Rather-A-Meal Fiction

[fic: Life on Mars] Turnabout

2008-01-04T15:11:32Z

TITLE: Turnabout
WORD COUNT: 1417
STYLE/WARNINGS: Crack. Brown Cortina/NC-17. Annie/Maya. AND LOOK WHO PROVIDED THE PROMPTS. Spoilers, such as they may be, for S2.08.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I'm very very sorry. This cannot possibly be overstated, which I just tried to typo as "oversated," which may also be true. *eg* For fiandyfic, in response to this challenge.

TURNABOUT

"When I said 'Stay forever,' I didn't mean 'bring your girlfriend from the future back with you!" Annie finally exploded.

"But...wha...I didn't! I couldn't! I can't even figure out how to get myself back to the future, let alone bring someone else here!" Sam yelled back. 1973 had made him quite good at this yelling thing.

"I see 1973 has made you quite good at telling us how you really feel, Sam," Maya said, bitterly, as she watched the row taking place just to the left of her and leaned against the bar, lapping rather steadily at her pint of bitter in hopes that the faster she drunk it, the better it would taste.

"I...I can't even be in the same room as the two of you!" Sam said, throwing his hands up in disgust and flinging a sodden shower of angst at any and all occupants of the pub around him. He huffed and stomped and left the Railway Arms in a very hurried clatter, nearly tripping over his Cuban heels as he lost all composure.

“What do you suppose all that was about?” Maya said to no-one in particular, merely having a private joke with herself about what a lunatic her ex was.

“He does that all the time. You get used to it. I’d think you would be used to it, actually,” Annie turned back to her drink, tamping the stirrer down and around and swirling the lime about in her gin and tonic. Usually she just had whatever those around her were having, wanting to do her best to fit in and be one of the team, but when she was on her own, she quite liked the taste.

“He was never that way with me,” Maya hastily downed the rest of her bitter, finding the bottom much more palatable than the top.

“So you’re really from the future?” Annie responded, simply because she couldn’t think what else to say.

“Yep.” Maya looked sideways at Annie and thought about the hours it must take to get her hair into shape in the morning.

“You catch aliens?” Annie asked, a sudden mischievous twinkle in her eye.

Maya spluttered, and it was a good thing she’d finished her drink, or else it would have been everywhere. A dot of foam flecked her upper lip as she spoke. “What do you mean by that?”

Annie blushed, aware that what she’d said could be a bit misconstrued. “I was making a joke. Sam. Madness. Little green men. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…” she trailed off.

“No, no, it’s OK. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, it’s just your DCI rather rubbed me the wrong way back there. I’m not usually overly sensitive; that’s Sam’s job. Back home, anyway.” Maya sniffed, wondering whether to chance another pint of the same or to try something else. She peered at Annie, then at her drink.

“That any good?” she nodded in the direction of Annie’s gin and tonic.

“Oh, I much prefer the bit—“ Annie coughed, interrupting her automatic response.

“No you don’t. I can see how you’re enjoying that. I think I’ll have one of those, too.” Maya said, and ordered up.
******

“Well, I suppose you could stay at my place. You’ve got to go somewhere, haven’t you? I’ve got room,” Annie sounded much happier than she felt. This was still awfully odd, considering the situation.

“Are you sure? I mean I know this must be really strange for you. At least I’ve got the additional strangeness of time-travel added in to distract me, you know…” Maya smiled wryly, companionably slipping her arm through Annie’s as they walked down the street, slightly inebriated but not seriously so. At least, so the both of them thought of themselves.

******

After they got to Annie’s flat, they had a nice cup of tea with a little whisky poured in to ensure a good night’s sleep. Most everyone down the station thought Annie was such a nice, sweet girl, immune to all the pressures that must surely be placed on a woman in her tenuous position. Truth was, she had more hiding places for her flask than even the Gene Genie could ever have dreamt of. The phrase “like water off a duck’s back” often came to mind when talking of how Annie dealt with the insults, but in truth, she didn’t hear a lot of it. She’d made herself immune, and it kept her on-task and on her way to the top. And also meant she could definitely have drunk her DCI under the table, but of course that was something she liked to keep under her hat. Which she didn’t wear anymore, she just really liked thinking of the phrase, as it made her giggle a little inside in a way few other things did.

