Bleak meter: Bleak
Timeline: Sometime after Season 9
Context: When Wu said in "Hunted" that Firstbourne can see people's hearts, he wasn't being metaphorical.
Firstbourne was used to reading humans' hearts. It took minimal effort, it offered significant benefits. Even if nothing else it offered a mildly amusing pastime: watching the shifting colorful displays rippling across each person's soul, judging how well their tiny mortal forms masked their true emotions.
She was used to the crackling sheets of red that signified rage. As long as it wasn't directed against her or her spawn she wasn't concerned. She admired the more subtle crimson embers of stifled resentment. Dispassionately she noted the yellow bursts of happiness and the milky brown of concentration, the sickly pink dribbles of boredom and the endless black of grief. She permitted herself, at times, to enjoy the gentle teals and greens of love, although it never quite got past bittersweet. She had learned many, many centuries ago the false promise of that bubbling teal.
But her favorite emotion to watch was fear.
Fear was beautiful. Visually, just for starters. It burst in a blinding white-hot flash, a soul struck by lightning, a nuclear impact. After the initial jolt came a dizzying staccato of washed-out neon, cycling almost too fast and too bright to follow, static on a TV screen, a life flashing before your eyes. It looked the way a scream sounded.
On the nobler side of things, her reptilian brain did grasp some rudimentary form of compassion, and a primitive sort of imagination. She herself, Queen of Creation, the apex of all apex predators, had never felt anything resembling fear. But if she tried hard she could almost, just barely, get an inkling of what it must be like: to know there were forces stronger than you. To know that you could be harmed and to feel helpless against it. It was a stimulating thought exercise to try.
And fear was gratifying. Part of that was just raw sadism—you didn't live past 1,000 without becoming a little sadistic. She got a cruel amusement out of watching these tiny beings getting into fights, posturing, squawking, making threats—externally paragons of aggression—and yet the souls on both sides would have hailstorms of fear bursting through the scarlet of their anger. They all lived in near-constant fear of each other. It was comical.
The other gratifying thing about fear—very often it was in response to her. She liked that. It confirmed her power. And then, she was still at core an animal. A predatory animal. Fear signified prey. Each coruscating soul was a beacon screaming out, "I'm vulnerable. Deep down I know you could devour me."
She had a neocortex, of course. She controlled her urges. She wouldn't have eaten any of the Hunters, even the annoying ones, even the ones with ugly hate-filled souls that disgusted her. But she liked to titillate herself watching the dazzling flashes of their souls. Just sort of bask in those ancient hungers, feel the instincts hissing in her veins.
"Why is she looking at me like I'm breakfast," Jet Jack had complained once. She had been scoffed off the stage and nothing more was said of it.
And Firstbourne continued to watch the show, licking her slathering jaws.
Prompt was "Fear." (Okay so I lied, the grim prompts aren't always going to be cute and fluffy . . . But at least not as grim as they could be, I guess?)