On the twelfth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me
twelve great weights
[Title] Full of Potential
[Fandom] Battle Royale
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 210
[Notes/Summary] For Yuichiro, happiness is a bag of new books.
The bag’s pretty heavy. Okay, really heavy. Okay, Yuichiro can see it starting to stretch in places. Okay, maybe he bought a little too much manga.
“Maybe? Try definitely,” Tadakatsu says, as they cross the road. “How’re you even going to read all of those?”
“Come on, when have you ever seen me do anything else but read manga?” Yuichiro says. “Unlike you, I don’t have my amazing baseball career to fall back on. Professional otaku’s the only route open to me.”
Tadakatsu shakes his head like, I can’t believe you just said that.
“Besides, you can borrow all the sports stories.”
Tadakatsu shrugs but he looks kind of pleased. He still doesn’t really get it, though, Yuichiro knows. To Tadakatsu, a super-heavy bag full of books is just a pain in the ass to lug home. Whereas Yuichiro can’t think of anything better. He figures some people would feel like this if they got to buy, like, a super triple chocolate ice cream sundae, or… a brand-name handbag, maybe? He kinds of draws a blank on what makes other people happy, sometimes. But it doesn’t matter. The fatness and shiny covers and page-smell of new books and all of them waiting to be read is heaven enough for him.
[Title] Uses For A Weighted Storage Cube
[Fandom] Portal
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 301
[Notes/Summary] What did Aperture Science design the cubes for, anyway? Rattmann’s not sure.
They didn’t design the cubes to be portable. Stackable, yes. But - he shifts his grip a little, rests his head on the Companion Cube’s surface for a moment, then takes a deep breath and keeps walking - they were called Weighted Storage Cubes for a reason.
Of course, it depends what you choose to store in them. The Companion Cube is empty. Well, probably. He never got his head round all the inner workings. There may have been some compressor technology. Some miniature portals. Possibly a soul or two. There’s a reason the product listing states that Aperture Science takes no responsibility for the preservation of goods stored within the Weighted Storage Cube and advises they not be used to store fragile items or materials sensitive to heat, light, damp, cold, radiation, motion, tachyon particles, or human tissue.
All right, so they didn’t design the cubes to be portable, and they didn’t design them as storage devices, and they definitely didn’t design them to be safe (in one office there’s an entire box of mouldering leaflets entitled So Your Pet’s Been Crushed By a Weighted Storage Cube… What Now?, part of a marketing campaign for some never-created robot dogs…)
Does it matter what I am or what I was designed for? the Cube says.
“No, of course it doesn’t. I was just thinking about the past, really.”
I’m sorry to be heavy.
“You’re not. I’ll rig up a sling or something, that’ll be better.”
He puts the Cube down against the wall, sits next to it, rests his arms on it.
Aperture Science can’t have designed them to be comforting, and yet the weight of this one, and the way it is far more solid than him, far more able to withstand the environment they’ve found themselves trapped in, is exactly that.
[Title] Marked Man
[Fandom] Death Note
[Rating] G; mention of bullying
[Word Count] 391
[Notes/Summary] Even after the bullying stopped, Mikami couldn’t forget it.
They tell you that bullying isn’t really a big deal. Well, all right, they mostly don’t tell you anything, because they all pretend it isn’t happening, and if they ever acknowledge that it is, they tell you that you must be doing something to provoke it, that if you were only less you, it wouldn’t happen.
But even after it’s over (whether that’s because you are forced to flee or because something else intervened and wiped the people hurting you off the face of the earth), even after it’s over, you are not supposed to care. Not that Mikami ever talks about it to others, but he listens. When the classmates he tried to protect shrug and say, oh, those guys who died… they just roughed me up in the bathroom a few times, you know, the usual stuff. When he hears two shop workers talking and one says, he can be kind of rough with the other kids, but, you know, boys will be boys. When the girl who cried every day last year because no one talked to her flips her hair back and says, What are you talking about, Sa-chan is my best friend! It seems that you’re supposed to forget.
