(no subject)
Fandom: Persona 4
Rating: NC-17
Characters: Dojima Ryotaro Adachi Tohru
Warnings: Done for the P4 kink meme. Prompt was dubcon inside the TV.
Dojima wakes up with his back on the floor and the high-pitched ring of Nanako’s flat-line (the sound of his life skidding to a halt) echoing in his ears. He remembers the confrontation, raising his voice, raising his fist, and most of all, the drawn, solemn look on Adachi’s face as he raised his eyes to his partner. In retrospect, he recalls the split-second glance at the television behind him. “I’m-“ Adachi had said, the beginning of a sentence that he’ll never hear the answer to now.
He remembers being pushed.
Hours pass. The air is damp and muggy, like Inaba after a bout of rain, and Dojima finds himself fatigued. No matter how far he walks, he will not find Nanako, so he doesn’t wander far. The fog pulls up walls from the ground around him, floors upon ceilings upon floors, but he doesn’t notice. They are painted with strips of alternating black and white, prisoner’s garb, the windows are barred, and the floor is littered with newspapers all headlining a hit-and-run accident of years past.
After a while, there is a rap of knuckles on the cell door, and Dojima looks up to find Adachi standing there, smiling wryly. “Here you are,” he says. There is a deep scratch with still-red edges on his forehead that Dojima does not recall giving him, and a scarlet stain matting his left sleeve to his upper arm. The tip of his ring finger is dripping crimson. He is holding a gun. “I was wondering what kind of hellhole you’d end up in, Dojima-san. The décor suits you.”
Dojima drags himself to his feet and flies at him. The doors give away obligingly, and Dojima registers the surprised look on Adachi’s face the separation between them disappears into air just as his fist makes contact with Adachi’s face. His knuckles graze Adachi’s mouth and come away bloody. Just when he raises his other hand, Adachi shouts something. There is a flash of red and black, and something very solid and very big rams into Dojima’s gut, throwing him across the room, skidding until his back hits the wall.
“You shouldn’t do that,” mutters Adachi, pulling himself up slowly. His tongue swipes over his bloody lip, and from the look on his face, he clearly doesn’t like the taste of iron (of blood.) Magatsu Izanagi is gone, and the sound of crinkling paper marks his footsteps as Adachi crosses the room, gun cocked. “You’re hardly in the state to,” he continues, pressing the barrel into Dojima’s forehead and pushing forward, pinning him in place.
“It’s going to stop raining tomorrow, you know.” (What does weather have to do with anything?) “Your nephew is trying to get up here, but they’re not going to be fast enough.” He steps over Dojima’s legs and sits on them, leaning forward. There’s that look again, and Adachi fists his free hand in his hair and pulls. His kiss smears red across Dojima’s closed mouth, reckless and frenzied. Adrenaline knocked out of his body with the impact of defeat, Dojima only manages to push at Adachi’s shoulders, trying to buck him off to little success.
By chance, he places a hand around Adachi’s arm (the injured one), and Adachi hisses and reflexively recoils, knocking Dojima to the side with the butt of his gun, like a cornered, snarling dog. He blinks down at the other man, cradling his own wound with wide eyes, watching as Dojima grimaces, rubs his bruising temple. “This works too,” says Adachi, after a moment, and then he’s hovering over him, gun still in one hand, pulling off Dojima’s clothes with the other.
Dojima vaguely registers Adachi talking (always talking), even with a bullet resting inches from his chin, even as Adachi bites his way down his body (one at the throat, one at the collarbone, one at the waist, the hip). Suddenly, he sucks in breath, feeling Adachi envelope him. The inside of his mouth is hot and moist, and Dojima is only human, old and tired and once having almost believed that he could’ve maybe once learned to love someone other than his wife. He fights to keep himself from responding.
Nonetheless, he cries out when fingers slip under and inside. This feeling is prying, is uncomfortable; it stings. He can’t move with that gun laying on his throat, finger on the trigger, so he arches into Adachi’s mouth instead, hearing the sound of coughing even as he is stretched raw. Adachi’s face reenters his view, pushing his knees to his chest, and then with a smirk, he pushes in.
