the androgynous keeper of plushfrogs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crossfortune) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2013-01-17 01:14 am
crossfortune) wrote in rainbowfic2013-01-17 01:14 am
Entry tags:
to those left behind
Name: Mischa
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: atomic tangerine (after the end)
Supplies and Styles: none.
Word Count: 1371
Rating: R (narrator swears. a lot.)
Warnings: quite a lot of background violence, brief mentioned sexism, child/teenage soldiers: onscreen death of one of those.
Summary: I want to change the world. Centuries after the end of the world, one woman confronts the results of her mistakes.
I want to change the world.
Zorya Starfall holds onto every memory that she can, because the alternative of sinking into forgetfulness, of losing everything she ever was, is far worse, but damn if she doesn’t want to punch past her in the face. Alexia was more than cynical enough to know how broken the world was but still determined enough to do anything to change the world, to make it better. Yeah, she’d changed the world alright: five billion people and counting, every nightmare of hard-takeoff singularity without even the tech to show for it anymore.
So stupid. So brilliant, so smart, yet so goddamn stupid: they were going to do great things, they were going to change the world, they were going to make things better, and they’re all gone, years, centuries, gone, and she’s left standing in the ashes of the world that was and the world that could be, trying to hold back the urge to burn it all down, to burn it all away, to tear off her golden ornaments and forget what it was like to ever be human.
Those are the good dreams. Because at least she wakes from them wanting even more to light something on fire, and there’s no shortage of things to light on fire, to stab, to kick, things that aren’t the remnants of humanity, that aren’t the shattered remains of the world. The bad dreams come more often: clear as living, the sounds of city noise outside the underground lab, the windowseat in her apartment she’d caught catnaps on in the sun, the feel of guitar strings beneath her fingers, the sound her radio had made when she’d thrown it against the wall the first time she’d heard One Direction come out of it too early in the fucking morning after working for days straight on a particularly tedious and knotty procedure or another, trying to get just a bit closer to cracking the code.
And for all the shit she hadn’t liked, and fuck knows there’d been a lot of shit she hadn’t liked - Taco Bell, screechy pop groups, reality television, Creationism, the sexism and closed doors that had ended with her accepting working on that damn project after years of proposals being turned down for grant funding for not being good enough when what they meant was that she both had tits but not good enough tits to even be good eye candy, too temperamental, too bitchy, and too willing to let idiots have it, and she could go the fuck on forever listing shit she’d hated about the old world- life had still been pretty good before she’d blown up the fucking world.
The worst dreams, though, are when she dreams of the girl, Lilia, with all her stubborn hope and goodness that shone through her like light shining through her skin. Dreams of her death, of a slender body in her arms while Lilia struggles for breath, drowning in her own blood, and it wasn’t her wounds that killed her in the end, not really, not when she’d used too much power, drawn on too much magic, for her body to handle. Still thinking of everyone else in the end, even when her voice cracked, low, barely able to talk.
Promise me, Zorya...after me, I want you to lead them.
Stupid, stupid girl, throwing that on her: Zorya doesn’t make promises, not any more, they always turn out bad, since she shot herself up with a fragment of divinity trying to do something good for once in her life. Shit, she promised Ilyas to support the girl, in her own special way (at least he didn’t expect her to be nice, he knew her too well for that), try to keep her alive: then she had to go tell him that his last student, the lastr in the chain of girls he trained and saw as daughters, his adopted children, was dead too.
She doesn’t make promises, and she’s always been a bitch, even when she was still Alexia, but even Zorya doesn’t have the heart to tell the girl no. Girl, that’s your job, (don’t fucking die on me) while trying to remember every bit of medical knowledge Alexia had known but she hadn’t had any use for in centuries, not when every wound she took healed easier than breathing, though she already knew that modern-but-ancient medicine was useless, not when she’d burned herself out like that.
There were a thousand fucking things she wanted to tell the girl - that she was the wrong fucking person for this job, that she’s no fucking messiah, that she was the absolute last person to have this shit and all the hopes of humanity pinned on her, the absolute last person qualified to lead the army, that she’s not even human, that she’s one of the Wisps they’re trying so desperately to kill for three hundred years but the only one who managed to hold her humanity and memories enough to not want to murder absolutely fucking everyone, that she’s the one who figured out how to make them in the first fucking place and they worked off her fucking notes that she hadn’t exploded well enough.. But she doesn’t tell Lilia any of those things: girl’s dying, after all, and even she’s not enough of a bitch to refuse to take up what the girl's asking her to finish since she won't be there to do it herself.
