Frith (n): sanctuary, place of safety. (British English, obsolete)

question and meme

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:16:57 GMT

(I had a dream last night that I asked one of my old English teachers this question, and she shouted at me and told me that I was wrong. You guys'll tell me whether to listen to her, won't you? *g*)

This is about my sky pirate AU, which is now quite a way through the planning stages, and which I shall start writing next week during a terrible period of having no internet connection. (I'll also be skiing, but it's the lack of internet I'm currently dwelling on...)

Basically, since it's an AU, the characters won't be American/Canadian. So would I be able to use British English instead of American? This is because steam/clock-punk is heavily based on Victorian England anyway, and there are probably a hundred little words about sailing ships that are different in the two dialects, and they're wearing trousers and waistcoats and braces, and also I still can't take the word 'pants' very seriously. So unless anyone tells me I'm not allowed to, I probably will use BrEn in this. Opinions, plz?

And now a writing meme, which I stole from teh_elb :

Tell me about a story I never wrote, (eg, "The one where Aziraphale is a 1930s Chicago mobster") and I'll write you a snippet from it.

Fandoms: SGA, Sanctuary, Criminal Minds, Edge Chronicles, Discworld (City Watch), CSI (any), NCIS (either)

icon post

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:18:39 GMT

Small icon post. None are related to fandom - they're mostly composited images with T. S. Eliot quotes, and some random blank ones. Help yourself, but please give credit!

Total Icon Count: 13

Teasers:

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Table created with accio.nu's icon table(less) generator

rather incoherent soapboxing

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:20:06 GMT

Note: the general 'you' is in use throughout this post.

I want to link to this post by phaetonschariot today. Go read it now, because the rest of this post is going to assume that you have. It's meta, although it's headed like a fic, but the header is what's being discussed in the meta.

I lurk around quite a few meta places on LJ, and this topic's been flying around lately, particularly on fanficrants , and side-by-side with numerous ship wars, where it usually takes the form of (as illustrated by this post) "X IS NOT GAY! YOU'RE BREAKING CANON! STOP MAKING THEM GAY" - and while that was written in that post as an over-the-top example, some people were actually agreeing with it. (Because of course your personal opinions that everyone is straight until proven otherwise, and never ever bisexual, should dictate what everyone else is allowed to write and read. ::eyeroll::)

From that you may be able to work out that I fully agree with phaetonschariot 's post. Because however much to try to colour it as a 'squick', it really is offensive to demand that non-straight relationships should be warned for by others, and especially if you're then surprised that people do get offended by your reaction. Maybe I've been reading too much SGA fic, but it does seem that this fandom has pretty bitter feelings between those who write slash and those who write het. I recently dipped into the Criminal Minds fandom and was very surprised by the sheer amount of multishipping there - I'm honestly not sure which pairing has the majority. Possibly Aaron/Emily or Emily/Jennifer. (Seriously, I was quite amazed by the amount of femslash - in most fandoms those pairings tend to be shoved up on a metaphorical dusty shelf and barely ever looked at.)

Yeah, that's about all I have to say. I know that I mostly stick to gen myself because I'm not really a romance fan in general, but when I do read pairings, I'm pretty indiscriminante about them. I've just been stumbling across this homo- and bi-phobic attitude a lot online lately, and it's really pissing me off.

In the interests of ~~TMI~~ disclosure, I write this as someone who's still not entirely sure whether I identify as bisexual or asexual. Which doesn't make much sense, I know, but yeah :P

meme

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:00:32 GMT

From proskynesis :

If you see this, post a poem in your own LJ today.

Nettle Love
~ Dave McClure

Some favour finest muslin, others silk.
A few prefer synthetics. That's OK.
You'll find no judgment here.

Newcomers often ask - why dress at all?
believing (as they would) that nettles seek
the unprotected skin.

They do not understand - the sheerest weave
catches each predatory ragged leaf
to press it sweetly close.

Nor do we run and thrash. Each loving sting
is better savoured in a peaceful mien
than in a turbulence.

We are not many. It is for the few
to walk in nettled fields and to enjoy
this most aesthetic pain.

And another option, by the same guy, and imagine that he's reading it aloud, because I think this one sounds best in a Scottish accent. Of course, having come across it by hearing him read it out, I'm not a reliable source.

The Pessimistic Ballade of Arbitrary Behaviour
~ Dave McClure

Nathaniel thought the way ahead
was clear. He looked at Clementine
(a silly name) and softly said
"My only love, will you be mine?
A word, a nod, a glance, a sign
that I'm your Jack and you're my Jill?"
But then he swallowed turpentine
for people do as people will.

She laid him on her mother's bed.
(Her dad had gone to Lichtenstein
in search of mirth and maidenhead,
which some considered out of line.)
She called the priest at ten to nine.
He leaned across the window-sill
and purred, "Your arse is very fine!"
for people do as people will.

He died (Nathaniel) but, instead
of grieving, she went out to dine
(that's Clementine) on garlic bread
and marinated porcupine.
She choked (of course) upon a spine
that lay concealed in fronds of dill.
The waiter gave her shoes a shine
for people do as people will.

Rational souls, though you decline
to heed my dismal codecil,
pull up a chair, uncork the wine
for people do as people will.

fic: the woods are deadly, dark and deep

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:06:51 GMT

Title: The Woods are Deadly, Dark and Deep
Rating: PG-13, Gen
Characters: Teyla Emmagan, Rodney McKay
Word count: 7000
Notes: This was written as a response to a gorgeous piece of art by astridv which is here - go and look at it and drop her a comment!
Beta'd by michelel72 - thank you very much!

Summary: The village was burned down before they got there, and now the night's closing in. Here, there's a very good reason to fear the dark.

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The Woods are Deadly, Dark and Deep

Tears crept their way down Teyla’s face, and Rodney stared at her in horror. If he had ever needed a sign to tell him when things were fucked up as much as they could possibly be, Teyla crying might just be it.

The air was thick with stinging particles of wood-smoke. It would have been thicker, a few hours ago. The remains of the houses were only smouldering now, no flames, just the occasional red glow lurking in shadows. Thank god these people knew about fire breaks, Rodney found himself thinking, dreamily. The whole forest might have gone up. Resinous trees. Pine. They’d burn for hours…

But it wasn’t just woodsmoke that he could smell, wasn’t just woodsmoke wisping up through the pale sky of early evening. Clearly at least some of Pegasus’s residents had discovered similar chemicals for paint and garments and possessions as were used on Earth, because some of those sharp fumes were eerily familiar.

And overpowering the other smells was the rich odour of roasting meat.

“We have to split up and search for survivors,” Teyla said, the first words since they had crested a ridge and seen the pall of grey smoke drifting up above the canopy. Rodney looked at her. She hadn’t wiped the tears from her face, but they were the only expression of her emotions. The rest of her features were drawn tight; a mask. He felt that he should say something, but he had no idea what words to use as morsels of empty comfort. Sheppard might have known what to do, but he didn’t.

“You take those houses,” she said, pointing. And then she began running towards the others, as if every moment would make a difference, although she had to know that it probably wouldn’t.

Rodney moved more slowly. If there were people still alive then he wanted to find them, of course he did, but… he took a deep breath, covered his nose and mouth with his sleeve, and forced his way into the nearest timber skeleton that had once been a house. The bones and ribs were of some dense wood that was still merely smouldering, still standing upright as the boards of the walls and the inside furnishings had flamed and crumbled and burned.

But not thoroughly enough.

Teyla paused her own search to jog over to him and rub his shoulders comfortingly as he was violently sick, leaning on a tree for support. “They were attacked,” he choked out.

“I know.”

“I thought – I thought it was just a fire…”

“Doubtless the fire was set to conceal what happened here.”

Rodney looked at the remains of the structures. “I’m not going in any more of them.”

Teyla removed her hands from his shoulders, and helped him upright. “You must.”

“But they’re all… cut up…”

“Yes, I have seen.”

“So – ”

“So there may be survivors. Would you like to think, Dr McKay, that you had refused to search, and possibly condemned a friend of mine, just because you did not want to see death?”

This wasn’t the Teyla he usually saw, the friend and teammate who would by turns tease and support the others. This was Teyla Emmagan of Athos, who had steered her people thorough the rock-filled torrent that was life in the Pegasus galaxy – fast, dangerous and merciless, where death could lurk in every shadow.

And this Teyla would not let him fall back onto the comfortable support of his weaknesses. “I’ll keep looking,” he said, wiping his mouth.

“Thank you, Rodney,” Teyla said, gently. She paused. “We will search together.”

It was slightly easier with Teyla beside him. He didn’t have to look too closely at the bodies, didn’t have to think too much about who they might have been. At least, he kept reminding himself, this wasn’t a proper village. Just a small settlement near the Loishans’ holy places. The main body of adults, and all of the children, lived on another world. On Atlantis, away from the reality, the horror, he would have called the Loishans lucky.

He became aware that Teyla wasn’t moving away from the woman she had checked last. They were in the last house now – he suspected that Teyla had deliberately left this one before. Maybe she had wanted to hold onto hope for as long as possible. “Teyla?” he asked.

Teyla stayed kneeling. “This is Ness,” she said quietly.

“Who – Oh. Oh god. We talked to her on the radio.”

She nodded, and swallowed hard.

