Words:
river (not River lol)
boot
dad
trap
Ah thank you love!! These are super motivation. You don't know how hard it was to find where I had river and not River in these. A true challenge.
river and Boot - Captive Audience Ch10
The weight of Frank’s gun at his side and the pressure of the claw handed grip at his neck was the only thing that was keeping River moving. Every joint and every muscle was crying out and begging River to just stop and curl up and die. He couldn’t give Frank the satisfaction even as his head slumped, neck too tight and locked to be able to hold up the entire weight of his head. His time in the car boot cage had wrecked his body in a way that even the bullet wound hadn’t. Suddenly River’s head swum with overwhelming vertigo as his good foot gave way underneath him. The world fluttered and flickered out of focus interspersed with flashes of pitch darkness. His head clattered into the floor with the wave of nausea that came with it, sending his stomach spasming. The floor was wet all around him, his hands round mud and rotting leaves through the slow flow of water. A river, or more likely a stream based on the flow rate but stream didn’t have the same irony. River Cartwright in so much pain and blood loss and atrophy and infection that he was ready to die, meeting his maker in his namesake.
For those sprints I got 574 words!
Dad - mangroves Ch2
“It’s his dad. River’s dad had something to do with Westacres and River’s gone to France to talk to him and investigate,” Louisa blurted out. The secret had been eating her up from the inside in the hour or so since River had told her; getting it off her chest made some actions to help lift the crushing weight that River had settled on her. They could not fuck this up. “River’s dad?” Lamb’s attention was grabbed and his voice perked up. “I always assumed that River was some fiendish consequence of a deal that David Cartwright made with a devil,” he huffed but despite the levity Louisa could see the cogs turning in his mind. He was doing exactly what Louisa had done on the tube ride back to Slough House; he was piecing together everything he knew about the Cartwright family into the new world now that he knew the big secret.
For that sprint I got 416 words!
Trap - Dead Weight
Louisa hadn’t been on board with River’s plan to go and do this job for first desk. She knew it was hypocritical after her secondment to the office of the spider for her to judge River’s desperate efforts to get back into the good graces of The Park, which was why she hadn’t said anything to him or tried to stop him. She had come with him, unable to have another person she cared about die alone while serving the whims of the service. Of course it had been a trap, Louisa should have seen it coming. Why sacrifice the life of a real agent when you could sacrifice the life of a slow horse; it was kinder than the bullet to the head they would all get when they weren’t useful anymore. River wouldn’t have been alive to see his name tossed about by the water cooler as a traitor. He still might not see it.
For that sprint I got 383 words!
