senri
in
bedlam_mix
(Xiaolin Showdown - untitled&art) (D.Gray-man - Composite) (BotI - art)
It's been a while, huh? Well, I'm back from Peru, and I have some fic to post. And a little bit of art too! ♥ And to those of you who are new watchers, please introduce yourselves and if you don't mind, tell me how you found me? Just out of curiosity. XD I like to know these things!
Genre: Gen.
Warnings: K.
Characters: Omi&a certain villainous villain.
Notes: Had this in my head for a while, and eventually just... had to write it. =/ This seemed like a prime opportunity.
He woke with the temple still burning. Those parts of it that could burn, at least; thatched roofs flaring up in glorious blaze, the outer fields, the library - the library burned better than anything, gouts of fire in red and orange blazing out the windows. The Xiaolin Temple had been razed before, Omi knew; it was a place where fighters were trained, after all, and naturally it came sometimes under attack. But not in his memory, and not in Fung's, not in... centuries. And perhaps - the thought came to him, although he had no proof of it - perhaps never so badly.
He closed his eyes. Flare tore ruddy fingers through the night.
He opened his eyes. Someone was carrying him, not very gently; he bounced against a broad muscular back with every stride. He was wrapped, swinging freely, in something soft and thick, scented with darkness and smoke. No wonder he'd dreamed of the temple burning.
Omi squeezed his eyes shut. Tears burned, wanted to escape - he was too old for tears, he had been for years. He scrubbed them away with the back of his wrist. He was a Xiaolin Dragon, and had to act like one.
His throat burned, roughened by smoke. He coughed when he first tried to speak. "Clay?" It came out more as a rough breath than a name, but whoever was carrying him stopped - he bounced against whoever it was one final time, and stopped. By the time the person carrying him had swung him around and started to unbundle him he knew from that lack of response that it was not Clay, or any of the other Xiaolin, and had a good idea who it was besides.
It was with little surprise that he looked into the beaten gold eyes of Chase Young.
The Heylin Lord sat back on his haunches and watched Omi. He seemed utterly unmarked by the flames and chaos; not a reddening burn or a smooch of soot on him. Pulled together as usual; Chase could probably wade through a mudslide and step out looking ready to ascend a throne. Under the moonlight Omi could see that his face had left smears of ash on his already tattered sleeves, and he could feel the raw, painful heat of burns on his face. Fairly minor ones, really, from jumping too close to the fires to fight and then leaping back again.
Chase said nothing. Omi coughed again, wiped his forehead. "Where are my friends?"
Chase shrugged, the movement sinuous, languorous, even in his somewhat awkward position. "Not in the fires," he offered, voice as vague and dry as ever. "I saw the dragon of earth come out with the others."
That they were living - the knews was a kindness. Omi nodded. Kimiko, Raimundo and Clay might be five miles from him or fifty or five hundred. The distance hardly mattered, as long as they lived. He would find them and rejoin them, or they him, later, when it was needed. For now it seemed that karma or fate of the humor of the universe had tossed him into the company of the turncoat Xiaolin once again.
Or perhaps it was just Chase, who had an aggressive tendency to take matters into his own hands.
Where Omi's legs were still covered with the cloth, moon-stark shadows beneath stones were the only things visible. Chase Young had folded a makeshift sling out of the shroud of shadows to carry him in.
The sight sent a frission of pain through him. The Wu vault had burned too - fire had been carried there, forced on the things it wouldn't take to immediately. It was almost nauseating to think of. Wu were durable, of course - the sheer number of them surviving the centuries since Dashi had made them showed that. But the flames had been so hot, the things that carried them so strange, oily shadows sliding from place to place, hard to see, even harder to hit - his mind shied away when he tried to picture them. They flickered, moved, refused to be captured - that, or his brain refused to capture them.
They hadn't cared about Wu. About taking books, or prisoners. They'd just come to destroy.
"What were they?" Omi asked, looking up abruptly, twisting the soft cloth between his fingers.
At a second glance, was that a shadow of exhaustion on Chase's face? They'd been moving on foot, Omi thought abruptly. Either Chase was getting tired, or he hadn't wanted to be tracked by the expenditure of power it would take to fly. Omi knew which option he preferred. Anything that could force Chase Young into moving stealthily was scary, but something that could tire him out...
