Fandom stocking snippets
For shinyjenni
One minute there was a multiple pile up on the M25 bleeding out of the ambulances into casualty and it was all hands on deck life and death screaming blood spurting same old same old. And then, all of a sudden, it stopped.
There was that blissful feeling you get, like when you stop banging your head against a brick wall.
She leaned against the wall, sucking down the lukewarm vending machine coffee like it was manna from heaven, and finally took a moment to look around her.
He was leaning the other side of the room. Human, kind of short, nice honest normal sort of face, grimacing a bit at his drink. He must have tried to get the machine to disgorge tea: rookie mistake.
“War zones, eh?” she said cheerfully.
He laughed at that, saluted her with his plastic cup of tea.
“That was nothing: should have seen Friday night in Helmand,” he said. She snorted coffee out her nose. “I’ll see you Afghanistan and raise you UNIT and the Sontarans.”
“The ATMOS factory? You were there?”
“You know about it?”
“You didn’t think that cover story would hold, did you?”
“Seriously? No, I suppose not.”
They both finished their respective drinks, crumpled up their plastic cups and aimed them at the non-recyclables bin. Hers went in, his didn’t. She raised her arms and pumped a “yes”.
“You staff?”
“Locum. You?”
“Me too. Just visiting. Martha Jones. Back to Helmand?”
“Me? No. God, no. Invalided out. Settled in London now, do a bit here and there. John Watson.”
“Well, Merry Christmas, John Watson. Back to the frontline.”
“Merry Christmas, Martha Jones. You too.”
For meneleth
“Castle? Castle!”
In the next Nikki Heat book, Rick told himself, he would have to see if he could convey that quality, that ability, to pack several paragraphs of questioning, disappointment, and just plain old anger and irritation into two heavily inflected words. And what had he done? He checked his conscience carefully. Nope, his mother and his daughter between them had persuaded him that the Victoria’s Secret catalogue did not contain the perfect gift for *every* female acquaintance, and particularly not the ones with guns. The coffee machine was still working and he’d hidden the decaf. He was wearing pants, his hair was combed and he was still as ruggedy handsome as ever. No-one was bleeding, waving guns, or strapped to high explosives anywhere within his sightline. He’d even bought - and written - actual Christmas cards.
So he did the only thing he could. Man up, Castle, he thought, and yelled back “what?”
“Why is there a giant blue closet in the middle of my office? And why does it say “police box” on the side?”
Oh. He should probably have mentioned that part. But it had been ten years ago, and he’d been drunk, and who remembers weird people with sticky-up hair who rescue you from the drunk tank with improbable tales of intergalactic adventure?
“Hello!” the man with the sticky-up hair was saying cheerfully as he stepped out of the TARDIS. “You must be Nikki Heat. I’m a big fan.”
For scarletsherlock
“Why?”
“Why? Because... because that’s the whole secret of the thing, that the butter stays cool, so that by rubbing it into the flour you coat each particle of flour with fat, do you see, so that it repels water and stays light. The important thing is that you don’t melt the fat, because then the flour absorbs it and becomes heavy and sticky. It’s a fine art, my friend, one practiced by the dwarfs for thousands of years.”
“And so this *rubbing in* of the butter and the flour is accomplished, say: what then?”
“What then? What then? Do the elves truly know nothing of the making of pastry? Why, you take water - the purest, coldest water you can gather, mind - and mix it in, a spoonful at a time, using a cold steel knife, till the crumbs of rubbed in flour and fat start to join together into a dough. You wash your hands in cold water and then lightly knead the pastry together, and then roll it out thin.”
“Roll it?”
“With a smooth rod of marble if you can get it, for the coldness, or of turned wood if you have no marble. But ever it must be cold, still. Roll out the pastry into a thin sheet, and then cut round shapes from it. We dwarves have been making special circular cutters with fluted edges for just such a task since the days of Balan the Bold, did you not know? Elves!”
