Drabble Meme
Jul. 11th, 2008 06:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sulwen1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it’s over. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do ten of these, then post them.
I didn't pick a particular fandom, just went with whatever came to mind. These are entirely unedited, so they're a bit rough. This is purely what came out of my head and onto the page. I've included bits of lyrics for those unfamiliar with the songs.
1. "Streak of Madness" from Jekyll & Hyde - Sam/Dean, Supernatural
"What streak of madness lies inside me?/What is the truth my fears conceal?"
Dean's seen a lot of mad things in his time. He wonders, sometimes, if it's a good or bad thing that he hasn't gone utterly mad himself having seen what he has, having been surrounded by evil his entire life. But this...this takes the cake. He can't remember the moment when his fiercely protective streak became something more than brotherly, but there's no going back now that it has. And now that he knows about it, he realizes that it's been there for longer than he cares to think about, that in some deep, fucked-up corner of his mind, it's always been about loving Sam and never being able to love anyone else.
2. "All for Believing" by Missy Higgins - Clark/Lex, Smallville
"I need to know just how you feel, to comfort you/I need to find the key to let me in, into your heart, to find your soul."
Chloe has always cried over Clark, ever since they were in middle school together and she ran into him in the hallway and felt his strong arms go around her, catch her, steady her, keep her from falling. But lately, she cries over him for a different reason - not because of the pain he's causing her, but the pain he's causing himself. And Lex. Lex, who has always had too much pain in his life. She wants to believe that everything will turn out all right for them, that they'll get the happy ending Clark deserves and Lex needs. But somewhere deep within, she knows that it's gone too far for that. Somewhere, one of these mad days, they crossed a line that has shattered any chance of what they could have had. And though she wants to believe, she's finding that it's harder every day, and the day is coming - rather soon - when she won't be able to anymore, and there will be no more believing. Only regret.
3. "If I Can't Love Her" from Beauty and the Beast - Snape/Hermione, Harry Potter (set in my personal fanon reality)
"No pain could be deeper/No life could be cheaper/No point anymore/If I can't love her."
He didn't need anything else to fight for. There was the cause, always. There was Dumbledore, who had saved him. There was his work, which had never ceased to fascinate him even after all these years. He hadn't considered giving up...until her. She made all the other reasons fade into darkness, into insignificance. She made him remember all his faults, all the mistakes of a long and difficult life. She made him want more than he could have, and it hurt him more than anything else he'd ever given up, ever lost, for the Dark Lord and this damnable war. He hated and loved her for it, and he wouldn't have given anything in the world to take it back.
4. "Carry on Wayward Son" by Kansas - Roland, the Dark Tower series (OMG I wrote gen!)
"Once I rose above the noise and confusion/Just to get a glimpse beyond the illusion."
He dreamed about the other levels of the Tower. He would never have told the others about the dreams, never thought them important enough to mention, even in passing. But sometimes, during the quiet pauses in their long journey and in the moments when he was alone, they would come back to him, and he would sometimes feel dizzy at the very complexity of it. In another level of the Tower, Jake's level, he thought, someone reached into the darkness of the cosmos and wrote a song about him, though the man didn't know it. Somewhere, a woman reached out toward an antique set of heavy pistols and said a silent prayer for him, unsure of why. In a place and time that were achingly, heartbreakingly familiar to him, a beautiful young girl reached out toward a rose, thinking to pluck it and take it home to her mother...but stopped herself, feeling things that were almost too much for her to understand. And he was in the center of it all, swept away in the whirlpool of existence, and it was all he could do to keep afloat, keep moving ever onward, unresting, unrelenting, hardly daring to hope.
5. "Ice" by Sarah McLachlan - Mal/River, Firefly
"The ice is thin, come on dive in/Underneath my lucid skin/The cold is lost, forgotten."
