more advent drabbles
“This is
your fault,” Molly grumbled, as softly as she could, and shifted so she wasn’t sitting on a shoe.
Carlos Ramirez looked reproachfully down at her from where he stood, bent awkwardly to the right to avoid an outthrust shelf. “And whose idea was it to sneak up here?” he asked, his voice as indignent as a whisper could bear.
“Yours,” she said, innocently.
He snorted, and smiled, and crouched down so he hovered just above her. “Liar,” he breathed into her ear.
“Shush, they’ll hear you!” she hissed.
“Not me. I am sneaky like ninja.” And he kissed her.
They didn’t get caught after all.
She dove behind a trashcan, (seriously, what the hell was a fifty-year-old man doing with a freaking crossbow, this was worse than inner-city Chicago) and collided with someone else’s legs.
The collidee, a cute policeman with a fuzz of red-hair and Dramatic Sunglasses, muttered something detrogatory about civilians.
“Okay, first of all,” she said, yanking him down as a crossbow bolt whizzed over their heads and clattered off the wall, “I’m not a civilian. Secondly, you’re not doing so hot yourself. Aren’t crossbows illegal?”
“You’re a civilian here until you get that transfer,” he retorted. “Yes, they are. I don’t know how
he got it, he’s usually a shut-in.”
Another crossbow bolt clattered off the wall, and she sighed. “You damn kids get off my lawn?”
“Something like that.” He peered out around the cans (he would keep calling them bins). “Oi, Mr. Poindexter! Put down the crossbow or I’ll bring out the big guns!”
He sounded vaguely ridiculous, and she told him so. “The big guns, Nick? Really?”
Poindexter had apparently found something else to shoot with. Chips of brick sprayed off the wall as he hit it with bullets.
“Looks like your cue,” Angel said, heartlessly. “Off you go then.”
She gave him a feral smile, and rolled out.
The first thing he notices is that he doesn’t hurt anymore.
It’s quite odd. In one way or another, James Norrington has been in pain for most of his life, and he knows how it feels to be hurt so badly you barely feel it. This isn’t that. This is a total
lack of pain.
He is sitting in a boat. A rowboat? There is a lantern in the prow. He leans forward idly and examines the flame as it flickers ahead of him, illuminating nothing but the water.
He is at sea, he knows that by the soft rocking of the boat. He is sailing somewhere, and he cannot bring himself to care where, just so long as he never arrives. There are stars above him and the water below him, a perfect lovely night on the water.
The water rolls along behind him, and he is at peace.
Stan looked at the kid in front of him, all beaming nervousness, spiky blonde hair and badly-held spatulas, and sighed. “Kid, do you even know how to make a burger?”
“Sure I do!” the kid said. “I can fry cook like nobody’s business, mister. If you hire me I will definitely show that fry how to cook.”
Stan didn’t even dignify that one with an answer. “Says here you’re in flying school.”
“Flight school,” the kid corrected him. “Could be a great fry cook. Nobody ever said pilots couldn’t be great fry cooks.”
“I do.”
The kid pouted, and Stan blinked. That was a damn good puppy face. Came close to working on
him, and he had three daughters. “But I’m sure I could do a great job!”
“Probably could. I ain’t got time for you to learn,” Stan said.
“But I spent all week teaching myself how to spin the spatulas!”
Stan made an immediate and concentrated effort to appear as if he did not want to know. Unfortunately the kid took it as interest. He ducked, fast.
Both of them stared at the spatula as it vibrated gently on end in the corkwood behind Stan’s desk.
“Get out.”
There was blessed silence for all of two minutes before Maggie started up again.
“Are we there yet?”
Harry barely kept himself from slamming his head into the wheel, repeatedly, and only managed because he was driving on the highway in a Volkswagon Beetle in heavy traffic in the dark with his wife and two young daughters in the car. Not a good idea.
“No, Maggie,” he said, in what struck him as a commendably even tone. “We were not there two minutes ago, and we are not there now.”
“Are we in Missouri yet?” she persisted, fiddling with her hair.
“No.” Hopefully that tone was forbidding enough that she wouldn’t ask again.
At least Julia was asleep, so soundly that he didn’t think she’d be waking up any time soon, and Murphy was, if not asleep, zoned out so thoroughly that she wouldn’t be irritating him anytime soon. Not that she ever really did, unintentionally, anyway.
He moved to shift as traffic sped up a little, and gave Murphy’s hand an absent caress on the way to the stick as an apology of sorts for thinking ill of her. Even if he was cranky.
Maggie sensed his drifting attention and changed tactics. “Why aren’t we there yet?”
“Because traffic is awful,” he replied, tersely.
“Why is traffic awful?”
He shrugged. “Because there’s an accident? I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
Harry glanced sharply in the rearview mirror and caught the tail end of a vanishing grin on his older child’s face. “Margaret Anne Dresden…”
“Sorry, Daddy,” she said, seeming at least half contrite, and he returned his attention to the road, hoping she was finished.
This time the silence lasted, and he really thought all his girls had fallen asleep. Until…
“Daddy!” Maggie cried suddenly, startling him enough that he nearly hit the car in front of him. Beside him, in the passenger’s seat, Murphy jerked back to the world in a flurry of confused words and movements that trailed off into an irritated mumbling, and in the back, Julia flailed into waking, but thankfully did not start crying.
