#f!lwcourier

[ilcuoreardendo-fic]

5 Works in Progress Meme

Pick 5 works in progress. Go to the 5th paragraph and post 5 sentence starting from that point.

These are all mostly untouched from their first draft forms (in other words, not polished and edited, except for some slight structure/grammar clean up to make them not horrible).

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Belle finds out that she can’t go home again. Whatever joy she thought her father would have at seeing his only daughter again slips away from him at the words the priest whispers in his ear.

Her father has her locked in an unused tower in the west wing of the castle.

When the priests come with their holy books, their candles, their manacles and whips, they don’t speak to her but over her, calling her tainted, unclean, the devil’s whore. They hurt her.

- Untitled, Rumbelle fic

# # #

Faith couldn’t quite find the words to explain that as much as she had come to love Megaton, as much as she had come to get to know and enjoy—at least some of—the people of the Capital Wasteland, it wasn’t home. Home was the place she’d grown up, the place she’d thought she’d been born in, that lay mere miles from her Megaton doorstep, shut off to her. Forever.

Home was the man who’d raised her, who’d taught her how to hack into her first computer, how to splint broken bones and mend tears in clothes as well as skin. The man who’d kissed her forehead and then left her to the tender mercies of the citizens of Vault 101 when he thought the time had come to finish the work he’d started before she was born.

- “Off the Map,” Hearts on Fire series

# # #

“But he is faithful to the traditions. He may be tempted, but he meditates, swims in the cold river every morning to cool his blood. He won’t allow himself to fall until he’s certain he can do so and remain true to himself and his faith.”

“No sex before marriage, huh?”

She could see the smile in Joshua’s eyes. “In short.”

- “Sweet Nothings,” Hearts on Fire series.

# # #

His jaw set, Rumplestiltskin wound fresh muslin strips around his foot, binding muscle and bone tightly. Too much so, if the shock of pain that leapt from his ankle to the base of his knee was to be believed. Stars exploded behind his eyes, the big muscle of his leg shivered and he grit his teeth against the flood of hurt, breathing harshly through his nose as it tapered off, settled to a dull throb. As he’d done since the moments after he’d swung the hammer that crippled him, he sent out a silent plea, that even if he should never walk fair again, the pain would at least lessen, leave him capable of movement that didn’t leave him half blind and whimpering. And it wasn’t a plea just for himself.

- “Yellow,” Color Wheel challenge (1/5)

# # #

Labintias, yunoks Jidai*, he'd said, the language strange and sibilant and coiling around Obi-Wan like a snake. Obi-Wan had reached for his lightsaber only to find the alley empty as his fingers closed around the hilt, the presence of the man fading from his mind like a wisp of smoke on the air.

The next time they met, they crossed sabers, as Obi-Wan protected a member of the Royal House of Kuan-tu on Aleria Prime.

“He's not worth your protection,” the Sith had told him. “The entire family should earn your ire.”

- From an untitled Star Wars fic, featuring Sith!Qui-Gon (Darth Sotiris)

*Greetings, little Jedi

# # # # #

BONUS Obi-Wan knocked on the door. There was no answer, but the handle turned easily and the door swung open. Beyond it, lay a simple sitting room, doused in orange and red shadows from the fire in the hearth. There was a low couch and, in front of it, a table set with a platter of bread and fruits and two empty bowls no doubt meant to hold the contents of the pot that was bubbling in front of the fireplace. 

Even as his vision blurred again, Obi-Wan scoffed softly at the convenience, remembering some old tale he’d heard in the creche about a girl and an enchanted palace where all her needs were seen to by invisible servants.

- Untitled piece, initially intended to be part of a spooky set for October, but got waylaid because I started too late.

[ilcuoreardendo-fic]

Off the Map (Hearts on Fire series)

#004 Off the Map - from this Prompt Table.

Faith leaves the Capital Wasteland

I’ve given up on the semblance of chronological order while I post these to Tumblr and Dreamwidth. I’m writing all out of sync. They’ll make more sense as a story once they go onto A03.

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Charon watched her from the doorway. She had her supplies laid out on the bed in front of her. Rations, cleaning and repair supplies for armor and gun, extra ammo for Polaris—Security Chief Harkness’s plasma rifle—bobby pins, underwear, some spare shirts and light pants, and a few odds and ends, including the medicine bobble head she’d taken from her dad’s desk almost three years ago, on her flight from the vault.

She met Charon’s eyes, waited for him to call her crazy, foolish, stupid.

He only grinned—that small, lazy grin that on anyone else would look like a cross between a grimace and a smirk—and told her to move her ass unless she wanted to miss Crow.

Everyone else had called her crazy. Asked her why she wanted to leave her home.

She couldn’t quite find the words to explain that as much as she’d come to love Megaton, as much as she’d come to get to know and enjoy—at least some of—the people of the Capital Wasteland, it wasn’t home. Home was the place she’d grown up, the place she’d thought she’d been born in, that lay mere miles from her Megaton doorstep, shut off to her forever.