"Rift creatures," Chase said, after a long moment. "I suppose. Not a variety I am familiar with."
Which was as good as saying he didn't know. Omi shivered. Chase knew he knew, and he knew Chase knew he knew, and he knew Chase knew he knew he knew, that they were both in the dark on this one.
He was being treated like an adult. Thirteen years old, and for a second, Omi wanted to curl up in a ball and just howl. His home had been razed, he was alone with a sometimes quasi-friendly mentor and enemy who didn't know what the things descending upon them out of the night were, and he was injured and cold, sitting draped in the shroud of shadows while the moon lowered slowly towards the horizon.
He rubbed his face again instead. Take a grasp, Omi - whatever it was they said. He knew what he meant.
If the world needed saving again, he was up for it. Chase shifted and stood. With the moonlight moving over his sharp features it was hard to see him as he'd seemed a moment ago - a little tired. Worn.
Omi bundled up the shroud in his arms and stood too.
They were alone. None of Chase's feline warriors in evidence.
"Come, Omi," his teacher said. Omi waited politely for Chase to turn and orient himself, and then followed the other man, as he moved silently into the dark.
Genre: Gen.
Warnings: K+. A little gore, nothing detailed.
Characters: Sakura, Kakashi
Notes: I've seen lots of pictures of maskless Kakashi, but it's never how I pictured him. For the 31_days prompt "the mathematics of forgetting".
Sakura saw her sensei’s face one (1) time, exactly. In fact, she damn well near tripped over it, and a good thing she did; the telltale form of his body had been broken up by the grass he’d hidden in, he’d lost a lot of blood, and only the fact that he’d seen her before she’d seen him stopped him from gutting her.
“You fail,” he rasped, as she dropped to her knees by his side and rolled him over to start working on the ugly hole in his guts.
“Shut,” she paused midphrase, realizing he was maskless and for a moment transfixed. Not that the revealed face was so special, just from the shock of it. He had a good strong jaw and a bit of silvery stubble. The scar from his transplanted eye trailed down a lot further than she’d pictured, all the way down to the corner of his mouth, where the healed tissue insured that his lips were drawn up in a perpetually amused quirk. It was interesting more than handsome, a shade darker than the rest of his skin, distinctive.
“What are you waiting for?” he said, managing to sound laconic even with his entrails warm and ropy in her hands. Sakura shook herself, apologized. Focused on the wound.
He had a spare bandana, of course. Before he returned to battle he tied it on and said in the usual lackadaisical way he had where she was never sure if he was joking or deathly serious, “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Your darkest secret?”
“You betcha.”
“Safe with me, sensei.”
His eyes curved in that way that suggested he found her hilarious, and he reached out (still too fast to dodge, damn the man) to mash her hair around a little. “That’s my girl.”
And gone again, back into the morass. He moved easily; she guessed her work was good.
It wasn’t that memorable a scar, she guessed. Years later, the bell test was the thing she remembered clearest. The most distinctive part of his face was the indistinctive scar, not an unlucky one, for a shinobi. It guaranteed he’d face death with just that look, the inquisitive, sarcastically amused look, the forced half-smile. Which suited him, if she was honest.
Title: Composite
Genre: Gen
Warnings: T. Cruelty to animals. ♥
Characters: Lavi
Notes: For the 31_days prompt "knowing only departures, never returns". Lavi... this fic kind of came into my head and then stuck there, and in spite of not knowing the canon much, I realized I would have to write it or carry it around forever. I wrote it. Here it is.
i. The best historians have no identity - this is the only way to obtain impartiality. How can a mere human perspective, singular, isolated, grasp the meaning and import of an event? How can one identity separate the facts that make history from those that are trivial, without true influence, that come and go like dew? An identity connotes partiality, and partiality is not the purvey of a true historian.
This is the kind of stuff he gets from Bookman, at least. Lavi has nursed on this kind of rhetoric like it’s his mother’s milk, and regurgitated it all back up word for word, so Bookman can be sure he’s remembering.
