Wednesday: Female Characters

[beth-soprano.livejournal.com]

Hello, beth_soprano again! I can't believe it's already Wednesday.

Today's theme is female characters.

Rules:

You can leave up to five prompts, with no more than three prompts per fandom. If your prompt is filled, you can leave another prompt.

No spoilers in your prompts until a week after the original material has been released. If your fic contains spoilers, leave a warning in bold and three spaces at the top of your comment.

Please format your prompt correctly! (Our code monkeys like their sanity :D)

Format examples:
Star Trek XI, Uhura, words
Avatar: the Last Airbender, Toph, earthquake
Sanctuary, Kate, telling her family about Jimmy

Don't forget to check out the lonely prompts if none of today's prompts catch your eyes.

Have fun!

[tag=femalecharacters]

Comments

[beth-soprano.livejournal.com]

Sanctuary, Kate, telling her family about Jimmy

[beth-soprano.livejournal.com]

Star Trek XI, Uhura, words

hope this will do

[einodia.livejournal.com]

a day's work.

People are always saying things.   Sometimes, they mean more than they say. 

"Uhura, now!"  Noun, predicate!  An imperative sentence, structure conveying command.  Tone and pitch expressing a tightly-wound temper.  Experience with this speaker (and the red alert clanging in her ears) suggests he is two phase cannon blasts away from tightly-wound panic.  

Sometimes they say only what they mean.  "Working on it!"  Intransitive verb, preposition, object.  A declarative sentence, expressing determination.  Although she may have included "Don't ask me again, Captain" in the subtext.  He may have picked up on her frustration visually, or he might have had a mental counter on her probability of striking him at any given moment; whatever the reason, he kept the bridge relatively quiet for the final few minutes she needed to translate the language from the subspace transmission sent received moments before their attackers had introduced themselves as such.

"They came from one of the moons by 892-IV.  Just passing through, but they were intending to collect something they left behind...they think we took it!"  Subject, predicate, dependent clause after dependent clause, declaration.  Aspect expressing complex system of temporal measurements.  Antipassive diathesis indicating an ergative-absolutive language structure similar to Sumarian or Tibetian.  Translation will involve the breaking apart and reconstruction of grammar into careful two-way exposition.  Possibly even into peaceful negotiation, if Kirk isn't feeling too prickly. 

This is Nyota's job.

[beth-soprano.livejournal.com]

Avatar: the Last Airbender, Toph, earthquake

[lunasol28.livejournal.com]

Her ability enabled her to feel the earth in ways that nobody else could but she had never felt this before.

Toph had never felt the Earth quake

Earth never bended (until today). She had been standing on the precipice, arms spread wide, it was one of the few times that she got to be by herself. She was pretending to be a bird, she hated flying but birds got to be free. They got to go where they wanted without anything holding them still; she wish she had that.

And then she felt it. She felt the Earth bend and quake beneath her feet and she felt him.

"Hey, what are you doing?"

She was afraid to turn but she did anyway and when she looked into his eyes everything just stopped. Her breath stopped, her heart stopped, and she felt (more like saw) this red fissure crackle from her feet to his and then straighten and solidify. This boy and her were connected, she knew that, she could feel that. She, the overprotected blind girl, and he, the scrawny boy with the weird blue arrow down his head, were connected.

"Hey, do you want to fly with me?"

Toph shook her head no.

"Come on. We'll be like birds and we'll go anywhere you want to."

She bit her lip. She wanted to be like a bird, she wanted to be free. Nodding her head before she could change her mind she walked to the boy. Within seconds they were in the air and it felt...it felt..terrifying and she was clinging to him like her life depended on it (which it did) but she felt like a bird. Like she wouldn't ever have to go back home with the rules and the gilded cage they forced her into. As a bird she could just be Toph and no one else.

Her hand went out to feel the air move across it...but she didn't feel anything but her blanket. There was a trembling of her lip before the tears came. Throwing her blanket aside she felt her way to her parent's room. She could sort of see by using the floor but she hadn't mastered it yet.

"Mommy," she whispered when she got to her side of the bed.

