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Eight Crazy Nights: Six
OMG did I really promise to do 17 more of these, plus Yuletide? *facepalm*
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skippy_fluff: SV: Oliver and Clark find they have more oil than they expected (or the oil they have lasts longer than expected). Came out a bit shaggy-dog, sorry.
Clark and Oliver stared at the underground sea in front of them. “Okay,” Oliver said, “that’s a lot more than I expected.”
“What are we going to do with it?” Clark very desperately did not want to have to ask Bruce for assistance, not after the mess last week; Bruce got this exquisitely formal tone in his voice that made it clear just how stupid he thought his teammates were. Or, even worse, if they didn’t fix it quick, word would leak out and LuthorCorp would clean it up, giving Lex yet another PR coup at Superman’s expense.
“Are we sure it’s not going to reconstitute?” Oliver asked, hand twitching by his bow at the thought that the alien entities that had nearly overwhelmed them might come back to life.
Clark narrowed his eyes and ran through the various levels of his vision. “All electrical signals have ceased, and cellular integrity is degrading rapidly,” he reported back. “I think we’ve got a big pool of alien protoplasm, that’s all.”
“Could be worse,” Oliver said after another minute. “It could be Ice-9.”
“It could still be fighting back,” Clark agreed.
“The problem remains,” Oliver said and sighed. “Arthur is going to throw a fit if this gets into the water table. The river’s not that far. Hey,” he perked up. “Could you set it on fire?”
Clark considered the question, then shook his head. “Given the composition, we’d end up with a cloud of toxic smoke.”
Oliver pursed his lips and looked helpless, which Clark privately thought was how he got all the girls; nobody ever said the world was fair—wait a second.
“We need a miracle,” he said.
“Uh, yeah.” Oliver continued to stare at the sloshing, blackened lake stretching out in front of them.
“No, I mean, we need magic. Zatanna—she’ll help, without—”
“Tattling?” Oliver’s grin was both rueful and conspiratorial. “She’ll tell Diana, no doubt. But yeah, she might be able to help without creating a major environmental catastrophe or a major news story.” He pulled out his phone—Clark still didn’t know where he kept it; you wouldn’t think that there was room in so much tight spandex and leather—and started to dial.
Clark sagged a little in relief.
Some days it barely paid to put on the costume. But at least he had comrades-in-tights, and that made it all bearable.
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giandujakiss: The Inside, Rebecca/Web/Paul UST, mindgames! This seemed to me to be the same prompt as livrelibre's Web/Rebecca/Paul (trust).
Paul jerked awake. Karen shifted, murmuring a wordless complaint, and rolled on her side, away from him. He considered trying to go back to sleep, but the memory of the dream stopped him.
His mind kept cycling back to it while he was putting the coffee on, then showering and shaving.
He’d been coming to the office to start the day, same as any other. Opened the door to Web’s office to check in, and—
Rebecca had been wearing a business suit, skirt hem ending just above her knees. Her calves were sleek, muscles tight; her heels matched the gray of the suit.
She’d been kneeling in front of Web, who had his arms crossed, his eyebrow raised, looking at Paul like he was demonstrating something. Rebecca’s eyes had been downcast, not looking at Web.
They’d been at least two feet apart, maybe more. Not touching, not close, no hint of movement in the air. Just a tableau, like Web had set it up just for Paul to see.
And still it felt like—if Paul was honest, it felt like he was cheating.
Dreams weren’t exact analogues to waking thoughts, he knew that, but knowledge was very little help. Most of their targets knew what they were doing was wrong. They just couldn’t stop.
That day Paul and Rebecca spent reading through ten sets of hospital records; their killer deliberately infected patients with MRSA.
The next night he found himself in a well-appointed restaurant. Rebecca was wearing a sleeveless, boat-necked black dress and a string of pearls. Her hair was swept back, out of her face, elegant. She was sitting next to Paul, across from that kid from the bar, Corey Hall. Hall looked good in his suit, real Hollywood.
Paul was seated across from Web, who wore his usual smirk as he watched Paul watch Rebecca.
“I think I’ll have the blood jelly,” Rebecca said, closing her menu with a sound like a slap.
Hall smiled at her, lovestruck.
“Very good, Rebecca,” Web said. “What about you, Paul?”
“None for me,” Paul said. “I’ll have what he’s having.”
Web tilted his head. “Are you sure about that?”
