Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	fandom: deltora quest, fandom: leven thumps, fandom: percy jackson, fandom: phoenix wright, fandom: slotat, fandom: tin man, fandom: twilight, prompt: alphabet drabble challenge

The Alphabet Soup Drabble Challenge, Letters S-Z
Final post.


19. "Senorita" by VAST: Percy Jackson and the Olympians (also done for the 2x5obsessions prompt, "4. incredible youth")
and i
i love you more than life

Sally learns -- the way one learns a neighborhood, the way one learns which newspapers are reliable -- to dislike the way Nico pleads. On a child, it would be whining. On him, it is desperation. Even though his door is closed, she can hear him begging, and she slips her hands up underneath her hair to cup her ears, to drown him out with her own live heartbeat, her own rushing blood.

there must be some way

no, Nico. no.

please, Bianca

it would destroy us both.

And then. And then. The part Sally dislikes the most. I don't care.

Percy goes back into battle without him, and Sally does not listen as he pleads with the ghost of his dead sister, because it could very well be her. Please. Please. There must be some way to bring my son safely back to me.

I'll do anything.






+++++




20. "This is Halloween" by Danny Elfman: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
won't you please make way for a very special guy?

Kristoph Gavin looks like a ceramic pot, is the first thing Edgeworth thinks, because it's true and it's not quite nine in the morning yet and he can be allowed such things; the smooth curve to his face looks exactly like clay, the color of sandstone and the texture of marble, and his hair coils across his shoulder the way his mother (no, not his mother, Franziska's mother, Vanessa's mother, not his own) used to braid hers before bed, and it's perhaps the only part of him that doesn't look like it's made from stone.

"You have got to be kidding me," he says, voice so flat Christopher Columbus could probably sail right off the edge and never reach America, and behind him, he can feel Gumshoe cringe, because good days never begin with Edgeworth using that tone.

Kristoph gives him an idle look. "A witness is a witness, my young friend, and ultimately the key to any case."

"I think you'll find evidence is the key to any case," Edgeworth answers, a little too tartly, but again, nine in the morning. And where the hell does Kristoph Gavin get off calling him young when they were roughly the same age? He thinks. He isn't certain, but he can probably find out: they've got carbon dating for rocks, right? "And witnesses make slipshod evidence."

"I don't know why you're complaining, Miles Edgeworth. He's on your side."

"Is he now?" And while he was complaining, how come every lawyer he'd ever met in Germany always had to use people's first and last names? Franziska did it, and they were siblings, for crying out loud; no one really understands just how weird it was to hear, pass the syrup, please, Miles Edgeworth, at the dinner table set for five (five German monkeys jumping on the bed, two fell off; how many does that leave?) "Have you talked to him?"

"I was the one who brought him in," Kristoph's smile is liquid and careless. "He's my best friend."

And it isn't what it sounds like, Edgeworth knows; isn't a defense attorney bringing in a witness for the prosecution against all common judgment and competitive spirit, but a claim. It's a claim, and god, Kristoph has eyes the kind of blue that are really creepy to stare at.

"Best friends," he echoes, not wanting to understand the truth in that at all. "Huh."

In the interrogation room, Phoenix Wright laughs at something Angel's telling him, her hands whirring wildly in the air in front of her like a fan, like she can stir her own words into being, and Phoenix's face is probably the brightest thing in the world, the edges of his eyes crinkled like the folds of a paper plane, and Edgeworth swallows against a dry throat.



***



"I didn't know you could draw," he says from the doorway.

Phoenix taps the eraser against the edge of his paper; his veins stand out on his skin, thin, corded, and blue, running down his arm to disappear beneath the rolled-up cuff of his sweatshirt. He rests his chin on his knuckled hand, pencil caught between his fingers and held fast. He smiles, like he'd been expecting Edgeworth to be standing there and no one else.

"I was an art major," he says, and there's a smokiness to his voice that Edgeworth doesn't recall being there before; it's the kind of low, rasping tone that sounds like dry pages, tissue-thin like the ones out of a Bible, that people develop when they want to talk without disturbing the air. It's the way people talk when they're dead, too, he imagines, all clustered together in the underworld. "Before I took the bar exam."

"Right," Edgeworth says, still following and rather proud of this fact because he's long since mentally prepared himself to lose Phoenix Wright the moment he opens his mouth. "Because it's that easy."

Phoenix chuckles (and Edgeworth's heart clenches, because nobody with any sense of self-preservation laughs at Miles Edgeworth, and he won't admit he's missed it -- he won't, he won't, he won't) and looks wistfully down at his paper. "I thought it would be like riding a bike. I used to do this all the time. But it's more like trying to remember how to ride a unicycle with a blindfold on." He starts to chew on the end of his pencil, teeth worrying at the small, worn down, pink nub of the eraser, and Edgeworth remembers very quickly why he likes to keep Phoenix Wright at an arm's length. "I suppose it'll be the same, if and when I ever go back to being a lawyer."

"You suppose," says Edgeworth, and it's the same feeling he got when Kristoph said, best friends -- like he'd swallowed a stone and could feel it stuck inside of him, pushing out against his chest.