Her mother stirred and saw the tears in her daughter's eyes. Without hesitation she pulled her onto the bed and into her arms.

"What's a matter little one?"

Toph sniffed. "I want to be a bird."

Her mother rubbed her hair. "Baby, you are a bird. You're our little bird who will stay with us. Our little bird to protect.

She pressed further into her mother. She wasn't their little bird and she wasn't a bird yet. Birds were strong and she wasn't strong but she would be. She would make herself stronger so when that blue arrow boy came she could fly away.

I'm not a bird but I will be, she thought with conviction.

[zortified.livejournal.com]

Leverage, Parker, one bridge she's never jumped from

[zortified.livejournal.com]

BtVS, Faith, she really does wish she could just be the Slayer she was trained to be

[helly-uk.livejournal.com]

Faith was the first one to e suprised when the potentials had nominated her their leader instead of Buffy. She never thought she'd be good enough to be considdered the Slayer. Really the true slayer, the better of the two.

Truthfully? she wasn't sure was good enough now. But those girls beleived her, and that meant something. Somehow.

Faith wished more than anything that she could be the slayer they wanted her to be.

She had allways wished more than anything that she could be the Slayer she was trained to be.

But she never was.

From the moment she turned up in Sunnydale for the very first time, she was painfully aware that she was not what was expected of a slayer.

She was not Buffy.

Was had infuriated her at the time, was the fact that Buffy had never been trained. Buffy had no prior knowledge of this world. And yet she was better than faith.

Faith had long since accepted the fact that it was a rule of nature that Buffy would always be number one, and faith second.

Untill now. When a group of teenaged girls threw nature upon its head and chose Faith first.

Faith wasn't sure she could be what they wanted. what they needed.

But she would damn well try to be Number one, and do it well.

For the girls.

For herself.

[glorious-spoon.livejournal.com]

SPN, Jess, family traditions

[glorious-spoon.livejournal.com]

Leverage, Parker/any, Parker has a protective streak.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

When Parker saw Eliot go down, she wasn't remembering that she was supposed to be one of the good guys anymore. She forgotten about modeling her behavior on Hardison and Nate's. She forgot about Sophie's lessons in talking to people and acting nice.

When she saw her Eliot go down, all bets were off. She knew about car jacking and explosives and how to kill a man so that he couldn't see you and he couldn't scream. And even if Eliot got back up and even if Sophie and Nate took them for all they had and even if Hardison made their lives a living hell, Parker would make them pay in pain.

And she would never tell anyone.

[glorious-spoon.livejournal.com]

Firefly, Kaylee, bartering for supplies

[zortified.livejournal.com]

Ironman, Pepper Potts, she's had offers

Pepper And The Tuesday Turmoil.

[einodia.livejournal.com]

Pepper And The Tuesday Turmoil.

Today Tony set a stone fountain on fire.  He insisted he had no idea how it happened, other than the obvious connection to his attempts to install a flamethrower to the Iron Man suit, but really stone should only have problems being whipped if involved are volcanic levels of heat, or anything above 1500C, which was possibly higher than the temperature he was working with, and anyway stone usually melts, so how was he supposed to know what would happen? 

Pepper thinks there was a time when she wouldn't have been able to parse that sentence, and wonders how that version of herself lived.  She probably got to eat breakfast every day.  She probably remembered things like whether or not she would have time to eat breakfast every day.  Tony Stark is taking up too much of her life. 

On days like this - so, roughly thrice biweekly - Pepper delegates more duties than she usually would to various Stark Industries office interns and steals away a few hours to herself.  She lunches with old friends who tease her about disappearing into the world of corporations and glamorous parties.  She takes them window-shopping for things none of them need and could buy, if they asked her to. 
She thinks of the stack of job offers cluttering her inbox, promising stability and weekends not on-call and bosses who wouldn't need her help tying their shoes.  She thinks of the extended family she barely sees and could get to know if she had the inclination. 

She thinks of her present-day prestige.  No one has a job like this, a souped-up secretary with a C.E.O.'s salary and a lover's influence over the magpie mind behind everything this multimillion corporation does.  She's spent years diverting proceeds from weapons sales into charity accounts, into slowly raising the wages S.I. pays its factory workers; her desktop is littered with budgetary pie charts.  She's built such a life here.  She's needed.  She's important.  She is the right-hand woman of the most powerful business conglomerate who also happens to be a vigilante superhero.  That she knows of. 

