[drabble consolidation] five found things
It did take the better part of five days, but they're all done now. ♥ Thanks for playing, everyone! I think I got some really good ones out of this.
Title:
Summary: Even in the desert, life flourishes.
Prompt: 1. It's gonna rain tonight
2. Neverwhere
3. Orange
4. Content
5. cat by ostia
The setting sun paints the troubled sky in messy, rusty streaks of color, as ocher as the sands spread beneath it. Without the azure line of the horizon to show where heaven and earth meet, it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.
When she squints her eyes and lets her vision blur like her brother taught her to when she was younger, the girl can almost imagine the roiling clouds form a wrinkled, furious face, ancient as the ground beneath her feet. She wriggles her toes and watches them bury themselves into still-warm sand. She pretends her toes have been chopped off, like the witch they burned in the other county, and imagines pretending to scream for mercy.
The girl decides against it. She's been spanked for upsetting her grandmother once before, and she doesn't want to do it again.
Abruptly bored of the game, she turns and steps up onto the porch, shedding fine red dust. Wood begins to creak in a familiar symphony of decay and ruin, responding to her weight. She deftly shifts to the right to make the planks sound out a minor cord, hop-skipping half a step forward to tease out a sharp squeak.
Before she can execute the complicated sequence of steps that will make the aging floorboards sound exactly like Beethoven's Fifth, a warm, furry weight rams into the back of her knees. The girl almost buckles, but she catches herself on her hands and spins herself around, facing the threat.
Her grandmother's cat is an evil-tempered creature covered in almost as many scars as fur and twice her age. He has also been her wrestling partner for as long as she can remember, and neither of them hesitates now. Like wild creatures, like savage beasts, they roll across the porch in a tangle of paws and uncoordinated limbs, hissing and spitting.
There's a sudden streak of light across the sky, and they both freeze in mid-blow, ears perked. The girl claps her hands over her ears as a roar rolls through the air, loud enough to make it shiver in its wake.
And then there's a sound like a hundred, a thousand, a million cats hissing all at once, and the girl watches the sky fall for the first time.
Summary: Gale calls home.
Prompt: 1. Is it bright where you are (Smashing Pumpkins, Beginning of the End of the Beginning)
2. The Losers (David Eddings)
3. Yellow
4. Depressed
5. Bird by veshy
Gale's been gone for the better part of a week.
It's always quieter when the girl isn't around, and Palomir still can't-- quite-- get used to it, never mind how often she takes these sidetrips (and never gives any notice beforehand) or how long she stays away (generally without any satisfactory explanation as to why). Oh, she leaves instructions, and that's well and good, but the sheer irresponsibility of it all irritates him.
It takes him fifteen minutes longer than usual to drag himself out of bed.
He isn't sure what to blame his restless irritation on: the pressure hovering over the city like a dense fog, or the curious sense of being bereft. Palomir feels, unaccountably, like he's been left vulnerable, as if his defenses have been torn down only for him to be left to be eaten by any sharp-clawed thing.
It's not a pleasant feeling.
On the bright side, at least he can go into overtime in peace. Erias gives up trying to haul him out for a drink after the fifth time he's flatly rejected, and leaves his cousin to it.
The clock on Palomir's desk reads five minutes past three when the phone on Palomir's desk rings. He counts off each ring-- one, two-- and lifts the receiver on the ninth. No one else would be this persistent.
"Palomir!" Gale twitters, barely seeming to care that she's been kept waiting, too excited by something Palomir can't see. Unaccountably, he's reminded of one of the flighty creatures that flicker through the Windy City's canopy, sun-bright and fickle. "You'll never believe what I just--"
"Gale," Palomir interrupts, with long-suffering patience. "It's three in the morning. Everyone else went home."
There's a pause for all of five seconds. "Oh, right. I guess I counted the wrong way, then, it's only five here-- but listen, this is amazing--"
Palomir leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and lets her in.
Summary: The beast surprises her.
Prompt: 1. I feel like a monster
2. After Dark
3. Orange
4. Vexation
5. Kinkajou by maladaptive
He is aware of the girl in his castle in an abstract way. His servants tell him she has traveled through the woods in the middle of winter in response to his command; her father had not accompanied her. Her pony is half-frozen from the trip, and he considers putting it out of its misery and save them the expense of upkeep before he decides against it.
It's the only consolation the girl has left to her, at the moment.
He'd looked into the man's mind to see what he valued the most, and found his daughter. Taking her seemed adequate punishment for his trespass, but now that she is actually here, not a name echoing in the back of a terrified merchant's mind, he isn't quite sure what to do with her.
(His servants tell him she's begun to ask for him. He goes to see her.)
"Where is your master?" she asks him, curled up with a book on a plush seat, the leather setting off the brilliance of her hair. (She has occupied herself with reading since she discovered the library. He is pleased she seems capable of entertaining herself, and that her choice of reading material is neither insipid nor pretentious).
He takes care to set down the tray of food he's brought before he turns and smiles at her, with a man's flat teeth in a man's flat face.
"Actually, I am the master of this castle. I was told you wanted to see me."
The look on her face is worth it.
Later, she tells him, she expected a monster. Her father had wept, great streams of water that had trickled down his face unabated. It had been the reason she agreed to go. She had not expected to meet a man.
He ducks his head modestly. Perhaps her father had simply been too frightened to recognize what he saw in the darkness.
She looks at him for a long, quiet moment, then agrees.
Yes. Perhaps.
She is a pleasant companion, and the days bleed into weeks, into months. He thinks he might be falling in love.
He grows careless.
Not once has he let her see him after the sun has set, and he has forbidden his servants to grant her passage into his rooms-- so her voice is the last thing he expects to hear. Even racked with agony, he pulls his awkward, unwieldy body deeper into the shadows.
As if it will hide him from the unforgiving light, or the scrutiny of her eyes.
She takes one step closer, and he shudders like he's been struck. He half-expects he will be. Instead, he feels a delicate hand touching his chest, stroking coarse fur.
"You're beautiful," she says softly. She reaches up.
The beast lowers his muzzle, curling his tail around her ankles, and lets her know his shame.
Summary: Only one need burn.
Prompt: 1. For I must die for what I've done
2. Dark Whispers
3. Evergreen
4. Serenity
5. Mouse by syvia
The shouts of the crowd, baying for blood, preys on the edges of her awareness. She sags against her prison, feeling cold iron bite into bones prominent enough to nearly break through skin. The maelstrom of voices, none distinct enough for her to understand, throbs and shifts like a living thing.
She does not need to listen to know what they accuse her of.
One voice cuts across the others, the one clear reflection in a room of shattered glass.
