[Fic] assorted "three sentence" ficlets -- various fandoms

[edenfalling]

I've filled 21 prompts, though only two of them actually managed to stay within the three sentence limit. I am so bad at length restrictions. *hides face* (I did get another one down to four sentences! That's not too far off, right? And one of the multi-sentence ficlets is only a hundred words long... *makes feeble excuses*)

Anyway, eleven of them are responses to one person asking for a specific scenario in a specific fandom -- Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, for be_themoon -- and they all fit into a unified timeline. So I'm going to post those separately.

All the other random stuff (so far) is in this post. *grin*

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1. Storm Warning: Doctor Who/Narnia, young!Jadis, he was the one who made her this way, for elenielofnarnia (200 words)

Everyone in Charn knows the tale of how Lilith, the All-Mother, refused to relinquish her pride and instead crossed the endless void between the worlds to establish a new world where her children could grow strong and free away from Adam's chains. Only a few who have the privilege to enter the Imperial Library, the patience to sort through millennia of dusty myths, and the authority to kill anyone who might report their interest in forbidden records know the rest of the story: that Lilith did not travel alone, but rather tricked a god of storms and doorways into giving her passage, and founded her kingdom in Charn not because she chose the world herself but because the nameless god, a trickster himself, fooled her into leaving his ship and abandoned her on a dying planet lit by a weary star.

That god gained his power by killing the rest of his race, so Lilith's memoirs claim. Jadis considers the current state of her game with her sister: with her eyes now opened, they seem as if two lionesses fighting over the decaying corpse of a half-starved deer, never thinking to look beyond their drought-stricken territory for richer game. She tucks the crumbling papers into her bodice and begins to rethink her goals.

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2. Loyalty: Merlin, girl!Merlin/Arthur, forever and further, for caramelsilver (100 words)

She kneels at Arthur's feet, black hair tangled from the fierce wind of her spells and blue eyes locked on his, heedless of the sword he holds to her throat. "Who are you?" he demands. "Who sent you? What do you want, sorceress?"

"My name is Merlin Emrys, daughter of Hunith and Balinor," she says. "I sent myself. I serve you. All that I am is yours, Arthur, from now until eternity -- beyond death, beyond hope, beyond time."

Behind her, only the gentle sound of shifting rubble breaks the silence of the crowd.

Arthur lowers his sword.

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3. Tribute: Chronicles of Narnia, Susan & Lucy Pevensie, jewelry, for katakokk (125 words)

When Rabadash gives her a necklace, Susan expects something heavy with gold and jewels and the weight of Calormene arrogance, made with the blood of slaves annealed into the links. Instead he slips a delicate chain of silver over her head, catching briefly on the crown of braids woven into her hair, and holds up the little dagger-shaped charm made of pearls for her to admire ("Oh, lovely!" says Lucy at her side, her hands rising in the heedless need to touch whatever she admires), and Susan cannot help but smile to know that he sees her and respects her for her strength as well as her beauty.

That turns out to be a lie and the necklace a calculated feint, but Susan wears it all the way home from Tashbaan as spoils of war.

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4. In Strict Obedience to Her Commands: Lucifer, Beatrice/Mazikeen, after the fact, for mrinalinee (275 words)

Beatrice is working at a strip club -- behind the bar, not on stage; there's a limit to how much of her body she's willing to have a hundred random men ogle every night -- when a dark-haired woman in a silver half-mask strides past the bouncer, stiff-arming him in the gut when he tries to grab her shoulder. Something about her seems familiar, Beatrice thinks, something caught up in the haze that blurs nearly a year of her life when, so far as the private detective she hired has been able to tell, she vanished off the face of the earth.

The woman looks around, dismissing everyone she sees, until her gaze snags on Beatrice and she strides toward the bar, her coat swirling open to reveal the sword belted to her waist over her jeans and the T-shirt proclaiming It was a pleasure to burn. "Oh shit," the bouncer wheezes. "Bea baby, call 911. She's gonna kill us all."

