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rainbowfic2014-04-08 07:01 pm
crossfortune) wrote in rainbowfic2014-04-08 07:01 pm
dancing without malice or mercy
Name: Mischa
Story: A Chant of Exorcists
Colors: white opal, "gazing out the window", halloween orange, "nothing in my pocket but a hand and a prayer", dove grey, "the pain passes, but the beauty remains"
Supplies and Styles: none.
Word Count: 551
Rating: PG-13-ish?
Warnings: suicide; the deaths of several teenage girls.
Summary: An exorcist trying to pay off his student loans takes an unexpected case involving a pair of cursed ballet slippers.
Notes: Unfinished, and I have no idea what I'm really doing with it: it was written in twenty minutes in my writer's group for a mishmash of prompts.
By this point, Jamie was certain that his vacations were cursed: he hadn’t been able to even think about taking one for three years without something going horribly wrong. Maybe he should have listened to his mother haranguing him night and day about going to college to become a doctor or a lawyer - why an English major, Jamie, there’s no money in that, you’ll be paying off student loans the rest of your life - because he might still be paying off student loans the rest of his life, he’d be at least doing it with a thousand percent less risk to life and limb. That and he wouldn’t have found a copy of the Necrologos in the university library while doing research for a paper on gothic literature;the least glamorous way possible to explain how he’d ended up an exorcist, literally stumbling across a cursed book in the university library that tried to eat his soul.
Wonderful. And now he was here in Boulder, Colorado, with a hurriedly-canceled vacation, one that he’d been saving for for a long time, and plane tickets that weren’t refundable. He’d be eating the cost on that for weeks, and instead of lying on the beach in Hawaii, here he was in Boulder, standing outside the arts building on campus at 3 am, with a stuffed lion staring death at him. It wasn’t even alive anymore, and yet he could feel its hatred for all humans just boring into him.
Maybe I should exorcise that damn thing instead, he half-wondered, but sternly forced himself to focus. A girl in the ballet program - a talented dancer, by all accounts, with a bright future ahead of her - had hung herself after the opening night performance of Swan Lake ,still wearing the shoes she’d danced the thirty-two fouettes in. Tragic, and he knew he’d never know the whole story behind it, but she was gone, taking her secrets with her: however, her shoes had somehow ended up floating around the ballet rooms, and morbid young dancers trying to capture even a fragment of her talent put them on.
Four girls had danced to their deaths since then, the shoes ensnaring them and forcing them to dance until their bodies gave out, unable to take the slippers off. It was a story he’d heard before and god, he hated it - truly, he’d be glad when he could burn those shoes and never think about it again.
“There’s another in there, dancing,” Sophia, his assistant and part-time apprentice, said from behind him: he nearly jumped out of his skin, as he hadn’t heard her coming, but refused to show how startled he was. “Look, you can see through the window.”
“Give a little warning next time,” he muttered through his teeth. “Or I’ll dump the holy water on you thinking you’re a ghost.”
Her arm came up, and his eyes followed the long line of it as she pointed: through the window, he could see a slender figure with white hair, dancing as if she was the one possessed instead of the shoes. No, not her, he realized as the figure turned: he, a skinny, small boy that had to be a freshman, eighteen at best, and then Jamie suddenly swore as recognition hit him.
Alex - his younger brother. Fuck.
Story: A Chant of Exorcists
Colors: white opal, "gazing out the window", halloween orange, "nothing in my pocket but a hand and a prayer", dove grey, "the pain passes, but the beauty remains"
Supplies and Styles: none.
Word Count: 551
Rating: PG-13-ish?
Warnings: suicide; the deaths of several teenage girls.
Summary: An exorcist trying to pay off his student loans takes an unexpected case involving a pair of cursed ballet slippers.
Notes: Unfinished, and I have no idea what I'm really doing with it: it was written in twenty minutes in my writer's group for a mishmash of prompts.
By this point, Jamie was certain that his vacations were cursed: he hadn’t been able to even think about taking one for three years without something going horribly wrong. Maybe he should have listened to his mother haranguing him night and day about going to college to become a doctor or a lawyer - why an English major, Jamie, there’s no money in that, you’ll be paying off student loans the rest of your life - because he might still be paying off student loans the rest of his life, he’d be at least doing it with a thousand percent less risk to life and limb. That and he wouldn’t have found a copy of the Necrologos in the university library while doing research for a paper on gothic literature;the least glamorous way possible to explain how he’d ended up an exorcist, literally stumbling across a cursed book in the university library that tried to eat his soul.
Wonderful. And now he was here in Boulder, Colorado, with a hurriedly-canceled vacation, one that he’d been saving for for a long time, and plane tickets that weren’t refundable. He’d be eating the cost on that for weeks, and instead of lying on the beach in Hawaii, here he was in Boulder, standing outside the arts building on campus at 3 am, with a stuffed lion staring death at him. It wasn’t even alive anymore, and yet he could feel its hatred for all humans just boring into him.
Maybe I should exorcise that damn thing instead, he half-wondered, but sternly forced himself to focus. A girl in the ballet program - a talented dancer, by all accounts, with a bright future ahead of her - had hung herself after the opening night performance of Swan Lake ,still wearing the shoes she’d danced the thirty-two fouettes in. Tragic, and he knew he’d never know the whole story behind it, but she was gone, taking her secrets with her: however, her shoes had somehow ended up floating around the ballet rooms, and morbid young dancers trying to capture even a fragment of her talent put them on.
Four girls had danced to their deaths since then, the shoes ensnaring them and forcing them to dance until their bodies gave out, unable to take the slippers off. It was a story he’d heard before and god, he hated it - truly, he’d be glad when he could burn those shoes and never think about it again.
“There’s another in there, dancing,” Sophia, his assistant and part-time apprentice, said from behind him: he nearly jumped out of his skin, as he hadn’t heard her coming, but refused to show how startled he was. “Look, you can see through the window.”
“Give a little warning next time,” he muttered through his teeth. “Or I’ll dump the holy water on you thinking you’re a ghost.”
Her arm came up, and his eyes followed the long line of it as she pointed: through the window, he could see a slender figure with white hair, dancing as if she was the one possessed instead of the shoes. No, not her, he realized as the figure turned: he, a skinny, small boy that had to be a freshman, eighteen at best, and then Jamie suddenly swore as recognition hit him.
Alex - his younger brother. Fuck.