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fffcFandoms: Battlestar Galactica, Black Panther, Doctor Who, We Fix Space Junk, Teen Wolf
Team: Reality
Rating: G
Contents: 25 icons in 5 fandoms: Battlestar Galactica (10), Black Panther (10), Doctor Who (4), Teen Wolf (1); 1 graphic in We Fix Space Junk (800x600 px); 1754 words of Teen Wolf fic.
Battlestar Galactica
Black Panther
Doctor Who
We Fix Space Junk
Teen Wolf
Title: Hone
Summary: Set AU from season 1, newly-made werewolf Jackson is loosed to his first training mission.
Characters: Jackson, Scott, Derek
Rating: G/PG
Word Count: 1754
Derek left them in the forest.
Derek left them in the forest.
At night.
Jackson turned a slow circle and tried to differentiate one tree from another. He recognized the majority of them as young pines, the trunks spannable with his arms, planted in rows that had only begun to fill in with natural growth. Their needles coated the forest floor, slid against each other with each treacherous step. The pine smell choked the air, obliterating every other scent.
Jackson took a step back, aligning himself with a hole in the overhead coverage of branches, threw his head back, and yelled as loudly as he could.
“What are you trying to do?” Scott asked. He was hunkered down, back to a tree, his phone clutched in one hand. The dim light from the screen illuminated his face with a pale green glow. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.” He turned his phone so that the screen faced Jackson, as if he needed to prove his point with the fact that his phone had no bars.
“I know he’s out there,” Jackson hissed. “He wouldn’t just leave. He said he was going to train us.”
Scott blinked, his expression impassive. “We are talking about Derek, right?” He thumbed a button on the phone, slid the now dark device into his pocket, tipped his head back with a sigh. “This is the training.”
Jackson narrowed his eyes. Without the sickly glare from the phone getting in the way, his vision was adjusting to the dark. Though the branches obscured what little light the stars and half-moon could provide, he could see a lot better than he expected. The tree trunks stood out as dark shadows against a slightly less dark background; their branches waved and shivered with the small breezes that wandered through. Rocks and tangles of bushes and leaves littered the ground. Yet, the whole scene had a feel of flatness, like it wasn’t entirely real. “So we’re supposed to … what?” he asked. Spend the night? Get home? Kill each other? The last was looking to be the most likely.
“I. Want. You. To. Learn.” Derek replied, his voice reverberating all around them. He had been listening, waiting to give this answer.
Jackson jumped, his heart suddenly scampering. He slapped a hand over his thudding chest, partially turned his body in hopes that McCall hadn’t noticed his reaction. “Where are you?” he shouted. Derek was nowhere to be seen. “You call this training?”
“He could be chasing us,” Scott pointed out, sounding unreasonably calm, especially for Scott.
Jackson whipped his head around, and snarled at his co-captain. Scott simply raised an eyebrow in response. And, damn it, but he had a point. The last training session had consisted of Derek ambushing the two high schoolers when they showed up at the Hale house for what they thought would be a routine “don’t transform in public” speech before a game. He’d caught and tackled them both so frequently and viciously that their clothes had been ripped to shreds. Jackson had thrown his out in the school’s Dumpster.
True, they were stranded in the woods. True, Derek had lured them out here for what he claimed would be a pack bonding exercise. And, true, he’d sent the two younger boys one direction while he disappeared with all of their supplies…
“Shut up,” Jackson snapped, suddenly not seeing anything redeeming in Derek’s actions. Scott complied, his teeth clicking together, head turning to the side as if he’d found a particularly interesting leaf to inspect. Jackson’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. McCall was not acting like himself. What was going on? For starters, the boy spent most of his life hanging off the edge of panic. Yet here he was, calm as anything. Even his heart beat only slightly faster than normal. Jackson lunged at him, caught him by the shirt. “You know something,” he growled into Scott’s face. “You’re in on—“ he waved a hand vaguely at the trees behind him, “—this.”
A faint whistling noise cut through the air.
“Get down!” Scott yelled, diving for the ground. Jackson wasn’t as fast. He had time to see Scott throw an arm over his face, to bend his own knees and start to lurch forward, before an explosion of white light washed out the world. A loud crunching followed, then a crash that shook the needles on the forest floor, and made the air quiver. It went dark.