"Vheatrigzh," the woman says, her voice strangely mushy and mangled, and maddeningly almost, almost familiar.

"Do I know you?" Beatrice asks, setting the phone back in its cradle and leaning over the bar without quite realizing what she's doing. "Do you know me?"

"Yezh," the woman says. "Vheatrigzh, khome vish me." She holds out her hand.

When they touch, skin to burning skin, Beatrice remembers.

She hoists herself over the bar and follows Mazikeen out of the silent, shaking, piss-scared room, trailing her mistress like a faithful shadow.

"I'm sorry I forgot," she says. "I won't forget again."

In the white-orange light of the streetlamp outside the club, Mazikeen removes her mask. Both halves of her face smile, and she bends down to meet Beatrice's lips.

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5. Everything Ends: Ender's Game/Doctor Who, the Doctor, he listens to a Speaking and knows it to be true, for lizzie_marie_23 (350 words)

His latest companion -- Zora, lovely young woman, if ultimately too rash for her own good (though not the good of the double planetary system she'd saved with her sacrifice) -- had always insisted on coming home to visit her family after every subjective three months. If he didn't bring her home now, he'd never hear the end of it. So he wrapped up her mangled body in a clean white cloth that the TARDIS mournfully provided, popped it into a stasis chamber, and set a course for Nádej.

Her family was Old Catholic, but Zora had opted to have a secular memorial, with a Speaker for the Dead instead of a priest. The Doctor had long since made his apologies to her family and escaped, but two subjective years later, he found himself in the back of the church listening to a stranger tell an abridged version of her life. The Speaker didn't know about the whole 'travels in time and space' thing, or about Zora literally saving worlds, but somehow that didn't matter. She summed up and shared the heart of the woman the Doctor had known: bright and brave and unconcerned with herself when she could be out doing things, righting wrongs like a knight errant with the Doctor as her crotchety old wizard advisor.

"Like Arthur and Merlin," Zora had always said, no matter how many times he'd told her that legend was from completely the wrong cultural tradition for her to cite. She'd just grinned and ruffled his hair.

"To Zora, a hero," the Doctor whispered along with the Speaker, as the simple ceremony drew to a close, because that was truer than true. He could see why she'd wanted this form of closure for her family.

For a moment he thought about hiring a Speaker for himself, dropping by now and then to explain what he'd done, what he'd meant to do, and how he'd tried so desperately to rationalize the difference, but the moment passed and he slipped out the door while the others went forward to share more memories of Zora and her too-brief life.

Everyone died. Only the best deserved to be remembered.

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6. Seek and Ye Shall Find: Chronicles of Narnia/Dark is Rising, Lucy/Will, he had the look of adventure in his eyes, for wingedflight21 (300 words)

Lucy and Edmund are visiting Eustace again for the summer and the boys have gone off to practice swordplay as best one can with broken sticks from a tree in the neighborhood park. Edmund asked if she'd like to give their cousin more pointers, or talk about differences between male and female centers of balance so Eustace can help Jill at school this autumn, but Lucy shook her head. She's wandering alone by the little weed-choked stream, hoping for glimpses of fish, when a strange boy knocks her to the grass.

"I'm sorry, it's entirely my fault; I should have paid more attention to where I was going," he says, offering her a hand up.

By the time she's on her feet, he's already staring upstream with a determined light in his eyes: the look of someone on a deadly serious adventure, something Lucy recognizes from Narnia but sees all too rarely here in England. There's something else about him, something equally familiar but less easy to place. She sets that aside for a moment.

"You're on a quest," Lucy pronounces. His eyes snap back to her face, and she smiles to know that she guessed right. "I can help," she offers.

"How did--?" he starts to say, and then freezes, his eyes skimming around her as if he can see the traces of magic left by Aslan and Narnia. And that explains Lucy's second impression. This boy is out of his own time and place, just like she is.

"Neither of us belongs here, but that just makes it more fun, don't you think?" she says, and offers her hand to shake. "I'm Lucy Pevensie."

"Will Stanton," he says.

