cabinpres_fic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cabinpres_fic) wrote2012-05-29 05:28 am
cabinpres_fic) wrote2012-05-29 05:28 am
Entry tags:
Prompting Post V
Please see the most recent MOD NOTE and ADDENDUM
(updated 5 July)
Welcome everybody. How you got here I have no idea but thank you for coming and welcome again, nonetheless . As you may have gathered this is a Fic Prompting Meme dedicated solely to the hilarious and oh-so-addictive BBC Radio 4 sitcom - Cabin Pressure. I'm aiming for this to be pretty anything goes - but in order for everything to run smoothly, there are a few guidelines. Don't worry - they're not too restrictive.
FILLING GUIDELINES
As you probably all know - our meme now has it's very own database created and maintained by the great Enigel. It both catalogues each and every prompt that we post and provides links to fills. You can find it here: Google Spreadsheet
We also have a Pinboard archive which has been put in place by the lovely
oxfordtweed in the place of our late Delicious Archive. This Archive contains a list of all the prompts this meme has to offer - you can find it here: Pinboard ArchiveThis is a great step forward in making our meme just a little more organised (but not too organised of course. This is Cabin Pressure) which is always a good thing.
So in order to make things easier to archive - Please nest your fills.
This can be done by either posting each part as a reply to that part's immediate predecessor, OR by replying each time to Part I OR - well you get the idea :D
It makes it simpler for Enigel and myself to link fills in a clean and clear manner. Following these guildelines will be very much appreciated guys :D
REPROMPTING
Reprompting is allowed but please include the URL of the original prompt when you do so. It will make it infinitely more easy to Archive which would make both Enigel and I very happy :)
As for everything else
- Be respectful to one another. Disagreements are fine, but not everything disagreeable is trolling. If you suspect someone of trolling, just ignore it. If you cannot respond to a comment without attacking or trolling someone else, keep it to yourself.
- No bashing prompts. It might not be your cup of tea - but obviously someone wants it enough to go to the effort of requesting it. So just scroll past it.
- Prompt away as much as you like guys - seriously, go wild - but please try to fill as well.
- Please no RPF. I'm not trying to oppress you RPF writers and enthusiasts, I would just really like to avoid any legal problems.
- When you post a fill (or post a new part of a WIP) please go over to the Filled Prompts Post (if it is complete) or the WIP Post (if there are still more parts to come) and, following each post's guideline's, post a link to this fill or new part.
NEW - If your fill includes a major element that veers from the original prompt (crossovers, established universes, kinks, et cetera), please take a few moments to check with the OP that such additions are welcome. This has caused problems in the past and it only takes a few moments of your time.
REALLY IMPORTANT ADDENDUM
According to numerous Child Safety laws it is illegal to provide pornographic material to minors. Seeing that the majority of the stuff we have here is rather adult in nature, this Meme is consequently an 18+ zone. Failing to comply to this rule could result in the Meme getting shut down. So if you're here and you're under 18 please back button now.
+ Please do not post anything regarding minors in a sexual situation. It really doesn't matter how tasteful or crass it is, there are laws that classify that sort of thing as child pornography and as such, I'm afraid we're going to have to go with the attitude that safe is better than sorry.
It really is VERY important that these rules are upheld as the consequences are severe.
Other than that - go crazy guys. Any problems please just message me and I'll try my best to work it out.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | Part VIII | Prompt Index
Current Prompt Post | Current Chatter Post | WIP Post | Filled Prompts Post | Searching Post | Orphan Post | Page-a-Mod Post | FAQ | Beta/Concrit Post
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Re: 1000 Paper Cranes FILL Part 2
“That felt brilliant,” he enthused, emerging twenty minutes later shaved and with damp hair, wearing fresh clothes. Martin took the next turn after arguing that she should go first.
“Never mind chivalry, Martin. You smell worse than I do. Go!”
When they returned to the hospital, it was just in time to see James and Vanessa entering. “I dragged her home to bathe and eat a proper breakfast,” he admitted to Carolyn.
“We took a hotel room a block away. Perhaps I should see if I can detach Douglas from the hospital for a bit.”
It took some doing, Carolyn finally telling Douglas that if he didn’t tidy himself up he’d terrify Emma when she woke up and found a large, reeking bear sitting beside her bed, but she was finally able to bundle him out of the hospital. “My suitcase—“
“Is in the hotel room with ours. Come along, you.”
The warm water washing over him felt wonderful, Douglas decided, sighing as he let it pound on his aching muscles. Once he was cleaned up and changed into fresh clothing, Carolyn took him to the hotel restaurant for a proper breakfast. “Eat up. For once, it’s my treat,” she told him tartly.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Try. If you keep living on coffee, you’ll end up with an ulcer.”