Dojima grunts in pain, but keeps his eyes fixed on Adachi’s until the other man has to look away, and he hears the newspapers slide underneath Adachi’s knees. “How does this feel?” Adachi asks, spitting out the words between thrusts, “Isn’t that nice, is it? Being someone’s bitch.” His words leak of revenge, but revenge must be painful, if it makes his face look like that. Adachi glances at him, quickly, and shuts his eyes, pushing harder, faster, trying to narrow down everything to the slap of skin against skin.
The problem is that as an adult, Dojima begins to understand, and when the world ceases to be black and white (clear typed print on white paper, black and white photos with stippled illusions of gray, headlines and cold, detached words, tomorrow’s weather forecast and today’s servings of tragedy), it becomes easy to hate blindly, but more difficult to be blind enough to. He has spent months trying to get into Adachi’s mind without realizing it was Adachi, and he is not completely empty-handed. Things start falling into place; things start falling apart.
There is a voice in his head (almost tangible) whispering things. I didn’t want justice, I wanted revenge. What am I going to do now? Police force? I couldn’t even protect them. I haven’t got anyone left, not even- Adachi is still talking, too. If you had waited, you would’ve never needed to know. Look what you did. This isn’t my fault. I’m not the one killing them, it’s the Shadows. It’s not me, I shouldn’t be blamed. I shouldn’t have been transferred. You deserve it. They deserved it.
Dojima strains against the hand stroking him, the grip tight and rough. He gives a fair fight, but nothing about this is fair anymore, and he comes until he feels everything empty out of him. Adachi cries out, goes tense and trembles as he spills inside, resting his forehead on Dojima’s shoulder and mouthing something against his chest. Everything (everything) hurts. He closes his eyes. Adachi doesn’t raise his head afterward, and his breathing becomes irregular, rather than even, like he’s taking long shuddering inhales and choking them back out.
Barely a moment passes. The sound of something slithering filters through, and Adachi looks up, curses under his breath as they draw near. Something dark, red-eyed, and formless advances in the periphery of Dojima’s vision - a large, ominous, starving mass he doesn’t recognize. Everything else happens fast. “I won’t let you,” he hears Adachi say. Something clicks - a trigger - and the edges of the world begin to blacken, until he can’t tell how close they are, or which part it is that hurts, or what Adachi’s expression means. “Dojima-san, I-“
But he’ll never hear that end of that either.
Fandom: Persona 4
Rating: G
Characters: Ichijou Kou, Ebihara Ai
Warnings: Done for the P4 kink meme. Prompt was Kou/Ai.
When Kou asks her to go out with him, she looks surprised and then elated, but Souji has given him enough hints that he expects her to. (“Go for it!” Daisuke said. “Be careful,” said Souji, quietly over the phone, after a moment of thought.) Ai’s expression has begun to change, though, and there is an ever-increasing sense of restraint in her smiles that he doesn’t expect, and he doesn’t know quite what to make of it.
She is and isn’t like the girls that he goes on group dates with - always throwing voices and fake tantrums for attention. Ai throws her money around instead (because it is the only thing she has in abundance), her tantrums are all real, and she buys herself and him things that they will possibly never need. Sometimes she takes him to a jewelry shop down by the station, and he half expects her to ask him to buy one of those matching ring sets that couples nowadays wear, but always ends up barking at the clingy attendant before dragging them both out instead.
Because of his family, Kou was raised with a gentleman’s sensibilities, and he fancies himself a bit of a ladies’ man, but it’s much too awkward to plainly ask her what’s wrong (if there is anything). Ai has always been outspoken - he figures she’ll tell him eventually, but she doesn’t. In fact, she starts talking less, filling up their awkward silences by pulling her compact mirror out of her purse and constantly checking her makeup and hair.
She says she didn’t use to be, but Ai’s pretty - Kou knows that (he has eyes). He tells her that one day, on the rooftop of the school in their third year, and she flushes the same color as the sunset. With blush already on, it makes her cheeks look much too red, and he laughs when she protests. “Whatever,” she says haughtily, flipping her hair, but she sounds somewhat pleased. It’s been a while - he knows how to decipher her, even if just a little. “You’re just saying that because you think girls want to hear it.”
It happens again - her eyes widen just a fraction, and then she lowers them. The downturn of her mouth turns into a smile, but it looks fake. Kou stands up. “Hey, why do you keep on doing that?” he asks, crossing his arms.
“You do a lot of things just because you think girls want to hear it,” says Ai, more quietly.