One cup of tea soon turned into two, and by around two in the morning, they’d somehow finished the whole bottle of whisky. Annie could tell Maya wasn’t as seasoned a drinker as she was when she was going through Annie’s records and trying to find something good to listen to a moment prior.

“Hey…” Maya paused, exaggeratedly, trying to think of something that would have existed in 1973 that she’d want to listen to. “You got any Ladyspluff Black Mambazo?”

“Have I got any what?” Annie looked around, bewildered, laughing hysterically.

“Nevermind,” Maya’s ears had a rather adorable habit of turning red at the tips when she was embarrassed, which she was now, very much so. She never would have expected to like Annie, especially given the circumstances under which she was meeting her, but she was rather alarmed to find that she did---and more than she would ever have guessed. But, like Sam, she was rather good at pushing down her feelings when it suited her, and it definitely suited her now.

That is, until Annie made it very clear that she was thinking something along the lines of what Maya was thinking.

“Know what would be really terrible of us? “ Annie suddenly said, in a whispery, low, throaty, conspiratorial voice.

“No, what?” Maya said, leaning in closer in order to hear what Annie was saying.

“If we made Sam come round to my flat in the morning looking for us, and he found us…in flagrante delicto. Well, seemingly, I mean,” she added hastily, not wanting to alarm Maya overmuch.

“Perhaps I could get used to this time after all. That’s the most evil thing I’ve heard in awhile, and he totally deserves it. Besides, it’s about time us girls got some play, right?” Maya, too, now grinned devilishly and it was quite a gorgeous sight.

“All girls together, as they say.” Annie said, lightly putting her hands on Maya’s waist and drawing her in closer so that she could kiss her.

“Yes. Together.” Maya giggled as she firmly placed her mouth on Annie’s and pulled Annie closer to her.
Their tongues entwined, and each discovered the other was quite a good kisser, and both wondered around the same time why Sam was such an idiot---only neither of them knew the other was thinking this at the time, of course. After awhile, Annie didn’t even care if Maya mussed her hair or not, and indeed her hair did become quite mussed in the act of eagerly nibbling at Maya’s horizontal fishcake whilst eagerly delving down deep in search of the prized lovebutton with each piercing probe of her tongue. It wasn’t terribly long before Maya returned the favour, although in her defence, she did also spend a great amount of time sucking and laving the great reddish-pink cherry drops that were Annie’s very excitable nipples.

It was clear, by this point, that neither of them was acting, and that they were both truly enjoying themselves. But the set-up was still perfect, and when Sam and the Guv burst in on the girls in the morning, Sam was, for once, rendered utterly speechless. The Guv, on the other hand, insisted on addressing Annie as "Andy” for the rest of the day, and clapping her on the shoulder rather alarmingly, all the while insisting that Samantha go get them both a nice cup of tea so they could do some thorough investigation on their most recent cases.

slap me on the patio

2004-09-04T18:40:31Z

The following is an HP shortfic, inspired by some graffiti witnessed in real life on a stall door in a public women's restroom. Enjoy.

Reel Around the Fountain

It was somewhere during the course of the fourth Hogsmeade weekend that year that Hermione Granger noticed something slightly amiss.

"It's a bit strange, don't you think, Ron?" she whispered urgently while simultaneously grasping Ron Weasley's left robe sleeve and tugging so hard it pulled both his shoulder seams askew.

"What's strange?" Ron said, only it sounded more like "Mwhaahraange?" as he had quite a large mouthful of toffee. He chewed a bit and managed to swallow most of the sticky, succulent sweetness currently filling his mouth. "And will you STOP that? If you rip my robes, you're buying me new ones," he huffed.

"SORRY," Hermione hissed. "I'd think you'd be a little more concerned about someone who's meant to be your best FRIEND than about your clothes, Ron," she glared.

"Huh? Harry, y'mean? What about him?" This was about the point where, had he not been in Hermione's viewing range, Ron's eyes would have rolled back so far in his head the whites would be visible. Not again, he thought.

"You mean you haven't even noticed?" Hermione scoffed, disbelieving that anyone could possibly be so dense.

"What, has he got horns, or purple spots, or feathers or something?" Ron snapped back.

"He might just as well have done, for all his best friend has been paying attention!" Hermione spat back.

"I'm not his only best friend, you know." Ron shot daggers at Hermione with both eyes and vocal tone.

