Fic Amnesty, Part the Second: Harry Dresden, GitS: SAG, Highlander
[Harry Dresden, Yuletide 2008 dry-start, Carlos/Molly]
He tells everyone that it's her tongue ring. And her belly button ring, and the way that she makes pigtails of her hair, and the fact that she can hide the two of them from whole hoardes of Red Court vampires when they're out on patrols. He tells Harry that Molly is the best partner he's had since... and that there's something to be said for partners-with-benefits. Then Luccio gives him the death glare, and he starts to understand what Harry sees in her. Aside from the massive amount of terrifying whup-ass the woman brings to the table.
No, Carlos only admits to himself, but only in his thoughts, that it was Molly's father that really cemented his love for her. No, no, not in some sort of homoerotic way. It actually has nothing to do with Michael Carpenter, really but instead, the look that Molly gave him one afternoon when he rolled his wheelchair across the picnic site, and the wheels got stuck in a ditch.
[Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, 14 valentines, The Major's cybernetic body]
The soul is like a UFO. Only people who need one will see one.
--Mamoru Oshii
By the time she was sixteen, her cybernetic body already weighed over three hundred pounds. She CLEPed out of physical education classes, or rather, all of the kids with cybernetic bodies (there were three of them), were exempt from gym classes. It wasn't just that they didn't need the exercise (though they could have made the argument that the bodies needed the physical body movement training. It was hard to learn to use the body without some sort of therapy), it was that most teenagers, even those with cybernetic bodies, were awkward and gangly, and that didn't mesh well with their classmates flesh and blood and decidedly more fragile bodies.
Motoko, unlike most teenagers, could bench press a car. And her fingers still spasmed a bit when she concentrated too hard, or not enough. It was an unsure thing, holding a pencil in her hand, or her girlfriend's fingers, or the curve of the basketball. Minute control like folding a paper crane. She didn't know how much pressure her feet left when she jumped down from the top row of bleachers. Enough, for example, to dimple the linoleum into the concrete floor.
There weren't enough fully cyber kids in her school to organise any sort of sporting event, and indeed, there weren't enough of them yet in the entire area (that would change when she was much older, but by then, she was an adult and off in South America with the Black Ops). Periods for physical education, then, were spent sitting on the bleachers, playing fast knife fingers with Kaoru and Soji, not a particularly challenging feat really, not for cyberkids, but amusing enough. (Later Kaoru would join the JGSDF, and Soji would become a performance artist on the streets of Kyoto, offering cheap and dirty hack ins to make his body dance like a puppet. Even later Kaoru would fail in a routine upload, and Soji would dive into the net and never come back. Some days, Motoko thinks she sees his ghost on the edges of the chat rooms she likes to flit in and out of while driving home from work).
She had understood why she wasn't participating in the basketball and tennis games. Her adoptive parents had explained everything to her.
***
Batou suggests that she upgrade, and she doesn't really say anything to that, because he doesn't mean it in a malicious way. He thinks that she deserves something faster, stronger, larger, like a man. Motoko has often considered the idea of it, large male hands that could palm all manner of firearms that engulf her small ones (note that this, she says to herself with smug satisfaction, that this doesn't not impair her ability to fire said weapon. All the triggers are terribly easy to depress.). She imagines different equipment in between her legs, or no equipment at all, really, she doesn't need it for e-sex, per se.
How Stella Methos Got His Groove Aim Back
The thing that I can gladly say that I have had ample time to hone is my aim. I'm very good at aiming. Really. I can hit anything in the first try: dart boards, beer cans on a fence post, the trash can, another immortal's neck. So when I missed the hamper yesterday morning with a wadded up shirt, an action that most people wouldn't care about, I think my body instinctually froze in terror a full five seconds before I had even realized why.
My aim was utterly gone.
And I don't mean like, 'Oh I wasn't paying attention,' or, 'I forgot to be the ball,' or, 'win some lose some,' because I never miss. I can hit the hamper from the other room through a wall with my eyes closed. I can hit the hamper when I'm on Rue de Bac and my apartment is in Saint-Germain. I can hit the hamper in my Paris apartment when I'm on a flight to Bora Bora, in the middle of eating my complementary pretzels and drinking a Heineken.
I tried it again with a shoe. Nothing. You know when I finally scored three fucking points? The slam dunk.
It was okay, though. I was okay. I would be okay. Shaquille had never made a free throw in his life, and he was still a great basketball player, right? Well, okay, he did make those rap albums, and after all, he'd never had to aim for someone's neck in the hopes of taking their head off. That took the bloom off the metaphorical rose.
I troubleshot the situation: floor-level; blood alcohol level-sober; wheels on the hamper-not a wheel in sight; earthquake-not even close.
It was official. I was fucked.