Gift fics and pimpage
I'm starting to think I write too much.
He just had to go and get himself kidnapped. What Murphy still can’t figure out is why he left the message keyed to her, and not Thomas, or Ebenezar, or someone more suited to digging him out of this magical mess he’s gotten himself into. It’s just coincidence that she happened to be investigating his kidnappers for something entirely different.
Of course, she’s found plenty of evidence for her case, too, though she isn’t sure how much of it is admissible in court, since she’s gotten it primarily by sneaking. Now, though, she’s tripped some kind of alarm and is perilously close to being caught. She got lucky, getting caught by a guard only three inches taller than her who happened to be in possession of a keyring. The uniform fits reasonably well, but she can’t count on that kind of luck twice, so she’s hauling ass.
She skids around a corner, plants a hand on her purloined hat to keep it from flying off, and stops herself by slamming into a wall. There’s the door... she fumbles through the keyring, hunting frantically, thinking all the while how very cliché this is. It could only be more overdone if Harry was, in fact, a damsel...
Finally the right key. She shoves it into the lock, turns it, throws a frantic glance over her shoulder. She isn’t being chased yet, her stolen uniform has bought her a little time, but she doesn’t know what condition he’s in, and getting him out if he’s hurt could take more time than they have. Maybe she’s better off just getting as much ammunition as she can find and making a stand right there...
The door slides open in response to her harsh shove, and she is stopped in her tracks. Harry’s asleep, or pretending to be, and goddamnit, he looks cute... she’s struck by sudden inspiration. She is blonde, after all, and it’s already so cliché.
“I’m Luke Skywalker,” she says. “I’m here to rescue you.”
Harry opens his eyes immediately, sits up, grins slyly at her. “Hey, aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?”
It’s either kill him or kiss him, and she’s gone to far too much trouble to kill him now. At least she shut him up.
“Four lies and a truth,” I said.
Murph looked at me oddly. “We’re going to resort to playing Truth or Dare now? What are you, fourteen?”
I rolled my eyes. “Ha, ha. Look, we’ve got nearly twenty hours before the wards go down, we’ve done all the planning we can do without further information and I, for one, am bored. I’d like to hear your ideas.”
She folded her hands behind her head and put her feet up on my coffee table. “On second thought, this sounds vaguely interesting. Better than sniping, anyway.” She paused, scanning my bookshelves, and added, “And I still can’t believe it’s possible that you don’t have any Terry Pratchett in your paperback collection.”
“That would require me to have heard of him.” Murph made a face, and I hurried on. “Anyway, the game goes like this; you tell four lies and a truth, and see if the other person can guess the truth. Works best in groups of four or less.”
“To prevent default winning, I suppose.” She nodded. “All right. You go first.”
Uh. Great. I had hoped for a little time to think. “Okay. Uh. Give me a minute.” I thought, then said, “All right. One, I brush my teeth with the lights off. Two, the Beetle has an ejector seat.”
She snorted a laugh, and said, “You wish.”
I grinned. “Okay, so that’s a lie, but damn would that be cool. Anyway. Three, I have a crazy ex-girlfriend named Caroline. Four...uh.. hell, I’m running out of things to say here.”
Murphy just looked at me, clearly amused. “Well, you’ve yet to tell a truth. You could try that.”
“Let’s not get crazy here.” I thought a moment more, and had a sudden, awful, wonderful idea. Did I dare say that? What would happen if I did? We’d been through a lot before, and since, and I think she already knew it, even if I hadn’t ever actually said it...so did I have the nerve?
“Okay,” I said, before I lost that nerve. “Four, I have worn tights before, and five, I’m head over heels in love with you.”
She went abruptly very still, none of the little twitches she got as her muscles relaxed. Shit. Maybe I should’ve said something about Thomas instead...
“Dammit, Dresden,” she said, quietly. “You took mine.”
I don’t think we ever finished that game. On the other hand, though, I don’t think I’ve ever spent a happier twenty hours.
There was a tree on his ship.
