the deep moans round with many voices

I've gotten in the habit of posting my fills in sets of six, and there's no reason to fix what isn't broken. :)

All prompts drawn from the current iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon, hosted by the wonderful rthstewart. Come join the fun!

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( 1. ) For rthstewart: Any, any, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, written 2/1/20

We Make Our Own Second Chances (150 words)

Fandom = The Magnus Archives.

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Her replacement yanked open the door to the Archives before Gertrude could knock with the more functional of her rebuilt hands, and exclaimed, in a shocked and slightly offended tone, "I saw your corpse; I was a suspect for your murder; how on earth--!"

"One fascinating thing about having one's face and voice used by the Stranger in the heart of the Unknowing is that when reality becomes utterly malleable, a determined person can wrangle that sliver of near-existence into something more solid once things settle back into place," Gertrude said as she pushed past him and cataloged the changes to her old haunts, and then added, "Admittedly it took longer than I expected, and I'm not entirely certain I got all the pieces in the right order, but the important parts are clear enough. Now, will you help me kill Jonah Magnus or must I continue doing everything myself?"

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( 2. ) For wingedflight: Queen's Thief, Eugenides, what do you mean "kings can't steal"??, written 2/1/20

How You Frame the Question (70 words)

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"Kings do nothing but steal; theft is the very essence of government. Taxes steal money, wars steal land and lives, laws steal freedom, to name simply the most obvious examples -- shall I go on?"

Helen sighed, and kicked her cousin's ankle, and said in the driest tone she could muster, "It was practical advice, not an invitation to philosophy; please stop being so very much yourself before I've eaten breakfast."

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( 3. ) For kalira: Naruto, any ninja, chakra tricks, written 2/1/20

Unorthodox Uses (85 words)

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1. Why clutter your tea ceremony by fussing with a kettle when you can pour a stream of perfectly heated water from thin air into your cup?

2. It's not technically illegal to have a side-job using earth jutsu in the civilian construction industry, and it's not like you undercharge the village by that much, right, so really you're just doing your part to keep the economy turning.

3. Interior design is overrated; just buy cheap secondhand furniture and cast an exciting new genjutsu whenever you have visitors!

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( 4. ) For syrena_of_the_lake: Harry Potter; Professor Kettleburn; occupational hazards, written 2/1/20

Duty of Care (75 words)

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The animals aren't the problem. Oh, certainly they're dangerous if you don't respect them and take sensible precautions, but Kettleburn is an old hand at that game; he knows perfectly well how to keep himself safe in any reasonably foreseeable circumstance (and several unreasonable ones too).

The problem is the students, and their improbable ability to manufacture new deadly accidents waiting to happen, and the damnable need to keep them safe from their own stupidity.

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( 5. ) For shinon: Any, any, back to the drawing board, written 2/2/20

A Change of Perspective (225 words)

Fandom = The Magnus Archives. Text slightly edited from the version on the Ficathon page.

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There is an art book in Artefact Storage, titled Scraps from the Drawing Board and marked with Jurgen Leitner's bookplate, which is not only locked in a safe (as per standard containment protocol) but also wrapped in several layers of very thick and opaque paper, so as to prevent even the most casual glimpse of its cover: nobody is entirely certain who managed to wrap and glue the paper so neatly, or what became of them afterwards, but the rumors surrounding the book's acquisition suggest nothing good.

The story goes that it belonged to an artist obsessed with fractals, Escher, and trompe l'oeil , who became convinced that if she drew the exact right combination of impossible patterns and perspectives that she could walk straight out of the universe; every painting in the book is one of her failed attempts, bound together by her students after she vanished (successful at last? eaten horribly by the Spiral? is there even any difference between those possibilities?), and at best those who flip through all the pages become mangled, screaming impossibilities whose warped bodies cannot long survive once the book is closed and the rational laws of physics reassert themselves.

The worst are those who remain outwardly human, but who nod calmly, close the book, and then head to the nearest art store to buy supplies of their own.

