storytime!
so i was going through a bunch of my WIPs today, and thought it would be amusing to post them. warning: many of them are months, years old, even, so this hodgepodge of unfinished fic is bound to be devoid of quality. proceed at your own risk and things like that!
starting with the oldest thing i found on my computer, entitled "the winter." it was supposed to be a meet cute fic between zabuza and haku, except instead of cute things happening, there's death and destruction. 8D also i was kind of obsessed with the idea of a bingo book for some reason. hence the following, questionable content:
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on a bingo board he lays his pieces of checkers and shougi. see - he’s playing a game with himself, because life and death is always a game, seeing if he get get a row of corpses first or perhaps a column or if he was being really original, a diagonal. he will do this until the morning light, when he will roll up the board into a tight, neat little scroll, stack the mismatched game pieces in even more mismatched piles, and store them away in his pack before heading out on his daily journey. this is the life.
he gets square thirteen first, black cat thirteen. this one is a pretty tricky shinobi, wearing a mask that looks like it’s been lifted out of an ANBU corps. and perhaps this one is a rogue ANBU - he’s got the moves of a lithe jungle cat. but no, not too soon, because he detects a blind spot, and said cat goes down like a stone. “you let me get behind you. too bad,” before he blackens him out for good.
square thirteen is in the upper right corner of the board.
afterwards, a long, tenuous week of walking from small village to even smaller villages, asking for what could be the most generic-looking person in the world - because truly, in reality, a ninja must be able to blend in with the crowd. he guesses this is not the case with himself. not that he particularly stands out or anything - but everytime he enters a room, a building, a town, it seems like everyone sees him and knows, just knows he’s different. numerous sharp pupils dilating and shrinking with such rapid curiosity (ferocity) that he paints masks on them all, in his mind. and soon they look the same. he leaves.
the one he is looking for is number 34, stuck in the awkward spot between corner 14 and 6. this does nothing to alleviate his position on the bingo board, but he slices the man’s throat and the warm, sticky blood spills onto his fingers, anyway. the sun shines anyway, the earth moves anyway.
he strikes lucky with number 7 wandering a path by the inn. they eye each other with a sort of acknowledgement first, as if they were both forewarned of the other’s identities, and no sooner than that was over, they launched into their attacks. they were well-matched; he could feel the fatigue creeping up his limbs. but he musn’t let up now. 7 is in the middle of the board, the instant win. like a feral animal he strikes from above, and when his arms become restrained, his teeth go for the man’s neck. skin breaks and he tastes metal. there is a pleasure, a catharsis, as he wraps his freed arms around the other man’s torso and fills his mouth with the vitality, the life force of his energy. the body underneath him goes limp. on signal, he reverts and lets go, wiping his mouth.
the other man has been reduced to a faint voice. “i don’t understand you. i don’t understand the hunger you possess, the beast-like fury underneath your stony face. what has the world come to, with people like you? where is it going?”
and before he can do anything, the man grabs a discarded blade and drags it through his abdomen, forever taking his life into his own hands.
lucky number 7 was a throwaway. he clenches his teeth, a bit upset.
the winter is harsh, as he takes out 23, 9, and 11 - top right corner, mid-left, bottom left. the game pieces are so shivered in their antiquity he quietly rubs them with his thumbs, deep in contemplation.
this is probably the shortest one i have, haha. called "easy traitors," and it was supposed to be a modern breakup!AU of sasunaru, delineating how dysfunctional their relationship is. kind of like the second half of (500) days of summer, i guess? as you probably know, sasunaru is like. my otp of otps, but you have to admit that it has the dysfunctionality of a o'neill play.
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even with his eyes closed, he can see sasuke so clearly against the landscape of his mind.
it’s a disease, he says, muttering as he gropes for the half-empty bottle of vodka on his bedside, sharp and burning on his tongue to erase the memories. he flinches at the sunlight filtering through the window, squints, rubs his eyes with the back of his arm. it’s a new day, and he wishes from the bottom of his heart it wasn’t.
i've definitely posted this one before, but trololo i'll just post it again. it's an attempt at adult!r27, something i almost immediately regretted doing because it's possible the worst ship to write for, which is saying a lot considering everything in KHR seems immediately shippable. IDK, i just sort of cobbsquint it sometimes.
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tsuna is on his last visit to italy when he decides to say good-bye. “an idiot will never stop being an idiot,” reborn mutters as tsuna thrusts himself through the door and wraps his arms around the man he once called his tutor, pulling him into a tight embrace.
“can’t you come back to japan with me?” tsuna’s voice is muffled, buried in the expensive italian threads of reborn’s suit.
