Beta Lyrae

I'm reposting some ficlets I wrote last year. Untitled snippets, mostly, although some are part of hypothetical longer works and others might be continued.


Fandom: 7 Seeds
Characters: Gengoro, OC
Prompt: canon divergence
Notes: Due to my inability to figure out what Japanese baseball players would've been famous when Team Winter went into cryo, their firstborn child is a daughter is named for Tomoe Gozen (and also the heroine of Yumi Tamura's older manga There Goes Tomoe!, because why not.) Seemed like a reference Mitsuru might make.


Gengoro saw the dog first—large, brown and wolflike, lying still in the shade. It took him a moment longer to notice the child crouched beside it, half-hidden by the leaves, one hand buried in the dog's fur.

The child—a girl, probably—was small and skinny, dressed in ragged clothes that looked like they belonged to someone much larger than herself. He had no idea how old she was; besides the boy Ayu had found, he'd never seen a child younger than himself in person.

"Are you a member of Team Spring?" he asked. That was the only team that he knew for sure had awakened, after all.

"I'm Tomoe," the girl said, sharply—much more boldly than the boy. "And I'm not from any team. I was born here." Grudgingly she added, "My parents are Team Winter."



Fandom: The Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells
Characters: Moon, Consolation
Prompt: canon divergence


The half-Fell queen tilted her head. "Do you have a mentor?"

Moon froze.

"Our father is sick," she said. "He's a consort, like you. He said that maybe a mentor could help him." She hesitated. "If we catch the flying boat for you, would you help?"

She had to know that both of the Arbora who’d come here were in the flying boat. If he said yes, she’d go after them, and once Jade and the others recovered, they could probably rescue Merit and Bramble from these Fell. But Merit and Bramble weren’t the only prisoners the Hians had taken.



Fandom: The Heartstrikers series by Rachel Aaron
Characters: Svena the White Witch
Prompt: nemesis


Deep in her mothers' glacial fortress in Siberia, Svena the White Witch plotted.

She plotted for the survival of her clan, her ten surviving sisters and five unhatched eggs, in the face of Algonquin’s looming threat. She plotted vengeance against that same enemy—true, Algonquin seemed invincible now, but Svena’s daughter would be a seer, and perhaps a seer could make even the Lady of the Lakes pay in blood for the Three Sisters’ deaths.

Mostly, she plotted against Brohomir, Great Seer of the Heartstrikers, for the death of his sister and her enemy. Amelia the Planeswalker, Svena’s last and greatest rival, who should have died in battle against her, not been struck down by the one dragon she’d trusted.

It galled her all the more because she’d played into the seer’s hands. Amelia had persuaded her to help with an ill-advised bit of magical experimentation, dividing Amelia’s vast flame in half and placing half—for safekeeping, the Planeswalker had claimed—within a mortal mage. A mortal who wasn’t even hers, either of theirs, but who served Amelia’s weakling of a youngest brother. A mortal who’d been dead days later, before Amelia herself, turning that protection into a greater weakness, draining Amelia until she’d been as vulnerable as an old and powerful dragon could be.

Had she refused to help Amelia in her foolishness, Svena was certain that her rival would still be alive. There was no way that the second greatest dragon mage could have met such an ignominious death if she’d been at full strength; even Brohomir was no match for the Planeswalker, either as a mage or as a fighter. Had been no match for her.

Svena swore that she would make him pay for using her. She and her daughter would turn all his plans against him, for that. And they'd make his life a misery, because he'd taken Amelia from her.

Rage made a fine distraction from her grief.

My best and greatest enemy...



Fandom: Star Trek: Rihannsu series by Diane Duane
Characters: Thala t'Kaveth
Prompt: textiles


They had taken the plants with them to their worlds of exile, but not the machines; those, they had had to reverse-engineer. Some to rett the fiber (and oh, how bitter it had been at first, the carefully-tended tivish turned stiff and brittle by their own errors)! More to spin the thread too fine to be seen, still more to weave it into cloth light as mist—none of that had been easy, and nor had it been simple to rediscover the dyes that would bind properly to the fiber. It had taken years for them to replicate the infrastructure that had been available to them on ch'Havran, especially when they needed to spend such time and effort on mere survival. Compared to food and shelter, tivish was a luxury.

But that was the point, was it not? This was better than jewels or precious metal, better than fine swords; the former the Rihannsu disdained, and the latter they passed down as heirlooms. But the robes and scarves and fine shawls of tivish they bought new; and the finest-grade cloth, light and airy and brilliant of color, had become quite the status symbol.

Half the Praetorate and still more of the Senate would be wearing Kavethssu tivish by now, little though they might suspect. Even the Three themselves.

That rankled some of the family—to sell the fruits of their long labor to their enemies. But pleased Thala t'Kaveth, new-made Mother of the House, very much. She reminded her kin that money was money, and soon spent—on weapons, on research, and most of all on their ship, the home-to-be of their children. What better vengeance on those who had stolen their ancestral lands, than to make them fund their own downfall?



Fandom: X-Men (comics)
Characters: Madelyne Pryor, Illyana Rasputin, S'ym
Prompt: canon divergence
Notes: Roughly in continuity with this story.


"It's only a dream," Madelyne Pryor said, reaching out to touch the demon's fingernail.

Another hand reached out and caught her wrist before she could touch it—before she was even sure which nail she'd chosen. "You sure about that? Dreams can have power."

The newcomer was a teenager, a teenage girl in a blue-and-yellow jumpsuit with an X on the belt. She looked vaguely familiar, with long blonde hair and cold, cold blue eyes.

But while she had spoken to Madelyne, she wasn't looking at her. "S'ym, you've overreached yourself. Go away."

"I could say the same about you, boss," the demon said.

"That's my business." The girl waved a hand, and a circle of light opened underneath the demon's feet. In a moment, he was gone.

The girl turned to Madelyne. "Now, Ms. Pryor. Shall we talk?"



Fandom: X-Men (comics)
Characters: Anya Eisenhardt, The Genegineer
Prompt: schadenfreude
Notes: This is part of a larger universe that I haven't posted anything else from. For the purposes of this story, the most important point of divergence is that Anya Eisenhardt, firstborn daughter of Magneto, survived to adulthood.


Genosha was beautiful now, even to her eyes: the rot at its heart purged, the fires come and gone, the rebuilding almost done. The suburban paradise built on the backs of slaves had been all but annihilated; on its ruins free mutants had built something new. Not perfect—not ever perfect—but honest.

It was not what she'd dreamed of, all those years. Nor was it the goal her father and his friends had striven for. (That one of them had died for. That she had died for, in her time.) But it might last.

And it was the Genegineer's worst nightmare.

Not Genosha's prosperity, of course; he'd always held that up as the highest good. Not the freedom of his mutant slaves, who he'd always claimed to pity anyway. But he could see, now, that his life's work had been for nothing; his every atrocity, rather than a necessarily evil, had simply been the lazy way out.

His entire image of himself was collapsing, now. When she visited him in his cell, she saw the merest shell of the man who had wiped minds and rewritten bodies, turning his country's children into useful automatons. He was hollow, skin over ash.

Perhaps it was petty of her, to take such joy in her enemy's suffering, instead of focusing on the good she'd done here. But doing good was slow, painful, limited. There was so much harm she could never undo, so many scars that she had to navigate around instead of healing, so much stolen that she could not restore. But she could hold onto her old, cold rage, her spite, her hatred, and that was the fire that warmed her, these days.

She'd spared him so that she could watch his heart die slowly, rather than letting him go to his death still convinced he'd been justified. She was well satisfied with the result.