Tales of the Abyss fanfiction: I am so sorry : ((((
For narugami,
young!Luke and Guy fic:
“Luke-sama, you can’t eat that! Put it d- spit it out! Spit it out now!”
Pear laughed at Guy’s consternation. “You have to let him learn from his mistakes,” said the gardener, indulgently, seeming to enjoy the sight of the frantic Guy making his way towards the boy in the middle of the flowerbeds, not caring that his words were falling on deaf ears. “You can’t protect him from everything, you know.”
The scion of the von Faber family, heir to the most impressive dukedom in all of Kimlasca, unceremoniously spat out the flower he’d attempted to swallow, and screwed up his face in extreme distaste. He glared at Guy, as if accusing him of making the petals bitter.
“I told you not to eat it, Luke,” remonstrated his weary servant and caretaker, even while watching Luke carefully for any further signs that the flower was disagreeing with his young charge. “Now come out of the flowerbed, you’re ruining the flowers.”
Luke obstinately sat down in the midst of the blossoms and refused to budge.
If he hadn’t been the son of one of the most important men in Markt, Guy would have given him a good spanking. As it was, Guy found himself wishing he could have done just that - it might have saved all of them a great deal of bad behavior. But Luke had been treated like glass since his abduction barely over a year ago, and in Guy’s opinion, it was doing him more harm than good.
Luke held out his arms to Guy, demanding to be carried.
Clearly, the young master might have forgotten how to speak, but he didn’t need words to make his feelings clear.
Guy had, in fact, on more than one occasion, refused to give in to Luke’s outrageous demands, but those attempts never lasted for long. They both knew how those particular contests of will would end. Guy might win those which required Luke to get out of bed, or those over wearing clothes, and about going to sleep, but he never won any arguments over who had to eat his carrots, and he certainly never won when Luke wanted to be carried.
As it was, Guy stepped knee-deep into flowers and gave in to the youngest von Faber’s increasingly insistent demands to be carried. The weight of the young Luke in his arms was considerable, and Guy knew that at the rate Luke was growing, he wouldn’t be able to do this much longer.
Luke put his arms around Guy’s neck, and looked up at him as if he had all the right in the world to be in Guy’s arms, and he was doing Guy a favour by letting himself be carried. And all of a sudden Guy realised he would miss this, when Luke was old enough not to want to be carried any more.
It was strange, how Luke’s kidnapping had changed so much. Aside from that matter of Luke never being allowed out of the von Faber compound until he was of age, it had made Luke a much greater part of Guy’s life than he had ever been before. Before this, Luke hadn’t needed to be looked after for every second of his life. While Guy still been Luke’s servant, this Luke seemed to need him more than the previous one had. He set Luke down on the path between the flowerbeds, and Luke immediately set off for Pear’s wheelbarrow.
Correction, thought Guy, this Luke definitely needed him more, as he stepped between the inquisitive Luke and Pear’s collection of gardening tools. Wouldn’t want the young master to scratch himself on a rake now, what with that flower he’d almost eaten. Hopefully he wouldn’t be landed with the task of explaining the unexpected addition to Luke’s diet to the household, if said diet disagreed with him.
Whether Guy wanted to admit it or not, he was getting used to the new Luke. In the morning, Luke woke and was attended to by the household maids, and was returned to them every evening to be put to bed, but between then, he was all Guy’s. It hadn’t been a responsibility that Guy embraced. Not at first, at least.
For fate_repeated - (I was serious! *grin* - but I can't get Jade to be nice to Dist! I'm working on it!)
Jade fic.
In Markt, everything was different. Gone were the snows that had marked so the days of their childhood, and in their place were the dusty streets and the clamor of an Empire they had to learn to command.
Everyone was different, too. Even if they hadn’t already been changing, they’d have had to change. The children of Ketelburg were no more. Peony developed a heretofore undiscovered fascination with buusagi, Saphil changed his name, and Jade Curtiss learnt that secret of diplomacy lay in being able to insult people without their knowing it, although Jade thought that far too easy, given the people he was surrounded with.
Saphil, for one. Or Dist as he now wanted to be called. Saphil was far too easy a target, being easily roused to anger, easy to provoke, and in many ways as simple an adult as the child he once had been. Jade wondered if growing up with Saphil made him completely incapable of seeing him as a complex individual, because he knew why and how Saphil had turned out that way, so there was no mystery to the man as far as he was concerned. As individuals went, Peony was far more interesting, and at least he never bored Jade the way Saphil did.