It has taken a long time, but Kou catches on. News travels fast in a small town like Inaba. Kou remembers Souji hanging out with Ai, back when he thought they were dating, back when he still had that crush on Satonaka, and said so, when he was asked. Kou knows enough about girls to know that they remember all the things you wish they didn’t, and never realized all the things you wished they did. He sighs.
“I don’t come out here just because you want me to.”
She looks incredulous, tipping her chin up at him, staring at him from the bridge of her nose. That princess look has earned her the disfavor of a good number of fellow classmates, but Kou is taller than Ai is - she doesn’t do a very good job of staring him down. “Because I’m ‘pretty,’” she supplies, sounding bitter. Her foot starts tapping, like she has been wanting to get this over with for a long time.
“That too,” Kou admits, already seeing the blood rise under her skin and up her neck in warning of a fit. “I just mostly come up here to sit with you.” It’s a smooth line - they both know it, but he also knows it’s true. He holds out his hand.
Ai stares at him, brows furrowing, like she can’t decide whether or not to believe him. He waits - sometimes she takes a while to cool down, to catch up. “You’re just saying that because you think I want to hear it,” she snaps eventually, but it’s a little different from what she said earlier, and she raises a hand to slap his hand away, but without enough force, it ends up simply resting against his palm.
Fandom: Persona 4
Rating: G
Characters: Adachi Tohru, Dojima Nanako
Warnings: Done for the P4 kink meme. Prompt was taking care of a sick Nanako.
Adachi comes to appreciate these days the way people come to appreciate things that they know are numbered, counted - even things like this, with Nanako on the couch, curled up on the seat (a stomach virus, weak stuff, prescribed an antibiotic, the half-empty mug of lukewarm water is still on the coffee table), every reassuring pat on her shoulder goes one, two, three, tick, tick, tock, until December comes, and everything ends.
It is only a matter of time.
This is the second but it will be the last time Adachi will be given the responsibility of watching over Dojima’s daughter, while her father pulls overtime on that file of car accident articles he won’t talk about and her cousin is out late pretending to study when he’s gallivanting around in a television instead. This is the third-to-last time he’ll rub her back, the second-to-last, the last. When he gets up, a weak hand pulls at the hem of his jacket, and Nanako looks up at him with wide, trusting eyes.
“When will Daddy be home?” she asks, and her weakened voice sounds pitiful. It is probably more than the hundredth time she has asked a question like that, but the opportunity for that, too, is limited. Maybe that was the twentieth-to-last time she’ll ask it, but no, she is the type of child who tries to be strong in the absence of strength of her elders, so maybe it is the tenth-to-last instead.
Nanako is young, and she is innocent, but one day she’ll grow old, and she’ll see the ugliness of the world, becoming ugly to echo it, because otherwise there’s no way to survive. Humans are creatures of adaptation, and their perseverance only comes in their ability to bend, not to stand up against. Poor girl, poor thing, she’ll grow, she’ll twist. He might as well stop it.
Adachi smiles gently at her (it’s a little more difficult than normal, stretching the expression across his face like a second skin - that must be because he’s tired), sitting back down on the arm of the couch and dwarfing her hand in his. He could crush it if he wanted to - he’s stronger than he pretends to be and she’s quite the opposite - bones are only so brittle. He cradles it instead, like it’s precious and made of glass in the cup of his palm, the way you hold tiny little birds when you catch them, like they’ll break, if you even so much as tighten your grip just so.
“Soon,” he promises, because empty promises are easier to make when you are an adult. He brushes the thumb of his free hand over her eyes, willing them to close, so that she’ll fall asleep, and not realize that he hadn’t told the truth, as if maybe one day the entirety of Inaba will do the same if he gets enough practice. He doesn’t want to see it, because he knows, he has felt what it feels like to find out one of the basic truths you believed in was a lie someone told you, and that no, you’re notspecial enough, and no, you won’t ever be.
She seems to know, though, because the look she gives him is a little too bitter for someone her age, even as she lets her hand slip from the cage of his fingers, but even that she won’t have to do long. He almost wants to say, Don’t worry, soon you’ll never have to feel that way again, but doesn’t, because that’d ruin everything, it’d be too soon, and she wouldn’t understand. “I’ll stay until he does,” he offers instead, scooting onto the seat and letting her rest her head on his knee. “I’ll watch over you, Nanako-chan.”
“Will you protect me from that ‘serial killer’ person they talk about on TV?” she asks, turning a pleading expression to him, and in the dim light she looks unguarded and blissfully ignorant.