“No,” Paul said. “Have you seen what’s in the kitchen?”
Web shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me.” He looked around and signalled for the waiter. “So, Paul. Tell me: Is Corey a good lover?”
Paul didn’t look at Rebecca. “Not for her,” he said.
“And why is that?” His voice, honey over charcoal, seeped into Paul’s brain. It was like being drunk, except the reverse: total clarity, total indifference, total precision.
“She needs something else. Something special.”
“Does she need to be hurt?”
It wasn’t just because of Web’s suggestion that he knew it couldn’t be true. He imagined it—her—how she’d be, bruised maybe, marked up. That wasn’t the way to get to Rebecca, never would be, not any more. Rebecca Locke (the e is silent) didn’t want or need pain from her partners.
He shook his head in negation and watched the slow spread of Web’s proud smile.
He woke, or at least thought he did, and he was still shaking. He threw up his breakfast before he got into his car.
They interrogated the suspect for three hours before he confessed. He liked, he said, to watch the rot progress.
Paul stared at Rebecca’s face while she was writing up the final report and thought about buried things. Worms, bacteria, hearts.
“Rebecca?” Web asked, opening his door and gesturing for her, the same motion he’d used to summon the waiter in Paul’s dream. “Can I speak to you privately?”
“Of course,” she said, and stood, so smooth it might have been automatic.
The door closed with a click like a gas flame springing to life, blue-white.
He wanted to ask her if they were doing this together, the two of them.
He knew better, though. Web had set up the path.
But when Paul fell, he’d be on his own.
meret: SPN - A Captured by the Game (Sam/Dean) time stamp.
Dean wavered on his feet, still clutching the Colt. When he started towards John—John’s body—he only got a few steps before going to his knees.
Sam unfroze and ran to him, catching his shoulders before he could fall on his face. Dean was scrabbling weakly, still trying to reach his father, tears streaking through the dirt and blood on his face. Sam clutched Dean to him, holding Dean back so he wouldn’t have to see the ruin of John’s torso.
Father’s dead, Sam thought, and he was ice, blood stopped in his veins, his limbs like blocks of wood. Only the fact that Dean was in even worse shape kept Dean from cold-cocking him and breaking free.
After a while, Dean’s sobs and Sam’s shakes subsided, though Sam couldn’t make his hands unclench from around Dean’s arms.
He thought, randomly, of how John had pulled him aside two days ago, while they were preparing for the final confrontation. “You can—I’ve got no call to stop the two of you from being the way you are.” Sam had found that more than usually cryptic, and John had seen the confusion on his face. “Mary and I, we never could keep our hands off each other. You don’t need to hold back on my account.”
Sam hadn’t managed to get around to telling Dean that they had John’s permission to engage in PDAs in front of John, not that Dean would have taken him up on the offer. But it had felt like a moment, like he was finally getting a bit of John’s respect.
No more of that to go around, now.
“He saved us,” Sam whispered. And it had been them, the two of them, John Winchester ending his days on behalf of the son he knew and the son he didn’t, exactly the hero Dean had always believed in.
We’re orphans now, he realized. With his history, that was something to rejoice, but he felt Dean’s suffering too, like a barely-healed broken bone.
Dean sagged against him, the tears still leaking down his face. Sam wrapped his arms around Dean’s back and rocked him, held him close. Never again, he thought. No more pain, no more loss; Dean had reached his lifetime limit.
They’d killed Azazel, and Sam would deal with that minor demon who’d been nosing around him like she knew something he didn’t, and so they were going to get their happily ever after even if he had to march into Hell to make that happen.
For now, though, he just hung on to Dean and let him grieve.
livrelibre: Chuck, Chuck/Casey/Sarah (post-finale, training or "Let's get ready to rumble!"). Bonus to the first to ID the movie reference.
“Front handspring stepout, roundoff back handspring stepout, roundoff back handspring, full twisting layout,” Sarah said.
Chuck swallowed, bounced up and down a couple of times on his feet, and—
The world kept spinning for half a minute after he stopped. “Okay, so gymnastics is apparently part of the skill set!” The grin on his face felt more like a rictus of terror. Was there no limit to what had been stuffed into his brain? And why would the Intersect have been programmed to be able to make a seven-layer chocolate torte?
“You started with a cartwheel, moron, not a front handspring,” Casey said from the sidelines, bringing him back to the present.
