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rainbowfic2013-07-05 11:59 pm
crossfortune) wrote in rainbowfic2013-07-05 11:59 pm
no surrender, no retreat
Name: Mischa
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: atomic tangerine, "(near) extinction", dove gray "for some moments in life, there are no words"
Supplies and Styles: N/A
Word Count: 1777
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: child/teenage soldiers, Zorya's swearing.
Summary: "Keep yourself alive, girl." Zorya, Lilia, and preparing to face impossible odds.
Somehow, Zorya knows that shit is going to be bad when she sees the little lieutenant come running up to her while she’s standing around finishing a cigarette. Smoking for lack of anything better to do: bored as shit and that’s never led to anything good. There’s only so many physics equations for physical laws that don’t work quite right anymore that she can run through her head before she wants to light something on fire all over again and there isn’t anything to light on fire right now. And she’s already taken apart and put back together every single magic gun that this division can manage to get its hands on, even the ones that were deemed unfixable, there isn’t anything left for her to take apart and remake.
War’s a whole lot of waiting, she’s realized over the past few centuries, a whole lot of waiting and nothing until the flurry of everything and then there’s nothing again. Zorya’s never done well with nothing and waiting, unless she feels too lazy to do anything and even then she can’t stop thinking, can’t turn her brain off, even before she’d gone and blown up the world, even before there’s that voice in the back of her head whispering for her to burn it all down and start again. Yeah, fuck that bullshit. Give her something to do already.
“What?” she shrugs at the boy - another fucking kid- and inhales as he steps back a bit from her. Completely fucking scared of her just like most of the people here: wasn’t like she gave a damn, either, actually it made shit so much easier for her, not being bothered for anything unless it was actually important. “Speak.”
“The commander’s, uh, looking for you,” the boy stammers, obviously trying not to trip headlong over his words.
“Right,” Zorya takes one last drag and drops the cigarette butt to the ground, stamping it out beneath her booted foot. She doesn’t wait for him to tell her where to find Lilia, striding off without even bothering to look back to see if he’s following in her wake: the girl’d be easy to find, after all. Just had to find where everything was going on: Lilia would be right in the middle of it. Girl was predictable, after all, and she had a job to do.
Maybe by now, the cleansing’d be over and she could actually walk around without fucking it all up, or better yet, they’d be moving the hell on. Ain’t got talent for that, she’d told Lilia without another word of explanation, and just let her come to the conclusion everyone else did: fire purified, but darkness was absolute shit for clearing up the warping in the leylines, even if she didn’t use that side of her magic often. Hah. True enough, and Zorya doesn’t have the patience or feel like the effort for all the delicate ritual work it’d take to clear this shit, on top of the fact that even limited or not, she’d probably warp it just by being around the working. Surprised it worked, even after she’d made herself scarce, and the part of her brain that she can’t turn off is running through observations, theories, and if she doesn’t get her mind off it and onto something actually important would start formulating hypotheses. (couldn’t take the scientist completely out of her, hah, even after all these years, loss of humanity, and burning down the world)
As she expected, Lilia was at the center of a flurry of activity, calm even in the midst of the storm around her, calmly directing and giving orders in a clear voice above the tumult. In her hands was a sheaf of papers - transcriptions of orders and discussions that’d come over the crystals, no doubt.
“T’fuck’s going on?” Zorya drawled: she could hear the orders Lilia was giving and they sounded nothing like ‘preparing to move the fuck out’ and more like ‘digging the fuck in’, only far less vulgar. Didn’t take much to realize that whatever orders up above had dropped on the girl were no kind of good news and it fell to Lilia to salvage it. Sucked to be supreme field commander, or just a field commander in general: wouldn’t catch her in charge of this mess.
“Walk with me a moment,” Lilia said: Zorya shrugs and follows after her.
Lazily: it didn’t take much effort for her to keep up with the girl, even with as fast as Lilia moves, trying to get everything done at once. The world moves at an entirely different pace for her, and she almost doesn’t remember that part of being human, the rushing about to get everything done: she’d done it, she’s sure, in those frantic experiment days, the fascination of the work and her relentless drive somehow enough to make up for the fact that she was really pretty lazy and didn’t especially like playing by rules, even then. Scientific rules, sure, people rules? Fuck that.