Saphil could be so tedious sometimes, especially when Jade knew all too well what he was trying to do, and it wasn’t working. At least, not with Jade. One might as well have given a cheegle a mantle and called it the Doushi. A fool by any other name would still be the same fool; the only difference being that said fool would now have a similarly foolish title. So, whether Saphil preferred to be called Dist, or disliked being called Shinigami no Dist, or wanted to be known as Dist of the Rose, it was all the same to Jade.
To his mind, Saphil was still Saphil, had always been Saphil, and would always be Saphil, no matter what he called himself now. Jade occasionally called him Dist only because it made things easier, because as much as Saphil’s subsequent convulsions of rage could be on occasion amusing, Jade often had more important things to do than indulge him.
For harajukufuuri, CONGRATULATIONS ON BEATING ASCH, this story is the exact opposite. C'MON MAKE ASCH HAPPY FANTHINGS. XD I THROW DOWN THE GAUNTLET =D
The afternoon sun casts long slanting shadows on the scrublands of Markt, as Luke von Faber fights with himself.
They are almost evenly matched, he and Asch, taught by the same teacher and given each others’ advantages of power and strength and speed. But truth be told, in this fight, Asch has the edge, his experience in the Markt Army and his time as one of the Rokujinshou gifting him the ability to read enemies and know what they will do, sometimes even before they know it. And it is this knowledge that stands him in good stead now.
“Pathetic,” says Asch shortly, as he knocks Luke off-balance and to the dusty ground. Luke rises almost instantly, alive with indignation, but the point of Asch’s sword, suddenly at his throat, kills the impulse to protest.
“I can beat you just as well with a replica as I can with an original,” said Asch, with absolutely no trace of irony in his voice. He tosses the wooden sword to the ground and stalks off. “Try again later,” he says, without looking back at Luke. “And try not to be such an embarrassment to yourself this time.”
Luke slowly picks himself up, sore in about a hundred places and annoyed in even more ways. “Idiot,” he mutters, under his breath.
“He isn’t wrong,” says an impish voice, and Luke turns to meet eyes the colour of his own, as a certain firebrand steps out from behind a convenient tree, where she almost certainly had been watching the entire display.
“Fight him and then speak for yourself!”
“He wouldn’t ask anything of you that he couldn’t ask of himself,” says Natalia,
“I know,” groaned Luke. He knew it, and acknowledging it didn’t help.
“But I think it best that you train with him,” said Natalia, surprisingly.
“Why?” asked Luke, startled. Surely Guy would have made a better choice, if for the sole reason that he wouldn’t resent it quite so much.
“He won’t hold back,” replied Natalia, with absolute certainty. “Not with anyone, and never with you.”
“That doesn’t help at all,” retorted Luke.
“No?”
The question brings Luke up short, and the look that those green eyes level at him makes him remember that he is, after all, looking at the Princess of Kimlasca-Lanvandear.
As he thinks about it, he is forced to admit that she isn’t wrong, either. Where Van and Guy might have held back out of a sense of fairness for who and what he was, Asch had no such reservations. And where they were going, they would need all the help they could get - and indeed, who would know your limits as well as you, yourself?
OH GOD ASCH I AM SO SORRY but I wanted to write this.
warning for TOTAL CRACK.
HAPPY!Rokujinshou fic.
“A toast!” roared the tallest General in the Malkuth tavern. “To one of our youngest members!”
“I remember when you first came to Markt,” said the silver-haired Shinigami, teasingly. “You couldn’t get over your replica, and you couldn’t think about anything else except wanting to go home.” But under his light humor there was genuine warmth as he raised his glass in celebration.
“Don’t remind me,” said the redheaded Oracle Knight, wryly. “That was such an embarrassment.”
“I’m proud to say that today, some of his best friends are replicas,” added an emerald-maned youth, raising his visor so that the company could see him grinning from ear to ear, and hooking an arm around the redhead’s waist.
“You’ve come a long way indeed,” chimed a tiny peach-haired girl, nodding vigorously.
The hum of conversation in the tavern was drowned out by a spirited rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Rokujinshou”, as the newest member of the Six Generals blushed as scarlet as his hair.
POOR ASCH. Spoilers for... a world that never was.
“Tell them they can throw themselves into an abyss,” says your replica, characteristically direct, and characteristically frustrated with the entire enterprise. "Or off the Tartarus. I don't care. At least if they throw themselves into an abyss we won't have to clean up the mess."