“Casey,” Sarah said, managing to put into his name her entire speech about how it was important to figure out exactly what resources Chuck now had available to him.
Casey sneered at her. “What good’s the skills if he can’t follow orders?”
“Seems to me Chuck’s done pretty well so far, not always following orders.”
Casey snorted, but didn’t offer further commentary. The training room felt warm, supercharged with energy, unless that was just Chuck. Since the new Intersect and its exciting extra powers, he’d had a hard time keeping still. Plus he was pretty sure that one of the things the Intersect allowed him to do was read body language, and not only was he now feeling pretty good about his chances with Sarah, he was mostly convinced that Casey wouldn’t kick either of them out of bed for—well, who was he kidding, Casey would totally kick them out of bed for offenses minor or imagined, but Casey still wanted them, wanted Chuck, which was so hysterically cool Chuck kept worrying that he had to be hallucinating it.
Problem was, he couldn’t decide how to bring the topic up. Hey, Casey, one of my superpowers is gaydar? Hey, Casey, I would seriously like to be the meat in a spy sandwich? Not to mention the issue of whether Sarah would be willing to share, though he had his hopes there as well. Casey was undoubtedly a fine specimen of manhood, at least if he wasn’t talking, and there were a lot of ways Chuck could imagine to accomplish that particular goal.
--aaand Casey had just whapped him in the back of the head. “Pay attention, Bartowski!” he griped. “Or I’m gonna send that film of you breakdancing to every damn employee at the BuyMore.”
Casey was snarling, but he was standing three inches closer than heterosexual male standard, so Chuck grinned at him, with just enough fear to show that he wasn’t ignoring the threat. “You got it,” he said, leaning in and watching Casey sway just a fraction forward to match him.
Come to think of it, he really wanted to know whether he’d gotten the ability to deep-throat.
ariadnes_string: Fringe!fic: Locked room/trapped/quarantine always does it for me. Gen, Peter & Olivia.
“I think I saw this episode of The X-Files,” Peter said, and launched his latest paper airplane. This one looked more like a pterodactyl than a mechanical artifact, actually, and it made it all the way across the room, then looped twice before it drifted gently to the ground.
“I don’t think Mulder and Scully ever faced a challenge like Walter,” Olivia noted, watching the elder Bishop through the glass of their temporary prison. He was moving his hands in and out, as if he were squeezing a big, invisible ball. For all she knew, that was exactly what he was doing. “Tell me, Peter: do you really think we’re infectious?”
Peter glanced over at her—she’d noticed that about him, this split-second emotional temperature-taking he did, and not just with her but with anyone whose help he thought he might need. And Peter liked to keep his options open, so that meant just about anyone they met. He wasn’t at all obvious about it, but she did wonder sometimes what he really thought about her, or about anyone really. Other than Walter, as to whom Peter’s emotions, while complex, seemed quite readily expressed.
In any event, after ascertaining that Olivia was curious but not overly concerned, Peter gave her question serious consideration. “Engineered viruses are actually less likely to be easily transmissible than naturally occuring ones,” he said. “Unless you start with a truly nasty bug—and there’s no evidence of that here—you’re more likely to end up with an evolutionary dead end, and part of that is a difficulty reproducing. No, my bet is that if we make it another ten hours without bleeding black goo from our eyes we’re safe as houses.”
Outside, Agent Farnsworth ripped off her lab coat and used it to beat out the flames covering the table in front of Walter.
“Well,” Peter said, smiling crookedly, “if Walter doesn’t kill us first, anyway.”
libgirl: M/S: snowflakes. Warning: gratuitous meanness to Bill Scully Jr.
There was very little more satisfying than staring out into a cold and snowy night from a warm and bright room, she thought, watching the snow drift down. With the world dark and silent, the snow coated the cars and sidewalks like fondant, and it was easy to ignore the impending reality of slush and shovels.
“It’s a common misconception that no two snowflakes are alike, Scully,” Mulder said from behind her, resting his chin on her shoulder as he checked to see what she was looking at. He was warm against her back, leaning into her with a reassuring weight. “But in fact the smallest snow crystals are extremely likely to produce duplicates on a regular basis.”
She smiled, just a little, at his reflection in the windowpane. “I’m surprised you credit a probabilistic account rather than an inductive one.”
“Do you want me to go out with a microscope and start looking?”
She was almost entirely sure he was joking.
“When I told my brothers that the snowflake story wasn’t true, Bill threatened to beat me up,” she mused, settling back against his chest.