“Everything was fine. It was just their shield generator. They were – that was this morning.” An easy piece of maintenance for one of their allies. Not really something requiring the Chief of Science, but they were old friends of Teyla, and she had persuaded him to be the one to accompany her. To meet them. He looked at Ness, and then quickly looked away again. If they had been here a few hours earlier…

Teyla was already moving, searching. “Here,” she said. Rodney stepped cautiously after her, and watched her crouch down beside another woman. During the search he had automatically been counting the bodies. This was number twenty-seven , and the last. Ness had told him the current population number as part of the data he had gathered from her earlier, between routine questions about their rudimentary shield.

“We should go back to Atlantis,” he said. “Tomorrow we can bring a couple of Jumpers, do a site survey, and, um, collect the bodies.”

He didn’t get a reply. Teyla was still crouched beside the woman, her eyes closed. “Teyla?”

Her eyes flew open. “She is alive!”

“Really?” Rodney joined her, his breath catching in anticipation.

“Yes, just – she is badly hurt. Several stab wounds, see.”

“Do you know her?”

“Her name is Iren. She and Ness are – were married.”

Iren reminded Rodney horribly of Jeannie. Her hair was the same colour, and composed of the same wildly corkscrewing curls. Blood from the wounds to her torso and abdomen stained the light brown of her tunic and slacks. “What should we do?” he asked.

Teyla pursed her mouth. “We cannot stay here. She urgently needs medicine, or she will die. We will have to carry her to the Gate.”

Rodney thought about the route they had travelled along. There was a deep, fast-flowing river not far from the settlement, spanned by two ropes – one to walk on and one at shoulder height to hold onto. “What about the bridge? We can’t carry her across that.”

“There is a ford upstream. It’s how they get their supplies across.”

“We shouldn’t move her, though, should we?” That was one of the clearest first aid principles he remembered.

Teyla seemed to know what he was thinking. “It’s nearly dark. Splitting up would be too dangerous.”

“Why? What is it?”

She hesitated. “It is always dangerous to travel alone at night.”

“You aren’t telling me something.”

Teyla ignored him. “I will find a way to carry her. You find some blankets.”

She walked off before he could stop her, and he set about finding a blanket, thankful that Ness and Iren’s house was set apart from the others, and so hadn’t been caught by the main blaze. Most of the destruction had been caused by whoever had sacked the settlement. Rodney covered Iren with one blanket, folded another beneath her head, and field-dressed with gauze pads what seemed like him to be the worst of her wounds, wrapping her abdomen tightly. It was inexpert, and he had kept his face screwed up at having to touch her blood, but it slowed the bleeding. By the time that Teyla returned, carrying with her a rough litter that she had found, two wooden poles with a rope lattice strung between them, he had finished.

The path to the ford was clearly much less well-travelled than the one to the rope bridge. Rodney’s feet stumbled over stones and tree roots, his view of the ground blocked by Iren’s blanket-covered body on the litter. “If they use this path for carrying supplies, why don’t they look after it better?” he asked.

“Because for the past year, the transport of supplies has been with the assistance of Atlantis’s Puddlejumpers,” Teyla’s voice, drifting back, informed him.

“Why wasn’t I notified of this?”

“You were.”

“I’m sure I wasn’t.”

“I informed you myself. I believe your response was, ‘Whatever, leave me alone’.” Rodney could only see the back of her head, but he could practically hear her lips quirk as she spoke. For a second he wondered how she could move so quickly from the blank horror she had displayed at the settlement, and then felt ashamed as he recognised the thought. He wondered how often she had stepped through the Gate to visit friends, only to find destruction instead. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to know.

Instead, he tried to look around. The spiked canopy of the conifer forest was punctured by patches of lighter sky, but shadows were packed tight around the trunks and the needle-strewn floor. Here and there, patches of slowly melting snow ghosted in the gloom.

It was getting colder, too. He wished that he was wearing gloves – not just to warm his fingers, but to stop the rubbing of the wooden poles on his palms. He was going to get blisters, and wouldn’t be able to type properly for days. His arms ached, too, and the way his P90 bounced from its strap with every step to smack against the front of his vest was becoming increasingly aggravating.

“How far is it to the ford?” he asked.

“I do not remember precisely. It is a much longer route than the shorter one we took earlier.”

“Funnily enough, I’d already guessed that.”

She didn’t answer.

Every quarter of an hour or so they stopped to rest, and lowered the litter down gently to the ground, so that Teyla could dribble some water from her canteen between her friend’s lips. On the third occasion Iren opened her eyes briefly, but made no other signs of awareness. “She’s running out of time,” Teyla whispered, stroking her hair gently.

“How much time do we have?” Rodney whispered back. Not that it was likely that Iren could hear them.

Teyla shook her head, her expression grim. “Maybe not enough.”

When they started walking again Rodney kept looking down at Iren, trying to reassure himself that she was indeed still breathing, but the jolting movement of the litter made that impossible. They were now noticeably travelling uphill.

There was no warning. One instant Teyla was ahead of him, on a rare piece of level ground, and the next instant she wasn’t, and the poles he was still grasping tightly were pulling him forward and then down into a hidden gully, sliding and rolling down a steep scree slope of earth and stones, tumbling over and over and over, the poles wrenched from his hands, the breath torn from his lungs.

And then he came to a stop and lay still with his mouth full of dirt and a searing, buzzing pain in his leg, and Iren’s face was next to his and her eyes were wide open and she didn’t blink.

- * -

Teyla struggled to sit upright as soon as her body came to a stop, fighting against dizziness and pain in her chest. “Rodney!” she called, pulling herself to her knees.

The reassuring weight of her P90 was gone, the strap torn out from the seam.

“Teyla?” Rodney’s voice was nearby. She clambered to her feet and stumbled determinedly towards him. He didn’t look up at her approach.

She didn’t need to be told. People looked different once the life had left them. “Are you hurt?” she asked him, kneeling on the cold earth, and not taking her eyes from Iren’s already-cooling body. She stroked the smooth skin of her cheek, gently closing her eyes.

“Yes,” Rodney said.

Her hand glided over the sun-shaped pendant Iren wore around her neck. She had spoken to Ness that morning. They should be spending the night in the house with her and Iren. And now they were both dead. But they should have been able to get Iren home, should have been able to save her…

“Teyla!” Rodney snapped, and she finally looked up at him. This time she noticed his wide eyes, and the way his face was drawn in.

“Are you hurt?”

“Are you okay?” Rodney asked. “Because I’ve just said your name several times, and also you’ve already asked me that.”

She took a breath, and this time her brain properly registered the pain of bruised, possibly cracked ribs. “I am fine.”

“You might want to put more effort into that next time.” He scrunched his face. “And I don’t want to inconvenience you or anything, but I’m pretty sure my leg’s broken.” His voice was slightly distant. She would have expected him to be panicky, but he wasn’t. Shock was enforcing in him an unaccustomed calm.

This is not the time for mourning. Teyla shook her head fiercely.

“It is! Don’t shake your head!”

“That is not – ” She cut herself off. That argument would be futile. Instead she reached towards the leg of Rodney’s BDUs, and then stopped. From the angle of it, it was obvious that he was right. “Do you have any other injuries?”

“Isn’t having a broken leg bad enough?”

“Rodney…” There were many wind-torn branches lying among the leaf litter. The planet was prone to storms, and she sent up a quick thanks to the Ancestors that tonight was calm. Teyla tested several straight sticks before finding one that was firm, without a treacherous rot-brittled core.

“What are you going to do?” Rodney asked, and the note of fear in his voice told her that he already knew the answer.

“I have to set and splint your leg.”

“You sure you have to?”

“Otherwise we will not make it to the Gate.”

Rodney moaned quietly. “We aren’t even at the ford yet. If you actually think I can walk to the Gate, you’re deluding yourself.”

Teyla looked up to the deepening indigo of the sky, the feathery disk of the moon thickening into existence against it. “We have to get back to Atlantis,” she said.

“Can’t we just wait here?”

She felt her chest tighten painfully. “No.”

His eyes widened suddenly. “Are you – do you think whoever attacked the people will come for us?”

“No, I do not,” Teyla said, and was grateful that he had asked such a specific question, one to which she did not have to lie. She looked up again at the darkening skies, and a knot of fear tightened in her stomach. They should be in the village. They should be surrounded by bright lights and strong walls.

“Who were they?” Rodney asked, quickly, and Teyla recognised the question for what it was – a delaying tactic.

She knelt by his feet and passed him a stick that she had rejected. “Put this in your mouth, and bite down.”

“Why does it matter whether I scream or not? I’m entitled to it, aren’t I?”

“Put it in your mouth.”

He complied. Teyla snapped her chosen stick in half over her knee, pretending for Rodney’s sake that she didn’t notice him gasp and wince at the noise. “The men who attacked the settlement will not return,” she said steadily, pulling her belt from its loops. “They have what they want.”

He took the stick out of his mouth. “What did they want?” At a pointed look from her he replaced it between his teeth.

“Violence. Money. Food. Death.” She guided Rodney’s hand to the trunk of a nearby sapling. “Hold on to this.”

“Mmm.”

“There are a few such raiding groups. They prey on worlds populated only by small groups of people – easy targets.” Teyla grasped his ankle and pulled, gritting her teeth. She had set bones before. It didn’t get any less unpleasant.

