Four drabbles
Jul. 30th, 2010 03:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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fiction_drabblesI've been lurking around since about prompt 52. I usually write novel-length fiction; I can't tell a complete story in under 10,000 words to save my life. This community is actually the first time I've tried drabbles since I know I can't write short stuff and my stories are all original fic anyway. I'm up to about fifteen of them all sitting in a .doc file on my hard drive, not doing anything.
Challenge/Prompt: 61: Mouth
Original fiction
Characters/pairings: Fox, Laz Murphy
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Post-shape change nudity, sexually suggestive language.
Summary: Laz's mouth in human shape can be just as unpleasant in its own way as it can in cat shape.
Author’s Notes: From a bit of urban fantasy I'm working on. Laz is something akin to a selkie, except that he turns into a mountain lion instead of a seal. Fox owns a bookstore in a little college town and got dragged into a bunch of supernatural weirdness.
What first strikes Fox about Laz Murphy in his cougar shape is his enormous mouth, spread wide in a feline yawn. White whiskers frame the deep pink of his throat, fangs as long as her finger.
He catches his upper lip with a saucer-sized paw and pulls it back. In a moment he is a man, naked and wrapped in a cat skin. He grins a cat’s grin. "Kitten, I got something you can do with that mouth if you’re just gonna stand there with it hanging open."
It’s still his big mouth that makes the most impression on her.
Challenge/Prompt: 59: Serious
Original fiction
Characters/pairings: Nicholas/Charlie
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Summary: Nicholas is an only child meeting his boyfriend’s big, loud family for the first time. He doesn’t know quite what to make of them.
Author's Notes: For NaNoWrimo in 2003 I tried to write a space opera in a setting that was, in very fast and loose terms, South Australia in space. Then in 2006 I tried it again, though most of the main characters from the original but one and his eventual husband remained. That one didn’t work either, but Nicholas and Charlie were still loud in my head. So last year I started writing their romance to make them shut up. Somehow over the course of writing to the prompts I’ve gotten into a story I’ve been meaning to write for a while, where Charlie drags Nicholas up to his family’s summer house in the hills up north of the coastal desert where they both live.
The problem with Charlie’s family wasn’t just the northcountry drawl, thick as butter, that Nicholas could hardly understand, or even that he’d expected this trip to go very differently. They made him feel so serious. It was the shouts of laughter at jokes he didn’t understand, and the Bridger smile-like someone trying to sell desert as farmland-everywhere, how everyone asked if he was okay when he didn’t join in.
Charlie plopped down next to him on the porch step. He pulled Nicholas close, kissed him on the cheek. "Y'okay?"
Nicholas blinked at him, and after a moment, began to laugh.
Title: Unexpected company
Challenge/Prompt: 58: Surprise
Original fiction
Characters/pairings: Marion, Augustine
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Summary: There are more people at breakfast than Marion was expecting.
Author's Notes: This is from a story I’m calling "Augustine’s thing" in the absence of a real title. This setting includes genetic engineering advanced enough that very intelligent--like, parrot or chimp intelligent--artificially created creatures are fairly common, though no one's actually made a real thinking being yet. Marion works for the federal agency that regulates genetic engineering, doing safety and health inspections at the medical/engineering facilities that use or make created beings. Augustine is the created being who she finds at one of them, who seems to her pretty obviously able to think on his own.
Marion sighs, dragging her hands down her face. Can’t ignore the sun any longer, she decides. She puts on her glasses and her fraying robe and starts downstairs. In the kitchen she hears Florie chattering away, wonders who she’s cornered.
There he is, sitting across the table from Florie. The created being that thinks like a man, that she thought had gone. If not for his enormous silver eyes and flattened nose, his face would be boyish, even pretty. If he weren’t in her house, she’d be pleased to see him.
He blinks in the morning light. "Morning," he says.
Challenge/Prompt: 57: Glasses
Characters/pairings: Lisandro
Rating: PG
Warnings: mild language, implied violence
Summary: Just because Lisandro can play the idiot doesn't mean it always works.
Author's notes: These come from a story I’m working on titled "The Lancebearer’s Children," which is a sort of political fantasy set in a city-state that borrows heavily from the golden ages of the Dutch and Venetian Republics and Enlightenment-era Britain and America. Lisandro is one of the main secondary characters, heir to one of the city’s ungodly wealthy merchant families. He has a kind of Scarlet Pimpernel thing going on where he pretends to be a much more vapid person than he is to ensure that people will underestimate him.
Bastard's luck, he’d misjudged.
Lisandro looks at the alley behind him, the large man in front of him. Who would have thought that a Salveni shipmaster would know the difference between cotton and linen cloth?
He laughs the grating whinny of a chuckle he’s cultivated, and lays his fingers to his breast. "Good sir," he says, his voice deliberately high and foolish.
