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New Fic: Packaging Hope (Criminal Minds, PG)
Title: Packaging Hope
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rivestra
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Rating: PG
Length: 1,100 words, complete
Warnings: It's an apocalypse; people die.
A/N: Pinch hit story forafteriwake in the 2010 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
apocalyptothon. Many thinks to snarkgoddess for tense wrangling and other beta duties.
Summary: Emily calls them dispossessed fairy tales.
Disclaimer: Written purely for fun; no profit or harm intended. All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners.
~~~~~~~~~*******~~~~~~~~
Jack pulls at my hand, and I look down. He whispers, his voice only just returning from his latest fever. He looks up at the bleak sky and wants to know when it will be warm again.
I know better than to spill all the facts onto him, but I still have to bite my tongue. It's not always easy, now, to remember.
I want to open my mouth and let my cold, scientific hopelessness flow out onto his tiny frame. I want to shake him a bit and say, "Well, little boy, India and Pakistan reacted to the slow crawl of designer plague by leveling mountains and sending radioactive dust spewing up into the atmosphere, reducing the sun's bright rays to a watery haze."
Some days I can barely stop myself.
Protecting him from other things is easy. It's second nature to slide him behind me when our perimeter is breached, simple instinct to shield him when the gunfire starts or to rush him inside, away from the toxic rain. I know I don't want him to know about the poison in the sky above him or about all the places he can never go because they're too contaminated.
And it won't be for him if I open wide and tell him about the way Garcia brazenly lied to the rest of us, sending us scurrying off to our families in the wake of a vengeful - and imaginary - serial killer. Or how our bosses sabotaged and harassed her until she locked herself in with her computers, desperate to collate enough data to make the CDC see that she was right, that the incubation was freakishly long, but the pattern was there.
Someday, though, I'll tell him. And I'll tell him how Morgan saw through her and refused to be fooled like the rest of us. I'll tell Jack how Derek stayed at her side, even though she'd locked him out. How Derek fought his way to the roof to get power back to her systems so she could send everything she'd collected in one last, desperate burst to the CDC - just before the FBI, in all its paranoid glory, raided the building and rained fire down on them.
He'll need to know all that someday – but not yet.
Really, the very hardest thing for me is trying to pull something happy out of my mind when Jack looks up at me and says, "Uncle Spencer? Tell me a story?"
I've been digging back into my own childhood whenever he asks. I've told him about his namesake and the beanstalk and about Gretel and the gingerbread house. I've done my best to mimic the lyrically descriptive rhythms of Tolkien and the chaotic rhymes of Dr Seuss. They fall from my mouth like chalk, though, and Jack hears it in my voice.
Emily called them dispossessed fairy tales last night.
We were sitting, staring into the fire, waiting to hear something good through the shortwave. Waiting for the others to come back whole. She was babbling, high on our small store of morphine and her frustration at being stuck at camp with me, but her words made me realize that we need – that Jack needs – something different now, in this desolate time.
Hope and morality packaged for the didactic, globally plasticized world in which I came of age isn't going to work for him.
This afternoon, when I tuck him in for his nap, I tell him about Emily instead of Frodo. I tell him how we'd all been hungry and how she thought long and hard and realized that the National Guard had been some of the first hit by the plague. She poured over the maps and found a likely place in Adelphi. She poured over the last of the newspapers and knew that Maryland's unit had been on maneuvers when they'd been hit, far from their base, far from their caches of supplies. She took JJ and our natural gas-burning truck, and headed off to scout.
She'd hoped the place would be empty, but Jack already knows that she was wrong. I hold Jack's hand when I tell him about the ambush and about how Emily was captured, barely inside the gate. He knows she got away, but not how she talked her way around the men, and he smiles when I tell him how she convinced them she was alone and weak. She watched them closely as they bragged and postured, taking note of everything while JJ waited outside for her signal.
The men said they were just farmers, but Emily's keen eyes noticed the way they held their guard-issue guns, loose and secure. They said they'd take care of her, but Emily saw the way the women in their camp trembled and cowered, hiding bruises and taking great pains to avoid being alone with the men. They said they just needed shelter, but Emily heard their radios crackle with words like "package" and "White Oak" and "half-life", and she wondered what the Navy had siloed just a few miles away.
