30DaysMeme: Well, Crap, where am I? (fanfic/Cali/Criminal Minds xover)

Jul6

Day 15 of 30 days of Fiction: “28) Prompt: overhearing a conversation.”

Tir na Cali/Criminal Minds, another scene from that fan fic my brain demanded I write. (Lj Link)…(This was the first one written) (LJ link; this story comes right after this one (LJ Link)).

Reid woke slowly, groggy, and cotton-mouthed, the last of the drug cocktail leaving the world hazy and his stomach uneasy. He was still bound – no, not still, bound again. For one, he was no longer in a chair; his knees were almost at his chest and the floor under him was padded. For another, whatever was holding him now was both less uncomfortable and had less give than the ropes Tobias had tied him with. His hands were behind his back, his ankles together, and he was leaning sideways against something padded. His eyes, when he opened them, were covered, hooded or blindfolded.

When the first voice he heard was male, he almost believed Tobias had sprouted a new personality.

“So, you’ve got him, now what are you going to do with him, then?” His accent had the peculiar combination of Irish and pioneer that suggested Californian working-class. Unlikely to be Tobias, then. All his personalities had Georgian accents.

“What we do when we kidnap someone.” The second voice was female. From the swallowed, lazy consonants, she might be royalty. This wasn’t looking all that good.

“Mor, he’s an American Federal Agent. You can’t just go kidnapping fibbies.”

“I don’t see why not.” And that was a third voice, another female, working-class. So the bleary memories he had of getting snatched from Tobias’ hands were accurate. He wondered what they’d done with his captor. “Ours now, isn’t he?”

That couldn’t be good. He cleared his throat into the moment of silence. “Excuse me,” he croaked. “Could I have some water?”

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30 Days, Daily Prompt, Kink Bingo… Make you Mine

Jul5

Day 25 of 30 days of Fiction: “27) Prompt: trapped.”

From [community profile] dailyprompt: “life and liberty”.

A double up on [community profile] kink_bingo – O-1 – possession/marking – from my card.

An excuse to use a new icon from djinni

And in the Harem sub-setting of Tir na Cali. (all that for 500 words!!)

“‘… among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

Stephen was talking to himself when Ursula came into her suite. She’d left the manor for a couple days, her ostensible purpose a meeting at the Agency but her side goal giving him a little time to get used to the room and the idea of being hers.

She returned to find him staring out over the vineyards from her balcony, murmuring what she believed was probably part of the American’s Declaration of Independence, over and over again.

“ ‘That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” she provided from memory, and was rewarded by a twitch in his shoulder blades.

“I didn’t know you were back.” He hadn’t turned around yet, but he did remember to add, rather belatedly, “my Lady.”

“I just got home. We have most of the American documents in our library, you know.”

“I was just thinking,” he said, his bare back still to her and his back tense, “that I took it for granted, back home. I never really thought about the Declaration, or any of that. Liberty. You people barely even have the concept.”

“That’s like saying your people don’t have the idea of ‘pursuit of happiness,’ just because ours do it better,” she objected mildly. “It’s just not a priority for us, the way it is for Americans.” She hadn’t intended to argue with him today. She never intended to.

“I guessed that.” Now, now he turned around, frowning, and raked his eyes over her in a way that would have gotten him whipped by most of her cousins and peers. His eyes stopped at the narrow gold collar she was holding in her left hand. “Being trapped here, and all.” His gesture was a bit choppy as it took in the scenic vista behind him.

“Trapped,” she agreed softly. He was, after all, with her or in the harems. He was never going to go home again. “How are you enjoying your new cage?”

He winced, and she almost felt guilty. Almost. “The newspaper on the bottom is nicer, and it’s a bit roomier than the old one,” he quipped back. “Quieter, too. I’m still not sure about that part.”

“I’ll try to be sure you don’t get too lonely,” she assured him. His eyes were still on the collar in her hand; she wondered how long he could keep making jokes while staring at it.

Not long, it seemed. “I already have a collar,” he snapped abruptly. “Where are you going to lock that one?”

“You have my grandmother’s collar.” She set this new one down on the table, her eyes still on him. “Kneel for me, Stephan.”

