auguris: ([GS] Broker: Waiting)
Gabe ([personal profile] auguris) wrote in [community profile] rainbowfic2013-08-17 02:47 pm

Summertime Blues 11, Bone Black 16

Name: [personal profile] auguris
'verse: Ghost Sight
Story: Something Else
Colors: Summertime Blues 11. Without respite, without cause. Bone Black 16. Buried with
Supplies and Styles: n/a
Word Count: 632
Rating: PG
Warnings: None.
Summary: Broker is lost in a haunting (or something else). A snippet of something larger that isn't quite ready to be told. For my Lint Roller, prompt provided by [personal profile] kay_brooke: "Broker, what is your most cherished memory?"

Broker knows this place is not real. The mist envelopes him until he can no longer see his feet, his outstretched hand. He sees glimpses of this place, when he exorcises the dead or -- sometimes -- when he projects himself, but he is not actually here. This is a dream.

In a way.

This is the secret all Seers share. This is the knowing look Master Vider gives him when one of them returns from an appointment. This is the hand that stays Mitchell's ire. This is the dread that crawls down your spine when you enter a haunting. This is where they pass through. This is where the dead forget they were alive.

This is not a place but a concept made concrete; this is real the way a glamour is real. The way death is a permanent end. The way he belongs in Krixos with Tamsin and Elina but also belongs in Caydoon with Master Vider but also in White Rock with his mother and father and sister.

He has been here before.

Sevana's hand reaches through the mist. He knows it is her hand because she is wearing the bracelet she wore when she died, glass beads on a cord, blue and green and black. He made it for her. The Assembly buried her wearing it, in a grave between his mother's and his own. It is not her hand because she is dead. It is not her bracelet that he made for her because it rests with her body in a small town far away.

She waits, fingers ready to curl around his own. The gray mist darkens. Flecks of her skin fall away as disturbed ash. If he touches her she will crumble.

Broker not her voice she never called him

He takes her hand, skin and muscles and blood falling away until he clutches only bone, creaking and firm. She leads him

that's not right, Sevana scolds. She holds the sapling upright and whispers to it, magic flowing from her lips, embracing the green stalk. It grows sturdier, stays up on its own. She smiles, tying it to a small stick.

Broker Havard shrugs and says, I'm only good at dead stuff. He says, it's ironic, isn't it? A Gardener and a Seer, brother and sister?

It makes sense, Sevana says, because life and death are so closely linked. We cannot die without life or live without death. The universe needs you just as much as it needs me.

That sounds nice, Broker Havard says, I hope you're right


Mitchell slapped him across the face, sharp red pain punctuating the gray mist -- there was no mist, he knelt on concrete. Mitchell held him by the collar, searching his face for -- recognition?

"Better not hit me again," Broker rasped. As if he'd swallowed hot, acrid smoke. "What... where am I?"

"The abandoned hospital on Graven. Nieve and Master Vider are examining the second floor. We were working the ground floor when you... man, I don't know what happened, you ran off down into the basement and got stuck." Mitchell shook him a little. "You know Tam would burn off my eyebrows if I let anything happen to you. I like my eyebrows."

Mitchell helped Broker stand on shaking legs, propped him up against a concrete support.

"Do you remember what dragged you in?"

Broker rubbed his eyes. "Sevana."

"Your sister?" Broker glanced sharply at him. "Elina told me." Mitchell folded his arms. "She can't be here, you know that. She didn't live or die here."

Broker snorted. "Yeah kid, I know." Mitchell rolled his eyes. "Something else is, though. Something bad." He stood up straighter, adjusting his coat. "Something pretending to be my sister."
kay_brooke: Stick drawing of a linked adenine and thymine molecule with text "DNA: my OTP" (Default)

[personal profile] kay_brooke 2013-08-18 04:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, poor Broker. He wants so badly for it to be his sister even though he knows it can't be. I can't blame him for wanting to indulge in memories, even though he knows that's a dangerous thing to do at the moment.