[meme] first kiss drabbles

[citycouncil]

Tag your characters into the post and respond to each other with either prompts for or drabbles about the first time they kissed. In the city or out the city, alternate universe (whether or not they've already kissed), total crack, utterly chaste or downright pornographic, current pairings or match-ups that would never happen — whatever suits your fancy, write it here.



This meme will be open all weekend, so write drabbles at your leisure!

Comments

[femmejosephine]

Nikita

[shieldmaiden_rohan]

Eowyn

[ssrsousa]

Daniel Sousa

[frozenfractals]

Elsa

[and_survive]

Ellie

[daughterofawolf]

Dear Scott, this is really really goddamn long. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it :D

"You see that, girl? That's what a goldmine looks like."

Eponine's father's fingers feel like they must be leaving bruises, his grip is so intent, as they look out over the valley to the lights dappling below. Jackson, Wyoming.

A lot of people have heard about it - heard about this little experiment here, heard rumors of a place where there's safety and electricity and a real town that's been building on itself for years. When she looks at it, she's not sure she sees a goldmine. From here, the lights look like stars. From this vantage, above everything, she can hear music from inside the walls. If she closes her eyes, she can imagine how warm it must be. How safe.

Her father, though, he's never been one for dreams. He hears about something nice and he wants to own it.

That's what got them kicked out of what was, a long time ago, the NOLA QZ. It'd been a mess from the start, from what she can tell, but for a while -- a good while -- they'd had a good setup there. FEDRA had been ousted when Eponine was a toddler, but when infighting and attempts to reclaim the Zone had taken out the Fireflies, he'd charmed a few of those left into keeping a group together. They'd patrolled for Infected, lured in refugees with a facade of open arms and Southern hospitality, and taken them for whatever they were worth.

It was survival. But he'd wanted to run the show, and they'd found themselves booted from there at the end of a rifle.

It was good, he told them. It was a sign there were better things for them. "There's nothing but space out there," he said, "and we're gonna be kings of it."

A few years later, and Eponine is pretty sure they're the royalty of fuck all. They've seen temperatures lower than anything in the south, their shoes turned into ribbons, holding their breath at any sound in the night, starving and standing each other only because none of them could make it alone. They'd stay in one place or another for only a little while before it wasn't enough or their luck ran out again.

Gavroche had been bitten in an ammo run. She'd taken him down herself. She wouldn't let anyone else do it.


Her father shoves her forward, down the mountainside. "You know what to do."
She scowls, but she does.


Eponine's following a trodden-down path when she's startled by a whinny and a behind her: she whirls, hand on her pistol. It's part of the act, of course, but it's a good part of the act, because not everyone is keen on being made to feel guilty.

She pauses, though, because the patrol is a girl. A young woman in a worn but mostly clean jacket and jeans, hair falling out of her ponytail around her face and hand on her own gun. Eponine isn't sure what she's more startled by, a girl on patrol -- you see it, sometimes, but way more men on their own -- or her ease and the fact that she looks washed.

"Help," she says, remembering herself and raising her hands, "I need help."

"It's okay," the girl says, glancing over her shoulder as a young man rounds the trees on his own horse. They don't come closer, their two horses stamping and huffing in the cold. "Are you alone out here?"

"Yes," she says immediately, and then, "Sort of. My family, they're back a ways. My sister's hurt --" That, at least is true. Azelma's hand had gotten slashed open in their last run in with Infected, and she looks clean, but it's red and angry where Eponine had stitched it closed. Their father had joked that it makes a better story.

The girl looks for a long moment into the snowy woods past her.
"Ellie," the boy says, and his accent is heavier than the girl's. "We can't go riding off into the woods on her say so. It's getting dark. We've got to at least let people know."
"I know," she says, brusque and still looking.
"Please," Eponine says, clutching at the momentary indecision, at the somehow intense idea that they might just disappear, and throws herself toward the neck of the horse. "Don't leave me alone out here."