“Make me,” he snapped back, his hands going to the steel band around his neck. “What’s the difference? A collar is a collar. They all make me a slave, right?”

He was, she noted, really freaking out. “This one will make you mine.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/69723.html. You can comment here or there.

30daysmeme, Sparkle Lust

Jul5

Day 25 of 30 days of Fiction: “26) Write a personalized rejection letter for the YA novel ‘Sparkle Lust.'”

This is an in-joke of sorts off of the Addergoole setting; one might wonder why, of everyone, you never see Ardell’s Change…

Dear Ardell Drake:

Thank you for submitting your novel “Sparkle Lust” for consideration. However, we are not interested in publishing it at this time for several reasons.

Firstly, although you billed this as YA, and I acknowledge that the main characters are, indeed, teenagers throughout most of the story, the subject matter is uncomfortably dark even for jaded adults.

The story itself, of a stifling, abusive stepfather, a distant father, an inappropriately interested professor, and a heavy-handed first boyfriend, bears telling, I believe, but the dark and fantastic elements that you choose to couch it in bring it into the realm of a terrifying acid trip. In addition, although I am impressed with the way your metaphors carry through the entire tale, I am not certain why you chose to use something so reminiscent of recent well-known YA novels as a symbol for uncertain sexuality.

That similarity – the sparkle which you even put in the title of your novel – would open this publishing house up to potential lawsuits, since it cannot be said that your novel is a parody or satire of the original.

Additionally, the thinly-veiled autobiographical nature of some of your details is worrisome, and would likely cause many of our customers distress. If such things are truly happening in an American boarding school; action should be taken.

And, as a personal reason, Dr. Regine Avonmorea gives this publishing house quite a bit of money, and would be very irked with this novel. And your stepfather would break my neck.

My apologies, and we wish you luck with another publishing house,

Lyn Thorne-Alder
Editor,
Alder’s Grove Press

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Random pondering

Jul5

Looking at other people’s icons, pondering my own.

I seem to have, generally, icons for a theme, icons for a story/character/setting, and icons that mean me. Other people seem to have “mood” icons. I wonder why I don’t?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/68991.html. You can comment here or there.

Reader Input: Kink Bingo

Jul3

I finished a line of Kink Bingo!

Which line of my card should I do next? Either a horizontal line or, since I have ideas for another story for Sense Dep. and Marking, one of the vertical lines headed by those topics.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/68532.html. You can comment here or there.

Kink Bingo: His (Marking/Possession)

Jul3

[community profile] kink_bingo – O-1 – possession/marking – from my card.

Fae Apoc, Addergoole, year Nine, the same characters as here. Fae Apoc’s landing page is here (Lj Link); Addergoole is here.

She tried to breathe, but found she was having trouble working around the panic. He’d seemed like a such a nice guy, before today. Before he and his friends had jumped her in the hallway. Even then, he’d hung back, trying to convince the rest of them to be gentle with her.

It hadn’t been his hand that had bruised her ribs, but it was his large, large hand around her throat now. Not choking, not at all, though his thumbs were pressing into the sides of her neck with nearly bruising force, but holding her while she struggled, holding her upright while she wanted to collapse to the ground and sob.

“Look at me,” he murmured. Terrifyingly, her body obeyed without asking her what she thought about the matter, she found herself looking into his dark brown eyes. He looked concerned, even now.

“What?” she whispered. She’d worn her voice out, earlier, shouting. “What do you want from me?”

“Time will tell,” he answered unhelpfully. “What I already have from you is what you need to understand. I’m going to let go of you for a moment, and I want you to sit down and try to pull yourself together, okay?”

Since sitting down was what she wanted to do anyway, she nodded, feeling his fingers catching her chin as she moved. Why didn’t he just let her go?

She didn’t want to leave right now, she reminded herself. The halls outside were dark and full of monsters. In here, it was light, and there was only the one monster, at least.

He released her, and she sagged to the floor, watching him with dull interest as he walked over to his desk and picked up a bag. “I know,” she breathed, “they told me words had power. Watch what I say. I didn’t think…” She hadn’t thought. That covered it.

