tangential

Joker’s Wild

Bones

Most people didn’t think much about their bones.  Oh, maybe they’d broken a leg or an arm in some sport or another, but it wasn’t the same, not for him.  Other people didn’t have to know where the bones in their feet lined up, paying attention to the roll of their ankle so nothing rubbed, so no one tiny metatarsal had too much pressure put on it and cracked against the  phalanges.

206.

He knew the name of every single fucking one of them.  

Fuck you very much, lab partner in biology, who’d accused him of cheating for knowing every single fucking one of them on the first day of class.

Wouldn’t have lasted a day in my shoes, smug little asshole.

Unfortunately, letting him fail would’ve meant Jeff failed too, and he needed that A, to get himself high enough honors he could request a waiver, could get himself in the Academy, could get himself his wings.

He might not be able to walk, but he was damn well going to fly.

You know, if someone prompted you to write an alphabet (favorite character? whole cast? mass effect alphabet?) it would cover you for TWENTY-SIX days ;D 

What about a Joker alphabet?

—tarysande

Joker’s Wild

Arcturus

Thinking back, he had no idea how his parents pulled it off, how they’d gotten ringside lodgings, how they’d made him a bedroom with an actual viewport, how they’d gotten a view of the dock.  Not just any dock, a welding dock, one where they put together the very first basic framework of a ship.  

A civilian dock, of course; the Alliance kept theirs carefully hidden away, so no one could spy on their newest designs.  His mother got to see it, being a contractor, but she wasn’t allowed to show anyone, especially not allowed to drag her crippled little boy off to work with her, not even when every other office got flooded with children once a year for the job shadow program the school system had set up.

He and his chair, or in a good year his braces, he’d be in the way.

And his chair certainly didn’t have a high enough security clearance, after all.

Anytime he’d been restricted to his bed, bored of studying or reading or listening to stories or breaking through the parental lock they thought they’d put on his extranet, or even tired of Grandpere Moreau’s visits and silly french songs, he could look out at the stars.

Space was big, and black, and endless, but people kept filling it up anyways.  He could see the heavy lines of VI-controlled robotic arms, the slow and stately dance of building, the birth of something solid, something with bones that would never break, sleek and beautiful and strong.