Martin and Arthur folded cranes nonstop that day. Carolyn looked at the bags they’d filled and thought of something. A quick trip to a nearby shop yielded bright yellow string, a small stapler, and a box of 1500 staples. She started attaching the cranes to lengths of string, the staples acting like tiny hooks, making festoons of them. Emma continued to hold her own, even improving slightly as the day wore on.
“I told you the cranes would work! We’ve got to keep folding! Mum, here’s some paper.”
“I can’t fold cranes.”
“Yes you can. Here, I’ll show you.”
Carolyn folded more slowly than the other two, and her cranes always came out a little awkward and lopsided, but Arthur added them to the pile over her objections. “They don’t have to be pretty. They just have to be cranes, and you have to want the wish to come true.” She thought she’d never loved Arthur more than at that moment, intently folding cranes with chapped and paper-nicked fingers, absolutely certain they would heal a little girl he’d only met a few times. And she felt a wave of tenderness toward Martin, far less certain and more desperate for distraction, but folding away with his own sore fingers, doing the only thing he could for his friend and the one thing his friend loved above all else in the world.
The sky was lightening to dawn when the thousandth crane was clipped into place among its siblings. They had several festoons thick with cranes. “Now what do we do?” Martin asked.
“I think we’re supposed to give them to Emma now.” Arthur led the way as they all stepped quietly into the ward. The staff at the nurses’ station looked up.
One nurse tilted her head to look at them oddly. “What are you doing?”
“We folded a thousand paper cranes for Emma Richardson,” Arthur told her earnestly. “Like the story. So she’d get well.”
The nurse looked at him, then at the rest of them, tired and rumpled, carrying their cranes. She smiled gently. “I can’t see how that would hurt.” She led the way, getting a tall young nurse to help.
“You folded them all this quickly?” he asked, amazed.
“They scarcely took a break,” Carolyn told him.
Douglas looked up when they stepped into the space around Emma’s bed. Vanessa had gone for a cup of tea. His face changed when he saw what they were carrying. “You folded cranes?”
“A thousand of them, Douglas,” Arthur told him happily. “You can count them if you like. And then we made a few extra, just in case.”
“That must have taken forever.”
“We started on the flight. I started making them, then Skip joined in. Mum made some too, and she put them on the string. Can we hang them around Emma’s bed?”
Douglas’s answer was to take a festoon of cranes and start draping it along the wall over the bed. It gave him a chance to hide his face and blink back a sudden rush of tears. “I used to read her a story about folding a thousand cranes when she was little.”
The nurse brought sticky-backed hooks for hanging the cranes on the wall, and they soon had them draped along the wall over the headboard, well out of the way of the wires and monitors, and paper-clipped to the edges of the privacy curtain around the bed. Emma was surrounded by cranes, dancing gently in the tiny breezes the ventilation stirred in the room.
Vanessa returned after the others had left. “What’s all this?”
“Arthur and Martin have been folding origami cranes the whole time we’ve been here. They actually managed to fold a thousand.”
Vanessa smiled. “That was her favorite story. Did I tell you she found another book about it? One for older children, I mean. About a Japanese girl who was folding cranes while she was ill. Her classmates finished them for her after she died. She gave a book report to the class and got full marks for it.” She looked around at the cranes. “You have some wonderful friends, Douglas.”
Douglas had leaned over the bed to smooth back Emma’s golden-brown hair and kiss her forehead. He tilted his head. “I do, don’t I?” he said quietly, a touch of wonder in his voice as if he was just realizing it himself.
Emma opened her dark brown eyes a little before noon. “Daddy?” she whispered.
Douglas leaned over her in an instant. “I’m here, Emmie.”
“Cranes, Daddy,” she said with a tired smile.
“Yes, angel. A thousand of them. All for you.”
“Mummy?”
“Right here, darling.” Vanessa leaned over her from the other side.
“Can we go home now?”
It had never felt so good to laugh, Douglas decided.
He went out to tell the others, finding himself enveloped in a group hug. “I knew the cranes would work!” Arthur was exulting.
“I’m so happy for you,” Martin told him.
“I told you it would be all right,” Carolyn murmured against his ear. “Trust an old mum. Although if you ever call me old, you’ll regret it.”
Douglas’s next stop was the men’s loo down the corridor. He closed himself into a cubicle, put the lid down, and sat heavily. He was shaking with sobs almost immediately. The tension and terror of the last few days overcame him at last, mingled with overwhelming relief. He gasped, the sobs shaking his entire body, feeling as if he might never stop but too exhausted to care.
