Multifandom Drabbles and Fourteen-Word Stories
Warning: Some of the fourteen-word stories -- all right, all of them -- might be considered a bit crude. You have been warned.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Gift drabble for Jimaine:
These days, news runs fast as a locomotive, but Etta drifts ahead, unsynchronized. She stops where the land stops and haunts the 'Frisco bars that stink like wharves. For a false redhead who wears her fading finery well, there is money, not comfort, in this life.
Her wandering ceases, and one night, news overtakes her. The paper allots the death notice a space small as the world has become. She abandons it for a drink from the nearest regular.
"Cold tonight, Etta?" he asks. With a feeling like falling, she cuts loose at last: "My name," she says, "is Ethel."
Crossovers
M*A*S*H/The Naked and the Dead for M*A*S*H 100th:
Hawkeye's last patient in his residency hospital is a soldier from '45, found under a park bench.
He's called "Red." Maybe the name fit when he was lithe and sunburned, but now you can trace his ruin beneath a tent of yellowed skin. Though kidney failure is his diagnosis, Red speaks only of the compression of combat: a hike to nowhere, a helmet leaking blood. War seems indistinguishable from his body's banal decay.
In the fever-dream of Korea, Hawkeye will understand that clench in the gut. Will understand the breakdown of the filtration system; how horror, accrued, gradually turns toxic.
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Drabbles for Thursday 100:
I. "Sunday Night"
In the flat glare of the streetlamps, they crouch over the pavement. Bobby touches the corpse casually, examines the bruises on the face. Soon he gets to his feet, confers with the police, and moves on, heavy-limbed, his footsteps loud in the close alleyway.
The lights of the squad cars shiver over them; the lamps flare high in Bobby's eyes; the fine hairs rise on the back of Alex's neck. Three o'clock on a Sunday night: the cooling body of a streetwalker and somewhere, behind a fence, a dog barking sonorously. Alex, standing, tugs her coat more snugly around herself.
Les Mis�rables
Fourteen-word stories for the LMFFI challenge:
I. Grantaire was good at falling down. He met Enjolras and never regained his feet.
II. Javert Porn: Is that a loaf, or are you just happy to see me?
Drabbles for Gleams Which Pass:
I. "Fantine"
Some nights, after they had snuffed the candle, Marguerite heard the murmurous sound of Fantine pacing upstairs. In the starlight that wavered across the floor, she sat up and listened to the ragged breathing, the feeble mumbling, and the brush of Fantine's stockinged feet overhead, a movement endlessly repeated and ultimately rendered meaningless.
One night in January, they put out the candle a final time. Fantine coughed until morning and left early in a spendthrift rustle of old satin, blur of blossoms in her once-bright hair. The other tenants divided up her belongings when she didn't return that evening.
The Marvin Trilogy
"A Person, Too: Finn Femslash in Two Acts" for Petra:
Second semester freshman year, Lisa Goldberg teaches Marvin's girlfriend. She's not particularly smart. She is prettier than Lisa expected, because Marvin always gets what he wants; and yet somehow not as pretty, because Marvin never has what he wants.
She lingers after class the first day, pale and rangy and unformed.
"Marvin's already told me," she says in her child's voice, eminently reasonable, "that he's in love with you. I don't mind. I haveta respect his wants and needs."
Lisa stares, then says gently, "You'll be late for lunch."
The girl ends up failing History. They all fail, that year.
Years later, some schlub invites Lisa to their first high-school reunion. (Apparently, more than one boy had eyes for Miss Goldberg.) Lisa spots her in this stranger's living room, on a sofa near the door. She is tanner, shapelier, and no prettier. Maybe smarter, though.
Lisa approaches. Reintroductions aren't necessary; the girl brandishes her wine glass and says too loudly, "Two years, he hasn't called me."
Lisa sits beside her on the sofa and puts a hand in hers. "Don't the rest of us get to have wants and needs?"
The girl allows the touch and smiles a little, sadly.