By eight men and women of this parson you have been accused of witchcraft, Goody Byrd, by eight; do you deny it?
She doesn't need to look to see the sheriff on his horse, bright and blazing and the white knight that will light her pyre. Parched lips crack as they part, lips that have touched no water save what little dew forms on the rust- and scum-covered bars.
I deny it.
The words shatter the fragile barrier she's built around herself; sound roars in, triumphant and overwhelming, and she hears their hearts too clearly.
--killed my daughter on her birthbed, sold my grandchild to the devil to make your spells stronger--
--saw you teaching the mice to get into the grain bins, my John did, and he went blind after--
--filthy whore, spreading your legs by the side of our road for any traveler to take--
She hears the shrill keen of envy and tastes the bitter copper of hate. She shivers under the sick heat of lust and the weight of grief. The desires they will not acknowledge. The truths they will not-- cannot-- accept.
She understands, and she takes them in-- all of them-- opening eyes as deep as forest's heart.
They will not burn her for who she is, but for what she is: an effigy of all the worst in themselves that they fear, pulled free of their madly-beating hearts and throw into flight. It would mean nothing were her innocence proved, for the dark things no longer caged in their chests will circle in discontent: watching, waiting for the next carcass to alight upon and tear apart.
The sheriff knows it, but there is little of pity in his eyes as he gazes as her. A muffled, terrified sob behind her reminds her of why. There are two others accused of witchcraft in this town, two girls too young to understand why this is being done to them, why this is necessary. They are all of the town's ill-will bound into one body, an abscess to be pierced before the infection spreads and the townsfolk begin to take their revenge into their own hands.
It would be so easy to let them burn with her.
She takes the other path.
Summary: What happens after dark?
Prompt: 1. O cities memories of cities
cities draped with our desires
cities early and late
cities strong cities intimate
2. Middlesex
3. Periwinkle *o*
4. Murderous
5. Flying lemur by scratchmist
Wrapped in the cloak of night, breathing in the city's musk like a lover's perfume, she loses the trappings of her sex. It does not happen all at once: like a snake shedding skin, like a butterfly stepping out of the dry husk of its old life, she strips herself out of herself, step by steady step.
The rouge on her cheeks and lips is wiped off in a stroke that leaves her skin cold and bare, exposed to the biting edge of night. She steps out of her teetering shoes, lining them up neatly on the edge as shortened calf muscles screech protest. Fingernails painted the color of a summer dawn fumble for the catch of her dress, pull it down; it slithers off her shoulders and thighs in a slick slide of material, iridescent under the neon lights.
One finger hooks into the string of pearls around her neck, pulling tightly enough to make it snap. They scatter along the concrete, some rolling off the edge; some bite into the soles of her feet as she steps forward, swaying closer to the brink. Hairpins cascade down her shoulders, freeing her hair from its painstaking coiffure.
Only then, naked and glistening, can she be reborn.
What steps off the edge of the tower at the corner of Fifty-first and Broadway is not a woman, beautiful and fragile and derided, but a creature, wild and vengeful. It lands on all fours and leaves a dent in a yellow-painted cab that will take all of its driver's lifetime savings to pay for. It disappears into the night.
They find it nine hours later, gouging out the throat of a would-be rapist with fingers coated with drying blood. That's after they find the other eight 'victims'; one strangled with his own belt, the others twisted and mangled.
The women they assaulted are unavailable for comment.
The media loves a crazy, and crazy doesn't get much better than this. By the next morning, speculation on the serial killer pending further investigation runs rampant. Some say she's just a poor, sick mind that was crying out for help. Some say she's a monster that damn well knew what she should be doing, and deserves to be put down.
WE ARE NOT ANIMALS, the headlines read, words culled from the police commissioner's press conference. Democracy is built on the assumption of certain human rights. To deny even the the most savage criminal those rights would be a crime far greater than any they could accomplish.
The sharks don't care. They can smell the blood.
Commissioner, one source tells us you're quite close to the accused--
Halfway across the city, a frowning mother tells her daughter to stop watching that rubbish and go back to the Discovery channel.
Summary: Twice-dead, once-shy.
Prompt: 1. And there and then I behold that a time will come when I again dead will be
2. Awakening
3. Royal blue
4. Nostalgia
5. Raven by khibee
There isn't a white light. There isn't even darkness.
There's only the sky, and the deep, dark blue.
He's floating on his back on an endless ocean, limbs swaying in a current gentle enough to leave the water's surface undisturbed. He tries lifting a hand out, experimentally; by all reason, it should feel like moving through mud or treacle, but his arm breaks the water's surface as if it's made of nothing but air.
Looking at his bare wrist, trailing water, he realizes he's naked. As soon as that thought crosses his mind, he finds himself covered in wet fabric, clinging to his body like a second skin. He sags in the water, pulled down by the sodden weight, but he does not sink.
That's funny. He's pretty sure he failed his last swimming class. Basic Life Saving, wasn't it? His instructors couldn't even classify him as 'buoyant'. Curious, he touches damp fingers to his mouth.
Cracked lips sing with pain, and flavor bursts on his tongue; his mouth waters in a desperate attempt to compensate for the stolen moisture, but all he can do is roll his head back and laugh.
The Dead Sea.
He's in the fucking Dead Sea.
Halfway through, he realizes his voice has risen to an unhealthy pitch, high and mad and desperate. Even then, he can't stop. He laughs and laughs until the tears bleed out the corners of his eyes, silently feeding the ocean beneath him.
Something passes overhead, casting a shadow over his face, and he stops as abruptly as though his throat has been cut.
His fingers curl in the water, and he tries to turn his head.
Talons clench around his heart, and he arches like a man on the brink of climax or the brink of death with so little difference between the two that it's impossible to tell where they end and begin.
No, he thinks. Memory rolls and crests like a wave. No no nonono--
The world ends.
Later, they tell him he's lucky the paramedics were able to revive him. It's amazing, they tell him. He had stopped breathing for nearly five whole minutes.
He's lucky, they tell him, wiping away the spit that froths down his lips. He's very fortunate.
They don't quite manage to hide the revulsion in their eyes, or the strain in their voices as they talk to him about sweet, bright things. They can pretend he isn't trapped with a working mind in a body that will no longer respond to his commands.
He cannot. He wishes they had left him dead.
With practice, they tell him, with patience, with careful physical rehabilitation, he can learn to regain control in up to thirty-five percent of his body. He'll never walk again, he may never eat normally again, but he'll be alive.
He practices. He learns patience. He performs every one of the exercises they prompt him through, the effort it takes to clench a hand staining his sheets with sweat.
