date a selkie, but don’t hide her cloak. let her go home and visit her family now and then, knowing that she’ll come back and hang her seal cloak in the closet like she always does. trust is important.
The first time she lets the redhead take her home, she’s diligent about hiding her cloak. She folds it carefully against tears and rips and abrasions, and hides it in a sea cave whose entrance is concealed by the tide.
She does the same, the second and third and fourth times, careful, wary, mindful of her mother’s lessons. Remembers the way her mother’s hands had chafed on her soft cheeks, rough with cooking and cleaning for her fisherman husband, the way her mother’s peat-dark eyes had been tense and harsh with the lesson.
“Mind me, Niahm. Never let them find your cloak.”
The way her mother’s mouth had curved, a sickle of dissatisfaction and relief and envy, as she had escaped into the waves.
So she minds her mother’s lesson, and she takes care with her cloak.
Would that she had taken as much care with her heart.
The fifth time, she wears the cloak to the girl’s door, clutched about her throat, dripping along the darkened lanes.
She enters the home, welcomed with soft kisses and gentle touches and kindling passion. She drapes the cloak, artful in her carelessness, across an old wooden chair, the one that creaks and tilts slightly if you don’t sit just right.
When she wakes, in the wee hours of the morning, even before her lover, the cloak still rests, supple and dappled by the sea, on the back of the chair.
She frowns into the softening dawn, dons the cloak, and returns to the sea.
And again, the sixth time. And the seventh.
The eighth time, she finally breaks, prickling and hurt with longing, gripping a handful of russet hair in her hand, firm with emphasis.
“Surely you know what I am,” she says to her lover, the cool froth of sea foam and the call of gulls curling around her voice.
“Of course,” her lover responds, soft and tender in the dawnlight, throat arched willingly, pale as the inner whorls of a shell. “You taste of the sea,” the girl whispers, reverently.
She shakes her lover’s head gently, fingers tangled still in russet locks. “Why?” she demands. “Why won’t you keep me?”
A long silence that waits and fills, like a tidepool, stretches between them. Cool as a current. Deep as the Channel.
Her lover’s eyes are dark and tender. “Must I trap you to keep you, my heart? Is that the shape of love that you desire?”
She sinks into the thought, struck and stymied, remembering her mother’s harsh hands, her cold eyes. Her hand eases into russet waves, caresses where her grip had punished. Her lips press cool and damp as the sea against the arching curve of her lover’s shoulder. “What shape of love will you give to me?”
The answer is easy, quick, certain. “Myself. Only myself, whenever you should wish it. Your cloak by the door, your body in my bed, and the freedom to go, whenever you must. As long as you wish.”
It’s not an answer a fisherman could ever give, nor would think to.
The ninth time, she hangs her cloak by the door, draped in careful dappled folds next to a drying oilskin jacket.
every so often i post a few passages from this. it’s by ken liu, whose explanation of silkpunk i just reblogged, and it’s an excerpt from his story paper menagerie (linked here in its entirety; it won the hugo, the nebula, and the world fantasy awards, the first work of fiction to do so). it is not remotely an easy read, particularly if you are a child of a diaspora, particularly if you have ever struggled with assimilation, particularly if you are struggling with cultural and personal identity. it shouldn’t need to pull its punches, and it doesn’t. if you haven’t read it already, i cannot recommend it highly enough. it will not make you feel better, but it is an axe for one’s internal frozen sea, if you will. sometimes a story like this is the only way to stay alive.
“we didn’t know any better,” the crewman says, and swallows, presenting the chest to the captain. “what do we do now?”
“kill it,” the captain says, but the ice is melting in his eyes.
“we can’t,” the first mate says desperately, praying she won’t have to fight her captain on this. “we can’t. we – i won’t. we won’t.”