Jackson dreamed he was a child. He recognized immediately that it wasn’t his childhood. He was stocky and small for his age, the youngest of the lot, surrounded by people who called themselves family and thought he was wonderful just for existing. He’d never had that experience, and a part of his brain kept trying to remind him that the wrestling match he found himself in—found himself losing in—was a construct, even as he worked to throw himself deeper into the memory. There was a sister not much older than he who liked to boss him around, and an older brother on the edge of puberty who liked to hint at the special knowledge of the world he was so sure his age granted. There were cousins, other kids whose ages fell in-between his and his brother’s ages. They were all piled on him, arms and elbows and knees poking and jabbing and protruding. He smelled sweat and crushed grass, his nose pressed into the ground, a hand that wasn’t his pressed against his face. He struggled against the pile, but not too hard. This was how life was supposed to be; this was how life needed to be. He couldn’t imagine that it could ever be anything else.
When Jackson came to, he was lying on his back, staring up at the shattered fragments of the night sky that existed beyond the trees. His head throbbed worse than any hangover he’d ever had and he had a strange blurring around the edges of his vision. The forest was quiet. Unnaturally so. It took Jackson a moment to notice that all he could hear was the pounding of his pulse in his temples and the susurrations of his breath. There were no birds, no rustles of wind or leaves. At least he was still breathing.
He leveraged himself to his knees, each movement nearly costing him the contents of his stomach. Somehow he managed to keep it all in, despite the bitter bile that kept rising in the back of his throat. He looked around at the trees, the endless trees. A brief rain must have come through while he was out because he noticed now that the ground was damp, the air reeked of ozone, and a faint scent of drifting mold had woven into the pine. He scowled. Enhanced olfactory senses were not living up to his expectations.
Scott was nowhere to be seen. It figured that he’d have run off at the first available opportunity. Jackson started to shake his head, then stopped as he realized what a bad idea that would be. The explosion had twisted all his senses, made him feel like his head had been torn off and badly replaced.
“Derek?!” he called, his voice a mere croak. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder this time. “Derek!” He waited, scanning the edges of the clearing for any sign of the man. He managed to work a leg under him, got it to hold his weight. Then the other. He stood. He was shaky and off-balance, but he was standing, and that already made him feel better, more in control. “I’m going to kill you,” he spoke toward a break in the tree-line. He probably meant the threat for Derek, but he couldn’t swear to that. What was this? This wasn’t training; this was sadism, pure and simple.
From nowhere, Derek crossed the clearing, his steps soundless, like his feet weren’t quite touching the forest floor. He strode straight up to Jackson, straight into his personal space.
Jackson started to take a step back, to open some distance between them, but then Derek’s hand was wrapped around the back of his neck and there was no place to go. Derek’s fingers, his very human fingers, thank goodness, pressed along the nubs of his spine, brushing the scars from where his claws had once pierced into Jackson’s neck. He drew even closer, only a thin slice of air in between their shirts. Jackson’s knees trembled and his breath went shallow.
“No you won’t. You need me to teach you. I am trying to teach you,” Derek replied. “But you have to pay attention.”
“Pay attention to what?” Jackson asked. None of this made any sense: the abandonment, the explosion. He felt his lip curl into a snarl. He’d trained under enough coaches to recognize good instruction and bad instruction, and how tough love could fall on either side depending on who administered it. This was not good instruction, and Jackson doubted it could be called tough love either.
Another piece of the dream flashed into his head then, of how the kids were encouraged by their parents to play hide-and-seek in a forest a lot like this one. But the rules were different from what Jackson knew. There was no it and no safe zone, no place to run to that would protect you from capture. The kids played at night, no flashlights allowed. The adults monitored the game from the perimeter, indulgent, nostalgic, but never helping or getting involved. Hide in the forest and find each other, they said. Learn how to be quiet. Learn how to listen. Learn how to know.
“Scott’s out there right now. And he’s not the only one.” Derek tightened his grip and pain shot up Jackson’s spine. “Now, go! Find him, if you want to live.” The pressure drove Jackson to his knees, and once again his vision began to white out.
Abruptly, the grip vanished, and the pain dissipated. Slowly, Jackson leveraged himself back to his feet. From deep int the woods, he caught the crinkle and snap of twigs and pine needles breaking as beings stepped on them.
He knew the goal now, and he had an agenda: Find Scott, then find Derek. Then find the Hunters.
When he did, they'd all realize that Jackson Whittemore already knew what he needed to know to survive — most of all, that he was no one's prey.
Team: Reality
Rating: G
Contents: 25 icons in 5 fandoms: Battlestar Galactica (10), Black Panther (10), Doctor Who (4), Teen Wolf (1); 1 graphic in We Fix Space Junk (800x600 px); 1754 words of Teen Wolf fic.