“you don’t need me to look after you anymore,” he says recalcitrantly. “act your age, tsuna-kun.”
tsuna unlatches himself and reaches his hand up to cup reborn’s face - a movement so sudden the older man asks, “what are you doing?”
the tenth’s eyes are stern and unwavering. “i am acting the way i want.”
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a teacher will never stop teaching his student, reborn discovers. there are many things that tsuna, naive and innocent of cruelty, needs to learn. “chin up,” he tells him on the day of tsuna’s initiation ceremony. “you’re about to become a leader. look the part. don’t be slack-jawed.”
tsuna frowns. “i am never slack-jawed,” he mumbles.
reborn slaps him smartly across the face, and tsuna yelps in pain, clutching his cheek. “you were just now.”
he gives his former tutor one last pout before straightening out his face. yes, tsuna, this is the man i raised you to be. this is the man who will lead the greatest generation of the vongola family, and who will be my greatest accomplishment.
“now that’s more like it.” even he is in awe of how much this gangly boy has become a man.
“reborn.” tsuna’s words are soft. “never let me out of your sight.”
and he never does. reborn stays as tsuna’s advisor, the left hand to gokudera’s right. he is the one who teaches tsuna how to handle a gun, how the sweet steel will click and lock. “steady, steady,” he says in a low voice, pressing his fingers to tsuna’s forearms. “no need to rush. the art of shooting is calm and precision. aim at the target…lock in…”
boom! the gun recoil sends a shockwave through the boy’s frail arms, and he could barely hold onto the firearm if not for reborn’s firm grip. “and now you know how it feels,” he says simply, before turning away.
tsuna, predictably, is confused. “how to feel what?”
“how to kill a man with a weapon.”
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there are things reborn doesn’t know how to teach tsuna - how to kiss with affection, how to hold a lover’s hand. he tilts up his chin and kisses reborn sweetly, a touch so light it could only be that of a boy yet not grown into manhood. reborn grimaces. “don’t do this. i am not the one you should be chasing after.”
there are lessons reborn tries to drill into his students skull, day after day: pain, rejection, a cold-bloodedness that only he can sharpen. tsuna fails to learn any.
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tsuna - still a kid, innocence personified. “you think you can lead legions of men, an army with this attitude? if so, you are sorely mistaken,” reborn snarls.
tsuna frowns. “i think i can do it without becoming a monster,” he says. devoid of petulance. a challenge.
so this might just be the thing i'm most proud of this this little weird batch. it's an AU ita/shi in which shisui kills itachi and becomes madara's prodigy, instead of the other way around (and it was all written before the big recent reveal, so~). the title was "angry little boys," and look, it even came with a summary! “at fifteen, shisui is required to learn how to grow up. at thirteen, itachi is required to learn how to be a remorseless killer. konoha needs to learn to stop handing schoolboys knives and expertly putting a murderous glint in their eyes. (in which shisui survives and comes out alive, and itachi is left to burn in the ashes of his past.)” i should also note right now that i have a lot of different headcanon shisuis, trololo. some of them are kind, some are goofy, some are crueler than they let on. they all have the same background, though - his mother died giving birth to him, and his father was a drunkard incapable of taking care of him, so he was passed around from relative to relative, all of whom scorned him because they found his family and existence a disgrace to the uchiha name. sooo there you go, some background. furthermore, this is only a skeleton of the entire story, so the essentially the first two paragraphs is really the beginning, and the end is the actual end~. ANYWAYS.
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there is a stigma in konoha and across all ninja villages that children are not children, but miniscule fighting machines. small adults. consider this: peak physical strength and agility declines around the age of thirty, and in a world where firepower is everything, ninja prodigies are revered. every single boy and girl is shipped off the ninja academy at the age of five and run through drills of throwing tiny sharp stars at wooden dummies, in hopes that this early exposure to combat might awaken in them something even the middle-aged can fear. and that’s the key word - fear, isn’ it? while the elder sit back and pit their greatest, most precious fighting dogs each other, fear pervades the air.
it’s lucky, then, that ninja villages also happen to have bloodline limits, and cast these pools of genetic abnormalties as nobles. even the daimyo has a tough time getting through konoha with any respect aside from the facade that is required, but when an uchiha enters a room? complete silence. everyone is shaking in their boots. the mere thought of provoking an uchiha needlessly is enough to make one piss in their pants. and shisui learns this early, early on, when even before the age of five, that prime age when kids are sent to make adolescent murderers of themselves, he is given a kunai and taught how to throw it, and executes all his exercises with such precision it earns him a rare prestige. he learns it when there are men ten times his age bowing at his feet, in hopes that the approval of a child might boost their own social standing, he learns it when he can command an entire room of adults with a single cry. at four years old, he understands he is special, and that there is nothing in the world that can change that.