There was a gorram tree on his gorram ship.
Malcolm Reynolds stared at the tree and tried to force it to make any sort of sense. It refused.
Some enterprising soul had stuck an ornament on its branches; the sapling was bent nearly parallel to the floor under the weight. He supposed it could have been a Christmas tree, then, but it was all wrong for that. The general shape was right, but it had ring-sized, flat green leaves instead of the long, spiky needles Christmas trees were supposed to have.
“What in the sphincter of hell is a tree doing on my gorram ship?” he asked, aloud.
“Looks kinda cheerful, don’t it?” Kaylee piped up, from behind him. Mal wasn’t sure when she’d come in the room, but she was one of his prime suspects for the tree; her or the crazy girl. Could’ve been either. He rounded on her.
“Is this yours?” he demanded.
Kaylee shook her head. “Nope, but the star’s mine.” She pointed at the ornament. “It just looked so lonely without anything on it.”
“Kaylee,” Mal said, patiently, “it’s a tree. It doesn’t belong on my ship.”
She shrugged. “I dunno who put it there, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. “But don’t it look nice?”
Mal looked at the tree again. Bent over, stuck in a pot, totally out of place among the machinery... “No,” he said, flatly. “Looks kinda pathetic.”
“Oh, Captain.” Kaylee shook her head, with a pitying expression on her face, and went back to whatever she’d been doing.
He questioned the entire crew over the course of the day, working his way from River (“It’s a figment of your imagination. Trees don’t belong in space. They don’t like pots and walls and metal”) to Jayne (“There’s a gorram tree on the ship?”) to Book (“It’s a wonderful expression of faith, and I didn’t put it there”), without result. He’d missed Wash, and Zoe, but honestly, he couldn’t imagine either one of them with a tree. Dinosaurs, or a particularly lovely painting, yes, but not a tree.
Evening found Mal standing in the crew’s lounge again, staring at the tree. It didn’t belong there. It ought to be planted somewhere on some little world, not taking up space on a Firefly-class smuggler headed out to the depths of the Black. Who the hell would...
Wait. He’d missed the little tag on his first look at it. Either that, or the ornament had hidden it from view. Mal leaned down and picked up the tag, the better to read the tiny, flowing writing on it.
Reminded me of you, the tag read.
Won’t bend and looks like a giant middle finger. Love, Mom. It was unkind to swear at presents from one’s mother. Probably uncouth, too. Of course, being uncouth had never stopped him before.
My life hates me.
Seriously. Get this. This woman with the improbable name of Elsabetta Charlotte Adeliza O’Conner (“I’m half-Italian, half-Irish, half-gypsy”) hired me to do a little gumshoe work for her at generous rates. Very generous rates. Nearly twice my actual rates, as a matter of fact. I asked her once where she was getting the money, since she didn’t seem to work, just hung around me and my office. She just simpered.
She actually seemed pretty nice at first (“Oh, please, just call me Lotte!”), but then she just started getting downright creepy. Aforementioned hanging around me and my office, blithering on about soulmates while giving me this really terrifying wide-eyed look, getting into trouble and begging me to rescue her. I use trouble here in the lightest of senses. At least one of those incidents involved a paper cut.
I wish I was kidding.
Anyway, it got to be enough. I figured nothing was worth this, and quit.
And. She. Kept. Following. Me.
Which brings us to now.
“Harry?” Murph asked me, through gritted teeth. “Can I shoot her? Look, I’m asking nicely and everything.”
How interesting. I hadn’t known “Little Lotte” had run afoul of Murph, too. If she’d strained my patience, though, she must have snapped, shot, trampled over and defecated on what remained of Murph’s. Tempting as it was to watch her get Murphy’d... “No,” I said, and pulled her back against me. “She’s still a girl. And you’d get all sticky.”
“You and your chivalry,” Murph said, but she’d relaxed a little, good-relaxed, not bad-relaxed. “She freaks you out as much as she does me. I don’t get why you won’t let me slap her with a restraining order.” She paused a moment, then added, “Or just slap her. That would work too.”
