great big fictiony splurt
Apr. 17th, 2009 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanter1944This... has been a long time coming, actually. Admittedly certain bits have had a longer time waiting than others, though. Part of this was inspired by the stone angels plot that ran at Milliways or, more specifically, by a conversation Micara and I had while the plot was running. the idea we were tossing around didn't work out IC, more's the pity, so it ended up happening in fic instead. The large majority of the rest of this was inspired by a daily entertainment post in the back room. What didn't come from either of those sources... well. Call it equal parts thanks to 'fic with demons in' a la ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
newredshoes (Hi Esther!) and something Sariel reminded Tuck of during her first trip to Sherwood. Er. In other words, my imagination's been in overdrive again. Forget everything else and blame me for this. Utterly.
Oh, and just because I'm paranoid like that, these are a whole lapful of might-have-beens and none of them actually happened to the folks from the bar. Just sayin'.
1
It's the third wand she tries that sends a water-warm spiral of friendly current down her arm, making her entire right hand tingle with a thrill of reaction the second she moves to raise it. Olivander looks unsurprised as a comet's tail of canary yellow sparks fountains from the tip, three of Sariel's small fingers wide and sunshine bright, reflected all the more strongly in her parents' delighted faces and her own awed dark eyes. "Willow," the wandmaker says proudly, "tten inches long, unicorn hair core. Very fitting if I dare say so, my dear."
"Hufflepuff!" the Sorting Hat bellows. Sariel nearly trips over her own feet as she stumbles from the stool, thankfully remembering to remove the ragged hat from her head before hurrying to join the indicated table--her new House, oh dieu, it's real. She knows her parents, both Gryffindors of twenty years before, won't mind the difference in sorting in the slightest, but she still wishes she could see their reactions in person--and then she's scurrying down the nearest aisle with what feels like the eyes of half the hall on her back. The other Hufflepuffs are applauding as she reaches them--for her? They're actually doing that for her? oh, but she's blushing positively magenta by now - and a slightly older girl in blonde pigtails moves over to make room as she slips onto a bench. "Hi," the third year says, "I'm Hannah."
It's a little surprising to some people when she makes Chaser in her fourth year; that quiet little curly-haired do-gooder girl who hardly ever says boo, they say. How did she manage that one? but she can fly, or so the Hufflepuff Captain claims. She tries desperately hard not to prove him wrong. She's a little conservative in the air, a little caughtious; to be sure, there's no danger of her knocking anyone off their broom. All the same, she can fly and she can score and she works well as part of the yellow-robed seven, and what little resentment there might have been over her appointment has faded by their first match's end. Rager's not a bad Quidditch player, even if she is a skinny little doormouse of a thing.
She keeps her head down through the first battle inside Hogwarts castle when it comes; she's half-awake and still seeing movable starscapes lifted from the pages of her astronomy textbook as she stumbles from her dormitory, all rumpled pajamas and tousled hair, just in time to hear the clatter of a thousand and one hourglass rubies as they cascade to the entrance hall's floor. The next year's a blur; she keeps quiet, keeps out of sight, keeps her eyes on people infinitely braver and stronger than she is and tries to copy them in a hundred tiny ways. Most of dumbledore's Army don't know her, don't see her, don't realize she exists, but Hannah's always been nice and Susan is fair straight down to her core and Neville... she likes Neville.
She likes how much Neville is like her.
She's not of age during the final battle for Hogwarts. she won't be of age for another two years, and so she files out with the rest of the school's younger students, just one small figure in a crowd. Kevin Whitby's stuck himself to her and is clinging on like a limpet as they leave, but she doesn't honestly mind. She'd be stuck to someone else's robes too, if she weren't one of the oldest unqualified witches in the lot. She wouldn't dare defy Professor McGonagall at a moment like this, or a moment like almost any other, but she knows that if she were of age, if she were allowed, she'd be one of the Hufflepuffs keeping their seats and readying to defend the castle now. Yes, she'd be terrified down to the soles of her twitching feet, but it would only be right that she help. So she would.