The first thing he does when he regains full use of his arm is to rip out the tubes they've shoved into every orifice of his body.
The shadow flutters down on his chest. It leaves scratches on his throat, and it swallows his eyes.
The world goes dark.
Summary: He reminds her of things she'd rather forget.
Prompt: 1. ALL MY GIRLS IN THE RAINBOW CADILLAC (good luck incorporating this kytha)
2. Rosemary's Baby
3. Yellow
4. Jealousy
5. Stauroteuthis syrtensis by itsumobelated
If she knew her Biology professor could be this fucking hilarious when he was tripping, she would have slipped drugs into his Starbucks latte sooner.
Her friends are grinning, ribbing each other as their professor reels around his table, using the wooden edges for support as he gesticulates wildly. He's already broken two beakers. The girls in the back of the class are already taking bets on what he'll shatter next.
"The deep sea is not the colorless abyss you think it is, girls!" Her professor yells, arms pinwheeling. "The ocean is bri-bri-brimming with brilliance!" The front of his lab coat is streaked with color. Someone's slipped him a box of colored chalk, and the blackboard looks like a rainbow vomited, pissed, and shat on it.
Laid and overlaid on top of each other, interlocking like the lines of an arcane sigil, the amoebas and livers and god-knows-what-else his hands have scrawled out on the board look almost pretty, mystical and beyond comprehension.
The other girls laugh, snapping her out of her trance, and she hears the malice in their voices. She sinks lower in her desk. This far down, she can peer under the other tables; she notices conservative collegian skirts carelessly hiked up, an innocent-looking box of candy being passed around for the others to take a sniff and get a quick high. Without the professor to correct her posture, she's quite content slipping away from his attention entirely.
No such luck.
Her professor comes bounding over to her table, eyes intense and so completely out of it that it scares her. Warm hands clasp hers, and for a terrified moment, she thinks she's about to be kissed. Racing, her mind tries to remember what he'd been talking about--
"Nature," her professor says solemnly, looking at her like he's seeing something else in her eyes, "Is an amazing thing. Take, for example--" he straightens abruptly, spinning around, dragging her with him-- "--a common deep-sea cephalopod. Stauroteuthis syrtensis."
She hears her classmates titter as she's dragged to the front of the room, but the noise is uglier somehow. She's wishing she'd never slipped those drugs into her professor's cup, but then he's leaning awfully close, and she realizes he's slipping off one of his latex gloves to put on her own hand.
"--known about the life cycle of these fascinating creatures, so little that they do not possess a unique common name--"
She's too startled to resist, and the glove is too big. The mustard-colored rubber flops around on her fingers like her mom's dress when she was three years old, missing and hurting and wanting her back.
"--light organs at the base of each sucker, thought to attract prey rather than mates--"
(The paisley-patterned cotton had still smelled like her. Before the sickness. Before dying. Before everything.)
"Like ships in the night," her professor murmurs softly, breath warm on her face. "It is only by chance that they meet." Yellow-clad fingers entwine with her own, oddly gentle.
"And the sole reason the mother exists is to let her children live."
He doesn't look like he's high anymore.
"Stop it," she whispers.
"Perhaps, miss Rose," he replies, words for her ears alone. "You should refrain from slipping hallucinogens into people's drinks simply because you've been told."
"Let me go."
He had been faking all along.
He smiles.
And he releases her.
Summary: Some questions are better left unanswered.
Prompt: 1. I'm nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too?
2. Life of Pi
3. Sea Green
4. Uncertainty (or discomfort of being uncertain?)
5. Goldfish by izuma_yaki
Sometimes, Isle says, the only way to understand how a mind went wrong is to trace it back to where it began.
Nick thinks it's a stupid idea, but she goes anyway.
The nuns don't ask any questions, thankfully. They do, however, quietly tell her that the room hasn't been used for some time. Not since...
That's fine, Nick tells them, smiling grimly. It's the last occupant she's interested anyway.
The lack of windows is something she expected before she came here-- heaven forbid they permit the insane to be exposed to the unhealthy stimulation of sunlight. It isn't until her fifth fruitless attempt to grope for a light switch that she realizes that no one ever bothered to install one.
Cursing about overtime pay under her breath, she fumbles for the heavy-duty flashlight on her hip and flicks it on, peering into the gloom.
It's a small room, small even for her. A child would have more room to move around in, but with the complete lack of any openings-- the door's rotting on its hinges now, but it doesn't take much imagination to realize it was a fairly solid thing, nothing but a slit near the bottom for food-- the net effect couldn't have been anything but claustrophobic.
Sweeping the light around reveals a sad-looking pile in one corner. Nick steps closer to investigate.
The nun wasn't lying-- they really didn't touch anything. Using the tip of a boot, Nick prods the rusty remains of what must have been a chamber pot at some time, though whatever contents it might have evaporated years ago. She grimaces. There are other things, tattered rags wrapped around something she's loathe to pick up, but then the flashlight beam catches a spot of bright color in the darkness, and she takes a closer look.
Huh. Chalk.
The drawings are faded, worn away by time and the motions of a hundred thousand tiny tireless creatures whose activities aren't always governed by sunlight. She almost reaches out to touch them, then changes her mind; she leans forward instead, trying to read the crazy hieroglyphs of a child who'd lived in almost complete darkness.
Aqua-colored ferns frame an orange oasis; something that could be a fish (or a dog or a bear) is suspended, splay-legged, in a semi-circle. Kinda cute, really. Half-recognizable numbers trail up to the corner where the walls meet, then turn ninety degrees and march straight up, unrelenting. Amused, she uses the flashlight to follow the trail of numbers.
Her smile drops, abruptly.
God. What kind of kid draws pencils stabbing through their imaginary goldfish?
Nick doesn't realize someone else has joined her until an awfully familiar scent fills her nostrils. By then, a deceptively frail arm has wound around her waist, pulling her up against something unpleasantly soft. Cold steel kisses her throat, and she restrains the impulse to swallow.
"Oh darling, darling, darling," he coos into her ear, low and rough and-- angry. He's actually angry.
"Didn't your mother teach you not to go digging for skeletons in people's closets?"
Summary: Can't run from your past.
Prompt: 1. "You think you're evil but you're not"
2. Unnatural Wonders
3. Red
4. Entitlement
5. Moth by chriskarate
Sometimes, it was hard to remember that there was a before.
"Do you remember?" she asked him, screaming so that her voice could outlast the storm. "It was ten years ago. On my eighth birthday. You told me you'd show me something I'd never seen before."
