Written to some of lilfluff‘s prompts.
The characters uh. Have something to do with wyste‘s ongoing very long fanfic. That is, ah,
are completely original. Really.

Jaime had gotten himself “arrested” by simply being in the wrong (right) place at the wrong (right) time, an occurrence that had been happening far too much lately. A suggestion that he happened to be maybe A Little Bit Magical had gotten him put in the right cells, and then it had taken just four or five mundane tricks to assure that he wasn’t actually stuck in the cell.

It sounded simple if you didn’t think about the weeks of planning and four people worth of preparation that had gone into this, all of which had involved quite a bit of arguing, more than a bit of negotiation, and a tiny bit of blackmail.

Jaime had gotten his mission. Now he just had to get out of it.

And the lock was proving slightly more tricky than he’d expected.

He was swearing quietly at the door when it swung open. He slid his lockpicks up his sleeves and tried to look disgruntled and imprisoned.

“We’ve got to get you out of here.” The blond face on the other side of the door was definitely not a guard. He was also thinner, more drawn, and paler than the last time Jaime had seen him.

“Falco?” He stared at his old enemy, his old ally.

“It’s a good disguise, well done, but the moment they have the seer taste your magic, you’re done for. Come on, you’ve got to leave soon, before someone notices.” Falco shoved a pile of incense-smelling robes at Jaime. “Put these on, nobody will notice one more of them marching out the back way. They all skiv out there for a smoke, anyway.”

“You’ve got to come with me. You’re half the reason I’m in here! Come on.” He grabbed Falco’s arm.

There was hardly anything there, and Falco didn’t even try to pull away. “I…” He closed his eyes and struggled to speak. After a moment, he managed to mouth can’t.

Jaime’s heart went cold. They’d heard the enemy was doing those things, but- “I’m sorry, Falco.” He took the robe, waited until Falco had relaxed.

He didn’t like that he even knew this curse. It was a nasty one, and it left a stain on you just to think about t. But it, unfortunately, had its uses in the rebellion.

When Falco was no longer in control of his own body, Jaime handed him the robes back. “Put these on. You’re a lot less conspicuous that way.”

They got out by the back way, Jaime spelling cell doors open on the way. In the ensuing havoc, they’d have at least an hour before anyone noticed Falco was gone.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1313888.html. You can comment here or there.

Unknown ‘verse, possibly the one I wrote another slave rebellion in that nobody’s ever read, to lilfluff’s prompt “Mistress meets former slave after the successful rebellion”.

The rebellion had gone far more smoothly than anyone had ever expected such a thing might go.

It was bloody, of course; it was violent, of course, and in the end there were nearly as many slaves dead as owners.

The thing was, though: there were a lot more slaves than owners, and they had been a lot more willing to die than their owners had.

Paleyah Rose, formerly Junior Lady of Rose Heights, had not been willing to die, and her personal slaves had not felt very strongly about killing her, the way some owners’ slaves had. She was incarcerated in what had been the slave quarters of Rose Heights, and she had been put to work with such tasks as the current establishment believed she might be able to handle. At the moment, that was light cleaning and light food preparation, her former Head Chef keeping the position but working under his own free will now.

She did not mind the work, finding it meditative. She did not mind working for Yothen; she had always been of the impression that he thought she worked for him anyway, so the change was only in the labor she was performing. She did not mind, much, no longer being Junior Lady, and she found, rather guiltily, that she did not altogether miss Geshana Rose, the former Senior Lady of Rose Heights and Paleyah’s step-mother. She did not know where Geshana had been taken, as nobody would tell her, but she had not tried very hard to find out, either.

Her own daughter, Teregrine, had, on the other hand, been returned to her, as Teregrine’s nanny had, as a matter of course, been freed in the rebellion. She had not seen her now-ten-year-old daughter since she was weaned, and found she enjoyed the girl’s company, and that they could, together, enjoy peeling carrots.

What Paleyah did not enjoy was the gloating of some of the former staff – both those who had worked at Rose Heights before and those who had climbed up the ranks in the rebellion. There had been many reasons for the slave revolt, and Paleyah could not argue with many of them, but that didn’t stop her from finding their leering and joking and gloating – well, revolting.

And, at the same time, strangely impotent. Many had died in the initial surge, but since then, there had been very few deaths and almost no violence against the former owners, except those who attempted to fight back. Paleyah had not attempted to fight back; she was comfortable where she was, for one, and for another, she had no interest in a losing battle.

She had retired for the evening to her tiny room; her daughter was playing with some of the former-slaves’ children, and nobody seemed to think that was a bad thing, least of all Paleyah.

“Jun- Paleyah.” Herusten had not quite broken himself of calling her by her former title. “You have a visitor.”

Paleyah had heard enough of “visitors” through the gossip mill which now, as when she had been a Junior Lady, assumed that since she was quiet and spoke little, she also heard little. She stood and pulled her robe around herself. “Teregrine…?”