2
She's freezing, utterly freezing, by the time the details of the Experimental Station are indistinct behind them. the fire's plenty visible; she imagines the orange-red-yellow glow stands out for miles in every direction, but the fine features of the buildings are soon far less clear. Fire and distance will do that. Sariel isn't sorry to lose sight of the Station. She's half-terrified they'll be followed, though. Alexandre, cat-formed and with fur as long as her own hair (though far less curly), climbs inside her clumsily-made anorak and curls up, warming her as best he can. Beside her, Martha is shivering almost as violently as she herself is, clutching her rabbit daemon close and whimpering something almost inaudible as she walks. A step ahead, annie and Bella are moving together, wobbling and clumsy but determinedly side by side. One of them--Bella, it's Bella--reaches back and grasps at Martha's sleeve; she flinches, staggers, but drags herself forward to join her friends with a hiccup all the same. Sariel stumbles in their wake, half-tripping in the snow and raggedly praying for something, anything so long as it's warm. Bridget's bright blonde head is barely visible against the white, and Lyra-Lizzie-Lyra appears in glimpses, then vanishes again. One minute she's hauling Sara bodily out of a snowdrift and leading her onward, the next she's at Sariel's side. "We'll get out of this," she says, and Alexandre's face appears over her collar just long enough to touch noses with Pantalaimon. "Just come on."
"We'll get out of this," Alexandre repeats, curled as far around Sariel as he can manage beneath the coal silk of her outer clothes. she hardly dares believe him until an unfamiliar man's caught her up in both arms, surrounding her with the sound of baying dog teams and sledges over snow as he bellows in broken Dutch "Forty-four! By God, forty-four! Get some blankets for this one; Lord Faa, we've got them all!"
"I told you we'd get out," Alexandre says, purring ecstatically and hardly smug at all despite his words. Sariel agrees in a murmur, huddled beneath layers of furs and finally, blessedly warm, as she cuddles her daemon to her chest. "You were right."
3
She doesn't believe them.
She's from Santo, originally. The markets and the museums and the wide, wide beaches are home; her folks keep her out of the shadier parts of town and that's fine by her, anyway. Nothing she wants to see there, not till she's older. they're good people, her folks, hard-working and warm and when a chance comes for their daughter to get an education, they take it. Sariel's a might uncertain, but she goes along; can't hurt, really. Can it?
But oh, tell God sorry how it can.
She doesn't believe them. What they put in the food and what they do and how they lay into her, and all the time they're loud, loud. they want me to talk--want me to talk--want me to--loud, loud. Don't like it no more. Sariel doesn't say much, hasn't ever really, and by now it's almost a rule that she keeps quiet. But oh, how it's hurting her - voices where there weren't before and looming, laughing can-toi (two by two) at every turn and tiny orange spiders scurrying around the edges of her vision even when she blinks. So she stares down at a datareader's screen, circulatory system mapped in blue (two by two) and red (turns it red) in her hand; listens when the nurses and the doctors insist that it's all for her own good, dear; grits her teeth and whimpers into her pillow and hears the can-toi (two by two) laughing (two by two) and first come smiles, then come lies - she doesn't believe them.
Sariel's not a gunslinger. But she'd make a damn good soldier.
Not. A. Word.
Talk, moans, screams, gunshots, and the crackle of spreading fire - she clings to Arbalest's arm almost from the seige's start. She's almost never glad to see anyone die--gotta show mercy--but it's relief she feels when the can-toi lay down, say sorry. and she's not sure she ought to be sorry. Arbalest talks even less than she does, and it's him she sticks to all the way down that long, long corridor out to Serenity; he's like her, sort of. Gotta find something familiar. and there's Yuanli, by the grace of God-cha-dieu-someone--by the grace, and there's Roberto, and there's Hana-Mavis-Zhexiang-Stefan-zillah, and oh but when the beam breaks.
And oh, but when the beam heals.
She and Arbalest step through the portal together, just behind Roberto's steady figure and barely avoiding walking on his shadow as their feet hit Taos for the first time. "Gonna get my parents," she says to the air over Arbalest's near shoulder, maybe aiming at his ear and maybe not but missing all the same. "Dangran. Bring 'em out. It's generational."
"To his ears," Arbalest says simply as they follow in Kate Welker's wake, but he doesn't disbelieve her conviction.
4
tuck was a man of the church once. He's not so arrogant as to think he's entirely free of the rot that started spreading, started smelling, started something - but he tries for goodness as best he can and never mind the distinction between someone ordained and someone working by the sweat of his brow--by the grace--in the green. His glimpse of her is relatively brief, somewhere along a road in Sherwood, and their conversation lasts thirty seconds at most. There's a language barrier between them, thick as the coarse cloth of the habit she wears, but he doesn't miss everything. He's never entirely sure how that happened.
There's something serene about her, this tiny nun with jet black curls peeping out around her face and dark eyes a body could easily fall for miles in, something that immediately marks her as one of the ones who believes every word she prays, every word she says. There's no such thing as false conviction, here. Her name is Sister Sariel, she says, and she's traveling. Whether she means she's on a pilgrimage or something else isn't clear; Tuck has as much French as the sister has English, so all but the rudiments of what she's trying to convey go clear over his head. He only remembers after she's disappeared amid a stand of close-growing trees that in certain stories, Sariel was an angel's name.
