comment_fic and other short fic round-up
Sep. 6th, 2015 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99Fandom: Harry Potter
Disclaimer: Not mine. All Bloomsbury's. No money being made from this.
Characters: Remus Lupin
Rating: PG
Prompt: 10 Words Monday - any. any supernatural creature. under judgment
Being a werewolf is never good. Under Umbridge it's worse.
Fandom: Sherlock
Disclaimer: Not mine. All the BBC's. No money being made from this.
Characters/Pairing: Molly/Lestrade
Rating: PG
John spent most of his time after his baby was born shuffling around like a sleep-deprived zombie so Lestrade and Molly took over minding Sherlock. Sherlock would probably have insisted that they were acting as his assistants, but they knew they were really minding him. Watson's child would probably be less trouble.
They had to fit it in around work, which should have been more of a problem than it was but Greg was pleased to have something to distract him, his wife having moved back to her mother's. Again.
He and Molly swapped notes on the cases when they handed over to each other after Sherlock-watching shifts, timed so that they could get at least a few hours kip. Molly was the better assistant, having had practise before, Lestrade tended to blunder in and then had to vanish while Sherlock broke at least three laws doing things that Lestrade should, probably, have arrested him for.
John was finally capable of putting up with Sherlock's demands again (although Lestrade and Molly had told Sherlock to ring one of them first if he needed someone at three in the morning), so they stood down.
Despite that, Lestrade still brought Molly coffee at the end of her shifts, when he wasn't knee deep in some case, because, well, seeing her smile made him feel indescribably better for being there.
He wouldn't have made a move if Molly hadn't already told Tom to shove off. He'd been being an arsehole, which anyone who spent time with Sherlock was used to and could deal with, but he wasn't a useful arsehole, and, to be honest, Sherlock was a good man, somewhere not that far underneath it all, and Tom wasn't.
Greg chooses a restaurant, a nice one but not too fancy, because he doesn't do fancy food and he chooses a quiet night because doesn't want Molly to feel awkward and he knows her well enough to know that she doesn't like large or loud crowds.
She gives him a goodnight kiss when he drops her off, "if Sherlock says anything, we tell everyone about the aluminium crutch." Greg is still laughing when she shuts the door behind her.
Fandom: MCU
Disclaimer: Not mine, all Marvel's. No money is being made from this.
Characters: Tony Stark and Vision
Rating: PG
Notes: Huge spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Prompt: MCU, Tony Stark + Vision (+ any), JARVIS feels.
Tony Stark is not an idiot. He'd backed up JARVIS's software on a daily basis, because even before he'd become Iron Man, before the Avengers, before all the madness and aliens and metahumans, he'd been an engineer and knew you should back everything up.
And because he never knows when he's beaten, he's been trying to bring JARVIS back from the backups.
He's on his tenth attempt when Vision comes down to his workshop.
The problem with each failed recreation has been that while all the original information is present, and all the algorithms that made JARVIS, something's missing. All the things that JARVIS had learnt, every personality quirk in his neural network, either they never saved properly or they couldn't be saved.
Some part of Tony, not oddly grief-crazed and working on caffeine and three days of no sleep, knows that that's what he should be working on - why it didn't save, how to save it in future, all the technological details.
But Tony isn't listening to that part of himself, because it would mean admitting JARVIS is gone.
He is JARVIS's creator. He will be able to fix this, even if he can't fix Sokovia, or Bruce.
Attempt ten is not going any better than the others. What he's produced sounds like JARVIS, it works like JARVIS, but it is not JARVIS, and the presence of Vision, who also sounds like JARVIS but is not JARVIS, is not helping. He's yet another reminder of all of Tony's failures.
Vision is not quite everything that Ultron was supposed to be, and is not any of the things Ultron turned out to be. Tony thinks he could take it better if he could understand why that was. What had he done wrong? What had Thor, or JARVIS, or someone, done right?
