Drabble Meme

[etherati]

Snagged from wednesday42 , from whom I requested a drabble; now reposting as requested.

Also participating, and involved in WM, to my knowledge: steals_thyme , circleswithin , tuff_ghost , jackiemei , chibifukurou , simshocking , slipstreamborne , mad_bertha , spiffystuff 

Fandom-wise I'd say anything I currently have fic for is fair game (Watchmen, Doctor Who, Final Fantasy 7(Turks only, sorry), Equilibrium, M*A*S*H, Moon, Hitchhiker's Guide) as well as a few others that I've written stuff for but never posted it (Human Target, Echo Bazaar, Scrubs, Firefly, Dead Like Me, and in honor of its 25th anniversary, BTTF!), but I fully expect the majority to be WM and that's cool.

So, to quote the prompt:

---

The first TEN people to comment get to request that I write a drabble of any pairing/character of their choosing. Feel free to add prompt words/phrases/video if you like, just remember it's only 100 words.

In return, they have to post this meme in their own journal, offering drabbles OR icons (graphics fen, say one icon per prompt?), regardless of their ability level, and give it a go.

---

I AM ANAL ABOUT THE 100 WORDS THING, it will be PRECISELY 100 words if I can manage it. :D

Nevermind. I am picky about this when the drabbles are a personal challenge for ME, but these are meant to be gifts, and I won't make them less good just to shave them down to 100 words.

1. chibifukurou - Dan: Owls are predators too.
2. jackiemei - D/R/L "Only I'm allowed to call her that."
3. tuff_ghost - Dan, Hollis "I hope you two are being careful..."
4. steals_thyme - Dan/Zorschach: Flea market
5. mad_bertha - Zorschach and Dan watch walking dead zombie flicks.
6. ook - Rorschach interacting with a female prostitute.
7. simshocking - D/R - playing L4D OR Nick and Ellis. OR SOME KIND OF MEET UP
8. wednesday42 - Laurie, Rorschach. Gone fishing.
9. tortoisegirl - Dan/Rorschach, local wildlife
10. brancher - (Adult) Dan makes fucking machines. And uses them. On himself. Rorschach finds out.

Comments

[chibifukurou]

I find it amusing that this drabble meme has made it all the way back to my friends list. Does it count if I posted this offer up previously? I still have open spots to fill. If you want to request back.

http://chibifukurou.livejournal.com/30606.html

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Man I have no idea how that would work, just go ahead and request, I think you previously having posted it is enough. We all will end up with an incestuous knot of drabble-gifting no matter how hard we try to avoid it anyway. XD

[jackiemei.livejournal.com]

D/R/L

"Only I'm allowed to call her that."

[etherati.livejournal.com]

The thug spits blood into his hand, something that might be a tooth. "Fuckin' whore," he drools out—and just like that, his night has gotten ten times worse.

Laurel just laughs, but Rorschach freezes; turns back to the man, slow and ominous. He imagines his hand as a vise when it closes around the man's throat, something that can squeeze language out of his body, that can squeeze life—

A gasp, behind him. Now Laurel isn't laughing. Daniel's stepped forward, one hand out, placating. Rorschach realizes, distant: He isn't supposed to do this, anymore.

He counts to three, lets the man crumple at his feet. Looms. "Only I'm allowed to call her that," he growls, "Scum."

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

Dan, Hollis

"I hope you two are being careful..."

[etherati.livejournal.com]

(AN: Z!verse because tuff clarified that was what she was asking for, no I am not inflicting zombies without just cause XD)

-

"Looks like you picked up a doozy there," Hollis says one night. He points with the neck of his bottle, chuckling knowingly.

And Dan freezes, because his collar's too low and he knows what 'injuries' Hollis is talking about, and he knows how he must smell—how his clothes and furniture and entire house smells. Zombie.

Does he have a girlfriend, Hollis asks, obligatory. No.

"Didn't expect so." Then the quiet contemplation of a half-bottle of beer, Dan feeling flayed open, exposed.

When Hollis gets up to replace their beer, Dan fumbles for an explanation. "Look, I..."

"You know I'm not the judging type, Danny," Hollis says, popping the caps off both bottles. "I just hope to god the two of you are being careful."

[steals-thyme.livejournal.com]

Dan/Zorschach: Flea market

[etherati.livejournal.com]

"Why did you want to come here again?"

Rorschach picks something up from a table, shielded from Dan’s view. He turns it over, examines the price tag. "Given up things," he says, musing. "Unwanted, cast off."

"And patched up to within an inch of their lives."

"Yes." A quiet chuckle, Rorschach scratching at his own itchy patchwork. "Feel a kinship."

Dan nods; doesn't say anything when Rorschach pulls a crumpled single from his pocket and hands it to the man behind the table, shoves whatever it is into his pocket, walks on.

He finds it the next evening, propped on the bedside table next to his glasses: an ancient stuffed owl, repair work snaked over it like sutures, held together only by thread and love.

