yonmei

11:24 pm: 10 flash fiction stories
As requested. A very different range from last year.

sinsense asked: Oh, please? Harry Potter, the word is "gelding." Thematically speaking, go as wild as you like.
St Mungo and the Mudbloods

St Mungo baptised Merlin, but as a general rule, wizards do not become Christians. Snape has never precisely concealed his father's religion, but he never voluntarily speaks of it, either. Wizards who have never knowingly met a Christian often think of Christian wizards as geldings trying to compete with stallions, Squibs trying to pretend they're wizards, children fighting adults.

Severus wondered sometimes if there were other Christian wizards at Hogwarts, but he never tried to find them. Most of them were Muggle-borns, Mudbloods, and he doesn't want anyone to think he's one of them.

After his father leaves them, the summer holidays are quieter. Severus doesn't miss him. He wonders sometimes what his father saw in the religion of St Mungo, but not enough to go near the Muggle church where the priest never talks about Merlin.


phoenixw asked: Fandom: Harry Potter, Word: Scrumptious, Theme: Hope

Seeker for Hope

Harry's first days at Hogwarts were forever whirled together in his mind: a mixed-up potion that enthralled his mind and bewitched his senses. The silent sweep of owls delivering mail, the looming wild hills beyond the school walls, the smell of wolfsbane in the corridor outside the Potions dungeon, the lavish meals set in the dining hall morning, noon, and night - scrumptious food and lots of it, with no disapproving faces to remind him that only Dudley got first choice and all the second helpings he could eat - all of it enchanted him, caught him up into a daze of happiness. And people liked him: most of the teachers, the kids his age, the older kids.

He came out of his daze when he stood in the corridor and looked at Quiddich cups from twenty years ago, won by Gryffindor. Four years of cups with his father's name engraved on gold: James Potter, Seeker.

When no one else was around, Aunt Petunia occasionally mentioned her sister, his mother: stories about Lily as a child. He had never wondered before why the stories stopped before Lily's eleventh birthday. Now he knew: Lily had been to this school too. Lily had run up the stairs that moved underfoot, had run through the haunted corridors, had been Sorted by hat trick into Gryffindor. Lily was half-real to Harry: James wasn't real at all.

But he'd existed. Harry stared at the engraved name on gold. James Potter had become Seeker for Gryffindor when he was a Third Year, and - Harry made an enormous leap of insight - those four years when James had won cups for Gryffindor hadn't been so long ago in grown-up terms. Many of the teachers then were still teachers now. They remembered his father.

You look extraordinarily like James. It was real to him now, as it hadn't been before: he was his father's son. His father, a Seeker, like him.

The corridor was stone and cold. The boy whose name was on the cups was eleven years dead, and Harry would never know him. But looking at the name, Harry felt something very like hope.


daegaer asked: Good Omens/transubstantiation*/longing
Let this cup pass from me

"Should he be doing that?" Crowley enquired, watching the nice young man from Galilee shouting at the moneychangers in the outer court of the Temple.

"They really are most unpleasant people," Aziraphale observed mildly. His eyes were fixed on the nice young man, and his face held the kind of desire that transcends physical longing and goes right into the white heat of the soul. No one had ever looked at Crowley like that. It was terrifying and outrageous, to see that blaze within the quiet angel who liked wine and good dinners and had worked very hard to get books invented, not so long ago when they were both in Egypt. Aziraphale wasn't supposed to look at anyone like that.

"Just doing their job," Crowley said. He winced a little as the nice young man took hold of the edge of one moneychanger's table and lifted it. The young man was grinning, and he didn't look nice at all: he looked incandescently angry. The piled coins tilted, rolled, fell: they landed with a glittering rush and thud and spun off in all directions.

Nobody likes a moneychanger. The crowd in the Temple courtyard had had mixed feelings about a preacher interrupting their Temple duties with talk of God, but they liked the rolling coins and the agonized shout from the moneychanger. In a few minutes, there was not a table standing: and the crowd picked up the moneychangers and threw them out of the Temple. Then the joiner from Galilee stood on the steps to the inner court and told the mob what he thought of their reducing the service they owed to God to a rote sacrifice of birds or lambs, and they listened to him.

Crowley made a mental note to keep an eye on that young man. Even though he was a peasant with no formal education, if he escaped being executed by the Romans or imprisoned by the priests, he'd be a force to be reckoned with. But within the year... there was Golgotha, and an odd absence in Crowley's life. He missed the young man, in an odd sort of way: he missed Aziraphale. Sensibly, however, he stayed out of the angel's way: he suspected the angel thought he was responsible.

After two or three centuries, it became obvious that in the running game between Heaven and Hell, the Adversary had managed to score points with that nice young man from Galilee even though he had been killed with half his life ahead of him. Crowley stopped deliberately avoiding Aziraphale, no longer much worried that the angel would exercise divine wrath - no matter how sorry Aziraphale was for it after, it would take an infinite amount of hellish bureaucracy to get a new body - but he didn't run into Aziraphale again for a century or two.

He was sitting in a rather nice wine bar in Nicea when he saw Aziraphale come in with one of the prelates from the conference: eavesdropping shamelessly, Crowley realised the prelate thought Aziraphale was another bishop. They were having a rather technical conversation about theology in which Aziraphale had an unfair advantage: the wine didn't affect him unless he wanted it to, and he didn't need sleep. When the prelate put his head down on the table, Aziraphale kept talking: when the prelate started snoring, Aziraphale got up, with his wine cup (that hadn't needed refilling, and probably held better wine than this tavern-keeper sold) and came over to Crowley's table.