He could lock Vision out of his workshop, the way he has with everyone else, but that would involve re-writing his building's security protocols to only accept his back-up, and removing JARVIS's access. It would mean admitting defeat, and Tony isn't ready for that.
"Miss Potts was beginning to worry that you'd got stuck underneath a car." It's the same gently chiding, slightly sarcastic tone that JARVIS always used, but Tony isn't prepared for the tone to have an expression that comes with it.
He knows Pepper sent Vision deliberately, to try and drag Tony out of the funk he was in, to show him that everything isn't terrible, that something of JARVIS lives on. She'd say it herself, except she's in New York running Stark Industries, and she knows it won't come across the same over the videophone. Making Pepper CEO is one of the few decisions he's ever made that Tony can say went one hundred percent right. She's far better at the job than he ever was, because she likes running the company and doesn't just see it as the thing that lets her do fun stuff, the way Tony had always viewed being the boss.
Why couldn't everything work out so well?
It's not like he can set up a special projects division just for this, even if Pepper would probably let him have the money and Stark employees to do it. The engine for JARVIS is beyond anything most computer engineers can cope with, and it's not like there's anyone he can call up for help; Jane is busy and Bruce is AWOL.
He could put fixing JARVIS on the back-burner, go upstairs and rejoin the world of the living for a while, but he's not ready to do that yet.
Vision moves, almost imperceptibly, a sort of kinetic cough. It means Tony is going to go upstairs, or Vision will carry him bodily up there, and Tony knows that he will because it's what JARVIS would have done if he could.
There's so much of JARVIS in Vision and that makes it worse.
So Tony lets Vision lead him upstairs, and promises himself that he'll return to finish the job soon.
Fandom: Inception
Disclaimer: Not mine, all Warner Brothers's and Syncopy's. No money is being made from this.
Characters: Yusuf
Rating: PG
Prompt: Inception, Yusuf, after Inception, Yusuf detests rain.
Notes: Set after the film, so spoilers for the plot and world.
After everything that happened, Yusuf can't stand the rain. So of course, it's rainy season when he returns to Mombasa. He could just wait it out, the rainy season is only really two months, and he's missed the start of it. But the job has given him enough money to do anything he wants, so he runs away to Namibia.
Then there's a rain-shower in Windhoek, so he runs further, into the Namib Desert itself. If it rains while he's here, he'll just accept that he's cursed.
He waits for everything to feel better, hopes that his subconscious will dry out in the heat.
It doesn't.
Because, and he knows this really, it's not the rain he's running from but what they did. He sells dreams for a living, so he really ought not to have such a problem with this, but his dreams are all the dreamers's own, all he provides is a way for them to get there, a chemical chauffeur, if you will. The thing with Fisher was something else.
Yusuf tries to console himself with how much happier Fisher was now. He'd been interviewed after selling off parts of the Fisher empire to Saito, and did seem to be legitimately glowing with a cheerful relief. But can true happiness be built on a lie, even if the person believes that lie to be the truth?
Yusuf isn't sure. The one thing he is certain of is that what they did wasn't right. Changing someone's mind, a large part of their identity, without their consent, couldn't be.
On the worst nights, the long dark hours before the morning, cold and alone in the desert, he tries to comfort himself that everyone is happier now. Saito has his deal, Fisher, deceived though he was, was happy in his choice, Cobb got to see his children again and Miles got his son-in-law back. Miles never asked how they did it, knew it was undoubtedly something illegal, but was grateful and sent them all a video of Phillipa and James with their father, and it's the look on Phillipa's face that Yusuf clings to. There's innocent delight on her face, and that, that is something worthwhile.
It gets better. The harshness of desert life brings a clarity. It wasn't as though feeling guilty about it would change what had happened, nor would giving away the money, or anything else in that vein.
What was done, was done, and feeling bad about it wouldn't fix it, and maybe he should think about things before he did them in future. All of that was trite but true and none of it worked as strongly as the photo of Phillipa.
