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Oct. 13th, 2007 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
3pipeproblemWhile I am fundamentally opposed to posting fic (especially fic that stands to max out at about 2000 words, tops) in installments, I'm on a deadline and have a book to proofread by tomorrow afternoon. Soooo, with that in the forefront of my mind, I present to you my submission to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
delurker's His Dark Materials crossover/fusion challenge.
For those of you who haven't read the books (which are awesome, especially the first--my intense dislike of Will Parry hampered my enjoyment of the second) and are somehow still interested in reading this fic, basically all you need to know is that in the HDM verse, every person has an animal companion (a talking animal companion--no, stay with me!) called a dæmon. The dæmon is essentially the embodiment of that person's soul. Children's dæmons can change forms, but once a person reaches a certain age (around puberty), their dæmon "settles" into a single form.
Title: Three Forms Alan Shore's Dæmon Didn't Settle Into (And One It Did) (1/2)
Full names of the fandom and characters: Boston Legal: Alan Shore, Alan Shore, Alan Shore (Shirley and Denny to follow)
Summary:...hahahaha, why do I include these things? I think the title's pretty self-explanatory.
The pat of butter hits the pan with a hiss and Alan lifts his head. His mother cooks like she's dancing, moving in time with some snatch of melody in her head, pausing mid-stir to tap whisk against bowl, one-two. Sometimes, with the aid of a footstool—an antique, comes the inevitable warning—Alan steps into the percussionist’s role, churning batter, struggling to keep pace with the slap of her bare feet on kitchen tile.
Today he's been exiled to the breakfast table, forced to watch her bathrobe flap about her ankles, to endure the cinnamon-and-egg smell of half-cooked French toast and the uncontrollable watering of his mouth.
"Is he looking?" Alan whispers, diverting his gaze to his hands.
"He's always looking." Right now—for the next three seconds—Melantha is a mongoose a la Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, beady-eyed and plump, with tiny, scrabbling paws. "If there was an animal with eyes in the back of its head, he'd have settled as that."
"Spiders."
"What?"
"Spiders have eyes in the backs of their heads."
Mel's nose twitches like she's about to sneeze. "No, they don't."
"Yeah, they do."
"Remind me, Alan, which of us has actually been a spider?"
Alan thunks his elbows on the table, hard, knocks his wrists together and settles his head in his hands. "You make a stupid mongoose," he says at length.
Mel cycles through forms in rapid succession, and for a handful of seconds it's as though Alan's watching a View-Master reel of especially ferocious members of the animal kingdom: wildcat (hackles raised), scorpion (pinchers thick and swollen, tail poised to strike), king cobra (hood flared), poison dart frog (skin jet black and lurid yellow, like a road sign), spider (to prove a point). Then she vanishes.
Alan's scalp begins to prickle. "Stop it," he warns through clenched teeth. "Stop it. I know what you're doing." He can feel the hairs on his head shifting, can either feel or imagine the tread of Mel's feet as she negotiates swaying stalks of dead cells. "This is gross. You're drinking my blood, you know."
"I know." His daemon's voice is tinny, her words faintly slurred. She is, Alan realizes with no small measure of revulsion, talking with her mouth full. "It's kind of sour. Do you think that's because you're a disagreeable person?"
"I'll smush you."
"I'll lay eggs first."
"Alan."
Alan starts; his mother's voice possesses a mysterious quality that renders it inaudible until at least the third repetition of his name. A plate bearing two pieces of French toast, piled atop one another like the bronzed legs of a sunbather, lands in front of him.
"Sorry," he recites, raising a hand to scratch at his head. "I didn't hear. Thank you."
Arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, and with an air of cool skepticism, his mother appraises the apology, finds it acceptable. Perhaps as a conciliatory gesture, she sets a bowl of powdered sugar beside her son's French toast.
It's her dæmon, an osprey whose irises are the color of yolk, whose claws have scarred the back of Colleen Shore's favorite chair and whose beak terminates in a sinister hook, who says, "Where's Melantha?"
"Interesting question," Alan replies, powdered sugar avalanching off his spoon and onto the once-pristine placemat. A staring contest ensues—a staring contest he quickly loses. "On my head."
"Again," his mother says, and for an instant he thinks the unimpressed look she's directing at him will give way to tenderness, dissolve like powdered sugar drizzled with lemon, and she'll reach out to stroke his hair.
She remains unimpressed. "Tell Mel to be careful. If she turns into a blood-sucking insect too many times, maybe she'll stay that way."
"Panthera onca."
Sophomore year is a relief—a relief from the burden of being a Freshman, of stumbling down the wrong corridors, into the wrong classroom, into the wrong guy’s girlfriend. Most dæmons have settled; it’s impossible to weave through the halls without hearing how everyone just knew she was a peacock or how nobody’d ever have pegged him for a stoat.
A kid in Alan’s chem class—burly, boisterous, face riddled with acne—transfers. Word percolates down that his daemon settled as a dolphin.
“Panthera onca.” He murmurs the words like incantation.
In jaguar form, Melantha moves with hypnotic grace. Nothing is wasted, not a twitch of the tail or the flicker of an eye. She’s sleek, powerful. Alan looks at her and swears the word beautiful can only properly apply to things that are potentially lethal.