It all comes down to loyalty.  Tony Stark plucked her from the secretarial pool and gave her a chance to prove her skills to herself.  He is single-handedly responsible for every reason she has become qualified to run a company, even if he is also responsible for every reason she has to quit and just start her own more environmentally and socially conscious business.  She can't leave. 

[schizoauthoress.livejournal.com]

DCU, Wonder Woman, meeting Ferdinand

[schizoauthoress.livejournal.com]

DCU, Vanessa Kapatelis, Daddy's girl

[oteap.livejournal.com]

Life, Reese, risk

[oteap.livejournal.com]

Dexter, Deb, fucked up

It's alright to include male characters as well, right?

[sycophantastic.livejournal.com]

Supernatural, Dean/Lisa, your apple pie don't taste too nice

[rocketgirl2.livejournal.com]

Castle, Beckett, she hadn't always wanted to be a cop

[alcetis.livejournal.com]

Sometimes she remembers the uncertainty of youth with a faint sense of loss. It seems like a distant ideal now, not at all resembling the frantic fear she had felt it to be at the time. Every second of every day she had wanted to grow out of the gnawing sense of dread and into her place, her niche, where everything would be alright and she would be happy and useful.

But that's not how it happened. She didn't slowly understand her calling in life, there was no epiphany, no realization that left her full and content. There was just sudden emptiness and a set of blinders that let her see nothing else.

She remembers her sketch books, penciled drawings made after hours spent examining a friend's jawline, the way the light reflected off his eyes, the soft sweep of his hair. Maybe she would be an artist. Maybe she would set up an easel outside of a trendy coffee shop day after day and just paint what she saw. Maybe if she tried hard enough she could capture the beauty of the world on her paper, scratched out in charcoal or illuminated in watercolours.

Or maybe not. She also remembers career day, and the woman with a stethoscope in all white talking passionately about saving lives, and her kindergarten teacher who still knew her name all those years later.

Beckett hadn't always wanted to be a cop. She had never even thought about it; although as a girl she had thought very little. She didn't know what she wanted to do. She remembers that unsure feeling she felt when she looked at a table full of college applications, like being lost in the Bronx late at night and not knowing which way is safest to turn, not knowing which voices to follow.

But things change, people change. She was never given a true choice. She loves her job but so much of that love is born from hate.

Beckett hadn't always wanted to be a cop. It had only taken a uniformed man a couple of softly spoken words to change everything.

Sometimes she misses the uncertainty.

[tigriswolf]

Biblical, Eve, mother of knowledge, granddaughter of dust

Strength in weakness

[rise-your-dead.livejournal.com]

She is molded of him and lives knowing it with her every step. And with every step, Eve wishes she could take back her choice, to erase her connection to sin, to reclaim her name as something wholly hers, to have the apple whole and on her palm.

Never will she be as bold as Lilith, willing to spurn Adam and the Garden. Every day, she wishes for strength, the strength to keep walking, protection against her fatal weaknesses.

[sycophantastic.livejournal.com]

Bones, Brennan, it's surprising how much she misses her life at the Jeffersonian

Fic: Home

[readingredhead.livejournal.com]

She was never the one to feel homesick before. "Homesick" implied a home to which one wanted to return, and though she'd been through so many houses in her life, the real homes had been few and far between. She'd been starting to think that her flat in DC was a home - a place for everything and everything in its place - but now she knows it's just another one of the many places she came back to at the end of the day, looking for little more than a place to rest her head.

Now, she rests it in a tent pitched in the shadow of an active volcano in the midst of a tropical forest. Now, she knows that comfort, while favorable when available, is not a necessity. She's done this sort of thing before, and the excitement of discovery runs so high (even if she doesn't always show it) that the discomfort of escaping civilization is little more than a minor inconvenience. The air here is rich with the smell of spices, thick with moisture more often than not, and sometimes when she's far from the excavation site and no one's looking she stoops down and gathers a handful of soil, just to feel it slide between her ungloved fingers. She doesn't get much sleep, that's not new - but instead of being kept awake by fear and anger and pain, kept in the lab to solve one more case and track down one more killer, she's so immersed in uncovering the secrets of humanity's past that if she sleeps she's afraid she'll miss something.