“Would there be bikinis and mud involved?” I wondered aloud. Murph punched me.
Honestly, though, batshit though she was, Elsabetta Charlotte Adeliza O’Conner was a looker. Tall, curvy as a corkscrew and yet fashionably thin, impossibly long blonde hair and enormous violet eyes. If she hadn’t been crazy as a crazy thing, and if I hadn’t had Murph, I might have taken her up on her several very obvious offers.
But I did have Murph, and let me tell you, there is nothing on the planet that compares to having intimate relations with an aikodoka. Particularly one you happen to be in love with. So Elsabetta Charlotte Adeliza O’Conner didn’t stand a chance. Which she seemed to have gotten, actually.
“Speaking of the pest,” I said, as the thought occurred to me, “I haven’t seen her around in a bit. Have you?”
Murph leaned her head against my shoulder and thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No. Not since you told her off that last time. Dare we hope she’s moved on?”
“Maybe, if we hope very very hard,” I began, and got interrupted by the phone.
Lucky me, I have long arms. I reached out and snagged the phone without having to move from my very comfortable position between Murph and the couch. “Yello.”
“Harry,” came Thomas’s voice, cracked and desperate, “you’ve got to help me.”
I stared at the phone for a moment, then heard a familiar voice in the background. “Oh,
Tom-my!”
Poor Thomas.
Three AM and he still couldn’t sleep.
He was definitely up
much too late. His favorite apatosaurus was beginning to look at him quizzically; quite a feat since it was plastic. Perhaps reptiles didn’t have insomnia.
Did reptiles get insomnia? Something to ponder in the future. But for now, the question that was keeping him awake demanded attention.
He was
not tormented about this, in any way. Wash did not suffer torment, except some of outside infliction having to do with his given name. It wasn’t anguish keeping him up at night. It was simply... confusion.
Not just any confusion, either. This was bewilderment on a fundamental and basic level, an uncertainty second to none. Even the time he’d come in second to the worst pilot he’d ever met had nothing on this. He could ask Mal, he supposed, but Mal would probably just laugh at him. Neither Bester nor Jayne would understand what he was asking. Zoë was out of the question for obvious reasons.
...course, she really wasn’t out of the question, considering he hadn’t even
asked her the question yet. And therein lay the trouble.
Hoban Washburne was not a coward, not by any stretch of the imagination. He’d flown at top speed through an asteroid belt on a dare (admittedly one fueled by bottle courage, but he’d been painfully, muscle-clenchingly sober on the flight itself), gone headlong through maneuvers that could have killed him with the tiniest mistake, and signed on with Malcolm Reynolds, for God’s sake. ‘Course, he wasn’t exactly fond of death, and given his druthers he’d prefer to go the safer route, but what man wouldn’t?
...Mal didn’t count.
That, he thought, might be the problem here. There
was no safe route. Either he asked her, or he didn’t. Either she said yes, or she didn’t. Either it worked, or it didn’t. Either he was crazy...or he wasn’t.
“Hey, Zoë,” he whispered, to the apatosaurus, which looked even more confused. “Want to get some dinner sometime? You know, like actual food?”
If she was going to have to get Simon drunk in order to get sweet things out of him, this relationship was not going to be fun.
Kaylee Fry poked disconsolately at a broken flash plug. Strictly speaking, she didn’t need to fix it. Flash plugs were a credit a dozen. You could pick them up off any port, or if you were really poor you could pick a working set off any wreck.
Strictly speaking, she didn’t need Simon. There were boys in every port.
Flash plugs. Right. She wrestled a bent prong back into place and fiddled with some connections, and was rewarded with a soft buzz of life. The plug wasn’t fixed yet, but no need to go tossing it out. A little care and attention was all it took.