[mad-bertha.livejournal.com]

Zorschach and Dan watch walking dead zombie flicks.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Friday Night Zombie Marathon, the screen reads, in gory, dripping letters.

Rorschach is not convinced.

“Come on,” Dan says, setting popcorn on the coffeetable, gathering a thick blanket around them, mindful of both their slings. “It’ll be fun.”

It’s not fun. It’s supposed to be mindless, laughable horror, but hours pass and there’s just something about the gleeful way the heroes in each film put down their former neighbors, friends, lovers, that gets to him, a splinter between the ribs. It had come so close.

Four movies in and he’s starting to shut down, and then all at once Daniel’s hands are on his face, hot, tilting it away from the screen; Daniel is kissing him, slow and lingering.

“I’m glad it didn’t turn out that way,” he says into Rorschach’s throat, the most wild of understatements, voice as shaken as Rorschach feels.

[ook.livejournal.com]

Rorschach interacting with a female prostitute. Can be any rating.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

(AN/warnings: Misogynist and victim-blaming, because this is Rorschach POV, after all. Sorry.)

-

She isn’t like the others, he tells himself as a sop to his indignation, fishing through his pockets for something to use as a compress. Victim. Of course it isn’t true; she’s just like all the others, bleeds and blossoms bruises like anyone does who is too often under a fist to notice them—but just as filthy too, just as depraved.

He presses the napkin against the side of her head, ungentle. Grunts for her to take it herself. Asks, expecting the same answer he gets every time—Sure, man or Whatever you say, honey— “Are you going to stop?”

But she just bites her swollen lip, resignation painted through all the run makeup, says, “No, probably not,”—and it is the most honest thing one of them has ever said to him.

[simshocking.livejournal.com]

D/R - playing L4D
OR
Nick and Ellis. : D

OR SOME KIND OF MEET UP
YOUR CHOICE.

[jackiemei.livejournal.com]

lol, this prompt.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

(AN: Not a drabble, not even an attempt at a drabble; I already had this idea and I was having too much fun writing it. ~440 words, sorry.)

-

Across the junkyard—hunter at thirty paces. Nick would like to flatter himself that he’s getting good at spotting them, but even he has to concede, lining up the shot, that this one’s not exactly being stealthy.

“Uh, Nick?”

He squeezes the trigger, the shot goes just slightly wide. “Not now, Ellis.”

“I just don’t think—”

“What a revelation.”

“Ha ha, very funny,” Ellis complains, “but come on now, I don’t think that’s a zombie.”

“If this is anything like that shit with the pilot, Ellis, I swear to god—”

“Just look at it, man, this ain’t rocket science.”

So Nick does, as he’s lining up the second shot, and yeah, it is acting a little weird. No, scratch that; a lot weird, waving its arms around like it’s trying to surrender but doesn’t have a white flag on hand. Nearby, a motion that looks a lot like another head ducking behind a pile of scrap; a hand gesturing to the hunter, Get down, get DOWN.

It doesn’t get down, but the frenzied, shrieking charge he’s expecting doesn’t come either. The damn thing just stands there, waving at him.

“Shit,” Nick says, pulling the rifle up short. “They’re survivors.”

*

The shooting’s stopped, after only one shot. Dan crawls out from cover, bodily yanks Rorschach to the ground because the damn idiot apparently doesn’t know when to get out of the line of fire on his own. “You okay?” he asks, panicked, a little fucking furious, searching for the bullet hole.

“Fine,” the man under the hood growls, and dressing him up like this had seemed like such a good idea when all they’d had to keep away were other zombies. Crazy survivalists with assault rifles, they hadn’t counted on. “Missed me, terrible aim.”

“Good thing,” Dan says; then they’re both on alert again, crouched in the junk, because: footsteps. Voices, too, getting louder very quickly.

“Of all the idiotic bullshit I’ve ever seen!” shouts the man with the terrible aim in question, rifle in one hand, jogging down the embankment. A kid trails behind him, bloody fireman’s axe at the ready. “What on earth,” he continues, breathing hard, coming right up to them with no caution, “would possess you to dress up like a fucking—”

And before either of them can stop him, he reaches out and yanks the hood down.

Rorschach doesn’t even bother ducking his gaze, and not one of the four says a word for a very long moment.

“...hunter,” the man finally finishes, gone almost as pale as Rorschach. “Shit.”

-

[wednesday42.livejournal.com]

Laurie, Rorschach. Gone fishing.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

(AN: Two drabbles for this one, because they fit together in the same vague post-Karnak Rorschach-survives AUish thing, and I liked both ideas too much to not do both.)

-

The biggest problems in the wake of Veidt’s Squidpocolypse are social ones: looting, rioting, mugging. The city is now sixty percent homeless, and they are common targets, robbed blind in their sleep. It’s disgraceful, and completely expected.

So Laurie isn’t surprised when Rorschach pulls her out of their shared tenement one evening, grunts that they’re going ‘fishing’, bundles her down an alley and onto a fire escape. What she is surprised by is Dan, down in the gutter, faking like he’s passed out and well enough dressed to be worth stealing from.

