On the sixth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me
six questions asked
[Title] No Solution
[Fandom] Death Note
[Rating] PG, maybe PG-13 for language and vague implied child abuse
[Notes/Summary] The night before the kidnapping attempt, Matt asks Mello about the morality of Kira.
This was the kind of night when you said stuff you thought needed to be got off your chest
[Title] Iron in the Soul
[Fandom] X-Men: Apocalypse / Battle Royale
[Rating] PG for death
[Notes/Summary] After Erik has lost his family, he meets a strange young man. (I apologise if the timing for what we see in the film is off.)
After they died, Erik began walking. He forgets this walk. In his head, memory moves from the forest (and the sudden scream and the blood) to the factory (and the silence and the solid figure and the ground opening) but there was several hours of putting one foot in front of the other over and over again. On the outskirts of the village, a tiny ramshackle bar. He has never been in there because it is a place for lonely men looking for trouble and he was not lonely, he had Magda, he had Nina (this was the kind of place he had gone to before, hunting down killers, searching for the dispossessed and the suffering and those who had made them that way) -
He is seated at a low, sticky table. The ceiling slopes behind him. He is drinking and it is doing nothing. It is like water welling up over his thoughts but that doesn’t mean he can’t still think them. Like rusty barrels and shopping carts and barbed wire under flood water, the shapes of them in his mind’s eye, the scream, her breath knocked out of her, white in the air -
He is raw as if he has no skin left and he feels as though every piece of metal in the room is moments away from flying towards him. There are only two people here: the bartender, smoking, and a skinny, dead-eyed young man not even drinking, just watching. Erik would like to pull free the nails and the screws and the coins and the locks of the windows and wrench them through the building until everything is scoured clean. He is not that stupid. He knows it would do nothing.
Perhaps he never came here. Perhaps this is a dream. Because there is metal in the young man’s head, towards the back of the skull. One tiny sharp piece like a fingernail. It itches as if it’s Erik’s head it is stuck in. He would wrench it out. As if it’s that easy. And perhaps he nudges the piece, just a micrometre. The young man blinks. Stares straight at him.
Cold. Empty. Erik has met many people who look at you as if you are not human but the majority of them hate you for it, or love to hate you, or other things. This man stares and it means nothing.
Erik thinks that Charles would doubtless be fascinated by this man’s mind and then he imagines what Charles would say about the events of the last twenty-four hours and why is it that thoughts are not just splinters you can wrench free? Leave trails of blood and torn-up grey matter but they would be out of your head -
He is walking over, and the man is staring back at him, and there is a faint hint of interest now. Erik had thought he never wanted to talk to anyone again if they were not Magda and Nina whole and happy but he is leaning over the young man and saying, What is it like?
A raised eyebrow. What?
Erik wants to say, You have metal right at the heart of you, in your innermost thoughts, and, I should be like you, I should feel nothing but a splinter but instead he says, Does it hurt? and finds himself putting a hand to his own head, an echo, a sympathy. The young man shakes his head. Watches. You can sense it, he says, and then, some kind of -
They were interrupted, then. Found out. He was found out. And he was readying his power and already seeing the blood and the young man pulled a gun from inside his coat and shot each of the men who’d found them at point-blank range, between the eyes, so quickly, so neatly, that Erik thought that this must be power too.
They’re walking away and the young man says, possibly in reply to a question, I wanted to finish our conversation.
What would happen, what would happen if I tore it out?
I suppose - and he doesn’t look the least bit concerned, I suppose that things would go back to how they were before.
How was that?
There were colours, the young man says. And people who were different people. I don’t particularly remember.
Different people?
For me, everyone is the same. It’s been like that since… but I don’t really remember.
Erik thinks of Magda and Nina and how two deaths, just two deaths out of the millions on this planet today, have - have -
An accident, he says. But at the instant of impact, it… cut through that which is needed to feel the impact. And… now there are no more colours? He finds himself smiling. If I were different, if things were different, I could move the splinter, and a… a friend of mine, he would probably be able to heal the wound.
The young man’s face remains blank and Erik wants him, wants to be impervious like this, yearns not to wish even that things could return to how they were before. The impact cuts through what is needed to feel the impact.
Where are you going? he asks. They’ll be hunting you as well.
It will be all right. They won’t succeed.
Then stay with me, I want -
No. No more want, ever again.
I find you interesting, as well, he says instead.