“It’s not that easy,” you say, brushing a sheaf of paper off the scatter of books on your desk. “The Lorelai Church would hardly be put off by an argument like that.”
The replica’s eyes narrow as he ignores your last suggestion. “Any institution that designates one of these -” here he nudges his sleeping cheegle with his foot - “As a Holy Beast surely has more than just the Score wrong.”
You shake your head and laugh. It’s not enough that he manages to systematically insult the leading religion in Markt and Kimlasca with every sentence he utters, it’s also that he probably isn’t even aware he’s doing it.
You look at him, scowling fit to rival a thunderstorm over the lines of fonim that he’s meant to be learning, and you can’t help but wonder how someone who’s supposed to be exactly like you turned out so very different, instead. The sunlight spilling through the tall windows turns his hair to fire amidst the cool dim shadows of the library. He mutters under his breath as he turns the page, and his cheegle lets out a sleepy mieu, but doesn’t rouse from its position as his footrest.
“One really good Choushindou would put an end to all of this,” he says, casting a certain look in your direction. It’s almost a look you would have called plaintive, save for the fact that like you, your replica has no patience for pleading. You would reprove him for what he’s just said, if it wasn’t something you yourself had thought, many a time. Then again, if that sort of opinion had been entertained, you’d all be living in Qlipoth.
The replica frowns at you, and you could almost swear that he can read your mind, just like you can read his.
For little_ribbon, the contents of that file you were interested in. Coincidentally, it was actually inspired by you.
Everyone who's ever found the 'he's so much like me' / "we have so much in common" concept remotely attractive should bear in mind the legend of Narcissus, a man who fell in love with his own reflection, and as befits all Greek myths of this sort, came to a rather disastrous end.
So as you can see, it's really not advisable to fall in love with yourself.
[I really do write rubbish, you know. and here's how the file got its name.]
'Even a cheegle would starve on what you eat,' growled Asch.
[I AM SO SORRY THAT IS ALL THERE IS. You picked a notepad file!]
And this was in the file, too, and probably summarises my Abyss writing techniques:
You see, bad fanfiction makes baby cheegles cry.
Because every time bad fanfiction gets written, Luke-sama abuses a cheegle.
Please, think of the cheegles.
...Mieu, I'll make it up to you.
young!Luke and Guy fic:
“Luke-sama, you can’t eat that! Put it d- spit it out! Spit it out now!”
Pear laughed at Guy’s consternation. “You have to let him learn from his mistakes,” said the gardener, indulgently, seeming to enjoy the sight of the frantic Guy making his way towards the boy in the middle of the flowerbeds, not caring that his words were falling on deaf ears. “You can’t protect him from everything, you know.”
The scion of the von Faber family, heir to the most impressive dukedom in all of Kimlasca, unceremoniously spat out the flower he’d attempted to swallow, and screwed up his face in extreme distaste. He glared at Guy, as if accusing him of making the petals bitter.
“I told you not to eat it, Luke,” remonstrated his weary servant and caretaker, even while watching Luke carefully for any further signs that the flower was disagreeing with his young charge. “Now come out of the flowerbed, you’re ruining the flowers.”
Luke obstinately sat down in the midst of the blossoms and refused to budge.
If he hadn’t been the son of one of the most important men in Markt, Guy would have given him a good spanking. As it was, Guy found himself wishing he could have done just that - it might have saved all of them a great deal of bad behavior. But Luke had been treated like glass since his abduction barely over a year ago, and in Guy’s opinion, it was doing him more harm than good.
Luke held out his arms to Guy, demanding to be carried.
Clearly, the young master might have forgotten how to speak, but he didn’t need words to make his feelings clear.
Guy had, in fact, on more than one occasion, refused to give in to Luke’s outrageous demands, but those attempts never lasted for long. They both knew how those particular contests of will would end. Guy might win those which required Luke to get out of bed, or those over wearing clothes, and about going to sleep, but he never won any arguments over who had to eat his carrots, and he certainly never won when Luke wanted to be carried.
As it was, Guy stepped knee-deep into flowers and gave in to the youngest von Faber’s increasingly insistent demands to be carried. The weight of the young Luke in his arms was considerable, and Guy knew that at the rate Luke was growing, he wouldn’t be able to do this much longer.
Luke put his arms around Guy’s neck, and looked up at him as if he had all the right in the world to be in Guy’s arms, and he was doing Guy a favour by letting himself be carried. And all of a sudden Guy realised he would miss this, when Luke was old enough not to want to be carried any more.
