(no subject)
Fandom: Good Omens
Pairing: Famine x Pollution
Theme set: Epsilon
Rating: They're G to PG.
Author's Notes: I was fixated on the idea of humanity vs. mere existence, and am trying to use this community as a way to develop ideas for future fics, so there are some repetitious bits. I apologize.
Not all of them conform to this theme, though (#44 is particularly random).
#01 - Motion
Famine smiled when he triumphed, as thin as a page's edge, but Pollution arched his back and tipped his head back and curled his fingers weakly, manifesting victory in sluggish movement.
#02 - Cool
Nonchalance was the key to handling conversation with Snow, and Sable felt lucky that he had spent so many decades cultivating it.
#03 - Young
He scoffed when he could and pointed out that he had been around far, far longer, and Snow only smiled muzzily and said that not having a name did not mean lacking an existence, his hand wandering absently through his hair.
#04 - Last
It had been the first time he had failed to see the division between the wants of Sable and the scant requirements of Famine, and he felt, with grim misgivings, that if he did not learn to see it soon, it would also be the last.
#05 - Wrong
Thousands of years of existence alongside the other Three had never made him feel as disconcerted as he did now, entirely too human.
#06 - Gentle
Snow's touch was strangely paternal, given his odd boyish tendencies, his slim pale hands moving over the sidewalk as he stretched on his belly, as blind to passers-by as they were to him and the pavement gleaming under a growing slick of oil under his delicate, exacting touch, oblivious to Famine's lingering, fascinated eyes.
#07 - One
The problem with Pollution, reflected Famine, and with his own fascination for him, was that he was so singularly himself.
#08 - Thousand
"We're about a thousand times more effective when we work together," Sable had pointed out, businesslike, and Snow had only nodded, smiled knowingly, and nibbled at a fingernail in contemplation.
#09 - King
Even with the tarnished circlet on his hair, Famine never saw Pollution as a king, always the impulsive boy-prince, a sharp, shoulders-back silhouette of white against the grey and black of his own making and his hands helpless and ecstatic.
#10 - Learn
When Pestilence had named his successor, Sable's thought had been to teach him, to shape him from a concept borne of human problems into a real being, an identity--but the boy came into his own and Sable found himself, to his dim surprise, with things to learn.
#11 - Blur
The barrier between what defined a life and what defined an existence had grown increasingly hard to see.
#12 - Wait
He had thought he had all the time in the world to sort out those irritating human tendencies towards the boy from his own responsibilities, until the message had come that the world had very little time left.
#13 - Change
Pestilence had insisted that it was time for a change, but Pestilence had not known how drastic the change would be for one of the number.
#14 - Command
He had sometimes entertained the idle possibility of demanding some trifle from Pollution in the way that it had never occured to him to command War or Pestilence and (least of all) Death, just to see if the exercise would be as futile as he imagined, or to see if the boy, in his strange and impulsive way, would comply.
#15 - Hold
Famine was his own master, as all the Horsemen were, but Pollution with his eyes and his hands and his damned crown held some sort of unspeakable sway and Famine resorted to nonchalance and ulterior motives.
#16 - Need
By definition, as the embodiment of a simple concept, Famine needed nothing; in practice -- he had found of late -- things did not always work so neatly.
#17 - Vision
Snow was a mirage, like the taunting ripples of water on a flat stretch of desert pavement, elusive and enigmatic and just as fickle; Famine wondered, at times, if he truly existed in the way that he and War did, or if he moved in the seams between moments with Death.
#18 - Attention
He could not decide, and never had, if it would be easier or worse if Snow would just pretend to focus on anything but his own handiwork.
#19 - Soul
He questioned, as he had many times with cold, detached professionalism, the possibility of admiration without humanity, and of affection without a soul.
#20 - Picture
Albus White, said the employee pass to the nether regions of the nuclear power plant, and Famine smiled to himself, because the picture on the laminated card looked very little like what he saw when he looked at Snow.
#21 - Fool
He had too long dabbled in cultivating a personality, and now personality was taking its toll on him, and he was distracted by slim white hands and hazy gray eyes.