[Title] Whose Beats are Made from Solid Gold
[Fandom] Jet Set Radio
[Rating] G
[Notes/Summary] Even now, Cube still hopes she might see Coin again.
Even after it was all over and Cube knew Coin was never coming back, she caught herself looking for him in Tokyo-to. Sometimes it was seeing a guy in a baseball cap and broad shoulders in the crowd and thinking that if he just turned to look at her... Sometimes a snatch of song that he’d loved, playing from an open window or a car. Sometimes early morning mist making a tag look like his before she blinked and it reshaped itself into kanji, which she’d sometimes drawn on the walls to annoy him ‘cause he didn’t know what it meant.
Mostly she knew he was gone. But she made up a story anyway how he wasn’t, how he’d survived and he was making a new life here too and they just kept missing each other. How he was hiding out in Benten, DJing on the side for some hole-in-the-wall club and surviving on ramen. She could let herself think, Where are you? like she didn’t know the answer. Sometimes, at the end of a long night, just before the sun came up, she’d feel like she could almost hear his music. She knew she was only fooling herself, but it was a way of keeping him alive.
[Title] Re-education
[Fandom] Battle Royale; AU where Class B never went into the Program
[Rating] PG-13 for sex and implied violence
[Notes/Summary] Shou Tsukioka/Shinji Mimura. Shou wasn't expecting to run into his former classmate. Or what happened next.
Shou’s hardly the type to cuddle, and strings are typically very much not attached, but it would be bad manners to kick this one out of bed at dawn, wouldn’t it?
So he’s made coffee (how domesticated!) and he’s even trying not to make any noise, tiptoeing round the tiny kitchen of the apartment and - well, all right, yes, every so often he is taking the opportunity to peek into the bedroom and feast his eyes. There’s a special satisfaction to watching someone while they sleep. And this is, after all, Shinji “Third Man” Mimura, former star of Shiroiwa Junior High basketball court, teenage heartthrob, and if they were both still in school then wouldn’t the girls spit if they knew about this little encounter?
They’re not still in school.
I barely recognised you, darling Shou had said. He’d been camping it up even more than usual once he’d realised who it was. Mimura had always liked to maintain that too-cool-for-the-room, never-take-anything-seriously demeanour, and he’d even seemed to mean it (most boys, scratch the surface and they’ve got so much to defend, so much to lose…) Shou had never had the chance to see whether a little flirtation would be treated in kind or if it would trip the threat-to-masculinity alarm and crack Mimura’s cool façade.
Now the façade was a lot more obviously that.
Yeah, well, jail time’ll do that to a person. Bad for the complexion, you know? He’d sounded tired. Shou couldn’t remember Mimura ever seeming tired, back then. But he’d appreciated the effort to be flippant, and offered to buy his former classmate a drink - another drink, because the man had been knocking them back for about an hour already - and he’d had to ask, after all:
So, do you have a place to stay?
Mimura met his eyes and said, Do I look like I’ve got a place to stay? That’s why I came in here. Tapping the glass. Insulate from the inside out.
None of your friends putting you up?
You know what, Mimura said, and oh, yes, there was a line to be crossed, I didn’t feel like seeking out the old crowd. Times change, you know? Scenes get old. He said it like they both knew it was a lie. When they were walking back to the flat and Shou noticed the limp he thought he could make a good guess as to why Mimura wasn’t throwing himself on anyone else’s mercy, but why state the obvious?
Inside the flat under one tiny bright light. What can I get you? Tea, coffee, gin and tonic… Mimura sitting on the floor, arms on his knees. The light sucking what colour there had been out of his face. He was all shadows and the ghosts of bruises. Of course Shou had always been an admirer. Wasn’t it one of the girls who’d said that the only good thing about basketball season was Mimura in shorts? But Shou had never been captivated. Now… now there was the darkness which had always been what lured him in. Not like Kazuo, of course (no one would ever be like Kazuo). Different, yet still tempting. Whispers of pain and scars. The mask brittle. Touch it and it would crumble into dust. Whistling in the dark, and you could see that Mimura knew, now, how dark it could get.
Two years without a drink and now you’re on a bender? I’m surprised you’re still standing. And Mimura said, almost a grin on his lips, I wouldn’t be standing even if I was sober. Thought you noticed that on the way here.
Mm. It looked nasty. And his breath was stuck in his throat as he leaned a little nearer and said, May I take a closer look?
