takin a break from fma 107 incoherence
TO POST THIS MONSTER.
It's actually a tiny little 50-sentence fic. But like. IT TOOK ME NINE MONTHS TO FINISH. The last 8 sentences I got to FOUGHT ME TOOTH AND NAIL. (First 35 prompts: a fortnight. Last 15: NINE MONTHS.)
Anyway. This is not officially endorsed by the 50setence comm, not even a little bit. I just saw nice prompts and wanted to gank and so I did. :D
It's Fakiru, BTW. Because clearly, the only time I'm not incoherenting about FMA is when I'm incoherenting about Princess Tutu! ♥.
Title: Licht und Dunkelheit
Fandom: Princess Tutu
Rating: PG-13-ish? For ~references~.
Prompt set: beta
Characters/Pairings: Fakir/Ahiru, with Autor as a side character and guest appearances by Rue.
Words: 2 700 or thereabouts
#01 - Walking
“It’s just like you, to be incapable of walking across a perfectly flat surface without falling over,” grumped Fakir, prompting an embarrassed pout from Ahiru, who was currently clinging to his back with a white bandage gleaming on her freshly-sprained ankle.
#02 - Waltz
She still couldn’t dance en pointe or do a perfect arabesque, but with a few months of hard training she had managed to pin down a basic waltz-and as they swept across the floor of his kitchen, her hand on his shoulder and her eyes on his, he felt that a waltz was more than enough.
#03 - Wishes
It was silly, childish, and probably useless, but she wished on the first star of every clear night for her human form back one day-and though he’d rather die than admit it, so did he.
#04 - Wonder
She points at a fluffy cloud one bright day and wonders how they could possibly turn into the dark, moody thunderclouds she so hated; he shakes his head and wonders where it is that she gets her endless supply of inane and pointless comments from; she pouts and wonders why he’s such a huge jerk for no particularly good reason; he glares back and wonders how she managed to make him fall in love with her despite her glaring stupidity; she sticks her nose in the air and wonders which one of his-wait, what?
#05 - Worry
He stumbles into the house after dark, sodden with rain, his new tunic torn to shreds, and she immediately begins screaming and scolding-it’s fully twenty minutes before it comes out that she was worried sick (“nice way of showing it,” he mumbles, earning himself another weak smack).
#06 - Whimsy
“And then they lived happily ever after, right, Fakir?” giggles the strange girl, clutching at his parchment excitedly; there is a slight pause as he remembers the half-mature white duck swimming idly in the pond back home, and the growing ache in his empty heart, before he yanks the pages from her hands and sprints back home, the words “happily ever after” pounding in his head.
#07 - Waste/Wasteland
He still remembers the plains of despair that Rue danced in temporarily forever; they return sometimes, in his nightmares, only it’s not the raven princess who is forced to step across the dusty graveyard for the rest of eternity, but the white swan of hope-not Rue, graceful and collected, but Ahiru, clumsy and eager, her happiness sapped and half her soul gone, not even her vast store of enthusiasm enough to light the bleak and lonely wasteland called Despair.
#08 - Whiskey and rum
“Oh, dear God, why me,” whispered a terrified Fakir, his eyes glued to Ahiru’s giggling figure as she attempted to do a clumsy fouettés en tournant on top of the nearest table, trying to figure out if it was worth the embarrassment of admitting he actually knew this person to drag her home and get her into bed and blend some tea leaves for the inevitable headache she would have tomorrow morning and whose bright idea was it to take Ahiru to a bar anyway?!
#09 - War
He stares after her, speechless, trying to process the words that had just left her mouth (“Sometimes I wonder why I even love you as much as I do-you great huge jerk!”); it is minutes before his brain is functioning again, and immediately he begins plotting his counterattack-Ahiru may have won the verbal battle, he thinks grimly, but he will win the war.
#10 - Weddings
Colour schemes, flower arrangements, ribbons and streamers and have you thought about your dress yet-Rue, Pique and Lilie are hyped up and excited; all Ahiru can do is blink helplessly and say, “but he hasn’t proposed yet.”
#11 - Birthday
Wrapping paper, ribbons, cakes and quiches; even Mytho and Rue came down to Kinkan for the occasion-all he can remember of the day is the shy kiss she left on his cheek and the whispered “happy birthday, Fakir”.