Maybe this is one of the last of many lies he will have to make. “Of course. I won’t let anything happen to you.” And maybe this is one of the truths. “It’ll all be over soon.”
Fandom: Suikoden Tierkreis
Rating: G
Characters: Liu (Shen), Luo Tao
Warnings: Done for the SuikoTier kink meme.
"Elder Liu-Sh-"
"Just 'Liu' is fine," Liu interrupts, looking up from the map to Luo-Tao's face. They have done a lot of work, but there is a lot of work yet to be done as well - new lands, new people, new mindsets for a people who had lived most of their existence in seclusion and secrecy. Re-introduction into the world of the living is not a simple task, and he is yet young, but capable of many things. He blinks at Luo-Tao's carefully blank face, and suddenly feels sheepish for being so forward. Some people stuck to their traditions, after all. "I mean...uh, you can call me whatever you want."
"Elder Liu," Luo-Tao amends, with a nod of his head, testing the incomplete title and the hanging syllables on his tongue. It is satisfactory (and easier to say.) Len-Lien is out today, (forced) on a rare holiday, because the girl tends to take things much too seriously sometimes, and Liu thought it absolutely ludicrous that she hadn't even heard of taking a break if she were the Elder's attendant. (Go out and uh...do whatever it is that girls do these days - stalk Sieg's room, or chase around playboys, or something.) Admittedly, his perception of female activities is a little skewed thanks to the inhabitants of the castle, but still - it's the principle of the matter.
Luo-Tao places down a tray of simple afternoon fare. The message is implicit. "I'm not really hungr-" Liu begins.
"Please eat," Luo-Tao says. Strange - he'd never even think about issuing one, but that sure sounded like an order. Liu blinks at him for a moment, then back at the map (fraying at the edges and marked and remarked with so many lines it's hardly a legible mess to anyone but Liu). He sighs - concessions were to be made in a war, whether it was agreeing not to attack, agreeing to withdraw, agreeing to follow a boy leader, agreeing to call someone by their nickname, or agreeing to at least take a bite out of a meal brought to him. Liu reaches towards the plate.
"Thanks," he mumbles, sheepish again.
Rating: NC-17
Characters: Dojima Ryotaro Adachi Tohru
Warnings: Done for the P4 kink meme. Prompt was dubcon inside the TV.
Dojima wakes up with his back on the floor and the high-pitched ring of Nanako’s flat-line (the sound of his life skidding to a halt) echoing in his ears. He remembers the confrontation, raising his voice, raising his fist, and most of all, the drawn, solemn look on Adachi’s face as he raised his eyes to his partner. In retrospect, he recalls the split-second glance at the television behind him. “I’m-“ Adachi had said, the beginning of a sentence that he’ll never hear the answer to now.
He remembers being pushed.
Hours pass. The air is damp and muggy, like Inaba after a bout of rain, and Dojima finds himself fatigued. No matter how far he walks, he will not find Nanako, so he doesn’t wander far. The fog pulls up walls from the ground around him, floors upon ceilings upon floors, but he doesn’t notice. They are painted with strips of alternating black and white, prisoner’s garb, the windows are barred, and the floor is littered with newspapers all headlining a hit-and-run accident of years past.
After a while, there is a rap of knuckles on the cell door, and Dojima looks up to find Adachi standing there, smiling wryly. “Here you are,” he says. There is a deep scratch with still-red edges on his forehead that Dojima does not recall giving him, and a scarlet stain matting his left sleeve to his upper arm. The tip of his ring finger is dripping crimson. He is holding a gun. “I was wondering what kind of hellhole you’d end up in, Dojima-san. The décor suits you.”
Dojima drags himself to his feet and flies at him. The doors give away obligingly, and Dojima registers the surprised look on Adachi’s face the separation between them disappears into air just as his fist makes contact with Adachi’s face. His knuckles graze Adachi’s mouth and come away bloody. Just when he raises his other hand, Adachi shouts something. There is a flash of red and black, and something very solid and very big rams into Dojima’s gut, throwing him across the room, skidding until his back hits the wall.
“You shouldn’t do that,” mutters Adachi, pulling himself up slowly. His tongue swipes over his bloody lip, and from the look on his face, he clearly doesn’t like the taste of iron (of blood.) Magatsu Izanagi is gone, and the sound of crinkling paper marks his footsteps as Adachi crosses the room, gun cocked. “You’re hardly in the state to,” he continues, pressing the barrel into Dojima’s forehead and pushing forward, pinning him in place.