"I suppose," nods Phoenix, still smiling, and he dips his head and goes back to drawing, nose close to his paper and head crooked to one side so that the bones at the nape of his neck stood out against his flesh in hard, white knobs. His fingers arched around his pencil, bracing themselves like the legs of an insect, and they look older, knobblier, his knuckles rough like a sore patch on his skin. Edgeworth keeps on standing there, just watching, because he can appreciate art. He can.



***



The next morning, before court begins, Kristoph leaves his defendant and finds Edgeworth by the drinking fountain. He pushes his glasses up further onto the bridge of his nose.

"What?" goes Edgeworth, testily, because he doesn't like the fact that the new defense attorney can out-stare him.

"It might be too early to say this with any certainty," says Kristoph, his German schooled perfectly. "But I did want to wish you an early congratulations on your victory."

"It is a bit early to say that," he bends to drink, perplexed; his words are a harsh twist in his throat, not unlike a bark, but it's deceptively easy to slide back into the language he grew up with. "Why?"

"I remember your father very well. He was my mentor once upon a time. And if his policies and his tactics have taken root in the next generation, I have no doubt in my mind that you will win this case, no matter what. I'm looking forward to it, actually."

Manfred. He means Manfred von Karma, thinks Edgeworth, frozen. The stream of water buzzes right by his lips.



***



"You," Edgeworth declares in what he hopes is his most arch, disgusted tone he's ever used -- the kind that would make Gumshoe shrivel up on the spot and die, and it's kind of sad, actually, that he defines most of his interactions with people by Gumshoe. "Are the worst witness ever."

Phoenix just smiles, unaffected, as if Edgeworth at his most scathing was no more bothersome than a fly. "I thought that was Wendy Oldbag. You know, this is the first time I've been in the prosecution lobby."

"That is not something to brag about."

"It isn't?" His eyes are half-lidded, glassy, like somebody half-asleep, and it's probably the best disguise Edgeworth has ever seen. He stood up on the witness stand and when Edgeworth said, name and occupation, please, the way people do when they're about to pull teeth, he said, "I'm Phoenix Wright," in that smoky, buzzing, underworld voice, "And I'm a pianist at the bar where the victim was murdered," and everyone, including the Judge, said, "oh, that's nice," and went on with business.

Objection! Edgeworth had almost cried. Don't you remember him? How can you just forget about him?

"I'm surprised it didn't end today," Phoenix continues, hands hidden within the pockets of his sweatshirt, apparently deeply interested in the artwork on the wall. "With a guilty verdict."

"Wright --" says Edgeworth. Then, "Phoenix," and he had no idea his voice could sound like that. You learn something new every day.

Phoenix turns his head, pulse beating against his neck, and Edgeworth swallows, says his name again, and Phoenix's eyes open, and they're blue, he can see, because he forgot. That's the first thing he noticed, too, he remembers, the first time they stood on opposite sides of the courtroom, was that Phoenix's eyes were the darkest blue he had ever seen on a human being, and now's really not the time to be thinking that -- then again, he isn't sure what he's supposed to be thinking now.

"Edgeworth," Phoenix extends a hand. "Pleased to meet you."

Edgeworth's breath dries up in his lungs, like a vacuum, and something hot and angry erupts in the middle of his belly, turning the edges of his vision dark like he'd stood up too fast and gotten dizzy. Before he can find his control, he closes the distance between them, snatching Phoenix's outstretched hand by the wrist, and pins it, hard, against the wall behind him. Phoenix's eyes flicker, but that's all the surprise he shows (and Edgeworth thinks of how he used to be, how surprise made him jerk like someone had jabbed a live wire into his veins, and wonders were all that went.)

"I rememb --" he says. "I just ..."

"You just?" He should not sound that calm, that casual, like this happens every day.

"You're a. You --! You."

"Me."

He's half dragged him, half shoved himself so close to him that he can hardly make out his features anymore, which is probably a bad thing. "You ... you. Just. Are you --" His tongue darts out to wet his lips, and touches Phoenix's mouth; the jolt goes through them both, and he doesn't have a prayer of remembering what he was going to say.

"Hm," says Phoenix thoughtfully, and reaches out with his free hand to grip the sleeve of Edgeworth's blazer, tilting his body into him, and kisses him. Just like that.

Oh, he thinks. And then pushes him back, as far as they can go, mouth spreading wide and good god, he tells himself, control your tongue just a little bit, will you, so you don't seem that desperate, but it's already too late and he can feel Phoenix's smile and that's not weird. Oh, not at all. The hand holding his wrist loosens, and his fingers slip down to twine with his; he can see them out of the corner of his eye (and isn't there some rule against kissing with your eyes open? Christ, he is just not doing this right, is he?); there are still charcoal smudges on the ends of his fingers, leaving little imprints of black on the back of Edgeworth's hand.