#22 - Mad
A suggestion before Pestilence's retirement that he might be capable of such a strange urge towards one of his colleagues -- it would have been dismissed as nonsense and fancy, if not outright madness, a strange thing to realize now.
#23 - Child
Pestilence, tinkering with his avian flu, had referred absently to Snow as his child, and left Famine cold with sudden, inexplicable misgiving.
#24 - Now
The stress of humanity's resilience had driven Pestilence into retirement, and now the stress of its influence drove Famine to distraction.
#25 - Shadow
He questioned the validity of his own impulses, the shadows of human urges, and whether they were created by Famine or if they created Dr. Raven Sable.
#26 - Goodbye
He had expected it to be more difficult to part with such an old business partner, until his replacement proved to be so fascinating.
#27 - Hide
He lingered briefly for the Middle East in a collaborative effort with War, until the threats of the anthrax came in and he felt strangely hunted.
#28 - Fortune
He enjoyed the facade afforded to him by human money, slimline limousines and tailored clothes, disconcerted but intrigued by the boy's enthusiasm for a certain guise that had him crawling through gutters, spreading stink and filth and litter in a Brooklyn alley.
#29 - Safe
He had a safe in his office, and War had a red pickup truck, and Death had -- well, Death had many things -- but Pollution, so far as he could tell, kept hold of nothing that he did not need, and so kept hold of nothing at all.
#30 - Ghost
Snow moved like a phantom: ephemeral and aimless but never uncertain, with eyes that looked beyond the here and the now, and right through Sable to some alluring attraction just beyond him.
#31 - Book
Times were moving on, he knew, when Pollution had smiled enigmatic and distant and boyish, and observed that the chapters in middle school textbooks about modern pollution laws were longer than those about Ireland in the 1840's.
#32 - Eye
They had met once, at the eye of the hurricane, and compared notes and progress reports, and Pollution had smiled approvingly and Famine had nodded appreciatively before the storm crashed on again, scattering buildings and destroying delicate chemical holding facilities while it wiped out grain fields and thousands of cattle.
#33 - Never
He knew that he looked like a ghost and sounded like smoke and smelled like a chemical slick, but he had never known and always wondered, to his abject humiliation, what he felt like, and in the blackest of secret shoved-away thoughts, what he tasted like.
#34 - Sing
War's voice sang like a bombshell and pattered like bullets; Pestilence's dragged like a funeral dirge; but the boy, he was the silence of smog and all the chaotic crash of traffic, in one distant, chatty voice that rang too clearly in Famine's memory.
#35 - Sudden
It occured to him suddenly one irrelevant moment, the thing that had happened so gradually: the humanity of Dr. Raven Sable, and the tide of unwelcome things that had come with it, like expectations and desires and a curious preoccupation with a slender pale-haired creature that smelled like bleach and smiled a perfect white smile.
#36 - Stop
There were ways, of course, to stop the gnawing, troubling ripples in his usually-undisturbed thought processes, but somehow the idea of a day unfettered by the preoccupation was even less appealing than the uneasiness.
#37 - Time
It had been mere decades since Pollution had come into his own and inherited the crown, barely ticks on Famine's mental calendar, and already he was analyizing his admiration and his appreciation, driven to the point of distraction.
#38 - Wash
He had stood on a dock in New England, once, and watched the salt spray lap at bare white feet as a more-than-beachcomber ambled through the surf, and although his hands were impeccable as he bent for a piece of sea-glass in the sand, the waves subsided back slick and rainbow-filmed.
#39 - Torn
Pollution's influence in Famine's existence was strange and unsubtle; like a page torn from one book and pasted clumsily into another, it lacked context and ruined the whole.
#40 - History
There was some precedent, of course, for the seemingly-idle suggestion of Snow's that they work side-by-side: old, past days of illness and starvation unfolding simultaneously, the one the result of and the fuel for the other, and two slim figures, pale and dark, sharing a drink in quiet triumph.