No, Alanis, Zorya thinks sometimes, ironic wasn’t any of those things that Alexia remembers that song about, but instead, it’s spending three hundred years trying to make up for your mistakes, one genius teenage girl gets ten thousand times closer in two years then you got in those three hundred to finishing everything off, to ending that war, then she dies and it gets tossed in your goddamn lap to lead an army of what remains of the world and humanity, when you’re not charismatic or a team player and they’ve seen the girl who was all their hope die because their leaders gave her too little and expected too many miracles and you’re still trying to fix your mistakes.
And Zorya is so goddamn tired. Tired of watching everyone around her die, whether or not she actually likes them, tired of children who feel like they have nothing to lose, even if they’re probably right, tired of being three hundred and counting years old and always the one left to be around to answer for her fucking mistakes at the end and everyone else’s, too.. And she’s tired of the word hope, because it seems that everyone has just enough of it to fight and die but not enough to live, and she tells Lilia that, too, in the very worst dreams of all, when she’s fallen asleep when she can’t stand up anymore, so tired that even her inhuman body can’t go without sleep any longer, and the girl’s ghost comes to see her. Haunt her, more like, the girl’s spent too many years fighting for everyone else to let herself rest properly.
Hope’s how Alexia made her mistakes and got into this mess in the first place: just a little hope, that humanity could someday transcend their limitations, of age and illness and death, shot herself up with fragments of a dead god in order to prove it was possible and maybe just arrogant enough to believe that she could save the world, grasp hold of that one cosmic string in her hands and make it right, and then they’d taken her notes and done the same to the dead, and that, as they say, was fucking that.
And she can’t imagine any more that there’s anything left but ashes and war: she clenches her fist against the whispers that say she should burn down the world and start again, because wasn’t once fucking enough?
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: atomic tangerine (after the end)
Supplies and Styles: none.
Word Count: 1371
Rating: R (narrator swears. a lot.)
Warnings: quite a lot of background violence, brief mentioned sexism, child/teenage soldiers: onscreen death of one of those.
Summary: I want to change the world. Centuries after the end of the world, one woman confronts the results of her mistakes.
I want to change the world.
Zorya Starfall holds onto every memory that she can, because the alternative of sinking into forgetfulness, of losing everything she ever was, is far worse, but damn if she doesn’t want to punch past her in the face. Alexia was more than cynical enough to know how broken the world was but still determined enough to do anything to change the world, to make it better. Yeah, she’d changed the world alright: five billion people and counting, every nightmare of hard-takeoff singularity without even the tech to show for it anymore.
So stupid. So brilliant, so smart, yet so goddamn stupid: they were going to do great things, they were going to change the world, they were going to make things better, and they’re all gone, years, centuries, gone, and she’s left standing in the ashes of the world that was and the world that could be, trying to hold back the urge to burn it all down, to burn it all away, to tear off her golden ornaments and forget what it was like to ever be human.
Those are the good dreams. Because at least she wakes from them wanting even more to light something on fire, and there’s no shortage of things to light on fire, to stab, to kick, things that aren’t the remnants of humanity, that aren’t the shattered remains of the world. The bad dreams come more often: clear as living, the sounds of city noise outside the underground lab, the windowseat in her apartment she’d caught catnaps on in the sun, the feel of guitar strings beneath her fingers, the sound her radio had made when she’d thrown it against the wall the first time she’d heard One Direction come out of it too early in the fucking morning after working for days straight on a particularly tedious and knotty procedure or another, trying to get just a bit closer to cracking the code.
And for all the shit she hadn’t liked, and fuck knows there’d been a lot of shit she hadn’t liked - Taco Bell, screechy pop groups, reality television, Creationism, the sexism and closed doors that had ended with her accepting working on that damn project after years of proposals being turned down for grant funding for not being good enough when what they meant was that she both had tits but not good enough tits to even be good eye candy, too temperamental, too bitchy, and too willing to let idiots have it, and she could go the fuck on forever listing shit she’d hated about the old world- life had still been pretty good before she’d blown up the fucking world.