He pulls back, tilting his head far enough away so that it doesn't look like Phoenix just has one eyeball, and he looks back. Then he seizes Edgeworth's wrist and pulls him out of the prosecution lobby and into the first unused, unlit conference room and shuts the door behind them, throwing them into near complete darkness.

And okay, Edgeworth thinks, well, if you were going to go for cliché, might as well go the whole nine yards.

Phoenix releases him, tucking his hands back into his pockets. "So," he says.

"So."

"How long?"

Edgeworth thinks about this, because the answer doesn't come readily. "A long time," he settles for, lamely, but can probably pin it down to the first time Phoenix looked at him with those wide, blue eyes and said, "Because I'm going to need to know for your defense, you moron."

Phoenix's face flickers with a faint frown. "That's not what I was asking."

Whatever he did mean, Edgeworth never did find out, because then they're kissing again; he presses Phoenix into the board table, eyes closed properly this time, and his first order of business is to get that damn hat off, so he can coil his fingers into his hair, which is as coarse as it's always looked to be, only longer and slightly damp.

He doesn't know where Phoenix's hands are until suddenly, they're spread flat against the flesh of his hips and stomach, underneath his waistcoat and undershirt, and it's an incredibly strange feeling. But not unpleasant. Not any more unpleasant than it is to have Phoenix's tongue in the back of his throat, and if he spreads his mouth any wider he's going to be gagging, he really is, and he doesn't mind a bit.

He pulls them off the table, and he's dizzy for a long moment, uncertain of where his body is or even if he's standing up straight; the whole world is spinning around him (them) and then his back hits the wall, hard, and Phoenix pins him there by the shoulders and the hips.

They come up for air at some point, and if he had any shame left in him at all, he would be mortified by the shivers that race up and down his spine when Phoenix presses several light kisses to the inside of his arm and elbow where they're crooked right next to his face. Then his fingers dip underneath the lining of his underwear and Edgeworth doesn't have any remaining neurons for anything beyond touch and there and whole long, string of German cuss words, which he murmurs to midair the way some people pray, caught in the back of his throat like gasping, and he knows he should have invested in a belt because having pants with an elastic waistband just made him too easy-access, really.

Phoenix's mouth flushes hot against his ear. "I lied," he whispers.

Less conversation, more of what you're -- oh, god. "What?" he manages, which he thinks is rather coherent, given the circumstances.

"I lied," he repeats. "I didn't see a thing. What I drew ... came from my imagination only, from what I knew of the crime scene. Your evidence," he adds, when Edgeworth doesn't immediately click. "Is completely false. I forged it."

That grabs his attention. He goes completely still, so cold and still that Phoenix stops what he's doing, pulling his hands back to him. He can't untangle himself completely, though, because Edgeworth's arms are still around his neck.

"What?" he says, voice grounded and flat as the wrong side of a penny.

Phoenix tilts his head ever so slightly, kissing a path up Edgeworth's jaw line. "I don't think he did it," he replies, as casually as if they were discussing political preferences. "I listened very carefully to everything you covered today, and I think he's innocent."

He's rarely wrong. The worst part is, Edgeworth knows it. "So why," he hisses, pausing as his lips get kissed, nipped, and nibbled on. "Did you do that? Why did you throw yourself behind the prosecution? Why didn't you talk to Kristoph? He's your best friend now, isn't he?"

Phoenix's fists clench in the fabric of his blazer, because Edgeworth made no attempt to hide the bitterness in his voice.

"Kristoph was going to let you win," he whispers, voice cracked like the ill-oiled spine of a book, like a fire log, and it's too twisted, too messed up, and the case isn't even that important (okay, yeah, it's murder, but it's not him on trial and somehow that's important and he's not even sure which him he's talking about, and oh, wow, that's not confusing) but everybody's playing mind tricks with each other already and it's just the first day of court -- and Phoenix has his hips in between his fingers and he's dragging them together. Edgeworth has nowhere to go, between the wall against his back and Phoenix is everywhere and he's fairly certain he's trying to make a point. That's it. Something about best friends.

So Edgeworth says, "I thought you were supposed to be the good guy," and something goes off kilter in Phoenix's eyes, and he dips his head to put his mouth to the hollow of his throat.



***



He calls the Judge as early as it's prudent to the next morning to tell him that new investigative findings had rendered one of the pieces of evidence useless, and he'd like to have it removed from the Court Record.

"Well, all right, although I'm sorry that's such a blow to your case," says the Judge when he elaborates on which piece of evidence it is, sounding sleepy and bemused. A tea kettle whistles in the background. "But Mr. Edgeworth, this could have waited until court was in session to announce, you know."

I know, thinks Edgeworth. But I didn't want you to know whose piece of evidence it is we're getting rid of.

He puts the phone back into the cradle when a noise behind him startles him, but it's just Phoenix, moving as quietly as if he's nothing more substantial than ash.

"Your father would be proud," he says, and Edgeworth knows he's talking about Gregory.






+++++




21. "Uneasy" by Laika: Tin Man
can the earth beneath shoulder my weight?
raw bony ghost waiting by my door
what on earth is he waiting for?

The first thing Cain does after introducing his face to the earth is drink.