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at six, he learns that everything can change that. the clan is extraordinarily fickle when it comes to propping up their gems for the world to see, and it doesn’t help matters much when you’re essentially an orphan,
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in which shisui is a beast in battle, yet itachi, despite being a pacifist, is a natural. there’s a difference that is steadily growing apparent in shisui’s eyes.
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“…you tried to kill me,” Itachi spits out in surprise.
shisui spins his kunai between his fingers. the blade is so sharp, so freshly cut across the whetstone, that the newly spilt blood barely clings to it as centrifugal force launches it in arcs across the green grass. “only trying to return the favor,” he says rather blithely. “now get up.”
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after he kills itachi, he drags the body toward the riverbanks and flings it into the cool, rushing river. such ephemeral beauty doesn’t deserve to be fit in a box and left to rot in the earth, nor burnt to ashes, as is the uchiha tradition. no - this is their battle, their love, their tears, their funeral - this is how it’s done in their terms.
if only they were the only two people to exist in this wretched world.
but they aren’t.
shisui doesn’t let any trace of emotion pass over his face. his education is ingrained in him, that emotion is weak and is easy to exploit; he keeps his eyes steady and dry as he watches itachi’s long black locks, the same ones he was so carelessly threading his fingers through only three months ago, disappear with the current around the bend. this is not how things are done, but this is how we were raised.
“let the wars begin.”
i might have posted this before as well, but lol, TYL!lambo/fuuta shhh i ship this a lot secretly, okay. it's a good ship. :c
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lambo is the number one laziest living being in the world, i tell him. behind him is the koala, who sleeps twenty-two hours of the day, and the three-toed sloth, an animal world-reknowned for its lack of movement. he doesn’t say anything, just laughs and continues dozing on my stomach, no extraneous movement required. a few years ago, he might’ve cried and told me to stop making fun of him, but today he casts it off like it was air above his head. he casts everything off.
sleepily, he murmurs, “and who is the number one person in the world that fuuta loves? i bet you don’t need to consult with the ranking planet for that one.”
i bite my bottom lip. “tsuna-nii.”
“liar,” he whispers into the skin of my belly, eyes fluttering open, “liar.”
first, i should note: i am terribly and deeply in love with dino cavallone for unknown reasons. i mean, i'm essentially in love with every single character in KHR for completely ignoble reasons, but dino possibly takes the cake. that being said, this is a D1880 love triangle snippet, trololo, and i just. dino is my favorite part. of everything.
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“give it up. it would never work between the two of you.”
yamamoto smirks. “this isn’t just to throw me off chasing your boyfriend, now, is it?”
dino laughs, completely and utterly amused. “i like you, kid.” he takes a bite of biscuit, eyes fixed on the japanese boy. the cavallone boss is no flake, despite appearances; he regards him in the same way he would an opponent or prisoner of war, and yamamoto’d like to think he counted as both. “i really, really like you, kid.”
LOOK, i even tried to write a ginzura once, omg. the bb!foursome is always my favorite thing, so as you can see, i was in the middle of writing it into the story before i stopped. and before you ask, no, i had no idea what direction this was going to take. xD
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on the last day he told katsura, “i’m not leaving without you,” but he left without him anyway. it was a mistake, a fateful interference; they had missed each other by mere seconds. katsura murmured, i can’t be late, i can’t be late, i can’t be late, a little white rabbit in the middle of 19th century japan, and when the train came, he had left with it. gintoki made an effort not to be late that morning, only to be thwarted by the traffic. “two centuries worth of technological development in this country during the past decade, and you think they’d have come up with a way to get rid of traffic instead of congesting it further,” he muttered as he absent-mindedly kicked his heel against the back of his moped. by the time he’d reached the train station, the large metal wheels had started to turn, a celebratory whistle announced the vehicle’s departure from edo. as gin shouted and pushed through crowds, “zura! zura!” katsura could not even correct his friend for the last time, as he stared out the window at the picturesque landscape flatlining in the distance, lost in thought.
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the first time they had met gintoki took an immediate disliking to katsura kotaro. “your hair looks stupid,” he told him belligerently, pinky diligently picking at one of his nostrils.
the other boy, older than gin by just a year, cocked his head to the side. “is your hair naturally permed like that? if we’re going by stupidity of looks, i think yours trumps mine by a mile.” and he hadn’t even meant it as an insult.
“che.” gin rolled his eyes and turned away. “loser.”
it hadn’t fared any better when that sakamoto kid tried to befriend the both of them at the same time.
another pretty old one. i remember working on this the summer of 2010, wow. in china, where i was on vacation. xD the writing is pretty sketchy, but the main thing i liked about this was the way izaya talks in this, because i could never quite pin him down since. also LOL ignore the abrupt tense change; i tended to do that because i was attempting to make the transition from past-tense writing to present-tense writing around that time.