“i know.”
x
“daddy,” she says, floating in a tub of seawater in the hold, “daddy, la-la, la-la-la.”
her voice rings like bells. her accent is strange; her mouth isn’t made for human words. it mesmerises even the hardiest amongst them and she wasn’t even trying. the crew has taken to diving for shellfish near the shorelines for her; she loves them, splitting the shells apart with strength seen in no human toddler, slurping down the slimy molluscs inside and laughing, all plump brown cheeks and needle-sharp teeth. she sometimes splashes them for fun with her smooth, rubbery brown tail. even when they get soaked they laugh. they love her.
“daddy,” she calls again, and he can hear the worry in her voice. the storm rocking the ship is harsh and uncaring, and if they go down, she would be the only survivor.
“don’t worry,” he says, and goes over, sitting next to the tub. the first mate, leaning against the wall, pretends not to notice as he quietly begins to sing.
x
“father,” she says, one day, as she leans on the edge of the dock and the captain sits next to her, “why am I here?”
“your mother abandoned you,” he says, as he always has. “we found you adrift, and couldn’t bear to leave you there.”
she picks at the salt-soaked boards, uncertain. her hair is pulled back in a fluffy black puff, the white linen holding it slipping almost over one of her dark eyes. one of her first tattoos, a many-limbed kraken, curls over her right shoulder and down her arm, delicate tendrils wrapped around her calloused fingertips. “alright,” she says.
x
“why am I really here?” she asks the first mate, watching the sun set over the water in streaks of liquid metal that pooled in the troughs of the waves and glittered on the seafoam.
“we didn’t know any better,” the first mate says, staring into the water. “we didn’t know- we didn’t know anything. we didn’t understand why she fought so viciously to guard her treasure. we could not know she protected something a thousand times more precious than the purest gold.”
she wants to be furious, but she can’t. she already knew the answer, from reading the guilt in her father’s eyes and the empty space in her own history. and she can’t hate her family.
“it’s alright,” she says. “i do have a family, anyways. i don’t think i would have liked my other life near as much.”
x
her kraken grows, spreading its tendrils over her torso and arms. she grows too, too large to come on board the ship without being hauled up in a boat from the water. she sings when the storms come and swims before the ship to guide it to safety. she fights off more than one beast of the seas, and gathers a set of scars across her back that she bears with pride. “i don’t mind,” she says, when the captain fusses over her, “now i match all of you.”
the first time their ship is threatened, really threatened, is by another fleet. a friend turned enemy of the first mate. “we shouldn’t fight him,” she says, peering through the spyglass.
“why not?” the mermaid asks.
“he’ll win,” the first mate says.
the mermaid tips her head sideways. Her eyes, dark as the deep waters, gleam in the noon light. “are you sure?” she asks.
x
the enemy fleet surrenders after the flagship is sunk in the night, the anchor ripped off the ship and the planks torn off the hull. the surviving crew, wild-eyed and delirious, whimper and say a sea serpent came from the water and attacked them, say it was longer than the boat and crushed it in its coils. the first mate hears this and has to hide her laughter. the captain apologizes to his daughter for doubting her.
“don’t worry,” she says, with a bright laugh, “it was fun.”
x
the second time, they are pushed by a storm into a royal fleet. they can’t possibly fight them, and they don’t have the time to escape.
“let me up,” the mermaid urges, surfacing starboard and shouting to the crew. “bring me up, quickly, quickly.”
they lower the boat and she piles her sinous form into it, and uses her claws to help the crew pull her up. once on the deck she flops out of the boat and makes her way over to the bow. the crew tries to help but she’s so heavy they can barely lift parts of her.
she crawls up out in front of the rail and wraps her long webbed tail around the prow. the figurehead has served them well so far but they need more right now. she wraps herself around the figurehead and raises her body up into the wind takes a breath of the stinging salt air and sings.
the storm carries her voice on its front to the royal navy. they are enchanted, so stunned by her song that they drop the rigging ropes and let the tillers drift. the pirates sail through the center of the fleet, trailing the storm behind them, and by the time the fleet has managed to regain its senses they are buried in wind and rain and the pirates are gone.
x
she declines guns. instead she carries a harpoon and its launcher, and uses them to board enemy ships, hauling her massive form out of the water to coil on the deck and dispatch enemies with ruthless efficiency. her family is feared across all the sea.
x
“you know we are dying,” the captain says, looking down at her.
she floats next to the ship, so massive she could hold it in her arms. her eyes are wise.