He’d no idea what to expect - furious rejection, pretense of misunderstanding, enthusiastic reciprocation mixed in with I’m not like that, all right -
Mimura was silent for a few seconds before he said, I dunno, probably be a bit of a let-down. Out of practice, you know? Plus I never played for your team. An edge to his voice. Of course if it’s payment for room and board -
Darling, please, I’m hardly that desperate for company. If you’re not up for it I’ll go to bed on my own and keep my hands to myself. But if you are, then, trust me, I know what I’m doing enough for both of us. You won’t need to worry about a thing.
Mimura’s silent again and Shou wonders if the waters aren’t that deep after all. Perhaps the pain is just below the surface and Mimura will crumble into pathetic self-pity and there’ll be no artifice, no game, just -
What the hell, Mimura says at last, draining the rest of his drink. Always hate to disappoint a pretty lady. He shakes his head like he can’t quite believe he just said it. Plus I’ll be doing my bit for the Greater East Asian Republic. Got a nice little collection of scars that’ll serve as a public service announcement on why you should toe the party line.
Myself, I like things a little cracked and broken.
He had kissed every one of those scars. Some of them, Mimura had whispered, between gasps, how he had been given them. Torture porn, indeed. Shou sees nothing wrong with licking away the marks of someone’s re-education. And the poor boy’s been broken down enough. Shou likes to think he’s contributing a little deviancy to the rebuilding.
[Title] Rat Dog
[Fandom] Endeavour / His Dark Materials
[Rating] PG-13 for implied/referenced child abuse
[Notes/Summary] Jakes is happy with how his daemon settled, but sometimes you wonder. (Kudos to lycoris for prompting this and discussing daemons with me on many occasions.)
Of course Jakes has never been one to listen to that bollocks about how your daemon is a window to your soul or how this or that animal tells people you have this or that special perfect quality. You’re what you are and so’s your daemon, and, okay, you often find you get on better with people who’ve got normal stuff like birds or dogs or foxes than flashy stuff like… peacocks or an elephant, for god’s sake, Morse is all right but could he really blame them for thinking he was a jumped-up little nobody when he goes around looking like he’s on the run from a circus?
But the point is sometimes you wonder.
He’d always kind of thought Katie would settle as a dog. Most of the men he knew ended up with dogs (the scary ones had things like wolves or snakes but they were on another level that he was quite happy not being anywhere near). He liked dogs, even the mangy strays who snarled at you from across the street. You knew where you were with a dog. Pit bull? he’d say to her. Or Dobermann? Something useful… She’d laugh, and shift into one of those little lap-dogs, rat dogs, just to annoy him.
She hadn’t settled when he went to Blenheim Vale. Little Pete, late bloomer, not a surprise. He told her not to change about too much, it made you look like a kid.
Thing is he always kind of thought if someone was hurting you then if it got bad enough your daemon could shift into something big and mean and make them stop. You forgot that when there’s people hurting you they won’t care about the Taboo, they’ll touch your daemon as well. Or if they don’t (and sometimes you’re lucky and they don’t) their daemons will be on yours and she’ll have it just as bad. You forget that kind of thing. After the first few times Katie would go small instead, a mouse or a rat or a spider, run away under the furniture, into the walls. It hurt for her to not be there but at least he knew she was all right, and stuff hurt anyway, right?
She didn’t fix until after he left, after he’d said to her that now they just never needed to think about it again. She was a dog, but she wasn’t a pit bull or a Dobermann or even something like a sheepdog or a greyhound. Smaller. Jack Russell. You could pick her up, and she could wriggle into places or out of them. And bark and snap at people’s heels but turn tail and run if she needed to. Nothing wrong with a Jack Russell. Not a rat dog. Except he couldn’t help wondering, sometimes, if it had all never happened, if she’d never had to spend all that time being small and running away, would she have fixed as something bigger? Something that wouldn’t need to run, wouldn’t even think of it, would’ve fought back instead? Only it’s a stupid question. You are what you are and so’s your daemon. There’s no point in looking back.
[Title] Moral Dilemma
[Fandom] Death Note
[Rating] PG, brief mentions of sex and death
[Notes/Summary] Gevanni has not succumbed to Mikami's black-and-white morality. It's just he can see the appeal. Brief implied Mikami/Gevanni.
This is why they tell you not to get emotionally involved.