Finally, Lilia turns to her, and there’s something like anger in her eyes, mixed with her usual earnest determination that was sometimes fucking painful to watch sometimes. Goddamn Girl Guide, should be wearing green instead of white and blue, even if she doesn’t understand Zorya’s lazy jibes about cookies when she’s trying to wind her up. “They want us to hold here.” she says, fingers curling at her side. “All the seers at HQ say there’s going to be a major attack coming in the next four days, -”
The girl doesn’t need to finish her sentence for Zorya to already put the pieces together and know how fucked they are. Lilia’s plans - and they’ve actually goddamn worked - involve pushing fast and hard, getting the leylines cleansed to starve their ultimate opponent of the tainted power that it feeds on while warping the world around it and give them something they’re able to draw on. Y’know, just knock the chances for eventually killing the thing from “completely impossible” to “perhaps vaguely in the realm of possibility”.
Yeah. Right. Zorya’s still pretty hellbent on sending every Wisp - including herself- right to hell, only way to fix her fucking mistakes that keep coming back to bite her in the ass, but it’s been three hundred fucking years and this is the closest anyone’s ever gotten to that, at least there’s only one left and her otherwise everyone’d be dead by now instead of humanity being mostly fucked. Girl’s fucking pulled miracles out of her ass with as little as the higher-ups have given her, gotten this much cleansed, but of course now there’s the hard part: holding onto it and they’re sitting right on a major nexus of power. Course the fucking thing wants it back.
And of course the same fucking morons who made the girl the messiah and expected fucking miracles from her with too little aren’t sending her shit. Zorya knows she’s a one-woman army on her own, but fuck, this is beyond stupid, and she’d lived back when professional buck-passing and stupid decisions were standard fucking operating procedure. Fucking assholes, ain’t like they’re any kind of use, and it’s why she doesn’t ever deal with them: she’d light them all on fire and be done with it. Too bad bureaucracy as a fucking concept hadn’t died when the world did.
“They ain’t sending you any fucking help.” Zorya drawls bitterly, and watches Lilia stiffen for a moment.
“...Father came.” the girl says quietly. “He brought healers.”
Well, fuck, this was even worse than she’d thought, if Ilyas had come back out of his retirement - one spent wrangling with the goddamn higher-ups for every scrap he can force out of them for his daughter - to take the field again, even if it was only as a healer. Finest healer she’d seen in a long fucking time, even Zorya had to admit it and he could still do that, even if he was too old to swing a sword,, but the man was seventy-five. Hell. If this was all they could get, they were going to need every goddamn healer they were going to get.
“...couldn’t send you anyone else? Tch.”
“The fighting’s bad in the south. Lalika can’t break away.” Lilia said. “I sent orders for the division that’s advancing past Wean to reinforce me here, but the best they can give me is three days.” Vienna, Zorya mentally translates, or rather, the burnt-out ruin that had once been Vienna, and they’re in what used to be in Romania, right in the heart of fucking Transylvania, and swears, throws a double-handed mountza in the direction of Istanbul, or the Lady’s city or whatever the fuck they call it now, and headquarters. “Here,” she mutters threateningly, despite the fact she’s miles away and this really only works if she’s up in their faces with this, and then for good measure turns the gesture into a double-handed flipping the bird, nevermind that no one even knows what that means anymore- Lilia looks scandalized at the mountza though, and at least that’s still around.
...so, fucking terrific. Lilia doesn’t need to say anything for Zorya to know how much of a fucking disaster in the making this is. Lilia’s got a a high-mobility division facing a siege and their mobility is constrained because of having to make sure the Wisp’s goddamn nightmare children don’t get fucking near that leyline nexus, she doesn’t have enough men, the nearest reinforcements are three days away by gate or airship if they’re amazingly lucky, and at this rate, Zorya’s expecting a labyrinth only to add to this.
And she sees that Lilia knows it, too, knows the odds she’s up against, and knows the girl’s already thinking, planning, determination clear as crystal in blue eyes.
“Zorya?” Lilia says, and those eyes fix on her, not challenging this time. Zorya won’t, doesn’t look away, even knowing like she does that it’s her fault this is happening, that it’s her fault this seventeen-year old girl is facing these kinds of odds, this kind of responsibility, and it’s her fault that this world is this fucked. “...I’m going to need you.”
Zorya shrugs. “Yeah,” she says, and that’s all she needs to say, watching as Lilia hurries off to finish what she’s doing, ten thousand things at once and no sleep tonight, trying to be ready. A moment later, Zorya digs a cigarette out of her pouch, touches a fingertip to it and lights it, takes a deep drag and mutters around it,“...keep yourself alive, girl.”
