August drabble dump, other fandoms

[tiptoe39]

Hands

John watches his hands. Watches them fold, watches them turn, watches wrists flick and fingers pinch. Around a dead man's collar, peeling off a nicotine patch, flying on the keyboard of a cell phone. They're quick. They're nimble. They're masterful, the physical counterpart to the brain that captivates John so. He can't see the mind working, but he can see the flash of fingers, and he worships them.

Then they lie limp, dangling off the edge of an easy chair as Sherlock dozes, head lolled back and mouth open to snore lightly into the air. John rolls over from the rug by the fireplace and approaches, his military stealth still ready, and runs his own fingertips lightly over each ridge and bump of his knuckles. So long, this close up. Like spider's legs.

Yet Sherlock doesn't wake when John strokes his index finger, from the first knuckle down to blunt fingernail. John's curiosity is perking inside him. His eyes are wide open, and his lips are parted, flash of a pink tongue in the dim firelight. He strokes two more of Sherlock's fingers, cups his hand beneath the palm to raise Sherlock's hand.

His lips have sucked two delicate fingertips, teeth grazing along the sensitive pads, before John realized Sherlock has opened his eyes and is gazing down at him.

The nimble hand moves, but only to cup his cheek. And Sherlock's other hand does the same. John looks into eyes suddenly level with his and thinks, for an instant before his own eyes close, that he can finally see the movement inside Sherlock's brain.

---

Yellow

Whoever thought to put a yellow bandanna with a pink shirt was out of his cotton pickin' mind. Monica always felt like a chicken in a henhouse with that uniform on. Of course that didn't matter. Who cares what you wore so long as the money came in? Still, there was something about wearing a big fancy canary collar around your neck that made Monica feel like she was gonna get yanked across the counter one of these days by a dissatisfied customer.

She didn't much trust the guy with the creepy glasses who came in and looked down at her like she was a piece of meat. He seemed to be staring straight at her even from the back of the line, and that gaze never flagged as he approached or even as his cell phone rang and he rummaged in his pocket for it. Monica felt even more like a hen, and she wasn't sure she wasn't getting sized up for Sunday dinner.

So as good as she was at toeing the line, keeping her head down, when he arrived and ordered his meal, she said, "You been looking at me."

His face crinkled into a genial, absolutely untrustworthy smile. "You noticed. Good eye."

She froze up, her teeth grinding uncomfortably against her jaw. "Why?"

"Your scarf," he said without missing a beat. "My wife breeds show dogs, and last weekend she won a show with a dog wearing a bright yellow bow just like that."

Monica felt like an idiot. "Oh."

But later on, when she looked up from counting change, she met the man's eyes yet again. He was talking on his cell phone, and as she stared she thought she saw his lips curl around the syllables of her name.

---

Baby Booties
Rin had complained about the baby booties. "They aren't even real shoes!" he'd said. "They're socks pretending they're shoes! And they're all lacy, and people will think Ren is a girl, and..."

Alice had stopped him with a look.

"OK, fine, get the damn booties," he said. You didn't mess with a nine-months-pregnant woman, even if you were sure she was going to emasculate your poor unborn son through her purchasing habits.

But at the dinner table that night Rin came to the table with one baby bootie stretched over each finger. Alice nearly threw a spatula at him.

Be that as it may, when the time came and Alice had dressed Ren up in a periwinkle blue hat, singlet and those insufferable booties, Rin laughed. "OK, all right, they are kind of cute," he said, a grin stretched wide across his face.

"He doesn't look like a girl," Alice pointed out.

"Well, no," Rin said, frowning down at the tiny bundle in Alice's arms. "He looks like an alien, actually."

He was all set to duck and cover when Alice suddenly laughed. "He does," she said, leaning forward to kiss Rin's cheek. "Our beautiful little alien."

---

Don't Look Down

What was he doing?

He had the weight of a girl in his arms, soft, warm and trembling. He could feel her tears staining the fabric of his shirt, soaking through the fibers to touch his skin with the wetness. This was a military uniform he was wearing, and yet a girl's tears were touching him. It seemed incongruous. More than incongruous. Impossible.

He shouldn't be touched by her tears. He shouldn't have fought for her, for the humans. They were animals, sources of energy, sacrifices to the darkness. Specks of dust among the infinite stars. They would die, and the stars would go on and on. His eyes had always been on them. He couldn't look down. And he definitely couldn't look at her.

He was afraid of just how much he might see.

---

Date

Twenty-four hours ago this would have been ludicrous. No, John corrected himself, this was still ludicrous. But it was happening. He was sitting in a romantic cafe with another man, telling the waitress it wasn't a date and tracking a psychotic killer in a taxicab.

But what could he do? He hadn't felt like this in ages. His heart was racing. The man next to him could say anything, could notice something that would turn the night upside down. John was enthralled, but he was also nervous as hell. This whole thing was so dangerous, so chancy, and based upon such a confusing track of logic and instinct and observation that John wasn't sure they weren't going in completely the wrong direction. But wrong or not, he was enjoying the ride too much to even think about stopping.

Maybe it was a bit like a date, at that.

---

Terrorist

Peter had never thought of himself as a terrorist. Even after the bomb, even after Nathan turned on him and turned the government on their kind, he still wanted to think he was mostly a nurse, just called to something higher. The cause of justice. He was just doing what was right. What any human being would do.

But nowadays it was hard to maintain that illusion. He'd seen too much, he'd gone too far. Hiro embraced the term terrorist, and Hiro had been the most idealistic man Peter had ever known. And when it became clear that it was time to take them all down, Peter had to admit a sort of sadistic thrill in the approach.

His coat fastened tight around him, he headed into the lion's mouth. The walls gleamed white around him, and only the pale glow of his skin reflected it. The rest was darkness.

If he was going to be a terrorist, he at least looked the part.

---