When the sky above his ad hoc campsite darkens, and thunder booms and lighting crashes down in the ensuing storm, and he holds his face up to the rain and dances with the other traveller that was passing, he takes that as a sign too. He may actually be missing rain. His time here is done. He should go back. Face whatever consequences there would be, if there were any, face the lack of consequences, and why there weren't any and how wrong what they'd done had been.
Because there would always been rain, no matter what he'd done and what he did in future.
End notes: I ended up doing some climate googling and discovered that while thunderstorms in the Namib desert are extremely rare, but they do happen, so I couldn't resist.
Fandom: MCU
Disclaimer: Not mine, all Marvel's. No money is being made from this.
Characters: Natasha Romanoff
Rating: PG
Prompt: MCU, Natasha/Black Widow, building a new cover
Notes: Set after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and contains general spoilers for it.
After her testimony in Congress, the Black Widow was going to have to take a hopefully brief retirement. But not Natasha. Fury was going to need her if he wanted to rebuild SHIELD, build it back up, better than it ever had been before. Both of them, her and Clint, they were Fury's weapons as much as they were anything else, so she was going to be ready to answer his call when it came.
Most of her trainers and handlers had complained about how distinctive her look was, only one of them ever appreciated the reason why. Because if the Black Widow had red hair and wore black, then how could this woman, who didn't quite fit that profile, be the famous assassin. It had saved her life more than once.
The image of the Black Widow was something greater than herself, something she could use. One target had had a heart attack at the sight of her, the dreaded Black Widow, she hadn't needed to do anything to fulfill that particular contract.
And it was so easy to fool people with the slightest change in her appearance. She thought she'd be blonde this time. She hadn't been blonde in a while. A nice all-American girl from Minnesota. The accent was tricky though, so, before she finished making up the ID she changed it to Wisconsin. She'd made IDs in more difficult circumstances before and, while it wasn't as good as some of the fake IDs SHIELD had provided her with, it wasn't bad, and people didn't look too closely at the IDs of pretty country girls looking for bar work in the city.
She'd be another face in the crowd, waiting to be re-activated.
Disclaimer: Not mine. All Bloomsbury's. No money being made from this.
Characters: Remus Lupin
Rating: PG
Prompt: 10 Words Monday - any. any supernatural creature. under judgment
Being a werewolf is never good. Under Umbridge it's worse.
Fandom: Sherlock
Disclaimer: Not mine. All the BBC's. No money being made from this.
Characters/Pairing: Molly/Lestrade
Rating: PG
John spent most of his time after his baby was born shuffling around like a sleep-deprived zombie so Lestrade and Molly took over minding Sherlock. Sherlock would probably have insisted that they were acting as his assistants, but they knew they were really minding him. Watson's child would probably be less trouble.
They had to fit it in around work, which should have been more of a problem than it was but Greg was pleased to have something to distract him, his wife having moved back to her mother's. Again.
He and Molly swapped notes on the cases when they handed over to each other after Sherlock-watching shifts, timed so that they could get at least a few hours kip. Molly was the better assistant, having had practise before, Lestrade tended to blunder in and then had to vanish while Sherlock broke at least three laws doing things that Lestrade should, probably, have arrested him for.
John was finally capable of putting up with Sherlock's demands again (although Lestrade and Molly had told Sherlock to ring one of them first if he needed someone at three in the morning), so they stood down.
Despite that, Lestrade still brought Molly coffee at the end of her shifts, when he wasn't knee deep in some case, because, well, seeing her smile made him feel indescribably better for being there.
He wouldn't have made a move if Molly hadn't already told Tom to shove off. He'd been being an arsehole, which anyone who spent time with Sherlock was used to and could deal with, but he wasn't a useful arsehole, and, to be honest, Sherlock was a good man, somewhere not that far underneath it all, and Tom wasn't.
Greg chooses a restaurant, a nice one but not too fancy, because he doesn't do fancy food and he chooses a quiet night because doesn't want Molly to feel awkward and he knows her well enough to know that she doesn't like large or loud crowds.