Not that Gevanni is emotionally involved. Not that he is even, god forbid, physically involved (though Mikami has an odd, sharp handsomeness behind the glasses and the wary stare, and on the rare occasions he smiles because of something Gevanni has said - as opposed to because of Kira's works - it feels like you've saved the world) (and their hands keep accidentally meeting if one or other of them reaches for a coffee cup or a chair, but that might well be nothing more than an accident -)
All they are doing is talking, after gym sessions, if they run into each other, all they are doing is talking. About the world and about ethics and about Kira. Gevanni does not have cold feet. Mikami's belief system is cold and sharp and there's no room for redemption, for change, for the nuances of the human condition. Mikami does not believe in forgiveness. Gevanni thought that he himself did. He thinks that he does. He knows that he does, in the abstract, but then you start applying it to specifics. This man, Mikami says, pointing to the newspaper article, this man, what he did to that child, he would know it was wrong. He was able to delude himself enough to believe that it wasn't. Or perhaps he knew it was wrong and didn't care. Such people are dangerous, Gevanni-san. There are isolated incidents of people changing but they are far between. And there is so much suffering in the world. Why should we be using resources to help those who've done something like that? His eyes gleam and his voice trembles a little but you can see that he spends his professional life presenting arguments. Gevanni doesn't want to go all out arguing the opposing side, that might break the plausible deniability thing they've both got going on about who the other one is. He's playing the casual observer who hasn't really thought about this stuff much. Sometimes he feels like he really hasn't thought about this stuff much. When he joined the SPK he thought they were going to do a good job and work as a team and, with Near at the helm, wrap this up in weeks. It hasn't worked out like that, and he is spending his days in Japanese and his nights painstakingly copying the names of the dead and he is so tired sometimes he is almost deaf with it. Everyone knows some toxic people. Everyone hears a story and thinks how the hell could you behave like that? Kira's stopped any number of skirmishes blowing up into outright war. Gevanni is not emotionally involved (and physical involvement might even make all this simpler, take things out of the realms of logic) but he can see, on the horizon, the crisp clear shape of Mikami's - Kira's - new world. He knows they're the deluded ones, that life isn't that simple, that there's never going to be one code of conduct that resolves everything and is perfect for all needs. He knows life isn't that simple but sometimes he'd really like to believe otherwise.
six questions asked
[Title] No Solution
[Fandom] Death Note
[Rating] PG, maybe PG-13 for language and vague implied child abuse
[Notes/Summary] The night before the kidnapping attempt, Matt asks Mello about the morality of Kira.
This was the kind of night when you said stuff you thought needed to be got off your chest
[Title] Iron in the Soul
[Fandom] X-Men: Apocalypse / Battle Royale
[Rating] PG for death
[Notes/Summary] After Erik has lost his family, he meets a strange young man. (I apologise if the timing for what we see in the film is off.)
After they died, Erik began walking. He forgets this walk. In his head, memory moves from the forest (and the sudden scream and the blood) to the factory (and the silence and the solid figure and the ground opening) but there was several hours of putting one foot in front of the other over and over again. On the outskirts of the village, a tiny ramshackle bar. He has never been in there because it is a place for lonely men looking for trouble and he was not lonely, he had Magda, he had Nina (this was the kind of place he had gone to before, hunting down killers, searching for the dispossessed and the suffering and those who had made them that way) -
He is seated at a low, sticky table. The ceiling slopes behind him. He is drinking and it is doing nothing. It is like water welling up over his thoughts but that doesn’t mean he can’t still think them. Like rusty barrels and shopping carts and barbed wire under flood water, the shapes of them in his mind’s eye, the scream, her breath knocked out of her, white in the air -
He is raw as if he has no skin left and he feels as though every piece of metal in the room is moments away from flying towards him. There are only two people here: the bartender, smoking, and a skinny, dead-eyed young man not even drinking, just watching. Erik would like to pull free the nails and the screws and the coins and the locks of the windows and wrench them through the building until everything is scoured clean. He is not that stupid. He knows it would do nothing.
Perhaps he never came here. Perhaps this is a dream. Because there is metal in the young man’s head, towards the back of the skull. One tiny sharp piece like a fingernail. It itches as if it’s Erik’s head it is stuck in. He would wrench it out. As if it’s that easy. And perhaps he nudges the piece, just a micrometre. The young man blinks. Stares straight at him.
Cold. Empty. Erik has met many people who look at you as if you are not human but the majority of them hate you for it, or love to hate you, or other things. This man stares and it means nothing.
