Work in Progress Wednesday!

[tjs_whatnot]

Let's do this!

Give me what you got! Read and comment on others' WiPs.

♥

Comments

[sixbeforelunch]

I finished my exchange fic a few days ago, and did the revisions tonight. It's not quite as awful as I thought. (As an aside (and with apologies to tjs_whatnot if this is totally off base of me) if anyone is interested in doing a quickie beta, I would be hugely appreciative. I just need a quick SPAG read. It's very short. PM me if you're interested and I'll give more details. (Just can't give them here because of exchange anonymity.))

Anyhoo. Something different this week. Not the Riker fic, but something set in the Star Trek universe all the same. It's part of my Pi'maat series, which is about normal people in the Star Trek universe. (Normal people who happen to be aliens, but whatever.) I'm struggling mightily with the next story in the series, mostly because I'm not entirely sure what the next story is, but I am fond of this little bit.

She walked down three flights, all the way to the subbasement. The accumulation of centuries greeted her, illuminated by dim, recessed light. Boxes of papers and data crystals, toys, games, blankets, musical instruments, childhood science projects done by people who had long since grown up and had children of their own, PADDs so old they had metal casings, outdated appliances, half-completed paintings and embroidery projects, old chairs and tables in need of a simple repair that no one had ever bothered to do, clothing that fit no one currently living and was long out of fashion anyway, calligraphy pens with dried out inkwells, a dull lirpa...

An archaeologist could have peeled back the last six hundred and eighteen years of her family's history in this place.

She had played down here as a child. Her favorite spot had been a small space under one of the shelves, cleared out and decorated with pillows and a lamp and a portrait of a family member so distant and so long dead that no one could remember his name without digging into the family records. He had stared down at her from his perch on a broken chair. She had thought he had a kind face, and she told him her childish stories about Sherlock Holmes coming forward in time and being so impressed with her logic and deductive reasoning that he invited her to come solve crimes with him.

She reached the far corner of the subbasement. Behind a wall of transparent aluminum, the guth went about their lives. She wrinkled her nose at them.

"I saw that."

T'Lin did not jump. She was Vulcan. Vulcans controlled their startle response. But her head swung around with an undeniable rapidity.

Suvin was sitting in a dark corner of the basement, staring out at her.

"What are you doing down here?"

"Thinking."

She set the bucket down and walked over to him, sitting on an old couch that had been pushed off into one corner. A cloud of dust erupted, and made her sneeze once, and then three times in rapid succession.

She sniffed. "Did your EC tell you?" She had asked Suvin's educational coordinator to tell him that their parents had gone into seclusion. She did not like revealing such things to someone outside their family, but it was better than if he had come home to an empty house with no explanation.

"About our parents? Yes. He wanted to know if I had questions. It was awkward."

"Do you? Have questions?"

Suvin gave her a stare that begged to know why he had been burdened with such a sibling as her. "I know how biology works. Our father is temporarily insane. Someday I will go temporarily insane, and there's nothing that anyone can do about it, so there is no sense in talking about it."

She nodded slowly. "So why are you sitting in the dark?"

"I was watching the guth."

T'Lin turned back to look at the writhing mass of insects. They were invaluable to the environment, and it was convenient to have a colony of them in the basement to handle biodegradable household waste, but they were like the sewage processor. Necessary, but hardly pleasant to contemplate.

"Why?"

"Their lives are so simple. It seems like it would be nice."

"I hardly think so. They eat, and they defecate. They cannot even reproduce unless we flood the compartment and trigger a mating cycle."

"There is no moral complexity to wrestle with. Not like us."

T'Lin got up and dumped the bucket of ruined plomeek into the shoot. "You are ten years old. How much moral complexity can your life contain?" She turned back to face him. "I ruined dinner. Do you want Terran food?"

"Fine."

"Any preference?"

"No. Turn the light out when you go."

T'Lin had not been nearly so dramatic at ten. She was sure of it.

[tjs_whatnot]

I hope you got some replies to your beta request. I would totes do it, but SPAG isn't my strongest thing, and also, as you can tell, I'm not super on top of things these days. ;)

But this snippet was lovely! ♥ I love the idea of all those stories from regulars in the ST universe.

♥

[sixbeforelunch]

Thanks!