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: atomic tangerine, "(near) extinction", dove gray "for some moments in life, there are no words"
Supplies and Styles: N/A
Word Count: 1777
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: child/teenage soldiers, Zorya's swearing.
Summary: "Keep yourself alive, girl." Zorya, Lilia, and preparing to face impossible odds.
Somehow, Zorya knows that shit is going to be bad when she sees the little lieutenant come running up to her while she’s standing around finishing a cigarette. Smoking for lack of anything better to do: bored as shit and that’s never led to anything good. There’s only so many physics equations for physical laws that don’t work quite right anymore that she can run through her head before she wants to light something on fire all over again and there isn’t anything to light on fire right now. And she’s already taken apart and put back together every single magic gun that this division can manage to get its hands on, even the ones that were deemed unfixable, there isn’t anything left for her to take apart and remake.
War’s a whole lot of waiting, she’s realized over the past few centuries, a whole lot of waiting and nothing until the flurry of everything and then there’s nothing again. Zorya’s never done well with nothing and waiting, unless she feels too lazy to do anything and even then she can’t stop thinking, can’t turn her brain off, even before she’d gone and blown up the world, even before there’s that voice in the back of her head whispering for her to burn it all down and start again. Yeah, fuck that bullshit. Give her something to do already.
“What?” she shrugs at the boy - another fucking kid- and inhales as he steps back a bit from her. Completely fucking scared of her just like most of the people here: wasn’t like she gave a damn, either, actually it made shit so much easier for her, not being bothered for anything unless it was actually important. “Speak.”
“The commander’s, uh, looking for you,” the boy stammers, obviously trying not to trip headlong over his words.
“Right,” Zorya takes one last drag and drops the cigarette butt to the ground, stamping it out beneath her booted foot. She doesn’t wait for him to tell her where to find Lilia, striding off without even bothering to look back to see if he’s following in her wake: the girl’d be easy to find, after all. Just had to find where everything was going on: Lilia would be right in the middle of it. Girl was predictable, after all, and she had a job to do.
Maybe by now, the cleansing’d be over and she could actually walk around without fucking it all up, or better yet, they’d be moving the hell on. Ain’t got talent for that, she’d told Lilia without another word of explanation, and just let her come to the conclusion everyone else did: fire purified, but darkness was absolute shit for clearing up the warping in the leylines, even if she didn’t use that side of her magic often. Hah. True enough, and Zorya doesn’t have the patience or feel like the effort for all the delicate ritual work it’d take to clear this shit, on top of the fact that even limited or not, she’d probably warp it just by being around the working. Surprised it worked, even after she’d made herself scarce, and the part of her brain that she can’t turn off is running through observations, theories, and if she doesn’t get her mind off it and onto something actually important would start formulating hypotheses. (couldn’t take the scientist completely out of her, hah, even after all these years, loss of humanity, and burning down the world)
As she expected, Lilia was at the center of a flurry of activity, calm even in the midst of the storm around her, calmly directing and giving orders in a clear voice above the tumult. In her hands was a sheaf of papers - transcriptions of orders and discussions that’d come over the crystals, no doubt.
“T’fuck’s going on?” Zorya drawled: she could hear the orders Lilia was giving and they sounded nothing like ‘preparing to move the fuck out’ and more like ‘digging the fuck in’, only far less vulgar. Didn’t take much to realize that whatever orders up above had dropped on the girl were no kind of good news and it fell to Lilia to salvage it. Sucked to be supreme field commander, or just a field commander in general: wouldn’t catch her in charge of this mess.
“Walk with me a moment,” Lilia said: Zorya shrugs and follows after her.
Lazily: it didn’t take much effort for her to keep up with the girl, even with as fast as Lilia moves, trying to get everything done at once. The world moves at an entirely different pace for her, and she almost doesn’t remember that part of being human, the rushing about to get everything done: she’d done it, she’s sure, in those frantic experiment days, the fascination of the work and her relentless drive somehow enough to make up for the fact that she was really pretty lazy and didn’t especially like playing by rules, even then. Scientific rules, sure, people rules? Fuck that.