Home was the man who’d raised her, who’d taught her how to hack into her first computer, how to splint broken bones and mend tears in clothes as well as skin. The man who’d kissed her forehead and then left her to the tender mercies of the citizens of Vault 101 when he thought the time had come to finish the work he’d started before she was born. The man who she had followed across the wasteland and back, hoping for just a few moments of time, of explanation, of apology.

The man who died in front of her, leaving a gaping hole in the fabric of her being and a shadow over every action she took.

Her home was gone.

And for a while, she’d wished she was too.

Charon knew. He’d kept silent watch those late nights after Project Purity was taken by the Enclave, as she’d chased Med-X with whiskey, whispered stories to him about her father. Stories that ran the gamut from hero to villain. He’d watched as she’d grown more and more careless as they traveled the wastes, picking up the odd job or bounty.

At some point, he must have had enough of watching her try to kill herself. Or maybe he’d had enough of her whining. You never quite knew with Charon. But as they’d settled by their fire for the night, under some nameless overpass, and she’d unzipped the Roosevelt Academy pencil case she used to stash her Med-X, Charon had come out of the darkness like a demon, wrestled the case from her and thrown it into the fire. The needles were silver scratches in the air, falling like stars.

She’d tried to dive for them—and would have, straight into the fire—but he’d wrestled her to the ground, rolling so he was beneath her. He’d trapped her arms at her sides and held her back against his chest, legs hooking around her knees and holding her still until, minutes or hours later, exhausted, she’d sobbed herself to sleep against his shoulder. He whispered in her ear, reminding her of the unkept promises she’d made. To him. To those ragged people at the Temple of the Union. Even to that little idiot in Girdershade. His voice followed her down into the dark.

A few weeks after that, she’d finally gotten her shit together. Faced life without her father. Filled promise after promise. And finally faced down the Enclave, which had very nearly killed her. Irony that, since she’d just decided she’d wanted to live.

But the Brotherhood’s medics knew their stuff and it was only a few weeks before she was up and moving again, albeit a little more slowly and her recover necessitated a lot of time spent holed up in her house in Megaton, where she seemed to receive visitor after visitor wanting to see the Savior of the Wastelands. She finally had to resort to asking Charon to turn them away.

But still the shadow of not belonging remained.

She’d caught wind of the California New Republic from some members of the Brotherhood. Some sang its praises. Others cursed it into the atomic fire.

And then she’d met a trader, part of a new run out of Canterbury commons, who’d come from the West; he was full of stories about places that had been mostly untouched by the nuclear fallout. Places full of animals and food and clear, clean water.

Charon offered to go with her. His heart wasn’t in it. It was with the nice ghoul lady he’d met at Gob’s bar a few months back. But he would have gone, if she’d asked. Not due to the obedience of a contract but the loyalty of a friend.

He’d already saved her life more times than she could count. She couldn’t ask for more.

By the time Charon escorted her out to meet Crow—weaving her through the crowd of well wishers come to say thanks and goodbye or even cry a few tears on her shoulder—it was nearing sunset and Crow and his guards were tightening the packs strapped to the brahmin.

“Be safe,” Charon said, the words coming out more of a threat than a request, as if when he found out she wasn’t being safe, he’d take it upon himself to stalk across the greater United States and beat some sense into her.

“Of course.” She smirked back at him, reached into her back pocket and withdrew a slip of paper, pressing it into his hand.

He shook his head when he saw what it was. “I can’t take this. I don’t want it.” It means you won’t be coming back. The words were left unsaid, but she could see them in his eyes. It had taken a while, but she could read him now. Most of the time, anyway.

“I don’t want anyone hassling you or Letty while I’m gone. You have the deed, that means the house is yours. I come back, we can talk terms. Kay?” Kay meaning “take the deed or I shove it down your throat.”

Charon’s mouth set in a grim line and for a moment she thought he would argue with her, but then his shoulders loosened and he shook his head. “Fine.” It seemed like he was learning to read her too.

She hesitated a moment, then threw her arms around his shoulders, having to stand on tiptoes to reach. He tensed for a second, but then his arms caught her around the waist and squeezed back.

At the sound of the brahmin moving away, she took a deep breath, proud of herself when it didn’t shake, and stepped back, giving Charon a little wave, sending a thumbs up to Stockholm up in his nest, and followed the Caravan north.

She stayed with Crow’s caravan long enough to reach the old MD-193 and, after a warm, cuddly and rather watery hug from Crow—who tried to subtly wipe his eyes while his face was over her shoulder—she headed west.

The journey took the better part of a year, brought her into contact with settlements and traders of all types. She’d thought, at first, her goal might be the NCR. After hearing the Brotherhood speak of it, she’d gotten curious. And she wondered what the Pacific ocean looked like.

But the further west she went, the more she began to hear about a place where bombs had never fallen. A shining city of the Old World that had withstood the fires of the apocalypse, with thanks to the strange, enigmatic leader who people claimed still existed but who no one ever saw.

Along with these stories, she heard tales of a roving army, snatching up women and children, decimating native tribes, burning settlements, leaving their flags to flow over the rubble. A stark reminder of their power.