Rodney whimpered harshly through his tightly-clenched jaw as she splinted his leg, strapping the belt around the two sticks placed on either side of the break and buckling it tightly. She steeled her features, acting as if she couldn’t hear him. Sympathy, empathy, wouldn’t help. What would help was to be swift and efficient, and unthinking.

“I hate you,” Rodney managed, as she pressed a couple of painkillers into his mouth and offered her canteen.

“I am truly sorry for having to cause you pain, Rodney.”

“Yes, well.”

Teyla smiled slightly. It amused her how easily Rodney could be wrong-footed, just by refusing to answer back. “But I am sure that you will still be brave enough to make it back to the Gate.”

“Don’t try that guilt-tripping crap. I’m impervious to it.”

Teyla realised that Rodney had not alluded to Iren since the accident. But he kept on glancing towards her, and then away again. She reached out a hand and stroked her hair. Rodney’s eyes reluctantly followed the motion and came to rest on Iren’s face.

“I don’t – ” Rodney began, but Teyla cut him off with a shake of her head.

“We will have to leave her here.”

“She’s your friend. Don’t you…mind?”

“We can send a Jumper to retrieve her, along with the others.” She didn’t add that, by morning, there would be nothing to retrieve. Or that that was the reason for her insistence on moving on.

“Okay.” Rodney took a deep breath. “You’d better help me.”

“Of course.” She pushed a makeshift staff into his hand. “You can lean on this, and on me. Give me your weapon, too.”

“What? Oh, yours is gone.”

“I lost it in the fall.”

He passed it over, and she grasped it tightly, not able to clip it to her vest with the loop broken. Then she carefully removed Iren’s jewellery, stowing the pieces safely in a pocket. Rodney watched, but didn’t comment.

She stood up, biting her lip to suppress any noises being dragged from her by the pain in her ribs, and then reached down for him. “Let’s go.”

- * -

The quietness of the evening kept Teyla on edge. Without a reassuring background rustle and clatter of twigs and leaves jumping in a wind, every sound seemed amplified, crystallised, and she kept jerking her head around, staring into the shadows. She hoped Rodney didn’t notice, or at least that he assumed it was caused by his own lumbering motion as he tried to avoid his injured leg touching the ground.

Neither of them spoke. In Teyla’s case this was because she was listening on tenterhooks to the sounds of the forest; in Rodney’s case she thought he was probably trying to save his breath.

He also didn’t ask her why she hadn’t switched her flashlight on in the deepening gloam. And that probably was something he would have noticed, injury or not. Perhaps she wasn’t giving him enough credit, and he did know that something was wrong, but didn’t want to hear it.

She wished for a moment that she, too, didn’t know the reason for the strong wooden walls around the settlement, and for everyone, even inside them, to lock the doors of their houses at night.

A bird shrieked, high and shrill, and she jerked halfway around before controlling herself, her heart hammering, ears straining to catch the sound of stealthy movements. Patches of snow reflected the silver moon, even more unearthly now.

She stopped.

“What?” Rodney hissed.

She kept her voice low. “I am not sure. Probably nothing.”

“Oh god. I just want to get home. This trip is a joke.”

Despite herself, Teyla stiffened. She knew that Rodney didn’t mean any harm, but even so…

Beside her, Rodney’s brain caught up with his mouth. “No, Teyla, wait. I didn’t mean it like that – ”

“It is fine.”

“But – ”

“She held up a hand. “Be quiet a moment.”

“Can you hear something?” Rodney whispered.

“Be quiet!”

There must have been something in her voice, because Rodney silenced instantly. She listened, feeling the P90 slip slightly in her palm. She tightened her grip and tried to see once again into the shadows.

“What’s out there?” Rodney hissed.

“Nothing that we want to meet.”

“Yeah, I kind of got that!” Rodney’s voice began to rise.

“Be quiet!”

There was silence all around them; a vitrified pool of it. A silence that wasn’t just an absence of sound, but a conscious repression of it.

The pressure of Rodney’s hand on her shoulder was steadily increasing. “Teyla,” he whispered, his mouth close to her ear. “Please just tell me.”

Teyla hesitated, and then wondered why she was doing that. What was she afraid of – that he would panic? In serious situations, she should trust him more than that.

“We’re being hunted,” she whispered.

She felt Rodney tense still further, felt him shake with it and the pain. “By what?”

“They are – ”

They attacked.

They attacked in a roaring, snarling wave of sinuous muscles and grey fur and sharp teeth and claws which glinted beneath the moonlight; a blur of motion and intention and anger and finely-whetted hunger.

And Teyla fired, swinging the P90 around, pulling Rodney with her through a spin, cutting his scream from her mind as the flare from the weapon blazed a wound into the night.

She felt Rodney’s hand lose its grip; felt his weight leave her support. “Teyla!” she heard him shriek, and she twisted and fired and twisted and fired and then there was silence.

She didn’t turn on the flashlight. She could see Rodney by moonlight without it, a huddled shape on the ground, and terror clenched her tightly for a second, until he moaned.

“Rodney!” She dropped to her knees, and pushed him so that he rolled over, and he stared at her, his face terrified.

“They were going to eat me! You never told me this was the planet of the wargs!”

“You have these creatures on Earth?” His arm was bleeding, the sleeve and skin beneath shredded by razor-sharp teeth. But it looked as if the aim had been to drag him away, rather than to tear the flesh.

He’d been lucky.

“Yes. Well, no. Sort of.”

“Rodney, we need to move. They will return, likely in greater numbers.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not really up for much running right now!”

“Then you will die right here – is that what you want?”

“No.”

“Then we need to move. Now. I believe we are almost at the ford.”

Teyla bit down on another groan of pain as she helped Rodney to an unsteady footing. “It will be a short while before the…wargs…get the courage to return,” she said. “We should attempt to reach the other side of the ford by then.”

“What, can’t they cross running water?” Rodney’s breathing was already beginning to rasp again.

“They may try to ambush us while we are in the river.”

“That – doesn’t sound good.”

“No, it would not be.”

Rodney began to whisper beneath his breath as the path inched away beneath their feet. Teyla tried to make out what he was saying, and then realised that he was simply counting – treating every tree they passed as a minor milestone. She couldn’t tell, in the gloom, whether his arm was still bleeding, and prayed that she wasn’t making a mistake by not stopping to examine and bandage it. After all, they wouldn’t gain much ground by the lack of delay, but there was always the chance that what they were gaining could be just enough.

And she didn’t quite know why she was continually refusing to admit her own injuries. She didn’t want to worry Rodney any more than he already was. But more than that – it felt almost disloyal to consider herself as suffering, when her friends –

“I can hear the river,” she said.

Rodney’s head lifted, but he walked in silence for a few paces before answering. “Oh. Yes.”

Very soon they could see it, too, as the trees suddenly gave way. Fast-flowing water streamed among the rocks, the surface shining silver, and the depths beneath ink-black.

“You said it was a ford,” Rodney muttered.

“It is a ford.”

“Fords are shallow.”

“This is shallow. If it were daylight, you would see that for yourself.”

“Teyla…”

“Rodney, we need to cross. And we need to do it now.” She wished to herself, only occasionally, that Rodney was a soldier like the rest of them. Or that the Atlanteans didn’t draw such a distinction between soldiers and civilians, which simply perpetuated the differences in attitudes between them. “I wish we had a choice, but we do not, so there is no point in debate.”

“Oh god, I’m going to die.”

Teyla simply started walking forward, confident that Rodney, relying on her support, would have no choice but to move also.

The water was freezing, and high enough to immediately slop over and into her boots. It would be good for Rodney’s leg, though, bringing the swelling down, and she told herself that as she heard him hiss sharply at the shock of it. The current tugged at her legs. She knew that the flat stones beneath them had cross-patterns scored into them for grip, but they were still slimy under her soles. She stepped forward and the numbing water foamed around her knees.

A significant part of Rodney’s weight was on the arm around her shoulders. It joined with the current to threaten her balance, and she hoped that she was strong enough to support them both. It was something she didn’t often have to doubt.

She took a step, and felt Rodney shaking as he copied her, translated through his bones and into hers.

Another step. The unseen paving of the ford remained level, as she had remembered. She moved slowly and deliberately, recalling the sensation at the top of the steep bank when the ground had suddenly crumbled away beneath her feet. She had had no chance to stop them from falling, she told herself, but she wasn’t going to let it happen again.

The opposite bank was drawing steadily closer. She took another step, paused while Rodney took his, and then moved forwards again. The back of her neck prickled constantly with the fear of being watched, but even if they were, there was nothing she could do until they reached dry land.

The thoughts passed through her head slowly. Most of her concentration was on maintaining her balance on the treacherous footing.

Three steps left. Two steps left.

Rodney suddenly let go of her shoulder and grabbed for an outreaching tree limb instead. His fingers closed around it, and then it bent, flexing downwards with almost no resistance. Teyla heard a warning shout leave her mouth while she was already jumping forward, grabbing for him as he fell. Icy water flowed over her, freezing the breath in her lungs, but there was thick material clutched in her hand, and she didn’t let it go.

- * -

“What were you doing?” Teyla demanded in a fierce undertone to Rodney, as he slumped against the base of a tree.

He remembered the moment of blind panic when the only thing in his head had been the urge to get out of the water now. The tree, attached as it was to the bank, had represented that. “I thought it would help. I’m sorry, ok?”