But not even the most stubborn of flash plugs took three gorram months to recharge. Kaylee stuck it back into the charger and went about putting her stuff away. Maybe she oughta just give up on Simon. Every time he did something sweet, he’d turn around and do something stupid again, or his crazy sister would intervene, or the Captain or Jayne would come tromping through and mess up the whole thing.
...actually, come to think of it, it seemed mainly the Captain’s fault, some of the things that’d happened. But that wasn’t fair. If someone liked her, she’d go straight out and tell ‘em so, and never mind the consequences.
Anyway. She’d made it as clear as she could that she liked Simon, hadn’t she? And he sometimes liked her and sometimes didn’t. Or maybe he always liked her and just said stupid stuff. Or maybe he didn’t like her and just said sweet things. Maybe that was what passed for polite conversation in the Core.
The charger buzzed, and she reached back without looking and grabbed the flash plug. It fizzed and sparked smartly. At least she could do one thing right.
Care, and attention, and time. Simon was a little bigger than a flash plug. ‘Bout as thick sometimes, though.
Kaylee pushed the flash plug into its proper place on the engine, then stood up, wiping the grease off her hands. Time to try a little persistence.
“No.”
“But...”
“No, Danny!”
“He won’t get in the way!”
Sergeant Nicholas Angel glared at his partner. “You're not keeping it, and I am not having that thing in the car!”
“You’re just mad ‘cause he took a bite out of the lilies,” Danny said, with uncomfortable accuracy.
Angel ignored him. “It’s not coming and that’s final.”
“He’s a he, and think of what the criminals would do if they saw him!”
“Piss themselves laughing, probably.” Angel started the car. “Get in, already. And leave that thing behind!”
Danny put his new pet down and sulked his way into the car. “He doesn’t explode that often.”
"Other couples get dogs. We get a bloody
swamp dragon?""He's cute!"
The bag—not quite small enough to be called a purse, and not quite large enough to be called a shoulder bag, as suited its owner—thumped down on the table and made everything on it rattle, and Karrin Murphy slumped into her seat with a groan. She hid her face in her hands and said something unintelligible.
Domovi Butler did not look up from his cup of tea and his paper. “Long day?” he asked.
“The longest,” she replied, taking her hands away from her face. “The precinct captain is riding my back so hard he might as well be wearing spurs, I hit a dead end in the case I’m working and to top it all off Dresden went and dropped himself into a mess of some kind of giant bumblebees and nearly got himself killed. Again.” She took a deep breath, got some semblance of her composure back, and looked straight at him. “I hope you aren’t going to make it longer.”
“I don’t intend to, no.” He set the cup back on the table and folded up the newspaper. “Master Fowl is coming to town.”
She was instantly on alert, though she did not betray it in a way that any lesser man would have noticed. Butler knew, though, that Karrin Murphy never steepled her fingers like that unless she was feeling particularly tense. “Which one? And why?”
“The younger, of course.” Her fingers relaxed a hair and bowed into an arch instead of a steeple. “He wishes, I believe, to meet with Mr. Marcone.”
Back up into a steeple again. That was fast. “That’s not technically my business,” she pointed out, quite correctly. “I’m not on Vice, and Johnny Marcone can meet with whoever the hell he wants.”
“I believe,” Butler said, gently, “that he is bringing Miss Short with him.”
A moment of true confusion showed on her face. “Who?”
Ah. Something she did not know. A welcome change and a point for him. “Miss Holly Short,” Butler elaborated. “A faery. Not one of the kind you’ve had troubles with, and I know she does not speak for her people as a whole, but you and yours might want to keep an eye on this meeting.”
“I’ll tell Vice,” she said, at last. “And I’ll ask Dresden what he can do. I can’t guarantee anything.”
His eyes met hers in perfect understanding. “Master Fowl will, I suspect, keep Miss Short well away from Mr. Marcone until he understands just what the situation is. Miss Short is also perfectly capable of taking care of herself.”
“Heh.” Murphy leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap—whatever she’d been thinking, she’d resolved the situation in her own mind at least. “As long as Marcone doesn’t acquire an army of faeries, and I trust you’ll warn me if he does.”
