Disclaimer: I own neither Famine nor Pollution. A fact which I'm really quite relieved about
A/N: A few weeks ago I invited readers of my livejournal to challenge me to write - within limits - any pairing and/or scenario of their choice. This is one of the results. In this case the challenge was Famine/Pollution in any situation I was inspired to write.
Sable didn't like the car. It was big and bulky and brash. Sable liked slim, streamlined things. White, however, adored it. The ecstatic expression on the pale, young looking face, which glistened with the residue of a thousand chemical spills, told him that much. Its metal was the kind whose smelting had issued forth thick clouds of all consuming poisonous vapour on some health and safety forsaken town in the developing world. Its plastic interior was guaranteed not decompose for another fifty thousand years. And its paintwork, well, as far as Sable could surmise, he just liked the colour.
As its hulk of a shell swerved onto the motorway the catalytic converter dutifully broke, and thick clouds of black smoke began to belch out of the exhaust.
"Any thoughts about where to go?" said Sable, as a pigeon unfortunate enough to be flying overhead suddenly asphixiated and dropped dead onto the bonnet.
"Sellafield Visitors Centre?" said White, a rather delightful note of pleading in his voice.
"No, not there. Not yet anyway. I've been trying to crack the UK market properly for years, and I can't do that if most of the country's uninhabitable."
White's lips pursed into what, if he didn't know any better, Sable would have put down as a pout. A few hundred yards behind them a lorry carrying a variety of industrial disinfectant that had already been banned in seventeen countries overturned without warning.
Over the next half hour White put forward a series of suggestions, ranging from oil refineries, to coal fired power stations, to municipal rubbish tips. Sable didn't care for any of them.
"You're really no fun at all," White said, with a disquieting amount of petulance, when Sable rejected a corroding chemical plant in Widness out of hand. As in tapped his dusty fingers on the, now sweet wrapped laden, dashboard a vat of organophosphate laden sheep dip began to leak into a hitherto unspoilt stretch of river that ran to the right of the road.
There was really only one type of place in the country from which they could derive mutual and simultaneous satisfaction.
The shopping centre itself was an upmarket affair in Cheshire. White was enthralled by excess of pretty, useless, non-degradable, soon to be casually discarded, packaging. Sable smiled wryly at the range of pills, potions, lotions and devices marketed with the sole purpose of appetite suppression in mind. White sighed happily as he calculated the amount of coal that would be needed in order to power all the lighting, noise and other energy hungry background fripperies. Sable felt an overwhelming sense of achievement as two obese six year olds tucked into their MEALS (TM).
It was really inevitable that they would end up on the third floor balcony, unseen by humans milling about below then, twined in each others arms. Toxic kiss following toxic kiss. A bare torso, slick with what might have been oil, but was probably something far worse, pressed against slightly protruding ribs. Arsenic powdered hands settled on a slender waist. Delicious, desperate sensations reverberated between them. The climax was not, in the literal sense, earth shattering. But as they leaned against the glass barrier, temporarily subdued by the afterglow, it was easy to see that they'd managed to shatter something.
The authorities were eventually called to break up the riot. It was even reported in the national news. Try as they might to understand what happened that day, nobody could fathom what had caused the hungry, consumption frenzied stampede.