parents.
The others were engaged in their own occupations, whether it was his brother lost in his tree-shaped silver dais, or his sister talking to their cousin in a hushed voice about a personal matter. He wondered if he was the only one who was still too sleepy to do much talking. Despite appearing more alert than him, the others seemed mostly quiet in their murmuring talk.
Not so with Leighanna.
She talked loud enough for the kitchen maids to hear in the other room, had they been listening.
“Do you ever wonder what foreigners eat?” she asked no one in particular. “I do sometimes… but it’s probably a stupid question. It’s difficult to imagine what goes through the minds of those savages, if they have the ability to think.”
Syden took a sip of his soup from a silver spoon. “Maybe they eat human flesh,” he ventured, looking at her evenly.
Leighanna made a face like she was disgusted.
“I am so glad we live here,” she said. “There are finer pursuits in life for sophisticated people than dirtying their hands with other people’s blood, all in the name of… what, exactly? I see no reason to stoop so low unless you are lowborn to begin with.”
Syden looked into his soup bowl, stirring its contents silently.
“I understand killing beasts,” she went on. “But for a man to kill another man, it’s a deplorable act. Yet, if they were to punish the killers properly, they’d have to hang half the land…” She sighed. “They really are hopeless.”
“Not as hopeless as we are,” said Syden, finding his voice at last. Though he uttered it quietly, he could see that his sister was affected, by her disapproving and indignant glare.
“You talk like one who has blood on their hands,” she said, staring piercingly into his eyes, arctic blue against witching green.
“Maybe I do,” he said, taking a sip of his fruit juice from its tall glass.
Leighanna laughed.
“And I am secretly a Princess of the realm,” she said, finally finding some humour in the room.
_
[Several years before, about a decade ago]
The King sat back in his throne, restless in his seat, feeling a discomfort he hadn’t felt before.
The longer he sat, the more he felt the aches and pains in his body growing.
He dismissed it as merely a problem of needing to replace the worn cushions, and tried to focus his wandering attention back on the task before him.
There was the boy, in the center of the judgement hall, with a guard standing next to him, awaiting his decision. The boy was perhaps about fifteen, though from here, he looked rather small.
The King found himself staring long at his features. Pale skin, and raven-black hair that swept past his chin in wild streams. At first glance, the boy appeared to bear an uncanny resemblance to his lost son.
He had to stare hard to confirm that it was not, could not, be possible.
No. This boy’s eyes were a soft, chestnut brown.
“Is he one of the Order?” the King asked, addressing the guard, who held the boy up by the neck of his robe.
“No, Your Grace,” the man said in a rough-hewn tone devoid of feeling.
“Please…” he heard from a far corner of the hall. It was the quavering voice of a woman, who stood shrouded in a dark robe, held back by another guard. “Have mercy on my son.”
The King took some time pouring over a scroll, reading the detailed written accounts of the conduct in question.
“I am sorry,” he said, at length, having made up his mind following his scrutiny. “But the law is the law. As he is not an ordained Knight of the Order, his actions must be treated the same as any others of his kind…”
“No!” shouted the woman from the shadows.
“The sentence for practicing witchcraft is death.”
At those words, the boy’s legs seemed to become weaker, and the guard had to pull him roughly back up to stand straight. There was a strangled shriek from the end of the hall.
“Is this how you intend to keep the realm clean? By washing it with the blood of the innocent??!” screamed the woman.
He did not make reply, as he had no answer to give. The day’s work was long, and he had other matters to attend to, a large stack of complaints to go through. He could not sit here all day making idle conversation with those who could not accept their fate. Nor did he want to be reminded…
He gestured for the guard to take her away, as the other guard left with the boy through another door.
There were some creatures in this world that were far more dangerous in a herd than they might be alone. That was why it was important to keep them from congregating, from forming a Coven—or worse yet…an army.
First snippet of writing for a new WIP about my Neon Odyssey OCs, the Saffron crew!
Word count: 821
CW: guilt
Fandom: Neon Odyssey (D&D)
Hacked
———
Aeza’s blood ran cold as the decrypted message typed itself across the console’s hologram screen.
[The program. I know you have it. Bring it to the attached coordinates.
Or will you have yet another’s blood on your hands?
PHAZE]
Aeza could only stare at the tagline.
“Who…” Jay fussed with the console screen, urgently tabbing back and forth through menus as he echoed, “‘The program.’ They know about Coda. Who—how did they find out?”
<Tracker bug?> Jet suggested with a twitch of his antenna.