He drags himself by arms and legs to the creek, dips his hand in, and drinks. He drinks and he drinks, until silver rust is streaming from in between his fingers, until his belly feels distended and he imagines that he is clean inside. That he has washed away all the corroded, sticky bitterness, leaving no room for anything but the cold gleam of iron. His belly coated in tin, his heart as sharp as his badge. He drinks until Adora's face is eroded away, until the exact shape of his son's crumpled body is faded like sandstone. He drinks until his throat burns from it, until it leaves streaks down his front.

When he lowers his hand back down to the earth, it is trembling. He knots it so he can't feel its exhaustion, uses it to push himself to his feet.

He turns, and they're still there. A man with hair knotted like an afghan and silver shining along his part, and a girl with her head tilted like a clockwork doll, her eyes huge and pale like mirrors, like flowers. They're just standing there.

He takes a jolting step forward, towards the house, towards them, his limbs creaking in protest. His voice, when it comes rumbling up out of him, is squeaky with disuse.

"If it's all right with you, I'm going to put some clothes on now."







+++++




22. "Vegnagun Awakens" from the Final Fantasy X-2 soundtrack: Deltora Quest (also done for the fanfic100 prompt "27. Parents")

He appeared outside her bedroom door with a crack of displaced air. He stood barely a step from her threshold; it was considered extraordinarily impolite to actually appear inside one's bedroom, especially without invitation or any advance warning, but appearing just one step away was just plain insolent.

She looked up from her crochet hooks, and slowly put her knitting down onto her lap. "I believe I only have sixteen booties left to make," she said icily. "I do dislike it immensely when that sort of things gets interrupted."

The sorcerer bowed, a comical jerk of his torso. She sniffed, picking up her crochet hooks again and stealing an enchantment over their surfaces, so they kept on clicking away underneath her palms entirely independent of her while she making it look like she was doing all the work. She'd learned it at the academy, from the girl who washed the dishes after meal-time; it got her top marks from the head seamstress.

He edged his toe forward and found that her barrier was impenetrable. She arched a delicate silver eyebrow at him, daring him to do something about it. To his credit, his handsome, dark face only betrayed a polite sort of hurt.

"No need to stand on such ceremony, Thaegan," he said. "I only came to say hello to the children."

She stood, waving a scaly green hand at the doorway to invite him in. "You say that now, but before I know it, you will have me roped into one of your schemes again."

"I do not understand your meaning," he swept into the room, his cape billowing impressively around his figure. She sniffed again, fighting off a twinge of envy; it was a rather high-quality cape. He crossed over to the basinets, peering over the edges, one-by-one, to the infants inside. Some of the cribs rocked back and forth steadily; on others, the charms were wearing off, and their occupants beginning to stir.

Thaegan watched him like a hawk as he individually scrutinized her thirteen newborn children. "I do not know," she shrugged. "Last time we spoke, were you not mumbling about some little coastal fork of a thing? Deltoid or something like that?"

"Deltora," he corrected her, with the instant kind of sharpness of somebody who'd been thinking of nothing else for a very long time.

"Yes, that," she brushed her hair out of her face; it flashed silver like fish scales. "We went to school together, remember? Became a sorcerer and a sorceress in the same year? Whenever you get some notion into your head, I am usually the first person you try and recruit. You may not remember the trouble you got me --"

"Have you named them yet?" he asked her abruptly, his eyes still on the basinets.

She blinked, distracted. "Not all of them," she said, and introduced those she'd named so far, the ones with more distinguishable characteristics, like the thin and spindly Fie and Fly, and Lun and Lod, who had six eyes each. "I'm running out of syllables to use."

"What about this one?" he gestured with one long, arching, graceful hand.

She smiled, pleased that he had noticed as well. "He's special," she said, with soft pride. "Ichabod."

"Ichabod," he echoed. Before she even noticed he'd moved, he draped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her into him. Without thinking, she leaned against him; the static of his magic made the scales on her arms stand on end, and he smelled like gunpowder and something extremely less human, something like the very darkness of midnight.

"They're beautiful, Thaegan," the Shadow Lord whispered, and pressed a kiss to the crown of her head.






+++++




23. "We" by Home Video: The Secret Life of the American Teenager
you've come so far, weary child / we can feel the ache in your bones
we will shelter you / there will be no more ridicule
we knew this all along

This is a high school. It has seen many people come and go; children have bled their way through its walls, growing too fast for their own skins so that they split, exposing raw, gaping wounds that left trails of blood through their own years. High school sees it all.

Amy Juergens's eyes are wide and pinched at the corners, like she is always just seconds away from crying, or shattering into a million pieces like a pane of glass. The flesh of her stomach is quickening like the crust of a pie, and it's a good thing she's just a freshman, otherwise she would have to make a maternity dress for prom; the less attention drawn to her, the better.

Her sister is all sharp angles and tongues, and she flashes this way and that like nails, and the teachers crouch in their padded chairs and rub their faces, going, "why, why?" and Ashley Juergens puts her hands on her hips and goes, "why NOT?"