#12 - Blessing
Very occasionally, and only if he’s feeling particularly stupid and contrary, Fakir will think to himself that perhaps, just perhaps, Drosselmeyer couldn’t have been all bad-because he was, after all, the one to call his Ahiru into the story, and what was that but a blessing in disguise?
#13 - Bias
“She’s so beautiful-inconceivably beautiful,” sighs Autor, idly doodling a raven feather on the corner of his parchment; Fakir suppresses a snort with great difficulty and hastily scribbles out the swan he’d just outlined on the corner of his parchment, knowing full well that (even with all his biases aside) Ahiru was the most beautiful person in existence.
#14 - Burning
He’s not sure how it happened-all he knows is that she looks startlingly beautiful in her new dress, and all of a sudden he needed her like burning, and she didn’t really seem to mind, the kissing that is, and if he weren’t so busy marvelling at the soft heat of her lips he might realise what the enthusiasm with which she was kissing him back meant, but then she slips a hand down his chest and he decides he doesn’t really care, anyway.
#15 - Breathing
Sometimes, her ducky brain would not let her fall asleep; whenever this happened, she would carefully climb onto Fakir’s chest (he stirred but never woke), watch the moon move across the ink sky, and just listen to his breathing, delighting and rejoicing in his melancholy existence.
#16 - Breaking
Ravens, all around him, pitch feathers and gleaming eyes; their claws rip him open, their beaks draw blood and he is breaking-but she’s there to put him together again, the clumsy little duck-girl with the huge heart, big enough to let even the bitterest knight in.
#17 - Belief
“-It’s just hard, not to have anyone to believe in,” confided the broken knight to his duck princess; she hugged his arm and whispered, “you have me...you’ll always have me.”
#18 - Balloon
“Oh, it is so cute!” laughs Ahiru, as the stall vendor handed Fakir a bright pink heart-shaped balloon; he blushed, hairline to nose, and shoved it at her hastily-bad enough he had to stand within three metres of it, but hold it?
#19 - Balcony
“Duck, Duck, wherefore art thou a duck?” sighed Fakir idly, turning a quill in his hands; Duck quacked a giggle at his grammar, and he dryly shot back, “it’s by Shakespeare-the English do things differently.”
#20 - Bane
She was an absolute nuisance, and yet he couldn’t live without her-he was the bane of her existence, and yet she needed him to breathe; neither tolerance not sanity was synonymous with their love, and yet there they are, as happy as could be just being annoyed.
#21 - Quiet
It starts out as a whisper, an offhand comment Ahiru made about his ink, but quickly grows more heated as the worst possible interpretations of each sentence are made and egos are bruised beyond recognisability; finally, Autor can’t take anymore and hollers, “will you please be quiet?!”, prompting guilty starts from the bickering couple.
#22 - Quirks
Every time they go out, she expresses utter shock at his dislike of chocolate mousse (“how could you not like it, the light and creamy texture, the rich sweet taste of the chocolate as it melts on your tongue?”); until one day his temper cracked and he shot back: “well, you don’t like walnut cheesecake, you’re one to talk!”-after that, at least half their arguments consisted of which dessert was better.
#23 - Question
Everything that could possibly have gone wrong, went wrong, and in the worst conceivable way; somehow, the romantic sunset picnic-one that had nearly killed his brain to organise, it was so sickeningly cute and fluffy-had morphed into them fighting for their lives in the middle of a raging hailstorm; as he slices another raven-mook neatly in half with the cake knife, he roars in frustration: “for God’s sake, all I wanted to do was ask her to marry me!!”
#24 - Quarrel
A wise man once said that the measure of love is how much you can insult the other person without them taking offense-if that was so, thought Fakir grimly as Ahiru threw a stack of napkins at him, their love must be the truest in the world.
#25 - Quitting
He groaned and threw his quill to the floor, his creativity spent and his patience gone, unable to write even five hundred words of a decent story; and yet, it took less than a dozen from her-it’s not like you, to give up so easily-to spark into action the two thousand he needed to finish.
