So I wrote a little Sufferer<3Disciple fluff for the HSWC, so I guess I'll share it here cuz I'm a ham who compulsively shares stuff
The prompt was "AU where they win".
I don’t have to write anymore.
She stopped. It was only six words, but though her hand had worked day after day for years now with barely a cramp, somehow those six words had left her raspberry-red fountain pen shaking like a cocoon about to hatch. She took a deep breath, pressing the pads of her fingers into the smooth metal.
I don’t have to write anymore. And that terrifies me a little. Because all I know myself to be anymore is a writer. Not even a writer, really. He’s the writer. I’m just a scribe. I’m just an extension of the pen, just a mechanism that makes it move.
“Hey. That’s not true.”
She felt arms snaking gently around her waist, a warm weight easing with a creak into the big wooden chair behind her. He leaned over her shoulder to examine her page, brushing back a lock of her thick hair to get a better view.
She pushed his head away. “Stop critiquing my work before it’s done.”
He raised his hands in a defensive gesture. “Who’s critiquing? Can’t I just sit with you?”
She rolled her eyes, fighting back a smile as she returned to her work. “Fine.”
Here’s the thing about writing. Sometimes we do it to collect our thoughts, or to entertain people, or to speak to our community. But I think the real reason we write is because it lasts. It’s permanent. And just about every species out there in paradox space shares this desire for a little permanence. We want to find a log to hold onto in the river of time, some way to tie ourselves to land so that we’ll last.
I don’t care much whether people remember me or not. One lifetime of happiness is all I’m really after. But there is something that I need to last, and that’s the vision he has shown me. The ideas. The love.
She closed her eyes as he pulled her closer against him, the thick gray wool of his cloak a warm and reassuring cushion. When she opened them, she saw the page before her through a fog of green liquid. She blinked hard and drops smacked against the parchment like pea soup.
But yet another thing I’m learning from him is that a teacher needs to recognize the day when the class must end and the students must begin to learn the lesson from the world around them.
I like to think this is a textbook that I’ve written. I hope that you will read it and know some fraction of what it is like to hear him speak.
But today, we finally won our war. It’s a new planet now. A new beginning.
Our children will learn these lessons every day.
They will learn as they watch the whipping posts in our squares being torn down and replaced with flower beds. They will learn as they see high-bloods and low-bloods sharing bread in restaurants and holding hands on the street. They will learn about kinship and fairness in school and at home, when they are young and as they grow.
They will learn justice every day. They will know love before they know words.
“Stop it!” She giggled through her tears as she clenched the pen, resisting his attempts to pull it from her grasp as he pressed his lips to her ear.For an interplanetary leader, he could be awfully immature.
The universe is the page now, she scrawled as she reached the lower margin, and we are all the scribes. It’s time to write something together.
When she at last gave in and let the pen clatter to her desk, turning to slump into his crushing embrace, she was overcome with the buoyant certainty that this was anything but The End.