“It’s going to stop raining tomorrow, you know.” (What does weather have to do with anything?) “Your nephew is trying to get up here, but they’re not going to be fast enough.” He steps over Dojima’s legs and sits on them, leaning forward. There’s that look again, and Adachi fists his free hand in his hair and pulls. His kiss smears red across Dojima’s closed mouth, reckless and frenzied. Adrenaline knocked out of his body with the impact of defeat, Dojima only manages to push at Adachi’s shoulders, trying to buck him off to little success.
By chance, he places a hand around Adachi’s arm (the injured one), and Adachi hisses and reflexively recoils, knocking Dojima to the side with the butt of his gun, like a cornered, snarling dog. He blinks down at the other man, cradling his own wound with wide eyes, watching as Dojima grimaces, rubs his bruising temple. “This works too,” says Adachi, after a moment, and then he’s hovering over him, gun still in one hand, pulling off Dojima’s clothes with the other.
Dojima vaguely registers Adachi talking (always talking), even with a bullet resting inches from his chin, even as Adachi bites his way down his body (one at the throat, one at the collarbone, one at the waist, the hip). Suddenly, he sucks in breath, feeling Adachi envelope him. The inside of his mouth is hot and moist, and Dojima is only human, old and tired and once having almost believed that he could’ve maybe once learned to love someone other than his wife. He fights to keep himself from responding.
Nonetheless, he cries out when fingers slip under and inside. This feeling is prying, is uncomfortable; it stings. He can’t move with that gun laying on his throat, finger on the trigger, so he arches into Adachi’s mouth instead, hearing the sound of coughing even as he is stretched raw. Adachi’s face reenters his view, pushing his knees to his chest, and then with a smirk, he pushes in.
Dojima grunts in pain, but keeps his eyes fixed on Adachi’s until the other man has to look away, and he hears the newspapers slide underneath Adachi’s knees. “How does this feel?” Adachi asks, spitting out the words between thrusts, “Isn’t that nice, is it? Being someone’s bitch.” His words leak of revenge, but revenge must be painful, if it makes his face look like that. Adachi glances at him, quickly, and shuts his eyes, pushing harder, faster, trying to narrow down everything to the slap of skin against skin.
The problem is that as an adult, Dojima begins to understand, and when the world ceases to be black and white (clear typed print on white paper, black and white photos with stippled illusions of gray, headlines and cold, detached words, tomorrow’s weather forecast and today’s servings of tragedy), it becomes easy to hate blindly, but more difficult to be blind enough to. He has spent months trying to get into Adachi’s mind without realizing it was Adachi, and he is not completely empty-handed. Things start falling into place; things start falling apart.
There is a voice in his head (almost tangible) whispering things. I didn’t want justice, I wanted revenge. What am I going to do now? Police force? I couldn’t even protect them. I haven’t got anyone left, not even- Adachi is still talking, too. If you had waited, you would’ve never needed to know. Look what you did. This isn’t my fault. I’m not the one killing them, it’s the Shadows. It’s not me, I shouldn’t be blamed. I shouldn’t have been transferred. You deserve it. They deserved it.
Dojima strains against the hand stroking him, the grip tight and rough. He gives a fair fight, but nothing about this is fair anymore, and he comes until he feels everything empty out of him. Adachi cries out, goes tense and trembles as he spills inside, resting his forehead on Dojima’s shoulder and mouthing something against his chest. Everything (everything) hurts. He closes his eyes. Adachi doesn’t raise his head afterward, and his breathing becomes irregular, rather than even, like he’s taking long shuddering inhales and choking them back out.
Barely a moment passes. The sound of something slithering filters through, and Adachi looks up, curses under his breath as they draw near. Something dark, red-eyed, and formless advances in the periphery of Dojima’s vision - a large, ominous, starving mass he doesn’t recognize. Everything else happens fast. “I won’t let you,” he hears Adachi say. Something clicks - a trigger - and the edges of the world begin to blacken, until he can’t tell how close they are, or which part it is that hurts, or what Adachi’s expression means. “Dojima-san, I-“
But he’ll never hear that end of that either.