“i know,” she says, “i can feel it coming.”
the first mate stands next to the captain. she never had a lover or a child, and neither did he, but to the mermaid they are her parents. she will always love her daughter. the tattoos are graven in dark swirls across the mermaid’s deep brown skin and the flesh of her tail, even spiraling onto the spiked webbing on her spine and face. her hair is still tied back, this time with a sail that could not be patched one last time.
“we love you,” the first mate says simply, looking down. her own tightly coiled black hair falls in to her face; she shakes the locs out of the way and smiles through her tears. the captain pretends he isnt crying either.
“i love you too,” the mermaid says, and reached up to pull the ship down just a bit, just to hold them one last time.
“guard the ship,” the captain says. “you always have but you know they’re lost without you.”
“without you,” the mermaid corrects, with a shrug that makes waves. “what will we do?”
“i don’t know,” the captain says. “but you’ll help them, won’t you?”
“of course i will,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes. “i will always protect my family.”
x
the captain and the first mate are gone. the ship has a new captain, young and fearless – of the things she can afford to disregard. she fears and loves the ocean, as all captains do. she does not fear the royal fleet. and she does not fear the mermaid.
“you know, i heard stories about you when i was a little girl,” she says, trailing her fingers in the water next to the dock.
the mermaid stares at her with one eye the size of a dinner table. “is that so?” she hums, smirking with teeth sharper than the swords of the entire navy.
“they said you could sink an entire fleet and that you had skin tougher than dragon scales,” the new captain says, grinning right back at the monster who could eat her without a moment’s hesitation. “i always thought they were telling tall tales.”
“and now?”
“they were right,” the new captain says. “how did they ever befriend you?”
the mermaid smiles, fully this time, her dark eyes gleaming under the white linen sail. “they didn’t know any better.”
Bruce has set up a makeshift lab in Wakanda, while the world takes stock of their dead and Wakanda mourns for their king. Bruce isn’t doing anything important, but he needs to do something, so he studies Wakanda’s vibranium supply and attempts to keep Shuri busy.
Otherwise, the grief might just be too much for the both of them to bear.
Bruce also tries very hard not to think about Tony and what form of matter Tony may or may not be at this very moment. He’s only moderately successful.
It’s on the third day of the second week after half of the world has turned to ash that Thor brings Bruce a little green snake. Bruce is baffled, but he tried to be polite about it. Bruce is heartsick, though, so that makes everything a little harder.
Then Thor asks for Bruce to see if the snake is Loki, and it takes every bit of willpower Bruce Banner poses to not burst into tears. Thor is so strong and so keen to smile, he makes it so easy for everyone to forget that he has lost nearly everything.
Bruce pokes at the snake without any further complaints. When nothing happens, the grief on Thor’s face is unimaginable.
Bruce begins spending time with both Thor and Shuri, in a desperate attempt to combat his own grief by combatting theirs.
All the while, every second or third day, Thor brings Bruce a small green animal and asks Bruce to see if it his lost brother. Bruce checks every time, with care and precision, but the result is always negative. It’s awful for both of them, but Thor can’t seem to stop and Bruce doesn’t know how to make him.
This pattern holds for a few weeks, until Thor brings Bruce a beaten and battered lizard. It’d been burned somehow and it looked like one of its limbs had been badly broken. When Thor presents it to him, Bruce honestly isn’t sure if Thor had just brought the little thing to Bruce to see if it could be saved.
“Could you check?” Thor asks, the question quiet and hurt after so many weeks of negative results from Bruce’s prodding and poking.
“Of course,” Bruce says softly, adding his portion of the call and response.
He gingerly picks up the lizard, as the poor also looks like he’d been through the wringer, and gives him a quick once over. Bruce’d been right about the broken leg and the burns were pretty –
The lizard fucking turns into Loki. A damaged, burnt Loki who scuttles backward on a broken leg while spitting blood.