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( 6. ) For ernest: Narnia, girl!Edmund, smoke and blades, written 2/2/20

Pay It Forward (200 words)

For anyone wondering, yes, this is part of As the Morning and the Night continuity.

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The end of a siege is bitter, filthy work, no matter how hard one tries to hold to honor and treat one's enemies with respect -- and Edith tries, both to stop Mary and Stephen from watching her with the shadow of old alienation behind their eyes, and to keep the soldiers under her command from needing to look back on their actions either with horror, or, worse, with rationalizations that will twist their hearts to stone as sure as Jadis once petrified their bodies.

She leads her company through the wreckage of the crude wooden fort, a torn strip of gold and scarlet surcoat wrapped around her face to filter out smoke and sparks from the fires, until she spots a spruce dryad in the colors of the White Army lying crumpled in the ashes; while her squire stands guard, Edith kneels to run her sword through the still-breathing ruin of the dryad's chest, then lifts the new-sprouted seedling from between her wooden ribs to carry away and plant in more auspicious soil.

Edith can't conjure miraculous redemption from before the dawn of time, but mercy, at least, is within her power; and so she grants it where she can.

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More to come, hopefully tomorrow! :)

Two of these are actually from the previous iteration of the ficathon, which I apparently neglected to ever post to my journal. Oops?

Anyway, here is the link to the current ficathon if you want to play too. :D

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( 25. ) For syrena_of_the_lake: Any, any, everything outside us is mad as the mist and snow, written 1/18/16

battle magic (250 words)

"The trouble with magic," Edith said, studying the penciled reports of King Feyraud's current position with an absent frown, "and by 'trouble' I mean the reason it's so inefficient, is that it has no system. Every magician has a different center, which means there isn't any way to generalize from one to another. And that means people who try to turn magic into a rational field of study or practice end up writing treatises of rather dodgy philosophy and dictionaries of ingredients and spells that won't work for anyone but their creators, instead of something useful like a maths textbook or an engineering manual. So yes, I know some battle magic, but that doesn't mean anything in practical terms since none of what I've read will work for me. Especially not Jadis's spells."

"That is very interesting and I'd love to hear more once we're back at Cair Paravel," Mary said, "but at the moment I only need to know if you can do something both large and subtle enough with your shadows to keep the Sarovencian sentries from noticing the raiding party I plan to lead across the river this evening."

Edith lifted her eyes from her contemplation of the map. "Oh, is that all? I can't do it from here, but if I'm with the party, that shouldn't be a problem. It might even be fun." Her hand dropped to the stone knife at her belt, and Mary felt a moment of sympathy for the unsuspecting Sarovencians as her sister smiled.

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Note: This wound up as a tiny installment in As the Morning and the Night, my genderswapped Pevensies AU. King Feyraud of Sarovence is an OC ruler of a mountain country near Archenland who has a tenuous blood relation to the old Narnian royal family; he attempts to claim Narnia by conquest both in this AU and in my normal timeline.

I consider this ficlet non-canonical (for the AU) in its fine details, but I intend to rework it into a proper story someday.

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( 26. ) For killing_kurare: Any, Any, You must have made some kind of mistake // I asked for death, but instead I'm awake, written 2/29/16 [AO3 version]

the seer and the light (150 words)

She rises out of the Green Sun, shedding plasma in her wake, and for a moment everything is gloriously, impossibly clear: all the paths of fortune laid out in terrible, shining simplicity to the end of all possible universes. Then it occurs to Rose that sight implies someone to do the seeing, just as paths imply someone to travel them, which implies that she exists, which implies that she isn't done, and her enlightenment begins to fade.

She buries that thought with practiced skill, but buried isn't quite the same as gone and she retains just enough memory of future choices to know that she'll chase that taste of oblivion in other ways -- the same way she's spent her whole life chasing the void where her mother's love should be -- and despite the ruin down that road, she already knows she won't manage to (won't want to) make herself stop.