"It's lovely to meet you. Now, tell me what we're looking for," Lucy orders, and drags him upstream toward an unexpected adventure.

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7. Of Horses: Chronicles of Narnia, Rabadash, that one mare in the stable... for wingedflight21 (125 words) Brutality to animals

When he was a boy, before his father became Tisroc, Rabadash occasionally hid behind doorframes and listened to his milk-sister's mother tell elaborate stories about magic and demons, even though publically he insisted he was too old for such things. Even more secretly, he thought having a demon horse might be just the thing to show that he was a prince worth fearing and following, and he took to watching the horses in the stables and the mounts of visiting Tarkaans and soldiers with a considering eye.

Finally Rabadash was sure he'd found the demon he was looking for, but the mare in the last stall on the right refused to answer any of his pleas or orders to talk.

He had her whipped to death for supposedly stepping on his foot.

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8. No Illusions: Inception, Mal, Darkness has come upon me, painting, black, palpable; wipe it out, Dawn, like a debt, for seasight (150 words)

They escaped Limbo, but what good is that when they are still trapped in the dream, snared by their own minds into an eerily almost-perfect mirror of their lives, with only the nagging wrongness of angles and lighting, the too-scripted antics of their children, the unbelievable strokes of luck like the restoration of their project funding to tell Mal this is not real. And Dom will not listen; he deceives himself, wraps his mind and heart in this cocoon of candy sweetness no matter how she tries to show him the darkness lurking behind the painted sets.

So: she will tear down the walls, smash all the lights, stop the cameras and the clocks. Then dawn will break, he will see, and they will wake together from this nightmare into life.

Mal hurls the hotel lamp to the floor and begins to set the scene, stepping carelessly through the shattered glass.

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9. I'm Your Gun: Captain America, Steve/Bucky, I'm your gun, for musesfool (200 words)

Men kill each other in war, that's just how it goes; Steve knows this and he shoots when he has to, but it goes against some deep grain in his soul, and Bucky knows that, no matter how Steve tries to play the confident hero, because Captain America or not, Steve is still Steve and Bucky has always looked out for him.

So he takes the high ground and shoots every enemy he can before Steve gets into positions where he'd have to switch from his shield to his gun; he helps plan raids so they can capture more Hydra mooks than they kill; and he stops Steve while he's getting into his suit, pulls on Steve's gloves himself, and says, "When you're wearing these, when you hold your gun, these are my hands; anyone you kill is my fault, not yours."

"You can't keep the war away from me, Bucky, not any more than I could keep it away from you," Steve says, a little soft and a little sad, but his gloved fingers catch on Bucky's gun-callused ones for a moment before he pulls away and tugs the mask down over his eyes.

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10. Birds in the Hand: Chronicles of Narnia, Edmund Pevensie, pickpocket!AU, jack of all trades, for caramelsilver (250 words) Crime, child abuse, prostitution

The Thiefmaker likes her little birds to specialize -- easier to set up work gangs that way, easier to trust they know what they're doing and won't get caught. Peter picks pockets until he gets his growth; then he's switched to muscle. Susan's too pretty to end up anywhere but a whorehouse; the only saving grace is that she's clever enough to be more useful doing the accounts most of the time and only seeing a handful of johns she has Peter intimidate into good manners. Lucy's a distraction: the lost, helpless child of a good family who's wandered into a bad neighborhood and needs a mark's help to get her home... until she turns down the chosen alley and holds a knife to his back while Peter knocks him over the head and empties his pockets.

But Edmund never specializes. The Thiefmaker saw something in him that first night as the four little birds huddled lost and homeless and parentless in the cold, and set him on a different path. "Someone has to know all the secrets," she tells him as she listens to reports and counts the night's take. "Someone has to know how everything's done, even if we can't do the tricks perfectly ourselves. A ruler is a jack of all trades and master of none, except the one that matters."

Edmund listens and Edmund bides his time. One day, he'll show his mistress how well he's learned.

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More to come, probably. Dammit, why can I not find this level of inspiration for my actual fics???