W not really IP at all Amnesty
Oct. 18th, 2009 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnyI've been holding WIPs over my own head for a while now as an excuse not to write anything new, and I don't approve of it, so I'm going to post a few random snippets and then delete them off my hard drive.
And then I'm gonna go do cleaning, knitting, writing, useful stuff.
Random Dean & Castiel
Dean slumped back against the side of the Impala, huffing out uneven breaths that could almost be laughter so fuck you, buddy, and your… he regarded the pile of mangled chain links that was a little uncomfortable in its closeness. What the hell was that, anyway? A mace?
Whatever. He was totally still smiling.
He tilted his head back so it could rest against cool dusty metal and watched under lowered eyelashes as Castiel got a little lopsidedly to his feet and brushed uselessly at his coat. It was satisfying how quick he gave that one up, though, homed his laser sights in on Dean. He’d have lifted an arm, acknowledged it, but most of his weight was leaning on the left one and he wasn’t totally sure that the right wasn’t dislocated, so he got an angel limping towards him instead, to make sure he was still breathing.
The picture, lit by a kinda offensively pedestrian grey sky, seemed somehow incomplete. Dean felt that corner of the eye neck-nape prickle that always had the EMF flaring, and if Sam had been here with his camera phone it maybe would’ve picked up the huge shadowed wings that ought to be there, trailing battered lines through the dust. They were clear in weight, at least, bowing Castiel’s shoulders and slowing him down so Dean had time to check out the red-outlined bruise sketches on his face, the corner of his mouth, ones that’d be shaded in overnight.
(If Sam had been here - )
Cas went straight in for the pulse, which seemed so human a thing for an angel to be doing that Dean let out another soft snort of laughter and let his head roll just a little against the side of his hand, uncallused fingers brushing the side of his neck.
“Still here,” he said, with the familiar thick voice of approaching neck bruises.
“Which could be a mistake,” Castiel said, not missing a beat for a grin, a fist pump, a ‘top o’ the world, ma!’. Dean let out a half-groaned sigh, mentally pushing back the basking until he was someplace with Magic Fingers, and heaved himself upright enough that he could hold up his left arm and hope Cas still had enough angel-juice to get him upright without him having to contribute much.
“Where to, Kemosabe?”
“We should go to a motel.”
It had to be the sudden altitude change, hauled abruptly to his feet, that had Dean grinning.
“You’d think you could buy a guy some flowers first.”
He got one of those angel looks for it; not the unconditional love ones, the smile in the eyes that reached into his stomach and yanked something important up to where his throat was, but the kind that reminded him of nuns and their creepy headdresses and pinched expressions (and seriously, how many of them could fit into a tiny two-door car? He’d stood outside Mass one day, clearing up evidence, and had watched them pour out of a fucking clown car equivalent.) It was like that, but maybe a million times worse, ‘cos this guy had a direct line to God, to the piety party in the sky.
Plus – well, plus it was Cas.
***
Good Omens snippet
It was an unprecedentedly vile day.
The past seven days had been so dreadfully nice that rain, having been invented, appeared to feel as though there was lost time to be made up for. It poured from what were most probably the Heavens (if the force of it were anything to judge by) and was well on its way to drowning the lone shape slithering through the silver haze that was passing for air.
"Dust," it muttered wrathfully, pausing under a wide dark leaf and peering out at the endless sheets of water. "Dust. There was no mention of bloody mud, or puddles, or – "
The rest of his sentence was – quite literally – drowned out as the weight of water collected in the leaf upset its fragile equilibrium and emptied itself over the serpent beneath.
"Oh, yes," yelled Crawly at the clouds. "Very bloody funny."
"Goodness!"
If Crawly weren't so firmly entrenched in a puddle of mud he would probably have jumped. As it was there was something much closer to a squelch and an uncomfortable wriggle that eventually got him into a position from which he could see –
"Oh."
Apparently the dust thing, the mud thing, wasn't nearly punishment enough.
"It's you."
"It's me," said the angel, whose name was Aziraphale.
"Shouldn't you be – " Crawly jerked his head in the vague direction of where he might well have come from. It was a bit difficult to tell, what with all the rain.