Ricky Underwood's family tree is about to be a plus one, but you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at him. Everybody's concerned, but high school has seen boys like these a dime a dozen. Some will burn out, quick and fast, and live the rest of their lives waiting for parole, but not Ricky. He won't give his father the satisfaction. Ten years down the road, he will have tried every bad thing he could get his hands on and be bored of it all. He'll have a desk job and he'll never be late for his appointments with his shrink.

Conversely, nobody will remember girls like Adrian Lee. She's clever enough to make sure her education isn't a concern, but she's so incredibly stupid, she might as well be bashing her brains across the lockers for all the good they're doing her. Boys don't listen to her quippy rejoinders; they watch the swell of her hips in her shorts and the curve of her spine, and that's all she'll ever be to them: ass and tits and flouncing, shining hair. Nobody's going to remember her face.

The counselor puts his free coffee to the side as she winds her legs around his waist, climbing him like a trellis. He lets her, and when her mouth tries to seek his out, he whispers, "Get over yourself, Adrian," and dumps her unceremoniously into the chair. He goes home later to a boyfriend who laughs uproariously at the whole thing.

Grace Bowman's problem is that she listens too much. She listens to the Gospel, she listens to her parents, she listens to her (ex, un-ex, ex again) boyfriend, she listens to her teachers, she listens to Ricky and Adrian and all the small people who won't ever make a mark at all. She talks the talk and walks all other walks but her own.

Ben Boykewich has decided that the best way to survive high school is to treat it like a little brother: obnoxious when exposed to for long periods of time, but you learn to tolerate it simply because there's no way to cut it out. He steals his quotes from comedy central and he nourishes himself on the brief, fluttering smile on Amy's lips, because you can't live for something big, something magnanimous, like fame or world peace or sex. You have to live for the small things, like Amy's nervous butterfly laugh, because they mean so much more.

It's high school, and everyone's time here will end. But in the meantime, teachers assign homework and kids kiss and kick their way into growing up.






+++++




24. "Xerxes' Tent" from the 300 OST: Leven Thumps (also done for the 2x5obsessions prompt "3. entwined")

"Is is just me," says Leven, and the wind picks at the ends of his cloak. "Or are the roots of your hair going auburn?"

"You tell me," Winter replies, and in the lantern light her evergreen eyes sparkle; she grips a kilve in one hand, and she lets it hang loose at her side, as thoughtlessly as if she was a child holding onto the string of a balloon. "You're the one who sees everything now."

She reaches out, turns off the gas to the lantern, and in the darkness the only light comes from his eyes; the color in his irises swirl like wine in a glass, casting a faint, flickering golden glow on everything. She thinks, for a moment, that he's looking at her, but he isn't; he looks into the future, always, now. Leven Thumps has no time for the present. Leven Thumps has no time for anything except his ever-living daydream.


---


"How is my son doing?" asks the ghost of Maria Thumps, and her voice is like nothing she's ever heard before; it is whispery quiet and as loud as thunder, issuing from everywhere and nowhere all at once in a thousand layers of sound, as if someone has been playing with the sound effects at the movies. It's not so much a voice as it is a Voice. The woman herself is the etchy, silvery outline of a woman; hair, nose, eyes, breasts, hips, and legs, just lines in the air clinging to a set of bones.

"Your son is the Want," Winter says without sympathy. "He will never be okay, if that's what you're asking."

The lines of Maria's face become thicker and greyer with her sadness. "Do you see him often?"

Winter swallows her tongue at this, because it's not a question she's used to answering. "No," she answers truthfully, and comes back to the only thing she is sure of. "He's the Want; he is all that's left of Lith. Everything that happens to him is echoed a thousand fold throughout all of Foo. It's not hard to tell what he's thinking or what he's feeling; the evidence is everywhere around me."

"So you don't think he needs you by him? To remind him he is only human?"

Mothers, Winter is slowly learning, are some of the most off-putting creatures she has ever met. "I ..." she fumbles, and her icy mask slips; fear, confusion, guilt flicker across her war-weathered face. "Geth..."

"You and Geth are grown from the same seed," the Voice is sharp and rings with truth like a dozen tiny, pealing bells. "Your fates, since the beginning, grew together like vines and saplings, too wrapped up in the other's to be separated, and that's why you both came to Reality with Antsel and Clover, why your missions are the same, and why you feel so strange without him."

"How do you know so much? You never left Reality."

Maria Thumps grins a skeletal grin, and somewhere, buried beneath the burning soil, a secret giggles.


---


"You brought them!"

The voice is Geth's, and she's turning even before he ducks in underneath the flap of the tent, shaking the raindrops from his hair like a dog. Joy bubbles inside Winter's chest, making her ribs feel splintered as they expand, as if they had frozen over. It happens every time she sees him, as if the memory of her own Lore Coil is a warm coal she carries within her, and it only glows when he is nearby.

"Of course I did!" she flashes back, and when she hugs him, she presses her face into his neck and inhales the scent of him, more earthy than soil. "Revolutions are not that hard to spark, once you get going."

