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Help, my brain is making crossover fanfic

Jun13

Item the first: I watch crime shows while knitting. This month is Criminal Minds.

Item the second: I have this lovely abduction-and-slavery setting, Tir Na Cali.

Item the third: the two would marry pretty nicely, if Crim. Minds didn’t keep ending in people dying. Well, beginning that way.

So, I have this scene in my head where the Cali Agency slave-running team accidentally finds one of the girl-abduction-etc. stories in Criminal Minds (thinking the one I barely remember, involving impregnating girls in cages in a basement), ‘rescues(*)’ the girls, locks the bad guys in a cage, and sends the BAU a note.

(*) See slave-raiding. But at least now they’re not getting killed, right?

And then I was watching the episode where Reid is abducted, and imagined that this was a series of Cali taunts, one-upping the BAU, and it ended with them yoinking an FBI agent from the brink of death, only to kidnap him of to Cali.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/57011.html. You can comment here or there.

Drakeathon: Origins, Cali, Catpeople

Feb20

from [personal profile] moonwolf‘s prompt “More on the Cali Catpeople.

She had been born the smallest kid in her litter, the runt, and so she’d learned early on to be quick and clever where size sufficed for her peers; she learned quickly how to dodge, and how to entertain herself, because she was often left out of their games – tiny, weak, dark where the other slave kids were often as pale as the masters, sharp-tongued and quick-witted.

She found herself, in that small age before they had regular duties, “volunteered” quite frequently for chores that no-one else wanted to do, “volunteered” by being shoved forward to the front of the pack of kids.

But from being volunteered, she learned that the masters and the foremen liked slaves who were eager to work, who stepped forward to do the unpleasant tasks. They liked them, and they rewarded them. For a runty house slave born to a kitchen drudge, the chores forced on her by her peers became a ladder out of the kitchen.

She grew up, although she never grew too tall. Her eyes faded to a funny yellow-green as she reached puberty, and the slave children of her litter took it as even more reason to hate her: the alien princess. The brownnoser. The runt. The volunteer.

When the men from the Agency came to peruse the slaves of the Countess’ house, the foremen remembered her. There were four foremen for the house (it was a very large house, with many slaves to maintain; three stayed silent. Bay was a good worker, with initiative hard to find in those born to the collar, and an asset. They didn’t see the backstabbing and the namecalling, because it behooved them not to see it.

The fourth, however, had seen the bruises and heard the thin excuses: “I fell down the stairs” is not that believable the third time in a month, especially from someone as lithe and quick as Bay was. And the girl had all the traits the government men were looking for, so the fourth foreman put her name forth.

They asked her to volunteer for the program. It would be hard, and it would hurt, but it would, they told her, earn her freedom eventually.

Bay waited for them to finish talking only because it was the polite thing to do, and because they were free and she was a slave, before she said “I volunteer.” She was the volunteer, after all. The freak.

They took her away from the other children, from the Countess’ home, from the foremen; they gave her a new collar, one that was small, shiny, and gold, and a small room she shared with another volunteer. They gave them a week to acclimate to the new place, and to each other, the forty new volunteers in their bright, clean, new dorm. There was a lot of sniffing of tails, a lot of pecking-order establishment, but many of them had been the runts, the freaks, the brown-nosers where they came from, and they were more inclined to band together than they were to fight for dominance.

They had settled into loose social groups and alliances when the Agency men came to change everything.

They brought them into another room, a wide, white room with no furniture and no windows, in groups, not coincidentally in the groups they themselves had established. They herded them into the center of the room, and three royals with their grey eyes and their red hair, men with the arrogant pose of titled nobility, surrounded them.

Bay leaned against her roommate, a tall, scruffy looking slave named Jon from the far North of the country, and one of their closer friends, Natasha, a short, busty girl from the far south. She didn’t know what was happening, and she was a bit scared, but she’d volunteeeeeerrrrrrrrreed….

“Awwwwrrrwwwww.” The yowl startled her; was there a cat in the room? There had been only them, and… “noawwwww.” She hissed, trying to shut herself up, and stared at her fingers, at her paws, at her what?