Mikami still has dreams, sometimes, about being in a bathroom stall and listening to them waiting for him outside, or walking into a classroom and seeing them smile, or trying to run on a summer’s day outside in the school grounds.
How can you forget? For one thing, they may be gone, but you’re still the same. You can’t forget the snuffly feeling of your nose bleeding, or the goose bumps on your skin because they’ve held you down and ripped your clothes off you, or the way your hands ache because they locked you in the supply cupboard and you’ve been thumping on the door for hours and no one’s come. It’s still your body, your skin, your hands. Maybe other people are better at detaching themselves from who they are.
But it’s not just that. It’s the way they smiled. The ideas they thought up, and their anticipation of how he’d react. They knew what they were doing. They tailored their games to make him cry. Once you’ve seen people like that, it’s nothing you can forget. It’s a weight you’ll carry with you forever.
[Title] Representing For the Analogue Era
[Fandom] Jet Set Radio
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 285
[Notes/Summary] Beat and Cube don’t get why Combo sticks with his ghetto-blaster when there’s so much early-2000s technology to choose from.
“You never get tired of carrying that thing around, man?” Beat said to Combo as they were skating back towards the garage.
“What, the g-blaster? Hell, no. Reckon by this time if I went out without it, my balance’d be all off.”
“You might ask,” Cube said, “why he’s still relying on an eighties-era tape deck when there are these super-cool things called CD players - not to mention Walkmans -”
“Didn’t notice you complainin’ when Coin made you dual-track mixes on this, kid,” Combo says. “And you kiddin’? This baby’s got speakers to die for. Ain’t gonna rely on no handheld, I need that sweet sound.”
“I mean,” Beat said, dashing round to stand in front of them, skating backwards, “you can get some pretty decent headphones these days. I’m just saying.”
“Nope and nope,” Combo said. “Or, least not until the last second-hand cassette’s been sent to landfill and we’re all listenin’ through microchips in our brains or whatever. Til then, I’m representing for the analogue era. Plus, it’s seen me through a hell of a lot of close shaves. Be rude to ditch it for a younger model.”
“I guess,” Beat said. “Fair enough, I know most of the time when I started out I didn’t feel like a real rudie til I’d got my ‘phones on.”
“I felt like a rudie from the moment I was skating down the street praying I wouldn’t fall over,” Cube said. “You two are way too into your tech. On the other hand, Combo’s got a point about the mixes. And…” She shrugged, determinedly casual. “Coin’d be pissed if we got rid of the g-blaster before we find him again. Okay. Guess it can stay.”
[Title] Inner Workings
[Fandom] Akira
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 335
[Notes/Summary] Kaneda finds a broken-down bike.
Kaneda finds the bike on a patch of wasteground near the dorm. It’s blackened and burnt and the tyres are gone but it looks like its innards might have survived, maybe? And if they haven’t, no one’s gonna want it, and… really, if anyone wanted it, they shouldn’t have just left it here.
He lugs it back to the yard - nearly unknits his spine doing so and he stinks of sweat by the time he arrives, even by his standards - and then runs up to his room and grabs the screwdriver and wrench and stuff he’s been collecting (from older kids who’d moved on, from shop class at school, more junk left on the wasteground) and starts dissecting the bike. They had a couple of lessons at school where they taught you about engines and shit like that but not enough, even though that stuff’s way more important than history or, or gravity or whatever.
Tetsuo comes to find him after a bit - his hands are already covered in rust and oil - and Tetsuo’s always fine with listening so Kaneda starts explaining the bits he recognises under the casing and making up about the stuff he doesn’t. Tetsuo just listens for a bit but then he picks up some of the spare tools and comes to crouch on the oily ground and starts to prod away at the rest of the bike.
By the time it’s too dark to see, they’re both covered in oil and the bike is never going to be whole again, but Kaneda’s mind is buzzing with thoughts.