He pulls back from her, taking her face between his hands and studying her; her hair is a matted, ratty mess and her cheeks are probably a blotchy, apple-like red from her blush, but he smiles nonetheless. "You've grown again. Pretty soon there will be nothing left of the girl in you."

"You really know how to make someone feel good about themselves, don't you?" Winter rolls her eyes, backing away from him. The backs of her knees hit the edge of her cot; it protests, but not very hard. "Does fate provide you with all your pick-up lines?" she teases.

His eyes glow at her in an entirely different way than Leven's. "Be nice, Winter," he chides without reproach. "Fate's done some pretty fantastic things, if you recall. It moved me when I was a seed and when I was a toothpick; something so small and infinitesimal that shouldn't have caught its attention and now look at me."

She is. "Yes, but that was when you were something very tiny. It's not hard to move a seed. It's not hard to move a toothpick. But what about a war? It seems like something really, really heavy. How can fate move a war?"

Sensing the change in her mood, he edges closer, bringing with him the memory of warmth. Before he can say anything, she continues, "I'm scared all the time, Geth. Since the beginning, we've been putting our faith in something outside of ourselves -- fate, the Want, Leven. What if we reach the crucible and find there's nothing there to help us through? You and I, we've taken a dive off enough cliffs; I hate the feeling of falling. I don't want to do it again. I don't want to lose everything. Not again.

"Why can't we go back?" she looks at him, her eyes shining and the edges of her vision going blurry with tears, like an out-of-focus picture. "I want those memories you keep talking about. I want my childhood. I want to know who I was before I became Winter Frore. Everybody keeps on talking about how we're going to win ourselves a better future. Is it wrong that all I want is my past?"

He wraps her up in his arms; her hands clench in the worn, dirty fabric of his tunic. Her hips press into the flesh of his thighs; he holds her around the fan of her ribs, around the sash that holds her robes together -- one tug and he can have them undone. The tent doesn't offer much in the way of insulation; they can hear the murmured conversations of the other nits, alarmingly close, the huffs and snorts of onicks, the clatter of kilves. The army she had drawn out of Cusp, out of Cork, out of the ruins of the world. For your sycophants, she said in a voice like wildfire, and they came.

He can't manipulate the future to give her what she wants; that's Leven's job.

He pushes her down onto the cot, and he doesn't once think of fate.


---


"Does it bother you?" one of the nits asks her at meal time, perhaps a little bit tactlessly. "The things people say about you?"

Winter doesn't answer for a moment, doesn't even acknowledge that a question has even been posed to her. A wooden spoon in one hand, her other on the handle of her kilve, she glances around the camp, watching nits by the dozens tramp through the mud. Some of them come and go, flashing in and out of view with puffs like an explosion of chalk from a chalkboard eraser; others are cooking their own meals with fire from their veins. Some drop ice cubes into their glasses. Others still lift off into the air.

She wants her gift back.

Some days, her promise to help Leven restore Foo isn't enough to keep her going. Neither is the memory of Lilly's laughter, Clover's bright eyes, Geth's breath panting against her collarbone. But always, always, she remembers her gift, the first thing that ever gave her a purpose in life, and she forces herself to keep going.

"What bothers me," she says abruptly, startling the nit, who'd assumed she was ignoring him. "Is how preoccupied everyone is with who I have been in the past, the things I have done, the people I have stood by -- all things I cannot remember -- and who I will be in the future, what my destiny is. Why can't anyone just see what I am doing right now, in the present? That's all I have for me; this very moment. That's all we ever have. That's all we ever fight for.

"We don't fight to protect our rights, or to gain new ones, or to overthrow an oligarchy; no, we start wars to do that. We fight because someone, right now, is trying to kill us. We don't have time to be worrying about anything else."


---


Winter stands at the window, one hand hovering at the hollow of her throat, watching Geth in the garden; the sunlight dances across the streaks of red in his hair. Then he turns, and the sunlight falls straight through him; she can see the grass and the flower bulbs, filmy and grainy as if she is looking at them through smoke.

"I can grant your wish now," come Leven's voice from behind her, and she jumps, because she can make out the traces of his mother's Voice inside his words. They flow around her as if they have sustenance of their own.

"Your dreams," he elaborates when she throws him a confused look. He is tall and well-defined, his face broad and his eyes as sharp as amber, and she thinks she understands now, what Geth meant when he said there was no girl left in her; there is nothing about the man standing in front of her that would remind her of the scared, fourteen-year-old boy she first met cowering in an Oklahoma playground. "The dream you most hope to achieve, the thing you want above all other things in the world. I can give it to you."

She smiles at him patiently; Leven the Want tended to rattle on meaninglessly from time to time, and she could never tell when she was supposed to take him seriously. "Oh? And what is it?"

"To go back. To visit the past and to stay there. Isn't that what old people say? The past is another country? If that's so, I'm sending you on a vacation!"