Thor bursts into tears. Bruce bursts out laughing. Everyone has their own way of processing grief and shock and grief turned into shock, apparently.
It’s later, when they’ve gotten Loki a little patched up, convinced Okoye not to kill Loki (”He tried to destroy the world!” she says – “He’s gotten better,” Bruce says), and Thor’s eyes were mostly dry, that Loki finally says through clenched, bloodied teeth:
“They’re in a pocket dimension.”
“Who?” Bruce whispers, stunned.
“Everyone. I told him he’d never be a god. He was just a warlord playing at being something powerful. He should’ve fucking listened.”
date a selkie, but don’t hide her cloak. let her go home and visit her family now and then, knowing that she’ll come back and hang her seal cloak in the closet like she always does. trust is important.
The first time she lets the redhead take her home, she’s diligent about hiding her cloak. She folds it carefully against tears and rips and abrasions, and hides it in a sea cave whose entrance is concealed by the tide.
She does the same, the second and third and fourth times, careful, wary, mindful of her mother’s lessons. Remembers the way her mother’s hands had chafed on her soft cheeks, rough with cooking and cleaning for her fisherman husband, the way her mother’s peat-dark eyes had been tense and harsh with the lesson.
“Mind me, Niahm. Never let them find your cloak.”
The way her mother’s mouth had curved, a sickle of dissatisfaction and relief and envy, as she had escaped into the waves.
So she minds her mother’s lesson, and she takes care with her cloak.
Would that she had taken as much care with her heart.
The fifth time, she wears the cloak to the girl’s door, clutched about her throat, dripping along the darkened lanes.
She enters the home, welcomed with soft kisses and gentle touches and kindling passion. She drapes the cloak, artful in her carelessness, across an old wooden chair, the one that creaks and tilts slightly if you don’t sit just right.
When she wakes, in the wee hours of the morning, even before her lover, the cloak still rests, supple and dappled by the sea, on the back of the chair.
She frowns into the softening dawn, dons the cloak, and returns to the sea.
And again, the sixth time. And the seventh.
The eighth time, she finally breaks, prickling and hurt with longing, gripping a handful of russet hair in her hand, firm with emphasis.
“Surely you know what I am,” she says to her lover, the cool froth of sea foam and the call of gulls curling around her voice.
“Of course,” her lover responds, soft and tender in the dawnlight, throat arched willingly, pale as the inner whorls of a shell. “You taste of the sea,” the girl whispers, reverently.
She shakes her lover’s head gently, fingers tangled still in russet locks. “Why?” she demands. “Why won’t you keep me?”
A long silence that waits and fills, like a tidepool, stretches between them. Cool as a current. Deep as the Channel.
Her lover’s eyes are dark and tender. “Must I trap you to keep you, my heart? Is that the shape of love that you desire?”
She sinks into the thought, struck and stymied, remembering her mother’s harsh hands, her cold eyes. Her hand eases into russet waves, caresses where her grip had punished. Her lips press cool and damp as the sea against the arching curve of her lover’s shoulder. “What shape of love will you give to me?”
The answer is easy, quick, certain. “Myself. Only myself, whenever you should wish it. Your cloak by the door, your body in my bed, and the freedom to go, whenever you must. As long as you wish.”
It’s not an answer a fisherman could ever give, nor would think to.
The ninth time, she hangs her cloak by the door, draped in careful dappled folds next to a drying oilskin jacket.
i say this every time it crosses my dash but i’m so freaking happy someone liked my submission and Wrote Stuff and it’s so good!!! i love these girls so so so so much
Thor was
looking rather pensive when Bruce walked into his little apartment. He’d
expected the god of thunder to be there when he got home; it had become a
rather common occurrence over the last few months.
However,
Thor looked a little… unsettled. A thunderstorm had rolled in over the city,
casting the streets under a blanket of rain and wind and lightening, and Thor
was by the window, gazing out of it. He barely even reacted when Bruce walked
in.