“Some people just don’t like having their myths dispelled,” Mulder said, and if he didn’t see the irony in that she wasn’t going to point it out. Not tonight, while the two of them were safe and the only darkness she saw came from the fact that the sun was shining on another part of the planet.
kass: SV, Clark/Lex, glow
“Look at it!” Clark repeated, shoving the object in question under Lex’s nose.
“I did look at it,” Lex said calmly, “when I approved the design specs.”
“You approved a Superman doll that glows in the dark?”
“First, it’s an action figure, with sixty-seven points of articulation, based on character sketches by Alex Ross, whose run on Warrior Angel is widely regarded as the finest—”
“I don’t care what the SKU is! It’s green, it looks more like Bizarro, urk—”
That last wasn’t an argument, because Lex had taken the simple expedient of sliding out of his chair and onto his knees. He wasn’t gentle, because he didn’t need to be, and he wasn’t precise, because he was too turned on. Fortunately, Clark knew when to lose an argument.
Later, while Lex was tossing pieces of Clark’s discarded uniform off to the side, the better to lie on the extremely plush carpet, Clark blinked himself back to coherence. “Not that I’m complaining,” he said, “and not that I’m giving up on this, because my associations with green glowing things are not good—” Lex wisely forebore to mention his own occasional nostalgia for the mortal enemies days, when Kryptonite had been as constant a companion as Mercy—“but what brought that on?”
Lex sighed. It was one thing for Clark not to understand his own attractiveness. That was charming. Sometimes, though, Lex had to wonder just how alien the Kryptonian brain was. “It was what you said, Clark.”
Clark’s face went distant, accessing that photographic memory. Lex could tell when Clark figured it out, because his eyes went wide and his grin could have sold toothpaste to dentists. “You jumped me because I know the abbreviation for stock-keeping unit?”
“Next time you accuse me of wanting you only for your body, remember this moment,” Lex advised.
Clark pulled him close and Lex went without hesitation, already planning on the cheapest way to solve the glow-in-the-dark problem. He was a purist enough to hate repaints, but—Clark did that thing with his tongue, and Lex decided that he could suffer a marginal decrease in the profit margin in the interests of being the only person who got to put his hands on the life-size version.
END
skippy_fluff: SV: Oliver and Clark find they have more oil than they expected (or the oil they have lasts longer than expected). Came out a bit shaggy-dog, sorry.Clark and Oliver stared at the underground sea in front of them. “Okay,” Oliver said, “that’s a lot more than I expected.”
“What are we going to do with it?” Clark very desperately did not want to have to ask Bruce for assistance, not after the mess last week; Bruce got this exquisitely formal tone in his voice that made it clear just how stupid he thought his teammates were. Or, even worse, if they didn’t fix it quick, word would leak out and LuthorCorp would clean it up, giving Lex yet another PR coup at Superman’s expense.
“Are we sure it’s not going to reconstitute?” Oliver asked, hand twitching by his bow at the thought that the alien entities that had nearly overwhelmed them might come back to life.
Clark narrowed his eyes and ran through the various levels of his vision. “All electrical signals have ceased, and cellular integrity is degrading rapidly,” he reported back. “I think we’ve got a big pool of alien protoplasm, that’s all.”
“Could be worse,” Oliver said after another minute. “It could be Ice-9.”
“It could still be fighting back,” Clark agreed.
“The problem remains,” Oliver said and sighed. “Arthur is going to throw a fit if this gets into the water table. The river’s not that far. Hey,” he perked up. “Could you set it on fire?”
Clark considered the question, then shook his head. “Given the composition, we’d end up with a cloud of toxic smoke.”
Oliver pursed his lips and looked helpless, which Clark privately thought was how he got all the girls; nobody ever said the world was fair—wait a second.
“We need a miracle,” he said.
“Uh, yeah.” Oliver continued to stare at the sloshing, blackened lake stretching out in front of them.
“No, I mean, we need magic. Zatanna—she’ll help, without—”
“Tattling?” Oliver’s grin was both rueful and conspiratorial. “She’ll tell Diana, no doubt. But yeah, she might be able to help without creating a major environmental catastrophe or a major news story.” He pulled out his phone—Clark still didn’t know where he kept it; you wouldn’t think that there was room in so much tight spandex and leather—and started to dial.
Clark sagged a little in relief.