She stares at him, all traces of laughter fleeing from her face, wondering where all the oxygen has gone all of a sudden. Her mouth works soundlessly, giving her the impression of a brain-dead fish. "Geth..." she begins, and immediately hates herself at the hurt that flashes across his face, remembering the way Maria Thumps had said, you don't think he needs you by him? And now she wanted to remove the two people he loved the most.

"He will go, too," he says, his voice even and fair. "There was never any other option, really. If he stays here, he will die, and my will alone is not enough to keep him real and present. He needs the both of us. You will have him; the two of you, in the Foo before this one. You will have your past, your family, your sycophant, your gift. Everything you miss."

But not you. "We can't leave --" she blurts, her heart aching and wanting and hurting for all of it.

"I will always hear your dreams," he says kindly. "I'm the Want. You'll never be lost to me."

Her eyes are blurring with tears again. She really needs to get a handle on that. "How can you be so calm? I feel like you're cracking my heart down the middle!"

"I've known this was coming for a very long time," he answers, stepping up to her so she could see how brightly his eyes were glowing, so she could see his soft, sad smile, like he had said good-bye a long time ago. "I saw what it was you wanted the first time you touched me, and I swore to myself then that I would get it for you if it was the last thing I did. Fate made it really easy for me: it made me the Want."

At the expense of your sanity! Winter wants to cry, but she never gets the chance.

Leven leans forward, pressing his lips to her hairline, where her roots are coming in the same color as fire.









+++++




25. "Your Ex-Lover is Dead" by Stars: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
live through this / and you won't look back

There was a throaty note to her voice, Godot noticed, that she didn't use when she was singing. He heard it when she laughed the kind of laugh that began like a bark and lasted until tears choked it off. He'd only heard her laugh like this once, at a Christmas party at the CAD, shortly after his release. Trucy Wright stood before her, smiling with the bright delight of someone who didn't often make someone laugh until they cried. Apollo was there too, but Godot almost missed him; the red of his suit disappeared into the white of the wall behind him, and it wasn't until he and Lamirior extended their arms, wrapping them around each other for support, etching his red into her blue, that he even noticed him at all.

Then he looked closer, and saw what they couldn't; the wide flare of their cheekbones, the identical pale cinnamon of their eyes. Ah, he thought with a clarity that surprised him, considering how much alcohol he'd consumed. So that's the game Phoenix Wright is playing.

He heard it when she cried, too; long, broken sobs that made her back heave and streaked her face with a shiny sheen.

"No one ever quite understands how hard it is, do they?" he asked her in his deep, rasping voice, not unlike the sound of sandpaper from the bottom of a well. His prison mates had all put the blame on tobacco; Morgan Fey smiled at him from behind her styrafoam cup of tea, like she was proud of her daughter.

Lamiroir jumped, dragging the back of her hand across her face like a child and not with her thumbs like a grown woman. "I'm sorry," she said immediately, in a voice that couldn't settle on an accent. "I didn't think anyone else was here."

Godot resisted the urge to point out that this was a train station; granted, they were both standing beneath the map that told them they were at the end of the D line, a yellow, cragged line that jerked spasmodically through the mountains to reach them from the bay area, so it wasn't a very busy train station, but regardless.

"It will never stop hurting, Ms. Gramarye," he said instead, and she gulped at her tears, surprised at the foreign sound of her own name coming from a stranger's mouth. "It will always be the first thing you think of when you wake up, every morning. It is the echo of a memory. We know what it is to wake up from the longest sleep and learn that the one we loved above all others is dead, for no other reason than somebody wanted them to keep their trap closed."

She tilted her head like she was listening to something, and Godot understood what the throatiness in her voice was. It was bitterness; the same bitterness that festered in the very marrow of his bones, that tore at his words like an animal so that he sounded like one.

"There is no way to turn back the clock," she said, voice low and dark. No way to hear Zak's laughter, to see the way his eyes crinkled and snapped whenever she placed a winning hand down on the card table. No way to hold Mia around the waist underneath the inadequate circumference of a single umbrella, to watch her burn on the defense stand, her hair the color of crumbling leaves and her fingers splayed like forks of lightning.

He shook his head. "No way for us to go but forward."

And no one would understand exactly what it was like. It was like blinking; only moments ago, she had laughed at Zak and Valant as they tossed insults to each other over her head, turning off the safety on their guns. Then, a bullet through her chest; she flew ten feet into the air with a scream like the sky being rent apart, and someone hit pause on her memory. Ten years later, they hit play again, and nothing was the same.

"I'll only be a moment," he'd reassured Mia at the double doors of the cafeteria. "Go on ahead."

"You're just trying to get out of paperwork," she accused him, eyes dancing.

"Guilty," he confessed, and contemplated kissing her; her cheeks flushed like she knew what was on his mind, but he hadn't. He'd thought he had all the time in the world to stick his tongue down Mia Fey's throat.

Years later, he woke from his coma with his looks destroyed, his eyes ruined, and his throat burned like he'd swallowed poison -- oh, wait -- and she had been decomposing in a grave for two years.

"So what do you do?" Thalassa Gramarye asked him with Lamiroir's song-like voice.