The girl -- Ellie -- looks at her for a minute and says, "We can take you back with us now, and you can tell the guys where to go. Or, we'll be back in the morning." Her partner makes a little annoyed huff, but Eponine nods. Somehow, it sounds better than what she'd hoped for. Ellie puts a hand down to help her up behind her, and where her sleeve bares her arm the edge of a fern pokes out, tattooed intricately.

She's starved and tired, is all, but Eponine thinks of spring, in the middle of all this snow.

"What's your name?" Ellie asks, and she says,
"Eponine. Thenardier."
"I've never heard a name like that."
"Yeah, well, it's just from some old book," Eponine mumbles, glancing away.
"No, hey, it's nice. What about the accent, where's that from?"
"New Orleans, chere," she says and smirks. Somehow, despite it being a swampy, riotous mess that all but breeds spores on its own, she still loves the place. Or her memory of it, ancient gardens that survived the Infection just like everything else and colorful buildings, and happiness which might have never existed.
"Shit, really? I heard the old QZ there was underwater."
"Oh, just parts of it," she says, and laughs for the first time in a long time.
"I know a song about New Orleans," Ellie says thoughtfully, and Eponine says, "Everyone knows some song about New Orleans."

The ride back isn't that long, but Eponine falls asleep against Ellie's back, arm curled around her waist, and Ellie doesn't wake her back up until they get there.

"The guys" -- Eponine is introduced to them, but she's hungry enough for her vision to be wavering, and she doesn't remember their names -- go back out to get her family. They're told they can stay for a while, or for longer if they like, but with strict instruction that there are laws to follow, and if they're going to be using their supplies they're going to help out. Her father puts on just about the most charming, grateful act Eponine's ever seen and by the end of the night he's laughing with those men.

It makes her wince, but this place is like an oasis. There's electricity, fresh vegetables. Even hot water (not so much you can waste it, Ellie warns her when she goes dreamy-eyed at the idea of a warm shower). There are children playing and people eat dinner together. At night, people play music: Ellie even plays House of the Rising Sun on guitar once after a couple nights, and Eponine makes a face at her, but there's something beautiful and haunting about it and she doesn't take her eyes away.

If false charm and playing along is what keeps them here, she'll take it.


There's some kind of problem with the hydroelectric a week or so later, and Eponine volunteers to help just as soon as she can (and all right, maybe when she sees that Ellie does). It has them down in repurposed access tunnels: supposedly, a quick if irritating job to restart the generator. Even so, they walk quietly, occasionally breaking the quiet to laugh over terrible signage ("In case of fire, run down these stairs and straight into it?") or talk about their lives softly.

It's easy. It's a sort of easy, even with her stomach twisted and listening for stray noise, that Eponine hasn't ever quite felt before. Even down here, carrying a flashlight and a gun, tasked with helping a townful of people, is something she's never known: she never just helps.

"Ellie," she says, suddenly, trying to look casual by shining her flashlight to look down a side corridor. "You can't trust--"

She's cut off when Ellie's hand slams over her mouth, abrupt, dragging her down behind a support beam. As Eponine turns, she hears more than sees it, the distinct shuddering clack-shriek of a clicker, coming out of a cross path on the opposite side. Her heart triple-times; crouching against it with her breath held, she's sure the thing must be able to hear it pounding against her ribs. It clicks, it shudders, its misshapen fungal head twisting in confusion as it lurches toward them. Ellie reaches slowly, carefully, behind them for a piece of debris and tosses it across the tunnel: it clangs down a ladder in a collision of metal, and as the thing turns, in one swift move she has her shotgun out and firing, deafening next to Eponine's head: its head bursts open in a crimson blossom and it topples.