#26 - Jump
“One, two, arabesque, one, two-and jeté!” called the dance instructor; Ahiru seemed to change her mind halfway through the leap and landed in a pile of hair and tutu at Fakir’s feet, causing his own jeté to head straight into the ground; from the heap of embarrassed human and slight-squashed duck, she raised a hand and weakly called, “avant or seconde?”
#26 - Jump II (alternate)
Toward the end of the story, both of them had jumped-but only Fakir had fallen.
#27 - Jester
Two years, three months, thirty-seven tantrums; twenty-two broken quills, fifteen bowls of pancake batter, eleven ruined frocks, five lost notebooks, one light kiss and many, many feathers-and she remained the only one who could make him laugh.
#28 - Jousting
He told her she was absolutely not allowed to scream, it would spook the horses and then they’d be done for-but then again, he thinks to himself grimly as he gallops after the terrified girl clinging to the terrified pony, when was the last time she listened to him, anyway?
#29 - Jewel
He had promised her a gift, but came bearing no dress or hair ribbon or sparkling diamond; instead, a small, dark red jewel, roughly cut but glowing with an inner warmth-a piece of his own heart.
#30 - Just
The knight is just a writer and the princess just a duck; they can just barely dance together and Drosselmeyer’s story is just over; what they have together is just true love-and it’s just perfect.
#31 - Smirk
She slips in the snow, and he snorts unkindly; it is cut short as he promptly lands on his bottom right next to her, and she gives a righteous giggle.
#32 - Sorrow
When she falls over, he laughs; when she drops something, he growls; but when she’s alone, unneeded, and aching with sorrow, he’s there-quiet, still, and usually grumpy, but always, without fail, there.
#33 - Stupidity
“Hope” was only a poetic way to say “stupidity”-and stupidity was humankind’s greatest power (the irony of it having been brought about by a duck was only barely missed).
#34 - Serenade
“See, what a girl likes is a touch of class,” says Autor, unjustifiably knowing; Fakir gives him a dirty look, and Autor spreads his hands innocently (the piano had never been so traumatised).
#35 - Sarcasm
“Oh, no, I don’t care about you at all,” she says, rolling her eyes; he is so shocked by the prospect of Ahiru using sarcasm that he doesn’t quite catch the implications of her statement until three sentences later.
#36 - Sordid
Fakir isn’t particularly fond of roast duck, though he’ll eat it when it’s served; he tries it after he (they) defeat Kraehe, and finds that it tastes like hate and heartbreak in his mouth-he spits it out and decides to steer clear of the waterfowl from now on.
#37 - Soliloquy
“So,” says Fakir, “I figured if I tried enough times I’d get to the right paragraph eventually, so I kind of just strung words together until they made sense and waited to see if they would work, but they never did-which, I mean, you already knew that, since if they worked I wouldn’t have had to try again-but anyway, I was making my tea this one morning and I spilled some hot water on my shoe and for no reason at all I realised that I loved you, which you’d think would be surprising but for some reason it didn’t come as a shock, because I kind of already knew; and then after that I tried to write the right paragraph again but there were new words in it this time and somehow it worked and so now you’re here and you’re not a duck anymore and in case you missed it the first two times I said it, I love you and-and I’m really sorry it took me so long;” he takes a breath so he can continue, but she cuts him off with a kiss, and he finds he doesn’t mind.
#38 - Sojourn
“A brief break, that’s all, just a quick rest,” he mumbles; but his quill is blunt and his inkwell is dry and Ahiru is still very much a duck, and he’s starting to wonder where he will find the will to keep going.
#39 - Share
He brings her a scone, fresh and warm from the bakery, and smiles gently at her delight (he politely refused when she offered him the other half held up on a rather muddy wing, though).
#40 - Solitary
She floats with no one beside her, only the barest ripple distorting the smooth, moonlit surface of the lake; but she thinks of scarred knuckles and spilt ink, and does not feel alone.
#41 - Nowhere
“Where in the world could a human ever fall in love with a duck?” she whispers to herself, trying to keep her heart from breaking-for the answer, of course, is nowhere at all.