Butler snorted, thinking of the LEP’s probable reaction to that. “Trust me. He won’t.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “Miss Short is rather like yourself, actually. Down to the occupation. I doubt Mr. Marcone can get the better of her.” A little white lie about Holly’s occupation, but Murphy did not need to hear that a fellow policewoman had lost her job just now. Another point for him.
She grinned, and relaxed even further, leaning forward onto her knees. “Thanks for the compliment. Anything else?”
He shook his head. “No. Unless there’s something about this city I should know about before Master Fowl comes here.”
“The usual,” she said, and shrugged. “Keep him out of my sight, make sure no one does anything illegal. Oh, and there’s a former Mafia bodyguard somewhere around. I think she’s a librarian now.” She paused, and smirked.
Butler knew her too well to let it go at that. “And?”
“And Marcone has a man working for him who can turn into a bear.”
He let loose a startled profanity. “You’re serious.”
“Very. I won’t tell you who it is, because I promised I wouldn’t. Suffice to say you should be very, very polite to anyone in his employ who looks ursine.”
“A bear.” Two points for her, then. He hadn’t been thoroughly flabbergasted since he’d realized her pet headcase was an actual wizard.
“Yes. A bear.” She sounded seriously amused. “Has it sunk in yet?”
“It’s sinking,” he said, truthfully. “Didn’t you have work to get back to?”
Murphy sat back again and grinned at him. “I’d much rather sit here and watch you digest. Unfortunately you are right and I have to go clean up Harry’s mess.” She stood, and muttered something that Butler couldn’t quite catch, but boded ill for the unfortunate Harry. “Tell your bodyguardee he’s not allowed to cause trouble.”
“I shall,” he said, and nodded graciously. “Have a good day.”
She nodded, collected her bag and was off in a flurry of disconcerted people and quick movements. Butler opened his paper again with a rustle of sound, and decided then and there that he would introduce Murphy to Holly Short.
The meeting should be interesting at the very least.
Disclaimer: Karrin Murphy and Harry Dresden belong to Jim Butcher, Artemis Fowl, Holly Short and Butler belong to Eoin Colfer, and the barman belongs to Puck.
Spoilers for AWE and Mary Sue contained within. I did my best.
Even the Caribbean got chilly at night, and Michelle de Chalis was in formal dress, but she did not mind the cold, not now. There were far more important things to think about.
The sand chilled and grated on her bare feet (for she had left her shoes at the head of the beach). The ocean lapped up every so often to soak the hem of her dress. The salt would surely ruin it. No matter—her papa could afford more.
Dark. It was dark. Her
maman had said it must be dark, and the stars must be out, not a cloudy night. Michelle glanced up at the stars, cold pinpoints of light in a black velvet sky, and shivered, but not from the cold.
She walked forward until she was knee-deep in the surf. That too her
maman had said. Michelle must put herself entirely under the power of the sea. Only then would the sea answer her call.
Knee-deep was as far as she was prepared to go, though. Michelle did not swim and she did not intend to learn now.
She took a deep breath, knelt in the surf (shivering as the water struck her and soaked through her skirt and bodice), and ducked her head beneath the water just long enough to soak her hair. The preliminaries would have to be satisfied with that.
“Calypso,” she called, into the sea wind that blew in her face and chilled her further. “Calypso. I call you. Hear me!” Her voice rang out across the water, the confident command she had cultivated all her life shaken only a little by chattering teeth.
For a moment, all she heard was the washing of the waves on the sand.
“Calypso!” she called again, desperation beginning to tinge her voice.
“Hear me!” “I hear, chile,” said a quiet voice behind her.
Michelle pitched forward in surprise and nearly got a mouthful of salt water. As it was she caught herself in time and whirled on all fours to stare up at the goddess behind her.
She was made of water, was Michelle’s first stunned thought. A woman entirely of water, and as unself-consciously naked as Eve. She wore a faintly sad expression, and stood with her hands by her sides, though she smiled when Michelle looked up at her. “I hear, chile,” she repeated. “Why call me?”