And she does miss things in sleep, in flashes - the swish-beep sound her card key made when she swiped in, glass and steel industrial architecture, rows and rows of bones all clean and bared of flesh, the disinfectant tang that was her only partner for many years of late night shifts - but then she wakes up and brushes it aside like she swats away the insects that always get in past the netting. She has a job to do.

But she had a job to do there, too - and she's only just beginning to realize it was more than that. Because while she only sees the lab when she's asleep, the team that made it her home are constant waking presences. One day it's a smile at the thought that Hodgins would share her liking for the soil that everyone else complains about getting stuck beneath their fingers. The next, they uncover a skull - a real humanoid skull! and she gets to hold it! - and in the heart of her excitement is the thought of what Angela and her computer could do to transform this brittle bone into living flesh. On her first day, she caught herself psychoanalyzing her new colleagues with a method frighteningly akin to Sweets's. Just yesterday, she overheard one of her scientists recording a message for her daughter back home and she couldn't help but think of Cam and wonder how she's doing without her team.

Every day, she thinks about Booth, in the most incongruous situations, and she's starting to think some of his religious illogic must have rubbed off on her over the years, because each time the thoughts get closer and closer to being prayers - to keep him safe, to keep him sane, and mostly just to bring him home.

She's still not sure what exactly "home" means to her, but she's all about logic, and it can't be a coincidence that whenever she thinks about him, that word's never far behind.

[tigriswolf]

Supernatural, Lilith, she died knowing she'd won

[tigriswolf]

NCIS, Ziva (gen), Americans are strange

[sycophantastic.livejournal.com]

Wonderfalls, Jaye/Eric, "NO. No talking from things that can't talk at my wedding. I thought we had a deal this time!"

[tigriswolf]

Leverage, Sophie, she's much more dangerous than any of them (even Nate) expect, and when her team gets hurt... well.

[sycophantastic.livejournal.com]

X-Files/V, Scully & Anna, any

[tigriswolf]

Avatar: The Last Airbender, Azula, command the lightning-burn down the world

and now i know a lot more about whips and whipcracking then before.

[einodia.livejournal.com]

Better Than A Sonic Boom.

Mother was wrong.  Naturally.  It is because of the ruthless precision that stupid woman never knew how to maintain that the world is my oyster, not her favorite's. 

"You breathe too quickly" Li - or is it Lo? - archly informs me from her vantage point above.

"To command the lightening, you must command your thoughts" her sister adds, too perceptively.  I would command the lightening to lash them for impudence, but their tea table on the balcony overlooking my training space is farther than my current ability to reach. 

That's why they chose it. 

"My thoughts are perfectly in order, which you would be able to recognize had you any experience with the concept," is a good enough barb for now.  They cackle, but I filter them out, angle my head haughtily.  Their - accurate - babbling is not my most pressing concern. 

My idiot brother's betrayal, on the other hand, is.  So sloppily done, and with nothing to show for his snooping, dear Zu-Zu has no style.  No precision.  No power. 

Not like mine.  Exhalation under strict regulation, I lower an arm, pushing my breath like it's spiraling from my lungs up through shoulder, through elbow.  visualize your energy twisting, coarse, like knotted ropes  My body is a whip, and I snap straight elbow and wrist, jutting out two fingers - hot blue tails follow the cracker's direction, leaving scorch marks where'er it's handler trails.

I jerk my arm sideways, keeping the joints in perfect alignment, just to hear the cracking of my shoulder when I sweep my lightening-tipped limb down towards my torso, then back up and out. 

Everywhere my whip has trailed lies furled ash.

[bishojo-kitsune.livejournal.com]

HIMYM/BtVS, Lily/Normal Again!Buffy, Lily goes to visit an old friend at the hospital

[bishojo-kitsune.livejournal.com]

Tru Calling, Tru, Breakdown