“I need to get hold of one that’s not wrecked,” he says. “Then I can take it apart and put it back together for real. Then if I can learn to ride…”
“You’re not gonna buy one,” Tetsuo says. “I mean, you’ve got no money.”
“I mean,” Kaneda mimics, “who said anything about buying? C’mon. When I’ve learnt, I’ll teach you.”
Tetsuo looks thoughtful, but eventually he grins and nods. “Okay. Sounds cool.”
[Title] Remedy for Eldritch Forces
[Fandom] Jet Set Radio
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 468
[Notes/Summary] Tab’s kind of freaked out by the events of the night. Luckily, there is pizza.
Tab kind of thought he was fine. Like, okay, they’d nearly died even more than they regularly nearly die, and they’d seen a dude plunge off a building, and there’d been a possibly actual real demon up there, but, you know, they’d kept their heads and believed in each other and now the storm and the weird light and everything have all gone, it’s just a regular early morning, sun just starting to rise, the guy at the twenty-four-hour pizza joint frowning as he and Yo-Yo scoot in. “Early for you lot, isn’t it?” and Tab says, “We’ve had a hell of a night,” and as he says it, his mouth twitches and he has to work really hard not to burst out in laughter even though it’s seriously not that funny.
Beat gave them all the food fund and a big chunk of the paint fund and said, Go wild, I reckon we’ve earned it and so Tab’s like Ten large pizzas please and then Yo-Yo’s like with extra pepperoni on all of ‘em and Tab’s like Yeah, and make one Hawaiian, no, hang on, make two Hawaiian and Yo-Yo’s like and garlic bread, can we have, like, all the garlic bread and the radio - not Jet Set Radio, some mainstream station - is playing a Top 40 hit and the counter guy is shouting out the order to the kitchen and giving them the side-eye like How are you gonna pay for this? and it seems unreal that a few hours ago they were inches from being burnt alive or falling forty storeys. Like, okay, they’re often inches from nasty things happening or from falling off stuff, but this was…
“This was a trip, man,” Yo-Yo says when the two of them are staggering back, laden down with pizza boxes, basically just letting themselves roll down Center Street and hoping anyone ahead of them will move. “Like I keep thinking I can feel the ground spinning. I’m all for sick tunes but that was taking it too far, right?”
Tab’s really glad he said that. “Tell me about it,” he agrees from behind the boxes. “That whole thing - that was a thing that shouldn’t have happened. That shouldn’t have been a thing.”
“Oh, well,” Yo-Yo says. “Next time my mom starts getting on my case about me going back to school and getting a real job, I am going to have the best argument about the unhealthy influence of the corporate environment. I mean, preach it.”
Tab laughs, and breathes in the smell of melted cheese. The boxes are heavy and warm and slightly greasy in his arms, and the sun’s almost up. He feels like he’s slowly settling back into his own skin. He’s glad he volunteered to get the pizza in. He needed some grounding.
[Title] Portability
[Fandom] Portal
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 109
[Notes/Summary] The Portal gun is surprisingly… portable.
The gun was surprisingly light for something that could shoot holes in reality. She kept hefting it to check, like she was expecting it to suddenly wrench her arms down, like she was deluding herself that it could possibly exist or do the things it did and yet be so… portable. But it never did. It stayed in her arms, almost comfortable, and after a bit, it started to feel like she’d always been carrying it, always been walking down corridors looking for places to open the blue and orange circles on the walls. Perhaps she had. It wasn’t like she could remember anything before this time, after all.
[Title] Take A Last Breath
[Fandom] Death Note
[Rating] PG-13
[Word Count] 1606
[Notes/Summary] Aizawa/Ide. Ide and Aizawa take a walk in the small hours of January 28th.
Don’t be stupid, you didn’t do anything
[Fandom] Azumanga Daioh / Battle Royale
[Rating] PG-13 for death
[Notes/Summary] The game comes to an end.