"You chased me to the ends of the earth for the secret to a trick you never understood?" His voice was thick with disbelief, high and wild over the roar of the waves. He was perched on the mast like a scarecrow, a dead thing, ragged cape spreading out behind him like broken wings.
He was the stuff of children's nightmares.
In answer, she shook her head, winding her arms tighter into the tattered remains of the rigging. Holding on for so long had left rope burns on her wrists, and the salty copper of her blood was starting to mix with the sea. The raw flesh sang with every splash of seawater.
"I chased you to the ends of the earth," she said, softly, "To help a man who never understood himself."
His face twisted with something too hurt and unchecked to be anger; quicker than she could breathe, quicker than she could think, he closed the gap between them, leaping from the pitching mast to pin her to the deck.
"You lost your claim to that right a long time ago," he hissed, and his voice chilled her more than the water pouring down the back of her dress. Her wrists ached under the pressure of his fingers, threatening to break--
Just as abruptly, his weight lifted away, and he was gone.
Breathless in the wake of his departure, she wondered, suddenly, where everything had gone wrong.
Even by the time strong hands finally bore her up and dragged her to the last lifeboat, merciful oblivion claiming her when they cut away the ropes buried in her flesh, she couldn't come up with an answer.
Summary: A deal with a devil.
Prompt: 1. They're counting on a guilty conscience to save you, but I'm banking on the deep blue eyes and the face too.
2. Midsummer Night's Dream (shut up plays are books too)
3. Gold
4. Regret
5. Fox by purplesyrup
"Don't say it."
I wasn't going to say anything. Keane isn't sure, but he can almost hear the fairy grinning at him. Granted, it's a little difficult to tell, considering that he's hanging upside-down by his ankles and that the other party in this conversation is currently on all fours and equipped with a muzzle.
It could be a trick of the light, or the fact that the mouth of the thing below him is crammed with more wickedly sharp teeth than it should be able to hold. Hell, it's a fox spirit. It could probably grow a third eye in its ass if it really wanted to, never mind smiling.
Keane rotates on the rope slowly, unable to stop himself; the fox obligingly trots over to seat itself in his new field of vision. He scowls, looking away.
Finally, the fox fairy deigns to speak. You know, this would have been much easier if you had--
"I didn't know they were going to seriously try and kill me!" Keane explodes. "These people have so much money they jingle when they breathe, how was I supposed to know they'd miss a grubby old pot--"
They're not going to kill you.
"Of course they're going to kill me! What part of chanting 'burn the thief' while shaking pitchforks the size of cows doesn't get that point across?"
The fox shakes its head. Their laws forbid them from killing you outright. Even for trying to steal the elixir of life.
"The elixir of--, oh, hell." He sags in his bindings, wishing he had a hand free to smack against his head. "That's what the old man wanted. I should've known it was too much money to be something ordinary."
The fox shifts onto its haunches, and he's uncomfortably aware of the intelligence in bright amber eyes. You should have heard me out.
"Sorry," Keane snaps. "I'm not exactly used to having wild animals talking to me--"
I'd watch my tongue, if I were you. The fox's eyes glint.
They're not going to kill you. But they can extend the debate on what to do with you until you simply waste away here, and oh dear, what a pity, they had no idea mortals were so fragile. It pauses.
Or they could decide to use the time-honored tradition of dropping you into the crocodile pit. After you've been starved for a week or so. If you die, you're innocent.
Contemplating the mental image, he winces. He's fairly certain he isn't imagining how that smirk on the fox's mouth turns a bit crueler.
I'm here to offer you a way out.
"Yeah, yeah. But not for free, right?"
The fox leans forward until its cool, wet nose is pressed against Keane's and he goes cross-eyed trying to look at it.
We both know you aren't in a position to bargain, so you'll do exactly as I say. Because you're too afraid to die and face all the people you've killed.
The worst part, Keane realizes, is that it's right.
Summary: Here we go again.
Prompt: 1. Rush hour in the pouring rain
2. Hard Boiled
3. Turquoise
4. Selfishness
5. Turtle by audzilla
There weren't many customers today, and Elena figured that was as much to blame on the weather as anything else. After the umpteenth hassled-looking commuter rushed past her, dripping wet, moving away before she could do so much as blink, she gave up and decided to call it a day.
The Seven-Eleven across the street was dry, and mostly empty; the teenager mopping up the mud and grit people have tracked in from the street didn't even look up when she stepped in. So much for being ready to serve you. She fussed with her shawl, arranging its damp folds in a way that hid her lack of cleavage, and set about getting herself something to eat.
She was two cups of coffee later and halfway to feeling human before someone recognized her.
"Ah, hey. The fortuneteller from the subway station, right?"
Didn't sound like a debt collector. Elena risked turning her head, narrowed eyes taking in a boy with a squashed-looking cap jammed down onto his head. She didn't remember seeing him before, but then again, she didn't remember a lot of people unless she had a reason to avoid them. Why this one cared enough to talk to her probably doesn't mean anything good.
Trying to remember if she'd given out any particularly overoptimistic fortunes in the past few days, Elena almost missed him talking again.
"I guess even you've got to have days off, huh?"
Too chummy, and he was looking at her like he knew something he wasn't letting her in on. She scowled at him, hoping that would be enough to get him off her back-- no such luck. He was still grinning.
"Listen, I don't know who you are or what you want, but I'm just here for a coffee, all right?" She turned the styrofoam cup in her hands, wishing she'd stuck to the subway. So what if the water flooding the streets spilled down the stairs and right up to her usual spot?
"Now that's just cold. And I haven't even introduced myself, Elena."
Her head snapped up, faster than if he'd taken needles and stabbed them into her chest. "How the hell--"
"I wouldn't yell, if I were you," he advised cheerfully. "Those kids at the counter are paid far too little for them to come running to your aid."
Something cold, heavy, and unsubtly threatening dug into the small of her back. Her mouth worked softly, soundlessly; after a moment, she shut it with a click of teeth. "All right."
"I'm glad to see you're capable of reason," the boy murmured-- but he wasn't really a boy, was he? A sick swoop of something in her stomach nearly made her retch up everything she'd eaten; she quashed it down. "You've been telling made-up fortunes for the better part of seven years, now. We figured it was high time you got back to what you're really good at."
She folded her arms tightly enough that she could feel her tortoiseshell bangles digging into her forearms. It was a comforting sensation. "I gave up talking to the dead a long time ago. I don't think I can even hear them anymore."
"Don't lie." He grinned. "I know you need to pop three pills a night before you can even lie down."
"Yeah, well, some people just have something called insomnia," she snapped. "It's a medical condition. I don't understand what you could possibly need me for--"
The boy propped his chin in his hands, giving her a smile that cut right to bone.