“Gimli my friend, may you long celebrate the turning of the year with your pies of mince. All I ask, is that you keep me supplied with a tithe of them and I’ll supply you with the brandywine butter to go with them myself.”
“Legolas, I believe we have a deal.”
For yamx
“Jack!”
It was no use, the ropes might be silk but they wouldn’t give, and he couldn’t see for the velvet pad over his eyes and it was too much, too much, he couldn’t...
“Shhhh,” that familiar voice said, as the warm fingers played, up and down, up and down...
“Nothing you can do about it, love, you know that. You’re going to feel good, so good.... trust me. Let me.”
“Jack...”
He was sobbing now, it had been so long, so long, the weight of it, he was carrying it all, so far, so long, so alone...
“Trust me,” the voice whispered again, the warm hands caressing.
For meteorfire
“Hi. Don’t let the gun in my hand confuse you. Get in.”
“Interesting. Police telephone boxes haven’t been in use for, what, forty years? There clearly wouldn’t be room for the four of us in there - yes, John, the one in the navy blue suit behind you - he has a gun, too...”
“Look, Sherlock, John, we got the drop on you, we have guns, I haven’t got time to convince you we’re the good guys, even though we, actually, are - so step inside...” He gave them the most dazzling smile. “Please?”
“Well someone say it!”
“It’s, er, bigger on the inside, isn’t it?”
“Obviously, John. What’s rather more interesting, I think, is that our new... acquaintances aren’t exactly human. Correct?”
“Half way. I’m Ianto. And very, very human. And Welsh.”
“But you might say I’m the exception. Jack Harkness, pleased to make your acquaintance. Kind of human, originally, but I took a left turn there, some time back in the... oh, actually, in your future, I guess. Time travel does that.”
“And we’re here because...?”
“Because some friends of mine are in trouble, and we’re kind of gathering a few people with special skills to go help them out.”
“Special skills?”
Jack Harkness really did have an extraordinarily shiny smile, John Watson thought, and it wasn’t exactly a comforting one either. But then, he had a gun in his pocket, Sherlock Holmes at his back, and he appeared to be standing in a space ship. He found he was smiling himself.
For dellessa
“Sherlock? Sherlock! There’s a... Sherlock! Explain, please, why there’s a fireplace over there where - if I’m not sadly mistaken - this morning there was just a wall. And why the fireplace is full of green flames. And, um, a girl with pink hair who seems to be inflammable - in the sense of, able to stand in the middle of a fire without bursting into flames, rather than the opposite, obviously.”
Sherlock sighed, as though it was too dull even to begin to explain something so *obvious*, so utterly *mundane*.
“Nymphadora Tonks, meet John Watson. Tonks, John is a muggle. John, Tonks is a witch.” Sherlock sighed the deep sigh of someone forced into the unspeakable tedium of having to explain things which ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone with even the beginnings of a brain cell.
“He gets like that,” Tonks said confidingly, having obviously experienced Sherlock before.
John grinned. Whatever was going on, Tonks (and what kind of a name like that? Apart, obviously, from a heck of a lot better than *Nymphadora*) looked like the kind of person who’d have good gossip.
“Known him long, have you?” he tried. Tonks grinned conspiratorially. “Since the sorting hat,” she said, whatever that might mean. “We were at school together, till the daft git got himself expelled.”
“But I was right,” Sherlock said, “Self-evidently Slytherin should have contained as many people who were anti- as pro-Voldemort. Clever people are not inherently evil, and there’s no reason why a House whose whole purpose is cleverness should turn to the dark lord without a single exception.”
“Yea, but if people like you and your fat arse of a brother go and get yourselves expelled at the first sniff of sulphur then that’s all that’s going to be left, isn’t it.”
“It didn’t matter in the end, anyway,” Sherlock said quietly, and for the first time John noticed on the mantlepiece, next to the skull, a small piece of beautifully turned wood, slightly thicker at one end than the other, like a... a magic wand or something. Broken in half.