The worst dreams, though, are when she dreams of the girl, Lilia, with all her stubborn hope and goodness that shone through her like light shining through her skin. Dreams of her death, of a slender body in her arms while Lilia struggles for breath, drowning in her own blood, and it wasn’t her wounds that killed her in the end, not really, not when she’d used too much power, drawn on too much magic, for her body to handle. Still thinking of everyone else in the end, even when her voice cracked, low, barely able to talk.
Promise me, Zorya...after me, I want you to lead them.
Stupid, stupid girl, throwing that on her: Zorya doesn’t make promises, not any more, they always turn out bad, since she shot herself up with a fragment of divinity trying to do something good for once in her life. Shit, she promised Ilyas to support the girl, in her own special way (at least he didn’t expect her to be nice, he knew her too well for that), try to keep her alive: then she had to go tell him that his last student, the lastr in the chain of girls he trained and saw as daughters, his adopted children, was dead too.
She doesn’t make promises, and she’s always been a bitch, even when she was still Alexia, but even Zorya doesn’t have the heart to tell the girl no. Girl, that’s your job, (don’t fucking die on me) while trying to remember every bit of medical knowledge Alexia had known but she hadn’t had any use for in centuries, not when every wound she took healed easier than breathing, though she already knew that modern-but-ancient medicine was useless, not when she’d burned herself out like that.
There were a thousand fucking things she wanted to tell the girl - that she was the wrong fucking person for this job, that she’s no fucking messiah, that she was the absolute last person to have this shit and all the hopes of humanity pinned on her, the absolute last person qualified to lead the army, that she’s not even human, that she’s one of the Wisps they’re trying so desperately to kill for three hundred years but the only one who managed to hold her humanity and memories enough to not want to murder absolutely fucking everyone, that she’s the one who figured out how to make them in the first fucking place and they worked off her fucking notes that she hadn’t exploded well enough.. But she doesn’t tell Lilia any of those things: girl’s dying, after all, and even she’s not enough of a bitch to refuse to take up what the girl's asking her to finish since she won't be there to do it herself.
No, Alanis, Zorya thinks sometimes, ironic wasn’t any of those things that Alexia remembers that song about, but instead, it’s spending three hundred years trying to make up for your mistakes, one genius teenage girl gets ten thousand times closer in two years then you got in those three hundred to finishing everything off, to ending that war, then she dies and it gets tossed in your goddamn lap to lead an army of what remains of the world and humanity, when you’re not charismatic or a team player and they’ve seen the girl who was all their hope die because their leaders gave her too little and expected too many miracles and you’re still trying to fix your mistakes.
And Zorya is so goddamn tired. Tired of watching everyone around her die, whether or not she actually likes them, tired of children who feel like they have nothing to lose, even if they’re probably right, tired of being three hundred and counting years old and always the one left to be around to answer for her fucking mistakes at the end and everyone else’s, too.. And she’s tired of the word hope, because it seems that everyone has just enough of it to fight and die but not enough to live, and she tells Lilia that, too, in the very worst dreams of all, when she’s fallen asleep when she can’t stand up anymore, so tired that even her inhuman body can’t go without sleep any longer, and the girl’s ghost comes to see her. Haunt her, more like, the girl’s spent too many years fighting for everyone else to let herself rest properly.
Hope’s how Alexia made her mistakes and got into this mess in the first place: just a little hope, that humanity could someday transcend their limitations, of age and illness and death, shot herself up with fragments of a dead god in order to prove it was possible and maybe just arrogant enough to believe that she could save the world, grasp hold of that one cosmic string in her hands and make it right, and then they’d taken her notes and done the same to the dead, and that, as they say, was fucking that.
And she can’t imagine any more that there’s anything left but ashes and war: she clenches her fist against the whispers that say she should burn down the world and start again, because wasn’t once fucking enough?
no subject
Yeah, Zorya is a very angry woman: the depths of her anger keep going and going and going.
That was one of the first things I decided for this setting and when designing Lilia abd Ra'uf's character and her plot arc: to keep in mind that messiah figures died.