raven: [hello my name is] and a silhouette image of a raven (s&a - feeling a little crazy)
raven ([personal profile] raven) wrote2008-09-22 06:46 pm

drabble, and ficlet - dS and S&A

For [livejournal.com profile] brewsternorth, who asked for: Due South, "second star to the right and straight on till morning".

into the land of the midnight sun; or, how Fraser and Ray finally left Chicago, 100 words.

Out of the darkness comes light, but slowly, slowly, over hours. There is still the turn of the earth, here; Fraser calculates, slowly, his mind ticking over in rhythm with runners over snow, that they have miles to go, north into the midnight sun. For now, they have the stars, flickering solemnly through the jetstreams, and the distant dawn. Fraser’s needs aren’t simple – the enormity of space and seasons laid out – but for now, this is enough.

Ray’s asleep on the sled. He’s snoring. Fraser is humming to himself, lightly, happily, as they slice and skid through to the morning.


For [livejournal.com profile] isiscolo, a brief ficlet on the topic of Slings & Arrows, Anna, and a moose.

interlude, 400 words.

“I don’t understand the moose,” Anna said, waving her paper. “Isn’t it supposed to be horses?”

“Anna, why are you talking about moose? Oh, for heaven’s sake, Cyril, where were you? Inopportune fellatio again?”

Cyril looked aggrieved. “I’m an old man, Geoffrey! I take time to get down stairs.”

“You’re hardly in your second childishness. Honestly, I go away to Toronto for a week and this whole company becomes a mess of tardiness, and, I don’t know, too much eyeliner. Shakespeare, people, not late-eighties Tony Kushner. Can we take it from the top, please?”

Anna looked up as Ellen swept in through the rows, trailing fragrance. “Tell me, my dear, is he being a screaming queen?”

Anna grinned to herself. “A little bit,” she said, picked up her newspaper and bagel and walked calmly out. Behind her, the hubbub rose and fell, pierced by Geoffrey’s highest treble, and finally faded into blissful silence. On the front desk, there were a few stacks of neatly organised paper, and another bagel. Still smiling, she sat down and returned to the newspaper.

“A moose,” Nahum said thoughtfully, after a while.

“Have a bagel,” she said. “Yes. Apparently Darren Nichols requested it for his production of Equus at New Burbage.”

“This was in the newspaper?”

Anna nodded. “That was it. What’s on the agenda for today?”

“Today the young company begin their rehearsals for Twelfth Night. I anticipate vomit.”

“Have a nice day,” Anna said, a little ineffectively, and sat back down, and reached for her mouse to shake her computer into life, and sat up straight in her ergonomic chair, and then Geoffrey came striding out of the rehearsal and she thought she might not get any work done, after all.

“A moose, Anna? Did that pseudo-Nietzschean self-flagellating intellectual pissant get his sorry self out of whatever nail-studded entombing contraption that undoubtedly passes for his bed and seriously have it cross his tiny little mind that a large, antlered ungulate on the main stage was the single budgetary and creative choice that would most effectively serve the purpose of pushing New Burbage yet further into the now not-at-all metaphorical shitter?”

Anna paused. “Aren’t you glad none of us work there any more?”

Geoffrey looked nonplussed for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, after another moment. “Yeah, I really am.”

He strode off, whistling. Anna took a bite of her bagel, and smiled.

finis

More coming.