Hermione was momentarily abashed, but quickly recovered. "Well, at any rate, didn't it used to be that we'd all three of us be having this conversation right now?"

"What, talk of Harry right in front of him, you mean?" Ron looked incredulous.

"If you're not going to even try to have a reasonable conversation, Ronald..." Hermione could look and sound eerily like Professor McGonagall when she exerted herself this way.

Ron suddenly pulled a face as though he'd just smelled something utterly foul. "You don't suppose he's trying to...trying to..." he spluttered, unable to finish whatever thought was making him turn so red in the face.

"Trying to what, Ron?" Hermione raised an eyebrow.

"Trying to...you know...set us up?" Ron whispered, afraid someone might hear.

"Oh, honestly, Ron! Isn't anything ever not about you?!?" Hermione said, accidentally-on-purpose slapping his hand out of the way as she did so.

"Hang on, think about it a moment. Why else would he keep abandoning us whenever we go into Hogsmeade?" Ron scrunched up his face in thought.

******

"You don't think we've been followed, do you?" Draco whispered, unsuccessfully trying his best to look like he was doing something other than whimpering pathetically.

"By whom? Crabbe and Goyle've never got the brains to notice your absence as being at all suspicious, and Ron and Hermione are probably too busy bickering to have noticed me, either." Harry peered closely at Draco's quivering upper lip over his glasses.

"Oh, stop, you look much too much like that old bat McGonagall when you do that, Potter..." Draco squinched his eyes shut and made mock-fending-off gestures with his hands.

Harry arched an eyebrow and continued. "Besides which, supposing someone figures out we've Disapparated, how would that person figure out where we've Apparated?"

"I suppose you have a point." Draco conceded, then smirked. "It's digging me in the thigh, in fact."

"Er, no, that would be that shiny silver handle next to us." It was Harry's turn to smirk. "You'd think you'd have learnt where things are positioned by now, honestly."

"Oh, come on, it isn't as though you haven't pulled that old "wand in the pocket" trick before." Draco chided.

"Really not the same thing, now, is it?" Harry proceeded to mock Draco by nonchalantly examining his fingernails as though looking for flaws in the recent manicure he hadn't had.

"I'll show you pointy, Potter." Draco snarled, drawing Harry closer by the front of his robes.

"Not by banging my shins into the porcelain, you won't. OW!" Harry hopped up and down on his right leg, grabbing the shin of the left with both hands and casting a wounded glare at Draco whenever he could be bothered to look up. "Really, I meant what I said when I said we ought to have got this whole stall thing sorted by now. Which reminds me, why is it that we chose this of all places as our secret rendezvous closet?"

"Oh, I don't know...it's kind of got the excitement of exhibitionism without the risk of getting caught out by people we actually know, wouldn't you say? Besides, we're too young to rent a hotel room, and it's not as though we could possibly make it any filthier than the Muggles do, no matter what we..." Draco was forced to a halt as Harry shoved his hand up against Draco's mouth.

"You know, you're ever so much more attractive when you don't open your great big mouth." Harry was now mere millimeters away from Draco's face; he was in fact so close Draco's breath was causing his glasses to fog slightly.

"I thought you liked my great big mouth. Appropriately open." Draco tried his best to look wounded and yet sultry at the same time, but only succeeded in looking about as spoilt as he actually was.

"Shut." Harry whispered, before shutting Draco's mouth rather soundly by covering it with his own.

Somewhere behind them, a rogue autoflush valve was triggered by their movements and WHOOSHED, sending a slight spray of water rather high up into the air and misting the robes of both parties, a fact of which neither seemed to take much notice.

******

"And just why should he want to do that, Ron?" Hermione reproached, bright pink splodges of colour dotting her cheeks.

"And I'm the one who's being dense! He's hardly the only one who's commented under their breath about us! And I can't have been the only one of us who's heard it," Ron whispered angrily.

"Oh, everyone knows we're just good friends," Hermione scoffed.

"Sure they do." Ron muttered darkly, taking his turn at making various disbelieving faces.

"Do I have to kiss you to prove it?" Hermione's eyes shot icicles straight through to the base of his brain with this last.

"Erm, uh, you don't have to go doing anything rash, Hermione. Really. I believe you." Ron was aghast.

"So why d'you think Harry'd try to put us together, then, even if other people might? Doesn't he know us better than anyone?"