The rest of what Bookman tells him: the next best thing to having no identity is having many.
ii. The identity currently calling himself Lavi has gone through many names before his current moniker. Some long, some short, some high-class, some common. Name to name, skin to skin, playing hopscotch through assumed lives. Some names have lasted weeks, a few of them months. One lasted five minutes; a few (when he’s in a pinch) have lasted for much, much less. He remembers all of them, of course. Memory is part of becoming Bookman.
“Lavi” has been his most constant companion for a while now; of late it’s certainly the name that has lasted him the longest, and he has the ugly feeling it’s starting to suit him, which means he should be changing, and soon. If it’s suiting him he’s getting attached, and if he’s attached he’s partial, and if he’s partial he isn’t Bookman, which is the point of the whole ordeal, right?
It’s not the most interesting name he’s ever had. Two syllables, La-vi. They go with red hair and green eyes, the same as most of his other names, and also with a lazy smile and an accent and a group of twits who insist on trying to be his friends, sort of. This last part is much less common. If he’d known things were going to get weird, he might have chosen a different name for the gig. Something dramatic, maybe.
But Lavi is what he stuck himself with, and it’s still working fine, so far.
iii. He went by Lewis once. Spent some time as Lewis, some months. Lewis did okay, he lasted well; he bought hot buns from the same nice girl on the street corner in every town they went through every morning he could, and he fed the crumbs to the ubiquitous pigeons. He was nice-enough and not very noticeable, a good transition name, good transition identity, Lewis. Some of the many different-but-identical girls on the many different-identical street corners where he bought buns (dripping sweet melted butter, or honey, or some such) quite liked him, and had little fantasies about settling down with him, that his apparent love for hot buns with cinnamon or sugar would transfer to love for them, the kind of girls who sold bread on street-corners, with neat (if slightly threadbare) clothes and hair tucked behind their ears.
Gentle, rather shy Lewis was oblivious to this, of course. The quick-slippery wit driving Lewis noticed, however; took in how an easy smile and glass-green eyes crinkled up with honest happiness could send a heart a-flutter, knees a-tremble, and it filed these observations away as potentially useful. That was the most important thing he got from Lewis.
It took four months, seventeen days, nine hours and a quarter for Lewis to outlive his worth. He was feeding the pigeons, oblivious to the fact that his sun was setting. It was a rather cold, rainy morning, unpleasant. Lucky for Lewis, no one was there to see him absently snatch a pigeon when it took to the air in a whir of gray wings, and begin one-handed to casually unfeather the bird.
The creature made an awful noise, whipped its head about and bit at him ineffectually with its non-lethal pigeon bill. Lewis, soon to be discarded, was through with one wing and part of its warm feathered back before he realized what he was doing. His hand was foul with shit and blood.
He looked at the stupid creature, struggling in his hand, and blinked and snapped its neck.
He was in a park with a fountain in the center. He went and rinsed his filthy hands in the water.
The event puzzled him. He couldn’t think why he’d done it. Rain was slowly soaking through his coat; the boy who’d been Lewis, now nameless, went to find a café and some coffee, and a new identity.
iv. “Ajander,” he said, blinking limpidly up at the rough-looking gentleman who’d come looking for Marcus.
“Samuel,” he said, for the new man who’d come the other way two minutes later, in search of Ajander.
v. He spent five hours one evening as Regina: silk stockings, petticoats, lace and all. Regina wore her hair in a ruddy curl over her forehead, and a string of pearls with which she could easily be strangled. Ash (before he had been reborn as Regina) had played it safe and carefully weakened the strand until at a certain point, it barely held together. Just in case someone for some reason did take it in mind to garrote his future self with her jewelry.
Regina was an experience simultaneously educational, flattering and disturbing. He took off her many layers, her jewelry, her flounces and her make-up and her hairstyle with a sense of guilty relief.
It had been interesting. It wasn’t for him.
vi. A library of names. Enough to fill a short book, or cover a modest monument; each name with a history, enough for dozens of autobiographies.
Some of them were strange to step in to. He never really hesitated, a Bookman could not hesitate, he must move from identity to identity, life to life, as easily as a honeybee buzzing from flower to flower, and when he has had so many identities he has no identity than finally he has earned his one constant title (and name):
Book.