Finally, Lilia turns to her, and there’s something like anger in her eyes, mixed with her usual earnest determination that was sometimes fucking painful to watch sometimes. Goddamn Girl Guide, should be wearing green instead of white and blue, even if she doesn’t understand Zorya’s lazy jibes about cookies when she’s trying to wind her up. “They want us to hold here.” she says, fingers curling at her side. “All the seers at HQ say there’s going to be a major attack coming in the next four days, -”
The girl doesn’t need to finish her sentence for Zorya to already put the pieces together and know how fucked they are. Lilia’s plans - and they’ve actually goddamn worked - involve pushing fast and hard, getting the leylines cleansed to starve their ultimate opponent of the tainted power that it feeds on while warping the world around it and give them something they’re able to draw on. Y’know, just knock the chances for eventually killing the thing from “completely impossible” to “perhaps vaguely in the realm of possibility”.
Yeah. Right. Zorya’s still pretty hellbent on sending every Wisp - including herself- right to hell, only way to fix her fucking mistakes that keep coming back to bite her in the ass, but it’s been three hundred fucking years and this is the closest anyone’s ever gotten to that, at least there’s only one left and her otherwise everyone’d be dead by now instead of humanity being mostly fucked. Girl’s fucking pulled miracles out of her ass with as little as the higher-ups have given her, gotten this much cleansed, but of course now there’s the hard part: holding onto it and they’re sitting right on a major nexus of power. Course the fucking thing wants it back.
And of course the same fucking morons who made the girl the messiah and expected fucking miracles from her with too little aren’t sending her shit. Zorya knows she’s a one-woman army on her own, but fuck, this is beyond stupid, and she’d lived back when professional buck-passing and stupid decisions were standard fucking operating procedure. Fucking assholes, ain’t like they’re any kind of use, and it’s why she doesn’t ever deal with them: she’d light them all on fire and be done with it. Too bad bureaucracy as a fucking concept hadn’t died when the world did.
“They ain’t sending you any fucking help.” Zorya drawls bitterly, and watches Lilia stiffen for a moment.
“...Father came.” the girl says quietly. “He brought healers.”
Well, fuck, this was even worse than she’d thought, if Ilyas had come back out of his retirement - one spent wrangling with the goddamn higher-ups for every scrap he can force out of them for his daughter - to take the field again, even if it was only as a healer. Finest healer she’d seen in a long fucking time, even Zorya had to admit it and he could still do that, even if he was too old to swing a sword,, but the man was seventy-five. Hell. If this was all they could get, they were going to need every goddamn healer they were going to get.
“...couldn’t send you anyone else? Tch.”
“The fighting’s bad in the south. Lalika can’t break away.” Lilia said. “I sent orders for the division that’s advancing past Wean to reinforce me here, but the best they can give me is three days.” Vienna, Zorya mentally translates, or rather, the burnt-out ruin that had once been Vienna, and they’re in what used to be in Romania, right in the heart of fucking Transylvania, and swears, throws a double-handed mountza in the direction of Istanbul, or the Lady’s city or whatever the fuck they call it now, and headquarters. “Here,” she mutters threateningly, despite the fact she’s miles away and this really only works if she’s up in their faces with this, and then for good measure turns the gesture into a double-handed flipping the bird, nevermind that no one even knows what that means anymore- Lilia looks scandalized at the mountza though, and at least that’s still around.
...so, fucking terrific. Lilia doesn’t need to say anything for Zorya to know how much of a fucking disaster in the making this is. Lilia’s got a a high-mobility division facing a siege and their mobility is constrained because of having to make sure the Wisp’s goddamn nightmare children don’t get fucking near that leyline nexus, she doesn’t have enough men, the nearest reinforcements are three days away by gate or airship if they’re amazingly lucky, and at this rate, Zorya’s expecting a labyrinth only to add to this.
And she sees that Lilia knows it, too, knows the odds she’s up against, and knows the girl’s already thinking, planning, determination clear as crystal in blue eyes.
“Zorya?” Lilia says, and those eyes fix on her, not challenging this time. Zorya won’t, doesn’t look away, even knowing like she does that it’s her fault this is happening, that it’s her fault this seventeen-year old girl is facing these kinds of odds, this kind of responsibility, and it’s her fault that this world is this fucked. “...I’m going to need you.”
Zorya shrugs. “Yeah,” she says, and that’s all she needs to say, watching as Lilia hurries off to finish what she’s doing, ten thousand things at once and no sleep tonight, trying to be ready. A moment later, Zorya digs a cigarette out of her pouch, touches a fingertip to it and lights it, takes a deep drag and mutters around it,“...keep yourself alive, girl.”