He lies in his bed, dæmon curled at his side, delivers those two scraps of Latin into a world swollen with silence and darkness.
delurker's His Dark Materials crossover/fusion challenge.For those of you who haven't read the books (which are awesome, especially the first--my intense dislike of Will Parry hampered my enjoyment of the second) and are somehow still interested in reading this fic, basically all you need to know is that in the HDM verse, every person has an animal companion (a talking animal companion--no, stay with me!) called a dæmon. The dæmon is essentially the embodiment of that person's soul. Children's dæmons can change forms, but once a person reaches a certain age (around puberty), their dæmon "settles" into a single form.
Title: Three Forms Alan Shore's Dæmon Didn't Settle Into (And One It Did) (1/2)
Full names of the fandom and characters: Boston Legal: Alan Shore, Alan Shore, Alan Shore (Shirley and Denny to follow)
Summary:...hahahaha, why do I include these things? I think the title's pretty self-explanatory.
The pat of butter hits the pan with a hiss and Alan lifts his head. His mother cooks like she's dancing, moving in time with some snatch of melody in her head, pausing mid-stir to tap whisk against bowl, one-two. Sometimes, with the aid of a footstool—an antique, comes the inevitable warning—Alan steps into the percussionist’s role, churning batter, struggling to keep pace with the slap of her bare feet on kitchen tile.
Today he's been exiled to the breakfast table, forced to watch her bathrobe flap about her ankles, to endure the cinnamon-and-egg smell of half-cooked French toast and the uncontrollable watering of his mouth.
"Is he looking?" Alan whispers, diverting his gaze to his hands.
"He's always looking." Right now—for the next three seconds—Melantha is a mongoose a la Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, beady-eyed and plump, with tiny, scrabbling paws. "If there was an animal with eyes in the back of its head, he'd have settled as that."
"Spiders."
"What?"
"Spiders have eyes in the backs of their heads."
Mel's nose twitches like she's about to sneeze. "No, they don't."
"Yeah, they do."
"Remind me, Alan, which of us has actually been a spider?"
Alan thunks his elbows on the table, hard, knocks his wrists together and settles his head in his hands. "You make a stupid mongoose," he says at length.
Mel cycles through forms in rapid succession, and for a handful of seconds it's as though Alan's watching a View-Master reel of especially ferocious members of the animal kingdom: wildcat (hackles raised), scorpion (pinchers thick and swollen, tail poised to strike), king cobra (hood flared), poison dart frog (skin jet black and lurid yellow, like a road sign), spider (to prove a point). Then she vanishes.
Alan's scalp begins to prickle. "Stop it," he warns through clenched teeth. "Stop it. I know what you're doing." He can feel the hairs on his head shifting, can either feel or imagine the tread of Mel's feet as she negotiates swaying stalks of dead cells. "This is gross. You're drinking my blood, you know."
"I know." His daemon's voice is tinny, her words faintly slurred. She is, Alan realizes with no small measure of revulsion, talking with her mouth full. "It's kind of sour. Do you think that's because you're a disagreeable person?"
"I'll smush you."
"I'll lay eggs first."
"Alan."
Alan starts; his mother's voice possesses a mysterious quality that renders it inaudible until at least the third repetition of his name. A plate bearing two pieces of French toast, piled atop one another like the bronzed legs of a sunbather, lands in front of him.
"Sorry," he recites, raising a hand to scratch at his head. "I didn't hear. Thank you."
Arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, and with an air of cool skepticism, his mother appraises the apology, finds it acceptable. Perhaps as a conciliatory gesture, she sets a bowl of powdered sugar beside her son's French toast.
It's her dæmon, an osprey whose irises are the color of yolk, whose claws have scarred the back of Colleen Shore's favorite chair and whose beak terminates in a sinister hook, who says, "Where's Melantha?"
"Interesting question," Alan replies, powdered sugar avalanching off his spoon and onto the once-pristine placemat. A staring contest ensues—a staring contest he quickly loses. "On my head."
"Again," his mother says, and for an instant he thinks the unimpressed look she's directing at him will give way to tenderness, dissolve like powdered sugar drizzled with lemon, and she'll reach out to stroke his hair.
She remains unimpressed. "Tell Mel to be careful. If she turns into a blood-sucking insect too many times, maybe she'll stay that way."
"Panthera onca."
Sophomore year is a relief—a relief from the burden of being a Freshman, of stumbling down the wrong corridors, into the wrong classroom, into the wrong guy’s girlfriend. Most dæmons have settled; it’s impossible to weave through the halls without hearing how everyone just knew she was a peacock or how nobody’d ever have pegged him for a stoat.
A kid in Alan’s chem class—burly, boisterous, face riddled with acne—transfers. Word percolates down that his daemon settled as a dolphin.
“Panthera onca.” He murmurs the words like incantation.
In jaguar form, Melantha moves with hypnotic grace. Nothing is wasted, not a twitch of the tail or the flicker of an eye. She’s sleek, powerful. Alan looks at her and swears the word beautiful can only properly apply to things that are potentially lethal.
He lies in his bed, dæmon curled at his side, delivers those two scraps of Latin into a world swollen with silence and darkness.
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Date: 2007-10-14 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 11:09 pm (UTC)At least you got a rental, right?
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Date: 2007-10-14 11:19 pm (UTC)Baby steps.
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Date: 2007-10-15 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-15 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-16 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-16 10:21 pm (UTC)