“Come on.” She was angry, and shivering. He instinctively flinched as she reached towards him, but her touch as she slipped her arm beneath his shoulders was as gentle as it had been before. He could feel goosebumps puckering his skin, but the pain was reduced. The coldness of the river had numbed his leg, and for that he was grateful.

“Are you ok?” he asked. “Other than being, you know, really cold.” He thought that he had heard her make a noise of pain.

“Fine.” Her face was grim, and she held her P90 so that she could fire it at a moment’s notice while she scanned the surroundings. He tried to look as well, but he could only see the shadows, accumulating beneath branches and between the tree trunks that were stark like teeth in the dark maw of the forest.

Ready to bite down on them both.

He also remembered that the gun had been submerged. Would it still fire? But he’d witnessed them work in pouring rain, and surely Teyla would say something if she thought it was damaged.

“How long do you think until they come back?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

“How far’s the Gate?”

“Closer than the village is.”

“Yes, but how close?”

“We should be silent.”

Silent. He could do that. In the silence their movements sounded very loud, particularly his own lurching motion. Push off from one leg, and try to touch the ground with the other as little as possible. Step, ow, step, ow.

It was cold, and he was in pain, and he was tired.

The full moon glared down at him. He wondered if that was why the creatures were out hunting.

“They are not werewolves,” Teyla said.

“Did you just read my mind?” Rodney asked.

“You had an expression that told me you were half-way to believing something you know to be foolish.”

“Foolish? Do you want to compare IQs?”

“Do you want to lead us back to the Gate?”

He decided that being silent again would probably be a good idea, not wanting to bring down more of Teyla’s irritation on his head. He was pretty sure that the adrenaline he’d been running on was beginning to wear off, as was the briefly numbing effect of the river, while the bone-aching coldness remained, leaching continuously from his damp clothes. If John had been there then by now he would have been insisting that he couldn’t go any further, but… Teyla didn’t invite that so much.

So he was surprised but grateful when she abruptly halted, and he could lean most of his weight on her, with his broken leg off the ground, and take some deep breaths.

“Let me help you sit down,” she said.

He frowned. “I thought you said we had to keep moving?”

“We should stop here for a while.”

Her change of mind puzzled him briefly, but then she was lowering him hastily down next to a broad-trunked tree, and the relief that flooded through his body as he leaned heavily against it drove the barely-formed question out of his thoughts.

“Take this,” she ordered, and thrust the P90 at him.

“Why – what are you going to do?”

“Collect firewood.”

“Won’t that attract the wolf-monsters?”

“We are both soaked through and need to dry out.”

Once again, she had succeeded in sealing off the conversation. Rodney stared after her as she gathered fallen branches, seeming to find dry ones by some unerring talent. He twisted his mangled arm towards him, trying to see how bad it was. Surely if it was too bad, Teyla would have dressed it for him? Was that swelling he could faintly see in the moonlight, hinting of infection? The wound was still slowly seeping blood and plasma. Gingerly he poked at the torn flesh with his other set of fingers, and jerked them away rapidly when he discovered that doing that really hurt.

“You should be keeping watch,” Teyla said, as she began shaping her collection of sticks into a pyramid. There was no accusation in her voice. She winced as she twisted to reach into the pocket in which she kept matches in a waterproof container.

“Are you hurt?” Rodney asked. He wondered if it was something he should be worried about.

“No.”

“Really?”

She ignored him, striking a bud of flame onto the head of the match and holding it to the tinder, where it seeded and blossomed.

“Teyla, I’m sorry about the river.”

She again didn’t answer immediately, and remained crouching alertly by the fire until apparently satisfied that it would keep burning. The she settled herself beside him, silently reaching over and pulling the P90 from his fingers. “Please forget about it for now. When we arrive back at Atlantis you can apologise properly.”

“Now that’s an appealing prospect.”

She smiled slightly. “Which part?”

Now it was his turn not to answer. He leaned against the warmth of Teyla’s side and shoulder, and felt the greater warmth of the fire on his face as his clothes begin to gently steam. The flames danced and fluttered and stretched upwards, and seemed somehow to have the shape of the spires of Atlantis within them, reassuring and lulling him. Teyla’s arm was wrapped comfortably around him. He almost felt that he could sleep.

And then he looked up, and saw, in the deep blackness where the shadows clustered out of reach of the fire, points of light glowing with the reflections of the flames.

“Teyla,” he whispered, very, very quietly.

“Yes, I know.”

Of course she did. “What do we do?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“What do you suggest we do? Neither of us can go any further. At least we have the fire.”

Rodney nearly missed the telling choice of words, but they sparked something as they drifted through his head. “What do you mean, neither of us? I thought you’re okay!”

She squeezed his shoulder gently. “We must hold them off until morning. Do you have any more ammunition?”

A search of his pockets revealed three clips. Teyla put another branch on the fire. The eyes beneath the trees were unmoving. Watching. Waiting. He couldn’t look away.

“Why aren’t they attacking?” he hissed.

“They are working out whether it is they or us who will win.”

That was hardly more reassuring, and Rodney wanted to say that. But he held his tongue. Instead, he took refuge in facts. This planet had shorter nights than Earth – only a few hours, even in the current winter. Maybe Teyla could hold off the wargs. Maybe they weren’t certain to die. The probability of being torn apart and devoured could be as low as… 95 percent. Give or take.

A low growl sounded, and shook through the night. Teyla’s body tensed. Rodney screwed his eyes shut. He wasn’t some stoic hero who could stare without flinching as his death lunged at him, all wild eyes and claws and glistening teeth.

Teyla’s hand rested on his for a second and then it was gone. And gunfire ripped through the brooding quiet, as Rodney pressed his back up against the rough bark of the tree and wished to vanish inside it. There were yelps and snarls and he expected at any moment to feel hot, rancid breath against the exposed flesh of his neck, and he pressed his chin into the top of his vest in a futile attempt to protect his jugular.

Silence. He looked. Teyla was moving the P90 through a slow arc, her jaw clenched with fierce concentration. There was blood on the dry leaves at the edge of the circle of firelight. The eyes were, for the moment, not visible.

“I hit three,” she replied to his unasked question. “They crawled away. Apparently they are slow to die.”

He didn’t understand how she could be so calm. “So you scared them off? Won’t they come back?”

“Probably. I will collect more firewood before they do.”

She walked into the gloom as if there were no monsters out there, but taking the P90 with her. Rodney felt a twinge of selfish fear at being left unarmed, even with the protection of the flickering flames. But she returned with armfuls of fuel, which she piled next to him. “You are in charge of the fire,” she said.

“I’m not really very good at this survival stuff.”

“I will be defending us. If they bring a sustained attack I cannot divide my attention between that and the fire.”

“Okay, so I’ll do my best.” He threw a stick towards it to emphasise his point. It bounced off one of the half-burned branches and dropped uselessly to the soil Teyla picked it up and poked it into the flames, and this time there was no mistaking the involuntary groan of pain that escaped her as she straightened up. But he didn’t say anything, since she clearly didn’t want him to, and he didn’t see what it could possibly achieve in that case.

His silence was rewarded by a slight smile. “I am sure you will manage the fire wonderfully,” she said.

The wargs didn’t come back as Rodney slowly fed stick after stick to the flames. His leg throbbed, and he began to doubt that being devoured could possibly add to the pain he was in. Adrenaline and shock were well on their way to having completely worn off. He even managed to slip into a doze, with Teyla’s hand on his shoulder to shake him awake at a moment’s notice.

In fact, it was her hand slipping away from contact with him that caused him to wake. He opened his eyes to find that she had slumped across the ground away from him. Asleep, or – He hoped that she was merely asleep. He glanced at the fire while deciding what to do, and his gaze slid across the low red glow and pale ghosts of flames until it was locked onto the pair of eyes watching him from the other side of it.

The glow played across the thick silver fur of the creature and shone from its golden, unblinking eyes. The muzzle was lowered in his direction, and, although it was nearly closed, the points of sharp yellow-white teeth were visible in the thing’s bear-trap mouth. It was the size of a lion, and Rodney was certain that it could eat him as an early breakfast and still have plenty of room for seconds.

He didn’t dare move. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the P90, clutched tight in one of Teyla’s hands on the other side of her body. Way out of reach. And if he woke her up, that could be the cue that this mutant-space-wolf-warg was waiting for.

Go away! he screamed inside his head. Don’t eat me! I taste terrible!

It continued to fix him with its terrible stare, and Rodney tried to hold his breath and hoped that it wasn’t attracted to the blood matted in his sleeve.

And then it turned, and swiftly loped into the trees, where the shadows engulfed it.

Rodney drew a very very long, shuddering breath, but still didn’t move in case it was watching from a distance, ready to change its mind. He could feel the flood of adrenaline draining from him.

And then, ridiculously, he fell asleep again.

- * -

Her radio buzzed, close to her ear, and she put a hand out to her nightstand, fumbling for it, but her fingers couldn’t find among the damp dead leaves.

She opened her eyes and remembered that she wasn’t on Atlantis after all.

And then she sat bolt upright, not even registering the pain that flared in her chest at the sudden movement, twisting until she could see Rodney with his head tipped back against the tree trunk, his face alarmingly pale but his ribcage rising and falling with a reassuring regularity. He was even snoring slightly.