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Note: Homestuck, obviously. :)

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( 1. ) For notoriousreign: MCU, Laura Barton/Clint Barton, vacation, written 11/29/16 [AO3 version]

to get away from it all (175 words)

Once Laura got Clint past the urge to rehang the door of their very swanky hotel suite, and made him call in a tip to SHIELD about the suspicious behavior of the front desk clerk and two of the cleaning staff instead of pursuing the people himself, he settled fairly well into relaxation: his only stipulation that she try either scuba diving or surfing before they headed back north.

"I never really appreciated how fun doing nothing could be, before," he said, breath tickling along the curve of her ear as she lounged on a beach towel and basked in the sun and the pressure of his strong, callused fingers rubbing sunblock into her shoulders and down the hollow of her spine; "Maybe I just needed the right beautiful woman as my partner and mission coordinator."

"I'm telling Nat you said that, and getting Maria to record the resulting carnage," Laura murmured sleepily into the cradle of her folded arms, and smiled to herself at a job well done when Clint stopped his massage to laugh.

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( 2. ) For hanorganaas: Star Wars, Han/Leia, Passionate, written 11/29/16 [AO3 version]

the ruling passion conquers reason still (175 words)

They never stop loving each other; that's not the problem.

It is, however, a symptom of the problem, because the same passion that fuels their connection -- that makes them fight the whole galaxy when it would keep them apart -- drives them in all things, and what they want (besides each other's embrace, and Luke safe, and Vader and the Emperor dead) is fundamentally incompatible; Han will chew off his own legs to win freedom for himself while Leia will bind her entire self into service to win freedom for everyone else, and neither is willing to give in any more than they could possibly let go.

They love each other from a distance, then -- a comet swinging around a sun to spell glory or disaster, a meteor shower burning up in the atmosphere of the planet it can't escape, a pair of unstable stars perturbing each other into massive solar flares -- and each takes comfort knowing the other is out somewhere in the void, burning with a flame as unquenchable as their own.

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( 3. ) For adamas: Daredevil; Ensemble or Matt Murdock/Any; teaching how to see without sight, written 11/30/16 [AO3 version]

absence makes (275 words)

After Karen banged and tripped her way across what felt like miles of treacherous floor and furniture, Matt guided her (both of them still laughing) to his couch and said, "Maybe we should start with something simpler, or at least something that keeps you in one place and doesn't split your focus so much."

"Oh?" Karen said, and immediately wanted to kick herself for the breathless inanity of the word and her tone of voice, and then wanted to kick herself again for the way the jump in her heartbeat and the flush of heat across her cheeks (just kissing the edge of Matt's old mask, pulled low over her eyes) might have given Matt the idea that she was upset at him instead of mildly annoyed at herself and how much this was turning her on.

"Yeah, just, I'm going to hold my hand near some part of your body so you can feel the heat and air displacement -- because nobody's ever completely still -- and see if you can reach out and touch my hand with your own: no guessing," Matt said, sliding one hand through the loose tendrils of her hair as he spoke, in a slow, tender gesture of farewell before he shifted his weight off the couch and left Karen's skin tingling at the suddenly untenable lack of his touch... and she wondered, not for the first time but with more force than ever before, how he could possibly stand to live this way -- all his nerves raw, exposed, and hungry -- because despite the blackness that (temporarily, voluntarily) shrouded her world, she had never been more conscious of his body in her life.

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( 4. ) For silvr_dagger: Star Trek TOS or AOS, T'Pring/Uhura, a logical arrangement, written 11/30/16 [AO3 version]

no diplomacy like candor (250 words)

"He must contribute his genes toward the continuation of our species; he requires an advocate to navigate our people's internal politics in his name and that of his family; and he needs my control to lean on when his own fails, as I am sure you can attest it has done at inopportune moments," T'Pring said, somehow managing to make Spock and Nyota's shared bed and cabin look like a throne in an audience chamber, a domain entirely within her own control rather than someone else's home she had entered without invitation.

"All logical arguments," Nyota said, and left the implicit 'so far as they go, which isn't very' hanging in the tone of her voice, the position of her eyebrows, and the faint roughness at the end of the final word as if she'd been about to lead into another phrase.