“Bait,” Rorschach says, pointing at him, and then he pulls the grappling gun out of his coat, presses it into her hand. Its bent-back spines shine in the streetlight like violence both wicked and inevitable.

“Hook?” she asks, hefting its weight and tossing him a razorwire grin, and under the wrapped scarf, she’s sure that he smiles back.

-

Two weeks later, Laurie takes him fishing for real--or as real as she can manage, both of them city kids with no one to have learned from, This is how you thread a line, this is how you cast, and be careful of the blue flies at sundown, kiddo...

They’re on the pedestrian strip of a bridge over the harbor, lengths of line held by hand, trailing in the sluggish water below. Have been here for hours, and haven’t caught a thing.

There’s not a lot to catch, these days.

“Dan would know how to do this,” she says anyway, flicking the end of her smoke against the railing, watching the ash fall around their lines. “Bet he was doing this when he was twelve.”

“Hrmn.”

“He’d have the buckets full, and we’d be set for a week.” She kicks at their optimistically large paint pail; it echoes with emptiness. “No dumpsters, no food lines. Hey, we should have him teach us, you know?”

Walter nods, fingering his line, watching the hook jump and skip across the surface, bare. “...would like that, yes.”

-

[tortoisegirl.livejournal.com]

Dan/Rorschach, local wildlife

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Six stray dogs, five fleabitten alleycats, four filthy rats, three thin squirrels, two tough old seagulls--

“And a pigeon in a pear tree!” Nite Owl laughs, as the bird in question tries unsuccessfully to nest in a curl of his cape. “This is... wow. This is kind of ridiculous.”

“Amazing powers of observation, as always.” Rorschach leans against a lamp post, head canted to one side to observe the small zoo surrounding his partner, drawn by whatever he's been doused in. This is, he supposes, what happens when they bumble into Moloch’s lair unprepared. It’s inconvenient and annoying, and Rorschach is sure that there is something wrong with the fact that he is jealous of a cat, twining its sinuous way between Nite Owl’s legs. But it is also, he can admit, somewhat humorous.

“What?” Nite Owl asks, breathless with laughter. Something of his amusement must have shown through the mask, given him away.

He shrugs, schools himself back to propriety. “No pear trees in the city, Nite Owl,” he says, trying for derisive, only managing bemused. “Ludicrous.”

[brancher.livejournal.com]

Dan makes fucking machines. And uses them. On himself. Rorschach finds out. Go.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

(AN: This one's pretty NC-17, yeah. Also too long again, agh)

-

The ceiling swims in and out of focus; Dan screws his eyes shut, frustrated.

This had all started with a handheld motor and a moment of inspiration, watching the gears ratchet forward and back, forward and back; an epiphany that’d found its home coiled low in his belly and in the dank, lizardy back of his brain. Three months later and he’s on his back in the workshop, naked from the waist down and strapped in for his own safety as six inches of silicone work their slippery way in and out of him, relentless.

Still, it isn’t enough. There’s something wrong with the speed or the force, and there are dials that control these things--that’s what he’s testing, a new algorithm for force, such a hard to pin down combination of hungry plunge and sharp-snap backstroke--but he can’t reach them like this and this is going to end with an unsatisfying jerk-off like it always does and he has never been so frustrated and he could just fucking scream or tear his hair out or--

Or open his eyes.

Rorschach, standing impossibly close, mask staring down at him impassively.

“...oh, shit,” he manages after a long moment, mechanical squelches filling out the silence but he isn’t even noticing anymore, because oh shit, why is Rors-- and how is-- what, who, how did this--

Rorschach bends at the waist, moves imperceptibly closer, and the blots on his mask have fanned out into liquid black wings, unreadable. He makes a choked noise as Dan rocks with an exceptionally forceful jolt, lifts one hand, and Dan’s sure it’s going to ball into a fist or maybe, some lunatic voice offers in his head, maybe Rorschach is reaching for him, to touch him...

The hand hangs--then settles, light as a feather, on one of the dials.

[sepulchre-angel.livejournal.com]

"Oh look, eth did that drabble thing." -click- "Aww, I'm too late, oh well, lemme see what she's gonna write on..."

....as well as a few others that I've written stuff for but never posted it (Human Target, Echo Bazaar, Scrubs, Firefly, Dead Like Me, and in honor of its 25th anniversary, BTT--

*SCREECHING HALT*

...but never posted it (Human Target...

Human Target...

O.O I thought I was like the only person who watched this show!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my goodness this is so exciting. 8D I...would be very interested in reading that someday~ *grabby hands* haha xD Large and irrelevant comment is large and irrelevant but uh. You're awesome? Or something? XD

[etherati.livejournal.com]

I'll eventually post it, just haven't gotten around to it yet XD For now, you can find it over at zombie_fest.

And thanks <3

[findmyantidrug.livejournal.com]

All of these are absolutely fabulous; there are no words. :O

[etherati.livejournal.com]

That means so much from you, thank you so much :DD