Fandom: Persona 4
Rating: G
Characters: Ichijou Kou, Ebihara Ai
Warnings: Done for the P4 kink meme. Prompt was Kou/Ai.
When Kou asks her to go out with him, she looks surprised and then elated, but Souji has given him enough hints that he expects her to. (“Go for it!” Daisuke said. “Be careful,” said Souji, quietly over the phone, after a moment of thought.) Ai’s expression has begun to change, though, and there is an ever-increasing sense of restraint in her smiles that he doesn’t expect, and he doesn’t know quite what to make of it.
She is and isn’t like the girls that he goes on group dates with - always throwing voices and fake tantrums for attention. Ai throws her money around instead (because it is the only thing she has in abundance), her tantrums are all real, and she buys herself and him things that they will possibly never need. Sometimes she takes him to a jewelry shop down by the station, and he half expects her to ask him to buy one of those matching ring sets that couples nowadays wear, but always ends up barking at the clingy attendant before dragging them both out instead.
Because of his family, Kou was raised with a gentleman’s sensibilities, and he fancies himself a bit of a ladies’ man, but it’s much too awkward to plainly ask her what’s wrong (if there is anything). Ai has always been outspoken - he figures she’ll tell him eventually, but she doesn’t. In fact, she starts talking less, filling up their awkward silences by pulling her compact mirror out of her purse and constantly checking her makeup and hair.
She says she didn’t use to be, but Ai’s pretty - Kou knows that (he has eyes). He tells her that one day, on the rooftop of the school in their third year, and she flushes the same color as the sunset. With blush already on, it makes her cheeks look much too red, and he laughs when she protests. “Whatever,” she says haughtily, flipping her hair, but she sounds somewhat pleased. It’s been a while - he knows how to decipher her, even if just a little. “You’re just saying that because you think girls want to hear it.”
It happens again - her eyes widen just a fraction, and then she lowers them. The downturn of her mouth turns into a smile, but it looks fake. Kou stands up. “Hey, why do you keep on doing that?” he asks, crossing his arms.
“You do a lot of things just because you think girls want to hear it,” says Ai, more quietly.
It has taken a long time, but Kou catches on. News travels fast in a small town like Inaba. Kou remembers Souji hanging out with Ai, back when he thought they were dating, back when he still had that crush on Satonaka, and said so, when he was asked. Kou knows enough about girls to know that they remember all the things you wish they didn’t, and never realized all the things you wished they did. He sighs.
“I don’t come out here just because you want me to.”
She looks incredulous, tipping her chin up at him, staring at him from the bridge of her nose. That princess look has earned her the disfavor of a good number of fellow classmates, but Kou is taller than Ai is - she doesn’t do a very good job of staring him down. “Because I’m ‘pretty,’” she supplies, sounding bitter. Her foot starts tapping, like she has been wanting to get this over with for a long time.
“That too,” Kou admits, already seeing the blood rise under her skin and up her neck in warning of a fit. “I just mostly come up here to sit with you.” It’s a smooth line - they both know it, but he also knows it’s true. He holds out his hand.
Ai stares at him, brows furrowing, like she can’t decide whether or not to believe him. He waits - sometimes she takes a while to cool down, to catch up. “You’re just saying that because you think I want to hear it,” she snaps eventually, but it’s a little different from what she said earlier, and she raises a hand to slap his hand away, but without enough force, it ends up simply resting against his palm.
Fandom: Persona 4
Rating: G
Characters: Adachi Tohru, Dojima Nanako
Warnings: Done for the P4 kink meme. Prompt was taking care of a sick Nanako.
Adachi comes to appreciate these days the way people come to appreciate things that they know are numbered, counted - even things like this, with Nanako on the couch, curled up on the seat (a stomach virus, weak stuff, prescribed an antibiotic, the half-empty mug of lukewarm water is still on the coffee table), every reassuring pat on her shoulder goes one, two, three, tick, tick, tock, until December comes, and everything ends.
It is only a matter of time.
This is the second but it will be the last time Adachi will be given the responsibility of watching over Dojima’s daughter, while her father pulls overtime on that file of car accident articles he won’t talk about and her cousin is out late pretending to study when he’s gallivanting around in a television instead. This is the third-to-last time he’ll rub her back, the second-to-last, the last. When he gets up, a weak hand pulls at the hem of his jacket, and Nanako looks up at him with wide, trusting eyes.