"How about helping us do a little detective work?"
Title:
Summary: Even in the desert, life flourishes.
Prompt: 1. It's gonna rain tonight
2. Neverwhere
3. Orange
4. Content
5. cat by ostia
The setting sun paints the troubled sky in messy, rusty streaks of color, as ocher as the sands spread beneath it. Without the azure line of the horizon to show where heaven and earth meet, it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.
When she squints her eyes and lets her vision blur like her brother taught her to when she was younger, the girl can almost imagine the roiling clouds form a wrinkled, furious face, ancient as the ground beneath her feet. She wriggles her toes and watches them bury themselves into still-warm sand. She pretends her toes have been chopped off, like the witch they burned in the other county, and imagines pretending to scream for mercy.
The girl decides against it. She's been spanked for upsetting her grandmother once before, and she doesn't want to do it again.
Abruptly bored of the game, she turns and steps up onto the porch, shedding fine red dust. Wood begins to creak in a familiar symphony of decay and ruin, responding to her weight. She deftly shifts to the right to make the planks sound out a minor cord, hop-skipping half a step forward to tease out a sharp squeak.
Before she can execute the complicated sequence of steps that will make the aging floorboards sound exactly like Beethoven's Fifth, a warm, furry weight rams into the back of her knees. The girl almost buckles, but she catches herself on her hands and spins herself around, facing the threat.
Her grandmother's cat is an evil-tempered creature covered in almost as many scars as fur and twice her age. He has also been her wrestling partner for as long as she can remember, and neither of them hesitates now. Like wild creatures, like savage beasts, they roll across the porch in a tangle of paws and uncoordinated limbs, hissing and spitting.
There's a sudden streak of light across the sky, and they both freeze in mid-blow, ears perked. The girl claps her hands over her ears as a roar rolls through the air, loud enough to make it shiver in its wake.
And then there's a sound like a hundred, a thousand, a million cats hissing all at once, and the girl watches the sky fall for the first time.
Summary: Gale calls home.
Prompt: 1. Is it bright where you are (Smashing Pumpkins, Beginning of the End of the Beginning)
2. The Losers (David Eddings)
3. Yellow
4. Depressed
5. Bird by veshy
Gale's been gone for the better part of a week.
It's always quieter when the girl isn't around, and Palomir still can't-- quite-- get used to it, never mind how often she takes these sidetrips (and never gives any notice beforehand) or how long she stays away (generally without any satisfactory explanation as to why). Oh, she leaves instructions, and that's well and good, but the sheer irresponsibility of it all irritates him.
It takes him fifteen minutes longer than usual to drag himself out of bed.
He isn't sure what to blame his restless irritation on: the pressure hovering over the city like a dense fog, or the curious sense of being bereft. Palomir feels, unaccountably, like he's been left vulnerable, as if his defenses have been torn down only for him to be left to be eaten by any sharp-clawed thing.
It's not a pleasant feeling.
On the bright side, at least he can go into overtime in peace. Erias gives up trying to haul him out for a drink after the fifth time he's flatly rejected, and leaves his cousin to it.
The clock on Palomir's desk reads five minutes past three when the phone on Palomir's desk rings. He counts off each ring-- one, two-- and lifts the receiver on the ninth. No one else would be this persistent.
"Palomir!" Gale twitters, barely seeming to care that she's been kept waiting, too excited by something Palomir can't see. Unaccountably, he's reminded of one of the flighty creatures that flicker through the Windy City's canopy, sun-bright and fickle. "You'll never believe what I just--"
"Gale," Palomir interrupts, with long-suffering patience. "It's three in the morning. Everyone else went home."
There's a pause for all of five seconds. "Oh, right. I guess I counted the wrong way, then, it's only five here-- but listen, this is amazing--"
Palomir leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and lets her in.
Summary: The beast surprises her.
Prompt: 1. I feel like a monster
2. After Dark
3. Orange
4. Vexation
5. Kinkajou by maladaptive
He is aware of the girl in his castle in an abstract way. His servants tell him she has traveled through the woods in the middle of winter in response to his command; her father had not accompanied her. Her pony is half-frozen from the trip, and he considers putting it out of its misery and save them the expense of upkeep before he decides against it.
It's the only consolation the girl has left to her, at the moment.
He'd looked into the man's mind to see what he valued the most, and found his daughter. Taking her seemed adequate punishment for his trespass, but now that she is actually here, not a name echoing in the back of a terrified merchant's mind, he isn't quite sure what to do with her.
(His servants tell him she's begun to ask for him. He goes to see her.)
"Where is your master?" she asks him, curled up with a book on a plush seat, the leather setting off the brilliance of her hair. (She has occupied herself with reading since she discovered the library. He is pleased she seems capable of entertaining herself, and that her choice of reading material is neither insipid nor pretentious).
He takes care to set down the tray of food he's brought before he turns and smiles at her, with a man's flat teeth in a man's flat face.
"Actually, I am the master of this castle. I was told you wanted to see me."
The look on her face is worth it.
Later, she tells him, she expected a monster. Her father had wept, great streams of water that had trickled down his face unabated. It had been the reason she agreed to go. She had not expected to meet a man.
He ducks his head modestly. Perhaps her father had simply been too frightened to recognize what he saw in the darkness.
She looks at him for a long, quiet moment, then agrees.
Yes. Perhaps.
She is a pleasant companion, and the days bleed into weeks, into months. He thinks he might be falling in love.
He grows careless.
Not once has he let her see him after the sun has set, and he has forbidden his servants to grant her passage into his rooms-- so her voice is the last thing he expects to hear. Even racked with agony, he pulls his awkward, unwieldy body deeper into the shadows.
As if it will hide him from the unforgiving light, or the scrutiny of her eyes.
She takes one step closer, and he shudders like he's been struck. He half-expects he will be. Instead, he feels a delicate hand touching his chest, stroking coarse fur.
"You're beautiful," she says softly. She reaches up.
The beast lowers his muzzle, curling his tail around her ankles, and lets her know his shame.
Summary: Only one need burn.
Prompt: 1. For I must die for what I've done
2. Dark Whispers
3. Evergreen
4. Serenity
5. Mouse by syvia
The shouts of the crowd, baying for blood, preys on the edges of her awareness. She sags against her prison, feeling cold iron bite into bones prominent enough to nearly break through skin. The maelstrom of voices, none distinct enough for her to understand, throbs and shifts like a living thing.
She does not need to listen to know what they accuse her of.
One voice cuts across the others, the one clear reflection in a room of shattered glass.
By eight men and women of this parson you have been accused of witchcraft, Goody Byrd, by eight; do you deny it?