It was strange, how Luke’s kidnapping had changed so much. Aside from that matter of Luke never being allowed out of the von Faber compound until he was of age, it had made Luke a much greater part of Guy’s life than he had ever been before. Before this, Luke hadn’t needed to be looked after for every second of his life. While Guy still been Luke’s servant, this Luke seemed to need him more than the previous one had. He set Luke down on the path between the flowerbeds, and Luke immediately set off for Pear’s wheelbarrow.
Correction, thought Guy, this Luke definitely needed him more, as he stepped between the inquisitive Luke and Pear’s collection of gardening tools. Wouldn’t want the young master to scratch himself on a rake now, what with that flower he’d almost eaten. Hopefully he wouldn’t be landed with the task of explaining the unexpected addition to Luke’s diet to the household, if said diet disagreed with him.
Whether Guy wanted to admit it or not, he was getting used to the new Luke. In the morning, Luke woke and was attended to by the household maids, and was returned to them every evening to be put to bed, but between then, he was all Guy’s. It hadn’t been a responsibility that Guy embraced. Not at first, at least.
For fate_repeated - (I was serious! *grin* - but I can't get Jade to be nice to Dist! I'm working on it!)
Jade fic.
In Markt, everything was different. Gone were the snows that had marked so the days of their childhood, and in their place were the dusty streets and the clamor of an Empire they had to learn to command.
Everyone was different, too. Even if they hadn’t already been changing, they’d have had to change. The children of Ketelburg were no more. Peony developed a heretofore undiscovered fascination with buusagi, Saphil changed his name, and Jade Curtiss learnt that secret of diplomacy lay in being able to insult people without their knowing it, although Jade thought that far too easy, given the people he was surrounded with.
Saphil, for one. Or Dist as he now wanted to be called. Saphil was far too easy a target, being easily roused to anger, easy to provoke, and in many ways as simple an adult as the child he once had been. Jade wondered if growing up with Saphil made him completely incapable of seeing him as a complex individual, because he knew why and how Saphil had turned out that way, so there was no mystery to the man as far as he was concerned. As individuals went, Peony was far more interesting, and at least he never bored Jade the way Saphil did.
Saphil could be so tedious sometimes, especially when Jade knew all too well what he was trying to do, and it wasn’t working. At least, not with Jade. One might as well have given a cheegle a mantle and called it the Doushi. A fool by any other name would still be the same fool; the only difference being that said fool would now have a similarly foolish title. So, whether Saphil preferred to be called Dist, or disliked being called Shinigami no Dist, or wanted to be known as Dist of the Rose, it was all the same to Jade.
To his mind, Saphil was still Saphil, had always been Saphil, and would always be Saphil, no matter what he called himself now. Jade occasionally called him Dist only because it made things easier, because as much as Saphil’s subsequent convulsions of rage could be on occasion amusing, Jade often had more important things to do than indulge him.
For harajukufuuri, CONGRATULATIONS ON BEATING ASCH, this story is the exact opposite. C'MON MAKE ASCH HAPPY FANTHINGS. XD I THROW DOWN THE GAUNTLET =D
The afternoon sun casts long slanting shadows on the scrublands of Markt, as Luke von Faber fights with himself.
They are almost evenly matched, he and Asch, taught by the same teacher and given each others’ advantages of power and strength and speed. But truth be told, in this fight, Asch has the edge, his experience in the Markt Army and his time as one of the Rokujinshou gifting him the ability to read enemies and know what they will do, sometimes even before they know it. And it is this knowledge that stands him in good stead now.
“Pathetic,” says Asch shortly, as he knocks Luke off-balance and to the dusty ground. Luke rises almost instantly, alive with indignation, but the point of Asch’s sword, suddenly at his throat, kills the impulse to protest.
“I can beat you just as well with a replica as I can with an original,” said Asch, with absolutely no trace of irony in his voice. He tosses the wooden sword to the ground and stalks off. “Try again later,” he says, without looking back at Luke. “And try not to be such an embarrassment to yourself this time.”
Luke slowly picks himself up, sore in about a hundred places and annoyed in even more ways. “Idiot,” he mutters, under his breath.
“He isn’t wrong,” says an impish voice, and Luke turns to meet eyes the colour of his own, as a certain firebrand steps out from behind a convenient tree, where she almost certainly had been watching the entire display.
“Fight him and then speak for yourself!”