She grabs Eponine's wrist, but Eponine's already on her feet as the two take off running, past the dead clicker and toward the end of the tunnel where the generator sits, up behind a grate. The two of them can't get it fully open, but Ellie can wriggle in, the one who knows how to work the thing. She's not even started before Eponine can already hear shrieks and clicking coming down the hall, toward the noise of their shotgun and the creaky door.

"Get inside," Ellie hisses and Eponine whispers back, "just get the thing started."
"Get the fuck inside!"
"Shut the fuck up," she says, turning and putting her back to the grate and aiming at the small trio of them. One down, two --
.

Then it's on her, knocking her down with the open grate and Ellie and the generator behind her, and for all Eponine has sometimes wondered What if it's just easier, being infected, right now she wants to live. She fumbles for the knife she keeps on her at all times, shoving it right into the thing's jugular, over and over until she realizes it's collapsed. And that the lights are on, the generator humming as if nothing had happened and the grate door swinging open with an electric buzz.

She sits up.

"You are a goddamn nightmare," Ellie says, and relents, "And good with a knife."
"Yep," Eponine says and shoves the thing off her, checking for broken skin. Nothing. Clean. "Both."


"I don't know what you're doing," she hisses at her father, "what fucked up long game you're playing, what you already took maybe, but I'm out. We ain't gonna be gods of shit, we got a good thing here, and you're gonna fuck it up like you always do."
He slaps her across the face and she keeps staring at him.
"I didn't raise you to be a little bitch," he snarls.
"You didn't raise me at all," she says, raising an eyebrow, and goes.


Her mother and father get tossed out at the end of rifles, again, but when Eponine and Azelma watch them go, she doesn't feel anything. No, maybe she does. Maybe she feels something like the end of a story. But the beginning of a new one.


"There's another New Orleans song I like," she says to Ellie, paging through a comic book idly in her bedroom one night. "It even talks about Jackson." Sure, it's Jackson, Mississippi, but she likes this one better.
"You should teach me." Ellie's sitting cross-legged across from her, picking at her guitar, and Eponine says,
"I don't sing like you do, though," she warns, and Ellie snorts.

"It was on a bright March morning," she starts, looking down at her hands, "I bid New Orleans adieu." She flickers her eyes up to watch Ellie's reaction, feeling shy, but she smiles at the next line. "I took the road to Jackson town, my fortune to renew..."

Ellie leans across the guitar and kisses her, all of a sudden. Eponine blinks and freezes, a million different horrible men's kisses and a million reasons why Ellie should hate her all fluttering through her mind at once, cut through with that brief sure warmth of her, a glimpse of something completely different. She opens her mouth, just a little. Ellie hovers there, not saying anything for just a moment, her eyes very green.

Eponine thinks to all her horrible thoughts, shut the fuck up, and leans back in so she can kiss her back. A moment's time and Eponine laughs, soft, and moves her guitar away, tipping her head into Ellie's hand on her face like it's home, like it's air, and Ellie grins into it and pulls her closer.

[and_survive]

holy

fucking shit

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah??? aaaaaah!! THIS IS SO GOOD WHAT THE FUCK

"I know a song about New Orleans," Ellie says thoughtfully, and Eponine says, "Everyone knows some song about New Orleans."

this is my favourite apart from the whole thing which is also my favourite

i made this comment originally to the whole meme by accident which is where i'm at

[daughterofawolf]

!!!! aaah I'm so glad you like it so much :D :D :D :D I had SO much fun working in this universe, somehow it managed to open itself right up to a pretty straight AU for Eponine (and now i have all these ideas about the backstory of the NOLA QZ riots and little stupid stuff) but getting to write out them getting to know each other and get to the kiss with Ellie was just SO. FUN.

lol, I did enjoy that line XD

Aw, I'm so pleased. I was a little nervous this was turning into something entirely self-indulgent so I'm really, really glad that you like it and also that I didn't butcher Ellie's dialogue so much that it threw you or something. <3333

[herownway]

Jessica Drew

[wantthatmagicback]

Laura Moon