Man.
His life a calculus of names, infinite individualities pulled out like index cards, infinite parts combining to one whole. If (Lavi)(Lewis)(Regina)(Michael)(Trent)(Ithaca)(and so on) integrated these many disparate parts he might find himself in there somewhere. But this would be unacceptable; a Bookman cannot have a self. He is a finely-ground lens through which history may be observed.
The boy who will eventually be Lavi steps into another name. It is warm, familiar already, like stepping into a silhouette where an old friend once stood.
vii. Jonathan smokes cigarettes, because he wants to try them; he lefts go of the name early because he can’t stand the taste. Fallow cracks his knuckles incessantly. Alan (he’ll laugh at taking this name, later) stands in the central square of a town slaughtered by Akuma, and rolls a young man about his own age over, so that the corpse can see the sky.
The boy’s eyes are still open; they’re hazel and lack depth or definition, but then again, he is dead.
viii. He’s a bit like an Akuma himself, he thinks. All these souls, tethered to something not exactly human.
ix. These days, “Lavi” serves him well enough. A simple name, but not exactly common; and he has people trying to insist on friendship. They are the ones he’s observing, and what’s an aspiring Bookman to do? He’ll roll with it, just remember: partiality is a vice in a historian, and loyalty is too. Lavi’s allegiance (the allegiance of the intelligence currently choosing to call itself Lavi) is to the story. To clear-headed, fair and impartial recording.
Although he’s not sure there’s been a Bookman who’s an exorcist before. He doesn’t know of one, at least. The hammer holds him down, sometimes.
(The desperate way Allen wolfs his food, like it’s going to run away from him. Kanda’s surly glare and growl. Lenalee’s exasperation, not to mention her scary streak.)
He is going to be Bookman, and Bookman cannot have loyalties. But he’s Lavi too, at the moment, and Lavi is just one limited, flawed, isolated, finite human perspective.
He tries Lewis’ lazy smile on again. It still fits, more or less.
Art
Warnings: K
Characters: Chase Young
Notes: From Xiaolin Showdown.
Warnings: K
Characters: Rin.
Notes: From paradisa, on her catgirl loss. She had cat ears and a tail for a while, and had to say "nya" after some of her sentences and she HATED it hahahaha. I had to draw it, naturally.
Genre: Gen.
Warnings: K.
Characters: Omi&a certain villainous villain.
Notes: Had this in my head for a while, and eventually just... had to write it. =/ This seemed like a prime opportunity.
He woke with the temple still burning. Those parts of it that could burn, at least; thatched roofs flaring up in glorious blaze, the outer fields, the library - the library burned better than anything, gouts of fire in red and orange blazing out the windows. The Xiaolin Temple had been razed before, Omi knew; it was a place where fighters were trained, after all, and naturally it came sometimes under attack. But not in his memory, and not in Fung's, not in... centuries. And perhaps - the thought came to him, although he had no proof of it - perhaps never so badly.
He closed his eyes. Flare tore ruddy fingers through the night.
He opened his eyes. Someone was carrying him, not very gently; he bounced against a broad muscular back with every stride. He was wrapped, swinging freely, in something soft and thick, scented with darkness and smoke. No wonder he'd dreamed of the temple burning.
Omi squeezed his eyes shut. Tears burned, wanted to escape - he was too old for tears, he had been for years. He scrubbed them away with the back of his wrist. He was a Xiaolin Dragon, and had to act like one.
His throat burned, roughened by smoke. He coughed when he first tried to speak. "Clay?" It came out more as a rough breath than a name, but whoever was carrying him stopped - he bounced against whoever it was one final time, and stopped. By the time the person carrying him had swung him around and started to unbundle him he knew from that lack of response that it was not Clay, or any of the other Xiaolin, and had a good idea who it was besides.
It was with little surprise that he looked into the beaten gold eyes of Chase Young.
The Heylin Lord sat back on his haunches and watched Omi. He seemed utterly unmarked by the flames and chaos; not a reddening burn or a smooch of soot on him. Pulled together as usual; Chase could probably wade through a mudslide and step out looking ready to ascend a throne. Under the moonlight Omi could see that his face had left smears of ash on his already tattered sleeves, and he could feel the raw, painful heat of burns on his face. Fairly minor ones, really, from jumping too close to the fires to fight and then leaping back again.