M*A*S*H
Fourteen-word stories based on the LMFFI challenge:
I. Hawkeye couldn't guess what BJ's initials stood for. Finally, BJ decided to show him.
Drabbles:
I. "The Late Captain Pierce" post-ep, for Raven:
New to Korea, Hawkeye nevertheless recognized the acceptance of dog tags as a ritual suicide. Afterward, he climbed into a jeep to the 4077th, carrying this outdated identity. "Know why you get two?" asked the driver, sneering. "One to identify you for your family; one to go to the grave with you."
Later, the Army would tell Hawkeye he was dead, and he would believe it. The following night, he mailed one tag to his father. When BJ came off his shift, he found Hawkeye sleeping with a stillness grotesque as rigor mortis, his remaining tag curled around one fist.
II. Drabble related to "Dear Ma," for iolanthe:
When Hawkeye comes in for the monthly foot exam, Francis has been murmuring the rosary for an hour, over and over and it never goes anywhere.
Our Father, who art in Heaven--
When Francis lifts his feet onto Hawkeye's lap, there is a moment where Hawkeye's hands are warm as flame and Francis is cold, dreading the thaw. His voice catches when he says, "You have a lovely touch," and Hawkeye smiles.
Hail Mary, full of grace--
When Hawkeye leaves, Francis lets his fist fall open. His beads, so tightly gripped, have left an imprint like stigmata in his palm.
III. "Thanksgiving," for M*A*S*H 100th:
Hawkeye and BJ were the only ones awake early enough to greet their dinner. They watched idly as the sergeant unloaded the turkeys Potter had wrangled from HQ: Hawkeye slouched in his robe, BJ shivering through a parka.
"First winter in Korea?" inquired the sergeant, eyeing BJ.
"First winter," replied Hawkeye. "He's from San Francisco."
"It'll be a cold one." The sergeant spared them a grin, brittle as frost. "Means your wounded won't bleed to death, maybe. Happy Thanksgiving; ain't much more to be grateful for."
There was no answer, but BJ stiffened and laid an arm across Hawkeye's shoulders.
IV. "Easter," for M*A*S*H 100th and Amber:
Nothing has happened for weeks, but Radar feels disquieted -- and not because of breakfast. The only person in the Swamp is BJ, with eyes unfocused as the landscape of dreams. Radar offers, "Happy Easter, sir."
BJ smiles secretly. "Yeah."
"What're you doing?"
"Thinking," says BJ. "Back home, there's an egg hunt. If I were there, we'd take Erin."
Two hours later, a jeep delivers a boy without a foot. BJ catches Radar's glance across the table; smiles again, strangely; says, "In Korea, Easter hunts turn up mines."
It's like the end of a long, long dream in his eyes.
V. "Games People Play," for M*A*S*H 100th:
Poker night is the eve of BJ's first trip to the aid station. Frank is watching the game, filing his nails; Potter and Klinger are watching Sidney's face; and Hawkeye isn't watching his cards.
"Look at this surgeon's steady touch," says BJ, raising a shaking hand. "That's not the gin."
"Can you keep your head when you're this jittery?" asks Hawkeye.
"All that matters is can he fire a gun," snarls Frank, as Hawkeye distractedly loses thirty dollars to Sidney's not-bluff.
Just after dawn, Hawkeye will slip out to the front in BJ's place.
Some gambles you just don't make.
The Regeneration trilogy
Gift drabble for Senza:
"You know," said Moffet, on one of the blurry nights after they'd discovered him bleeding in the bath, "sometimes, I think I didn't want to walk. To go back to the front and hear all that noise."
Rivers nodded and continued checking Moffet's bandages. He'd made a bad job of the suicide attempt. Perhaps it was cleaner to disassociate mentally than to try to sever flesh from flesh.
Sometimes, Rivers thought he didn't want a visual memory, to grasp the receding shadows. Didn't want the possibility of recalling Sassoon, kneeling in the swelling dawn, his touch childishly earnest as prayer.
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