InsaneJournal

London Calling Drabbles: Round Two
Well, this certainly took long enough. (But give me some time in an airport, apparently, and it's fanfic time like whoa.)

At some point, I'll put together a timeline for this 'verse, because these do jump around a bit between past and present. Round One here.

Drabbles. All worksafe.

For puella_nerdii: Zecht:
"You're not old enough to retire." Drace hands Zecht a fresh pint, and he is glad they came here. The Maltings had been a favorite of his, back when he'd felt like socializing.

"I'm not retiring." He drinks deep. "I quit. I've had my fill." Of broken homes and ruined children and too many close calls--he still has nightmares, sometimes, of that one Old City bust, when he took a knife in the thigh and Bergan took it personally.

Drace sighs. "What'll you do, then?"

"Go to St. Andrews. I've a friend there I've not seen for too long."


For keikoazuki: Balthier:
The smack of his own feet on the broken streets is too loud, but not loud enough to drown out the closing pursuit, now only one turned corner back. Moscow is a terrible place to run away, especially with your mad father's business associate's wallet. He fumbles the cash out, drops the wallet--the guard might pause over it--and keeps running. He cuts into an alley, and someone grabs his arm. He stumbles into darkness, a hand claps over his mouth, and the most beautiful woman he's ever seen holds a finger to her lips. He finds the silence easy.


For lassarina: Balthier:
He rides pillion until she teaches him to ride--from Moscow to Greece, twelve hours or more each day, and he thinks his kidneys will vibrate for days. But there, on the twisting roads above the Aegean, she shows him how to navigate the steel skeleton, the lean and pull of gravity, the whip of a cross wind. She says if he wrecks her bike, she will leave him where he lies, and he believes her. By the third day, riding solo, trusted, when the heat from the pipes wraps around him like a second skin, he agrees with her.


And two for sugared: Fran:

She does not remember where first they lived, but she remembers their flight from it, her youngest sister’s cold hand clasped tight in her own, her eldest trying to return to a wreathe of smoke they later said had been home. She remembers her father only as absence.

In her next home, the chill, damp room in Budapest, where their mother dare not dance, not here, not yet—still they leave again under the weight of strangers’ eyes. Fran decides when she is fourteen: she will never again stay in one place long enough to be made to leave it.


Noah:
He stays in Belfast until Basch’s trial is done, and though he has no friends left, he stays yet longer, until his mother’s lungs give in, give up, and then—Basch would say—he gives up, too. He asks for reassignment, and he is three years in Aberdeen where he buries his accent and his past, buries himself in work until that, at least, gets noticed.

In Edinburgh, as a replacement in Narcotics, each day is fourteen, fifteen hours at his desk or in the streets, but those are enough hours, it seems, to make a cautious kind of peace.


If anyone wants to ask for more (The Clash lyrics could be considered optional, honestly), I'm not closing down that post.