"You move on," Godot replied with Diego Armando's unwavering faith, and turned around as Iris joined them on the platform, coming towards him with her hands outstretched and her smile wide and genuine.






+++++




26. "Zephyr" by Loscil: Twilight (Breaking Dawn)

Kuare sat on the information for almost a week, as if the longer she just sat with it, the more comfortable she would grow with it, and it would simply fade away. She had enough worries in her life, after all, and it was too late for the vampire's lover: nobody knew this better than her.

Still, she couldn't get the image out of her head; Edward Cullen, his face twisted and his voice low, speaking in a language older than the earth itself, I love her. I love her. Is there no way ...

"Kuare!" Gustavo exploded, voice sudden and panicked, and quicker than she'd ever seen him move, he lurched forward, away from the rudder, shoving her low to the floor of the boat. When he let her up, she saw that he had pushed her out of the way of a low-hanging branch, off of which grew a dozen flowers, each with thorns sharper and thinner than a syringe needle. If one of them hadn't punctured her eye, the branch itself would have brained her impressively. It was the same branch they ducked almost every day of the week.

Gustavo rounded on her, face furious and panic flashing in his eyes. "You idiot!" he raged. "What were you thinking?"

She studied him, all his features more familiar to her than her own. The faint crookedness of his nose, the deep, sun-browned wrinkles, the black of his eyes, faded like a book cover left in the sun too long.

She placed a hand on his chest, over his heart. "I think you should take me to the temple."

The anger drained out of him. "Oh, Kuare," he sighed. "Is that really the best option? What if you're wrong about them?"

"I'm not!" she defended herself instantly; she'd been asking the same question of herself for a week. "You saw them, Gustavo. You saw her: she looked like the very ocean herself had flung her on the rocks. No human man could have bruised her like that."

His jaw clenched. "No human man," he echoed. "Kuare, I know the legends of your village: I learned them when I came here to marry you. But you know I am a practical man. And really, it is none of our business. Those people, they come here to do things they cannot do at their home. We live in their paradise, and we let them do what they want because we pity them. Do not pry into their business if you do not want to know things."

"I am scared she will die," Kuare said flatly. "How is that not our business, Gustavo?"

He sighed again. Kissing both of her cheeks, he leapt to his feet to grab the rudder before they drifted onto the banks. He turned them around. "I will take you to the temple," he said reluctantly. "If it's the only way to get you to return to your senses."

The temple had been built centuries and centuries ago, at the top of a cliff, where the water exploded off the edge to go roaring down to the ocean. The legend said it had been built by the last, fleeing refugees of the Mayan empire, chased out of Guatemala and Belarus by the wars of the gods that had torn their kingdom apart: the wars between the vampires.

It was magnificent to behold, all gold and turquoise and reaching into the sky like a multi-layered cake, faded by the elements and by time. Kuare trembled as she climbed the steps; in her old age, she came here as little as she was able.

She stepped over the threshold, phasing silently from the sunlight to the cool, earthy-smelling darkness inside the temple. She felt the faintest of breezes waft across her face, and her knees gave way from beneath her. She dropped low, hands smacking the stone as she landed. Shaking harder than ever and her palms smarting, she pulled her hair out of the way, exposing the back of her neck. She could not speak even if she wanted to.

The chuckle that responded was low and cool. "Do not fear. I have fed recently. And even if I was hungry, I would not harm my own great-granddaughter. Stand, Kuare, and tell me why your heart is beating so."

Kuare did as she was bid, lifting her old eyes. It took them a long moment to adjust to the darkness, but eventually she could make out her great-grandmother's features, and as always, they took her breath away. Huilen could have passed for a statue of a Mayan princess; her hair was long and lustrously black, hanging low and loose and brushing against her elbows. Her eyes glittered bloodred, but Kuare could see herself in their shape and their slant. This was why she did not doubt what Edward Cullen was or the danger he posed: the proof was right in front of her.

"Kuare?" Huilen prompted patiently.

Kuare pulled herself to her feet, and found her voice somewhere deep inside of her. "I came to tell you that there's another."

Her great-grandmother blinked, her long, cow's eyelashes casting shadows across her apple cheeks. "Another what?"

"Another one like Nahuel."

Shock wiped Hiulen's face clean. Disbelief flickered shortly after that, beginning in her eyes. And then, a wild, unparalleled need, a want, and it looked to Kuare a lot like hope. "What --" she began, her voice the low rustle of leaves.

It lasted only a moment, before her head twisted to face the breeze floating in from the outside, her nostrils flaring. Kuare had time only to register that something was coming before it was there, another faint breath of wind on the back of her neck. She turned.

"She's right, you know," said the newcomer, smiling the kind of smile that linger in dreams.

She was a vampire, too; pale like the moon or like sunlight, with short hair manipulated into spikes like the flower that had almost blinded Kuare. She was the same height as them. A man trailed behind her, golden all over. Huilen stared at them both, not looking frightened, just out of her depth. Kuare fought the urge to reach out and hold her hand in sympathy.

"Hi!" said the girl. "My name's Alice."