She gives him a goodnight kiss when he drops her off, "if Sherlock says anything, we tell everyone about the aluminium crutch." Greg is still laughing when she shuts the door behind her.
Fandom: MCU
Disclaimer: Not mine, all Marvel's. No money is being made from this.
Characters: Tony Stark and Vision
Rating: PG
Notes: Huge spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Prompt: MCU, Tony Stark + Vision (+ any), JARVIS feels.
Tony Stark is not an idiot. He'd backed up JARVIS's software on a daily basis, because even before he'd become Iron Man, before the Avengers, before all the madness and aliens and metahumans, he'd been an engineer and knew you should back everything up.
And because he never knows when he's beaten, he's been trying to bring JARVIS back from the backups.
He's on his tenth attempt when Vision comes down to his workshop.
The problem with each failed recreation has been that while all the original information is present, and all the algorithms that made JARVIS, something's missing. All the things that JARVIS had learnt, every personality quirk in his neural network, either they never saved properly or they couldn't be saved.
Some part of Tony, not oddly grief-crazed and working on caffeine and three days of no sleep, knows that that's what he should be working on - why it didn't save, how to save it in future, all the technological details.
But Tony isn't listening to that part of himself, because it would mean admitting JARVIS is gone.
He is JARVIS's creator. He will be able to fix this, even if he can't fix Sokovia, or Bruce.
Attempt ten is not going any better than the others. What he's produced sounds like JARVIS, it works like JARVIS, but it is not JARVIS, and the presence of Vision, who also sounds like JARVIS but is not JARVIS, is not helping. He's yet another reminder of all of Tony's failures.
Vision is not quite everything that Ultron was supposed to be, and is not any of the things Ultron turned out to be. Tony thinks he could take it better if he could understand why that was. What had he done wrong? What had Thor, or JARVIS, or someone, done right?
He could lock Vision out of his workshop, the way he has with everyone else, but that would involve re-writing his building's security protocols to only accept his back-up, and removing JARVIS's access. It would mean admitting defeat, and Tony isn't ready for that.
"Miss Potts was beginning to worry that you'd got stuck underneath a car." It's the same gently chiding, slightly sarcastic tone that JARVIS always used, but Tony isn't prepared for the tone to have an expression that comes with it.
He knows Pepper sent Vision deliberately, to try and drag Tony out of the funk he was in, to show him that everything isn't terrible, that something of JARVIS lives on. She'd say it herself, except she's in New York running Stark Industries, and she knows it won't come across the same over the videophone. Making Pepper CEO is one of the few decisions he's ever made that Tony can say went one hundred percent right. She's far better at the job than he ever was, because she likes running the company and doesn't just see it as the thing that lets her do fun stuff, the way Tony had always viewed being the boss.
Why couldn't everything work out so well?
It's not like he can set up a special projects division just for this, even if Pepper would probably let him have the money and Stark employees to do it. The engine for JARVIS is beyond anything most computer engineers can cope with, and it's not like there's anyone he can call up for help; Jane is busy and Bruce is AWOL.
He could put fixing JARVIS on the back-burner, go upstairs and rejoin the world of the living for a while, but he's not ready to do that yet.
Vision moves, almost imperceptibly, a sort of kinetic cough. It means Tony is going to go upstairs, or Vision will carry him bodily up there, and Tony knows that he will because it's what JARVIS would have done if he could.
There's so much of JARVIS in Vision and that makes it worse.
So Tony lets Vision lead him upstairs, and promises himself that he'll return to finish the job soon.
Fandom: Inception
Disclaimer: Not mine, all Warner Brothers's and Syncopy's. No money is being made from this.
Characters: Yusuf
Rating: PG
Prompt: Inception, Yusuf, after Inception, Yusuf detests rain.
Notes: Set after the film, so spoilers for the plot and world.