You are a space traveler from Earth. One day you land on a seemingly advanced planet where the aliens are friendly. You decide to live there and learn their language, and with their technology it takes barely a day. However, you soon offend the wrong person by accident and become arrested. It is decided that your punishment is death, and you are brought a vial of liquid that you are told is of the deadliest kind. Terrified, you drink it only to find out it’s water. Turns out that the very substance keeping you alive is deadly to these creatures. Write what happens following this discovery.
Explorer’s log. Cycle thirty, Day 12, 0800 hours by Earth time.
Today, I was scheduled for execution in the high court for something I have not been told. As far as I can figure, I must have insulted a very important person in the Kathraxian society. Unlike Earth or any Earth -order planets, this population is a kind of hive with a strict hierarchy. I wasn’t given a trial, just escorted into the chamber before a row of judges, made to sit, and then given one of their liquid containment spheres. Unlike the normal ones which are colored depending on what hyper-concentrated gaseous element they used in making it– I was a bit alarmed as I’ve only seen them use it for industrial chemicals and rocket fuel– this one was clear.
“Drink!” the honor guard holding my chains commanded. I took notice that they were each a good two meters away from me, rubbing their mandibles together nervously This was going to be how I died then.
With my heart thundering in my ears, I bit lightly at the membrane of the pliable sphere, sucking at the section between my teeth until it burst. I jolted when it hit my tongue. Instead of burning acids or bitter base fluids that might have seriously harmed or killed me, the flavor was neutral, cool and clear and familiar. My body knew even if my anxiety drowned mind didn’t; this liquid wasn’t harmful. I drained the whole container until the sphere was only a deflated plastic-like skin between my fingers. My thirst only partially quenched from three days in confinement; I was severely dehydrated and sleep deprived.
While the sudden quart of water rushing into my stomach did make me a bit nauseous, I was able to stay seated and observe the nervous looks around me. They were waiting for something.
We all sat in silence for nearly twenty minutes before one of the judges hissed, her frill fanning out in frustration. “Guard, how could you fail to bring the correct poison?!”
“Your eminence,” he clicked in alarm, “I swear by the great queen I have brought the dihydrogen-monoxide distilled, as you asked!”
I laughed. What should have been an intimidating display was hilarious to my addled mind, my wits slowly returning to me. “Water? You gave me water?” I grinned through my laughter momentarily forgetting that baring teeth was considered a threat in most of the universe, I was well out of it. “Water!” I howled at the closest guard as if it was the funniest thing in the galaxy, and for me at the moment, it was.
“Terran!” the judge boomed ”I demand you explain this outrageous behavior this instant!”
As my giggles subsided, and with the thin atmosphere finally passing through my lungs enough to get the proper amount of oxygen to my brain, I coughed and stood. The guards moved back, abandoning the chains, which I now realized were made out of a hardened crystal like salt. With a quick tap on my wrist mounted relay, my retinal scan implant informed me that this was indeed a sodium chloride crystal array. If I twisted my writs around like so- and they were broken right off with ease.
“My dear matriarch, you are the paragons of an advanced collective, but in your advancement, you have not studied the other races around you. My world and my people are suffused with water. We inhale oxygen regularly and water vapor is in our breath. Earth,” at this point the reader in my artificial eye created a hologram with a live feed from one of the older space stations back home, “is a blue planet. What you call poison, we call necessary for biological life.” I couldn’t hide the smug look on my face any more than I could hide my obvious survival.
She clicked in alarm, frills flattening to the sides of her wide head. In a quiet voice, she hissed, “What are you, foul creature?”
I assumed the typical space federation stance I had seen in so many movies since the explorations core began. “A Human, your eminence, habitant of the third planet from Sol. Designated: Explorer One of the United Earth Celestial Forces, Explorations Core.”
“There are more of you?” her disgust was palpable. I resisted the urge to damage any further interracial relations.
“Approximately twelve billion including the Venus and Mars colony efforts. If successful, our scientist project our numbers to rise into the triple-digit billions by the next millennia.”
