labyfic | Drabble #196: Taking Things Into Your Own Hands

...we had a nice response to my last posted drabble prompt of Drabble 191, with entries by

apachefirecat, and commenting by the fabulous

redwolf. Huzzah!

As always, special labyfic love to

redwolf for adding entries and comments for several previous drabble prompts. Onward, fearless drabbler!

For this prompt, we continue with our one-word/phrase drabble roots:

Taking Things Into Your Own Hands

Who's taking what into their own hands, and why? Tell us all about it. Labyfic-style, of course.

Given our entries from recent months, let's continue with the suggested limit for this month of 500 words. Though remember that shorter pieces are most definitely welcome!

Your entry should take the following format, posted as a comment on this entry:
Word count: # of words
$your_beautiful_drabble

I'll aim to get my next drabble challenge out on the first Friday of next month (Mar 7).

I'm also very happy to take suggestions if something in particular strikes your fancy -- comment on this post or PM me with your suggestions. You can see our current collected suggestions here.

Remember: Feedback is LOVE. So do reply to your fellow labyficcers' drabbles if so inclined. (Though be careful of concrit unless specifically okayed by the author beforehand. Authors generally write for love.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Word count: 500

There had been a lot of debate over how to integrate the girls into their new families. Typically, they would have been given a choice to retain the memories of their lives Above, but that was in the case of those who were wished away, and all of the girls had wished themselves away to escape trauma that they didn’t understand.

While the girls' ages ranged from six through sixteen, they had been so infantilised by their parents that they had no concept of what had happened to them and no way of explaining it to others. Their parent’s insistence on homeschooling their children to protect them had backfired spectacularly when it gave a predator free rein to molest them.

In the end, as all of the girls were so lacking in education and socialisation, it was decided that when they underwent a transformation to fit into their adoptive families, their ages would regress to roughly match their arrested developmental states. It was no shock to anyone that none of the girls ended up appearing older than eight.

Sarah stretched as she finished recording the details of the girl who would be gaining a pair of wood elves as mothers. The ladies had been trading off sitting by their daughter’s bedside to hold her hand as she slowly transformed, with setting up their home for a long hoped for addition.

All of the other adoptions were proceeding in much the same manner and, as there were such an unusually high number of children involved at one time, the new parents were exchanging information and bonding in ways the Kingdom rarely experienced.

The discussions over how to deal with the man who had assaulted the girls was just as fraught. There was no shortage of people willing to educate the man on the error of his ways in a manner that would be unlikely to leave anything beyond an unsightly stain on the floor. Sarah couldn’t bring herself to care beyond a concern for the disgruntlement of those who missed out on administering their own justice, but Jareth had curtailed those urges by pointing out the man was beyond the bounds of the wish.

The foxes had confirmed the church leader as the perpetrator and, once the Above authorities were pointed in his direction, they ensured that his supplies of date rape drugs and his extensive library of video evidence of his crimes were not quite as hidden as he’d assumed.

While there was a disturbing history of sexual predators being given little punishment for their crimes, authorities tended to be a little more ardent when it came to child murderers. The Labyrinth has allowed the community to believe the girls were dead at the hands of their assailant and nobody had a problem with the parents getting called out for their own shortcomings. However, as the Labyrinth hadn’t erased the memory of the children, it gave Jareth a handy loophole to allow the goblins to make a nuisance of themselves.

Dark and beautiful. And so very satisfying with meting out justice more directly than we're often able to.

Thank you! Jareth does have some restrictions placed upon him by the nature of the wishes, but he's quite good at working with loopholes. 🦊🧡

Drabble #196: Taking Things Into Your Own Hands

Reckoning

Re: Reckoning

Re: Reckoning