She doesn't need to look to see the sheriff on his horse, bright and blazing and the white knight that will light her pyre. Parched lips crack as they part, lips that have touched no water save what little dew forms on the rust- and scum-covered bars.
I deny it.
The words shatter the fragile barrier she's built around herself; sound roars in, triumphant and overwhelming, and she hears their hearts too clearly.
--killed my daughter on her birthbed, sold my grandchild to the devil to make your spells stronger--
--saw you teaching the mice to get into the grain bins, my John did, and he went blind after--
--filthy whore, spreading your legs by the side of our road for any traveler to take--
She hears the shrill keen of envy and tastes the bitter copper of hate. She shivers under the sick heat of lust and the weight of grief. The desires they will not acknowledge. The truths they will not-- cannot-- accept.
She understands, and she takes them in-- all of them-- opening eyes as deep as forest's heart.
They will not burn her for who she is, but for what she is: an effigy of all the worst in themselves that they fear, pulled free of their madly-beating hearts and throw into flight. It would mean nothing were her innocence proved, for the dark things no longer caged in their chests will circle in discontent: watching, waiting for the next carcass to alight upon and tear apart.
The sheriff knows it, but there is little of pity in his eyes as he gazes as her. A muffled, terrified sob behind her reminds her of why. There are two others accused of witchcraft in this town, two girls too young to understand why this is being done to them, why this is necessary. They are all of the town's ill-will bound into one body, an abscess to be pierced before the infection spreads and the townsfolk begin to take their revenge into their own hands.
It would be so easy to let them burn with her.
She takes the other path.
Summary: What happens after dark?
Prompt: 1. O cities memories of cities
cities draped with our desires
cities early and late
cities strong cities intimate
2. Middlesex
3. Periwinkle *o*
4. Murderous
5. Flying lemur by scratchmist
Wrapped in the cloak of night, breathing in the city's musk like a lover's perfume, she loses the trappings of her sex. It does not happen all at once: like a snake shedding skin, like a butterfly stepping out of the dry husk of its old life, she strips herself out of herself, step by steady step.
The rouge on her cheeks and lips is wiped off in a stroke that leaves her skin cold and bare, exposed to the biting edge of night. She steps out of her teetering shoes, lining them up neatly on the edge as shortened calf muscles screech protest. Fingernails painted the color of a summer dawn fumble for the catch of her dress, pull it down; it slithers off her shoulders and thighs in a slick slide of material, iridescent under the neon lights.
One finger hooks into the string of pearls around her neck, pulling tightly enough to make it snap. They scatter along the concrete, some rolling off the edge; some bite into the soles of her feet as she steps forward, swaying closer to the brink. Hairpins cascade down her shoulders, freeing her hair from its painstaking coiffure.
Only then, naked and glistening, can she be reborn.
What steps off the edge of the tower at the corner of Fifty-first and Broadway is not a woman, beautiful and fragile and derided, but a creature, wild and vengeful. It lands on all fours and leaves a dent in a yellow-painted cab that will take all of its driver's lifetime savings to pay for. It disappears into the night.
They find it nine hours later, gouging out the throat of a would-be rapist with fingers coated with drying blood. That's after they find the other eight 'victims'; one strangled with his own belt, the others twisted and mangled.
The women they assaulted are unavailable for comment.
The media loves a crazy, and crazy doesn't get much better than this. By the next morning, speculation on the serial killer pending further investigation runs rampant. Some say she's just a poor, sick mind that was crying out for help. Some say she's a monster that damn well knew what she should be doing, and deserves to be put down.
WE ARE NOT ANIMALS, the headlines read, words culled from the police commissioner's press conference. Democracy is built on the assumption of certain human rights. To deny even the the most savage criminal those rights would be a crime far greater than any they could accomplish.
The sharks don't care. They can smell the blood.
Commissioner, one source tells us you're quite close to the accused--
Halfway across the city, a frowning mother tells her daughter to stop watching that rubbish and go back to the Discovery channel.
Summary: Twice-dead, once-shy.
Prompt: 1. And there and then I behold that a time will come when I again dead will be
2. Awakening
3. Royal blue
4. Nostalgia
5. Raven by khibee
There isn't a white light. There isn't even darkness.
There's only the sky, and the deep, dark blue.
He's floating on his back on an endless ocean, limbs swaying in a current gentle enough to leave the water's surface undisturbed. He tries lifting a hand out, experimentally; by all reason, it should feel like moving through mud or treacle, but his arm breaks the water's surface as if it's made of nothing but air.
Looking at his bare wrist, trailing water, he realizes he's naked. As soon as that thought crosses his mind, he finds himself covered in wet fabric, clinging to his body like a second skin. He sags in the water, pulled down by the sodden weight, but he does not sink.
That's funny. He's pretty sure he failed his last swimming class. Basic Life Saving, wasn't it? His instructors couldn't even classify him as 'buoyant'. Curious, he touches damp fingers to his mouth.
Cracked lips sing with pain, and flavor bursts on his tongue; his mouth waters in a desperate attempt to compensate for the stolen moisture, but all he can do is roll his head back and laugh.
The Dead Sea.
He's in the fucking Dead Sea.
Halfway through, he realizes his voice has risen to an unhealthy pitch, high and mad and desperate. Even then, he can't stop. He laughs and laughs until the tears bleed out the corners of his eyes, silently feeding the ocean beneath him.
Something passes overhead, casting a shadow over his face, and he stops as abruptly as though his throat has been cut.
His fingers curl in the water, and he tries to turn his head.
Talons clench around his heart, and he arches like a man on the brink of climax or the brink of death with so little difference between the two that it's impossible to tell where they end and begin.
No, he thinks. Memory rolls and crests like a wave. No no nonono--
The world ends.
Later, they tell him he's lucky the paramedics were able to revive him. It's amazing, they tell him. He had stopped breathing for nearly five whole minutes.
He's lucky, they tell him, wiping away the spit that froths down his lips. He's very fortunate.
They don't quite manage to hide the revulsion in their eyes, or the strain in their voices as they talk to him about sweet, bright things. They can pretend he isn't trapped with a working mind in a body that will no longer respond to his commands.
He cannot. He wishes they had left him dead.
With practice, they tell him, with patience, with careful physical rehabilitation, he can learn to regain control in up to thirty-five percent of his body. He'll never walk again, he may never eat normally again, but he'll be alive.
He practices. He learns patience. He performs every one of the exercises they prompt him through, the effort it takes to clench a hand staining his sheets with sweat.
The first thing he does when he regains full use of his arm is to rip out the tubes they've shoved into every orifice of his body.