He’s reaching. He knows it. But he still removes his glasses from his vest pocket. "Surely you wouldn’t strike a man who’d just purchased new spectacles, would you? They’re quite expensive, and--"
As it turns out, he would.
Challenge/Prompt: 61: Mouth
Original fiction
Characters/pairings: Fox, Laz Murphy
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Post-shape change nudity, sexually suggestive language.
Summary: Laz's mouth in human shape can be just as unpleasant in its own way as it can in cat shape.
Author’s Notes: From a bit of urban fantasy I'm working on. Laz is something akin to a selkie, except that he turns into a mountain lion instead of a seal. Fox owns a bookstore in a little college town and got dragged into a bunch of supernatural weirdness.
What first strikes Fox about Laz Murphy in his cougar shape is his enormous mouth, spread wide in a feline yawn. White whiskers frame the deep pink of his throat, fangs as long as her finger.
He catches his upper lip with a saucer-sized paw and pulls it back. In a moment he is a man, naked and wrapped in a cat skin. He grins a cat’s grin. "Kitten, I got something you can do with that mouth if you’re just gonna stand there with it hanging open."
It’s still his big mouth that makes the most impression on her.
Challenge/Prompt: 59: Serious
Original fiction
Characters/pairings: Nicholas/Charlie
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Summary: Nicholas is an only child meeting his boyfriend’s big, loud family for the first time. He doesn’t know quite what to make of them.
Author's Notes: For NaNoWrimo in 2003 I tried to write a space opera in a setting that was, in very fast and loose terms, South Australia in space. Then in 2006 I tried it again, though most of the main characters from the original but one and his eventual husband remained. That one didn’t work either, but Nicholas and Charlie were still loud in my head. So last year I started writing their romance to make them shut up. Somehow over the course of writing to the prompts I’ve gotten into a story I’ve been meaning to write for a while, where Charlie drags Nicholas up to his family’s summer house in the hills up north of the coastal desert where they both live.
The problem with Charlie’s family wasn’t just the northcountry drawl, thick as butter, that Nicholas could hardly understand, or even that he’d expected this trip to go very differently. They made him feel so serious. It was the shouts of laughter at jokes he didn’t understand, and the Bridger smile-like someone trying to sell desert as farmland-everywhere, how everyone asked if he was okay when he didn’t join in.
Charlie plopped down next to him on the porch step. He pulled Nicholas close, kissed him on the cheek. "Y'okay?"
Nicholas blinked at him, and after a moment, began to laugh.
Title: Unexpected company
Challenge/Prompt: 58: Surprise
Original fiction
Characters/pairings: Marion, Augustine
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Summary: There are more people at breakfast than Marion was expecting.
Author's Notes: This is from a story I’m calling "Augustine’s thing" in the absence of a real title. This setting includes genetic engineering advanced enough that very intelligent--like, parrot or chimp intelligent--artificially created creatures are fairly common, though no one's actually made a real thinking being yet. Marion works for the federal agency that regulates genetic engineering, doing safety and health inspections at the medical/engineering facilities that use or make created beings. Augustine is the created being who she finds at one of them, who seems to her pretty obviously able to think on his own.
Marion sighs, dragging her hands down her face. Can’t ignore the sun any longer, she decides. She puts on her glasses and her fraying robe and starts downstairs. In the kitchen she hears Florie chattering away, wonders who she’s cornered.
There he is, sitting across the table from Florie. The created being that thinks like a man, that she thought had gone. If not for his enormous silver eyes and flattened nose, his face would be boyish, even pretty. If he weren’t in her house, she’d be pleased to see him.
He blinks in the morning light. "Morning," he says.
Challenge/Prompt: 57: Glasses
Characters/pairings: Lisandro
Rating: PG
Warnings: mild language, implied violence
Summary: Just because Lisandro can play the idiot doesn't mean it always works.
Author's notes: These come from a story I’m working on titled "The Lancebearer’s Children," which is a sort of political fantasy set in a city-state that borrows heavily from the golden ages of the Dutch and Venetian Republics and Enlightenment-era Britain and America. Lisandro is one of the main secondary characters, heir to one of the city’s ungodly wealthy merchant families. He has a kind of Scarlet Pimpernel thing going on where he pretends to be a much more vapid person than he is to ensure that people will underestimate him.
Bastard's luck, he’d misjudged.
Lisandro looks at the alley behind him, the large man in front of him. Who would have thought that a Salveni shipmaster would know the difference between cotton and linen cloth?
He laughs the grating whinny of a chuckle he’s cultivated, and lays his fingers to his breast. "Good sir," he says, his voice deliberately high and foolish.
He’s reaching. He knows it. But he still removes his glasses from his vest pocket. "Surely you wouldn’t strike a man who’d just purchased new spectacles, would you? They’re quite expensive, and--"
As it turns out, he would.