5
The angel statue flung her here ten days ago. It may as well be ten years. time is moving at a crawl-sprint-flutter-crawl and it's worse without a chronometer to accurately judge the hours by. There's so much snow, and so much gunfire and by God, it's so cold. she's colder, she's sure by the first day's ragged end, than she's ever been in her life. Keep your head down, Sariel. She staggers against the wind, fights it (ka is a wind), walks straight into it, holds on.
She's no soldier, not like the people around her; any training she had gave her the basics of a phaser's use, not a rifle's and besides. she couldn't. So she helps where she can. She's ill-equipped for any of it - the blood and the bone and the screams - mother of God, the screaming, but it's where she's of most use. So she tries to heal, in her own small, inept, shaky way. By that first day's frozen end her clothes are spattered with mud, and blood, and worse. None of it's hers.
There are people she meets, friends made in brief, shivering minutes, and she'd be lying if she said she doesn't try sticking to them in the chaos. There's a certain blue headscarf she watches for, clumsily emulating it's wearer, and when a red-faced tower of a man staggers bellowing through the door she's at his side by instinct, letting him lean and stumble forward and lean and she'll be falling in another second, she knows it. He's twice her size, he's bleeding and cursing and favoring one leg, but she can't let him crash to the church's floor. that will only make things worse for him. So she walks, and wavers, and holds on. It's what she would do without another person's lead to follow, and she knows it, but it's also what Renee would do if she were in Sariel's position. that makes it a little more right, somehow.
she's not alone in the chaos. There's one person she knows, at least. He was as surprised as she was when she all but fell out of the sky, minus a set of jumpwings and plus one hell of a story. He believes her, though. she wouldn't lie about something this serious. Not on her life. Neither would he. They watch out for each other when they can, the half-trained traiteur and the pilot from another century. She's utterly unprepared for what she's landed in, she knows it, he knows it. and he's her friend. So they keep their eyes open for the other, at least when the haze of red-white-yellow-too many broken colors to name isn't blurring their vision. Sariel doesn't know the jargon, doesn't know the details, and at least once she drops generalities as a soldier bleeds - general distress signal - and calls "Gene! Gene, I need you over here!"
At least once, he comes running. Distress signal received.
The angel statue threw her here ten days ago. It might as well be - shivering and coughing and praying in the snow - ten years. Keep your head down, Sariel.
They hold on. It's what they do.
Whew, but this took a while to write! I really, really hope this works/isn't rubbish/doesn't tick anybody off. ahem.
newredshoes (Hi Esther!) and something Sariel reminded Tuck of during her first trip to Sherwood. Er. In other words, my imagination's been in overdrive again. Forget everything else and blame me for this. Utterly. Oh, and just because I'm paranoid like that, these are a whole lapful of might-have-beens and none of them actually happened to the folks from the bar. Just sayin'.
1
It's the third wand she tries that sends a water-warm spiral of friendly current down her arm, making her entire right hand tingle with a thrill of reaction the second she moves to raise it. Olivander looks unsurprised as a comet's tail of canary yellow sparks fountains from the tip, three of Sariel's small fingers wide and sunshine bright, reflected all the more strongly in her parents' delighted faces and her own awed dark eyes. "Willow," the wandmaker says proudly, "tten inches long, unicorn hair core. Very fitting if I dare say so, my dear."
"Hufflepuff!" the Sorting Hat bellows. Sariel nearly trips over her own feet as she stumbles from the stool, thankfully remembering to remove the ragged hat from her head before hurrying to join the indicated table--her new House, oh dieu, it's real. She knows her parents, both Gryffindors of twenty years before, won't mind the difference in sorting in the slightest, but she still wishes she could see their reactions in person--and then she's scurrying down the nearest aisle with what feels like the eyes of half the hall on her back. The other Hufflepuffs are applauding as she reaches them--for her? They're actually doing that for her? oh, but she's blushing positively magenta by now - and a slightly older girl in blonde pigtails moves over to make room as she slips onto a bench. "Hi," the third year says, "I'm Hannah."
It's a little surprising to some people when she makes Chaser in her fourth year; that quiet little curly-haired do-gooder girl who hardly ever says boo, they say. How did she manage that one? but she can fly, or so the Hufflepuff Captain claims. She tries desperately hard not to prove him wrong. She's a little conservative in the air, a little caughtious; to be sure, there's no danger of her knocking anyone off their broom. All the same, she can fly and she can score and she works well as part of the yellow-robed seven, and what little resentment there might have been over her appointment has faded by their first match's end. Rager's not a bad Quidditch player, even if she is a skinny little doormouse of a thing.