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out of all the gang leaders, izaya liked the fiesty, bipolar yellow scarf the best. * it was like this - kida-kun, as he liked to call him, was the only one who had any balls to get angry, get so furiously murderous that he’d tear the world down for his cause. you could say izaya loved prodding and pricking him, if only to see the beautiful fire behind his eyes. kida’s only downfall, however, was that the fire rarely burned long enough to last him the whole way through. fear would paralyze his legs at halftime; sweat would snake, cold, across his skin.
well, izaya decided, these flaws were the things he loved about humans anyway. and this was the thing - it was because that kida was about the most imperfect being, like a china vase with an infinite amount of infintessimal scars, that he loved him over anything. (at some points, when kida turns his head to the side or izaya manages to get a rise out of him, he fools himself into thinking he loves the boy even more than he loves destruction.)
“sayu-chan,” he purrs one day, “i am rather jealous of you.”
“of what, izaya-san?”
he paused, drawing his hands together before answering. “i am jealous, sayu-chan, of kida. look -” he gestures towards the window. a familiar mop of blonde hair paces back and fort below, but makes no visible sign of entering the building. at long last, he steals away, like an embarrassed thief. “- look at the way he torments himself. ah, i can almost taste it now - the sweetness is bearing down on my tongue!” he lifts his hands in a brief acknowledgement of holy wonderment, then just as quickly sets them down at his sides again. “sayu-chan, no matter how hard that boy fights it, he will continue loving you with all his heart. every action he pursues, every decision he makes, will be affected by the permanent scar you’ve inflicted on him. but don’t you worry! - he loves the pain. he loves that scar, despite trying his hardest to hide it behind all the fake smiles. and that is what i am jealous of, sayu-chan, what you are so graciously the recipient of - this - what shall i call it - this imperfect love.” he finally takes a breath, inhaling the stale hospital air around him. “it’s so lovely that i think,” he says softly, trailing his fingers lightly down the windowpane. his breath fogs a mishappen oval over the jagged landscape of Tokyo, and it dissipates slowly, painstakingly. “i think it breaks my heart.”
sayu said nothing as she closed her eyes and drifted into a dark sleep.
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“oh no,” izaya whispered into the pores of his skin, “i will hurt you. i will hurt you until the day you die. and i will never stop, because i love this fatal agony of yours. i will twist your brains, torture your heart, wrench out everything you thought was pure and sacred, and love you all the more for screaming in pain. because you’re mine, right? isn’t that right. you’re mine for the keeping.”
(the scary thing was, kida made izaya afraid of death.
vicious silence in his eyes.)
in which yamamoto is a bartender and gokudera is a come-and-go lover infatuated with the plains of the wild west. and i think that's all you have to know, haha. this was the 8059 that was inspired by lady gaga's song "you & i" that i talked incessantly about but barely even started. oops. in any case, it's not really supposed to be this minimalist -- i had the dialogue in my head but no sense of what the style of the fic would be yet, so i quickly scribbled some things down and well, that's what i was left with. not even complaining though because i think it gives it a ~cool style, idk.
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one jack daniel’s on the rocks.
i thought you were more of an amaretto guy.
i’m fucking broke and i need to get smashed, you got a problem with that?
smiles. no.
i’m not staying forever, you know.
i know. but i’ve tamed you.
what?
you know, like in the little prince? you’re the fox, and i’m the prince who tames you. so now, when you leave to wander the world on your own, you won’t be able to drink a mug of hot cocoa without thinking of my eyes. and you’ll hear my voice mixed in with the dulcet tones of ella fitzergerald. a baseball game will mean so much more to you.
shut up. i hate you.
and i love you.
this is actually extremely recent; i'd mark its inception in the past several months, say october. it was after i wrote that mada/hashi drabble, if you remember that, and i decided to embark on a full-length endeavor. well, that never happened, obviously, but i'm still relatively amused by a) how good of a handle, at least in my humble opinion, i had on madara's character then, and b) that last little tidbit. omg.
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(the founding of a country on such shallow tides.)
1.
Of one thing Madara was certain, and that was: Senju Hashirama was not to be trusted. He had known this since he was sixteen and first fought against the boy in battle, and lost. He had known this since his enemy smiled down upon him and instead of killing him, offered a hand of assistance.
Madara spat the blood from his mouth. “I do not need your help. This is war, not playtime.”
He merely shrugged. “I do not believe in unnecessary death. All life is sacred.”
Madara barked out a laugh. “Fool, that sort of attitude will get you killed young.” He flung a kunai at him, fleet and nearly invisible, as if to make a point, but Hashirama had deflected it with barely a glance.
“If it’s one thing I’m confident of, it is my ability to not die young.”
He scoffed. “Show-off.”