Erik thinks that Charles would doubtless be fascinated by this man’s mind and then he imagines what Charles would say about the events of the last twenty-four hours and why is it that thoughts are not just splinters you can wrench free? Leave trails of blood and torn-up grey matter but they would be out of your head -
He is walking over, and the man is staring back at him, and there is a faint hint of interest now. Erik had thought he never wanted to talk to anyone again if they were not Magda and Nina whole and happy but he is leaning over the young man and saying, What is it like?
A raised eyebrow. What?
Erik wants to say, You have metal right at the heart of you, in your innermost thoughts, and, I should be like you, I should feel nothing but a splinter but instead he says, Does it hurt? and finds himself putting a hand to his own head, an echo, a sympathy. The young man shakes his head. Watches. You can sense it, he says, and then, some kind of -
They were interrupted, then. Found out. He was found out. And he was readying his power and already seeing the blood and the young man pulled a gun from inside his coat and shot each of the men who’d found them at point-blank range, between the eyes, so quickly, so neatly, that Erik thought that this must be power too.
They’re walking away and the young man says, possibly in reply to a question, I wanted to finish our conversation.
What would happen, what would happen if I tore it out?
I suppose - and he doesn’t look the least bit concerned, I suppose that things would go back to how they were before.
How was that?
There were colours, the young man says. And people who were different people. I don’t particularly remember.
Different people?
For me, everyone is the same. It’s been like that since… but I don’t really remember.
Erik thinks of Magda and Nina and how two deaths, just two deaths out of the millions on this planet today, have - have -
An accident, he says. But at the instant of impact, it… cut through that which is needed to feel the impact. And… now there are no more colours? He finds himself smiling. If I were different, if things were different, I could move the splinter, and a… a friend of mine, he would probably be able to heal the wound.
The young man’s face remains blank and Erik wants him, wants to be impervious like this, yearns not to wish even that things could return to how they were before. The impact cuts through what is needed to feel the impact.
Where are you going? he asks. They’ll be hunting you as well.
It will be all right. They won’t succeed.
Then stay with me, I want -
No. No more want, ever again.
I find you interesting, as well, he says instead.
[Title] Whose Beats are Made from Solid Gold
[Fandom] Jet Set Radio
[Rating] G
[Notes/Summary] Even now, Cube still hopes she might see Coin again.
Even after it was all over and Cube knew Coin was never coming back, she caught herself looking for him in Tokyo-to. Sometimes it was seeing a guy in a baseball cap and broad shoulders in the crowd and thinking that if he just turned to look at her... Sometimes a snatch of song that he’d loved, playing from an open window or a car. Sometimes early morning mist making a tag look like his before she blinked and it reshaped itself into kanji, which she’d sometimes drawn on the walls to annoy him ‘cause he didn’t know what it meant.
Mostly she knew he was gone. But she made up a story anyway how he wasn’t, how he’d survived and he was making a new life here too and they just kept missing each other. How he was hiding out in Benten, DJing on the side for some hole-in-the-wall club and surviving on ramen. She could let herself think, Where are you? like she didn’t know the answer. Sometimes, at the end of a long night, just before the sun came up, she’d feel like she could almost hear his music. She knew she was only fooling herself, but it was a way of keeping him alive.
[Title] Re-education
[Fandom] Battle Royale; AU where Class B never went into the Program
[Rating] PG-13 for sex and implied violence
[Notes/Summary] Shou Tsukioka/Shinji Mimura. Shou wasn't expecting to run into his former classmate. Or what happened next.
Shou’s hardly the type to cuddle, and strings are typically very much not attached, but it would be bad manners to kick this one out of bed at dawn, wouldn’t it?
So he’s made coffee (how domesticated!) and he’s even trying not to make any noise, tiptoeing round the tiny kitchen of the apartment and - well, all right, yes, every so often he is taking the opportunity to peek into the bedroom and feast his eyes. There’s a special satisfaction to watching someone while they sleep. And this is, after all, Shinji “Third Man” Mimura, former star of Shiroiwa Junior High basketball court, teenage heartthrob, and if they were both still in school then wouldn’t the girls spit if they knew about this little encounter?
They’re not still in school.