Sometimes he tries to think like her. He's smart, always has been, but he can't quite wrap his mind around her kind of smart. It's all unnecessarily big words and talking in circles, thinking in spirals, and it sounds like deep wisdom and utter nonsense all at the same time. He hates it when it goes out of her control, and she becomes frightened and panicked and it's all tension and holding her down for a while. But there are other times too, his favorite times, when they lay in bed together and she rests her head on his bare shoulder and speaks in long, lazy sentences, and he just listens and lets her voice wash over him and smiles. Sometimes he thinks he can feel her in his head, and he knows he should be bothered. He's not. She already knows everything that's there, and she still comes to him. And he can't think of a purer love than that.
6. "Lies" by Evenescence - Jareth/Sarah, Labyrinth
"Bound at every limb by my shackles of fear/Sealed with lies through so many tears/Lost from within, pursuing the end/I fight for the chance to be lied to again."
She's always been the kind of girl that should have known better. She read once, somewhere, that a writer is a person who's taught her mind to misbehave, and she can relate. Her mind has never been one to color inside the lines anyway, and after the Labyrinth it only got worse. She knows that Jareth is...well, not quite evil, but not good either. She understood this easily enough when he was standing before her, offering her everything she's ever wanted, her mind clouded with fear and exhaustion and worry about Toby. Much later, in her bed in the dark, she has far too much time to think about that choice and what exactly she has given up. And as her relationships get darker and the scars get worse, she wonders if not-quite-but-almost-evil Jareth might not have been exactly what she needed.
7. "Pirates" by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer - Jack/Elizabeth/Hector, PotC
Note: This is a thirteen minute song. That makes it a bit more than a drabble.
"I see your hunger for a fortune/Could be better served beneath my flag/If you've the stomach for a broadside/Come aboard my pretty boys/I will take you and make you/Everything you've ever dreamed."
Elizabeth almost feels bad, the day she steps off the island, taking their offered hands and letting them pull her away from her past. Almost. But ten years is an awfully long time, and the melancholy romance of it has no hope of lasting her through it. By the time they reach the Pearl, thoughts of Will have faded into the dusty back corners of her mind, and there they stay.
They are exactly as she remembers them, and she laughs, relieved. What they've been through, all of them, can change a person, and not often for the better. But they all seem to have a talent for evading permanent scars, at least of the emotional kind, and she wonders again what strange, perverse gods have smiled on them.
On the fourth day out from the island, they take a ship. She is right beside them the whole time, sword flashing in the sun, and she has missed how alive she feels when she's covered in enemy blood.
That night, they are in the treasure hold, just the three of them, Captains all, sifting through their newfound riches. Elizabeth is in a merry mood, and some wayward impulse - more likely than not having to do with the celebratory rum - makes her strip off her clothes and instead drape herself solely in gold and jewels, relishing the sensation of cool metal on her flushed skin. She does not notice them staring at her until they are all too far gone, off the edge of the map.
There are no morals here, and she feels absolutely free, a seabird floating in the breeze, ruled by her whim and nothing else. She throws herself into them, and everything is a rush of hands and tongues and ah, pleasure. Jack is all skill and sensuality, playing her body as effortlessly as he does everything else. All the while, she can hear Hector's deep voice in her ear, manipulating her mind in much the same way that Jack does her body, and she knows that in that moment, she would do anything that voice told her, anything at all. And the combination is breathtaking and too much and altogether more than the admittedly limited experiences that have come before, and she decides all at once that she is never going back.
8. "It's a Dangerous Game" from Jekyll & Hyde - Angelus/Buffy, BtVS
"Watching your eyes/As they invade my soul/Forbidden pleasures/I'm afraid to make mine."
There's been too much violence in her life. Granted, more often than not she's the one causing it, but still. She doesn't think anyone would understand why she seeks out more. Maybe it's to do with some mix-up in her brain, some kind of connection she's made between sex and violence that she probably should be talking to a therapist about. But whatever. She's never been one for too much self-analysis. She's an action kind of girl. And though she blames Spike for giving her the first taste of it, it's Angelus who really gives her what she's craving, all chains and fangs and an expert touch with a whip. And she knows he's killing people, and that she could turn him back anytime she wanted, and that it goes against everything she stands for to let him do this...but night after night, she goes back to him, and he doesn't kill her, and she wonders how long things can possibly stay this way. And she wonders who will crack first.