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He scrawled back, Your letters of recruitment are starting to sound like lovesick declarations. It’s annoying.
starting with the oldest thing i found on my computer, entitled "the winter." it was supposed to be a meet cute fic between zabuza and haku, except instead of cute things happening, there's death and destruction. 8D also i was kind of obsessed with the idea of a bingo book for some reason. hence the following, questionable content:
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on a bingo board he lays his pieces of checkers and shougi. see - he’s playing a game with himself, because life and death is always a game, seeing if he get get a row of corpses first or perhaps a column or if he was being really original, a diagonal. he will do this until the morning light, when he will roll up the board into a tight, neat little scroll, stack the mismatched game pieces in even more mismatched piles, and store them away in his pack before heading out on his daily journey. this is the life.
he gets square thirteen first, black cat thirteen. this one is a pretty tricky shinobi, wearing a mask that looks like it’s been lifted out of an ANBU corps. and perhaps this one is a rogue ANBU - he’s got the moves of a lithe jungle cat. but no, not too soon, because he detects a blind spot, and said cat goes down like a stone. “you let me get behind you. too bad,” before he blackens him out for good.
square thirteen is in the upper right corner of the board.
afterwards, a long, tenuous week of walking from small village to even smaller villages, asking for what could be the most generic-looking person in the world - because truly, in reality, a ninja must be able to blend in with the crowd. he guesses this is not the case with himself. not that he particularly stands out or anything - but everytime he enters a room, a building, a town, it seems like everyone sees him and knows, just knows he’s different. numerous sharp pupils dilating and shrinking with such rapid curiosity (ferocity) that he paints masks on them all, in his mind. and soon they look the same. he leaves.
the one he is looking for is number 34, stuck in the awkward spot between corner 14 and 6. this does nothing to alleviate his position on the bingo board, but he slices the man’s throat and the warm, sticky blood spills onto his fingers, anyway. the sun shines anyway, the earth moves anyway.
he strikes lucky with number 7 wandering a path by the inn. they eye each other with a sort of acknowledgement first, as if they were both forewarned of the other’s identities, and no sooner than that was over, they launched into their attacks. they were well-matched; he could feel the fatigue creeping up his limbs. but he musn’t let up now. 7 is in the middle of the board, the instant win. like a feral animal he strikes from above, and when his arms become restrained, his teeth go for the man’s neck. skin breaks and he tastes metal. there is a pleasure, a catharsis, as he wraps his freed arms around the other man’s torso and fills his mouth with the vitality, the life force of his energy. the body underneath him goes limp. on signal, he reverts and lets go, wiping his mouth.
the other man has been reduced to a faint voice. “i don’t understand you. i don’t understand the hunger you possess, the beast-like fury underneath your stony face. what has the world come to, with people like you? where is it going?”
and before he can do anything, the man grabs a discarded blade and drags it through his abdomen, forever taking his life into his own hands.
lucky number 7 was a throwaway. he clenches his teeth, a bit upset.
the winter is harsh, as he takes out 23, 9, and 11 - top right corner, mid-left, bottom left. the game pieces are so shivered in their antiquity he quietly rubs them with his thumbs, deep in contemplation.
this is probably the shortest one i have, haha. called "easy traitors," and it was supposed to be a modern breakup!AU of sasunaru, delineating how dysfunctional their relationship is. kind of like the second half of (500) days of summer, i guess? as you probably know, sasunaru is like. my otp of otps, but you have to admit that it has the dysfunctionality of a o'neill play.
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even with his eyes closed, he can see sasuke so clearly against the landscape of his mind.
it’s a disease, he says, muttering as he gropes for the half-empty bottle of vodka on his bedside, sharp and burning on his tongue to erase the memories. he flinches at the sunlight filtering through the window, squints, rubs his eyes with the back of his arm. it’s a new day, and he wishes from the bottom of his heart it wasn’t.
i've definitely posted this one before, but trololo i'll just post it again. it's an attempt at adult!r27, something i almost immediately regretted doing because it's possible the worst ship to write for, which is saying a lot considering everything in KHR seems immediately shippable. IDK, i just sort of cobbsquint it sometimes.
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tsuna is on his last visit to italy when he decides to say good-bye. “an idiot will never stop being an idiot,” reborn mutters as tsuna thrusts himself through the door and wraps his arms around the man he once called his tutor, pulling him into a tight embrace.
“can’t you come back to japan with me?” tsuna’s voice is muffled, buried in the expensive italian threads of reborn’s suit.
“you don’t need me to look after you anymore,” he says recalcitrantly. “act your age, tsuna-kun.”
tsuna unlatches himself and reaches his hand up to cup reborn’s face - a movement so sudden the older man asks, “what are you doing?”
the tenth’s eyes are stern and unwavering. “i am acting the way i want.”