#42 - Neutral
“No, you great huge jerk, that’s not what I-are you even listening to what I say, or-excuse me, that never happened, and you-Rue, back me up here!” cried Ahiru in frustration; Rue swallowed a giggle with great difficulty and just managed to say, “hey, I’m not taking sides,” without grinning.
#43 - Nuance
The line, thought Ahiru, between “barely tolerate” and “love with all his heart” appeared to be frighteningly thin in Fakir’s book-if his words to her from one day to the next were anything at all to go by, anyway.
#44 - Near
If she quacked in alarm, he was beside her in an instant; if she got caught in a bush, he was there to free her; if she was cornered by a stray cat, he would beat it off with a book-at this point Ahiru was seriously staring to consider the possibility that Fakir could teleport.
#45 - Natural
“It’s not natural, to feel like this about a duck,” he murmurs to himself; and it hurts in his chest sometimes, it keeps him up at night-and yet, loving her seems easier than breathing.
#46 - Horizon
Green eyes stared unseeing toward the hemline of earth and sky, distant possibilities echoing within his ears as though they would never be quiet again (”Oh, for the love of-why don’t you just write her back into a girl, then?”).
#47 - Valiant
“Why do you still keep this old thing around, anyway?” she asks musingly, poking at Lohengrin’s sword, hanging from the wall; he shrugs as if unsure, though he knows the answer (and, subconsciously, though she wouldn’t admit it, so does she)-“in case you are ever in danger again.”
#48 - Virtuous
“Never,” Fakir growled, redder than Autor would have thought possible; “I will not compromise Ahiru’s virtue like that, you dirty, horrid, beastly, immoral, great old-why are you laughing?!”
#49 - Victory
Their victory is not written in a history book, nor passed down the generations as a great legend of old; nor, indeed, recorded anywhere but on the very last ink-stained page of a single battered notebook-but (he thinks as she kisses him for the first time with a girl’s lips again) it is a triumph all the same.
#50 - Defeat
She was the one who finally brought him to his knees and kept him there-and for unfathomable reasons, he did not mind.
UM. YES. I'M GONNA GO TRY NOT TO DIE IN MY MATHS HALFYEARLY TOMORROW AND INCOHERENT ABOUT FMA SUM MOAR. *_*
It's actually a tiny little 50-sentence fic. But like. IT TOOK ME NINE MONTHS TO FINISH. The last 8 sentences I got to FOUGHT ME TOOTH AND NAIL. (First 35 prompts: a fortnight. Last 15: NINE MONTHS.)
Anyway. This is not officially endorsed by the 50setence comm, not even a little bit. I just saw nice prompts and wanted to gank and so I did. :D
It's Fakiru, BTW. Because clearly, the only time I'm not incoherenting about FMA is when I'm incoherenting about Princess Tutu! ♥.
Title: Licht und Dunkelheit
Fandom: Princess Tutu
Rating: PG-13-ish? For ~references~.
Prompt set: beta
Characters/Pairings: Fakir/Ahiru, with Autor as a side character and guest appearances by Rue.
Words: 2 700 or thereabouts
#01 - Walking
“It’s just like you, to be incapable of walking across a perfectly flat surface without falling over,” grumped Fakir, prompting an embarrassed pout from Ahiru, who was currently clinging to his back with a white bandage gleaming on her freshly-sprained ankle.
#02 - Waltz
She still couldn’t dance en pointe or do a perfect arabesque, but with a few months of hard training she had managed to pin down a basic waltz-and as they swept across the floor of his kitchen, her hand on his shoulder and her eyes on his, he felt that a waltz was more than enough.
#03 - Wishes
It was silly, childish, and probably useless, but she wished on the first star of every clear night for her human form back one day-and though he’d rather die than admit it, so did he.
#04 - Wonder
She points at a fluffy cloud one bright day and wonders how they could possibly turn into the dark, moody thunderclouds she so hated; he shakes his head and wonders where it is that she gets her endless supply of inane and pointless comments from; she pouts and wonders why he’s such a huge jerk for no particularly good reason; he glares back and wonders how she managed to make him fall in love with her despite her glaring stupidity; she sticks her nose in the air and wonders which one of his-wait, what?