"Er," said Aziraphale, uncomfortably enough that Crawly found his mouth stretching into a smile quite involuntarily.
"What did you do?"
"Apparently," said the angel, a touch of a chill around the edges of his voice, "I'm considered a security risk. With the sword thing, you know."
***
An alternative beginning to the Christmas-esque story I wrote.
McKay’s nose – by now bright red – was tucked deeply into the scarf wrapped tight around his neck, but John could still hear the muffled complaints about the snow that was settling on his hair, the fact that they’d been standing there for over an hour, the wind that was making the brightly coloured flags flutter energetically.
They kind of reminded him of McMurdo, actually. A weird British guy with no hair and an infinity symbol tattooed on the inside of his forearm had had a workstation draped all over with Buddhist prayer flags. The script on them had been nothing like Ancient, nothing like Athosian script or McKay’s spider scrawl, but the principle was kind of the same. He wondered idly what Rodney had written on his flag, face intent with a line of faint tension arrowing down between his eyebrows, but apparently it was traditional not to share what was written. Like wishes and birthday cakes… only harder to articulate when you knew that someone else might be listening.
Of course, Rodney had snorted loudly and dismissively when Teyla had mentioned prayers to the Ancestors, but John had been in this galaxy way too long to dismiss that kind of thing off hand. And it wasn’t like they were hurting for good luck, wasn’t like they couldn’t do with their prayers being answered.
Ronon had accepted the tradition without comment, thinking hard before scratching out his thoughts quickly, resting his flag on McKay’s protesting back. John hadn’t been looking, not really, but it had looked sort of like a list of three names.
He’d been the next to be used as a writing surface, McKay bitching quietly about how his spine was skewing the letters, and then he’d written his own against the side of the puddlejumper. The pen he’d been using had run out after the first couple of words, halfway through a name, but he was pretty sure that the gist would get through to whoever it was intended for. He’d heard those Ancients were pretty bright.
When they’d got to the clearing, Teyla picking her way far more gracefully than the rest of them in their heavy boots, the light was already failing and the varicoloured cloth in the grey half light made it almost look like fall again. The tree had already been strung about with hundred of flags by the Athosians before Teyla had asked them here, waiting on approval – the fact that eventually Halling, by agreeing to their participation in the ceremony, had essentially accepted the team as a part of the Athosian people had quieted even Rodney’s bitching, for a while.
***
Weird Good Omens War/Famine thing
Let there be
(white)
light.
Black, first.
*
Blue on their bodies heads hands blue on their feet as they dance the steps she taught them, the dance she leads them in. She is in her element, red hair flying, and he doesn't begrudge her the ravens that will feast on her dead. They are her people. This is an art, in the balls and bones and blood, they sing in praise of her.
This is what she knows of love.
She shrieks her defiance of the silver wall, the shields and spears. But she is behind them, too; every battle she faces herself and triumphs, but it is never her blood on her lips. That is what sacrifice is for. That is their tribute.
Blue against the silver machine that feeds her daily, tasteless meals. Blue on their bodies on their faces, on the stricken expressions as they learn what her love means. How little her love means.
He is in the entrails of ravens that will never feed a starving child. He predicts their victory, he interprets the gods for them, he fouls their water supply and rots their grain. He shows no favour; the land is too fertile and the sun is too kind and it bores him. He stays only to see her rust-red smile.
The copper taste of her hunger, in camps of silver.
It is a dying art.
Black and red: the colour of old blood.
*
***
Something that was going to be an artword entry
The Stargate’s translations make things simpler and more complicated at the same time; it doesn’t feel right calling another man ‘The God’ but that’s the way their words shape themselves in his brain. It’s all like that: the citizens here are called ‘The People’ and their word for ‘world’ is the same as ‘universe’ and seriously, is it any surprise at all that this ended badly?
Rodney twitches as someone trails a finger coated in cool paste lightly across the back of his neck but he keeps his eyes fixed on Colonel Sheppard, partly because he’s learned what happens when you take your eyes off the man for more than a moment, and partly because everything else there is to look at right now is freaking him out more than slightly.
