Clarisse McClellan's Daughter

Posting this in here and going to make a habit of doing that, for my own records. Written for the thrill challenge at writers_choice.

Calling
Author: Chanter
Fandom: Sliders, season 3 pre-Exodus
Pairings: hints of Wade/Quinn
Rating: G probably
Summary: In response to the thrill challenge. Wade sings.
Dedicated to Dale, to prove I know what I’m doing.
Exactly 500 words--I checked, really! :)
Disclaimor: 'Tisn't mine, this universe isn't. *sniff* darn it, I wish it were.


It’s nothing new, that blue and white, that silver and red and cinnamon dark--it’s nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary. It’s one day tropical,
and one day frost-rimed, and one night in between swept with desert sand. It’s California in a thousand picture frames, a thousand names, a thousand postcards
and splinters and it’s not old news. It’s “… blistering idiot!” and it’s “Five minutes.” and it’s “You wouldn’t know a brick wall if you walked into it.”
and it’s “Cry like a man…” It’s understood, and she’ll never get tired of it.

But she has gotten used to it.

It’s dirt beneath her nails and dust on her clothing, it’s a hundred versions of the same mirrorscape, circle and spiral, angle and plain all back to the
same blue-white lacework linking one with one with one. It’s no makeup, and exchanges of currency, and decent wine only when her change adds up to a handful
of enough for the local trade. It’s Chinese noodles bolted in a hurry the better to make a spherical express, hot tea staining a worn sleeve, forgotten
zodiac symbols left unread in another set of almost identical constellations, endless clouds of road dust and ventures and faces she could have known once,
in some former life before cataclysmic, sweet angelic kharma landed her here… wherever here was-is-will be. It’s landing, and being landed on, and an endless
succession of apologies and flying remarks. It’s four elements in banter, four merging signs in concert; it’s spirit, soul, mind… and Quinn.

And it’s what she’s used to. It’s routine. Blessed, cursed, wonderful, ever-changing. Routine.

But it’s not rare.

It’s not porcelain pale blush snow-dusting just enough over warm glowing cheeks to lend absent-color to color, not liquid brown eyes flecked with silver
under stage lights, soulful on soulful, not clothes just classy enough to put the unusual in beloved and yet modest enough to keep identity attached. It’s
not a microphone that works and a balcony that she can reach with crystal high register, flawless, effortless and kharma eat your heart out she’ll *dance*
if she wants to. It’s not a band beside her, equal and measured, matching her chord for trill for graceful modulation, a musical telepathic link for a
not so telepathic human. It’s not the warm wood of a platform’s floorboards, and an audience rapt like they haven’t been all night, and bright eyes from
higher galleries watching in fascination as identifications form and parallels that have absolutely *nothing* to do with adjoining worlds are drawn. It’s
not.

But it *is* what she wants. Higher, brighter, a million dare-to-be nights on a million might-be Earths with no record left of herself, no claim to celebrity
glory and only her name, first and last or just “Wade something” whispered from ear to mouth to ear as she disappears out the backstage door, gone, not
gone, back to her accepted normalcy.

It’s a rarity, when she sings.

And that alone is a thrill.