Chase said nothing. Omi coughed again, wiped his forehead. "Where are my friends?"
Chase shrugged, the movement sinuous, languorous, even in his somewhat awkward position. "Not in the fires," he offered, voice as vague and dry as ever. "I saw the dragon of earth come out with the others."
That they were living - the knews was a kindness. Omi nodded. Kimiko, Raimundo and Clay might be five miles from him or fifty or five hundred. The distance hardly mattered, as long as they lived. He would find them and rejoin them, or they him, later, when it was needed. For now it seemed that karma or fate of the humor of the universe had tossed him into the company of the turncoat Xiaolin once again.
Or perhaps it was just Chase, who had an aggressive tendency to take matters into his own hands.
Where Omi's legs were still covered with the cloth, moon-stark shadows beneath stones were the only things visible. Chase Young had folded a makeshift sling out of the shroud of shadows to carry him in.
The sight sent a frission of pain through him. The Wu vault had burned too - fire had been carried there, forced on the things it wouldn't take to immediately. It was almost nauseating to think of. Wu were durable, of course - the sheer number of them surviving the centuries since Dashi had made them showed that. But the flames had been so hot, the things that carried them so strange, oily shadows sliding from place to place, hard to see, even harder to hit - his mind shied away when he tried to picture them. They flickered, moved, refused to be captured - that, or his brain refused to capture them.
They hadn't cared about Wu. About taking books, or prisoners. They'd just come to destroy.
"What were they?" Omi asked, looking up abruptly, twisting the soft cloth between his fingers.
At a second glance, was that a shadow of exhaustion on Chase's face? They'd been moving on foot, Omi thought abruptly. Either Chase was getting tired, or he hadn't wanted to be tracked by the expenditure of power it would take to fly. Omi knew which option he preferred. Anything that could force Chase Young into moving stealthily was scary, but something that could tire him out...
"Rift creatures," Chase said, after a long moment. "I suppose. Not a variety I am familiar with."
Which was as good as saying he didn't know. Omi shivered. Chase knew he knew, and he knew Chase knew he knew, and he knew Chase knew he knew he knew, that they were both in the dark on this one.
He was being treated like an adult. Thirteen years old, and for a second, Omi wanted to curl up in a ball and just howl. His home had been razed, he was alone with a sometimes quasi-friendly mentor and enemy who didn't know what the things descending upon them out of the night were, and he was injured and cold, sitting draped in the shroud of shadows while the moon lowered slowly towards the horizon.
He rubbed his face again instead. Take a grasp, Omi - whatever it was they said. He knew what he meant.
If the world needed saving again, he was up for it. Chase shifted and stood. With the moonlight moving over his sharp features it was hard to see him as he'd seemed a moment ago - a little tired. Worn.
Omi bundled up the shroud in his arms and stood too.
They were alone. None of Chase's feline warriors in evidence.
"Come, Omi," his teacher said. Omi waited politely for Chase to turn and orient himself, and then followed the other man, as he moved silently into the dark.
Genre: Gen.
Warnings: K+. A little gore, nothing detailed.
Characters: Sakura, Kakashi
Notes: I've seen lots of pictures of maskless Kakashi, but it's never how I pictured him. For the 31_days prompt "the mathematics of forgetting".
Sakura saw her sensei’s face one (1) time, exactly. In fact, she damn well near tripped over it, and a good thing she did; the telltale form of his body had been broken up by the grass he’d hidden in, he’d lost a lot of blood, and only the fact that he’d seen her before she’d seen him stopped him from gutting her.
“You fail,” he rasped, as she dropped to her knees by his side and rolled him over to start working on the ugly hole in his guts.
“Shut,” she paused midphrase, realizing he was maskless and for a moment transfixed. Not that the revealed face was so special, just from the shock of it. He had a good strong jaw and a bit of silvery stubble. The scar from his transplanted eye trailed down a lot further than she’d pictured, all the way down to the corner of his mouth, where the healed tissue insured that his lips were drawn up in a perpetually amused quirk. It was interesting more than handsome, a shade darker than the rest of his skin, distinctive.
