Fiction Drabbles: 100-Word Challenge Community

Title: Screening and Selection
Challenge/Prompt: #168 - Help
Original Fiction or Fanfiction: Original
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own terrible ideas.
Summary: A tutor must be safe to have around the children.

◘◘◘

The madam frets and the sir frowns, but it’s the guard who suggests taking his thumbs.

“Can’t hold no blade nor staff nor strangling wire that way,” he says, hooking his own into his belt in placid mockery.

(In eight years’ time he will lean upon the guard’s chest and gently, so gently, press the heels of his palms against the bulge of his throat. The eyelids will twitch, sluggish with the numbing poison swept under the taste of wine, and open just wide enough to see curled lips over yellow teeth.)

His fingers clench.

“Safest bet,” the guard says.

Title: Price of Admission
Challenge/Prompt: #142 - Battle
Original Fiction or Fanfiction: Original
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own disciplinary techniques.
Summary: He holds her teachings in the highest esteem.

◘◘◘

“What did you do?” she would ask him, and he would stand before with hands clasped behind his back and shoulders soldier-stiff and tell her. A classic technique, he had heard her say. Teaches honesty. Responsibility. Good-little-boy necessities.

He clasps his hands now in a nostalgic nod, but he hasn’t washed yet and the feeling is less than pleasant, so he lets them swing loose by his sides once more. She doesn’t seem to notice, kneeling before him with eyes cast upwards, a tremble on her lips and reaching hand.

“What did you do,” she whispers. “What did you do.”

-

Title: an open letter
Challenge/Prompt: #143 - Forgotten
Original Fiction or Fanfiction: Original
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own the apocalypse.
Summary: found the pen behind the desk it was from thailand pretty useless really but at least i can do this 

◘◘◘

my name

check under the couch there will be a hole in the underside and a gun is in there. no ammo but maybe you will have more luck than me. there are also some other things take them if you want leave them if you dont im not going to care.

i dont think i was very good at this. i hope you are. i hope you find this i hope you EXIST never heard of one-in-seven-billion statistics so there has to be someone. thats just maths.

just want someone to know i was here MY NAME IS CA

Title: Cell Count
Challenge/Prompt: #120 - Comfort
Original Fiction or Fanfiction: Original
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I still do not own federal agents.
Summary: From the same continuity as Mayflies (#114 - Value.)

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“Fuck my life,” he mutters into his own palm, crooked elbow next to his ear and couch arm under his head. “Eff em el. That’s what the kids say. I think.”

He catches her exasperated look through his fingers. “You’re twenty-nine.”

“So are you calling me too young or too old?”

She just spreads the fingers of his other hand and he hisses, shredded skin protesting as its weak knottings are tested.

“It’s healing,” she says. “Normally.”

“Humanly-normally?”

“Yes.” The hands slip upwards to squeeze his wrist above the missing pieces.

“Can I swear again?” he says, and she laughs.

Title: Blooded
Challenge/Prompt: #94 - Journey
Original Fiction or Fanfiction: Original
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own bodily fluids.
Summary: It hadn't seemed likely for a very long time, but here they are again, at the end of it all. 

◘◘◘

“You told me that if I abandoned you, any death or injury would be blood on my hands.”

The ward sparked between them, thrummed with a strength not felt for years.

“I did,” he said.

The ward designed by two, brought to life by five, broken by one.

They crouched together in the grimy room and his friend, enemy, friend held up his palm, blood still dribbling into his sleeve from the thin slash across his palm and painted across the tips of his fingers to match the swirled arcs etched on the ground. “It seems fortune favours the melodramatic."

Title: By Any Other
Challenge/Prompt: #87 - Menace
Original Fiction or Fanfiction: Original
Rating: G
Disclaimer: I do not own necromancy.
Summary: He didn't have much of a penchant for the dramatic. Or the imaginative.

◘◘◘

She tilted the skull to the side, admiring the sharp ridges, the smooth dips, the almost heart-shaped hollow where a nose would go in life, and glanced over to where her companion was still paging through the book, perpetual frown darkening his features. “So what do you call him? Grim? Black Shuck? Baskerville?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” he muttered. “I call him…” He paused, seemed to think a moment, and then said, “Dog.”

She and the skull shared a look. “Terrifying,” she observed dryly.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard him use a capital for it,” the skull replied. “It’s progress.”
 

Title: Cryogenic
Challenge/Prompt: #84 - Ice
Original Fiction or Fanfiction: Original
Rating: G
Disclaimer: I do not own old people.
Summary: There is ice in her joints.

◘◘◘

While global warming makes men mutter, her own cooling begins. There is ice in her joints, a grinding, cracking mass that crunches in the same way and with the same sound as the snow that coats her three steps each year between December and February. It is a growing stiffness, a steady slowing and freezing—these are the knees that sank the Titanic.

She laughs when people talk of medicines and reparations and longevity, as if this is something she might want to change. People thrust millions into rubber-gloved hands to seek frozen eternity; she is doing it for herself.