“I don’t think it’s that sort of visitor. But if it is, you know I’ll take care of her like she’s my own,” he assured her. Herusten had always been part of the household; now he ran it. It was Paleyah’s private opinion that he did a far better job at it than Geshana Rose ever had.

“Thank you.” She stepped out into the common room, wondering who might be coming for her, if it weren’t the leaders of the rebellion.

She thought for a moment her heart had stopped in her chest. “…Calandro.” She managed to whisper it, despite her breath having left her. “You-”

She’d woken to a house awash with violence and the slave who shared her bed – who had shared her bed since she was old enough for such things – gone. She’d feared he’d been killed as a sympathizer; she’d feared he’d joined the rebellion and helped with her incarceration; she’d feared he’d taken the first opportunity to leave her.

He was holding the hand of a young boy, maybe half of Teregrine’s age.

“I had to take care of some things. And I couldn’t be there in your bed. I might have tried, if it hadn’t been for the kids, but there were the kids… and they might have killed me if I’d been there.” He sounded, she thought, the same, and yet older, tireder. “If they’d decided you needed to die, and I couldn’t save you – and I wouldn’t have been able to, not against the whole rebellion – then I’d have died, too, and…”

“I’m glad you’re alive,” she cut him off gently. Calandro had been born into service. The ones who had started the rebellion, most of them hadn’t, or they’d served hard lives in hard positions. She had regrets about some things she’d done when she’d been Junior Lady, but Paleyah was fairly certain being her bedroom slave had not been a hard position for Calandro. “But you keep saying ‘children’. They brought Teregrine back to me.”

“Took me a while to find her. But this one, they’d hidden him even better.”

“This…” Her voice broke, the way it hadn’t when they took her mother away, when they took away her title and her silks, even when she woke to find Calandro gone. “Cal, our son was born dead.”

“No.” He shook his head, and she didn’t even bother to try to hide the sob. “No, he wasn’t, my Lady. I’m sorry, but he wasn’t. And this is him.”

She wasn’t a lady anymore. There was no reason to care who heard her cry.

Want More?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1290179.html. You can comment here or there.

After New kid moves in next door

There were four tall people in the family and one short one, a child, all of them tanned and with their hair unruly and sun-bleached. The tallest one was staring right at Sinclar and Ainsley, looking through the leaves of the potted plant at them.

He raised his eyebrows, smirked, and crossed the distance between their “stoops,” as Ainsley’s parents insisted on calling that little tiled area outside each apartment.

“You’re the Nessons, right? The Biddles are on the other side…?” Up close, he was very tall, but looked not that much older than Sinclair.

Ainsley squeaked. Her sister saved her. “We’re the Nessons. The Biddles have two boys and a very young daughter.” She nodded her head in a polite greeting. “I’m Sinclair Nesson, and this is my sister Ainsley.”

“I’m Ted Jendrock.” He thrust out a hand to them, and then, seeing their confused faces, “what, people don’t shake hands in this place?”

“It carries germs,” Sinclair whispered. Ainsley, feeling brave all of a sudden, held out her hand.

“Oh, what’s a few germs between neighbors? Besides, we went through a whole lot of decontamination before they’d let us in.” He squeezed Ainsley’s hand and moved it up and down a couple times. “Pleased to meet both of you.”

“So you’re-” Ainsley swallowed. Her hand felt weird. “You’re really from the outside? I didn’t think people ever came in.”

“We didn’t think so, either. We also didn’t think people ever left.” His gaze was suddenly sharp, but Ainsley had no idea what he was looking for. “Anyway, we had a skillset that was needed, so here we are.”

Want More?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1284350.html. You can comment here or there.

The apartment next door to Ainsley’s family’s home had been vacant since the Hawkings had left precipitously in the middle of the night, back when Ainsley was twelve. By this point, four years later, Ainsley and her sister Sinclair had started working on an application for the place. When they were both of age, they posited, they could move two or more mates in there easily enough, and still be close to their parents.

Now there were people moving in, moving in to their place.

“People don’t just move in.” Sinclair was staring at the wall between the two places. There wasn’t much noise – the Complex was well-engineered for many people in close proximity – but it felt like an invasion nonetheless. “Nobody moves in to the Complex.”

“Well,” Ainsley offered weakly. “Is it the Mccormicks? Their boys are just a couple years older than us – maybe they had the same idea.”

They opened the front door and peeked down the hallway around the potted plants their mothers had put up “to make it look more like a home”.

“Definitely not the Mccormicks,” Sinclair whispered. “They’re too tall. Who’s that tall, seriously?”

“Kind of cute, though… But they’re… tan. That’s…”

The Complex had sun lamps, because the plants in the hydro farms needed them, the animals down in the Ark level got twitchy without them, and humans functioned better with them. But that wasn’t the sort of tanned these people were.

“They’re Outsiders,” Sinclair hissed. “From…” She fell silent as the tallest of the family turned around and looked straight at them.

🏨
Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1284350.html

Want More?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1281406.html. You can comment here or there.