Jack's too-awake eyes trace Emily limping across the camp as I describe how she snuck into their operations center and grabbed everything she could so we can stop them. She passed it to JJ through the fence and when they grabbed her from behind, she told JJ to run but couldn't look to see if she had. Emily kicked and kicked at the men until she got free and was almost over the fence – so close! – when the bullet shattered her ankle. Jack flinches when I tell him that (even though he already knows that too) , and he asks in a small voice, "And that's when Aunt JJ came back, right, Uncle Spence?"
I reassure him, "Absolutely," and rub his back a little, knowing he won't really settle until I give him an ending and wishing I could. Instead, I tell him how JJ came back ("Even though she wasn't supposed to," Emily adds from where she's paused to eavesdrop nearby) and stopped the men who were closing in on Emily again. I tell him how she helped Emily over the fence and how they ran back to the truck and drove home faster than a hawk can fly.
Jack already knows how worried his daddy was about what Emily brought back. He already knows how his daddy gathered up every able body they'd managed to ally themselves with and took off for Adelphi, but he didn't know about the magic RPGs they'd taken with them . I tell him all about how far an RPG can throw a grenade and how that means his daddy doesn't need to actually get close to stop the bad men.
I tell him the magic will protect his daddy, and I rub his back until he falls asleep. I hope like hell I was telling the truth.
We make our own fairy tales now, and the endings are up to us.
Still, it's just past two in the afternoon, and I keep expecting to see the sun.
~fin~
afteriwake's Request: Criminal Minds. Details: Remember that vault full of biological weapons from season 4? There's a couple missing now, and they've destroyed 75% of the US population, and it's spreading. Current season's team. Please keep most of them alive (but especially Hotch, Reid and Prentiss). Jack being involved as a survivor would be nice as well.
I doubt this odd little thing is what you had in mind,afteriwake, but here's hoping it works for you, anyway!
~ Fic Index ~
Author:
rivestraFandom: Criminal Minds
Rating: PG
Length: 1,100 words, complete
Warnings: It's an apocalypse; people die.
A/N: Pinch hit story for
afteriwake in the 2010 apocalyptothon. Many thinks to snarkgoddess for tense wrangling and other beta duties.Summary: Emily calls them dispossessed fairy tales.
Disclaimer: Written purely for fun; no profit or harm intended. All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners.
Jack pulls at my hand, and I look down. He whispers, his voice only just returning from his latest fever. He looks up at the bleak sky and wants to know when it will be warm again.
I know better than to spill all the facts onto him, but I still have to bite my tongue. It's not always easy, now, to remember.
I want to open my mouth and let my cold, scientific hopelessness flow out onto his tiny frame. I want to shake him a bit and say, "Well, little boy, India and Pakistan reacted to the slow crawl of designer plague by leveling mountains and sending radioactive dust spewing up into the atmosphere, reducing the sun's bright rays to a watery haze."
Some days I can barely stop myself.
Protecting him from other things is easy. It's second nature to slide him behind me when our perimeter is breached, simple instinct to shield him when the gunfire starts or to rush him inside, away from the toxic rain. I know I don't want him to know about the poison in the sky above him or about all the places he can never go because they're too contaminated.
And it won't be for him if I open wide and tell him about the way Garcia brazenly lied to the rest of us, sending us scurrying off to our families in the wake of a vengeful - and imaginary - serial killer. Or how our bosses sabotaged and harassed her until she locked herself in with her computers, desperate to collate enough data to make the CDC see that she was right, that the incubation was freakishly long, but the pattern was there.
Someday, though, I'll tell him. And I'll tell him how Morgan saw through her and refused to be fooled like the rest of us. I'll tell Jack how Derek stayed at her side, even though she'd locked him out. How Derek fought his way to the roof to get power back to her systems so she could send everything she'd collected in one last, desperate burst to the CDC - just before the FBI, in all its paranoid glory, raided the building and rained fire down on them.
He'll need to know all that someday – but not yet.
Really, the very hardest thing for me is trying to pull something happy out of my mind when Jack looks up at me and says, "Uncle Spencer? Tell me a story?"
I've been digging back into my own childhood whenever he asks. I've told him about his namesake and the beanstalk and about Gretel and the gingerbread house. I've done my best to mimic the lyrically descriptive rhythms of Tolkien and the chaotic rhymes of Dr Seuss. They fall from my mouth like chalk, though, and Jack hears it in my voice.