“When will Daddy be home?” she asks, and her weakened voice sounds pitiful. It is probably more than the hundredth time she has asked a question like that, but the opportunity for that, too, is limited. Maybe that was the twentieth-to-last time she’ll ask it, but no, she is the type of child who tries to be strong in the absence of strength of her elders, so maybe it is the tenth-to-last instead.
Nanako is young, and she is innocent, but one day she’ll grow old, and she’ll see the ugliness of the world, becoming ugly to echo it, because otherwise there’s no way to survive. Humans are creatures of adaptation, and their perseverance only comes in their ability to bend, not to stand up against. Poor girl, poor thing, she’ll grow, she’ll twist. He might as well stop it.
Adachi smiles gently at her (it’s a little more difficult than normal, stretching the expression across his face like a second skin - that must be because he’s tired), sitting back down on the arm of the couch and dwarfing her hand in his. He could crush it if he wanted to - he’s stronger than he pretends to be and she’s quite the opposite - bones are only so brittle. He cradles it instead, like it’s precious and made of glass in the cup of his palm, the way you hold tiny little birds when you catch them, like they’ll break, if you even so much as tighten your grip just so.
“Soon,” he promises, because empty promises are easier to make when you are an adult. He brushes the thumb of his free hand over her eyes, willing them to close, so that she’ll fall asleep, and not realize that he hadn’t told the truth, as if maybe one day the entirety of Inaba will do the same if he gets enough practice. He doesn’t want to see it, because he knows, he has felt what it feels like to find out one of the basic truths you believed in was a lie someone told you, and that no, you’re notspecial enough, and no, you won’t ever be.
She seems to know, though, because the look she gives him is a little too bitter for someone her age, even as she lets her hand slip from the cage of his fingers, but even that she won’t have to do long. He almost wants to say, Don’t worry, soon you’ll never have to feel that way again, but doesn’t, because that’d ruin everything, it’d be too soon, and she wouldn’t understand. “I’ll stay until he does,” he offers instead, scooting onto the seat and letting her rest her head on his knee. “I’ll watch over you, Nanako-chan.”
“Will you protect me from that ‘serial killer’ person they talk about on TV?” she asks, turning a pleading expression to him, and in the dim light she looks unguarded and blissfully ignorant.
Maybe this is one of the last of many lies he will have to make. “Of course. I won’t let anything happen to you.” And maybe this is one of the truths. “It’ll all be over soon.”
Fandom: Suikoden Tierkreis
Rating: G
Characters: Liu (Shen), Luo Tao
Warnings: Done for the SuikoTier kink meme.
"Elder Liu-Sh-"
"Just 'Liu' is fine," Liu interrupts, looking up from the map to Luo-Tao's face. They have done a lot of work, but there is a lot of work yet to be done as well - new lands, new people, new mindsets for a people who had lived most of their existence in seclusion and secrecy. Re-introduction into the world of the living is not a simple task, and he is yet young, but capable of many things. He blinks at Luo-Tao's carefully blank face, and suddenly feels sheepish for being so forward. Some people stuck to their traditions, after all. "I mean...uh, you can call me whatever you want."
"Elder Liu," Luo-Tao amends, with a nod of his head, testing the incomplete title and the hanging syllables on his tongue. It is satisfactory (and easier to say.) Len-Lien is out today, (forced) on a rare holiday, because the girl tends to take things much too seriously sometimes, and Liu thought it absolutely ludicrous that she hadn't even heard of taking a break if she were the Elder's attendant. (Go out and uh...do whatever it is that girls do these days - stalk Sieg's room, or chase around playboys, or something.) Admittedly, his perception of female activities is a little skewed thanks to the inhabitants of the castle, but still - it's the principle of the matter.
Luo-Tao places down a tray of simple afternoon fare. The message is implicit. "I'm not really hungr-" Liu begins.
"Please eat," Luo-Tao says. Strange - he'd never even think about issuing one, but that sure sounded like an order. Liu blinks at him for a moment, then back at the map (fraying at the edges and marked and remarked with so many lines it's hardly a legible mess to anyone but Liu). He sighs - concessions were to be made in a war, whether it was agreeing not to attack, agreeing to withdraw, agreeing to follow a boy leader, agreeing to call someone by their nickname, or agreeing to at least take a bite out of a meal brought to him. Liu reaches towards the plate.
"Thanks," he mumbles, sheepish again.