She keeps her head down through the first battle inside Hogwarts castle when it comes; she's half-awake and still seeing movable starscapes lifted from the pages of her astronomy textbook as she stumbles from her dormitory, all rumpled pajamas and tousled hair, just in time to hear the clatter of a thousand and one hourglass rubies as they cascade to the entrance hall's floor. The next year's a blur; she keeps quiet, keeps out of sight, keeps her eyes on people infinitely braver and stronger than she is and tries to copy them in a hundred tiny ways. Most of dumbledore's Army don't know her, don't see her, don't realize she exists, but Hannah's always been nice and Susan is fair straight down to her core and Neville... she likes Neville.
She likes how much Neville is like her.
She's not of age during the final battle for Hogwarts. she won't be of age for another two years, and so she files out with the rest of the school's younger students, just one small figure in a crowd. Kevin Whitby's stuck himself to her and is clinging on like a limpet as they leave, but she doesn't honestly mind. She'd be stuck to someone else's robes too, if she weren't one of the oldest unqualified witches in the lot. She wouldn't dare defy Professor McGonagall at a moment like this, or a moment like almost any other, but she knows that if she were of age, if she were allowed, she'd be one of the Hufflepuffs keeping their seats and readying to defend the castle now. Yes, she'd be terrified down to the soles of her twitching feet, but it would only be right that she help. So she would.
2
She's freezing, utterly freezing, by the time the details of the Experimental Station are indistinct behind them. the fire's plenty visible; she imagines the orange-red-yellow glow stands out for miles in every direction, but the fine features of the buildings are soon far less clear. Fire and distance will do that. Sariel isn't sorry to lose sight of the Station. She's half-terrified they'll be followed, though. Alexandre, cat-formed and with fur as long as her own hair (though far less curly), climbs inside her clumsily-made anorak and curls up, warming her as best he can. Beside her, Martha is shivering almost as violently as she herself is, clutching her rabbit daemon close and whimpering something almost inaudible as she walks. A step ahead, annie and Bella are moving together, wobbling and clumsy but determinedly side by side. One of them--Bella, it's Bella--reaches back and grasps at Martha's sleeve; she flinches, staggers, but drags herself forward to join her friends with a hiccup all the same. Sariel stumbles in their wake, half-tripping in the snow and raggedly praying for something, anything so long as it's warm. Bridget's bright blonde head is barely visible against the white, and Lyra-Lizzie-Lyra appears in glimpses, then vanishes again. One minute she's hauling Sara bodily out of a snowdrift and leading her onward, the next she's at Sariel's side. "We'll get out of this," she says, and Alexandre's face appears over her collar just long enough to touch noses with Pantalaimon. "Just come on."
"We'll get out of this," Alexandre repeats, curled as far around Sariel as he can manage beneath the coal silk of her outer clothes. she hardly dares believe him until an unfamiliar man's caught her up in both arms, surrounding her with the sound of baying dog teams and sledges over snow as he bellows in broken Dutch "Forty-four! By God, forty-four! Get some blankets for this one; Lord Faa, we've got them all!"
"I told you we'd get out," Alexandre says, purring ecstatically and hardly smug at all despite his words. Sariel agrees in a murmur, huddled beneath layers of furs and finally, blessedly warm, as she cuddles her daemon to her chest. "You were right."
3
She doesn't believe them.
She's from Santo, originally. The markets and the museums and the wide, wide beaches are home; her folks keep her out of the shadier parts of town and that's fine by her, anyway. Nothing she wants to see there, not till she's older. they're good people, her folks, hard-working and warm and when a chance comes for their daughter to get an education, they take it. Sariel's a might uncertain, but she goes along; can't hurt, really. Can it?
But oh, tell God sorry how it can.
She doesn't believe them. What they put in the food and what they do and how they lay into her, and all the time they're loud, loud. they want me to talk--want me to talk--want me to--loud, loud. Don't like it no more. Sariel doesn't say much, hasn't ever really, and by now it's almost a rule that she keeps quiet. But oh, how it's hurting her - voices where there weren't before and looming, laughing can-toi (two by two) at every turn and tiny orange spiders scurrying around the edges of her vision even when she blinks. So she stares down at a datareader's screen, circulatory system mapped in blue (two by two) and red (turns it red) in her hand; listens when the nurses and the doctors insist that it's all for her own good, dear; grits her teeth and whimpers into her pillow and hears the can-toi (two by two) laughing (two by two) and first come smiles, then come lies - she doesn't believe them.
Sariel's not a gunslinger. But she'd make a damn good soldier.