#41 - Power
Anything they did, Sable knew, was a thinly-veiled power struggle caged in hazy dialogue and conflicting interests, and Snow's distraction was as much a mask for it as his own aplomb.
#42 - Bother
He was a bother: enigmatic and ephemeral and smiling, under the influence of some metaphorical narcotic that kept him otherworldly, but Famine enjoyed, despite himself, the chance to be irritated by such an insufferable pest.
#43 - God
They were only two factors in a larger and more ineffable plan, predestined pawns with no free will, created to balance the good of the world with corrosion and hunger, and what had once been comfortable guidelines to Sable seemed suddenly, cosmically intimidating: a foot outside the bounds expected of an inhuman being and he would be replaced, cleanly and dispassionately, by the force driving them towards an enigmatic but established goal.
#44 - Wall
Pollution had a sense of humour, at times: he claimed to Famine once, in all seriousness, that all dirtying influence had culminated in one moment just before the decline of the Roman empire, and that he had spontaneously manifested when an orgy-goer had scribbled his initials alongside that of the serving-boy's on a toilet wall.
#45 - Naked
Beyond black suits and white lab coats, the two of them were still merely abstract concepts given form: faint, falsified echos of real beings.
#46 - Drive
He had made the mistake of assuming that Snow had no motivation, just raw, youthful impulse, but as he stood at the boy's side and watched the columns of smoke and felt like a cold wind the irreversible damage of chemical haze spreading low over the ground, he questioned his own drive.
#47 - Harm
It was the mutual responsibility to cause misery in ways that frequently overlapped that hatched their brotherhood, and a mutual lust for it that had inspired more.
#48 - Precious
Moments working with Pollution were a valuable thing, but he could not help but feel that the moments away from him and his influence were even more so.
#49 - Hunger
It was terrible and cruel that the embodiment of famine could crave something for so long without putting a name to the hunger.
#50 - Believe
His entire existence was dictated by the beliefs and fears of mankind, as was Pollution's, but he realized too late that he was not immune to beliefs and fears of his own, and that they, too, shaped him.
Pairing: Famine x Pollution
Theme set: Epsilon
Rating: They're G to PG.
Author's Notes: I was fixated on the idea of humanity vs. mere existence, and am trying to use this community as a way to develop ideas for future fics, so there are some repetitious bits. I apologize.
Not all of them conform to this theme, though (#44 is particularly random).
#01 - Motion
Famine smiled when he triumphed, as thin as a page's edge, but Pollution arched his back and tipped his head back and curled his fingers weakly, manifesting victory in sluggish movement.
#02 - Cool
Nonchalance was the key to handling conversation with Snow, and Sable felt lucky that he had spent so many decades cultivating it.
#03 - Young
He scoffed when he could and pointed out that he had been around far, far longer, and Snow only smiled muzzily and said that not having a name did not mean lacking an existence, his hand wandering absently through his hair.
#04 - Last
It had been the first time he had failed to see the division between the wants of Sable and the scant requirements of Famine, and he felt, with grim misgivings, that if he did not learn to see it soon, it would also be the last.
#05 - Wrong
Thousands of years of existence alongside the other Three had never made him feel as disconcerted as he did now, entirely too human.
#06 - Gentle
Snow's touch was strangely paternal, given his odd boyish tendencies, his slim pale hands moving over the sidewalk as he stretched on his belly, as blind to passers-by as they were to him and the pavement gleaming under a growing slick of oil under his delicate, exacting touch, oblivious to Famine's lingering, fascinated eyes.
#07 - One
The problem with Pollution, reflected Famine, and with his own fascination for him, was that he was so singularly himself.
#08 - Thousand
"We're about a thousand times more effective when we work together," Sable had pointed out, businesslike, and Snow had only nodded, smiled knowingly, and nibbled at a fingernail in contemplation.
#09 - King
Even with the tarnished circlet on his hair, Famine never saw Pollution as a king, always the impulsive boy-prince, a sharp, shoulders-back silhouette of white against the grey and black of his own making and his hands helpless and ecstatic.