Some days it barely paid to put on the costume. But at least he had comrades-in-tights, and that made it all bearable.
giandujakiss: The Inside, Rebecca/Web/Paul UST, mindgames! This seemed to me to be the same prompt as livrelibre's Web/Rebecca/Paul (trust).Paul jerked awake. Karen shifted, murmuring a wordless complaint, and rolled on her side, away from him. He considered trying to go back to sleep, but the memory of the dream stopped him.
His mind kept cycling back to it while he was putting the coffee on, then showering and shaving.
He’d been coming to the office to start the day, same as any other. Opened the door to Web’s office to check in, and—
Rebecca had been wearing a business suit, skirt hem ending just above her knees. Her calves were sleek, muscles tight; her heels matched the gray of the suit.
She’d been kneeling in front of Web, who had his arms crossed, his eyebrow raised, looking at Paul like he was demonstrating something. Rebecca’s eyes had been downcast, not looking at Web.
They’d been at least two feet apart, maybe more. Not touching, not close, no hint of movement in the air. Just a tableau, like Web had set it up just for Paul to see.
And still it felt like—if Paul was honest, it felt like he was cheating.
Dreams weren’t exact analogues to waking thoughts, he knew that, but knowledge was very little help. Most of their targets knew what they were doing was wrong. They just couldn’t stop.
That day Paul and Rebecca spent reading through ten sets of hospital records; their killer deliberately infected patients with MRSA.
The next night he found himself in a well-appointed restaurant. Rebecca was wearing a sleeveless, boat-necked black dress and a string of pearls. Her hair was swept back, out of her face, elegant. She was sitting next to Paul, across from that kid from the bar, Corey Hall. Hall looked good in his suit, real Hollywood.
Paul was seated across from Web, who wore his usual smirk as he watched Paul watch Rebecca.
“I think I’ll have the blood jelly,” Rebecca said, closing her menu with a sound like a slap.
Hall smiled at her, lovestruck.
“Very good, Rebecca,” Web said. “What about you, Paul?”
“None for me,” Paul said. “I’ll have what he’s having.”
Web tilted his head. “Are you sure about that?”
“No,” Paul said. “Have you seen what’s in the kitchen?”
Web shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me.” He looked around and signalled for the waiter. “So, Paul. Tell me: Is Corey a good lover?”
Paul didn’t look at Rebecca. “Not for her,” he said.
“And why is that?” His voice, honey over charcoal, seeped into Paul’s brain. It was like being drunk, except the reverse: total clarity, total indifference, total precision.
“She needs something else. Something special.”
“Does she need to be hurt?”
It wasn’t just because of Web’s suggestion that he knew it couldn’t be true. He imagined it—her—how she’d be, bruised maybe, marked up. That wasn’t the way to get to Rebecca, never would be, not any more. Rebecca Locke (the e is silent) didn’t want or need pain from her partners.
He shook his head in negation and watched the slow spread of Web’s proud smile.
He woke, or at least thought he did, and he was still shaking. He threw up his breakfast before he got into his car.
They interrogated the suspect for three hours before he confessed. He liked, he said, to watch the rot progress.
Paul stared at Rebecca’s face while she was writing up the final report and thought about buried things. Worms, bacteria, hearts.
“Rebecca?” Web asked, opening his door and gesturing for her, the same motion he’d used to summon the waiter in Paul’s dream. “Can I speak to you privately?”
“Of course,” she said, and stood, so smooth it might have been automatic.
The door closed with a click like a gas flame springing to life, blue-white.
He wanted to ask her if they were doing this together, the two of them.
He knew better, though. Web had set up the path.
But when Paul fell, he’d be on his own.
meret: SPN - A Captured by the Game (Sam/Dean) time stamp.Dean wavered on his feet, still clutching the Colt. When he started towards John—John’s body—he only got a few steps before going to his knees.
Sam unfroze and ran to him, catching his shoulders before he could fall on his face. Dean was scrabbling weakly, still trying to reach his father, tears streaking through the dirt and blood on his face. Sam clutched Dean to him, holding Dean back so he wouldn’t have to see the ruin of John’s torso.
Father’s dead, Sam thought, and he was ice, blood stopped in his veins, his limbs like blocks of wood. Only the fact that Dean was in even worse shape kept Dean from cold-cocking him and breaking free.
After a while, Dean’s sobs and Sam’s shakes subsided, though Sam couldn’t make his hands unclench from around Dean’s arms.