T'Pring smiled, as shocking and unexpected as rain in the desert, and said, "A most elegant turn of phrase and a true display of cross-species linguistic mastery, though if you had spoken so to me in another world, I might have challenged you to kal-if-fee for your presumption at standing between me and my betrothed; in this one, however, necessity and loss have taught me the art of compromise, and I think that any person Spock would choose to bind himself to is one I might equally choose for myself, for mind, for soul, and for body -- and most particularly, in matters of the body, for your talented tongue."

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Note: I went with AOS. :)

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Part two coming tomorrow, maybe...

Just FYI, the revised and slightly extended final version of Come Close to Your Own World is now up on AO3! (4,375 words)

Summary: The Pevensies can only take one child with them to America. Mary is the logical choice -- she's the eldest, and the only one who has any interest in Father's work -- but she's not sure that's a good idea. (Part of the As the Morning and the Night genderswap AU)

Note: This fic was written for Cotton Candy Bingo Round One in incredibly belated response to the prompt: unexpected love. It's also in response to a prompt from asphodelimago: Narnia, Peter finds a hobby. Seems like his characterization is all about duty and great earthshaking deeds, especially in Narnia. It’d be neat to see him back in England, finding something quiet and ordinary that still matters, even after all those great deeds. (I am admittedly still smitten with As The Morning and the Night, and Mary or Stephen would also be fascinating for this, but I know you haven’t been back to that AU for a while. It got stuck in my head so hard, and it’s never quite left.)

Thanks to branchandroot for the beta advice!

I would like to preface this by apologizing for A) writing in second person, B) inflicting this much hideously angsty melodrama upon the world, C) probably not even making any sense in terms of character development, D) creating this kind of horrible melodramatic angst, E) using pretentious section titles, and F) making you read abominable angst and melodrama. Also, I don't think I made any sense whatsoever when trying to talk about gender roles, so I'm sorry for that too.

But I am so sick of this story by now, and it finally has some sort of ending, so I officially give up. If you have any editing advice whatsoever, I will... well. I will owe you a giant favor, okay? Exact payment methods are negotiable.

That said, here is a fic. (The title, of course, is from the nursery rhyme "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.")

Mary Pevensie and her family: a character study in three parts. (2,225 words)

[ETA: The AO3 crosspost is now up!]

( How Does Your Garden Grow? )

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...I really kind of hate this fic, but I don't know how to fix it. Please help?

Here is another Narnia genderswap character study, this one of Laurie Pevensie. He's been the hardest of the siblings for me to get hold of, probably because he's the closest to his canon counterpart. So far the only overt differences seem to be a greater penchant for categorizing things -- he makes lists and analogies and has a thing about spatial arrangements -- and an increased perceptiveness toward his family. But the latter is, I think, just a product of growing up in a different and tenser family situation; Lucy would probably be equally sensitive if she'd had a similarly troubled family, and if the tension had been going on for years instead of just one.

I expect the differences will grow as Laurie gets older, but even so, it surprises me how little change switching Lucy's gender seems to make.

Anyway. Laurie Pevensie's world always makes sense, even if his siblings don't see what he does. (550 words)

[ETA: The AO3 crosspost is now up!]

( Anchor Points )

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No prizes for guessing who the sun is. *wry*

In Narnia, Laurie continues his categorization habits and extends them to seasons as well. Starting from the Narnians' association of Edith with winter (because of her ties to Jadis), Laurie determines that Mary is summer, Stephen is autumn, and he himself is spring. Interestingly, while east and spring correspond well, as do west and autumn, north and summer and south and winter are normally opposite symbolic associations (at least in the northern hemisphere, which England is part of and which Narnia approximates). Laurie doesn't see any contradiction; he just thinks his sisters are complicated. :-D

I think once I get the Mary character study done, and maybe a snippet about the Christmas gifts, I will post these on ff.net as a sort of ficlet collection, to be added to randomly when the mood strikes me. But I want the Mary-POV piece done first.