drabble: 'The Storm', Gwen
Hi hi, this is me proving I'm still alive, with an itty bitty (470 words) fic I wrote for thefuturequeen's Gwen-themed LAS comp a few weeks back. It's totally G-rated, and the original reveal post is HERE
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The Storm
There's a storm brewing. She can feel it - the air is tense with it, thrumming almost palpably with the promise of violence. It's midsummer now, and it's been a long time since it rained. Weeks maybe. She's lost track. Sweat clings delicately to the space just over her lip and the nape of her neck. She's standing by the window in Morgana's chambers, searching for a breeze, breathing in the humid air hanging a weird, otherworldly green over the courtyard.
The room is clean. There are fresh flowers on the table. On another day Gwen might even have put warming stones beneath the covers. Just in case.
But no-one else enters. No-one has, since the strange day when everyone woke up from a strange dream to find Morgana gone. Kidnapped, they whisper. Taken. Held. Lost. Gwen, in her quietest moments, when it's just her in this dead room, has another word for it. Escaped.
She thinks of Morgana. The beautiful, so beautiful. Thinks of her as she'd become, those last months before she left. Her terror and her confusion, her desperate anger, the loneliness in her eyes that couldn't be soothed away with a smile or a touch. She thinks of these and knows somehow that this, whatever it is, was inevitable. And it pulls something in her, something bittersweet and old.
She can't even think the word to herself, although it's there. Jealousy. As she squints and stares under roiling clouds, past chimneys and walls, past paddocks and farmhouses, as far as she can. To where hazy purple mountains form a final barrier to her sight. Something wild within her, small and shackled, keens at the restriction. Rages silently against the smallness of her life, of her world.
But only in her quietest moments.
The first dark rumble ripples through everything, and Gwen feels something shake inside her in response. It often gets like this, when it storms. In the crazed summer cataclysms of atmosphere and heat that only come around once every so often. The lightning cracks and it feels like it's cutting her open, like for just that instant she catches a glimpse of something. A memory of a feeling, a realization quickly lost. The swelling of something huge inside her that she's never been able to put a name to. Some hidden expectation. She feels beyond herself, beyond the person she's always thought herself to be. Beyond the daughter, the girl, the maid, beyond blushes and boys and calloused fingers. Beyond the world she lives in every day. Beyond Camelot.
The sky opens and the rain plunges down in an angry downpour, with a sound that's almost a sigh, a whisper of something, a secret that might have been Destiny into Gwen's ear.
She shivers, and watches from the window until the storm passes over.
- - -
In other news: am still working on B/C fic. Bah, bear with me if you can.
- - -
The Storm
There's a storm brewing. She can feel it - the air is tense with it, thrumming almost palpably with the promise of violence. It's midsummer now, and it's been a long time since it rained. Weeks maybe. She's lost track. Sweat clings delicately to the space just over her lip and the nape of her neck. She's standing by the window in Morgana's chambers, searching for a breeze, breathing in the humid air hanging a weird, otherworldly green over the courtyard.
The room is clean. There are fresh flowers on the table. On another day Gwen might even have put warming stones beneath the covers. Just in case.
But no-one else enters. No-one has, since the strange day when everyone woke up from a strange dream to find Morgana gone. Kidnapped, they whisper. Taken. Held. Lost. Gwen, in her quietest moments, when it's just her in this dead room, has another word for it. Escaped.
She thinks of Morgana. The beautiful, so beautiful. Thinks of her as she'd become, those last months before she left. Her terror and her confusion, her desperate anger, the loneliness in her eyes that couldn't be soothed away with a smile or a touch. She thinks of these and knows somehow that this, whatever it is, was inevitable. And it pulls something in her, something bittersweet and old.
She can't even think the word to herself, although it's there. Jealousy. As she squints and stares under roiling clouds, past chimneys and walls, past paddocks and farmhouses, as far as she can. To where hazy purple mountains form a final barrier to her sight. Something wild within her, small and shackled, keens at the restriction. Rages silently against the smallness of her life, of her world.
But only in her quietest moments.
The first dark rumble ripples through everything, and Gwen feels something shake inside her in response. It often gets like this, when it storms. In the crazed summer cataclysms of atmosphere and heat that only come around once every so often. The lightning cracks and it feels like it's cutting her open, like for just that instant she catches a glimpse of something. A memory of a feeling, a realization quickly lost. The swelling of something huge inside her that she's never been able to put a name to. Some hidden expectation. She feels beyond herself, beyond the person she's always thought herself to be. Beyond the daughter, the girl, the maid, beyond blushes and boys and calloused fingers. Beyond the world she lives in every day. Beyond Camelot.
The sky opens and the rain plunges down in an angry downpour, with a sound that's almost a sigh, a whisper of something, a secret that might have been Destiny into Gwen's ear.
She shivers, and watches from the window until the storm passes over.
- - -
In other news: am still working on B/C fic. Bah, bear with me if you can.