He thought, randomly, of how John had pulled him aside two days ago, while they were preparing for the final confrontation. “You can—I’ve got no call to stop the two of you from being the way you are.” Sam had found that more than usually cryptic, and John had seen the confusion on his face. “Mary and I, we never could keep our hands off each other. You don’t need to hold back on my account.”
Sam hadn’t managed to get around to telling Dean that they had John’s permission to engage in PDAs in front of John, not that Dean would have taken him up on the offer. But it had felt like a moment, like he was finally getting a bit of John’s respect.
No more of that to go around, now.
“He saved us,” Sam whispered. And it had been them, the two of them, John Winchester ending his days on behalf of the son he knew and the son he didn’t, exactly the hero Dean had always believed in.
We’re orphans now, he realized. With his history, that was something to rejoice, but he felt Dean’s suffering too, like a barely-healed broken bone.
Dean sagged against him, the tears still leaking down his face. Sam wrapped his arms around Dean’s back and rocked him, held him close. Never again, he thought. No more pain, no more loss; Dean had reached his lifetime limit.
They’d killed Azazel, and Sam would deal with that minor demon who’d been nosing around him like she knew something he didn’t, and so they were going to get their happily ever after even if he had to march into Hell to make that happen.
For now, though, he just hung on to Dean and let him grieve.
livrelibre: Chuck, Chuck/Casey/Sarah (post-finale, training or "Let's get ready to rumble!"). Bonus to the first to ID the movie reference.“Front handspring stepout, roundoff back handspring stepout, roundoff back handspring, full twisting layout,” Sarah said.
Chuck swallowed, bounced up and down a couple of times on his feet, and—
The world kept spinning for half a minute after he stopped. “Okay, so gymnastics is apparently part of the skill set!” The grin on his face felt more like a rictus of terror. Was there no limit to what had been stuffed into his brain? And why would the Intersect have been programmed to be able to make a seven-layer chocolate torte?
“You started with a cartwheel, moron, not a front handspring,” Casey said from the sidelines, bringing him back to the present.
“Casey,” Sarah said, managing to put into his name her entire speech about how it was important to figure out exactly what resources Chuck now had available to him.
Casey sneered at her. “What good’s the skills if he can’t follow orders?”
“Seems to me Chuck’s done pretty well so far, not always following orders.”
Casey snorted, but didn’t offer further commentary. The training room felt warm, supercharged with energy, unless that was just Chuck. Since the new Intersect and its exciting extra powers, he’d had a hard time keeping still. Plus he was pretty sure that one of the things the Intersect allowed him to do was read body language, and not only was he now feeling pretty good about his chances with Sarah, he was mostly convinced that Casey wouldn’t kick either of them out of bed for—well, who was he kidding, Casey would totally kick them out of bed for offenses minor or imagined, but Casey still wanted them, wanted Chuck, which was so hysterically cool Chuck kept worrying that he had to be hallucinating it.
Problem was, he couldn’t decide how to bring the topic up. Hey, Casey, one of my superpowers is gaydar? Hey, Casey, I would seriously like to be the meat in a spy sandwich? Not to mention the issue of whether Sarah would be willing to share, though he had his hopes there as well. Casey was undoubtedly a fine specimen of manhood, at least if he wasn’t talking, and there were a lot of ways Chuck could imagine to accomplish that particular goal.
--aaand Casey had just whapped him in the back of the head. “Pay attention, Bartowski!” he griped. “Or I’m gonna send that film of you breakdancing to every damn employee at the BuyMore.”
Casey was snarling, but he was standing three inches closer than heterosexual male standard, so Chuck grinned at him, with just enough fear to show that he wasn’t ignoring the threat. “You got it,” he said, leaning in and watching Casey sway just a fraction forward to match him.
Come to think of it, he really wanted to know whether he’d gotten the ability to deep-throat.
ariadnes_string: Fringe!fic: Locked room/trapped/quarantine always does it for me. Gen, Peter & Olivia.“I think I saw this episode of The X-Files,” Peter said, and launched his latest paper airplane. This one looked more like a pterodactyl than a mechanical artifact, actually, and it made it all the way across the room, then looped twice before it drifted gently to the ground.