#05 - Worry
He stumbles into the house after dark, sodden with rain, his new tunic torn to shreds, and she immediately begins screaming and scolding-it’s fully twenty minutes before it comes out that she was worried sick (“nice way of showing it,” he mumbles, earning himself another weak smack).
#06 - Whimsy
“And then they lived happily ever after, right, Fakir?” giggles the strange girl, clutching at his parchment excitedly; there is a slight pause as he remembers the half-mature white duck swimming idly in the pond back home, and the growing ache in his empty heart, before he yanks the pages from her hands and sprints back home, the words “happily ever after” pounding in his head.
#07 - Waste/Wasteland
He still remembers the plains of despair that Rue danced in temporarily forever; they return sometimes, in his nightmares, only it’s not the raven princess who is forced to step across the dusty graveyard for the rest of eternity, but the white swan of hope-not Rue, graceful and collected, but Ahiru, clumsy and eager, her happiness sapped and half her soul gone, not even her vast store of enthusiasm enough to light the bleak and lonely wasteland called Despair.
#08 - Whiskey and rum
“Oh, dear God, why me,” whispered a terrified Fakir, his eyes glued to Ahiru’s giggling figure as she attempted to do a clumsy fouettés en tournant on top of the nearest table, trying to figure out if it was worth the embarrassment of admitting he actually knew this person to drag her home and get her into bed and blend some tea leaves for the inevitable headache she would have tomorrow morning and whose bright idea was it to take Ahiru to a bar anyway?!
#09 - War
He stares after her, speechless, trying to process the words that had just left her mouth (“Sometimes I wonder why I even love you as much as I do-you great huge jerk!”); it is minutes before his brain is functioning again, and immediately he begins plotting his counterattack-Ahiru may have won the verbal battle, he thinks grimly, but he will win the war.
#10 - Weddings
Colour schemes, flower arrangements, ribbons and streamers and have you thought about your dress yet-Rue, Pique and Lilie are hyped up and excited; all Ahiru can do is blink helplessly and say, “but he hasn’t proposed yet.”
#11 - Birthday
Wrapping paper, ribbons, cakes and quiches; even Mytho and Rue came down to Kinkan for the occasion-all he can remember of the day is the shy kiss she left on his cheek and the whispered “happy birthday, Fakir”.
#12 - Blessing
Very occasionally, and only if he’s feeling particularly stupid and contrary, Fakir will think to himself that perhaps, just perhaps, Drosselmeyer couldn’t have been all bad-because he was, after all, the one to call his Ahiru into the story, and what was that but a blessing in disguise?
#13 - Bias
“She’s so beautiful-inconceivably beautiful,” sighs Autor, idly doodling a raven feather on the corner of his parchment; Fakir suppresses a snort with great difficulty and hastily scribbles out the swan he’d just outlined on the corner of his parchment, knowing full well that (even with all his biases aside) Ahiru was the most beautiful person in existence.
#14 - Burning
He’s not sure how it happened-all he knows is that she looks startlingly beautiful in her new dress, and all of a sudden he needed her like burning, and she didn’t really seem to mind, the kissing that is, and if he weren’t so busy marvelling at the soft heat of her lips he might realise what the enthusiasm with which she was kissing him back meant, but then she slips a hand down his chest and he decides he doesn’t really care, anyway.
#15 - Breathing
Sometimes, her ducky brain would not let her fall asleep; whenever this happened, she would carefully climb onto Fakir’s chest (he stirred but never woke), watch the moon move across the ink sky, and just listen to his breathing, delighting and rejoicing in his melancholy existence.
#16 - Breaking
Ravens, all around him, pitch feathers and gleaming eyes; their claws rip him open, their beaks draw blood and he is breaking-but she’s there to put him together again, the clumsy little duck-girl with the huge heart, big enough to let even the bitterest knight in.
#17 - Belief
“-It’s just hard, not to have anyone to believe in,” confided the broken knight to his duck princess; she hugged his arm and whispered, “you have me...you’ll always have me.”
#18 - Balloon
“Oh, it is so cute!” laughs Ahiru, as the stall vendor handed Fakir a bright pink heart-shaped balloon; he blushed, hairline to nose, and shoved it at her hastily-bad enough he had to stand within three metres of it, but hold it?