The fire had burned down to embers, but the grey light of morning had dispelled the need for it.

Her radio buzzed again, and she answered it reflexively. “This is Teyla.”

“Teyla, I know it’s early, but Zelenka’s ranting because Rodney changed some important password somewhere, and I can’t take it anymore. Kick him awake and ask him what it is.”

Teyla couldn’t help it – she started to laugh, still holding open the channel.

“What’s so funny?” John asked.

Beside her, Rodney groaned and cracked his eyelids apart. “Get a Jumper crew ready for a rescue mission,” she said quickly into the radio. “Bring Keller.” Then she cut off John’s demands to know what had happened, and turned to Rodney instead. “How do you feel?”

“Terrible,” he groused. Then he opened his eyes properly. “Oh my god, we’re still alive.” He sounded sincerely shocked at that fact.

“We are. And Atlantis is sending a Jumper to pick us up.”

“Finally, something good happens. Keller had better not hold back on the painkillers.”

“I am sure she will not,” Teyla said, with a smile which quickly fell from her face. “Rodney, I am ashamed to have fallen asleep when on watch. If the creatures had come back…”

Rodney frowned, opened his mouth as if to say something, and then paused, clearly reconsidering. “Well, they didn’t. Huh. I wonder why not?”

And she had also already considered the answer to his question, and it was not a pleasant one. “I think they abandoned us in favour of a less troublesome source of food.”

It took Rodney a few seconds to understand, and then he looked horrified. “God, Teyla, I’m so sorry.”

So was she. And later she would allow herself to grieve for what had become of her friends. Later. “You did well last night,” she said instead.

“Yes, I’m sure Sheppard will be so very impressed. Oh, wait.”

Teyla didn’t tell him that it was having to take care of him that had allowed her to focus on the task before them, probably saving them both. Rodney would be sure to react with either supreme irritation or supreme smugness, and neither of those moods were particularly appealing prospects.

She slid Iren’s jewellery out of her pocket, and slipped the necklace over her head. The sun-shaped pendant glinted against the dark cloth.

“I wish we could have saved them,” Rodney said, quietly.

“We will remember them, and save others. And each other, in the meantime.”

“Very philosophical. I think you did most of the saving, anyway.”

“You can repay me by babysitting Torren sometime.” She laughed at his quick look of horror.

Above them, a Jumper soared into view. Rodney pointed needlessly up at it. “They’re here.”

Teyla slipped her arm around his shoulder and squeezed it gently. “I told you we would make it home.”

“Oh, I always knew we would.”

“Are you quite sure about that?”

The Jumper landed with its hatch already lowering, their friends spilling out. Any reply Rodney made was lost in the noise. It was probably better that way.

apparently, i'm crazy (what, you'd noticed already?)

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:09:27 GMT

I'd quite like to participate in the sgabigbang this year. Scratch that. I really want to. For some reason, everyone I've spoken to about this has only encouraged me (especially baby_werewolf ), which may not be a good thing...

Anyway, what I want to write is a sky pirate AU, where Teyla's the captain of a sky ship, and John's the first mate, and Ronon's the navigator and strategist, and Rodney's the mechanic. Sort of like The Edge Chronicles (It's a book series for older children, and I don't know if it's heard of outside the UK, but I hope it is!), but a bit more steampunk-y. And Atlantis can be a floating city. And, and, they'd be sky pirates with awesome clothes and awesome flying ships and chases and duels and....

I'm very sure that this AU has already been done, but I don't think I'll actually go and hunt others out, because my brain's firing off ideas already and if it turns out that someone's already written them then I'd feel obliged to come up with new ones instead. Ignorance is bliss?

Anyway, yeah. I think I'm rapidly approaching the point where talking me out of this won't be possible anymore. But some sane part of my brain is still going "you have to grow up more before you're allowed to write proper long stories", "do you actually think you can write stories which aren't self-indulgent h/c", "you know nothing about how to make up sky ships" etc.

So, oh wise flist, please give me validation for my decision, because I am truly pathetic in this regard :P

video

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:03:32 GMT

This is just so cool that I couldn't not share.

another cockroach update

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:55:31 GMT

I was intending to post lots of photos of Spencer, but my camera's refusing to connect to the computer, which is annoying. So there's one beneath the cut which baby_werewolf took after our epic quest into the wilds outside Oxford city centre to find the Pets At Home store, where I could get a better tank for him. (This was after she stayed the night and we made an obscene quantity of pancakes.) Then we introduced him to e_pepys (and fed him tea and pancakes) after moving stuff into the archive from his car. (If anyone else from Taruith/OUSFG wants to meet him, I love showing him off and will also give you tea!)

For those who have asked - he'll live on pieces of fruit and cat biscuits, and get fed once a week.

cockroach update

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:07:19 GMT

My cockroach now has a name. He is called Spencer. baby_werewolf and I are currently squeeing over him (and named him via hivemind).

:D

thoughts on life and health of minds

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:00:21 GMT

(Please note that this has absolutely nothing to do with the recent stuff going down on my flist. I’ve been refining this post for several days now.)

This post contains some things that I've been thinking about for a while, and thinking about saying publically. However, these are personal things, and they have the potential to change your opinion of me, so this is a warning. I considered flocking this post, but, having decided that I want to say these things, I don't want to hide them away.

Nor is this post either a whine or a rant. It is a thought.

This post has been sparked by two boys in the zoology department. I’d never seen them before, so they were likely biochemists just there for a lecture (the other possibilities are psychologists or medics, but I really hope that’s not the case). While sitting at a table in the café next to the one I was working at, they were having a loud conversation, focusing on a girl in their group who’d been given a pass on a due essay by their tutor, apparently because of a depressive episode. This was being discussed by them in terms of how unfair it was, how everyone was depressed occasionally (apparently one of them had been depressed the previous night because their football team lost…), and how it was pathetic that people were given special treatment just because they ‘couldn’t be bothered to have a better attitude’.

At the time, this made me very, very angry. I wanted to walk over to them and tell them that depression is not a general feeling of unhappiness or angst, it’s when you can’t move from where you’re lying on the floor because the air above you feels as if its turning black and smothering you. It’s when you can’t even imagine succeeding at anything you have to do, so even the simplest things like sending an email or going to buy milk are absolutely insurmountable. It’s when you start carving lines into your flesh with a blade because the endorphin release from making yourself bleed is the only happy feeling available to you. It’s when you need a lot of time to recover from social interactions, even ones you enjoy (in this the internet is a godsend – I can talk to people at my own pace, without the physical encounters. If it didn’t exist I’d probably be much worse off). It’s most decidedly not something that can be fixed with a better diet, or exercise, or the power of positive thinking. It is an illness.

Of course, I didn’t say anything. I have thought about what I would like to say, as evidenced above. However, more than that, I’ve been wondering why it is that circumstances arise far more often than I’d like to which the above paragraph would be a reasonable response.

After all, I’m absolutely not a Very Special And Unique Snowflake. There are a lot of people suffering from clinical depression. There are people on my flist with chronic illnesses which cause them a lot of pain, and so I often feel intensely guilty whenever I otherwise would like to complain about how crap I’m feeling. I don’t feel that I deserve to complain. In a strange way, I don’t feel that I ‘deserve’ to be suffering. After all, it’s all in my head. Maybe if I just tried to see the glass as half-full instead of half-empty…

Yeah. The thing I actually want to talk about is the attitude that people with this condition, this imbalance in brain chemistry, should be ashamed of it, should be helping themselves, should, for god’s sake, try and smile a bit more. Because I am ashamed of it. I’m incredibly ashamed, and do constantly feel that I shouldn’t be affected by this. I should be ‘stronger’, ‘more positive’. Only a few people know about this part of me, and know that I currently rely on a very high dose of prescription medication to enable me to function at all. I’m going on holiday with a group of Taruithorn friends in the summer, and I’m terrified of the part where we’ll go swimming and they’ll see my scars. (Part of the reason for writing this post, I confess, is because some of the Taruith people are on LJ, so I then won’t need to explain this face-to-face to them.) And yet other conditions affecting the brain (i.e. Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar disorder), don’t appear to have the same stigma attached to them, this idea that it’s the sufferer’s fault. Of course, I only have an outsider’s perspective on those, so I might be mistaken, but it’s the impression I’ve gained. I actually wonder whether it’s partly because they have ‘proper’ names, instead of also being the name given to a mood, that depression seems to be taken much less seriously in terms of being an illness which requires medical treatment.

And now that you’ve read all of this, you’ll think differently of me than you did before. It’s inevitable, and one of the reasons why I don’t share usually share this information. But right now, I want to be heard. I’m tired of standing in a corner and pretending I don’t exist. I want to speak up.

icon meme

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:55:37 GMT

Copied from leesa_perrie

1. Reply to this post saying "ME! ME! ME!", and I will pick five of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee.

This was made a couple of weeks ago for sgmen_itest . I'd been meaning to get around to one like this for ages, and then this Sheppard picture was one of the set ones, and I couldn't resist making it. And it won mod's choice! :-)

This one's by redscharlach and is Nick and Margaret from The Apprentice. It's the only reality-TV-style show I watch, and I love Nick and Margaret and their reactions to the candidates' stupidity. Sadly I haven't had the opportunity to use it yet, nor do I know if it'll actually be 'got' by my LJ friends not from the UK...