The shadow flutters down on his chest. It leaves scratches on his throat, and it swallows his eyes.
The world goes dark.
Summary: He reminds her of things she'd rather forget.
Prompt: 1. ALL MY GIRLS IN THE RAINBOW CADILLAC (good luck incorporating this kytha)
2. Rosemary's Baby
3. Yellow
4. Jealousy
5. Stauroteuthis syrtensis by itsumobelated
If she knew her Biology professor could be this fucking hilarious when he was tripping, she would have slipped drugs into his Starbucks latte sooner.
Her friends are grinning, ribbing each other as their professor reels around his table, using the wooden edges for support as he gesticulates wildly. He's already broken two beakers. The girls in the back of the class are already taking bets on what he'll shatter next.
"The deep sea is not the colorless abyss you think it is, girls!" Her professor yells, arms pinwheeling. "The ocean is bri-bri-brimming with brilliance!" The front of his lab coat is streaked with color. Someone's slipped him a box of colored chalk, and the blackboard looks like a rainbow vomited, pissed, and shat on it.
Laid and overlaid on top of each other, interlocking like the lines of an arcane sigil, the amoebas and livers and god-knows-what-else his hands have scrawled out on the board look almost pretty, mystical and beyond comprehension.
The other girls laugh, snapping her out of her trance, and she hears the malice in their voices. She sinks lower in her desk. This far down, she can peer under the other tables; she notices conservative collegian skirts carelessly hiked up, an innocent-looking box of candy being passed around for the others to take a sniff and get a quick high. Without the professor to correct her posture, she's quite content slipping away from his attention entirely.
No such luck.
Her professor comes bounding over to her table, eyes intense and so completely out of it that it scares her. Warm hands clasp hers, and for a terrified moment, she thinks she's about to be kissed. Racing, her mind tries to remember what he'd been talking about--
"Nature," her professor says solemnly, looking at her like he's seeing something else in her eyes, "Is an amazing thing. Take, for example--" he straightens abruptly, spinning around, dragging her with him-- "--a common deep-sea cephalopod. Stauroteuthis syrtensis."
She hears her classmates titter as she's dragged to the front of the room, but the noise is uglier somehow. She's wishing she'd never slipped those drugs into her professor's cup, but then he's leaning awfully close, and she realizes he's slipping off one of his latex gloves to put on her own hand.
"--known about the life cycle of these fascinating creatures, so little that they do not possess a unique common name--"
She's too startled to resist, and the glove is too big. The mustard-colored rubber flops around on her fingers like her mom's dress when she was three years old, missing and hurting and wanting her back.
"--light organs at the base of each sucker, thought to attract prey rather than mates--"
(The paisley-patterned cotton had still smelled like her. Before the sickness. Before dying. Before everything.)
"Like ships in the night," her professor murmurs softly, breath warm on her face. "It is only by chance that they meet." Yellow-clad fingers entwine with her own, oddly gentle.
"And the sole reason the mother exists is to let her children live."
He doesn't look like he's high anymore.
"Stop it," she whispers.
"Perhaps, miss Rose," he replies, words for her ears alone. "You should refrain from slipping hallucinogens into people's drinks simply because you've been told."
"Let me go."
He had been faking all along.
He smiles.
And he releases her.
Summary: Some questions are better left unanswered.
Prompt: 1. I'm nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too?
2. Life of Pi
3. Sea Green
4. Uncertainty (or discomfort of being uncertain?)
5. Goldfish by izuma_yaki
Sometimes, Isle says, the only way to understand how a mind went wrong is to trace it back to where it began.
Nick thinks it's a stupid idea, but she goes anyway.
The nuns don't ask any questions, thankfully. They do, however, quietly tell her that the room hasn't been used for some time. Not since...
That's fine, Nick tells them, smiling grimly. It's the last occupant she's interested anyway.
The lack of windows is something she expected before she came here-- heaven forbid they permit the insane to be exposed to the unhealthy stimulation of sunlight. It isn't until her fifth fruitless attempt to grope for a light switch that she realizes that no one ever bothered to install one.
Cursing about overtime pay under her breath, she fumbles for the heavy-duty flashlight on her hip and flicks it on, peering into the gloom.
It's a small room, small even for her. A child would have more room to move around in, but with the complete lack of any openings-- the door's rotting on its hinges now, but it doesn't take much imagination to realize it was a fairly solid thing, nothing but a slit near the bottom for food-- the net effect couldn't have been anything but claustrophobic.
Sweeping the light around reveals a sad-looking pile in one corner. Nick steps closer to investigate.
The nun wasn't lying-- they really didn't touch anything. Using the tip of a boot, Nick prods the rusty remains of what must have been a chamber pot at some time, though whatever contents it might have evaporated years ago. She grimaces. There are other things, tattered rags wrapped around something she's loathe to pick up, but then the flashlight beam catches a spot of bright color in the darkness, and she takes a closer look.
Huh. Chalk.
The drawings are faded, worn away by time and the motions of a hundred thousand tiny tireless creatures whose activities aren't always governed by sunlight. She almost reaches out to touch them, then changes her mind; she leans forward instead, trying to read the crazy hieroglyphs of a child who'd lived in almost complete darkness.
Aqua-colored ferns frame an orange oasis; something that could be a fish (or a dog or a bear) is suspended, splay-legged, in a semi-circle. Kinda cute, really. Half-recognizable numbers trail up to the corner where the walls meet, then turn ninety degrees and march straight up, unrelenting. Amused, she uses the flashlight to follow the trail of numbers.
Her smile drops, abruptly.
God. What kind of kid draws pencils stabbing through their imaginary goldfish?
Nick doesn't realize someone else has joined her until an awfully familiar scent fills her nostrils. By then, a deceptively frail arm has wound around her waist, pulling her up against something unpleasantly soft. Cold steel kisses her throat, and she restrains the impulse to swallow.
"Oh darling, darling, darling," he coos into her ear, low and rough and-- angry. He's actually angry.
"Didn't your mother teach you not to go digging for skeletons in people's closets?"
Summary: Can't run from your past.
Prompt: 1. "You think you're evil but you're not"
2. Unnatural Wonders
3. Red
4. Entitlement
5. Moth by chriskarate
Sometimes, it was hard to remember that there was a before.
"Do you remember?" she asked him, screaming so that her voice could outlast the storm. "It was ten years ago. On my eighth birthday. You told me you'd show me something I'd never seen before."
"You chased me to the ends of the earth for the secret to a trick you never understood?" His voice was thick with disbelief, high and wild over the roar of the waves. He was perched on the mast like a scarecrow, a dead thing, ragged cape spreading out behind him like broken wings.