“You can be caught even if you are thinking. It just takes more work. And I’m won’t be unkind. But you have to be very clear on this. You agreed to it, no matter what the duress. I own you. And until I graduate, or you do, you belong to me. You’re mine, Ceinwen. That is, after all, what you said.”

She nodded, afraid to repeat it, afraid something else would happen if she reinforced it. She was his. What did that mean? He couldn’t keep her a prisoner here, could he? In the middle of a school?

He returned to her, still holding the bag. “I will take very good care of you,” he murmured, as he knelt in front of her.

He placed a gentle kiss on her forehead. This close, now that she could breathe again, he smelled earthy, but not unpleasantly so. “I will protect you,” he continued, a bit louder. It sounded like a ritual. “I will guide you, and keep you safe, and warm, and fed.” The next kiss went on the top of her head, and then he tilted her chin up with one of his huge hands, and kissed her lips. “This is what I will do for you, Ceinwen, because you are mine.”

“I’m yours, Thornburn,” she echoed, moved by something she couldn’t put words to. The situation seemed to demand the words from her, but her pride demanded she add on to them. “Although I didn’t know what I was saying, although I came to you because I was scared, because you said you’d keep me safe.”

“And I did, and I will.” He reached into the bag, then, and pulled out… something. It glittered warmly in the artificial light. Some sort of necklace, it looked like, a series of amber plaques bordered and connected in gold. A choker? It had no closure, she noted, in a moment of rising panic. How was he going to put that on her? How was it going to come off?

He murmured words that made no sense, and the choker parted between two plaques. She shied back, and he moved forward more quickly than she could escape, holding the choker against her throat, around her neck, with one hand. He pressed the ends closed, murmuring again, and the necklace settled in to place against her skin.

“You are mine,” he repeated, “and I’ve marked you such. As long as you’re wearing my collar, no-one will mess with you. No-one will touch you, no-one will harm you.”

The collar was warm, a weight that seemed to encircle all of her the way his hands did, echoing her pulse back to her. She took a breath, and felt it remind her of its presence, pressing against her windpipe. She shifted, and it moved with her. He would be with her every moment she wore it, because she’d never be able to forget it was there.

Tears welled up in her eyes, but the panic was gone. She couldn’t escape this. “I’m yours,” she repeated. With his mark on her, wrapped around her, there was no way to deny it.

He brushed a thumb against the collar, looking pleased. “You wear it well,” he rumbled. “I will be proud to have you as mine.”

The pressure against her throat seemed unbearable, as his praise sent waves of pleasure through her. She was lost.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/68162.html. You can comment here or there.

30daysmeme, The Mommy Cases (Dragons Next Door)

Jul1

Day 25 of 30 days of Fiction: “25) Prompt: noir style.”

Dragons Next Door setting

It had been a long, grey, gritty day by the time the little man walked into my office. Cleaning floors is never a fun time, and, let me tell you, cleaning blood off of floors just adds a fine red mist to your entire day. Blood and soccer mud, well, there isn’t a dame in town that won’t tell you that’s the worst.

So there I was, up to my elbows in dirty water, tired of it all, with the stink of blood in my nose, when the little man strode in like he owned the place. My place, I might add.

“Someone stole my truck!” he declared. The boy could put on a sob story with the best of them, let me tell you, alligator tears and wide-eyed innocence. “It was Juniper! You have to stop her!”

It had been a while since I’d had a case, and, right then, I would have done anything to get off my knees and out of the dirt and blood. Especially if I could get someone else to deal with the dirt while I was gone. “Tell you what, little man,” I told him. “Get me my fedora, and I will find your truck.”

Chances his story was on the up and up were pretty slim. I knew his sort, and these sob stories almost always turned out to be song and dance routines to shift the blame. It got me off the floor, though, so I’d take it.

“Okay, Mommy.”

Mommy. That’s the name on my door.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/68044.html. You can comment here or there.

30Daysmeme, On the Set

Jun30

Day 24 of 30 days of Fiction: “24) Write a scene on a movie set”

In FaeApoc setting, or, at least, meta about the faeapoc setting, specifically the web-serial Addergoole.

Fae Apoc has A Landing Page (LJ Link).

“So, wait, what’s supposed to be going on here? Isn’t this a little unbelievable? Instant lust at first sight?”