This was one of the earlier Atlantis icons I made, and I still can't decide whether I like it or not - I think I may have overkilled it with effects. I played with light and contrast on a picture of Atlantis to get it to a reasonable silhouette, flipped it to make a reflection, and stuck it over a photo of the moon over the sea. Then I put an old paper texture over the top of it and fiddled with the colour. Then I put a faint star texture over that, and then stuck a border on. As I said, possible overkill.

This is currently my favourite icon (which is why it's on default). The clip's from 'Echos', and I just made it all black-and-white except for Rodney's jacket panels, which I then increased the colour of a bit to make more contrasting. I wanted an all-purpose Rodney (I could possibly word that better), and it seems to work well for that.

'How ood' is a part of my vocab because of Doctor Who. Basic ood promo picture, cut out the background (and painted in the top of his head, which was cut out of shot of the original), made a gradient background, and found a font I liked. I've used this icon mostly on fanficrants , I think...

ohmygodchevronwasamazing

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:38:54 GMT

I think I'm hooked on Stargate conventions. I had a brilliant time!

Since Esvan had a better camera, I let him take most of the photos, so will make a proper photo-and-commentary post later. In the meantime, these are the photoshoot photos with Brian J. Smith, Ryan Robbins, and David Hewlett.

eeeeeeeee!

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:12:52 GMT

Chevron con tomorrow! *bounces up and down*

I've still got to pack and stuff, but decided my time was better spent by making badges for Esvandiary and myself. And then I thought it would be a good idea to post them here, to facilitate the whole meeting-up-plans.

(Yes, the picture on Esvan's is supposed to be a PuddleJumper. He asked for it, but hasn't seen it yet. It looks slightly better in the handdrawn one, but I never pretended to be an artist!)

So I'll be the one wearing the badge with a picture of a tree. Possibly writing in a pad of file paper. Or reading a book about evolutionary selection pressures, in the (very) likely event that I don't manage to finish it tonight.

Also, I've discovered Criminal Minds, and am rapidly working my way through the four-and-a-half seasons of it. Why did it take me this long to start watching it?!

fic: analogue

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 02:54:49 GMT

Rating: Gen, PG-15
Characters: Rodney McKay, John Sheppard, Carson Beckett
Word count: 1600
Warnings: Following a suggestion from baby_werewolf , I'm warning for general dark-and-slightly-fucked-up-ness. Also possible self-harm triggers.

Summary: Sheppard’s here as well, standing awkwardly within the illusion of privacy created by the infirmary curtain, and he too is trying to be reassuring, and he too won’t listen.

Analogue

“This isn’t me,” Rodney whispers hoarsely. His throat is sore, rusted, dry surfaces scratching against each other as he swallows. “You have to listen – you have to – ”

He fights to raise his arms, but the restraints clamp him firmly to the bed. He’d scream, but he’s already screamed most of his voice away. If he could measure the rate of loss, he could calculate how long he’s been back on Atlantis, with the white masks and white curtains and white sheets and the beep of machines spilling out information all around him. There are drugs circulating through his body but they aren’t working, they won’t work, they can’t work on him, because he isn’t him.

This isn’t his body.

“Rodney,” says Carson. “You’re going to be alright.” Carson’s not lying, because he believes what he’s saying. He believes it because he won’t listen.

“It won’t,” Rodney tells him, his voice cracking, and he struggles harder against the restraints.

“Come on, McKay, lie still. You’ll only hurt yourself.” Sheppard’s here as well, standing awkwardly within the illusion of privacy created by the curtain, and he too is trying to be reassuring, and he too won’t listen.

Rodney chokes out a sound which might be mistaken for a laugh in different circumstances. “Can’t – hurt myself. Not possible.”

“What did they do to him?” Carson demands, again, as if this is going to be the time when he receives a different answer. He runs a hand despairingly through his hair.

“I don’t know,” John tells him, again. His voice is laced with something which might be exhaustion, or might be guilt. “They had him for hours. They must have given him something – ”

“No!” Rodney protests. “They didn’t give – they changed me!”

There’s a hand on his arm, and Carson’s voice is soothing, and laced with a concern that makes him feel sick. “Rodney, listen to me. You’re a wee bit confused right now, but I assure you you’re still very much yourself. Why don’t you try and sleep, and see if you feel better when you wake up?”

It sounds like a reasonable request. It isn’t, because he doesn’t know what’ll happen to him if he sleeps, or even if he can sleep, now. But he stops struggling, because even when he’s panicking, even when he’s only just holding on, he can’t stop himself from being logical. If he doesn’t struggle any more then they might take off the restraints. And then…

“You have to believe me,” he says, dredging up calm from a previously-unknown reservoir, only exposed now that the covering shield of hysteria has been drained. “You have to help me.”

Again that infuriating placidity. “We’re trying to help you, Rodney.”

Rodney seizes at a straw. “Look, the drugs you have me on aren’t working on!” He tries to gesture at the IV bag to illustrate his point, and Sheppard takes a quick involuntary step forward as his arm jerks. But the leather straps do their job and hold him fast.

Carson sighs. “Rodney, I don’t have you on any drugs. There’re clearly enough of them already in your system, and I’m worried about possible interactions. All that’s going into you is a saline solution to keep your fluids up.”

Rodney stares at both their faces. There’s concern in them, compassion, an honest worry.

They should be afraid. He’s afraid.

Sheppard pats him on the upper arm, and he flinches back. The hand is removed instantly, and there’s briefly an expression of hurt on Sheppard’s face. He brings it under control too slowly to hide it.

Carson checks his watch. “Colonel, you should leave. We won’t know what exactly we’re dealing with until all his bloodwork’s finished, which won’t be until morning. In the meantime, let him get some rest. That’s what he needs most right now, and you could probably do with some yourself.” He pauses. “Unless you want company, Rodney?”

Rodney stares at the ceiling in silence. They won’t listen and therefore they can’t help, but he also doesn’t want to be alone with the terror of what’s been done to him. Don’t leave me alone pleasedon’tleavemealone.

“Don’t,” he whispers, but it’s too late and they’ve already vanished through the curtain, the gap drawn behind them.

Rodney stares at the ceiling and calculates powers of two until he loses track, and then starts again with powers of three, and works his way up in turn through the prime numbers because it mostly stops him from thinking, until the wash of dawn seeps in through the windows and thickens into daylight.

And at last Sheppard appears again with a tray of food, which he plonks down next to the bed. “You feeling better this morning, McKay?” he asks, cheerfully.

“Much,” says Rodney calmly, because he needs to prove that what he knows is true, and this is the only way he can think of to do it, by being calm. By being… him. “Where’s Carson?”

“Making house calls. Two marines have food poisoning, but with the noise you were making last night Beckett said they’d do better in their quarters. He also says I can unshackle you to eat your breakfast if you look in the mood to behave.”

Rodney scowls, because it’s expected of him, which makes Sheppard laugh, and he wants to scream. “Just get the things off me,” he snaps, and his imitation of himself is perfect.

“I suppose I have to,” Sheppard concedes, grinning, and Rodney forces himself to half-smile, and then to cover it with a huff. Sheppard leans over and undoes the straps slowly – purposefully slowly. He thinks they’re playing the same game as always.

He’s wrong. Rodney can feel the metal of the scalpel against his thigh, through the thin fabric of the infirmary scrubs. He’s read old mission reports in the past; read how Carter once managed to obtain the same instrument for herself, in similar circumstances. Not that he’d imagined, when he’d read the file, that the knowledge would ever come in useful. But last night it had, just before they got him on the bed to strap him down.

The buckles are undone at last, and the thick leather lifts away from his skin. He dramatically flexes his forearms and fingers, sighing loudly. “Those things probably cut off the circulation to my hands. I’m developing gangrene as we speak.”

“Stop bitching.” Sheppard turns towards the tray on the side-table, and Rodney’s fingers close on the thin metal handle, pulling the scalpel out from beneath the covers in one quick many-times-imagined motion.

Sheppard turns in time to witness it. “McKay, wha – ”

The blade flickers, flashes as it catches the sunlight. It slices through the air and into skin, fast and precise. A spray of liquid splatters a jagged line across the white curtain.

“Rodney,” Sheppard says, his voice shaking. “Rodney, what are you doing?”

“Proving it,” Rodney says. He lets the scalpel drop. It rings against the floor, ripples spreading through a pool of sudden silence.

He stares at what he’s done.

No flesh, no bone. The skin was a veneer and beneath it is metal, wires mimicking muscles and neurones and tendons, and pale blue fluid leaking out from the incision and running down his bicep, already pooling and overflowing from the pit of his elbow. Possibly oil. Probably some sort of fuel, anyway, or perhaps a lubricant. Maybe it’s what makes the body look and feel so natural on the outside.

“Look,” he whispers, the negative-pressure contraption in his chest faltering in its endless gas-exchange. “Look.” This is what they did. He’d tried to tell Sheppard before, but he wouldn’t listen. They took him away and they turned him into something else. A machine. Not human. Not him.

For a moment, everything falters as Sheppard stares. Look.

“Get Beckett here right now!” Sheppard yells, and euphoric triumph floods Rodney for a brief instant before Sheppard frantically grabs a fistful of the bedcover and presses it hard against his arm. “Jesus, you’ve cut down to the bone! What were you thinking?!”