#19 - Balcony
“Duck, Duck, wherefore art thou a duck?” sighed Fakir idly, turning a quill in his hands; Duck quacked a giggle at his grammar, and he dryly shot back, “it’s by Shakespeare-the English do things differently.”
#20 - Bane
She was an absolute nuisance, and yet he couldn’t live without her-he was the bane of her existence, and yet she needed him to breathe; neither tolerance not sanity was synonymous with their love, and yet there they are, as happy as could be just being annoyed.
#21 - Quiet
It starts out as a whisper, an offhand comment Ahiru made about his ink, but quickly grows more heated as the worst possible interpretations of each sentence are made and egos are bruised beyond recognisability; finally, Autor can’t take anymore and hollers, “will you please be quiet?!”, prompting guilty starts from the bickering couple.
#22 - Quirks
Every time they go out, she expresses utter shock at his dislike of chocolate mousse (“how could you not like it, the light and creamy texture, the rich sweet taste of the chocolate as it melts on your tongue?”); until one day his temper cracked and he shot back: “well, you don’t like walnut cheesecake, you’re one to talk!”-after that, at least half their arguments consisted of which dessert was better.
#23 - Question
Everything that could possibly have gone wrong, went wrong, and in the worst conceivable way; somehow, the romantic sunset picnic-one that had nearly killed his brain to organise, it was so sickeningly cute and fluffy-had morphed into them fighting for their lives in the middle of a raging hailstorm; as he slices another raven-mook neatly in half with the cake knife, he roars in frustration: “for God’s sake, all I wanted to do was ask her to marry me!!”
#24 - Quarrel
A wise man once said that the measure of love is how much you can insult the other person without them taking offense-if that was so, thought Fakir grimly as Ahiru threw a stack of napkins at him, their love must be the truest in the world.
#25 - Quitting
He groaned and threw his quill to the floor, his creativity spent and his patience gone, unable to write even five hundred words of a decent story; and yet, it took less than a dozen from her-it’s not like you, to give up so easily-to spark into action the two thousand he needed to finish.
#26 - Jump
“One, two, arabesque, one, two-and jeté!” called the dance instructor; Ahiru seemed to change her mind halfway through the leap and landed in a pile of hair and tutu at Fakir’s feet, causing his own jeté to head straight into the ground; from the heap of embarrassed human and slight-squashed duck, she raised a hand and weakly called, “avant or seconde?”
#26 - Jump II (alternate)
Toward the end of the story, both of them had jumped-but only Fakir had fallen.
#27 - Jester
Two years, three months, thirty-seven tantrums; twenty-two broken quills, fifteen bowls of pancake batter, eleven ruined frocks, five lost notebooks, one light kiss and many, many feathers-and she remained the only one who could make him laugh.
#28 - Jousting
He told her she was absolutely not allowed to scream, it would spook the horses and then they’d be done for-but then again, he thinks to himself grimly as he gallops after the terrified girl clinging to the terrified pony, when was the last time she listened to him, anyway?
#29 - Jewel
He had promised her a gift, but came bearing no dress or hair ribbon or sparkling diamond; instead, a small, dark red jewel, roughly cut but glowing with an inner warmth-a piece of his own heart.
#30 - Just
The knight is just a writer and the princess just a duck; they can just barely dance together and Drosselmeyer’s story is just over; what they have together is just true love-and it’s just perfect.
#31 - Smirk
She slips in the snow, and he snorts unkindly; it is cut short as he promptly lands on his bottom right next to her, and she gives a righteous giggle.
#32 - Sorrow
When she falls over, he laughs; when she drops something, he growls; but when she’s alone, unneeded, and aching with sorrow, he’s there-quiet, still, and usually grumpy, but always, without fail, there.
#33 - Stupidity
“Hope” was only a poetic way to say “stupidity”-and stupidity was humankind’s greatest power (the irony of it having been brought about by a duck was only barely missed).
#34 - Serenade
“See, what a girl likes is a touch of class,” says Autor, unjustifiably knowing; Fakir gives him a dirty look, and Autor spreads his hands innocently (the piano had never been so traumatised).