Badass (1529 words)
What's Necessary (602 words)
Happy Ending (850 words)
Something to Live For (1255 words)
twelve great weights
[Title] Full of Potential
[Fandom] Battle Royale
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 210
[Notes/Summary] For Yuichiro, happiness is a bag of new books.
The bag’s pretty heavy. Okay, really heavy. Okay, Yuichiro can see it starting to stretch in places. Okay, maybe he bought a little too much manga.
“Maybe? Try definitely,” Tadakatsu says, as they cross the road. “How’re you even going to read all of those?”
“Come on, when have you ever seen me do anything else but read manga?” Yuichiro says. “Unlike you, I don’t have my amazing baseball career to fall back on. Professional otaku’s the only route open to me.”
Tadakatsu shakes his head like, I can’t believe you just said that.
“Besides, you can borrow all the sports stories.”
Tadakatsu shrugs but he looks kind of pleased. He still doesn’t really get it, though, Yuichiro knows. To Tadakatsu, a super-heavy bag full of books is just a pain in the ass to lug home. Whereas Yuichiro can’t think of anything better. He figures some people would feel like this if they got to buy, like, a super triple chocolate ice cream sundae, or… a brand-name handbag, maybe? He kinds of draws a blank on what makes other people happy, sometimes. But it doesn’t matter. The fatness and shiny covers and page-smell of new books and all of them waiting to be read is heaven enough for him.
[Title] Uses For A Weighted Storage Cube
[Fandom] Portal
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 301
[Notes/Summary] What did Aperture Science design the cubes for, anyway? Rattmann’s not sure.
They didn’t design the cubes to be portable. Stackable, yes. But - he shifts his grip a little, rests his head on the Companion Cube’s surface for a moment, then takes a deep breath and keeps walking - they were called Weighted Storage Cubes for a reason.
Of course, it depends what you choose to store in them. The Companion Cube is empty. Well, probably. He never got his head round all the inner workings. There may have been some compressor technology. Some miniature portals. Possibly a soul or two. There’s a reason the product listing states that Aperture Science takes no responsibility for the preservation of goods stored within the Weighted Storage Cube and advises they not be used to store fragile items or materials sensitive to heat, light, damp, cold, radiation, motion, tachyon particles, or human tissue.
All right, so they didn’t design the cubes to be portable, and they didn’t design them as storage devices, and they definitely didn’t design them to be safe (in one office there’s an entire box of mouldering leaflets entitled So Your Pet’s Been Crushed By a Weighted Storage Cube… What Now?, part of a marketing campaign for some never-created robot dogs…)
Does it matter what I am or what I was designed for? the Cube says.
“No, of course it doesn’t. I was just thinking about the past, really.”
I’m sorry to be heavy.
“You’re not. I’ll rig up a sling or something, that’ll be better.”
He puts the Cube down against the wall, sits next to it, rests his arms on it.
Aperture Science can’t have designed them to be comforting, and yet the weight of this one, and the way it is far more solid than him, far more able to withstand the environment they’ve found themselves trapped in, is exactly that.
[Title] Marked Man
[Fandom] Death Note
[Rating] G; mention of bullying
[Word Count] 391
[Notes/Summary] Even after the bullying stopped, Mikami couldn’t forget it.
They tell you that bullying isn’t really a big deal. Well, all right, they mostly don’t tell you anything, because they all pretend it isn’t happening, and if they ever acknowledge that it is, they tell you that you must be doing something to provoke it, that if you were only less you, it wouldn’t happen.
But even after it’s over (whether that’s because you are forced to flee or because something else intervened and wiped the people hurting you off the face of the earth), even after it’s over, you are not supposed to care. Not that Mikami ever talks about it to others, but he listens. When the classmates he tried to protect shrug and say, oh, those guys who died… they just roughed me up in the bathroom a few times, you know, the usual stuff. When he hears two shop workers talking and one says, he can be kind of rough with the other kids, but, you know, boys will be boys. When the girl who cried every day last year because no one talked to her flips her hair back and says, What are you talking about, Sa-chan is my best friend! It seems that you’re supposed to forget.