“No, no, you have to – ”

“What’s going on?” Carson demands, bursting into the cubicle, and his eyes flick immediately to the bunched material, slowly becoming soaked with the pale liquid.

“He stabbed himself!” Sheppard shouts.

“It’s not blood!” Rodney shouts. “I’m not real! I’m something made! Look!”

“Of course it’s blood!” Carson snaps. He grabs the makeshift pressure-pad from Sheppard and presses down harder, now not talking to Rodney. “He might have sliced an artery.” His voice rises in volume by another notch. “I need help in here now!”

“It’s not blood,” Rodney says, but no one’s listening. He feels the steady rhythm of whatever now ticks in his chest as it resonates inside the conduits running through him.

“I’m not real,” he says, and no one answers him as he’s pushed down sharply onto his back. He wants to take himself apart, find out how he works, and then put himself back together – machines can always be put back together and fixed. He might even enjoy the challenge.

“He’s losing a lot of blood,” someone says, and he doesn’t know how to break through whatever built-in perception filter this artifice comes with, doesn’t know what else to do to show the others that what he says is the truth.

Because whether it’s fuel or something else that he’s losing, it’s as vital to this ersatz body as his blood was to his flesh one. He feels machinery weakening, electric signals slowing.

“This is not me,” he whispers, and he has to hope that he’s right.

sorry flist, more adverts!

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:10:47 GMT

sgahcchallenges presents:

easter 2010 hurt/comfort fic exchange

more information

I haven't signed up yet because I need to think about what to write in the form, but I'm going to! If nothing else, I'll have time to write this in the first couple of weeks of the holidays.

And since the last sending-in date seems to be April 1st, I wonder how many people are going to email in "Sorry, haven't managed to write a story -- no, April fool!" ;P

Also, I'm happy because I had my start-of-term exam this morning and managed to write four reasonable essays in three hours - it certainly went better than I was expecting, and by luck I'd managed to revise exactly the right things :D So that's a panic over with, which is lovely!

why, yes i AM looking for sympathy here...

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:10:27 GMT

Right, I'm back at uni now, and should be revising hard, but I'm not yet, because MY FRIDGE IS FULL OF MOULD. Someone shut the door of it, which I had purposely left open since we have to switch the power off before we leave.

So now I have to clean it, while trying not to be sick. I HATE mould.

Urgh.

advert break

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:28:17 GMT

This is a fanfic tourney at sg_fic_uoa for both SGA and SG1 along the lines of LFWS, and since I haven't learnt my lesson from that, I've signed up for this one. It's still a fairly new and small community, so spreading the word never hurts! And I get a skip for it ;)

Community link is here.

this is the first stupid thing kate has done in 2010

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:33:33 GMT

I was bored at about 2.30am last night/this morning. So I went to visit Esvandiary, by walking a couple of miles through orchards and fields with a really, really rubbish torch, down one side of the valley and up the other to the village. He came and met me halfway, with a much better torch, and we were at his just before 3.

It was all beautiful and frosty - it looked thick enough to be snow as it's been too cold to melt it for several days (it was -6 last night), so has kept on layering. And it glittered everywhere in my pathetic excuse for a beam of light, and all the puddles were frozen completely solid all the way down.

Then today it actually did snow. Everything's covered all in several inches of white, and it's still snowing now. Came home this afternoon to find that mum had only just got my email telling her where I was, but she wasn't actually worried. Possibly I should feel hurt here ;)

ETA: And now I've just fallen the whole way down the stairs. Yay for extra stupid thing to go in this post.

a meme for curing boredom

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:20:19 GMT

As 'borrowed' from penknife , leesa_perrie and friendshipper

Ask me one fandom-related question in the comments. This can be fandom specific, general, or about fandom/lj stuff/fic writing/etc. in general.

Or more than one. I'm not fussy.

Question can be as wacky as you want. Ask me about tv shows, characters, fanfic in general, fandom issues/meta, anything about any of my stories specifically. Whatever you want.

If it's a fandom-specific question, you can ask me about anything I'm familiar with ... SGA being my main current fandom, but also Sanctuary, NCIS, SG1, SGU, nBSG, any CSI, Firefly, Doctor Who, Torchwood, Discworld, and anything else you know I'm into that I've forgotten to put on this list.

meme - fanfic year in review

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 21:44:10 GMT

This year I discovered the wonders of Stargate, via Esvandiary, and pretty much inhaled it all in one go. Then started writing for SGA in about April. Then discovered LJ. I think I'm here for good now.

I also fell out of love with CSI New York, which I'm actually quite sad about. I couldn't take either the overload of Danny/Lindsay fluff on FFN or the vitrolic Lindsay-bashing everywhere else, and somehow the latter in particular rather spoiled my experience of the fandom.

Also I've had a little thing called university, which gobbles up time that I might otherwise be spending in fandoms. (This is probably a good thing for my sanity and long-term prospects.)

SGA:
Not with a Bang - Jumped into SGA with this one -- it's on FFN with all the earlier ones, since I hadn't discovered LJ at this point. Rodney saving the day on the Daedalus.

Cinders - Fire, Rodney whump, and random child for Rodney to talk to.

In Medias Res - I like writing mind-screw fics (or attempting to, at any rate). This one got rec'ed on LJ, and I was happy.

Lullaby - I'm a biology student. Something like this was inevitable. Most of it got written in a very boring lecture.

Turn - Yeah, I need to finish this. The trouble is that I had an ending when I started, and I still have it, but I just cannot seem to make it anything other than cheesy -- it works in my head, but not down on the page!

This is not the Sound - Sensory deprivation, Rodney whump - I had fun with this, since I love descriptive writing. I usually have to restrict myself or everything gets far too flowery.

Help - Discovered LJ and LJ comms. This one is at sgahcchallenges .

Hush - Ficlet, which I may yet expand at some point. McKeller.

The Long Star Mile - Actually the first thing I started writing in the SGA fandom, but it took ages to get to the end, and is so far the longest SGA fic I've written. Shamelessly h/c for both John and Rodney.

Safety - For gate_women . Tag to Daedalus Variations, featuring Teyla

Missing Moments - My FF100 project -- one drabble as a tag for each episode. I should get back to this. I should also officially register it to FF100, come to think of it...

Many Hands - At sga_flashfic , for the AMTDI prompt. Team, Teyla-centric, and rather fluffy.

This Valley of Dying Stars - Darkfic/deathfic, since I have a weakness for writing them. McKeller.

Sunlight on Broken Things - Tag to Storm/Eye.

In Darkness Buried Deep - Little ficlet with Rodney and Ronon and claustrophobia.

Five Christmas Trees which Rodney Decorated - My Christmas fluff story!

Heaven for the Weather, Hell for the Company - At sga_santa . I worked on this one on and off for about half of term, and am quite happy with how it turned out.

Growing Pains - Again at sga_santa . This one was a pinch-hit, so done quickly and is a bit cracky - I was shocked at how many people liked it! It's also John/Rodney, which I'd never written before.

CSI New York:
Whose Woods These Are - Me playing around with descriptive writing, mostly. Mac/Stella.

Grace - sasha_and_rosa challenged me to write something based on 'The Lady of Shallot'. I wrote it mostly in my head while skiing, to give me something to think about on lifts and in white-outs. Mac/Stella.

Coffee Cups - Tag for 'Pay Up', written during the summer when we didn't know how the cliffhanger would be resolved. I decided to go with that theme, and gave this story and unresolved cliffhanger of my own. Then giggled evily at the reviews I got for it. Mac/Stella.

Eye Spied - Ohhh dear. Yes, this is my WIP... I've rather fallen out of love with this fandom (TalkCSI has quite a bit to do with this), and so cannot find the motivation to get on and finish it, although I know I really should. It's not Mac/Stella yet, but is getting there.

Favorite(s) of the batch: 'Whose Woods These Are'. It went exactly as I wanted it to go, which is rare. All the others I still feel very unsatisfied with. Second is probably 'Heaven for the Weather', since I think I'm finally starting to get the SGA characters close to how I'm trying to write them.
Best of the batch/most appreciated: 'In Medias Res' and 'Coffee Cups'. 'The Long Star Mile' also has my highest ratio of reviews:chapters for multichapter fic so far.
Most underappreciated by the universe: 'Missing Moments' if strictly in terms of reviews, but then I wasn't really expecting many per chapter for drabbles! I'd like to nominate 'Coffee Cups' for the prize of 'most reviewed by people missing the point'.
Most fun to write: 'Growing Pains', tied with 'This Valley of Dying Stars' and 'Whose Woods These Are'.
Sexiest fic: Um, none? Probably 'Growing Pains' by default, since it's the only one that's got even an oblique mention of sex in.
"Holy crap, that's wrong even for you" fic: Also none.
Hardest to write: 'Safety', and 'Eye Spied' makes this list by default, since I'm finding it so hard to write that it's on hiatus...
Year-end squee: I shall squee in happiness that I've discovered LJ! Also it's now a year since I started watching SGA. I'm not entirely sure what's supposed to go in this category, to be honest.
What's next: More fic? I still need to get my characters right. I owe baby_werewolf a Sanctuary fic, and astridv an SGA one. I've got far too many half-written stories in a folder on my computer, so I should dust some of them off. I have a suspicion that I'm going to be writing Discworld soon, it's sucking me in.

story: five christmas trees which rodney decorated

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:10:07 GMT

This fic is a fluffy, sugary cliche, with creme filling. Nothing substantial at all about it, but, hey, it's Christmas!

leesa_perrie , I said I'd write you a Christmas fic, didn't I? :)

Title: Five Christmas Trees Which Rodney Decorated
Characters: Mostly Rodney, surprisingly enough
Word count: 1,300
Summary: It's pretty much what the title states outright ;)

“Meredith, would you like to put the star on the tree?”

