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Character building: Rafe (a drabble)

Sep25

Near the end of Year 5
There were nights when Rafe woke up not knowing where he was anymore. Those were the bad nights – not the worst, but close to it. He’d stare at the ceiling, or at Renata’s fall of blonde hair, refusing to move, afraid to even breathe, until he remembered that this was his Kept, not his Keeper, that this was okay, that he was safe.

He never talked about those moments with anyone. Of the three of them – Eris and Joff and him – he was supposed to be the strong one, supposed to be the calm one. Of the three of them, he’d had it the easiest. Nobody had taken to cutting him up as a weekend hobby. Nobody had locked him in the closet whenever he forgot his script. He was strong. Protective. He wasn’t supposed to be the one with nightmares.

Last night had started with a bad night, and things were not looking up. He smiled at Eris, squeezed Joff’s hand, and gave Renata a gentle hug. “We’ll be back in a few hours. We’re going to go visit the kids.”

“I wish I could come with you.” Renata wrinkled her nose and looked down at the floor. “I’d like to meet your kids. Your other kids.”

“You will, eventually. I’m sure of it.” He rubbed her back for a moment in apology. “But not today. Stay here, okay?”

“Okay.” She settled carefully into the couch. “Maybe I’ll get some homework done.”

“Good idea.” Praise, touch. Gentleness. Those were the things that made a Keeping bearable, that made it feel like a warm nest instead of a cold cage. Rafe knew exactly what the lack of those things felt like, and he was not going to do that to his Kept. “We won’t be that long.”

He pulled his imaginary armor over himself as they left her behind. The smile faded into something hard and wolfish. His back straightened; he raised his chin. He didn’t have to look at Joff and Eris to know they were doing the same.

They were visiting their children. They were visiting Liza.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/985498.html. You can comment here or there.

On Addergoole and teenage parenting – after school

Sep23

I was thinking this morning of Cya having to deal with a new teacher:

“I wanted to talk to you about this picture of his family Yoshi drew.”

Horns? Tails? Cya’s worried for a moment; humans get so bent out of shape about these things, thinking they’re symbols when they’re just the way the family looks.

But no. She looks over the picture. Yoshi’s probably not a budding Picasso, as much as she’d like him to be, but it’s a pretty good representation.

“Yeah, that’s about right. That’s Yoshi and his brother Viddie – it’s Viðrou, that’s an eth, don’t mark him off for a wrong D when it’s not, please – those are my friends Howard, Leo, and Zita – she really is that short. Leo is Viddie’s father, that’s why he’s over there next to Viddie, and then that’s Leo’s daughter Sigruko and Zita’s kids Amy, Ariel, and Brandy. That’s everyone.”

“But the assignment was to draw his family.“

Cya aims a look of patient disparagement at the teacher. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”
~

All over America, from ’99 through 2011, kids in their early twenties are struggling with the system.

Acacia leans in close to the teacher. Her voice is low and full of menace. “Do not ever ask about my child’s father in front of her again. That is not a conversation she needs to hear. Do you understand?”

~

Orlaith sighs at the paperwork. “No. Ce’Rilla, with an apostrophe. Hunter-Hale, with a hyphen. Samael, not Samuel, a-e-l. Seriously.”

~

Aelgifu has dealt with the whispers and the strange looks, but it’s the soccer mom that actually comes out and asks that brings it all to a head.

“How did two lesbians end up with four kids before you even graduated college? I mean, it’s not like you can get pregnant by accident.”

She waits a heartbeat, then another, to see if the woman realizes how stupid what she just says is. When the woman flushes and stammers out something starting with “I mean…”, Ayla smiles reassuringly.

“At least you didn’t ask the kids.” There’s menace in her words. “And as to how: Io had Cecily before we were dating. Look up ‘bisexual’ sometime. She had Al right after we started dating, but you know, these things happen, and we worked through it. I had Niobe because we wanted a baby together, a kid that was ours. And then I had Siggie by arrangement with a gay friend of mine – twins, and he kept one, I kept one. It’s really quite easy.”

She smiles brightly at the woman and waits for her to go away stammering, happy at the lies and the honesty she’s managed to pile up together.

~

Addergoole grads raising their chins and looking in the face of people who call them irresponsible for being teen parents.

Addergoole grads refusing to answer questions about “but where’s the father in all this?” or “how could a mother leave her child?”

Addergoole grads not bothering to explain the complicated family trees and just explaining “they’re my kids.”

Or “They’re our kids.” Even if they have no kids in common, two people coming together after school and raising all their children as a family.

Addergoole grads struggling to be family when all the world sees is kids.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/984436.html. You can comment here or there.

Character building: Magnolia (a drabble)

Sep20

Near the end of year 5…

“You didn’t tell me!”

Mike sighed. Over the four years of school – the only four years she was supposed to be here! – Magnolia had gotten used to many of Mike’s sighs. This one, this one was new.