Every time there is a jet of flame from one of the wall sconces Rodney flinches, looking like he has some sort of palsy because whatever they’re burning spits worse than the llama-things on P7G-377. The unsteadily flickering lights makes everything looks surreal and dangerous or – or rather more so, because yes those are intricately decorated knives laid out carefully on the altar thing, and the whorls of red and white and black on The People’s faces are definitely translating themselves into ‘war paint’ in his mind.
Rodney wishes he wasn’t such a geek, suddenly. Wishes he hadn’t seen Temple of Doom more times than he’s had dates in his life, wishes it didn’t feel so much like the drum beats that roll out from behind The God had hooked themselves around his heart and are trying to tug it out of his chest.
John – Sheppard - doesn’t look like he’s doing much better, his eyes half-closed and his head tilted back, unconsciously leaning into every one of The People who dances past and trails fingers of white, black, blood red paste across his skin.
For an instant, bitter and irrational and unfair, Rodney hates him. For the way that firelight looks on the angles of his face; for the colours that decorate his arms, shoulders, back; for the small clump of red paste caught in the chest hair just next to his nipple that Rodney wishes he could please stop staring at. Mostly, though, Rodney hates him for the smell of citrus in the ceremonial drink and how it’s directly linked to the boneless way John arches into the fingers against his skin.
“Hey Rodney,” Sheppard drawls, half the speed of usual, and his eyes are black almost all the way through, “look.”
He doesn’t mean to but he does, eyes following Sheppard’s gaze to where The God stands, his robe elaborate and stark red against his pale skin, his headdress raised into two vicious points. When he quickly tears his eyes away, trying to keep a hold on the pace of his breathing, Sheppard has leaned closer.
”Hey,” he says again. “The devil made us do it.” And laughter is leaking around the sounds of his words, and Rodney twists his hands tighter together in his lap. John – no matter how hard he tries, nudity isn’t conducive to formalities – leans closer still, his mouth bare inches away before Rodney twists his head.
He can’t. Not that. Not when he’s answerable for his actions.
The look on John’s face is complicated but still more open than Rodney knows how to deal with, the haze of whatever they’ve drugged him with mingling with disappointment and more hurt than Rodney could have expected. It’s another thing that it’s easy to hate him for.
***
There'll probably be more of these later, mostly SG:A related.
And then I'm gonna go do cleaning, knitting, writing, useful stuff.
Random Dean & Castiel
Dean slumped back against the side of the Impala, huffing out uneven breaths that could almost be laughter so fuck you, buddy, and your… he regarded the pile of mangled chain links that was a little uncomfortable in its closeness. What the hell was that, anyway? A mace?
Whatever. He was totally still smiling.
He tilted his head back so it could rest against cool dusty metal and watched under lowered eyelashes as Castiel got a little lopsidedly to his feet and brushed uselessly at his coat. It was satisfying how quick he gave that one up, though, homed his laser sights in on Dean. He’d have lifted an arm, acknowledged it, but most of his weight was leaning on the left one and he wasn’t totally sure that the right wasn’t dislocated, so he got an angel limping towards him instead, to make sure he was still breathing.
The picture, lit by a kinda offensively pedestrian grey sky, seemed somehow incomplete. Dean felt that corner of the eye neck-nape prickle that always had the EMF flaring, and if Sam had been here with his camera phone it maybe would’ve picked up the huge shadowed wings that ought to be there, trailing battered lines through the dust. They were clear in weight, at least, bowing Castiel’s shoulders and slowing him down so Dean had time to check out the red-outlined bruise sketches on his face, the corner of his mouth, ones that’d be shaded in overnight.
(If Sam had been here - )
Cas went straight in for the pulse, which seemed so human a thing for an angel to be doing that Dean let out another soft snort of laughter and let his head roll just a little against the side of his hand, uncallused fingers brushing the side of his neck.
“Still here,” he said, with the familiar thick voice of approaching neck bruises.
“Which could be a mistake,” Castiel said, not missing a beat for a grin, a fist pump, a ‘top o’ the world, ma!’. Dean let out a half-groaned sigh, mentally pushing back the basking until he was someplace with Magic Fingers, and heaved himself upright enough that he could hold up his left arm and hope Cas still had enough angel-juice to get him upright without him having to contribute much.
“Where to, Kemosabe?”
“We should go to a motel.”