“I don’t think Mulder and Scully ever faced a challenge like Walter,” Olivia noted, watching the elder Bishop through the glass of their temporary prison. He was moving his hands in and out, as if he were squeezing a big, invisible ball. For all she knew, that was exactly what he was doing. “Tell me, Peter: do you really think we’re infectious?”
Peter glanced over at her—she’d noticed that about him, this split-second emotional temperature-taking he did, and not just with her but with anyone whose help he thought he might need. And Peter liked to keep his options open, so that meant just about anyone they met. He wasn’t at all obvious about it, but she did wonder sometimes what he really thought about her, or about anyone really. Other than Walter, as to whom Peter’s emotions, while complex, seemed quite readily expressed.
In any event, after ascertaining that Olivia was curious but not overly concerned, Peter gave her question serious consideration. “Engineered viruses are actually less likely to be easily transmissible than naturally occuring ones,” he said. “Unless you start with a truly nasty bug—and there’s no evidence of that here—you’re more likely to end up with an evolutionary dead end, and part of that is a difficulty reproducing. No, my bet is that if we make it another ten hours without bleeding black goo from our eyes we’re safe as houses.”
Outside, Agent Farnsworth ripped off her lab coat and used it to beat out the flames covering the table in front of Walter.
“Well,” Peter said, smiling crookedly, “if Walter doesn’t kill us first, anyway.”
libgirl: M/S: snowflakes. Warning: gratuitous meanness to Bill Scully Jr.There was very little more satisfying than staring out into a cold and snowy night from a warm and bright room, she thought, watching the snow drift down. With the world dark and silent, the snow coated the cars and sidewalks like fondant, and it was easy to ignore the impending reality of slush and shovels.
“It’s a common misconception that no two snowflakes are alike, Scully,” Mulder said from behind her, resting his chin on her shoulder as he checked to see what she was looking at. He was warm against her back, leaning into her with a reassuring weight. “But in fact the smallest snow crystals are extremely likely to produce duplicates on a regular basis.”
She smiled, just a little, at his reflection in the windowpane. “I’m surprised you credit a probabilistic account rather than an inductive one.”
“Do you want me to go out with a microscope and start looking?”
She was almost entirely sure he was joking.
“When I told my brothers that the snowflake story wasn’t true, Bill threatened to beat me up,” she mused, settling back against his chest.
“Some people just don’t like having their myths dispelled,” Mulder said, and if he didn’t see the irony in that she wasn’t going to point it out. Not tonight, while the two of them were safe and the only darkness she saw came from the fact that the sun was shining on another part of the planet.
kass: SV, Clark/Lex, glow“Look at it!” Clark repeated, shoving the object in question under Lex’s nose.
“I did look at it,” Lex said calmly, “when I approved the design specs.”
“You approved a Superman doll that glows in the dark?”
“First, it’s an action figure, with sixty-seven points of articulation, based on character sketches by Alex Ross, whose run on Warrior Angel is widely regarded as the finest—”
“I don’t care what the SKU is! It’s green, it looks more like Bizarro, urk—”
That last wasn’t an argument, because Lex had taken the simple expedient of sliding out of his chair and onto his knees. He wasn’t gentle, because he didn’t need to be, and he wasn’t precise, because he was too turned on. Fortunately, Clark knew when to lose an argument.
Later, while Lex was tossing pieces of Clark’s discarded uniform off to the side, the better to lie on the extremely plush carpet, Clark blinked himself back to coherence. “Not that I’m complaining,” he said, “and not that I’m giving up on this, because my associations with green glowing things are not good—” Lex wisely forebore to mention his own occasional nostalgia for the mortal enemies days, when Kryptonite had been as constant a companion as Mercy—“but what brought that on?”
Lex sighed. It was one thing for Clark not to understand his own attractiveness. That was charming. Sometimes, though, Lex had to wonder just how alien the Kryptonian brain was. “It was what you said, Clark.”
Clark’s face went distant, accessing that photographic memory. Lex could tell when Clark figured it out, because his eyes went wide and his grin could have sold toothpaste to dentists. “You jumped me because I know the abbreviation for stock-keeping unit?”
“Next time you accuse me of wanting you only for your body, remember this moment,” Lex advised.
Clark pulled him close and Lex went without hesitation, already planning on the cheapest way to solve the glow-in-the-dark problem. He was a purist enough to hate repaints, but—Clark did that thing with his tongue, and Lex decided that he could suffer a marginal decrease in the profit margin in the interests of being the only person who got to put his hands on the life-size version.
END