After everything that happened, Yusuf can't stand the rain. So of course, it's rainy season when he returns to Mombasa. He could just wait it out, the rainy season is only really two months, and he's missed the start of it. But the job has given him enough money to do anything he wants, so he runs away to Namibia.
Then there's a rain-shower in Windhoek, so he runs further, into the Namib Desert itself. If it rains while he's here, he'll just accept that he's cursed.
He waits for everything to feel better, hopes that his subconscious will dry out in the heat.
It doesn't.
Because, and he knows this really, it's not the rain he's running from but what they did. He sells dreams for a living, so he really ought not to have such a problem with this, but his dreams are all the dreamers's own, all he provides is a way for them to get there, a chemical chauffeur, if you will. The thing with Fisher was something else.
Yusuf tries to console himself with how much happier Fisher was now. He'd been interviewed after selling off parts of the Fisher empire to Saito, and did seem to be legitimately glowing with a cheerful relief. But can true happiness be built on a lie, even if the person believes that lie to be the truth?
Yusuf isn't sure. The one thing he is certain of is that what they did wasn't right. Changing someone's mind, a large part of their identity, without their consent, couldn't be.
On the worst nights, the long dark hours before the morning, cold and alone in the desert, he tries to comfort himself that everyone is happier now. Saito has his deal, Fisher, deceived though he was, was happy in his choice, Cobb got to see his children again and Miles got his son-in-law back. Miles never asked how they did it, knew it was undoubtedly something illegal, but was grateful and sent them all a video of Phillipa and James with their father, and it's the look on Phillipa's face that Yusuf clings to. There's innocent delight on her face, and that, that is something worthwhile.
It gets better. The harshness of desert life brings a clarity. It wasn't as though feeling guilty about it would change what had happened, nor would giving away the money, or anything else in that vein.
What was done, was done, and feeling bad about it wouldn't fix it, and maybe he should think about things before he did them in future. All of that was trite but true and none of it worked as strongly as the photo of Phillipa.
When the sky above his ad hoc campsite darkens, and thunder booms and lighting crashes down in the ensuing storm, and he holds his face up to the rain and dances with the other traveller that was passing, he takes that as a sign too. He may actually be missing rain. His time here is done. He should go back. Face whatever consequences there would be, if there were any, face the lack of consequences, and why there weren't any and how wrong what they'd done had been.
Because there would always been rain, no matter what he'd done and what he did in future.
End notes: I ended up doing some climate googling and discovered that while thunderstorms in the Namib desert are extremely rare, but they do happen, so I couldn't resist.
Fandom: MCU
Disclaimer: Not mine, all Marvel's. No money is being made from this.
Characters: Natasha Romanoff
Rating: PG
Prompt: MCU, Natasha/Black Widow, building a new cover
Notes: Set after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and contains general spoilers for it.
After her testimony in Congress, the Black Widow was going to have to take a hopefully brief retirement. But not Natasha. Fury was going to need her if he wanted to rebuild SHIELD, build it back up, better than it ever had been before. Both of them, her and Clint, they were Fury's weapons as much as they were anything else, so she was going to be ready to answer his call when it came.
Most of her trainers and handlers had complained about how distinctive her look was, only one of them ever appreciated the reason why. Because if the Black Widow had red hair and wore black, then how could this woman, who didn't quite fit that profile, be the famous assassin. It had saved her life more than once.
The image of the Black Widow was something greater than herself, something she could use. One target had had a heart attack at the sight of her, the dreaded Black Widow, she hadn't needed to do anything to fulfill that particular contract.
And it was so easy to fool people with the slightest change in her appearance. She thought she'd be blonde this time. She hadn't been blonde in a while. A nice all-American girl from Minnesota. The accent was tricky though, so, before she finished making up the ID she changed it to Wisconsin. She'd made IDs in more difficult circumstances before and, while it wasn't as good as some of the fake IDs SHIELD had provided her with, it wasn't bad, and people didn't look too closely at the IDs of pretty country girls looking for bar work in the city.
She'd be another face in the crowd, waiting to be re-activated.