“I told you, Magnolia. I told you last year. I told you the year before. And Professor Pelletier and Professor Solomon told you, too.”

Magnolia leaned against the wall of Mike’s office and blew quiet raspberries. They had, she had to admit. Her classwork wasn’t up to par. She wasn’t paying enough attention in class and she wasn’t doing the homework at all. It was just…

“I didn’t think y’all meant it.” She wasn’t going to cry. That would be ridiculous. but she didn’t bother hiding the little wiggle of her bottom lip. “I mean, I took care of the graduation requirements. You helped… remember?”

She had the not-very-pleasurable pleasure of making Mike flinch. “The problem is, Magnolia, that’s never been the only graduation requirement…”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/983568.html. You can comment here or there.

Useful

Sep20

Set ~50 years after Addergoole: the Original Series, after the “Retirement” stories.

To her credit, his owner hadn’t said “make yourself useful.”

To his frustration, when she’d said “I want to make use of you,” it hadn’t been anything like what he’d had in mind.

Rozen looked at the class – all girls, all in their teens – and then back at Kailani. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“You’re close enough to full strength now.” She had her analytical voice on. She was, however, also smiling. “I’m sure you can handle teaching self-defense.”

“Self-defense. Right.” He looked at the girls. They looked back at him, as uncertain as he felt. “All right. I’ve got this,” he told Kai. “I won’t hurt ’em. You can… go do whatever you do. Dean.”

She hesitated. He saw the moment where she questioned her decision to leave him alone with teenage girls. He wanted to be offended – but he didn’t want her to get into the habit of thinking he was harmless, either.

Rozen turned his back on his owner and studied the girls. “All right. We’re going to start with you showing me what you’ve got. Don’t hold back. I’m hard to hurt.”

Un-slump-me prompt call

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/983446.html. You can comment here or there.

Character building: Eris (a drabble)

Sep20

Mid year five

They were whispering again. Eris held her glass out to Aviv and waited, patiently enough, while he filled it.

He raised his eyebrows at her, at the way her free hand was drumming on the counter. “Careful. That’s your seventh.”

Eris laughed, although there was no humor in it. “What’s going to happen if I drink too many? You gonna try to grab me?”

“I won’t.” There was never a time when Aviv didn’t look serious. Eris wondered if the tentacles that made up his mouth under his Mask could even make a smile. Today, he sounded serious, too. “But I wouldn’t assume someone else is as smart.”

Eris raised her eyebrows. “Smart? You saying I’m a bad catch?”

He saluted her with a drink, the closest he might ever come to that elusive smile. “I’m saying nobody with half a brain thinks that they’d survive putting a collar on you again. If you didn’t kill them – and you probably would – well, Joff and Rafe aren’t collared anymore. It would be a mess.” He leaned back and sipped his drink, or, at least, held his drink up near his lips and some of it vanished. “I might even get involved.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/983165.html. You can comment here or there.

Mentor-Student

Sep19

He’d tried “no,” “fuck no” and “no way in a billion fucking years.” Doug had tried everything he thought he’d work and a few things he’d known wouldn’t, but in the end, he’d lost anyway. His father had put his foot down, and Doug had found himself sitting in his own office, staring across his desk at a new student.

“I’m going to be your Mentor.”

She glared back at him and worked her mouth for a moment, like the whole idea tasted bad. “They told me. Thought we were supposed to get a choice.”

Doug swallowed most of a laugh. “Yeah, me too. Guess we blew that one.”

She raised her eyebrows, raised her bic, and lit up a tiny flame. “Rock on.”

Un-slump-me prompt call

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/983020.html. You can comment here or there.

Character building: Rand (a drabble)

Sep19

This story contains allusions to non-consensual everything


End of Year Five.

Rand didn’t go out to Maureen’s much, but the day the Second Cohort left, he found himself leaning on the fence with a bunch of other dads, trying to pick his kid out of the tumbling toddlers. She’d be blonde, probably. That didn’t narrow it down all that much. Maybe about, what, a year old now? How big were one-year-olds?

A hand slapped across his back. He didn’t need to turn to know who it was. He’d always know her touch.

“Cheer up, kiddo.” Acacia was laughing at him. She spent a lot of time laughing, she always had. “You’ve got two more years left. You’ll find someone who holds still long enough.”

Rand bristled. “It was just-“

“Or,” she continued, that way she had of talking right over him, “it’s not like you don’t know what to do to make them hold still. I thought we taught you that much, at least.”

And she was gone, leaving Rand staring off into the Village at her ponytail. Following after her, the way he always seemed to.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/982649.html. You can comment here or there.

First Cohort’s Graduation, a drabble story of Addergoole

Sep15

I felt like writing this, so I did. Year four was pretty awful for everyone.

End of Year Four of the Addergoole School

The students had all walked across the stage, had all been given their names and released from one set of obligations and oaths into another. Various bonds and promises had broken. The students milled around now in the Village, waiting for parents to pick them up, waiting for Luke’s Jeep to take them to the airport.