9. "Something I Can Never Have" by Nine Inch Nails - Imriel/Phedre, the Kushiel's Legacy series
"You always were the one to show me how/Back then I couldn't do the things that I can do now./This thing is slowly taking me apart./Grey would be the color if I had a heart."
Note: I imagine these lines ^^ in Imriel's voice.
They are meant for each other, but Phedre is the only one who can admit it, even to herself. She watches Imriel and his mad quests to be with his Sun Princess, and she goes along with it because she loves him and she believes he will be happier this way. But she has learned many things in her long and eventful life, and the one she can't stop thinking of is that the gods will have their way in the end, always. Always and always, as the young lovers would say. She is an anguisette. He is Kushiel's scion. Their fate could not be more obvious, and Phedre knows that the day is coming when they will no longer be able to avoid it. And if she is truly honest with herself, she looks forward to it. It has been a long time for her, and she craves the utter satisfaction that comes only with the pain. In another life, perhaps, if things had turned out differently, if Imriel had not been taken in childhood, if she had not become the closest thing to a mother he had ever known, if he had been raised to embrace his inner desires rather than fear them...if, if, if. But Phedre knows better than to dwell on ifs, and it matters not anyway. Their day is coming, and she welcomes her pain - but she dreads his.
10. "Never Let Go" by Josh Groban - Seregil/Alec, the Nightrunner series
"Forced apart by time and sand/Take a step and take my hand/And don't let it go/Never let go."
Seregil has always been a romantic. It's such a part of his nature that he's never questioned it, even when it's been painful. But what he has now, with Alec, is more than that. He hesitates to call it romance, to even call it love, because it's simply more. They are more entwined than perhaps any two people should be. They live dangerous lives, and in those inevitable moments when Seregil imagines the possibility of Alec's death, he knows that he would not last long after. In those moments it's terrible, and he would almost rather have never met the boy than have to live with this paralyzing fear. But there are other moments, moments when eyes meet, when fingers brush or lips and tongues dance together or they simply share a secret smile - and the joy Seregil feels in these moments makes everything else, everything they've suffered through, absolutely worth it.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it’s over. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do ten of these, then post them.
I didn't pick a particular fandom, just went with whatever came to mind. These are entirely unedited, so they're a bit rough. This is purely what came out of my head and onto the page. I've included bits of lyrics for those unfamiliar with the songs.
1. "Streak of Madness" from Jekyll & Hyde - Sam/Dean, Supernatural
"What streak of madness lies inside me?/What is the truth my fears conceal?"
Dean's seen a lot of mad things in his time. He wonders, sometimes, if it's a good or bad thing that he hasn't gone utterly mad himself having seen what he has, having been surrounded by evil his entire life. But this...this takes the cake. He can't remember the moment when his fiercely protective streak became something more than brotherly, but there's no going back now that it has. And now that he knows about it, he realizes that it's been there for longer than he cares to think about, that in some deep, fucked-up corner of his mind, it's always been about loving Sam and never being able to love anyone else.
2. "All for Believing" by Missy Higgins - Clark/Lex, Smallville
"I need to know just how you feel, to comfort you/I need to find the key to let me in, into your heart, to find your soul."
Chloe has always cried over Clark, ever since they were in middle school together and she ran into him in the hallway and felt his strong arms go around her, catch her, steady her, keep her from falling. But lately, she cries over him for a different reason - not because of the pain he's causing her, but the pain he's causing himself. And Lex. Lex, who has always had too much pain in his life. She wants to believe that everything will turn out all right for them, that they'll get the happy ending Clark deserves and Lex needs. But somewhere deep within, she knows that it's gone too far for that. Somewhere, one of these mad days, they crossed a line that has shattered any chance of what they could have had. And though she wants to believe, she's finding that it's harder every day, and the day is coming - rather soon - when she won't be able to anymore, and there will be no more believing. Only regret.
3. "If I Can't Love Her" from Beauty and the Beast - Snape/Hermione, Harry Potter (set in my personal fanon reality)
"No pain could be deeper/No life could be cheaper/No point anymore/If I can't love her."