“Yes!” He had been watching his baby sister as she stared in abject fascination at the lights, but now he bounced up instantly towards Dad.

“Alright, get ready!” Dad’s strong arms wrapped around him, and he was swung into the air, giggling as his mother passed him the gold-foil star.

“I can’t reach the top!”

Dad lifted him higher. “Up you go.”

Meredith stretched out and wound the star’s loop of thread around the very top of the dark green spruce, Dad’s arms supporting him as he leaned over the branches glittering with lesser ornaments. He was high up above the floor, with only the golden star on a level with him. “Now you’re an astronaut,” Dad said.

An astronaut. Meredith stared at the star, not touching it any more. It gleamed, close and billions of miles away.

Dad swung him around and through the air, making him shriek with laughter, and causing Mom to instinctively reach out towards where the Christmas cards were balanced on top of the bookcase. “Careful!”

“He’s fine,” Dad said, setting him down next to Jeannie, who waved her fists at him. “No peeking at the presents!” he added, sternly.

He needn’t have bothered. Meredith was too busy gazing upwards.

Mr Golding had decided that an artificial tree would benefit the atmosphere in his classroom during the final days of term. The maths club were making decorations for it.

Rodney bent closely over his fractal snowflake, moving the scissor blades with exquisite care as he cut it out of the surrounding paper.

Beside him, Greg was on his sixth, slightly jagged, snowflake. They were stacked on a corner of his table, out of the way of the blizzard of tiny paper clippings which covered the rest of it. “You only going to make one of those things?” he asked.

“I’m doing it properly.” Rodney frowned in concentration.

“You’re such a perfectionist, Meredith.”

Rodney looked up long enough to glare. It had taken years of school to finally get everyone to stop calling him that stupid name. Everyone except Greg, of course. They had known each other for too long and endured too much brotherly teasing on both sides for that ever to be likely to happen.

“At least I can be proud of mine.”

“I’m proud I’ve got way more than you do!”

Rodney picked up his snowflake and threaded it onto a piece of string, tying it in a loop. Then he got up and very carefully hung it on a branch, right at the exact centre of the tree as seen from the front. Every edge was sharp and straight. It was perfect.

He only wound up having a Christmas tree in his college dorm room because the guy next door (Jack? Or Jake? Anyway, he was out drinking so often that he’d probably forgotten himself) had won it in a raffle and, chancing to meet him in the hallway, had asked Rodney if he wanted to give it a home.

It was two feet high and a sort of mouldy green that was more reminiscent of forgotten-about-bread than Norwegian Spruce, which the box claimed it was. The stand was also broken, which was probably why Jack/Jake had given it away.

However, Rodney decided that he might as well make the most of it. He propped the tree against the wall, where it looked slightly pathetic. He didn’t have any decorations, so instead he balanced the Christmas cards he had received from friends over its branches, with a couple of letters which Jeannie had sent him over the term there as well. He made a pre-New-Year’s-resolution to start answering them.

Rodney trod on his latest exam paper as he stepped back to admire the effect. It wasn’t very traditional, but it would do. As an afterthought, he picked up the exam paper and balanced it at the very top. He had got a starred A for it, so it seemed appropriate.

Christmas in Siberia was cold. Really, really cold.

But although the food was disgusting and there wasn’t even any sun to look pretty when it shone on the several feet of snowdrifts, to his great surprise, Rodney found that he didn’t really mind that much at the moment. After all, the scientists he worked with weren’t that bad, really, although he did moan about them an awful lot in the emails he exchanged with Jeannie, who was his only real contact with the sane world which didn’t involve aliens and wormholes and non-disclosure agreements.

Maybe the large quantity of vodka they were drinking together was responsible for some of the new-found feelings of cam-a-ra-der-ie (he found himself spelling it out very slowly in his head), but he doubted it. He was, after all, a gen.. genary… nice person. Friendly. He had lots of friends. Who needed blonde Colonels with their noses in the air, anyway?

At some point, someone mentioned that it was a pity that they didn’t have a Christmas tree, to general agreement. So they all trekked out together, in temperatures that thought sub-zero was practically summery, to find one.

No one was too sure, the next day, of the exact reason why a large amount of the most colourful clothes belonging to the base members were hanging from the branches of the nearest pine like strange unseasonable fruit. But then, on that next day, everyone had more pressing concerns, which had mostly to do with their brains trying to smash their way out of their skulls.

“Maybe we should just write it up to alien influence,” Ivan, who was in charge, suggested at last, and no one felt like arguing.

“That isn’t a Christmas tree!” Rodney protested, as soon as he set eyes on the thing that John, Ford, Teyla and Stackhouse between them had just manhandled through the Gate.

John shrugged. “It’s tall, it’s green, it’s got leaves. What more do you want?”

Rodney flapped his hands. “It should be… you know… more pointy. And… not so tidy. Less like it was a lollipop in disguise.”

“I like it,” Elizabeth said, after peering at it intently for a few seconds.

The tree was planted in one of the expedition’s empty crates, after John and Ford had travelled back offworld to fill it with soil, and stood proudly next to the Gate. “What are we going to deck it with?” Ford asked.

Rodney grinned. “While you were gone, the best brains in the galaxy worked on that.” He paused, for dramatic effect.

“And?” John asked, giving dramatic effect no heed.

Rodney looked around, expecting an entrance to be made. But no one appeared, so he tapped his headset. “What’s the holdup? You were supposed to be here by now!”

“Yes, yes, when you leave us to do the lifting, you do not get to complain we are not quick enough,” Radek grumbled as he and Miko arrived late for their entrance cue, with a box carried between them.

Rodney made a flourishing gesture in its direction. “Decorations fit for… well, fit for a tree that isn’t a Christmas tree at all, I suppose.”

He had half-expected that he would have to bully people into helping him to hang the shining pieces of metal and the origami shapes which Miko (and Kavanagh, to everyone’s surprise) had folded, but there was a general press within minutes as word got around. Seemingly everyone on the expedition wanted to be part of preparing the celebrations for the first Christmas which the city of Atlantis had ever celebrated.

In fact, Rodney only got to hang one ornament himself; a crude star shape cut from a piece of an old metal equipment cover. But he didn’t feel the annoyance which usually bubbled up inside him when other people muscled in on his projects – only a warm, happy glow.

Slightly strange as it was, this might just be his favourite Christmas tree yet.

we should have thought about this before now...

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 16:44:24 GMT

Esvandiary and I have just realised that we've yet to book for Chevron 7.4. Oops. Fortunately, it seems that there are still tickets - unfortunately, it's the accommodation that's not looking so lovely for two students on a student budget. Certainly, although staying at the official venue would be lovely, we can't really stretch to £74 a night, for three nights.

We have now started looking seriously for other options, so hopefully we'll find somewhere...

In fact, we'd better, because the guy on my icon has now also been announced as a guest! David Hewlett and Ryan Robbins... I do not want to pass this opportunity up!

christmas

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:57:45 GMT

Would anyone like me to send them Christmas cards? I know they wouldn't be anything hugely special, but I'm working under the assumption that getting post is always fun.

Anyway, if you want, leave your address in a comment (they're all screened), and I'll send some out. :)

happy things

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:45:34 GMT

To my relief and surprise, I have finally finished my sga_santa story. And I'm happy with it. I can now only hope that my receipient likes it too! I would like to say to myself that I'll never push deadlines again, since it stresses me so much, but I know that's something impossible...

In regard to more happy things, I've finally got round to getting a paid account, so that I can have more icons. Because I really like icons. However, when I relabelled all my current icons so that they were named more sensibly, this apparently confused LJ, and so everything I've posted anywhere now has a default icon on, which is slightly annoying, but ah well.

Now I can get on with all the other stories I'm supposed to be writing people!

:-)

meme... books

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:53:27 GMT

Meme: It's a list of 100 books which possibly everyone's supposed to have read or something - highlight ones read, underline ones loved (this was specified as opposed to merely liked) and italicise those which you intend to read.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible - various authors
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare [well, I've read quite a few of the plays and sonnets, but definitely not all!]
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows– Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Frith (n): sanctuary, place of safety. (British English, obsolete)

question and meme

icon post

rather incoherent soapboxing

meme

fic: the woods are deadly, dark and deep

apparently, i'm crazy (what, you'd noticed already?)

video

another cockroach update

cockroach update

thoughts on life and health of minds

icon meme

*ohmygodchevronwasamazing*

eeeeeeeee!

fic: analogue

sorry flist, more adverts!

why, yes i AM looking for sympathy here...

advert break

this is the first stupid thing kate has done in 2010

a meme for curing boredom

meme - fanfic year in review

story: five christmas trees which rodney decorated

we should have thought about this before now...

christmas

happy things

meme... books

ohmygodchevronwasamazing