Arthur rolled his eyes at Mindy. The actress had the arrogance and the look to play Shahin, but she understood none of the subtlety, and he was pretty sure she hadn’t even bothered to read the script, much less the source material.

The girl they’d gotten to play Kailani was a brilliant actress, but that was the only way she could ever be called brilliant. She didn’t need to be, of course; her lines were all written for her. The guy playing Conrad had the smile down, and that was all he really needed. Olly, playing Jamian, on the other hand, was so impressive at the role that Arthur had yet to figure out if the actor was in actuality a guy or a girl.

And Arthur himself? He stepped up to Mindy, setting a hand on her bare back. “It’s not quite first sight,” he murmured; “they’ve been courting all week. And, of course, there’s the magic to contend with.”

“The magic,” she said flatly, thinking, clearly, that it was a come-on. Yeah, she hadn’t read the script.

“They are made for each other,” he smiled, without a touch of shame. “Almost literally. They are carried away with lust, not because they’re both so damn hot,” he allowed that to be a smirk; both he and Mindy knew they were good looking, after all, “but because the touch of bare skin sends something like electricity through them. They get carried away by the feedback from her power.”

She looked up at him through long eyelashes; they’d even gotten the height right in their casting. “You’re really into this, aren’t you?”

He pressed his hand against her. “I like to know where I stand.”

Yeah, he thought, grinning to himself, they’d cast Emrys right, too.

My current fund-raising goals:
art for the Rin & Girey Ebook
and bedroom carpet for our new-house-to-be.

Donating gets you access to special donor-only posts! Every $4 gets you one month of access.

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Kink Bingo, Stranded World – Love Letters

Jun30

kink_bingo – G-1 – phonesex/epistolary – from my card.

Stranded World; Autumn in a private moment. Stranded has a landing page (LJ Link)
.

The mail drop was hidden in a hole in a tree, twisted around with magic to keep the squirrels from using their letters as nesting, to keep prying eyes from seeing.

One function that Autumn and several other itinerates of her ilk served was as couriers. E-mail could be read, phones tapped, postal mail interrupted. Messages travelling by courier were far less susceptible to tampering or loss; second best were messages left in strand-locked mail drops like this, then moved to the next drop by courier.

There were seven envelopes and one small box in this load; Autumn shuffled through them before sliding them into her backpack. The Tribe in Kansas. The Barony of Thescorre in New York. Autumn, who works the inks.

She’d expected the last one, although not the fine calligraphy in which it was written or the soft rag paper it was written on. He’d been practicing, was leaving her this in lieu of flowers that would die or jewelry she might not wear. She smiled warmly, and hurried back to her camper to read it.

My autumn leaf, my harvest moon, my darkest ink, my brightest day…

She couldn’t help but smile at the hyperbole. He’d played Shakespeare at a couple festivals she worked, and done the Bard one better such that even the lit majors were often fooled. But oh, did he love his overwrought turns of phrase.

I write these words on this paper, because this is the closest I can come, right now, to touching you. If I had my way, instead of dead trees, I would be drawing these words on your skin. I would start just below that tiny scar on your ankle bone, the thin line whose story changes every time I ask…

She’d tripped and fallen on her sister’s doll as a child. But that was secondary to the full, urgent shape of his letters, the way that he’d pressed in heavily on “I would start,” the way that his ink had blotched (he was using a real pen and ink, then) at “scar.”

And, starting there, I would write my love. I would write it in every language I know, twine it into the strands of the ink, whispering as I worked up and around your calf: this flesh, here, this line, this tendon. Let this leg carry you closer to me. Let this knee bend like the willow in the wind. Let this thigh…

Oh, the things I would write on your thighs, my midnight muse. The story of our love, of our lovemaking, spiraling up and up, until my ink ran with your wetness. Until my pen brushed your labia and I was writing around your pretty clitty of our secrets, words I would never utter, words no other soul could take from me.

And there on your sex I would write my love.

She lay on the picnic table, reading his letter again and again, picturing the lines of his calligraphy wrapping around her body, imagining how the pen would feel, scratching ever so lightly into her skin while his breath blew warm and humid, so close. He had sweet breath, she recalled, and sweet sweat.