He was the stuff of children's nightmares.
In answer, she shook her head, winding her arms tighter into the tattered remains of the rigging. Holding on for so long had left rope burns on her wrists, and the salty copper of her blood was starting to mix with the sea. The raw flesh sang with every splash of seawater.
"I chased you to the ends of the earth," she said, softly, "To help a man who never understood himself."
His face twisted with something too hurt and unchecked to be anger; quicker than she could breathe, quicker than she could think, he closed the gap between them, leaping from the pitching mast to pin her to the deck.
"You lost your claim to that right a long time ago," he hissed, and his voice chilled her more than the water pouring down the back of her dress. Her wrists ached under the pressure of his fingers, threatening to break--
Just as abruptly, his weight lifted away, and he was gone.
Breathless in the wake of his departure, she wondered, suddenly, where everything had gone wrong.
Even by the time strong hands finally bore her up and dragged her to the last lifeboat, merciful oblivion claiming her when they cut away the ropes buried in her flesh, she couldn't come up with an answer.
Summary: A deal with a devil.
Prompt: 1. They're counting on a guilty conscience to save you, but I'm banking on the deep blue eyes and the face too.
2. Midsummer Night's Dream (shut up plays are books too)
3. Gold
4. Regret
5. Fox by purplesyrup
"Don't say it."
I wasn't going to say anything. Keane isn't sure, but he can almost hear the fairy grinning at him. Granted, it's a little difficult to tell, considering that he's hanging upside-down by his ankles and that the other party in this conversation is currently on all fours and equipped with a muzzle.
It could be a trick of the light, or the fact that the mouth of the thing below him is crammed with more wickedly sharp teeth than it should be able to hold. Hell, it's a fox spirit. It could probably grow a third eye in its ass if it really wanted to, never mind smiling.
Keane rotates on the rope slowly, unable to stop himself; the fox obligingly trots over to seat itself in his new field of vision. He scowls, looking away.
Finally, the fox fairy deigns to speak. You know, this would have been much easier if you had--
"I didn't know they were going to seriously try and kill me!" Keane explodes. "These people have so much money they jingle when they breathe, how was I supposed to know they'd miss a grubby old pot--"
They're not going to kill you.
"Of course they're going to kill me! What part of chanting 'burn the thief' while shaking pitchforks the size of cows doesn't get that point across?"
The fox shakes its head. Their laws forbid them from killing you outright. Even for trying to steal the elixir of life.
"The elixir of--, oh, hell." He sags in his bindings, wishing he had a hand free to smack against his head. "That's what the old man wanted. I should've known it was too much money to be something ordinary."
The fox shifts onto its haunches, and he's uncomfortably aware of the intelligence in bright amber eyes. You should have heard me out.
"Sorry," Keane snaps. "I'm not exactly used to having wild animals talking to me--"
I'd watch my tongue, if I were you. The fox's eyes glint.
They're not going to kill you. But they can extend the debate on what to do with you until you simply waste away here, and oh dear, what a pity, they had no idea mortals were so fragile. It pauses.
Or they could decide to use the time-honored tradition of dropping you into the crocodile pit. After you've been starved for a week or so. If you die, you're innocent.
Contemplating the mental image, he winces. He's fairly certain he isn't imagining how that smirk on the fox's mouth turns a bit crueler.
I'm here to offer you a way out.
"Yeah, yeah. But not for free, right?"
The fox leans forward until its cool, wet nose is pressed against Keane's and he goes cross-eyed trying to look at it.
We both know you aren't in a position to bargain, so you'll do exactly as I say. Because you're too afraid to die and face all the people you've killed.
The worst part, Keane realizes, is that it's right.
Summary: Here we go again.
Prompt: 1. Rush hour in the pouring rain
2. Hard Boiled
3. Turquoise
4. Selfishness
5. Turtle by audzilla
There weren't many customers today, and Elena figured that was as much to blame on the weather as anything else. After the umpteenth hassled-looking commuter rushed past her, dripping wet, moving away before she could do so much as blink, she gave up and decided to call it a day.
The Seven-Eleven across the street was dry, and mostly empty; the teenager mopping up the mud and grit people have tracked in from the street didn't even look up when she stepped in. So much for being ready to serve you. She fussed with her shawl, arranging its damp folds in a way that hid her lack of cleavage, and set about getting herself something to eat.
She was two cups of coffee later and halfway to feeling human before someone recognized her.
"Ah, hey. The fortuneteller from the subway station, right?"
Didn't sound like a debt collector. Elena risked turning her head, narrowed eyes taking in a boy with a squashed-looking cap jammed down onto his head. She didn't remember seeing him before, but then again, she didn't remember a lot of people unless she had a reason to avoid them. Why this one cared enough to talk to her probably doesn't mean anything good.
Trying to remember if she'd given out any particularly overoptimistic fortunes in the past few days, Elena almost missed him talking again.
"I guess even you've got to have days off, huh?"
Too chummy, and he was looking at her like he knew something he wasn't letting her in on. She scowled at him, hoping that would be enough to get him off her back-- no such luck. He was still grinning.
"Listen, I don't know who you are or what you want, but I'm just here for a coffee, all right?" She turned the styrofoam cup in her hands, wishing she'd stuck to the subway. So what if the water flooding the streets spilled down the stairs and right up to her usual spot?
"Now that's just cold. And I haven't even introduced myself, Elena."
Her head snapped up, faster than if he'd taken needles and stabbed them into her chest. "How the hell--"
"I wouldn't yell, if I were you," he advised cheerfully. "Those kids at the counter are paid far too little for them to come running to your aid."
Something cold, heavy, and unsubtly threatening dug into the small of her back. Her mouth worked softly, soundlessly; after a moment, she shut it with a click of teeth. "All right."
"I'm glad to see you're capable of reason," the boy murmured-- but he wasn't really a boy, was he? A sick swoop of something in her stomach nearly made her retch up everything she'd eaten; she quashed it down. "You've been telling made-up fortunes for the better part of seven years, now. We figured it was high time you got back to what you're really good at."
She folded her arms tightly enough that she could feel her tortoiseshell bangles digging into her forearms. It was a comforting sensation. "I gave up talking to the dead a long time ago. I don't think I can even hear them anymore."
"Don't lie." He grinned. "I know you need to pop three pills a night before you can even lie down."
"Yeah, well, some people just have something called insomnia," she snapped. "It's a medical condition. I don't understand what you could possibly need me for--"
The boy propped his chin in his hands, giving her a smile that cut right to bone.
"How about helping us do a little detective work?"