I barely recognised you, darling Shou had said. He’d been camping it up even more than usual once he’d realised who it was. Mimura had always liked to maintain that too-cool-for-the-room, never-take-anything-seriously demeanour, and he’d even seemed to mean it (most boys, scratch the surface and they’ve got so much to defend, so much to lose…) Shou had never had the chance to see whether a little flirtation would be treated in kind or if it would trip the threat-to-masculinity alarm and crack Mimura’s cool façade.
Now the façade was a lot more obviously that.
Yeah, well, jail time’ll do that to a person. Bad for the complexion, you know? He’d sounded tired. Shou couldn’t remember Mimura ever seeming tired, back then. But he’d appreciated the effort to be flippant, and offered to buy his former classmate a drink - another drink, because the man had been knocking them back for about an hour already - and he’d had to ask, after all:
So, do you have a place to stay?
Mimura met his eyes and said, Do I look like I’ve got a place to stay? That’s why I came in here. Tapping the glass. Insulate from the inside out.
None of your friends putting you up?
You know what, Mimura said, and oh, yes, there was a line to be crossed, I didn’t feel like seeking out the old crowd. Times change, you know? Scenes get old. He said it like they both knew it was a lie. When they were walking back to the flat and Shou noticed the limp he thought he could make a good guess as to why Mimura wasn’t throwing himself on anyone else’s mercy, but why state the obvious?
Inside the flat under one tiny bright light. What can I get you? Tea, coffee, gin and tonic… Mimura sitting on the floor, arms on his knees. The light sucking what colour there had been out of his face. He was all shadows and the ghosts of bruises. Of course Shou had always been an admirer. Wasn’t it one of the girls who’d said that the only good thing about basketball season was Mimura in shorts? But Shou had never been captivated. Now… now there was the darkness which had always been what lured him in. Not like Kazuo, of course (no one would ever be like Kazuo). Different, yet still tempting. Whispers of pain and scars. The mask brittle. Touch it and it would crumble into dust. Whistling in the dark, and you could see that Mimura knew, now, how dark it could get.
Two years without a drink and now you’re on a bender? I’m surprised you’re still standing. And Mimura said, almost a grin on his lips, I wouldn’t be standing even if I was sober. Thought you noticed that on the way here.
Mm. It looked nasty. And his breath was stuck in his throat as he leaned a little nearer and said, May I take a closer look?
He’d no idea what to expect - furious rejection, pretense of misunderstanding, enthusiastic reciprocation mixed in with I’m not like that, all right -
Mimura was silent for a few seconds before he said, I dunno, probably be a bit of a let-down. Out of practice, you know? Plus I never played for your team. An edge to his voice. Of course if it’s payment for room and board -
Darling, please, I’m hardly that desperate for company. If you’re not up for it I’ll go to bed on my own and keep my hands to myself. But if you are, then, trust me, I know what I’m doing enough for both of us. You won’t need to worry about a thing.
Mimura’s silent again and Shou wonders if the waters aren’t that deep after all. Perhaps the pain is just below the surface and Mimura will crumble into pathetic self-pity and there’ll be no artifice, no game, just -
What the hell, Mimura says at last, draining the rest of his drink. Always hate to disappoint a pretty lady. He shakes his head like he can’t quite believe he just said it. Plus I’ll be doing my bit for the Greater East Asian Republic. Got a nice little collection of scars that’ll serve as a public service announcement on why you should toe the party line.
Myself, I like things a little cracked and broken.
He had kissed every one of those scars. Some of them, Mimura had whispered, between gasps, how he had been given them. Torture porn, indeed. Shou sees nothing wrong with licking away the marks of someone’s re-education. And the poor boy’s been broken down enough. Shou likes to think he’s contributing a little deviancy to the rebuilding.
[Title] Rat Dog
[Fandom] Endeavour / His Dark Materials
[Rating] PG-13 for implied/referenced child abuse
[Notes/Summary] Jakes is happy with how his daemon settled, but sometimes you wonder. (Kudos to lycoris for prompting this and discussing daemons with me on many occasions.)
Of course Jakes has never been one to listen to that bollocks about how your daemon is a window to your soul or how this or that animal tells people you have this or that special perfect quality. You’re what you are and so’s your daemon, and, okay, you often find you get on better with people who’ve got normal stuff like birds or dogs or foxes than flashy stuff like… peacocks or an elephant, for god’s sake, Morse is all right but could he really blame them for thinking he was a jumped-up little nobody when he goes around looking like he’s on the run from a circus?
But the point is sometimes you wonder.