“What are you waiting for?” he said, managing to sound laconic even with his entrails warm and ropy in her hands. Sakura shook herself, apologized. Focused on the wound.
He had a spare bandana, of course. Before he returned to battle he tied it on and said in the usual lackadaisical way he had where she was never sure if he was joking or deathly serious, “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Your darkest secret?”
“You betcha.”
“Safe with me, sensei.”
His eyes curved in that way that suggested he found her hilarious, and he reached out (still too fast to dodge, damn the man) to mash her hair around a little. “That’s my girl.”
And gone again, back into the morass. He moved easily; she guessed her work was good.
It wasn’t that memorable a scar, she guessed. Years later, the bell test was the thing she remembered clearest. The most distinctive part of his face was the indistinctive scar, not an unlucky one, for a shinobi. It guaranteed he’d face death with just that look, the inquisitive, sarcastically amused look, the forced half-smile. Which suited him, if she was honest.
Title: Composite
Genre: Gen
Warnings: T. Cruelty to animals. ♥
Characters: Lavi
Notes: For the 31_days prompt "knowing only departures, never returns". Lavi... this fic kind of came into my head and then stuck there, and in spite of not knowing the canon much, I realized I would have to write it or carry it around forever. I wrote it. Here it is.
i. The best historians have no identity - this is the only way to obtain impartiality. How can a mere human perspective, singular, isolated, grasp the meaning and import of an event? How can one identity separate the facts that make history from those that are trivial, without true influence, that come and go like dew? An identity connotes partiality, and partiality is not the purvey of a true historian.
This is the kind of stuff he gets from Bookman, at least. Lavi has nursed on this kind of rhetoric like it’s his mother’s milk, and regurgitated it all back up word for word, so Bookman can be sure he’s remembering.
The rest of what Bookman tells him: the next best thing to having no identity is having many.
ii. The identity currently calling himself Lavi has gone through many names before his current moniker. Some long, some short, some high-class, some common. Name to name, skin to skin, playing hopscotch through assumed lives. Some names have lasted weeks, a few of them months. One lasted five minutes; a few (when he’s in a pinch) have lasted for much, much less. He remembers all of them, of course. Memory is part of becoming Bookman.
“Lavi” has been his most constant companion for a while now; of late it’s certainly the name that has lasted him the longest, and he has the ugly feeling it’s starting to suit him, which means he should be changing, and soon. If it’s suiting him he’s getting attached, and if he’s attached he’s partial, and if he’s partial he isn’t Bookman, which is the point of the whole ordeal, right?
It’s not the most interesting name he’s ever had. Two syllables, La-vi. They go with red hair and green eyes, the same as most of his other names, and also with a lazy smile and an accent and a group of twits who insist on trying to be his friends, sort of. This last part is much less common. If he’d known things were going to get weird, he might have chosen a different name for the gig. Something dramatic, maybe.
But Lavi is what he stuck himself with, and it’s still working fine, so far.
iii. He went by Lewis once. Spent some time as Lewis, some months. Lewis did okay, he lasted well; he bought hot buns from the same nice girl on the street corner in every town they went through every morning he could, and he fed the crumbs to the ubiquitous pigeons. He was nice-enough and not very noticeable, a good transition name, good transition identity, Lewis. Some of the many different-but-identical girls on the many different-identical street corners where he bought buns (dripping sweet melted butter, or honey, or some such) quite liked him, and had little fantasies about settling down with him, that his apparent love for hot buns with cinnamon or sugar would transfer to love for them, the kind of girls who sold bread on street-corners, with neat (if slightly threadbare) clothes and hair tucked behind their ears.
Gentle, rather shy Lewis was oblivious to this, of course. The quick-slippery wit driving Lewis noticed, however; took in how an easy smile and glass-green eyes crinkled up with honest happiness could send a heart a-flutter, knees a-tremble, and it filed these observations away as potentially useful. That was the most important thing he got from Lewis.
It took four months, seventeen days, nine hours and a quarter for Lewis to outlive his worth. He was feeding the pigeons, oblivious to the fact that his sun was setting. It was a rather cold, rainy morning, unpleasant. Lucky for Lewis, no one was there to see him absently snatch a pigeon when it took to the air in a whir of gray wings, and begin one-handed to casually unfeather the bird.