#35 - Sarcasm
“Oh, no, I don’t care about you at all,” she says, rolling her eyes; he is so shocked by the prospect of Ahiru using sarcasm that he doesn’t quite catch the implications of her statement until three sentences later.
#36 - Sordid
Fakir isn’t particularly fond of roast duck, though he’ll eat it when it’s served; he tries it after he (they) defeat Kraehe, and finds that it tastes like hate and heartbreak in his mouth-he spits it out and decides to steer clear of the waterfowl from now on.
#37 - Soliloquy
“So,” says Fakir, “I figured if I tried enough times I’d get to the right paragraph eventually, so I kind of just strung words together until they made sense and waited to see if they would work, but they never did-which, I mean, you already knew that, since if they worked I wouldn’t have had to try again-but anyway, I was making my tea this one morning and I spilled some hot water on my shoe and for no reason at all I realised that I loved you, which you’d think would be surprising but for some reason it didn’t come as a shock, because I kind of already knew; and then after that I tried to write the right paragraph again but there were new words in it this time and somehow it worked and so now you’re here and you’re not a duck anymore and in case you missed it the first two times I said it, I love you and-and I’m really sorry it took me so long;” he takes a breath so he can continue, but she cuts him off with a kiss, and he finds he doesn’t mind.
#38 - Sojourn
“A brief break, that’s all, just a quick rest,” he mumbles; but his quill is blunt and his inkwell is dry and Ahiru is still very much a duck, and he’s starting to wonder where he will find the will to keep going.
#39 - Share
He brings her a scone, fresh and warm from the bakery, and smiles gently at her delight (he politely refused when she offered him the other half held up on a rather muddy wing, though).
#40 - Solitary
She floats with no one beside her, only the barest ripple distorting the smooth, moonlit surface of the lake; but she thinks of scarred knuckles and spilt ink, and does not feel alone.
#41 - Nowhere
“Where in the world could a human ever fall in love with a duck?” she whispers to herself, trying to keep her heart from breaking-for the answer, of course, is nowhere at all.
#42 - Neutral
“No, you great huge jerk, that’s not what I-are you even listening to what I say, or-excuse me, that never happened, and you-Rue, back me up here!” cried Ahiru in frustration; Rue swallowed a giggle with great difficulty and just managed to say, “hey, I’m not taking sides,” without grinning.
#43 - Nuance
The line, thought Ahiru, between “barely tolerate” and “love with all his heart” appeared to be frighteningly thin in Fakir’s book-if his words to her from one day to the next were anything at all to go by, anyway.
#44 - Near
If she quacked in alarm, he was beside her in an instant; if she got caught in a bush, he was there to free her; if she was cornered by a stray cat, he would beat it off with a book-at this point Ahiru was seriously staring to consider the possibility that Fakir could teleport.
#45 - Natural
“It’s not natural, to feel like this about a duck,” he murmurs to himself; and it hurts in his chest sometimes, it keeps him up at night-and yet, loving her seems easier than breathing.
#46 - Horizon
Green eyes stared unseeing toward the hemline of earth and sky, distant possibilities echoing within his ears as though they would never be quiet again (”Oh, for the love of-why don’t you just write her back into a girl, then?”).
#47 - Valiant
“Why do you still keep this old thing around, anyway?” she asks musingly, poking at Lohengrin’s sword, hanging from the wall; he shrugs as if unsure, though he knows the answer (and, subconsciously, though she wouldn’t admit it, so does she)-“in case you are ever in danger again.”
#48 - Virtuous
“Never,” Fakir growled, redder than Autor would have thought possible; “I will not compromise Ahiru’s virtue like that, you dirty, horrid, beastly, immoral, great old-why are you laughing?!”
#49 - Victory
Their victory is not written in a history book, nor passed down the generations as a great legend of old; nor, indeed, recorded anywhere but on the very last ink-stained page of a single battered notebook-but (he thinks as she kisses him for the first time with a girl’s lips again) it is a triumph all the same.
#50 - Defeat
She was the one who finally brought him to his knees and kept him there-and for unfathomable reasons, he did not mind.
UM. YES. I'M GONNA GO TRY NOT TO DIE IN MY MATHS HALFYEARLY TOMORROW AND INCOHERENT ABOUT FMA SUM MOAR. *_*