These drabbles are written in response to prompts over at the Next Gen Fanatics forum (come check us out!).

Many are set in the overarching universe I'm working on at the moment. These will all have "too many war wounds" as a subtitle, so you know they're part of that. The characters aren't necessarily paired together in my headcanon, but their personalities/ages/sorting/etc are the same as in that universe.

If they're standalone (i.e. kids sorted differently, different ages, different personalities) then they'll have "standalone" as a subtitle.

Feel free to leave requests in reviews or PMs (especially family bonding ones!) and I'll try to get to them as quickly as possible.

lucy/teddy, cheap wine, set by semiotics
too many war wounds

"I'm just saying," says Lucy, leaning into Teddy, "like, statistically, they're out there. They have to be. The odds are so big that there's no way they're not out there."

She is drunk. This is okay, because Teddy is also drunk.

"Yeah, but, what's the point in them being out there if we never get to meet them? Aliens are no fun if they're ten billion light years away." He maybe slurs some of the words together, but that's alright. Lucy has always got the gist, with him.

"I'm going to make it happen." Her eyes are wide and earnest, her hands tight around the box of wine in her lap. "M'gonna go to university. Proper university. In America. Then m'gonna invent it. Space travel. Fast space travel. At NASA or SpaceX or summin'."

Teddy picks up the box of wine and tilts the nozzle towards his face. Lucy is still holding onto it, though she probably doesn't realise.

"Expensive," he points out, then turns the little plastic tap and opens his mouth for the wine to arrive. Easiest way of drinking ever, ten points to Hufflepuff.

The wine stops. Teddy opens his eyes in horror and finds that Lucy has turned the tap off.

"Wine," he demands, but she pulls the box away. Before Teddy knows it the box is out of reach and Lucy has climbed into his lap and grabbed hold of his face and is staring at him very, very seriously.

"You should come. America. I'm gonna go to MIT or Harvard or whatever and then I'm going to work at NASA and you're going to come. You can do art there. Lots to paint in America."

Teddy likes the sound of that. There is, however, a tiny problem.

"We're not old enough to drink in America."

Lucy takes a few seconds to process the enormity of this horror. Then her entire body crumples inwards and she flops over Teddy, all her limbs draped over him in despair.

"Fuck America," she groans into his shoulder. "Cambridge it is. Then the UK's first space agency. Then the universe."

"Promise?"

Lucy lifts her head and smiles, her breath hot with cheap wine. "Promise."