Mikami still has dreams, sometimes, about being in a bathroom stall and listening to them waiting for him outside, or walking into a classroom and seeing them smile, or trying to run on a summer’s day outside in the school grounds.
How can you forget? For one thing, they may be gone, but you’re still the same. You can’t forget the snuffly feeling of your nose bleeding, or the goose bumps on your skin because they’ve held you down and ripped your clothes off you, or the way your hands ache because they locked you in the supply cupboard and you’ve been thumping on the door for hours and no one’s come. It’s still your body, your skin, your hands. Maybe other people are better at detaching themselves from who they are.
But it’s not just that. It’s the way they smiled. The ideas they thought up, and their anticipation of how he’d react. They knew what they were doing. They tailored their games to make him cry. Once you’ve seen people like that, it’s nothing you can forget. It’s a weight you’ll carry with you forever.
[Title] Representing For the Analogue Era
[Fandom] Jet Set Radio
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 285
[Notes/Summary] Beat and Cube don’t get why Combo sticks with his ghetto-blaster when there’s so much early-2000s technology to choose from.
“You never get tired of carrying that thing around, man?” Beat said to Combo as they were skating back towards the garage.
“What, the g-blaster? Hell, no. Reckon by this time if I went out without it, my balance’d be all off.”
“You might ask,” Cube said, “why he’s still relying on an eighties-era tape deck when there are these super-cool things called CD players - not to mention Walkmans -”
“Didn’t notice you complainin’ when Coin made you dual-track mixes on this, kid,” Combo says. “And you kiddin’? This baby’s got speakers to die for. Ain’t gonna rely on no handheld, I need that sweet sound.”
“I mean,” Beat said, dashing round to stand in front of them, skating backwards, “you can get some pretty decent headphones these days. I’m just saying.”
“Nope and nope,” Combo said. “Or, least not until the last second-hand cassette’s been sent to landfill and we’re all listenin’ through microchips in our brains or whatever. Til then, I’m representing for the analogue era. Plus, it’s seen me through a hell of a lot of close shaves. Be rude to ditch it for a younger model.”
“I guess,” Beat said. “Fair enough, I know most of the time when I started out I didn’t feel like a real rudie til I’d got my ‘phones on.”
“I felt like a rudie from the moment I was skating down the street praying I wouldn’t fall over,” Cube said. “You two are way too into your tech. On the other hand, Combo’s got a point about the mixes. And…” She shrugged, determinedly casual. “Coin’d be pissed if we got rid of the g-blaster before we find him again. Okay. Guess it can stay.”
[Title] Inner Workings
[Fandom] Akira
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 335
[Notes/Summary] Kaneda finds a broken-down bike.
Kaneda finds the bike on a patch of wasteground near the dorm. It’s blackened and burnt and the tyres are gone but it looks like its innards might have survived, maybe? And if they haven’t, no one’s gonna want it, and… really, if anyone wanted it, they shouldn’t have just left it here.
He lugs it back to the yard - nearly unknits his spine doing so and he stinks of sweat by the time he arrives, even by his standards - and then runs up to his room and grabs the screwdriver and wrench and stuff he’s been collecting (from older kids who’d moved on, from shop class at school, more junk left on the wasteground) and starts dissecting the bike. They had a couple of lessons at school where they taught you about engines and shit like that but not enough, even though that stuff’s way more important than history or, or gravity or whatever.
Tetsuo comes to find him after a bit - his hands are already covered in rust and oil - and Tetsuo’s always fine with listening so Kaneda starts explaining the bits he recognises under the casing and making up about the stuff he doesn’t. Tetsuo just listens for a bit but then he picks up some of the spare tools and comes to crouch on the oily ground and starts to prod away at the rest of the bike.
By the time it’s too dark to see, they’re both covered in oil and the bike is never going to be whole again, but Kaneda’s mind is buzzing with thoughts.