"Sometimes your friends think they know you better than they actually do, Hermione." Ron said, doing his best imitation of Hermione channelling McGonagall as he did so.

"I don't believe I wish to speak to you any longer if you can't be reasonable, Ronald Weasley." Hermione turned on one heel and ducked off into the nearest shop, which happened to be a bookseller's called 'Microscopic Myopic Magic, Ltd.'

******

"Look, someone's written us back!" Draco had untwined his tongue from its stranglehold on Harry's uvula for approximately a tenth of a second before pointing at the door in front of them.

Harry, for his part, cautiously opened his eyes one at a time, blinking and wincing as he got used to light invading his retinas once more. "You interrupted us for that?" Harry scowled. "It's not as though we have all the time in the world, you know. And we've got to get ourselves back into character, else someone might suspect something."

Draco looked hurt for a moment, then recovered himself enough to say, "One might think you were ashamed of us, or something."

Harry quirked an eyebrow at Draco and smirked. "Of course not, but we don't want the entire fabric of the magical world unravelling around us, do we? Let them believe what they must in order to keep themselves happy."

"Evidently, someone doesn't seem to believe in you, do they?" Harry snorted, looking at the writing on the door to the stall.

On a previous visit, Draco had taken a silver paint marker and written, in large, bold, all-capital strokes, "MALFOY WAS HERE." At the time, Harry had of course been shocked and horrified and had generally scolded Young Master Malfoy within an inch of his pointy, aristocratic nose. They then had the sort of trivial argument they often tended to, over something more meaningful to one than the other, which the other simply couldn't wrap his head around; after which, they had the usual sort of making-up activity for which they were quite famous in the stalls. And, in fact, for which a video camera had been secretly installed by some entrepreneurial and sneaky Muggle girls who happened to frequent the particular lavatory in question, and who were thusly quite privy to the specialised activities which often commenced therein, videocassette and DVD copies of which were often quite saleable for rather shocking amounts on eBay, particularly when offered region-free.

Since that time, instead of his graffiti being covered over or otherwise defaced (as he'd been expecting), someone else had come along and written "<====whatever!" in black Sharpie marker, all lowercase. It was quite clear that this person did not know who she (for presumably, even though they both were boys, it was mostly girls who frequented this stall) was dealing with.

To Draco's utter and complete surprise (and pleasure), it was Harry who whipped a blue ballpoint pen out of his trousers and wrote a line underneath this response which read, in rather small print made to resemble a miniature version of Draco's original handwriting as much as possible, "DON'T MESS WITH PRE-PUBE WIZARDS, MAN. WE DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO LOSE."

"I do enjoy it when you sound so...desperate, Potter." Draco drawled, trying his best to cover his slightly pink-stained cheeks with a badly woven cloak of sophistication.

"Well, we haven't, have we?" Harry glared, a tad defensively, before flinging himself at the unwitting Draco with all his might.

"WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH~~~~!" the toilet in their stall spoke up beneath them, as Harry's sudden leap tumbled Draco onto its seat, buckling Draco's knees underneath him and forcing his unwilling bottom into the bowlful of icy water now whooshing and whirling and gurgling as the autoflush valve struck once more. Harry somehow managed to extricate himself from the now-sodden Draco without suffering any great amount of water damage. Draco, on the other hand, merely sat in the bowl and pouted, even as his robes grew darker with the water they were soaking up.

"I'm completely sopping, Potter. I don't think it's funny, and I also don't think it's very attractive." Draco looked about to cry.

"You said you wanted a little time revving your engine in the wet, what?" Harry mocked.

"'Snot what I meant, and you bloody well KNOW it." Draco looked well-jewelled pewter letter openers directly into Harry's eyes.

"Oh, come now. I know a spell that'll dry you right up," Harry consoled, stifling a small laugh.

"You know loads of spells. How?!??! I know I don't have every class with you, Potter, but in the ones we do have together, it's not as though you pay any great amount of attention." Draco pouted as though pouting was going out of style in ten minutes' time.

"Oh, Hermione taught me. It's dead useful." Harry spouted immediately, before he had the chance to think the better of it.

"Oh, did she, now?" Draco raised an eyebrow and looked at Harry quite sharply indeed.

For the moment, Harry had the good grace to turn bright, flaming, Weasley-hair red.

~~~il est fini~~~