“He wouldn’t ask anything of you that he couldn’t ask of himself,” says Natalia,
“I know,” groaned Luke. He knew it, and acknowledging it didn’t help.
“But I think it best that you train with him,” said Natalia, surprisingly.
“Why?” asked Luke, startled. Surely Guy would have made a better choice, if for the sole reason that he wouldn’t resent it quite so much.
“He won’t hold back,” replied Natalia, with absolute certainty. “Not with anyone, and never with you.”
“That doesn’t help at all,” retorted Luke.
“No?”
The question brings Luke up short, and the look that those green eyes level at him makes him remember that he is, after all, looking at the Princess of Kimlasca-Lanvandear.
As he thinks about it, he is forced to admit that she isn’t wrong, either. Where Van and Guy might have held back out of a sense of fairness for who and what he was, Asch had no such reservations. And where they were going, they would need all the help they could get - and indeed, who would know your limits as well as you, yourself?
OH GOD ASCH I AM SO SORRY but I wanted to write this.
warning for TOTAL CRACK.
HAPPY!Rokujinshou fic.
“A toast!” roared the tallest General in the Malkuth tavern. “To one of our youngest members!”
“I remember when you first came to Markt,” said the silver-haired Shinigami, teasingly. “You couldn’t get over your replica, and you couldn’t think about anything else except wanting to go home.” But under his light humor there was genuine warmth as he raised his glass in celebration.
“Don’t remind me,” said the redheaded Oracle Knight, wryly. “That was such an embarrassment.”
“I’m proud to say that today, some of his best friends are replicas,” added an emerald-maned youth, raising his visor so that the company could see him grinning from ear to ear, and hooking an arm around the redhead’s waist.
“You’ve come a long way indeed,” chimed a tiny peach-haired girl, nodding vigorously.
The hum of conversation in the tavern was drowned out by a spirited rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Rokujinshou”, as the newest member of the Six Generals blushed as scarlet as his hair.
POOR ASCH. Spoilers for... a world that never was.
“Tell them they can throw themselves into an abyss,” says your replica, characteristically direct, and characteristically frustrated with the entire enterprise. "Or off the Tartarus. I don't care. At least if they throw themselves into an abyss we won't have to clean up the mess."
“It’s not that easy,” you say, brushing a sheaf of paper off the scatter of books on your desk. “The Lorelai Church would hardly be put off by an argument like that.”
The replica’s eyes narrow as he ignores your last suggestion. “Any institution that designates one of these -” here he nudges his sleeping cheegle with his foot - “As a Holy Beast surely has more than just the Score wrong.”
You shake your head and laugh. It’s not enough that he manages to systematically insult the leading religion in Markt and Kimlasca with every sentence he utters, it’s also that he probably isn’t even aware he’s doing it.
You look at him, scowling fit to rival a thunderstorm over the lines of fonim that he’s meant to be learning, and you can’t help but wonder how someone who’s supposed to be exactly like you turned out so very different, instead. The sunlight spilling through the tall windows turns his hair to fire amidst the cool dim shadows of the library. He mutters under his breath as he turns the page, and his cheegle lets out a sleepy mieu, but doesn’t rouse from its position as his footrest.
“One really good Choushindou would put an end to all of this,” he says, casting a certain look in your direction. It’s almost a look you would have called plaintive, save for the fact that like you, your replica has no patience for pleading. You would reprove him for what he’s just said, if it wasn’t something you yourself had thought, many a time. Then again, if that sort of opinion had been entertained, you’d all be living in Qlipoth.
The replica frowns at you, and you could almost swear that he can read your mind, just like you can read his.
For little_ribbon, the contents of that file you were interested in. Coincidentally, it was actually inspired by you.
Everyone who's ever found the 'he's so much like me' / "we have so much in common" concept remotely attractive should bear in mind the legend of Narcissus, a man who fell in love with his own reflection, and as befits all Greek myths of this sort, came to a rather disastrous end.
So as you can see, it's really not advisable to fall in love with yourself.
[I really do write rubbish, you know. and here's how the file got its name.]
'Even a cheegle would starve on what you eat,' growled Asch.
[I AM SO SORRY THAT IS ALL THERE IS. You picked a notepad file!]
And this was in the file, too, and probably summarises my Abyss writing techniques:
You see, bad fanfiction makes baby cheegles cry.
Because every time bad fanfiction gets written, Luke-sama abuses a cheegle.
Please, think of the cheegles.
...Mieu, I'll make it up to you.