"Angel," Crowley said neutrally.

"Foul spawn of hell," Aziraphale said, but his heart clearly wasn't in it. He sat down.

"What's so important about the difference between homoousian and homoiousian?" Crowley asked.

Aziraphale shrugged. "Take, eat," he said. "This is my blood: this is my body. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man..." His voice drifted off. "Transubstantiation. It's important," he said. "That's all I have to know." He looked down at his cup, and was silent.

"You're not still mad at me about that incident on Golgotha," Crowley said cautiously.

"No," Aziraphale said. "It was just one of those things. I'm not angry with you." He looked up and smiled, and his eyes were guarded, though his voice was empty. "I'm not angry about it at all. With anyone."


coyotegoth asked: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, please (first series; it's all about the Martians with me); the word is "transcend," and the theme is "foreboding."
A grave gentleman

I have always believed that a man can transcend what ordinary people think of as human limitations. I have lived a long time: I have seen what no other man now living has ever seen, in lands far distant and far stranger than the cold grey English town where I was born. I was born with no special powers. I have never acquired any. I am no Dr Jekyll nor Henry Griffin. I am not a vampire. I do not own a submarine vessel. I am only a man, and not a young man.

I survive. Lock me in a cave with stone doors sealed for an eternity, and I will find a way out. I am a survivor: I am locked in a cave with opium sealing me in, and a vampire is calling me to be the most famous survivor, and I do not wish to go.

You know what? It's hell being a survivor, being known as the man who can live through anything. Because people confuse being a survivor with being a hero, and they want the hero to do something heroic. But all I've ever been sure of is that I can survive. I've never been sure I can take other people with me.

I outlive my friends. Some of them were heroes.


kickair8p asked: Fandom: due South, Word: snowblind, Theme: happiness
Follow the leader

Fraser remembered being snowblind, once, long ago. It hurt. He wept, not because he was sad, or afraid, but because his eyes insisted on it. But his grandfather's sledge dog team brought him home, and his grandmother beat him for being stupid enough to go out without his dark glasses, and he had never forgotten them again.

But he had remembered, all of his life since then, what it felt like to cling to the back of a sledge as the dogs yelled ki-yi to each other along the trail, and trust in their speed and strength and enthusiasm to bear him blindly home.

Fraser remembers being snowblind every time he kisses Ray. He wants to cry, not because he's hurt, or afraid, but because Ray's mouth is taking him somewhere, with speed and strength and enthusiasm, and all he can do is cling to him blindly and trust that where they're going is home.


redstarrobot asked: Blake's 7/ewer/aliens (cuz I dig the aliens)
Alien possession

Aliens have possessed Cally. They speak to her with their strange unminded voices, and she longs for a telepathic touch as she longs for water poured from the ewer that stood in her clonemother's kitchen, cool and sweet as no other water. The aliens have dry hard lonely voices, leached of emotion. She is possessed by them, fascinated, fiercely intrigued by their interplay: these aliens watch each other from the outside, communicating with words and gestures, confused and confusing. They watch her from the outside, speaking to her across the walls of skin and air that separate them. She watches them, watching her, watching them.


darklily asked: Fandom: Sherlock Holmes, Word: Scintillating, Theme: Oh lawks, I'll leave that one up to you. It was all I could do to think of the non-optional.
"Holmes!" I ejaculated.

When Holmes paid attention, his focus was remarkable. I talked, though I cannot now remember what about: I was eloquent and brilliant, sparkling and witty. I spoke and went on speaking, and Holmes gave every proof that for once, his whole attention was bent on me.

When I was spent, Holmes reared up on his elbows and looked down at me. I smiled a little feebly. "I win, Holmes," I whispered. I knew Holmes would make me pay for my victory.

He smiled. "My dear Watson: you more than won. You were scintillating, my dear fellow. You bear the palm away."


angelofthenorth asked: Merchant of Venice: Antonio/Shylock ;) word to include: transcendance (or similar)
A drop of blood

The Jews have bled much in Venice. In gold and in blood.

There was a Jewish boy who stood and watched as a Christian merchant's son ran the race, and won the prize. He had been seen admiring this Christian boy in the past, and the boy's friends taunted him about it, about his Jewish admirer, about the ugliness of a prick mutilated.

There was a Christian merchant who put himself in debt, and it seemed for a while as if a Christian would bleed for gold.

There was a heart, too cold to say it bled like any human heart. The heart of a man who did not love, and would not love. The heart of a man weighs a pound in Venetian measure: but to take the heart of a man and not spill a drop of blood?

It may be possible with Antonio's heart, Shylock thinks. But he wants to see him bleed.


hfnuala asked: Earthsea. Theme: colour. Word: blind.
Rainbow

The rainbow has its own true name in the language of the making, but to cast a spell on a rainbow a wizard must name not only the rainbow, but each colour in it. Each colour has its own true name, and there are an infinite number of colours. No sighted wizard that ever lived learned all the true names of the rainbow. Kurremkarmerruk tells his students that a blind wizard could learn every name of every colour, and they wonder, silently, if he is joking. If he is, it's the only joke he ever made: but no wizard has ever been blind enough to cast a spell on a rainbow.


Tags: bible, blake's 7, christmas day stories, due south, films, flashfic, harry potter, leguin, shakespeare, write write write, yuletide