It had to be the sudden altitude change, hauled abruptly to his feet, that had Dean grinning.
“You’d think you could buy a guy some flowers first.”
He got one of those angel looks for it; not the unconditional love ones, the smile in the eyes that reached into his stomach and yanked something important up to where his throat was, but the kind that reminded him of nuns and their creepy headdresses and pinched expressions (and seriously, how many of them could fit into a tiny two-door car? He’d stood outside Mass one day, clearing up evidence, and had watched them pour out of a fucking clown car equivalent.) It was like that, but maybe a million times worse, ‘cos this guy had a direct line to God, to the piety party in the sky.
Plus – well, plus it was Cas.
Good Omens snippet
It was an unprecedentedly vile day.
The past seven days had been so dreadfully nice that rain, having been invented, appeared to feel as though there was lost time to be made up for. It poured from what were most probably the Heavens (if the force of it were anything to judge by) and was well on its way to drowning the lone shape slithering through the silver haze that was passing for air.
"Dust," it muttered wrathfully, pausing under a wide dark leaf and peering out at the endless sheets of water. "Dust. There was no mention of bloody mud, or puddles, or – "
The rest of his sentence was – quite literally – drowned out as the weight of water collected in the leaf upset its fragile equilibrium and emptied itself over the serpent beneath.
"Oh, yes," yelled Crawly at the clouds. "Very bloody funny."
"Goodness!"
If Crawly weren't so firmly entrenched in a puddle of mud he would probably have jumped. As it was there was something much closer to a squelch and an uncomfortable wriggle that eventually got him into a position from which he could see –
"Oh."
Apparently the dust thing, the mud thing, wasn't nearly punishment enough.
"It's you."
"It's me," said the angel, whose name was Aziraphale.
"Shouldn't you be – " Crawly jerked his head in the vague direction of where he might well have come from. It was a bit difficult to tell, what with all the rain.
"Er," said Aziraphale, uncomfortably enough that Crawly found his mouth stretching into a smile quite involuntarily.
"What did you do?"
"Apparently," said the angel, a touch of a chill around the edges of his voice, "I'm considered a security risk. With the sword thing, you know."
An alternative beginning to the Christmas-esque story I wrote.
McKay’s nose – by now bright red – was tucked deeply into the scarf wrapped tight around his neck, but John could still hear the muffled complaints about the snow that was settling on his hair, the fact that they’d been standing there for over an hour, the wind that was making the brightly coloured flags flutter energetically.
They kind of reminded him of McMurdo, actually. A weird British guy with no hair and an infinity symbol tattooed on the inside of his forearm had had a workstation draped all over with Buddhist prayer flags. The script on them had been nothing like Ancient, nothing like Athosian script or McKay’s spider scrawl, but the principle was kind of the same. He wondered idly what Rodney had written on his flag, face intent with a line of faint tension arrowing down between his eyebrows, but apparently it was traditional not to share what was written. Like wishes and birthday cakes… only harder to articulate when you knew that someone else might be listening.
Of course, Rodney had snorted loudly and dismissively when Teyla had mentioned prayers to the Ancestors, but John had been in this galaxy way too long to dismiss that kind of thing off hand. And it wasn’t like they were hurting for good luck, wasn’t like they couldn’t do with their prayers being answered.
Ronon had accepted the tradition without comment, thinking hard before scratching out his thoughts quickly, resting his flag on McKay’s protesting back. John hadn’t been looking, not really, but it had looked sort of like a list of three names.
He’d been the next to be used as a writing surface, McKay bitching quietly about how his spine was skewing the letters, and then he’d written his own against the side of the puddlejumper. The pen he’d been using had run out after the first couple of words, halfway through a name, but he was pretty sure that the gist would get through to whoever it was intended for. He’d heard those Ancients were pretty bright.
When they’d got to the clearing, Teyla picking her way far more gracefully than the rest of them in their heavy boots, the light was already failing and the varicoloured cloth in the grey half light made it almost look like fall again. The tree had already been strung about with hundred of flags by the Athosians before Teyla had asked them here, waiting on approval – the fact that eventually Halling, by agreeing to their participation in the ceremony, had essentially accepted the team as a part of the Athosian people had quieted even Rodney’s bitching, for a while.