Martin stepped into the loo, hearing the sobbing immediately and recognizing the gasping voice. “Douglas?” He tried the door. “Douglas, let me in.” The small bolt slid and he opened the door, taking in the scene in an instant. He knelt down, sliding his arms around Douglas and easing the other man’s head to his shoulder, all awkwardness forgotten in the urge to comfort his friend. He shushed and rocked, murmuring a litany of “It’s okay, just let it out, it’s okay, it’s over, she’s going to be fine, just let it out,” over and over, stroking the messy hair. It seemed like Douglas wept forever.
Another man, also tired-looking, stepped in to splash some water on his face. His eyes widened. “Bad news?” he asked sympathetically.
“Good news, actually,” Martin said quietly. “His daughter woke up and she’s going to be okay.”
“Oh, that’s good. My little lad just pulled through yesterday. I was the one going to pieces in the loo.” The other man left quietly.
“It’s like a horrible fraternity: fathers going to pieces in the loo after their kids are okay,” Douglas murmured.
“What Greek letters would you name it? Lambda has to be there for loo.”
“Or tau for toilet.” Douglas said, a ghost of his usual humor showing. He breathed deeply and started collecting himself. Martin left him rinsing his face in a sink, returning with a chilled bottle of water, which Douglas drank gratefully.
They joined the others in the waiting room, where a doctor was waiting to discuss future treatment with Vanessa and Douglas. “We’ll keep her a few more days to make sure she’s over it, and have a pediatric neurologist evaluate her. There’s a risk of brain damage, although the fact that she immediately recognized and addressed you both, and is now chattering about origami cranes, suggests that’s not an issue. She’s at an increased risk for seizures, and might need a bit of physical or occupational therapy, but children’s brains are far more resilient than adults’, and they have much better recovery. There’s a good chance there’s no lasting harm done, other than worrying you both half to death.”
Carolyn called Douglas over. “I’ve adjusted the schedule. We’ve got several short flights coming up that Martin can handle on his own. I’ve spoken to Herc, and he can cover your longer flights. You can take as much time as you need with Emma,” Carolyn told him quietly.
“Thank you.”
Carolyn waved it away. “When Arthur was so ill, I was a housewife. I had the luxury of spending as much time with him as I needed to. Then again, the way Gordon was, I wouldn’t have had a choice if I’d wanted one.”
Douglas spent the next two weeks in Barrow-in-Furness, helping take Emma to her doctors’ appointments and just spending time with her. One festoon of cranes had followed her home and was draped along the headboad of her bed. She’d given the rest to the children’s ward, and they were now adorning a colorful common room. The staff and some of the volunteers were learning to make cranes so there would be a full thousand again. She’d pressed Douglas into a hunt for a copy of the picture book she’d loved, hanging over his shoulder as he searched online, and donated that to the ward as well. It was a colorful book about a little girl in a flowered kimono folding her cranes and making a wish. “I’d donate a copy of the book I did the report on, for the older kids, but I think it might make people sad. That girl died, and some of those kids in hospital were pretty sick,” she told Douglas with the matter-of-factness of a ten-year-old.
When Gerti arrived to pick up Douglas, Emma ran up the stairs ahead of him to hug Martin and Arthur. “I brought you something,” she told them, before darting off to give her dad a good-bye hug. “I’ll miss you, Dad.”
“I’ll miss you, too, angel. See you in a month.”
“And you’ll let me come with you on the plane?”
“As long as you don’t pack so much baggage Gerti can’t lift off.”
“Dad, that’s silly. Gerti could carry a pony. Ooh, do you think Mum and James— I was pretty sick, after all.“
“You can always try.” He was firmly convinced she’d inherited the Richardson charm.
As they readied for takeoff fifteen minutes later, Douglas noticed something in the cockpit, tucked into the space under the front window. “Where did that come from?”
“Emma made it for me. She made one for Arthur and one for Carolyn, too.”
Douglas smiled at the crane, folded from teal-blue origami paper flecked with gold. It sparkled in the sunlight as Gerti started down the runway.
Note: I made up the picture book (although I wouldn’t be surprised if one like it exists). The book Emma did her report on actually does exist, and I found it in my research for the story. It’s called “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.”
Re: 1000 Paper Cranes FILL Part 2
(Anonymous) 2012-08-03 07:14 am (UTC)(link)Your story is gorgeous and a fine compliment to the original tale, and had me weeping openly.
Re: 1000 Paper Cranes FILL Part 2
I lie.
OP - Re: 1000 Paper Cranes FILL Part 2
(Anonymous) 2012-08-03 04:46 pm (UTC)(link)This was amazing and touching and wonderful and everything I was hoping for an more.
Re: OP - Re: 1000 Paper Cranes FILL Part 2
Re: 1000 Paper Cranes FILL Part 2
(Anonymous) 2012-08-04 09:08 pm (UTC)(link)Re: 1000 Paper Cranes FILL Part 2
(Anonymous) 2012-08-18 01:49 am (UTC)(link)Great work. Great Douglas too. So realistic.