There was a moment were they debated among themselves in High Speech, not something I could mimic with ease, nor was permitted to learn. It seemed really heated, though I did catch words like “War” and “Foolish” in the same sentence, so I only hope they wouldn’t try to wipe us out. They might have advanced technology, but they weren’t a warrior race so weapons technology wasn’t that far ahead of Earths, nor did they seem to focus on projectiles so much as heat weapons. If they tried deploying water as a weapon, or if they were counting on it as their version of the H-bomb, well…
“Terran,” she finally broke up the argument among her fellows, rising from her seat on four of her six limbs. “You are to leave this planet immediately and inform your people’s queen that we would like to negotiate a treaty of nonaggression with your race in exchange for a pact of minimal contact. The facts remain that your very presence on our world is a bio-hazard and we will not jeopardize the safety of our hives any further.”
I nodded, was escorted back to my ship, and given fuel to leave. Their scientists had been waiting for my execution to reverse engineer my ship, staring at the readings for oxygen levels in pure horror as I walked by. Once cleared for takeoff, I radioed my satellite jump station in the planetary orbit. As soon as the AI returned signal I knew I could leave safely. It’s a bit odd they didn’t try to confiscate the data I collected during my stay or any of the tech they’d gifted me while in the three months on their world, but I wasn’t complaining. I wondered what the other explorers had found on their trips while entering hyperspace.
Legolas’s friends beg him to
leave for Valinor early on. They know that he is fading, they know that he
thinks of their deaths more than anything else, and that it kills him. They are
terrified that he’ll die before he sails, and that he will remain in the Halls
of Mandos for a very long time. They’re afraid he’ll choose the void.
It’s an unspoken rule that
Legolas can never be left alone, that
someone must always be with him. They
don’t want him wandering somewhere to fade and never return (he nearly did it
once).
And before he dies, Estel makes
Gimli promise that he’ll see to it that Legolas will sail, and jokingly says, “Even
if you have to go with him”.
(i hope you don’t mind, but I ficletted 🙂
Frodo was first, and Gandalf with him, gone for so long now. Then Imrahil is dead – old age – and then Sam leaves one day, with little fanfare and less notice. Gone into the west.
Then Merry and Pippin make their last journey, and they are sleeping in the tombs of the great Kings of Gondor, two small hobbits lying in state. Eomer dies that same year.
Then Faramir is lost to them. Gone into the earth, and Aragorn will not be far behind them now.
Gimli eases himself into his chair, and holds his friend’s hand.
“I can choose my time,” Aragorn says, and Gimli nods. It was a gift granted to those of the ruling line of Numenor, that they might pass in the fullness of their prime and not suffer the dwindling of old age. “And it nears. Eldarion is full ready for this throne, and I am weary.”
“You’ll be making us the Two Hunters, then,” Gimli says, and clamps his teeth shut around his next words. His voice will fail him.
Aragorn studies the old Dwarf’s hand. Still powerful and strong, but as an ancient, gnarled tree-root is powerful and strong. He would wield his axe no longer, with hands such as these.
“You must make him sail,” he says, and he does not need to say who he is. “Merry and Pippin’s passing nearly finished him. I cannot be the loss that takes more than myself from him. He cannot hold, not with our number falling around him like mayflies! His eyes are already dimmed and he sings no more. Gimli, you must promise me. You must promise me: you must make him sail. You are the last of our number. The task falls to you.”
Gimli is silent for a long moment, and then he looks up at Aragorn with eyes that despite their age, are clear and bright with a proud warrior’s determination. “Aragorn, lad. I’ve followed him into golden wood and stinking fen, through mines and up mountains and down rivers. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: where Legolas goes, I will follow. If I cannot make him sail without me, then I’m getting on the damned boat with him.”
Aragorn holds the gaze, and then closes his eyes. “Good,” he says, and sighs. the relief settles into his bones. His last friends shall be together after his death: Legolas will not fade, Gimli will not be forced to mourn them both. “Thank you, Gimli.”
There is a soft snort, and Gimli’s great gnarled hand squeezes Aragorn’s with surprising gentleness. “You daft Man. As though you needed to ask.”
willowfoot 