“‘ay,” Jon called; she twisted to look at him, to see that his hair had grown into a pelt of soft tabby-striped fur, his nose had flattened, his teeth had sharpened.

“What did they do?” Natasha moaned, her words garbled but understandable. Bay, staring down at her strange new feet, could only shrug philosophically.

“We did volunteer.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/13497.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute Ficlet: Anger

Feb4

Originally posted here, in repsonse to the prompt:

“Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before – it takes something from him.”

I think it’s Tir na Cali –> Catpeople, but I’m not certain.

The rage was never as solid as it was that Wednesday, never as hot, never as silent.

The worst of it, for me, was knowing that no-one else would either see it nor care if they did. Anger, from one such as me, was /cute/, was adorable, pat-head and chuckle, like a kitten whose teeth aren’t a threat yet. No-one cared when I was angry, no one feared, no one worried.

I wanted them to worry, to quake, to run, but I’d learned to smile through the anger. I had learned, since my anger caused only amusement, to not give them the pleasure of being amused at my expense on top of whatever insult had angered me.

So I smiled. I smiled so they couldn’t see the teeth that their science had made sharp; I smiled so they couldn’t see the anger that they had bred, all unknowing, into me, the rage that demanded that I kill or be killed. I bowed, so very low, and I smiled, so very sweetly, and I did not acknowledge the insults with anything louder than a “yes, sir.”

That is what they expected, was it not? They expected a cute and defanged little pet, someone who would purr in their laps, someone who would snuggle against them and keep their bed warm, who would make cute little noises on cue. They had trained me for that. They had trained me to be domestic; they had forgotten, if they ever knew, that they had also bred me to be feral.

Though the smiles, through the bows, through the trained-animal dances that they put me through, through the day and into the night, the rage sustained me. Through the morning and the next day of the same. It had been, after all, a very great insult, and it would take a long time for the rage to build properly, while I bowed, while I danced, while I smiled.

When I slipped into his bed that next night, when my claws opened his belly from ribs to hip, I could see the surprise in his eyes as he gurgled out his last. I could see his confusion, that his good little pet had rebelled. That his kitten had claws that could rend flesh. That my anger was not to be head-patted and brushed off.

I left with his blood still wet on my claws, to find a master who would put no other pretty little thing before me.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/4344.html. You can comment here or there.

15-Minute Ficlet: Come the Dark

Jan31

Originally posted here, in response to the prompt: “The darkness holding me tightly / Until the sun rises up.” Faint shades of Cali, but rather faint.

Night had never felt so safe as it did in her little cubbyhole, so wrapped-in-cotton, so silent, and so entirely entrapping. Nothing could get to her, locked in her tiny, dark room, in her bunk with no sharp edges. She couldn’t even hurt herself, folded into the pod-bed as she was; there was nothing to use as a weapon, even her fingernails trimmed down, pretty and pink-painted and dull.

It was so soft and so surreal, the sheets so smooth as to have no texture at all, the bed like a hammock, sucking her in, that even emotions couldn’t seem to get through. There was the moment of panic, every time the pod closed, and then nothing but soft, comforting peace. Darkness wrapped around her with soft velvet fingers, and carried her in to sleep.

Only when the sun rose did her pod open, and only when her pod opened did she wake, and only then, with the sunlight trickling in through the windows high above, brushing over the long racks of pods, did she begin to fear again. Only when the overseer came, to hand out the day’s clothing ration, the day’s breakfast, did she find herself allowed to remember where she was, and only as her bare feet hit the cold concrete floor did she recall, for the briefest moment, who she had been before.

The sun may have been her friend, once upon a time, but here, it was an enemy. When the daylight shone, implacable on her chafed and chapped skin, she worked, she and all the others, the others she didn’t dare think too hard about. When the sun was in the sky, there was pain, and fear, and exhaustion that never seemed to end. Only when the darkness wrapped around her was there peace; only when the night held her close could she relax.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/2941.html. You can comment here or there.