#10 - Learn
When Pestilence had named his successor, Sable's thought had been to teach him, to shape him from a concept borne of human problems into a real being, an identity--but the boy came into his own and Sable found himself, to his dim surprise, with things to learn.
#11 - Blur
The barrier between what defined a life and what defined an existence had grown increasingly hard to see.
#12 - Wait
He had thought he had all the time in the world to sort out those irritating human tendencies towards the boy from his own responsibilities, until the message had come that the world had very little time left.
#13 - Change
Pestilence had insisted that it was time for a change, but Pestilence had not known how drastic the change would be for one of the number.
#14 - Command
He had sometimes entertained the idle possibility of demanding some trifle from Pollution in the way that it had never occured to him to command War or Pestilence and (least of all) Death, just to see if the exercise would be as futile as he imagined, or to see if the boy, in his strange and impulsive way, would comply.
#15 - Hold
Famine was his own master, as all the Horsemen were, but Pollution with his eyes and his hands and his damned crown held some sort of unspeakable sway and Famine resorted to nonchalance and ulterior motives.
#16 - Need
By definition, as the embodiment of a simple concept, Famine needed nothing; in practice -- he had found of late -- things did not always work so neatly.
#17 - Vision
Snow was a mirage, like the taunting ripples of water on a flat stretch of desert pavement, elusive and enigmatic and just as fickle; Famine wondered, at times, if he truly existed in the way that he and War did, or if he moved in the seams between moments with Death.
#18 - Attention
He could not decide, and never had, if it would be easier or worse if Snow would just pretend to focus on anything but his own handiwork.
#19 - Soul
He questioned, as he had many times with cold, detached professionalism, the possibility of admiration without humanity, and of affection without a soul.
#20 - Picture
Albus White, said the employee pass to the nether regions of the nuclear power plant, and Famine smiled to himself, because the picture on the laminated card looked very little like what he saw when he looked at Snow.
#21 - Fool
He had too long dabbled in cultivating a personality, and now personality was taking its toll on him, and he was distracted by slim white hands and hazy gray eyes.
#22 - Mad
A suggestion before Pestilence's retirement that he might be capable of such a strange urge towards one of his colleagues -- it would have been dismissed as nonsense and fancy, if not outright madness, a strange thing to realize now.
#23 - Child
Pestilence, tinkering with his avian flu, had referred absently to Snow as his child, and left Famine cold with sudden, inexplicable misgiving.
#24 - Now
The stress of humanity's resilience had driven Pestilence into retirement, and now the stress of its influence drove Famine to distraction.
#25 - Shadow
He questioned the validity of his own impulses, the shadows of human urges, and whether they were created by Famine or if they created Dr. Raven Sable.
#26 - Goodbye
He had expected it to be more difficult to part with such an old business partner, until his replacement proved to be so fascinating.
#27 - Hide
He lingered briefly for the Middle East in a collaborative effort with War, until the threats of the anthrax came in and he felt strangely hunted.
#28 - Fortune
He enjoyed the facade afforded to him by human money, slimline limousines and tailored clothes, disconcerted but intrigued by the boy's enthusiasm for a certain guise that had him crawling through gutters, spreading stink and filth and litter in a Brooklyn alley.
#29 - Safe
He had a safe in his office, and War had a red pickup truck, and Death had -- well, Death had many things -- but Pollution, so far as he could tell, kept hold of nothing that he did not need, and so kept hold of nothing at all.
#30 - Ghost
Snow moved like a phantom: ephemeral and aimless but never uncertain, with eyes that looked beyond the here and the now, and right through Sable to some alluring attraction just beyond him.
#31 - Book
Times were moving on, he knew, when Pollution had smiled enigmatic and distant and boyish, and observed that the chapters in middle school textbooks about modern pollution laws were longer than those about Ireland in the 1840's.
#32 - Eye
They had met once, at the eye of the hurricane, and compared notes and progress reports, and Pollution had smiled approvingly and Famine had nodded appreciatively before the storm crashed on again, scattering buildings and destroying delicate chemical holding facilities while it wiped out grain fields and thousands of cattle.