Battlestar Galactica
Black Panther
Doctor Who
We Fix Space Junk
Teen Wolf
Title: Hone
Summary: Set AU from season 1, newly-made werewolf Jackson is loosed to his first training mission.
Characters: Jackson, Scott, Derek
Rating: G/PG
Word Count: 1754
Derek left them in the forest.
Derek left them in the forest.
At night.
Jackson turned a slow circle and tried to differentiate one tree from another. He recognized the majority of them as young pines, the trunks spannable with his arms, planted in rows that had only begun to fill in with natural growth. Their needles coated the forest floor, slid against each other with each treacherous step. The pine smell choked the air, obliterating every other scent.
Jackson took a step back, aligning himself with a hole in the overhead coverage of branches, threw his head back, and yelled as loudly as he could.
“What are you trying to do?” Scott asked. He was hunkered down, back to a tree, his phone clutched in one hand. The dim light from the screen illuminated his face with a pale green glow. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.” He turned his phone so that the screen faced Jackson, as if he needed to prove his point with the fact that his phone had no bars.
“I know he’s out there,” Jackson hissed. “He wouldn’t just leave. He said he was going to train us.”
Scott blinked, his expression impassive. “We are talking about Derek, right?” He thumbed a button on the phone, slid the now dark device into his pocket, tipped his head back with a sigh. “This is the training.”
Jackson narrowed his eyes. Without the sickly glare from the phone getting in the way, his vision was adjusting to the dark. Though the branches obscured what little light the stars and half-moon could provide, he could see a lot better than he expected. The tree trunks stood out as dark shadows against a slightly less dark background; their branches waved and shivered with the small breezes that wandered through. Rocks and tangles of bushes and leaves littered the ground. Yet, the whole scene had a feel of flatness, like it wasn’t entirely real. “So we’re supposed to … what?” he asked. Spend the night? Get home? Kill each other? The last was looking to be the most likely.
“I. Want. You. To. Learn.” Derek replied, his voice reverberating all around them. He had been listening, waiting to give this answer.
Jackson jumped, his heart suddenly scampering. He slapped a hand over his thudding chest, partially turned his body in hopes that McCall hadn’t noticed his reaction. “Where are you?” he shouted. Derek was nowhere to be seen. “You call this training?”
“He could be chasing us,” Scott pointed out, sounding unreasonably calm, especially for Scott.
Jackson whipped his head around, and snarled at his co-captain. Scott simply raised an eyebrow in response. And, damn it, but he had a point. The last training session had consisted of Derek ambushing the two high schoolers when they showed up at the Hale house for what they thought would be a routine “don’t transform in public” speech before a game. He’d caught and tackled them both so frequently and viciously that their clothes had been ripped to shreds. Jackson had thrown his out in the school’s Dumpster.
True, they were stranded in the woods. True, Derek had lured them out here for what he claimed would be a pack bonding exercise. And, true, he’d sent the two younger boys one direction while he disappeared with all of their supplies…
“Shut up,” Jackson snapped, suddenly not seeing anything redeeming in Derek’s actions. Scott complied, his teeth clicking together, head turning to the side as if he’d found a particularly interesting leaf to inspect. Jackson’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. McCall was not acting like himself. What was going on? For starters, the boy spent most of his life hanging off the edge of panic. Yet here he was, calm as anything. Even his heart beat only slightly faster than normal. Jackson lunged at him, caught him by the shirt. “You know something,” he growled into Scott’s face. “You’re in on—“ he waved a hand vaguely at the trees behind him, “—this.”
A faint whistling noise cut through the air.
“Get down!” Scott yelled, diving for the ground. Jackson wasn’t as fast. He had time to see Scott throw an arm over his face, to bend his own knees and start to lurch forward, before an explosion of white light washed out the world. A loud crunching followed, then a crash that shook the needles on the forest floor, and made the air quiver. It went dark.
Jackson dreamed he was a child. He recognized immediately that it wasn’t his childhood. He was stocky and small for his age, the youngest of the lot, surrounded by people who called themselves family and thought he was wonderful just for existing. He’d never had that experience, and a part of his brain kept trying to remind him that the wrestling match he found himself in—found himself losing in—was a construct, even as he worked to throw himself deeper into the memory. There was a sister not much older than he who liked to boss him around, and an older brother on the edge of puberty who liked to hint at the special knowledge of the world he was so sure his age granted. There were cousins, other kids whose ages fell in-between his and his brother’s ages. They were all piled on him, arms and elbows and knees poking and jabbing and protruding. He smelled sweat and crushed grass, his nose pressed into the ground, a hand that wasn’t his pressed against his face. He struggled against the pile, but not too hard. This was how life was supposed to be; this was how life needed to be. He couldn’t imagine that it could ever be anything else.