Regine watched them from a distance, accompanied by Mike and Shira Pelletier. They bounced about, nervous energy making them louder than they normally would be. Students who had spent four years ignoring each other talked now, bonded by the feeling of “us against the world.”

There was a chance they’d need it. Mike cleared his throat. “Well, there goes the First Cohort.”

“Indeed.” Regine’s lip twitched. It wasn’t a smile, not as normal people smiled. Mike wasn’t even sure it counted as an expression for Regine.

“How do you think they’ll do?” He snuck a look at Shira, but she was ignoring him. “Do you think they’ll be okay, out in the world?”

“We gave them everything we could, every educational tool we had at our disposal.” Regine’s eyes tracked them coldly. Shadrach, who Mike had failed so badly. Dita, who had chosen her road and nailed herself to it with her stiletto heels. Isra. Lavanya. Linden had Named four Students as Adults today, and he wasn’t entirely certain he’d done well for any of them.

“We educated them.” Shira spoke slowly, thoughtfully. Her Students were all Third Cohort or younger. She had no horse in this race, as it were. “We taught them about being fae. We taught them about fighting, and we taught them history and science, literature and so on. But did we equip them for the end?”

Mike felt as if someone had dropped a truckload of rocks on his chest. The end. There were few scarier words than those, from a seer’s lips.

Regine cleared her throat. “We’ve followed the plan. If you believe the plan needs changing, Shira, then perhaps we should discuss it with the entire staff.”

If she expected the Skin-Taker to back down, she was barking up the wrong tree. Shira raised her perfect eyebrows and smirked.

“Why don’t we do that, then. Michel?” She made Mike’s name sound lovely in French. “What do you think?”

Mike watched Shadrach and Meshach hop into Luke’s Jeep. He cleared his throat and nodded.

“Yeah. Yeah, I think we ought to look at the plan again.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/981589.html. You can comment here or there.

Year ONE Addergoole

Sep15

If I was going to write a story about Addergoole Year one, do any of the students intrigue you as a Point-of-View character?

Cohort 1
1995

Absalom
Aella
Amanada
Anise
Barnaby [name subject to change]
Ciro
Dita
Donegal
Holly
Isra
Juniper
Lavanya [formerly known as Oralee]
Liza
Megan
Meshach
Shadrach
Tristan
Ysolde

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/981278.html. You can comment here or there.

Exit Strategy, a possibly beginning to a story/novella/thing

Sep13

“The thing is, I’m cheating.” The guts of the Heinlein sat in front of them, not all that different from the commercial space shuttles being developed in other parts of the country.

Chloe Rogers was perched there with the brightest mind in space flight, apologizing her ass off and hoping it would be enough. “What we want to do — what we need to do to make this trip worth it — it’s not possible yet. The science isn’t there.”

Dave Krueger looked down at his hands. He was clenching and unclenching his fists, as if the movement helped him think. As if he was trying not to break things. “I thought you’d had a breakthrough. I thought you’d really, truly figured out FTL travel.”

“The thing is, I have.” Chloe couldn’t have felt worse about this if she’d run over Dave’s puppy on the way to lying to him about the drive — fibbing, bending the truth a little, about the drive. But she needed him. “The problem is, I figured it out with magic, not with science.”

He looked up, his eyes widening, his eyebrows lifting. “So when you said you’d made a trip to Mars to test it—”

“I was being one hundred percent honest. I can fly this ship at FTL speeds. It’s just…” She held her hands open and shrugged.

“I thought the whole point of this ship was to get away from the magic people.” He twisted his mouth and spat out the words. “Magic people. ‘Gods’ It’s ridiculous. It shouldn’t exist.“

“I know. But we do. And we’ve been here a lot longer than these so-called ‘gods.” And the things is… you remember talking in college, about how the adults were ruining everything before we could get old enough to even start fixing it properly?”

She had a long history with Dave. Even if he hadn’t been the brightest mind in space flight, she would have wanted him on this trip.

“I remember.” The admission came slowly. “We were drinking pretty heavily at the time.”

“This is like that, Dave. It’s exactly like that. These old fae, the ones that were here already and the ones that think they’re gods, they’re going to ruin this planet. I’m not entirely certain they won’t utterly destroy it, just trying to claim a piece of it as their own.”

“So we have to get out, just like we always said.” Dave looked up slowly. “But I’m superfluous then. You’ve got your drive. It’s just… magic.”

“I’ve got me. I’ve got me, and there might be three other people on the planet who can do this, and I don’t trust two of them and the third one… has their own problems. Which means we need to keep working on proper, scientific FTL. So that when we’re ready, we can return, or keep exploring. Even if I’m dead, or lost, or just don’t want to come.”

“But everything we need, everything takes an industrial base. We can’t build any of this stuff on a raw planet, especially not with the equipment you can fit in the Heinlein. IT’s impossible, Chloe.”

Chloe stood up. “Let me introduce you to Boris.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/980981.html. You can comment here or there.