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a teacher will never stop teaching his student, reborn discovers. there are many things that tsuna, naive and innocent of cruelty, needs to learn. “chin up,” he tells him on the day of tsuna’s initiation ceremony. “you’re about to become a leader. look the part. don’t be slack-jawed.”
tsuna frowns. “i am never slack-jawed,” he mumbles.
reborn slaps him smartly across the face, and tsuna yelps in pain, clutching his cheek. “you were just now.”
he gives his former tutor one last pout before straightening out his face. yes, tsuna, this is the man i raised you to be. this is the man who will lead the greatest generation of the vongola family, and who will be my greatest accomplishment.
“now that’s more like it.” even he is in awe of how much this gangly boy has become a man.
“reborn.” tsuna’s words are soft. “never let me out of your sight.”
and he never does. reborn stays as tsuna’s advisor, the left hand to gokudera’s right. he is the one who teaches tsuna how to handle a gun, how the sweet steel will click and lock. “steady, steady,” he says in a low voice, pressing his fingers to tsuna’s forearms. “no need to rush. the art of shooting is calm and precision. aim at the target…lock in…”
boom! the gun recoil sends a shockwave through the boy’s frail arms, and he could barely hold onto the firearm if not for reborn’s firm grip. “and now you know how it feels,” he says simply, before turning away.
tsuna, predictably, is confused. “how to feel what?”
“how to kill a man with a weapon.”
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there are things reborn doesn’t know how to teach tsuna - how to kiss with affection, how to hold a lover’s hand. he tilts up his chin and kisses reborn sweetly, a touch so light it could only be that of a boy yet not grown into manhood. reborn grimaces. “don’t do this. i am not the one you should be chasing after.”
there are lessons reborn tries to drill into his students skull, day after day: pain, rejection, a cold-bloodedness that only he can sharpen. tsuna fails to learn any.
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tsuna - still a kid, innocence personified. “you think you can lead legions of men, an army with this attitude? if so, you are sorely mistaken,” reborn snarls.
tsuna frowns. “i think i can do it without becoming a monster,” he says. devoid of petulance. a challenge.
so this might just be the thing i'm most proud of this this little weird batch. it's an AU ita/shi in which shisui kills itachi and becomes madara's prodigy, instead of the other way around (and it was all written before the big recent reveal, so~). the title was "angry little boys," and look, it even came with a summary! “at fifteen, shisui is required to learn how to grow up. at thirteen, itachi is required to learn how to be a remorseless killer. konoha needs to learn to stop handing schoolboys knives and expertly putting a murderous glint in their eyes. (in which shisui survives and comes out alive, and itachi is left to burn in the ashes of his past.)” i should also note right now that i have a lot of different headcanon shisuis, trololo. some of them are kind, some are goofy, some are crueler than they let on. they all have the same background, though - his mother died giving birth to him, and his father was a drunkard incapable of taking care of him, so he was passed around from relative to relative, all of whom scorned him because they found his family and existence a disgrace to the uchiha name. sooo there you go, some background. furthermore, this is only a skeleton of the entire story, so the essentially the first two paragraphs is really the beginning, and the end is the actual end~. ANYWAYS.
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there is a stigma in konoha and across all ninja villages that children are not children, but miniscule fighting machines. small adults. consider this: peak physical strength and agility declines around the age of thirty, and in a world where firepower is everything, ninja prodigies are revered. every single boy and girl is shipped off the ninja academy at the age of five and run through drills of throwing tiny sharp stars at wooden dummies, in hopes that this early exposure to combat might awaken in them something even the middle-aged can fear. and that’s the key word - fear, isn’ it? while the elder sit back and pit their greatest, most precious fighting dogs each other, fear pervades the air.
it’s lucky, then, that ninja villages also happen to have bloodline limits, and cast these pools of genetic abnormalties as nobles. even the daimyo has a tough time getting through konoha with any respect aside from the facade that is required, but when an uchiha enters a room? complete silence. everyone is shaking in their boots. the mere thought of provoking an uchiha needlessly is enough to make one piss in their pants. and shisui learns this early, early on, when even before the age of five, that prime age when kids are sent to make adolescent murderers of themselves, he is given a kunai and taught how to throw it, and executes all his exercises with such precision it earns him a rare prestige. he learns it when there are men ten times his age bowing at his feet, in hopes that the approval of a child might boost their own social standing, he learns it when he can command an entire room of adults with a single cry. at four years old, he understands he is special, and that there is nothing in the world that can change that.
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at six, he learns that everything can change that. the clan is extraordinarily fickle when it comes to propping up their gems for the world to see, and it doesn’t help matters much when you’re essentially an orphan,
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in which shisui is a beast in battle, yet itachi, despite being a pacifist, is a natural. there’s a difference that is steadily growing apparent in shisui’s eyes.