When Jackson came to, he was lying on his back, staring up at the shattered fragments of the night sky that existed beyond the trees. His head throbbed worse than any hangover he’d ever had and he had a strange blurring around the edges of his vision. The forest was quiet. Unnaturally so. It took Jackson a moment to notice that all he could hear was the pounding of his pulse in his temples and the susurrations of his breath. There were no birds, no rustles of wind or leaves. At least he was still breathing.
He leveraged himself to his knees, each movement nearly costing him the contents of his stomach. Somehow he managed to keep it all in, despite the bitter bile that kept rising in the back of his throat. He looked around at the trees, the endless trees. A brief rain must have come through while he was out because he noticed now that the ground was damp, the air reeked of ozone, and a faint scent of drifting mold had woven into the pine. He scowled. Enhanced olfactory senses were not living up to his expectations.
Scott was nowhere to be seen. It figured that he’d have run off at the first available opportunity. Jackson started to shake his head, then stopped as he realized what a bad idea that would be. The explosion had twisted all his senses, made him feel like his head had been torn off and badly replaced.
“Derek?!” he called, his voice a mere croak. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder this time. “Derek!” He waited, scanning the edges of the clearing for any sign of the man. He managed to work a leg under him, got it to hold his weight. Then the other. He stood. He was shaky and off-balance, but he was standing, and that already made him feel better, more in control. “I’m going to kill you,” he spoke toward a break in the tree-line. He probably meant the threat for Derek, but he couldn’t swear to that. What was this? This wasn’t training; this was sadism, pure and simple.
From nowhere, Derek crossed the clearing, his steps soundless, like his feet weren’t quite touching the forest floor. He strode straight up to Jackson, straight into his personal space.
Jackson started to take a step back, to open some distance between them, but then Derek’s hand was wrapped around the back of his neck and there was no place to go. Derek’s fingers, his very human fingers, thank goodness, pressed along the nubs of his spine, brushing the scars from where his claws had once pierced into Jackson’s neck. He drew even closer, only a thin slice of air in between their shirts. Jackson’s knees trembled and his breath went shallow.
“No you won’t. You need me to teach you. I am trying to teach you,” Derek replied. “But you have to pay attention.”
“Pay attention to what?” Jackson asked. None of this made any sense: the abandonment, the explosion. He felt his lip curl into a snarl. He’d trained under enough coaches to recognize good instruction and bad instruction, and how tough love could fall on either side depending on who administered it. This was not good instruction, and Jackson doubted it could be called tough love either.
Another piece of the dream flashed into his head then, of how the kids were encouraged by their parents to play hide-and-seek in a forest a lot like this one. But the rules were different from what Jackson knew. There was no it and no safe zone, no place to run to that would protect you from capture. The kids played at night, no flashlights allowed. The adults monitored the game from the perimeter, indulgent, nostalgic, but never helping or getting involved. Hide in the forest and find each other, they said. Learn how to be quiet. Learn how to listen. Learn how to know.
“Scott’s out there right now. And he’s not the only one.” Derek tightened his grip and pain shot up Jackson’s spine. “Now, go! Find him, if you want to live.” The pressure drove Jackson to his knees, and once again his vision began to white out.
Abruptly, the grip vanished, and the pain dissipated. Slowly, Jackson leveraged himself back to his feet. From deep int the woods, he caught the crinkle and snap of twigs and pine needles breaking as beings stepped on them.
He knew the goal now, and he had an agenda: Find Scott, then find Derek. Then find the Hunters.
When he did, they'd all realize that Jackson Whittemore already knew what he needed to know to survive — most of all, that he was no one's prey.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-15 06:50 am (UTC)Scott blinked, his expression impassive. “We are talking about Derek, right?” He thumbed a button on the phone, slid the now dark device into his pocket, tipped his head back with a sigh. “This is the training.”
haha, Yep, I totally buy this.
This turned into something much more intricate than I expected, with the flashbacks to Derek's childhood showing just how different Jackson's life had been. I like the idea of Derek passing on such a tradition, except it seems much darker in the present day context.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-16 09:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-16 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-16 12:25 pm (UTC)Yes, this was a typo. I have 48 points for this post in my spreadsheet:
25 icons = 25 points
1 fic of 1,754 words = 17 points
1 graphic of 800x600 px = 6 points
= 48 points
(Graphics are calculated based on area.)
no subject
Date: 2021-06-16 12:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-16 08:02 pm (UTC)