The creature made an awful noise, whipped its head about and bit at him ineffectually with its non-lethal pigeon bill. Lewis, soon to be discarded, was through with one wing and part of its warm feathered back before he realized what he was doing. His hand was foul with shit and blood.
He looked at the stupid creature, struggling in his hand, and blinked and snapped its neck.
He was in a park with a fountain in the center. He went and rinsed his filthy hands in the water.
The event puzzled him. He couldn’t think why he’d done it. Rain was slowly soaking through his coat; the boy who’d been Lewis, now nameless, went to find a café and some coffee, and a new identity.
iv. “Ajander,” he said, blinking limpidly up at the rough-looking gentleman who’d come looking for Marcus.
“Samuel,” he said, for the new man who’d come the other way two minutes later, in search of Ajander.
v. He spent five hours one evening as Regina: silk stockings, petticoats, lace and all. Regina wore her hair in a ruddy curl over her forehead, and a string of pearls with which she could easily be strangled. Ash (before he had been reborn as Regina) had played it safe and carefully weakened the strand until at a certain point, it barely held together. Just in case someone for some reason did take it in mind to garrote his future self with her jewelry.
Regina was an experience simultaneously educational, flattering and disturbing. He took off her many layers, her jewelry, her flounces and her make-up and her hairstyle with a sense of guilty relief.
It had been interesting. It wasn’t for him.
vi. A library of names. Enough to fill a short book, or cover a modest monument; each name with a history, enough for dozens of autobiographies.
Some of them were strange to step in to. He never really hesitated, a Bookman could not hesitate, he must move from identity to identity, life to life, as easily as a honeybee buzzing from flower to flower, and when he has had so many identities he has no identity than finally he has earned his one constant title (and name):
Book.
Man.
His life a calculus of names, infinite individualities pulled out like index cards, infinite parts combining to one whole. If (Lavi)(Lewis)(Regina)(Michael)(Trent)(Ithaca)(and so on) integrated these many disparate parts he might find himself in there somewhere. But this would be unacceptable; a Bookman cannot have a self. He is a finely-ground lens through which history may be observed.
The boy who will eventually be Lavi steps into another name. It is warm, familiar already, like stepping into a silhouette where an old friend once stood.
vii. Jonathan smokes cigarettes, because he wants to try them; he lefts go of the name early because he can’t stand the taste. Fallow cracks his knuckles incessantly. Alan (he’ll laugh at taking this name, later) stands in the central square of a town slaughtered by Akuma, and rolls a young man about his own age over, so that the corpse can see the sky.
The boy’s eyes are still open; they’re hazel and lack depth or definition, but then again, he is dead.
viii. He’s a bit like an Akuma himself, he thinks. All these souls, tethered to something not exactly human.
ix. These days, “Lavi” serves him well enough. A simple name, but not exactly common; and he has people trying to insist on friendship. They are the ones he’s observing, and what’s an aspiring Bookman to do? He’ll roll with it, just remember: partiality is a vice in a historian, and loyalty is too. Lavi’s allegiance (the allegiance of the intelligence currently choosing to call itself Lavi) is to the story. To clear-headed, fair and impartial recording.
Although he’s not sure there’s been a Bookman who’s an exorcist before. He doesn’t know of one, at least. The hammer holds him down, sometimes.
(The desperate way Allen wolfs his food, like it’s going to run away from him. Kanda’s surly glare and growl. Lenalee’s exasperation, not to mention her scary streak.)
He is going to be Bookman, and Bookman cannot have loyalties. But he’s Lavi too, at the moment, and Lavi is just one limited, flawed, isolated, finite human perspective.
He tries Lewis’ lazy smile on again. It still fits, more or less.
Art
Warnings: K
Characters: Chase Young
Notes: From Xiaolin Showdown.
Warnings: K
Characters: Rin.
Notes: From paradisa, on her catgirl loss. She had cat ears and a tail for a while, and had to say "nya" after some of her sentences and she HATED it hahahaha. I had to draw it, naturally.