#33 - Never
He knew that he looked like a ghost and sounded like smoke and smelled like a chemical slick, but he had never known and always wondered, to his abject humiliation, what he felt like, and in the blackest of secret shoved-away thoughts, what he tasted like.
#34 - Sing
War's voice sang like a bombshell and pattered like bullets; Pestilence's dragged like a funeral dirge; but the boy, he was the silence of smog and all the chaotic crash of traffic, in one distant, chatty voice that rang too clearly in Famine's memory.
#35 - Sudden
It occured to him suddenly one irrelevant moment, the thing that had happened so gradually: the humanity of Dr. Raven Sable, and the tide of unwelcome things that had come with it, like expectations and desires and a curious preoccupation with a slender pale-haired creature that smelled like bleach and smiled a perfect white smile.
#36 - Stop
There were ways, of course, to stop the gnawing, troubling ripples in his usually-undisturbed thought processes, but somehow the idea of a day unfettered by the preoccupation was even less appealing than the uneasiness.
#37 - Time
It had been mere decades since Pollution had come into his own and inherited the crown, barely ticks on Famine's mental calendar, and already he was analyizing his admiration and his appreciation, driven to the point of distraction.
#38 - Wash
He had stood on a dock in New England, once, and watched the salt spray lap at bare white feet as a more-than-beachcomber ambled through the surf, and although his hands were impeccable as he bent for a piece of sea-glass in the sand, the waves subsided back slick and rainbow-filmed.
#39 - Torn
Pollution's influence in Famine's existence was strange and unsubtle; like a page torn from one book and pasted clumsily into another, it lacked context and ruined the whole.
#40 - History
There was some precedent, of course, for the seemingly-idle suggestion of Snow's that they work side-by-side: old, past days of illness and starvation unfolding simultaneously, the one the result of and the fuel for the other, and two slim figures, pale and dark, sharing a drink in quiet triumph.
#41 - Power
Anything they did, Sable knew, was a thinly-veiled power struggle caged in hazy dialogue and conflicting interests, and Snow's distraction was as much a mask for it as his own aplomb.
#42 - Bother
He was a bother: enigmatic and ephemeral and smiling, under the influence of some metaphorical narcotic that kept him otherworldly, but Famine enjoyed, despite himself, the chance to be irritated by such an insufferable pest.
#43 - God
They were only two factors in a larger and more ineffable plan, predestined pawns with no free will, created to balance the good of the world with corrosion and hunger, and what had once been comfortable guidelines to Sable seemed suddenly, cosmically intimidating: a foot outside the bounds expected of an inhuman being and he would be replaced, cleanly and dispassionately, by the force driving them towards an enigmatic but established goal.
#44 - Wall
Pollution had a sense of humour, at times: he claimed to Famine once, in all seriousness, that all dirtying influence had culminated in one moment just before the decline of the Roman empire, and that he had spontaneously manifested when an orgy-goer had scribbled his initials alongside that of the serving-boy's on a toilet wall.
#45 - Naked
Beyond black suits and white lab coats, the two of them were still merely abstract concepts given form: faint, falsified echos of real beings.
#46 - Drive
He had made the mistake of assuming that Snow had no motivation, just raw, youthful impulse, but as he stood at the boy's side and watched the columns of smoke and felt like a cold wind the irreversible damage of chemical haze spreading low over the ground, he questioned his own drive.
#47 - Harm
It was the mutual responsibility to cause misery in ways that frequently overlapped that hatched their brotherhood, and a mutual lust for it that had inspired more.
#48 - Precious
Moments working with Pollution were a valuable thing, but he could not help but feel that the moments away from him and his influence were even more so.
#49 - Hunger
It was terrible and cruel that the embodiment of famine could crave something for so long without putting a name to the hunger.
#50 - Believe
His entire existence was dictated by the beliefs and fears of mankind, as was Pollution's, but he realized too late that he was not immune to beliefs and fears of his own, and that they, too, shaped him.