Coda’s pale blue hardlight dimmed and gained a tint of a fearful, Somber lavender hue as she looked back and forth between Jay, Jet, and the console. “I can run a scan on the Saffron’s systems—”
“No!” Jay shoved a hand between Coda and the console. “Kid, if there’s a tracker bug, if you connect with the system you might get detected. We can’t risk that.”
“But if they already know about me—”
Jet gently pulled Coda away from the console and stepped around her, propping himself up on his tiptoes to reach buttons on the console. <I got it.>
Aeza’s breath quickened the longer she stared at the message on the screen, now surrounded by other windows as Jay and Jet pulled up status report upon status report of the Saffron’s computer network.
Phaze.
Her breath escaped her with a muttered, “No…”
She knew that name.
She knew that name.
Jay started to turn around and ask, “Aez, why would the message have come to—”
But Aeza barely heard his voice as she pivoted and ran.
She all but flew down the stairs from the bridge, dashing through the lobby. Her hand caught the handrail to the main stairs, and her momentum spun her into the stairway.
A chorus of footsteps behind her rang dully on Aeza’s ears beneath the racing of her own heart and breath. At the base of the stairs she flung herself forward, dashing down the corridor to her quarters.
The automatic doors couldn’t slide open fast enough. She shoved herself through them before they even parted fully.
There had to be something here.
Something had been bugged. Aeza threw her covers aside, her drawers open, and all but her most fragile belongings out across the floor. Her more fragile belongings she lifted and inspected more gently but no less frantically before setting them aside as well.
I must have missed something. What could she have bugged?
She threw herself at another set of drawers, holding nothing but a handful of spare pairs of socks and an old photograph she usually kept hidden.
Normally she pulled it out for comfort and nostalgia. Now she frantically turned it over and over. Searched it for anything amiss, anything she must have overlooked that could possibly be a tracker.
Nothing.
I need to look again.
The doors to her quarters slid open again as she dashed to her closet for another round of searching.
“Aez! What’re you doing!?” Jay demanded, his pale eyes darting around the rapidly increasing mess of Aeza’s room before fixing on her.
Aeza ignored him, instead darting again to the desk.
But his firm hands stopped her, grabbing her on the shoulders and spinning her to face him. “Aeza! What’s going on? What’s gotten into you?!”
“I—” Aeza pulled herself out of his grip and turned. Every nerve she had pled at her to search her room again, but she froze when she finally registered the mess. Everything she owned now lay across the cold floor, seeming to join with the industrial walls in mocking her failure. She could only run her hands through her hair and mutter, “It’s all my fault.”
“What?”
“It’s all my fault,” she repeated, voice soft even to her own ears. “I—she found me. She must have. She found Coda because of me.”
Jay frowned and spun Aeza around with a firm but gentle hand to her shoulder again. “What are you talking about? ‘She’ who?”
“Phaze!” Aeza insisted, meeting his eyes before glancing down and finally noticing Jet and Coda standing in the doorway behind him. Guilt shot a dart of frost through her heart as she met Coda’s eyes, still tinted lavender instead of innocent blue. She had to pry her eyes away, else she feel Coda scanning her soul and finding her guilt as she forced out, “I…I know who Phaze is. Or…I used to. I used to know her. But I…I thought she was dead. But now she—she’s found Coda. Because of me.” Her voice weakened as she groaned again, “It’s all my fault. Again.”
“Aez, listen to me,” Jay said, stepping forward to put himself in her field of vision again while Jet waddled into the room and looked around. “I don’t know what you’re on about, but we’ll figure this out, ok? Doesn’t matter whose fault it is; we’re not gonna let her get Coda.”
———
For this week’s prompt courtesy of @flashfictionfridayofficial!
-verse: Off the Rails
Story: The Circadyne Succession
Heads-Up: I mean just look at the prompt. I could not fluff my way out of this one. Immediately follows “Timely Manners”. Some mention of blood and injury. Not graphic.
–
Before, the heat was darkness. With input from the eyes rendered useless in those tunnels, all other senses sharpened and doubled in sensitivity.
The hissing of deep vents lining the veins of raw statnos ore.
The acrid smell of metal, but more dangerous. More toxic.
The two warning huffs of stinging air in his face, like a dragon preparing to snort flame, before the scalding and searing became his entire world.
But this scalding and searing was different. That was darkness. This was light. Light so strong that it burned, so brilliant that it threatened to dissolve him. It reminded him… it reminded him of…
It was unbearable. It seemed his only choices were to be scorched away, or hope it would subside in intensity.