He’d always kind of thought Katie would settle as a dog. Most of the men he knew ended up with dogs (the scary ones had things like wolves or snakes but they were on another level that he was quite happy not being anywhere near). He liked dogs, even the mangy strays who snarled at you from across the street. You knew where you were with a dog. Pit bull? he’d say to her. Or Dobermann? Something useful… She’d laugh, and shift into one of those little lap-dogs, rat dogs, just to annoy him.
She hadn’t settled when he went to Blenheim Vale. Little Pete, late bloomer, not a surprise. He told her not to change about too much, it made you look like a kid.
Thing is he always kind of thought if someone was hurting you then if it got bad enough your daemon could shift into something big and mean and make them stop. You forgot that when there’s people hurting you they won’t care about the Taboo, they’ll touch your daemon as well. Or if they don’t (and sometimes you’re lucky and they don’t) their daemons will be on yours and she’ll have it just as bad. You forget that kind of thing. After the first few times Katie would go small instead, a mouse or a rat or a spider, run away under the furniture, into the walls. It hurt for her to not be there but at least he knew she was all right, and stuff hurt anyway, right?
She didn’t fix until after he left, after he’d said to her that now they just never needed to think about it again. She was a dog, but she wasn’t a pit bull or a Dobermann or even something like a sheepdog or a greyhound. Smaller. Jack Russell. You could pick her up, and she could wriggle into places or out of them. And bark and snap at people’s heels but turn tail and run if she needed to. Nothing wrong with a Jack Russell. Not a rat dog. Except he couldn’t help wondering, sometimes, if it had all never happened, if she’d never had to spend all that time being small and running away, would she have fixed as something bigger? Something that wouldn’t need to run, wouldn’t even think of it, would’ve fought back instead? Only it’s a stupid question. You are what you are and so’s your daemon. There’s no point in looking back.
[Title] Moral Dilemma
[Fandom] Death Note
[Rating] PG, brief mentions of sex and death
[Notes/Summary] Gevanni has not succumbed to Mikami's black-and-white morality. It's just he can see the appeal. Brief implied Mikami/Gevanni.
This is why they tell you not to get emotionally involved.
Not that Gevanni is emotionally involved. Not that he is even, god forbid, physically involved (though Mikami has an odd, sharp handsomeness behind the glasses and the wary stare, and on the rare occasions he smiles because of something Gevanni has said - as opposed to because of Kira's works - it feels like you've saved the world) (and their hands keep accidentally meeting if one or other of them reaches for a coffee cup or a chair, but that might well be nothing more than an accident -)
All they are doing is talking, after gym sessions, if they run into each other, all they are doing is talking. About the world and about ethics and about Kira. Gevanni does not have cold feet. Mikami's belief system is cold and sharp and there's no room for redemption, for change, for the nuances of the human condition. Mikami does not believe in forgiveness. Gevanni thought that he himself did. He thinks that he does. He knows that he does, in the abstract, but then you start applying it to specifics. This man, Mikami says, pointing to the newspaper article, this man, what he did to that child, he would know it was wrong. He was able to delude himself enough to believe that it wasn't. Or perhaps he knew it was wrong and didn't care. Such people are dangerous, Gevanni-san. There are isolated incidents of people changing but they are far between. And there is so much suffering in the world. Why should we be using resources to help those who've done something like that? His eyes gleam and his voice trembles a little but you can see that he spends his professional life presenting arguments. Gevanni doesn't want to go all out arguing the opposing side, that might break the plausible deniability thing they've both got going on about who the other one is. He's playing the casual observer who hasn't really thought about this stuff much. Sometimes he feels like he really hasn't thought about this stuff much. When he joined the SPK he thought they were going to do a good job and work as a team and, with Near at the helm, wrap this up in weeks. It hasn't worked out like that, and he is spending his days in Japanese and his nights painstakingly copying the names of the dead and he is so tired sometimes he is almost deaf with it. Everyone knows some toxic people. Everyone hears a story and thinks how the hell could you behave like that? Kira's stopped any number of skirmishes blowing up into outright war. Gevanni is not emotionally involved (and physical involvement might even make all this simpler, take things out of the realms of logic) but he can see, on the horizon, the crisp clear shape of Mikami's - Kira's - new world. He knows they're the deluded ones, that life isn't that simple, that there's never going to be one code of conduct that resolves everything and is perfect for all needs. He knows life isn't that simple but sometimes he'd really like to believe otherwise.