“I...” Michelle shook away her shock and sat back on her heels, though she judged it wise not to rise to her feet. She noted with an absent corner of her mind that the wind had calmed. “I have a request of you.”
“Oh, so?” Calypso’s expression turned ironic, and she raised a single eyebrow. A small fish jumped from her navel into the water. “All do. What ask you?”
She took a deep breath. This was it. “I want him back.”
The water went silent. For an instant the tide had stopped coming in. Michelle jerked her head up and stared wide-eyed at Calypso, whose face had turned to stone.
“Him?” the goddess asked, carefully. “Him who?”
“James Norrington. My...my friend,” Michelle said. She had been about to claim him as lover, but to tell anything less than the truth might doom her cause from the beginning. “But I love him. And I want him back.”
“Him a man,” the goddess said harshly, and spat into the waters. “Him not yours, not now, not ever. Him love a woman who never love him back and you ask for him.”
She took a deep, steadying breath. “I love him,” she said, as simply as she could. “I know he does not love me. But I love him. I want him back.”
Calypso studied her face for a long moment, then sighed. “I demand payment.” Simple fact, simple statement.
Michelle nodded. She had expected this. “I offer myself,” she said. Simple in return.
To her surprise, Calypso snorted. “And what would I want wit’ you?” she demanded. “You are a chile of the earth and the flame, not of the sea. I can do nothing wit’ you and I wouldn’t want to. You are worth nothing to me.”
She blinked, and shivered again in the renewed sea wind. “Then I have nothing to give you.”
“You who wear fine dresses and jump in the water wit’ them, you say that?”
“They are not mine,” Michelle said, with unaccustomed candor. “They are my papa’s. And if he ever gets a child on his wife they will be taken away in a heartbeat. I am not quite fool enough to believe he will keep me for very long if another heir presents itself.”
Calypso looked her over again, under the stars. “Yes,” she said, at last. “I see that. These men, they do not keep their halfbreed children very long.”
Michelle had stopped being ashamed of her faintly colored skin a long time ago. “If it were not for my
maman I could not have contacted you,” she said. “It does not shame me.”
“Well for you,” Calypso said. “I do not work without payment.”
“And I have nothing to pay with.” She bowed her head and let the sea chill her spirit with her body. “I am sorry to have wasted your time.”
Calypso nodded, but did not depart. Instead, she circled Michelle again, her steps slow as an iceberg. “Perhaps...” she said, slowly. “Perhaps we can talk. A payment not now, but later.”
“I’ll do it,” Michelle said, immediately.
“A payment I will choose,” the goddess said, a warning in her tone. “You will give me whatever I ask when I ask it. Anything at all, chile, and you would do it for love of him who does not love you?”
There was silence for a moment; Michelle listened to the waves roll up the beach, felt the currents rush by her in the water, watched the stars reflected in the ocean and knew her answer.
“Isn’t that what love is?” she asked.
Calypso looked down at her, her face unreadable. Eventually, she said, “The payment is fair.”
Michelle blinked, startled, and jerked back as the woman-form of water collapsed into the ocean around her.
Suddenly the chill of the water penetrated and she shivered violently enough to fall over. She had to get out of the surf, and now, or she would freeze. She stumbled to her feet and out of the ocean and shivered herself a little warm again, and wished she had thought to bring a cape or something.
How long would it be before her request was fulfilled? How long could she wait? She didn’t even know when or where Calypso would bring him, she realized, and sighed. Her stepmother always said she needed to think before she acted...
Somewhere down the beach, a man groaned, and whimpered a name. Her name.
Michelle picked up her skirts and ran.
And some pimpage.
Doctors, Doctor's Girls and
Doctor's Boys, by Mimi~na.
David Tennant and Kittens.Harry Dresden meets the Doctor.A Christmas ficlet for me, from Liz; Zoe/Wash.
Amusing poem.A two-sentence ficlet from Gypsy. 