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“…you tried to kill me,” Itachi spits out in surprise.
shisui spins his kunai between his fingers. the blade is so sharp, so freshly cut across the whetstone, that the newly spilt blood barely clings to it as centrifugal force launches it in arcs across the green grass. “only trying to return the favor,” he says rather blithely. “now get up.”
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after he kills itachi, he drags the body toward the riverbanks and flings it into the cool, rushing river. such ephemeral beauty doesn’t deserve to be fit in a box and left to rot in the earth, nor burnt to ashes, as is the uchiha tradition. no - this is their battle, their love, their tears, their funeral - this is how it’s done in their terms.
if only they were the only two people to exist in this wretched world.
but they aren’t.
shisui doesn’t let any trace of emotion pass over his face. his education is ingrained in him, that emotion is weak and is easy to exploit; he keeps his eyes steady and dry as he watches itachi’s long black locks, the same ones he was so carelessly threading his fingers through only three months ago, disappear with the current around the bend. this is not how things are done, but this is how we were raised.
“let the wars begin.”
i might have posted this before as well, but lol, TYL!lambo/fuuta shhh i ship this a lot secretly, okay. it's a good ship. :c
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lambo is the number one laziest living being in the world, i tell him. behind him is the koala, who sleeps twenty-two hours of the day, and the three-toed sloth, an animal world-reknowned for its lack of movement. he doesn’t say anything, just laughs and continues dozing on my stomach, no extraneous movement required. a few years ago, he might’ve cried and told me to stop making fun of him, but today he casts it off like it was air above his head. he casts everything off.
sleepily, he murmurs, “and who is the number one person in the world that fuuta loves? i bet you don’t need to consult with the ranking planet for that one.”
i bite my bottom lip. “tsuna-nii.”
“liar,” he whispers into the skin of my belly, eyes fluttering open, “liar.”
first, i should note: i am terribly and deeply in love with dino cavallone for unknown reasons. i mean, i'm essentially in love with every single character in KHR for completely ignoble reasons, but dino possibly takes the cake. that being said, this is a D1880 love triangle snippet, trololo, and i just. dino is my favorite part. of everything.
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“give it up. it would never work between the two of you.”
yamamoto smirks. “this isn’t just to throw me off chasing your boyfriend, now, is it?”
dino laughs, completely and utterly amused. “i like you, kid.” he takes a bite of biscuit, eyes fixed on the japanese boy. the cavallone boss is no flake, despite appearances; he regards him in the same way he would an opponent or prisoner of war, and yamamoto’d like to think he counted as both. “i really, really like you, kid.”
LOOK, i even tried to write a ginzura once, omg. the bb!foursome is always my favorite thing, so as you can see, i was in the middle of writing it into the story before i stopped. and before you ask, no, i had no idea what direction this was going to take. xD
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on the last day he told katsura, “i’m not leaving without you,” but he left without him anyway. it was a mistake, a fateful interference; they had missed each other by mere seconds. katsura murmured, i can’t be late, i can’t be late, i can’t be late, a little white rabbit in the middle of 19th century japan, and when the train came, he had left with it. gintoki made an effort not to be late that morning, only to be thwarted by the traffic. “two centuries worth of technological development in this country during the past decade, and you think they’d have come up with a way to get rid of traffic instead of congesting it further,” he muttered as he absent-mindedly kicked his heel against the back of his moped. by the time he’d reached the train station, the large metal wheels had started to turn, a celebratory whistle announced the vehicle’s departure from edo. as gin shouted and pushed through crowds, “zura! zura!” katsura could not even correct his friend for the last time, as he stared out the window at the picturesque landscape flatlining in the distance, lost in thought.
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the first time they had met gintoki took an immediate disliking to katsura kotaro. “your hair looks stupid,” he told him belligerently, pinky diligently picking at one of his nostrils.
the other boy, older than gin by just a year, cocked his head to the side. “is your hair naturally permed like that? if we’re going by stupidity of looks, i think yours trumps mine by a mile.” and he hadn’t even meant it as an insult.
“che.” gin rolled his eyes and turned away. “loser.”
it hadn’t fared any better when that sakamoto kid tried to befriend the both of them at the same time.
another pretty old one. i remember working on this the summer of 2010, wow. in china, where i was on vacation. xD the writing is pretty sketchy, but the main thing i liked about this was the way izaya talks in this, because i could never quite pin him down since. also LOL ignore the abrupt tense change; i tended to do that because i was attempting to make the transition from past-tense writing to present-tense writing around that time.