He didn't need anything else to fight for. There was the cause, always. There was Dumbledore, who had saved him. There was his work, which had never ceased to fascinate him even after all these years. He hadn't considered giving up...until her. She made all the other reasons fade into darkness, into insignificance. She made him remember all his faults, all the mistakes of a long and difficult life. She made him want more than he could have, and it hurt him more than anything else he'd ever given up, ever lost, for the Dark Lord and this damnable war. He hated and loved her for it, and he wouldn't have given anything in the world to take it back.
4. "Carry on Wayward Son" by Kansas - Roland, the Dark Tower series (OMG I wrote gen!)
"Once I rose above the noise and confusion/Just to get a glimpse beyond the illusion."
He dreamed about the other levels of the Tower. He would never have told the others about the dreams, never thought them important enough to mention, even in passing. But sometimes, during the quiet pauses in their long journey and in the moments when he was alone, they would come back to him, and he would sometimes feel dizzy at the very complexity of it. In another level of the Tower, Jake's level, he thought, someone reached into the darkness of the cosmos and wrote a song about him, though the man didn't know it. Somewhere, a woman reached out toward an antique set of heavy pistols and said a silent prayer for him, unsure of why. In a place and time that were achingly, heartbreakingly familiar to him, a beautiful young girl reached out toward a rose, thinking to pluck it and take it home to her mother...but stopped herself, feeling things that were almost too much for her to understand. And he was in the center of it all, swept away in the whirlpool of existence, and it was all he could do to keep afloat, keep moving ever onward, unresting, unrelenting, hardly daring to hope.
5. "Ice" by Sarah McLachlan - Mal/River, Firefly
"The ice is thin, come on dive in/Underneath my lucid skin/The cold is lost, forgotten."
Sometimes he tries to think like her. He's smart, always has been, but he can't quite wrap his mind around her kind of smart. It's all unnecessarily big words and talking in circles, thinking in spirals, and it sounds like deep wisdom and utter nonsense all at the same time. He hates it when it goes out of her control, and she becomes frightened and panicked and it's all tension and holding her down for a while. But there are other times too, his favorite times, when they lay in bed together and she rests her head on his bare shoulder and speaks in long, lazy sentences, and he just listens and lets her voice wash over him and smiles. Sometimes he thinks he can feel her in his head, and he knows he should be bothered. He's not. She already knows everything that's there, and she still comes to him. And he can't think of a purer love than that.
6. "Lies" by Evenescence - Jareth/Sarah, Labyrinth
"Bound at every limb by my shackles of fear/Sealed with lies through so many tears/Lost from within, pursuing the end/I fight for the chance to be lied to again."
She's always been the kind of girl that should have known better. She read once, somewhere, that a writer is a person who's taught her mind to misbehave, and she can relate. Her mind has never been one to color inside the lines anyway, and after the Labyrinth it only got worse. She knows that Jareth is...well, not quite evil, but not good either. She understood this easily enough when he was standing before her, offering her everything she's ever wanted, her mind clouded with fear and exhaustion and worry about Toby. Much later, in her bed in the dark, she has far too much time to think about that choice and what exactly she has given up. And as her relationships get darker and the scars get worse, she wonders if not-quite-but-almost-evil Jareth might not have been exactly what she needed.
7. "Pirates" by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer - Jack/Elizabeth/Hector, PotC
Note: This is a thirteen minute song. That makes it a bit more than a drabble.
"I see your hunger for a fortune/Could be better served beneath my flag/If you've the stomach for a broadside/Come aboard my pretty boys/I will take you and make you/Everything you've ever dreamed."
Elizabeth almost feels bad, the day she steps off the island, taking their offered hands and letting them pull her away from her past. Almost. But ten years is an awfully long time, and the melancholy romance of it has no hope of lasting her through it. By the time they reach the Pearl, thoughts of Will have faded into the dusty back corners of her mind, and there they stay.
They are exactly as she remembers them, and she laughs, relieved. What they've been through, all of them, can change a person, and not often for the better. But they all seem to have a talent for evading permanent scars, at least of the emotional kind, and she wonders again what strange, perverse gods have smiled on them.