“What, Maggie?” he half-snarled, furious with her and the traffic and
everything and just wanting this damned drive over with.
Maggie was not unaware of his mood, but it seemed she didn’t care. “Daddy,” she repeated, in a strange sort of awe. “Daddy, it’s snowing.”
“It’s…” he started, and stopped, not just because Murphy had put a hand on his arm. “Huh.”
“It’s
snowing,” Maggie said, gleefully, and pressed her nose against the window to watch in silence.
Julia giggled sleepily. “Snow,” she said, then wriggled around in her car seat and to all appearances went back to sleep.
Murphy smiled; he wasn’t looking at her, but he could hear it in her voice. “Merry Christmas,” she said, her voice half-slurred with sleep.
“Merry Christmas,” he said, caught her hand and kissed it.
“Try not to get us all killed, dear,” she added, yawning.
“I’ll do my best.”
Jen sighed, put down her coffee mug, and said, flatly, “Spit it out, Vanessa.”
All morning her roommate had been giving her funny half-looks of some weird mixture of pity and concern, which Jen really did not get, especially considering her activites the previous night. Just thinking about it made her grin.
Behind the mug that she hastily picked up again. Vanessa did not appreciate being laughed at, even when she wasn’t.
She shouldn’t have bothered, because Vanessa wasn’t looking at her anyway. The other woman stared at her fingers, and said, “Jen, I… you know you can talk to me if you’re in trouble, right?”
“Er, yes,” Jen said, completely lost. “What brought that on?”
Vanessa fluttered her hands helplessly. “Just that… well, I heard yelling last night.”
She certainly had. Jen grinned again and took a sip of coffee to hide it.
Vanessa finally sat up straight and came out with it. “Jen, does Morgan ever hit you?”
Hot coffee through the sinuses
hurt. Jen clapped a hand over her nose and made faint squeaking noises for a moment until the pain went away.
“Jen?” Her roommate looked near-panicked.
“No,” she got out, finally, around the smarting sinuses. “He would never hit me! God, where’d you come up with that one?”
Vanessa, looking only slightly reassured, gestured towards Jen’s back and its accompanying large and colorful bruise with her lips set in a tight little line.
“Oh, that?” Jen asked. “I got that banging into the doorframe.”
“Jen,” Vanessa said, sternly. “I know that’s usually an excuse for domestic violence, but you have to understand…”
Oh, God, she was going to have to spell it out. “I know. I didn’t fall into the doorframe. I banged into it.”
The other woman narrowed her eyes. “I don’t see what the diff—“
Jen sighed.
“Repeatedly, Vanessa.”
As irritating as the whole conversation had been, the color Vanessa turned was worth the whole damned mess.
The butler did not even have time to announce Lady Sylvia Schofield before she burst past him, into the drawing room, and exasperatedly proclaimed, “Sons!”
Elizabeth Lady Wendall calmly replaced her teacup on its saucer. “I quite agree, my dear. Do sit down and tell me what yours has done, then I shall complain about mine and we shall have quite a comfortable coze.”
“Oh?” Lady Sylvia arched a silver eyebrow, abandoned theatrics in favor of curiosity, and seated herself elegantly beside her bosom bow. “Has Richard done something too?”
“I believe a more correct question would be what hasn’t Richard done. Tea?”
Lady Sylvia nodded. “Three sugars and no milk, if you would be so kind. Shall I go first, or you?”
“You, please.” Lady Wendall poured, and replenished her own cup while she was at it. “I am certain from the fuss at the Royal College that Thomas must have been getting into something on a far larger scale than Richard. My dear son was only saving himself, after all. Some friends of his as well, but if he hadn’t been pig-headed as always there would have been no need of it.” She paused for a genteel sip, then added, “And he seems to have gotten engaged to his ward, but that’s rather more in the pedestrian way of gossip and wholly expected besides.”
“Thomas has been saving the entire realm, I believe,” Lady Sylvia said, “and getting not unexpectedly engaged himself, to a lovely young woman named Katherine Talgarth. I have always found the pedestrian gossip to be more interesting once one has gotten the wizardly things out of the way. After all, one saves the realm every month, more or less, but it is hardly every day that one’s son marries.”
Lady Wendall lifted her teacup in an ironic salute. “Do you know, Sylvia, I believe you’re correct? On to the pedestrian gossip, then, as I’m afraid I have yet to get a straight answer out of Richard regarding his recent antics. Despite being peripherally involved myself.”
Lady Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Sons,” she repeated.
“Indeed.”
And one that's not an advent drabble:
He hasn’t called.
She drums her fingers on her desk, chews her nails, taps a pencil against her desk in rat-a-tat gunshot sounds. He said he’d call when he was finished and he hasn’t called.
Could mean anything; death, capture, possession, or forgetfulness, exhaustion, a sudden whim. He’s annoying that way, unpredictable.
The clock ticks by, the sound harsh on her spine, clicking of metal against bone. He hasn’t called.
Five o’clock, she gets fed up, grabs her purse and leaves. He’s not worth this, she tells herself. He’s not worth this.
She tries very hard to believe it.