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out of all the gang leaders, izaya liked the fiesty, bipolar yellow scarf the best. * it was like this - kida-kun, as he liked to call him, was the only one who had any balls to get angry, get so furiously murderous that he’d tear the world down for his cause. you could say izaya loved prodding and pricking him, if only to see the beautiful fire behind his eyes. kida’s only downfall, however, was that the fire rarely burned long enough to last him the whole way through. fear would paralyze his legs at halftime; sweat would snake, cold, across his skin.
well, izaya decided, these flaws were the things he loved about humans anyway. and this was the thing - it was because that kida was about the most imperfect being, like a china vase with an infinite amount of infintessimal scars, that he loved him over anything. (at some points, when kida turns his head to the side or izaya manages to get a rise out of him, he fools himself into thinking he loves the boy even more than he loves destruction.)
“sayu-chan,” he purrs one day, “i am rather jealous of you.”
“of what, izaya-san?”
he paused, drawing his hands together before answering. “i am jealous, sayu-chan, of kida. look -” he gestures towards the window. a familiar mop of blonde hair paces back and fort below, but makes no visible sign of entering the building. at long last, he steals away, like an embarrassed thief. “- look at the way he torments himself. ah, i can almost taste it now - the sweetness is bearing down on my tongue!” he lifts his hands in a brief acknowledgement of holy wonderment, then just as quickly sets them down at his sides again. “sayu-chan, no matter how hard that boy fights it, he will continue loving you with all his heart. every action he pursues, every decision he makes, will be affected by the permanent scar you’ve inflicted on him. but don’t you worry! - he loves the pain. he loves that scar, despite trying his hardest to hide it behind all the fake smiles. and that is what i am jealous of, sayu-chan, what you are so graciously the recipient of - this - what shall i call it - this imperfect love.” he finally takes a breath, inhaling the stale hospital air around him. “it’s so lovely that i think,” he says softly, trailing his fingers lightly down the windowpane. his breath fogs a mishappen oval over the jagged landscape of Tokyo, and it dissipates slowly, painstakingly. “i think it breaks my heart.”
sayu said nothing as she closed her eyes and drifted into a dark sleep.
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“oh no,” izaya whispered into the pores of his skin, “i will hurt you. i will hurt you until the day you die. and i will never stop, because i love this fatal agony of yours. i will twist your brains, torture your heart, wrench out everything you thought was pure and sacred, and love you all the more for screaming in pain. because you’re mine, right? isn’t that right. you’re mine for the keeping.”
(the scary thing was, kida made izaya afraid of death.
vicious silence in his eyes.)
in which yamamoto is a bartender and gokudera is a come-and-go lover infatuated with the plains of the wild west. and i think that's all you have to know, haha. this was the 8059 that was inspired by lady gaga's song "you & i" that i talked incessantly about but barely even started. oops. in any case, it's not really supposed to be this minimalist -- i had the dialogue in my head but no sense of what the style of the fic would be yet, so i quickly scribbled some things down and well, that's what i was left with. not even complaining though because i think it gives it a ~cool style, idk.
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one jack daniel’s on the rocks.
i thought you were more of an amaretto guy.
i’m fucking broke and i need to get smashed, you got a problem with that?
smiles. no.
i’m not staying forever, you know.
i know. but i’ve tamed you.
what?
you know, like in the little prince? you’re the fox, and i’m the prince who tames you. so now, when you leave to wander the world on your own, you won’t be able to drink a mug of hot cocoa without thinking of my eyes. and you’ll hear my voice mixed in with the dulcet tones of ella fitzergerald. a baseball game will mean so much more to you.
shut up. i hate you.
and i love you.
this is actually extremely recent; i'd mark its inception in the past several months, say october. it was after i wrote that mada/hashi drabble, if you remember that, and i decided to embark on a full-length endeavor. well, that never happened, obviously, but i'm still relatively amused by a) how good of a handle, at least in my humble opinion, i had on madara's character then, and b) that last little tidbit. omg.
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(the founding of a country on such shallow tides.)
1.
Of one thing Madara was certain, and that was: Senju Hashirama was not to be trusted. He had known this since he was sixteen and first fought against the boy in battle, and lost. He had known this since his enemy smiled down upon him and instead of killing him, offered a hand of assistance.
Madara spat the blood from his mouth. “I do not need your help. This is war, not playtime.”
He merely shrugged. “I do not believe in unnecessary death. All life is sacred.”
Madara barked out a laugh. “Fool, that sort of attitude will get you killed young.” He flung a kunai at him, fleet and nearly invisible, as if to make a point, but Hashirama had deflected it with barely a glance.
“If it’s one thing I’m confident of, it is my ability to not die young.”
He scoffed. “Show-off.”
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He scrawled back, Your letters of recruitment are starting to sound like lovesick declarations. It’s annoying.