People talked about trials by fire. He had been through a few (nearly literal) of his own. None so ultimately overpowering as the miniature sun that was burning him up from the inside of his skull, and none so utterly terrifying to him thanks to the realization that he could do nothing about it.
Something sharp, a little jolt of ice, though a forgivable discomfort compared to the rush of relief as his world shifted from a hot blue to a cool yellow.
The heat changed. But the light stayed.
–
Arensky had woken up in bad shape before. This time felt especially bad in a way he couldn’t quite pin down.
Though the fact that he had woken up at all was unexpected. Unexpected but welcome.
He remembered the dark tunnel, the hiss of the statnos vent. Arms acting before his brain had time to process. Shoving Firsen ahead before catching all the scalded silver spray. A literal shield for everyone else ahead.
Firsen.
If his eyes had been too lazy to open before, they were jolted into action now. He managed to open his left all the way; the right seemed slightly swollen. No matter, with one good eye and minimal head movement he could still register that he was in Calire’s clinic, on the usual table, though the healer’s apprentice was nowhere to be seen.
Someone brought me here. It had to be him.
He turned his head a little more to the right, and there! That unmistakable silhouette, lanky limbs draped unceremoniously over the couch as the dragonfly prince dozed, chest rising and falling evenly, if a little fast.
A twinge of discomfort twisted Arensky’s gut, a mix of worry and regret.
Up until this day, in the past year he had been Firsen’s scutar, he had never once seen the prince take a nap. Even getting him to sleep longer than four hours a night was a feat of its own.
Firsen’s sleeves were rolled up. This was also odd; he had never been comfortable exposing his bare skin and Dyne markings, and even wore long sleeves to spar. But as Arensky’s left eye slowly focused the image, he realized that Firsen’s arms were not bare, but wrapped in bandages.
He was injured. He was injured, and I wasn’t there to protect him.
Spiraling dread sucked him so deeply into his thoughts that he didn’t even notice the beeping until Calire hustled into the room.
“- that this machine is going to be the death of my patien – hm? Oh!” Calire stopped at the foot of the table. “Oh, you’re… you–! Arensky!” She looked like she wanted to hug him, nudge him, pat him on the back, but realized that might hurt him more so left her hands hanging awkwardly midair. “Sands, don’t ever scare us like that again, okay?”
He appreciated her concern, but all around it lingered the emptiness of a hollow victory. Of particular interest to him were the stains on her hands, dark and shimmery, with a shifting glow at certain angles. He knew what Icruxti blood looked like.
“What… happened to… him?” Arensky managed to grind out. Whoosh. His windpipes sounded like they were lined with broken glass.
Firsen stirred, likely awoken by the grating cacophony that was Arensky’s voice. “Whad’you mean what happened to me?” he asked, words slightly slurred in half-drowsiness. “You were the one who was dying, like… half an hour ago.”
“Hush, Fiers. Go back to sleep.”
“Wasn’t sleeping. Just… resting…” His head flopped back again as his words trailed off.
“Sure, Your Wakefulness.” Calire went to Arensky’s side, offering a sort of breathless smile, as if she’d denied herself the luxury of air until she knew he had access to it again. “You pulled through. That’s amazing. How do you feel?”
“I… don’t really feel anything,” Arensky replied, partially distracted. He still couldn’t take his eyes off the stains.
Calire was clicking something on the monitor, nodding her head. “Oh, that’s good. It means the statnos is working. I think I’ve gotten your dosing conversions down by now.”
The beeping finally stopped. Arensky swallowed. “You have blood on your hands.”
The Avie glanced down. Then she looked up at him, not quite eye contact, but somewhere just slightly off to the right. “Yeah. I didn’t have time to wash it.”
“From Firsen?”
“What? What makes you think–” Calire glanced back at the prince, registering the bandages around his arm. “Oh, no, not the same. He was scratching again.”
“Yours?” Arensky asked, because it wasn’t making sense. Who else could it be?
Calire stared for a few moments, then picked up a towel. She pressed it gently to the right side of his head, and he felt the pressure of something at his temple, like a wire or a thin cable trapped beneath gauze.
She pulled the towel away and showed him the same shimmering stain, fresh and vibrant. It wasn’t red. It wasn’t human. It couldn’t be.
“It’s your blood.”
-
958 words
Ahaha yeah we'll leave the cliffhanger there for now.