Not. A. Word.
Talk, moans, screams, gunshots, and the crackle of spreading fire - she clings to Arbalest's arm almost from the seige's start. She's almost never glad to see anyone die--gotta show mercy--but it's relief she feels when the can-toi lay down, say sorry. and she's not sure she ought to be sorry. Arbalest talks even less than she does, and it's him she sticks to all the way down that long, long corridor out to Serenity; he's like her, sort of. Gotta find something familiar. and there's Yuanli, by the grace of God-cha-dieu-someone--by the grace, and there's Roberto, and there's Hana-Mavis-Zhexiang-Stefan-zillah, and oh but when the beam breaks.
And oh, but when the beam heals.
She and Arbalest step through the portal together, just behind Roberto's steady figure and barely avoiding walking on his shadow as their feet hit Taos for the first time. "Gonna get my parents," she says to the air over Arbalest's near shoulder, maybe aiming at his ear and maybe not but missing all the same. "Dangran. Bring 'em out. It's generational."
"To his ears," Arbalest says simply as they follow in Kate Welker's wake, but he doesn't disbelieve her conviction.
4
tuck was a man of the church once. He's not so arrogant as to think he's entirely free of the rot that started spreading, started smelling, started something - but he tries for goodness as best he can and never mind the distinction between someone ordained and someone working by the sweat of his brow--by the grace--in the green. His glimpse of her is relatively brief, somewhere along a road in Sherwood, and their conversation lasts thirty seconds at most. There's a language barrier between them, thick as the coarse cloth of the habit she wears, but he doesn't miss everything. He's never entirely sure how that happened.
There's something serene about her, this tiny nun with jet black curls peeping out around her face and dark eyes a body could easily fall for miles in, something that immediately marks her as one of the ones who believes every word she prays, every word she says. There's no such thing as false conviction, here. Her name is Sister Sariel, she says, and she's traveling. Whether she means she's on a pilgrimage or something else isn't clear; Tuck has as much French as the sister has English, so all but the rudiments of what she's trying to convey go clear over his head. He only remembers after she's disappeared amid a stand of close-growing trees that in certain stories, Sariel was an angel's name.
5
The angel statue flung her here ten days ago. It may as well be ten years. time is moving at a crawl-sprint-flutter-crawl and it's worse without a chronometer to accurately judge the hours by. There's so much snow, and so much gunfire and by God, it's so cold. she's colder, she's sure by the first day's ragged end, than she's ever been in her life. Keep your head down, Sariel. She staggers against the wind, fights it (ka is a wind), walks straight into it, holds on.
She's no soldier, not like the people around her; any training she had gave her the basics of a phaser's use, not a rifle's and besides. she couldn't. So she helps where she can. She's ill-equipped for any of it - the blood and the bone and the screams - mother of God, the screaming, but it's where she's of most use. So she tries to heal, in her own small, inept, shaky way. By that first day's frozen end her clothes are spattered with mud, and blood, and worse. None of it's hers.
There are people she meets, friends made in brief, shivering minutes, and she'd be lying if she said she doesn't try sticking to them in the chaos. There's a certain blue headscarf she watches for, clumsily emulating it's wearer, and when a red-faced tower of a man staggers bellowing through the door she's at his side by instinct, letting him lean and stumble forward and lean and she'll be falling in another second, she knows it. He's twice her size, he's bleeding and cursing and favoring one leg, but she can't let him crash to the church's floor. that will only make things worse for him. So she walks, and wavers, and holds on. It's what she would do without another person's lead to follow, and she knows it, but it's also what Renee would do if she were in Sariel's position. that makes it a little more right, somehow.
she's not alone in the chaos. There's one person she knows, at least. He was as surprised as she was when she all but fell out of the sky, minus a set of jumpwings and plus one hell of a story. He believes her, though. she wouldn't lie about something this serious. Not on her life. Neither would he. They watch out for each other when they can, the half-trained traiteur and the pilot from another century. She's utterly unprepared for what she's landed in, she knows it, he knows it. and he's her friend. So they keep their eyes open for the other, at least when the haze of red-white-yellow-too many broken colors to name isn't blurring their vision. Sariel doesn't know the jargon, doesn't know the details, and at least once she drops generalities as a soldier bleeds - general distress signal - and calls "Gene! Gene, I need you over here!"
At least once, he comes running. Distress signal received.
The angel statue threw her here ten days ago. It might as well be - shivering and coughing and praying in the snow - ten years. Keep your head down, Sariel.
They hold on. It's what they do.
Whew, but this took a while to write! I really, really hope this works/isn't rubbish/doesn't tick anybody off. ahem.