“I need to get hold of one that’s not wrecked,” he says. “Then I can take it apart and put it back together for real. Then if I can learn to ride…”
“You’re not gonna buy one,” Tetsuo says. “I mean, you’ve got no money.”
“I mean,” Kaneda mimics, “who said anything about buying? C’mon. When I’ve learnt, I’ll teach you.”
Tetsuo looks thoughtful, but eventually he grins and nods. “Okay. Sounds cool.”
[Title] Remedy for Eldritch Forces
[Fandom] Jet Set Radio
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 468
[Notes/Summary] Tab’s kind of freaked out by the events of the night. Luckily, there is pizza.
Tab kind of thought he was fine. Like, okay, they’d nearly died even more than they regularly nearly die, and they’d seen a dude plunge off a building, and there’d been a possibly actual real demon up there, but, you know, they’d kept their heads and believed in each other and now the storm and the weird light and everything have all gone, it’s just a regular early morning, sun just starting to rise, the guy at the twenty-four-hour pizza joint frowning as he and Yo-Yo scoot in. “Early for you lot, isn’t it?” and Tab says, “We’ve had a hell of a night,” and as he says it, his mouth twitches and he has to work really hard not to burst out in laughter even though it’s seriously not that funny.
Beat gave them all the food fund and a big chunk of the paint fund and said, Go wild, I reckon we’ve earned it and so Tab’s like Ten large pizzas please and then Yo-Yo’s like with extra pepperoni on all of ‘em and Tab’s like Yeah, and make one Hawaiian, no, hang on, make two Hawaiian and Yo-Yo’s like and garlic bread, can we have, like, all the garlic bread and the radio - not Jet Set Radio, some mainstream station - is playing a Top 40 hit and the counter guy is shouting out the order to the kitchen and giving them the side-eye like How are you gonna pay for this? and it seems unreal that a few hours ago they were inches from being burnt alive or falling forty storeys. Like, okay, they’re often inches from nasty things happening or from falling off stuff, but this was…
“This was a trip, man,” Yo-Yo says when the two of them are staggering back, laden down with pizza boxes, basically just letting themselves roll down Center Street and hoping anyone ahead of them will move. “Like I keep thinking I can feel the ground spinning. I’m all for sick tunes but that was taking it too far, right?”
Tab’s really glad he said that. “Tell me about it,” he agrees from behind the boxes. “That whole thing - that was a thing that shouldn’t have happened. That shouldn’t have been a thing.”
“Oh, well,” Yo-Yo says. “Next time my mom starts getting on my case about me going back to school and getting a real job, I am going to have the best argument about the unhealthy influence of the corporate environment. I mean, preach it.”
Tab laughs, and breathes in the smell of melted cheese. The boxes are heavy and warm and slightly greasy in his arms, and the sun’s almost up. He feels like he’s slowly settling back into his own skin. He’s glad he volunteered to get the pizza in. He needed some grounding.
[Title] Portability
[Fandom] Portal
[Rating] G
[Word Count] 109
[Notes/Summary] The Portal gun is surprisingly… portable.
The gun was surprisingly light for something that could shoot holes in reality. She kept hefting it to check, like she was expecting it to suddenly wrench her arms down, like she was deluding herself that it could possibly exist or do the things it did and yet be so… portable. But it never did. It stayed in her arms, almost comfortable, and after a bit, it started to feel like she’d always been carrying it, always been walking down corridors looking for places to open the blue and orange circles on the walls. Perhaps she had. It wasn’t like she could remember anything before this time, after all.
[Title] Take A Last Breath
[Fandom] Death Note
[Rating] PG-13
[Word Count] 1606
[Notes/Summary] Aizawa/Ide. Ide and Aizawa take a walk in the small hours of January 28th.
Don’t be stupid, you didn’t do anything
[Fandom] Azumanga Daioh / Battle Royale
[Rating] PG-13 for death
[Notes/Summary] The game comes to an end.
Badass (1529 words)
What's Necessary (602 words)
Happy Ending (850 words)
Something to Live For (1255 words)