cross-posted paint challenge response
Jul. 25th, 2005 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanter1944This's *gasp* not sci-fi, but it is the second in that series I started with a different community's challenge a couple weeks ago. I know I said I'd be writing Amy fic, but it turned out to be sort of serious Butterfly and Tracy fic instead. Whoops.
Title: Wet Paint
Author: Chanter
Fandom: original, second in the 1992 series getting written in my own lj and several communities
Rating: PG for mild cursing
Summary: Butterfly, Tracy and Amy go furniture shopping, prompting a few personal touches and a tiny bit of admission.
Dedicated to the girls, because of that goofy song from when we were kids.
563 words
The old thing was redwood, nicked and splintery in the legs from decades of collisions with chairs, impacts of sneakers, avalanches of books and wheels--thank God, so Tracy thought, for resourceful people and Good Will. None of the chairs responsible for the assorted dents at the edges had come with it, probably for the best since the combined resources of one stingy and one willing but nearly broke roommate had been stretched to manage even getting the table home.
But it was there, squarely on it’s solid feet, substancial, mammoth on the threadbare rug unrolled over the floorboards that served as kitchen carpet. It had taken Tracy, Amy and a supremely unwilling Butterfly the better part of the morning to lug the carved monstrosity home, Butterfly complaining all the way, Amy laughing at everything and Tracy resisting an ever-growing urge to break into a song, any song, spawned in the depths of delta country and harkening back to the time certain of her ancestors had spent as sharecroppers. Finally, half the city beneath their shoes and safely in the creaking elevator, nothing could be done about that little bit of primal instinct and she’d thrown her head back and sang anyway. “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell old pharaoh to let my people--“
“Will you shut up before the neighbors call the goddamn insane asylum? Good gawd, it’s bad enough I’m stuck listening to that guitar all the time, now you’ve got to sing too? Ugh! Shut *up*, Tracy.”
Tracy had been too stunned at Butterfly’s second use of her actual name in four weeks of life together to care that she’d been rebuked. She ignored the blonde girl’s disgusted looks and repeated icy glares as she continued to hum, words and volume subsided for the time being, all the way up to 4-C. Amy’s amused snickering earned a single, sideways glance as the three navigated the doorway. “What? A girl’s gotta sing sometimes, y’know? You’ve just... gotta sing!”
So the monstrosity was on the kitchen’s throw rug carpet, taking up it’s fair share of the precious little room just inside the apartment’s door. And as the door swung open and a flurry of leather boots and denim sleeves clunked through it, that monstrosity was visible... only it wasn’t even close to resembling redwood.
The table was covered, legs and edges, top, sides and dribbled onto the carpet below, in paint. Lime beside lemon beside patches of orange-purple-blue-white, splashes and splatters and dainty handprints in lavender at the center. “Butterfly,” Tracy asked simply, one heel knocking the still-open door to just before she leaned both shoulders against it, alto voice slipping still lower for the directness of her question, “what the *hell* are you doin’?”
“If you must know,” the other girl answered, wiping a peach-colored smudge off the end of her delicate nose with a mint and thistle streaked finger, “I hate red.”
As simple as that. And for the second time in one day, Tracy was too stunned to immediately answer and simply walked across the floor to lower both hands into the dish of royal blue instead. Was it a sign of the end times when they had something like that revelation in common?
“My turn Butterfly. You’ve got your handprints all over this thing, now I’m gonna do it. And... uh, me too.”
Splat.
Title: Wet Paint
Author: Chanter
Fandom: original, second in the 1992 series getting written in my own lj and several communities
Rating: PG for mild cursing
Summary: Butterfly, Tracy and Amy go furniture shopping, prompting a few personal touches and a tiny bit of admission.
Dedicated to the girls, because of that goofy song from when we were kids.
563 words
The old thing was redwood, nicked and splintery in the legs from decades of collisions with chairs, impacts of sneakers, avalanches of books and wheels--thank God, so Tracy thought, for resourceful people and Good Will. None of the chairs responsible for the assorted dents at the edges had come with it, probably for the best since the combined resources of one stingy and one willing but nearly broke roommate had been stretched to manage even getting the table home.
But it was there, squarely on it’s solid feet, substancial, mammoth on the threadbare rug unrolled over the floorboards that served as kitchen carpet. It had taken Tracy, Amy and a supremely unwilling Butterfly the better part of the morning to lug the carved monstrosity home, Butterfly complaining all the way, Amy laughing at everything and Tracy resisting an ever-growing urge to break into a song, any song, spawned in the depths of delta country and harkening back to the time certain of her ancestors had spent as sharecroppers. Finally, half the city beneath their shoes and safely in the creaking elevator, nothing could be done about that little bit of primal instinct and she’d thrown her head back and sang anyway. “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell old pharaoh to let my people--“
“Will you shut up before the neighbors call the goddamn insane asylum? Good gawd, it’s bad enough I’m stuck listening to that guitar all the time, now you’ve got to sing too? Ugh! Shut *up*, Tracy.”
Tracy had been too stunned at Butterfly’s second use of her actual name in four weeks of life together to care that she’d been rebuked. She ignored the blonde girl’s disgusted looks and repeated icy glares as she continued to hum, words and volume subsided for the time being, all the way up to 4-C. Amy’s amused snickering earned a single, sideways glance as the three navigated the doorway. “What? A girl’s gotta sing sometimes, y’know? You’ve just... gotta sing!”
So the monstrosity was on the kitchen’s throw rug carpet, taking up it’s fair share of the precious little room just inside the apartment’s door. And as the door swung open and a flurry of leather boots and denim sleeves clunked through it, that monstrosity was visible... only it wasn’t even close to resembling redwood.
The table was covered, legs and edges, top, sides and dribbled onto the carpet below, in paint. Lime beside lemon beside patches of orange-purple-blue-white, splashes and splatters and dainty handprints in lavender at the center. “Butterfly,” Tracy asked simply, one heel knocking the still-open door to just before she leaned both shoulders against it, alto voice slipping still lower for the directness of her question, “what the *hell* are you doin’?”
“If you must know,” the other girl answered, wiping a peach-colored smudge off the end of her delicate nose with a mint and thistle streaked finger, “I hate red.”
As simple as that. And for the second time in one day, Tracy was too stunned to immediately answer and simply walked across the floor to lower both hands into the dish of royal blue instead. Was it a sign of the end times when they had something like that revelation in common?
“My turn Butterfly. You’ve got your handprints all over this thing, now I’m gonna do it. And... uh, me too.”
Splat.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-28 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 03:49 am (UTC)Don't worry, you will. Tracy and Butterfly share one apartment, Amy and Nancy share one but I haven't introduced them yet other than just Amy in passing, and there's a couple guys too someplace. Very 1992 humor too, I warn you.