She thought of the Enclave flag flying over Project Purity, thought of its soldiers bleeding the small settlements dry, the abandoned homes of Big Town and Arefu. She scratched at her left arm, the burn scar beneath her jumpsuit.

Changing course, she sold herself as an armed guard for a caravan making its way to New Vegas.

[ilcuoreardendo-fic]

In Dreams (Part 2 - Hearts on Fire series)

From this prompt list

This is going to be a cohesive series. And though I’m bouncing around the prompts, I’m posting (or should be) the scenes in order of occurrence. Though it’s always possible that might get away from me.

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#037 Night of Fire

Deep in the heart of Zion, Joshua Graham dreamed.

He often dreamed of his second baptism, the fire that had seared his soul. He woke up burning, clawing at the bandages on his face, wrapped around his chest. Often, he’d flee to the upper camp through the back of the Angel Cave, take refuge near the edge of the cliff side, against the rocks where the pre-world cache rested, undisturbed by himself or the Dead Horses for the messages of doom the Sorrows left scattered on the rock wall behind it. Not that he believed the messages, but it did seem ill-omened to take from the dead, when one did not have need.

There he would sit or stand, the ever present wind directed through the canyon buffeting him, carrying with it the light spray of water, sleeping between the bandages, temporarily cooling his skin.

But tonight, he dreamed of another fire, his mind casting back years to New Canaan and a girl he’d known there. He’d had a young man’s crush, assumed they would marry when he came back from his two year mission. He would be nearly 18 then. And his father and hers were good friends and they often spoke and she and him being well matched.

She’d given him his first kiss, the evening before he’d left on the journey that would take him thousands of miles from his home, his faith. A sweet thing, that kiss, soft and hesitant. Her lips moved against his like the wings of a moth.

In years to come, he would be reminded of that kiss with each slave woman Caesar paraded through his tent.

It was one reason he’d earned a reputation for harsh lips and stern hands off the battlefield, though his brutality, as he led men into battle, was something he tried to leave behind, in the night, when soft bodies replaced foes in armor and bare hands touched his skin. He wasn’t always successful at tamping down those raging fires.

Even in the dream, he felt it. Remembered that something inside him had wanted to cup her face and hold her still as he took her mouth. To slide his hand inside the blouse of the simple, modest dress she wore and feel the weight of her breast, the heat of her skin.

He didn’t.

But in this dream, she slid her hand beneath his shirt. Only to touch the uneven terrain of fire ravaged skin across his chest. Then came pain, sunburst bright and hot and he opened his eyes—eyes that he had closed to savor that first kiss—to find Edward before him. The hilt of a knife was in his hand. The blade stuck between Joshua’s ribs.

Joshua opened his eyes in the dark of the Angel Cave, in the heart of Zion. He heard the wind and water winding through the cavern and breathed out a sigh. He could feel dawn approaching, his skin twinging as if the meager heat from the rising sun could set him aflame again. In reality, it was only time to change his bandages.

There were visitors to Zion. A scout had returned yesterday to inform Joshua of the caravan’s approach across the Southern Passage. His dreams always turned to his death when new visitors arrived. And there was a courier this time.

He rose from the cot that served as his bed, gathered scissors and fresh bandages, and made his way from the cave to a secluded spot of the river bend to bathe and prepare for what the day would bring.

[ilcuoreardendo-fic]

Hearts on Fire (Female!Courier/Joshua Graham, prompt table)

My prompt list/chart for a little project. The Courier in this series is my vault dweller/lone wanderer from Shaking the Bough. 

You can also find this list at my Dreamwidth, in actual chart form: Rapture of the Moon.

001. Night Terror

002. Dancing with the Devil

003. Urban Legend

004. Off the Map

005. I Covet You

006. Messenger

007. Touch Me

008. Gaping Chasm

009. Arise from the Ashes

010. Caress the Darkness, Kiss the Light

011. Don't Look Away

012. One Heart, One Breath

013. Rough Hands

014. Silent Sentry

015. Whispers in the Dark

016. Uncontrollable Wrath

017. Killing Moon

018. The Power of Goodbye

019. You Are Everything

020. Enfold Your Heart in Mine

021. Ravenous Time

022. Weary Wanderer

023. Seductive Danger

024. Fire

025. Enchanting Surrender

026. Deserted Riverbank

027. Secret Bonding

028. Fall from Grace

029. The Tears of God

030. Dashed Against a Rock

031. Two Days from Now

032. There Will Always Be a Monster

033. To Love a Storm

034. If Looks Could Kill

035. Sweet Nothings

036. Beautiful Friendship

037. Night of Fire

038. Desire, Ask, Believe, Receive

039. Who Named the Stars

040. Passionate Desires

041. After Tonight

042. Siren's Song

043. One Thousand Promises

044. Suffer the Agony

045. On the Brink of Forever

046. Haunting Melody

047. Shooting Star

048. A Darker Pride

049. The Life Inside

050. When Words Fail