On the fourth day out from the island, they take a ship. She is right beside them the whole time, sword flashing in the sun, and she has missed how alive she feels when she's covered in enemy blood.
That night, they are in the treasure hold, just the three of them, Captains all, sifting through their newfound riches. Elizabeth is in a merry mood, and some wayward impulse - more likely than not having to do with the celebratory rum - makes her strip off her clothes and instead drape herself solely in gold and jewels, relishing the sensation of cool metal on her flushed skin. She does not notice them staring at her until they are all too far gone, off the edge of the map.
There are no morals here, and she feels absolutely free, a seabird floating in the breeze, ruled by her whim and nothing else. She throws herself into them, and everything is a rush of hands and tongues and ah, pleasure. Jack is all skill and sensuality, playing her body as effortlessly as he does everything else. All the while, she can hear Hector's deep voice in her ear, manipulating her mind in much the same way that Jack does her body, and she knows that in that moment, she would do anything that voice told her, anything at all. And the combination is breathtaking and too much and altogether more than the admittedly limited experiences that have come before, and she decides all at once that she is never going back.
8. "It's a Dangerous Game" from Jekyll & Hyde - Angelus/Buffy, BtVS
"Watching your eyes/As they invade my soul/Forbidden pleasures/I'm afraid to make mine."
There's been too much violence in her life. Granted, more often than not she's the one causing it, but still. She doesn't think anyone would understand why she seeks out more. Maybe it's to do with some mix-up in her brain, some kind of connection she's made between sex and violence that she probably should be talking to a therapist about. But whatever. She's never been one for too much self-analysis. She's an action kind of girl. And though she blames Spike for giving her the first taste of it, it's Angelus who really gives her what she's craving, all chains and fangs and an expert touch with a whip. And she knows he's killing people, and that she could turn him back anytime she wanted, and that it goes against everything she stands for to let him do this...but night after night, she goes back to him, and he doesn't kill her, and she wonders how long things can possibly stay this way. And she wonders who will crack first.
9. "Something I Can Never Have" by Nine Inch Nails - Imriel/Phedre, the Kushiel's Legacy series
"You always were the one to show me how/Back then I couldn't do the things that I can do now./This thing is slowly taking me apart./Grey would be the color if I had a heart."
Note: I imagine these lines ^^ in Imriel's voice.
They are meant for each other, but Phedre is the only one who can admit it, even to herself. She watches Imriel and his mad quests to be with his Sun Princess, and she goes along with it because she loves him and she believes he will be happier this way. But she has learned many things in her long and eventful life, and the one she can't stop thinking of is that the gods will have their way in the end, always. Always and always, as the young lovers would say. She is an anguisette. He is Kushiel's scion. Their fate could not be more obvious, and Phedre knows that the day is coming when they will no longer be able to avoid it. And if she is truly honest with herself, she looks forward to it. It has been a long time for her, and she craves the utter satisfaction that comes only with the pain. In another life, perhaps, if things had turned out differently, if Imriel had not been taken in childhood, if she had not become the closest thing to a mother he had ever known, if he had been raised to embrace his inner desires rather than fear them...if, if, if. But Phedre knows better than to dwell on ifs, and it matters not anyway. Their day is coming, and she welcomes her pain - but she dreads his.
10. "Never Let Go" by Josh Groban - Seregil/Alec, the Nightrunner series
"Forced apart by time and sand/Take a step and take my hand/And don't let it go/Never let go."
Seregil has always been a romantic. It's such a part of his nature that he's never questioned it, even when it's been painful. But what he has now, with Alec, is more than that. He hesitates to call it romance, to even call it love, because it's simply more. They are more entwined than perhaps any two people should be. They live dangerous lives, and in those inevitable moments when Seregil imagines the possibility of Alec's death, he knows that he would not last long after. In those moments it's terrible, and he would almost rather have never met the boy than have to live with this paralyzing fear. But there are other moments, moments when eyes meet, when fingers brush or lips and tongues dance together or they simply share a secret smile - and the joy Seregil feels in these moments makes everything else, everything they've suffered through, absolutely worth it.