Emily called them dispossessed fairy tales last night.
We were sitting, staring into the fire, waiting to hear something good through the shortwave. Waiting for the others to come back whole. She was babbling, high on our small store of morphine and her frustration at being stuck at camp with me, but her words made me realize that we need – that Jack needs – something different now, in this desolate time.
Hope and morality packaged for the didactic, globally plasticized world in which I came of age isn't going to work for him.
This afternoon, when I tuck him in for his nap, I tell him about Emily instead of Frodo. I tell him how we'd all been hungry and how she thought long and hard and realized that the National Guard had been some of the first hit by the plague. She poured over the maps and found a likely place in Adelphi. She poured over the last of the newspapers and knew that Maryland's unit had been on maneuvers when they'd been hit, far from their base, far from their caches of supplies. She took JJ and our natural gas-burning truck, and headed off to scout.
She'd hoped the place would be empty, but Jack already knows that she was wrong. I hold Jack's hand when I tell him about the ambush and about how Emily was captured, barely inside the gate. He knows she got away, but not how she talked her way around the men, and he smiles when I tell him how she convinced them she was alone and weak. She watched them closely as they bragged and postured, taking note of everything while JJ waited outside for her signal.
The men said they were just farmers, but Emily's keen eyes noticed the way they held their guard-issue guns, loose and secure. They said they'd take care of her, but Emily saw the way the women in their camp trembled and cowered, hiding bruises and taking great pains to avoid being alone with the men. They said they just needed shelter, but Emily heard their radios crackle with words like "package" and "White Oak" and "half-life", and she wondered what the Navy had siloed just a few miles away.
Jack's too-awake eyes trace Emily limping across the camp as I describe how she snuck into their operations center and grabbed everything she could so we can stop them. She passed it to JJ through the fence and when they grabbed her from behind, she told JJ to run but couldn't look to see if she had. Emily kicked and kicked at the men until she got free and was almost over the fence – so close! – when the bullet shattered her ankle. Jack flinches when I tell him that (even though he already knows that too) , and he asks in a small voice, "And that's when Aunt JJ came back, right, Uncle Spence?"
I reassure him, "Absolutely," and rub his back a little, knowing he won't really settle until I give him an ending and wishing I could. Instead, I tell him how JJ came back ("Even though she wasn't supposed to," Emily adds from where she's paused to eavesdrop nearby) and stopped the men who were closing in on Emily again. I tell him how she helped Emily over the fence and how they ran back to the truck and drove home faster than a hawk can fly.
Jack already knows how worried his daddy was about what Emily brought back. He already knows how his daddy gathered up every able body they'd managed to ally themselves with and took off for Adelphi, but he didn't know about the magic RPGs they'd taken with them . I tell him all about how far an RPG can throw a grenade and how that means his daddy doesn't need to actually get close to stop the bad men.
I tell him the magic will protect his daddy, and I rub his back until he falls asleep. I hope like hell I was telling the truth.
We make our own fairy tales now, and the endings are up to us.
Still, it's just past two in the afternoon, and I keep expecting to see the sun.
~fin~
afteriwake's Request: Criminal Minds. Details: Remember that vault full of biological weapons from season 4? There's a couple missing now, and they've destroyed 75% of the US population, and it's spreading. Current season's team. Please keep most of them alive (but especially Hotch, Reid and Prentiss). Jack being involved as a survivor would be nice as well.I doubt this odd little thing is what you had in mind,
afteriwake, but here's hoping it works for you, anyway!~ Fic Index ~
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I read your prompt and just started typing. Sometimes my brain picks a random direction and heads out. I had no idea where it was going when I started typing, so I'm extra glad that it worked for you!
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Of course, it's not always exactly useful. For instance I'm 50k words into Winchester Synchronicity (my SPN post-apocalyptic freaking EPIC). I know what's next, I know where it's going and I'm motiveated to write... yet I keep getting distracted by passing freaking butterflies.
Some of it's the time commitment (shorter stories take so much less), but I think a lot of it is that blank page thing. Like I said above, I know where it's going, I just need to get it down on paper. Watching it all come together is fun, and there's a huge sense of accomplishment as it does (feels like grownup writing!), but.. it's also a lot of work and not a lot of that sense of impending adventure.
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