It was a beautiful gift he had left for her. She picked up her stylus and dipped it in the good ink, the deep indigo she saved for special occasions. Starting just above the scar, she wrote to him:

If I could fold myself into a letter for you, and wait here in a mail drop for your touch, then I would. If I could press my skin through the postman’s slit, stamp my love, scan it and e-mail it, I would. I would become a letter so that you could always carry me.

“Carry me” wrapped around the base of her knee, tickling her, and she giggled, laughing at herself, laughing at the tickling.

But we are people, my love, and so, in lieu of myself, I give you these words on my skin. Your name on my thigh, my highwayman, my poet, my tattercoat bard.

She wrote in lazy spirals, so that “tattercoat” drew across her hip, and “bard” on her smooth mons. The photos would have to do, until she could see him again.

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The Anthropologist’s Journal

Jun30

From [community profile] dailyprompt

Planners’-verse, further in the future.

Beginning of Spring, probably year 317 Post-Conflict

I have been living among the Kaveh for a little over five seasons now. Such was not my original plan, of course; we do not embed anthropologists in the wild tribes any more. Early attempts had a 0% survival rate, and even we – the Tower, that is – are not that mad.

I was not, at the time, even studying the Kaveh, or any of the wild tribes. I was visiting a village along the canal, discussing education plans and a method of marrying-out to nearby settlements that would prevent the excessive inbreeding such places are prone to. Considering what the tribes did to that place, I doubt that is a problem anymore.

Not the Kaveh, however; that was the Kybelii. They raided in numbers and with ferocity that exceeded any report or tale I have ever heard, tearing through the village. They killed the men, and took the women and children prisoner, including, of course, me.

I will not write of my days with the Kybelii. They were a violent and smelly people, and I don’t mourn their demise, except in the loss of their genetic diversity.

Their demise, and my unwilling and accidental embedding among the Kavah, came two and one-half moons after the slaughter of Johnsport, when the Kavah and two other of the wild tribes attacked and killed all of the Kybelii warriors and about half of their domestic population. They split the remainders and the slaves – myself, again – among the three tribes. I, of course, went to the Kavah.

At first, I believed that this would simply be the same unpleasant, odorous captivity with a new set of captors. Our information on the wild tribes didn’t indicate any major variation in behavior: they pillaged, stole, and raped, and as far as we could tell, they did so indiscriminately. Their slaves were treated as chattel, as cattle, bought and sold, bred until they died, often in childbirth.

And perhaps that would have continued to be my fate. The tribe sold many of the slaves they acquired from the Kybelii, and two more died on the long trip from summer pastures to winter camp. I could have been among either group, easily enough.

But a young female warrior-in-training who I believed to be the chief’s daughter, and her brother, slightly older, took a liking to me, and I was moved into the yurt they shared with their mother for the duration of the winter.

By the time that the long, miserable, snow was over and it was time to move back to summer pastures, I was swollen with an unwanted pregnancy from the Kybelli, and had learned to speak the dialect the Kavah used and taught my owners quite a bit of the Scholar’s English I had grown up speaking. I had also befriended my owners’ mother, as well as the two teenagers themselves, and, through them, the chieftain, as well as the man, their lore-speaker, who I had originally thought was the chief.

(Their lore-speaker is the father to my young mistress, the chieftain the husband-to-be of both mistress and master. More on that later).

And it seems that their lore-speaker is intrigued by the way that The City People (that would be yours truly, neveryoumind that I am, in fact a Tower Person) handle their disputes. His children were very miffed to find him taking more and more of my time, but he is, after all, an important person. And he is open to new ideas, even if, between you and I, journal, they are in actuality very old ideas.

We have been working on the idea of justice, recently, he and I. The Kavah, as with, I gather, many of the other wild tribes, have a concept of “revenge” and one of “survival,” but justice has until now been missing from their vocabulary.

During the summer, there is little time for talking, so I talk quite a bit during the long idle periods of winter, and now, as the snow begins to melt, I find myself talking quickly. They will raid again, soon. Perhaps I can bend them, slowly, towards fairness and justice. Perhaps this year there will be less slaughter.

I hope that I can. Their summer pasture, this year, is awfully close to the Tower.

Prompt: “bending towards justice”

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