For some of these drabbles, I wrote them the same day that I posted them, but for others, I wrote them months ago when I was a crackhead. You can't tell the difference, though; haha, good luck!
Whumptober (1): Caesar has a little accident while working in the lab. Part 1: Caesar experiences the world differently when he's in his lab.
Accidents and unexpected damages happen all of the time in a lab, especially if that lab is of Salazar's.
Usually, he prefers to work on his own if he can help it, only requiring personal assistance from Providence either if insisted by others or if it's a job he simply cannot do without others. At the moment, he was only tinkering with a small collection of circuits and wires, so his spacious lab was occupied by scattered spare parts and only echoed with the sounds of clinking metal and the occasional whir or beep.
His movements are often precise and rarely not without purpose; the sounds of the machines around him would move in sync to his actions as if his creations flowed through him, and he controlled their performances with every twitch of his finger and rise and fall of his chest.
Every now and then, he would separate his attention from his current task and move up and down his lab, only muttering to himself as he checked between other devices and computers, but he would always return to his initial project, eventually.
Sometimes, though, between his automatic movements and thought, he will miss a part or will lose focus entirely whenever he comes up with a new task to add to his workload. A project or program that he could have spent hours, days, weeks, or so on, will not always progress as intended. While Caesar acknowledges this as part of the process, it is not without its risks.
After what may have been several minutes of shifting through and readjusting on what seemed like a cluster of colored wires and chips, Caesar set aside his screwdrivers and other tools and stood back to examine his work before swiftly picking up the miscellaneous pile and moving it to the other side of the lab. Kneeling down behind a large block of metal put together by screws and a monitor, he began to attach respective ports and plugs.
The resulting clicks as each wire and chip found their intended place was like an industrial puzzle that had filled the scientist with a low pulse of satisfaction that touched from his guts and spread out to the ends of the hair on his head and the tips of his fingers; it was accompanied by a more active sense of anticipation and excitement that oiled his joints to move faster but also very nearly put his limbs into a vibration as they ached to move quickly onto the next task. He went through mental debugs of all that he had been doing up to now thus far; did he remember to plug in- do not confuse this with the one that- is there enough power to operate- how many times had he checked-
With a final click, he pushed himself off of the floor, briskly, and nearly stumbled as he circled around the machine. His eyes screamed with rabid energy as he looked the contraption in front of him up and down whiles his arms patted his vest for the remote to activate it. Just as his fingers pulled out the cubic device from his pocket, he had already pressed the largest button.
The screen in front of him, after a moment of inactivity, split open in a pure blue light that revealed a scrolling list of commands in a language that used familiar letters and numbers but spoke in a cluster of words and symbols that would not have belonged together in any restaurant menu or human conversation. Whirring from beneath the metal exterior vibrated in the air, like a celebratory dance of the life of machine; it filled his senses with familiarity at something new. Warmth began to seep into the cold machinery like a hot drink in the winter, and gingerly pressing a hand to the surface, Caesar drank in the comfort eagerly like a child would hold a newly printed piece of paper to their face. But just like a fresh print, the content of warmth would soon fade and so would the excitement.
In this case, the heat only increased as if the hot drink had spilled into the wires and the most sensitive parts, and the reaction to this betrayal would be quick as a flinch in an attempt to escape the burn. The screen that had just been calmly telling the story of a machine's birth would soon begin to stumble between its words and even entire lines of text, shuffling the image to hide its mistakes. As if the shame and confusion of the building errors were taking a mental and physical toll on it, sparks screamed out between its crevices and had the scientist shielding himself. It was as if its tears of frustration evaporated into a dark smoke that had it sputtering like a springing door-stop until a last wheezing cough that resulted in absolute darkness.
Beverly Makes a Wish: Lilo & Stitch AU - Beverly & Rex version. Beverly makes a wish on what she thinks is a star, and Violeta listens in.
Taking a breath, Beverly clasped her hands together to her chest and gazed up at the night sky above her. She couldn't tell if her shivers were because of the anticipation, or because she forgot to bring a jacket in her excitement. With hope plaguing her nervous expression, her posture still remained closed off out of fear of being heard by someone, "So… hi, it's me, again!"
The responding breeze that had Bev habitually tucking her hair behind her ear was all to fill the following silence. Embarrassed, she felt her smile falter but kept her hands still loosely clasped, "...Okay, I don't even know who I'm talking to here… Maybe it's kind of immature to still believe in this kind of stuff still. Wishing on shooting stars? Might as well believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy!" she gave a brief chuckle before quickly masking it with a cough, "...Sometimes I feel like I'm still stuck in time those 5 years ago. Like, while everyone is moving on and adjusting to what happened, I'm not… all there? Like I'm stuck in this room with a small window as if I'm just this freak others need to hide from. It's probably why I don't have a lot of friends my age…"
Peeking out from behind the curtain, Violeta had to hold herself back from making a sound as she anxiously pressed her ear to the window, her glasses sliding down her face and her lips pulled into a thin line.
Still wishing to an invisible entity, Beverly chewed on her lip with her hands now resting in her lap, "So maybe you can give me a friend? Just someone who won't run away, an angel…? I know that Violeta might not believe in angels like that, but I kinda want to. So yeah, I'd really like a really nice one who will go to rock concerts with me and not call me weird."
Violeta frowned at her adopted daughter's confession. She had already been well aware of how Beverly had trouble fitting in, and perhaps maybe what Beverly called her "constant helicopter mom-ing" may have not helped. Could you blame the mother, though? With what Beverly and Violeta had in common with their circumstances, Violeta was not about to lose any more of her family.
And maybe, for a moment, she was comfortable just living in denial about it all, about Beverly, about Rafael, about her sons, but in her racing thoughts, she could never forget about her family. Almost as if things were okay again, her mind allowed her to remember their faces, their voices, them.
'Caesar had trouble making friends, too.'
That thought alone was enough to strengthen Violeta's resolve.
1: For Whumptober, I wrote this little bitty. This one is long, so I split the entire thing into about 5 parts to be posted later. What I wanted to do in this particular prompt was not use any dialogue and tell the whole thing in 3rd person limited from Caesar's point of view. In this particular part, I wanted to express how Caesar feels so passionately and so fully when he's in full-blown science mode. The language is very descriptive and brings a lot of these inanimate objects to life, to show how closely Caesar feels with his work and understands it. You'll see later how it contrasts with how he is around other things and people.
2: This one is much shorter than the last one, but it's basically the scene where Lilo wishes on the star which was actually Stitch's ship crashing onto Earth. This AU is pretty much "Lilo and Stitch", but I change a lot of the characters' circumstances. Here, Beverly and Violeta are both reflecting on how they lost their families in an incident about 5 years ago, and while it brought the two of them together, it has not done them well in any other aspect.