Weird Good Omens War/Famine thing
Let there be
(white)
light.
Black, first.
*
Blue on their bodies heads hands blue on their feet as they dance the steps she taught them, the dance she leads them in. She is in her element, red hair flying, and he doesn't begrudge her the ravens that will feast on her dead. They are her people. This is an art, in the balls and bones and blood, they sing in praise of her.
This is what she knows of love.
She shrieks her defiance of the silver wall, the shields and spears. But she is behind them, too; every battle she faces herself and triumphs, but it is never her blood on her lips. That is what sacrifice is for. That is their tribute.
Blue against the silver machine that feeds her daily, tasteless meals. Blue on their bodies on their faces, on the stricken expressions as they learn what her love means. How little her love means.
He is in the entrails of ravens that will never feed a starving child. He predicts their victory, he interprets the gods for them, he fouls their water supply and rots their grain. He shows no favour; the land is too fertile and the sun is too kind and it bores him. He stays only to see her rust-red smile.
The copper taste of her hunger, in camps of silver.
It is a dying art.
Black and red: the colour of old blood.
*
Something that was going to be an artword entry
The Stargate’s translations make things simpler and more complicated at the same time; it doesn’t feel right calling another man ‘The God’ but that’s the way their words shape themselves in his brain. It’s all like that: the citizens here are called ‘The People’ and their word for ‘world’ is the same as ‘universe’ and seriously, is it any surprise at all that this ended badly?
Rodney twitches as someone trails a finger coated in cool paste lightly across the back of his neck but he keeps his eyes fixed on Colonel Sheppard, partly because he’s learned what happens when you take your eyes off the man for more than a moment, and partly because everything else there is to look at right now is freaking him out more than slightly.
Every time there is a jet of flame from one of the wall sconces Rodney flinches, looking like he has some sort of palsy because whatever they’re burning spits worse than the llama-things on P7G-377. The unsteadily flickering lights makes everything looks surreal and dangerous or – or rather more so, because yes those are intricately decorated knives laid out carefully on the altar thing, and the whorls of red and white and black on The People’s faces are definitely translating themselves into ‘war paint’ in his mind.
Rodney wishes he wasn’t such a geek, suddenly. Wishes he hadn’t seen Temple of Doom more times than he’s had dates in his life, wishes it didn’t feel so much like the drum beats that roll out from behind The God had hooked themselves around his heart and are trying to tug it out of his chest.
John – Sheppard - doesn’t look like he’s doing much better, his eyes half-closed and his head tilted back, unconsciously leaning into every one of The People who dances past and trails fingers of white, black, blood red paste across his skin.
For an instant, bitter and irrational and unfair, Rodney hates him. For the way that firelight looks on the angles of his face; for the colours that decorate his arms, shoulders, back; for the small clump of red paste caught in the chest hair just next to his nipple that Rodney wishes he could please stop staring at. Mostly, though, Rodney hates him for the smell of citrus in the ceremonial drink and how it’s directly linked to the boneless way John arches into the fingers against his skin.
“Hey Rodney,” Sheppard drawls, half the speed of usual, and his eyes are black almost all the way through, “look.”
He doesn’t mean to but he does, eyes following Sheppard’s gaze to where The God stands, his robe elaborate and stark red against his pale skin, his headdress raised into two vicious points. When he quickly tears his eyes away, trying to keep a hold on the pace of his breathing, Sheppard has leaned closer.
”Hey,” he says again. “The devil made us do it.” And laughter is leaking around the sounds of his words, and Rodney twists his hands tighter together in his lap. John – no matter how hard he tries, nudity isn’t conducive to formalities – leans closer still, his mouth bare inches away before Rodney twists his head.
He can’t. Not that. Not when he’s answerable for his actions.
The look on John’s face is complicated but still more open than Rodney knows how to deal with, the haze of whatever they’ve drugged him with mingling with disappointment and more hurt than Rodney could have expected. It’s another thing that it’s easy to hate him for.
There'll probably be more of these later, mostly SG:A related.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-18 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 10:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 08:29 pm (UTC)Mostly they make me want to make vids. XD
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Date: 2009-10-20 08:29 pm (UTC)