sm_monthly Aug 22 theme
Technically set about the Silver Millennium but actually Trinity Advent inspired.
This reminds me of Stitch in Time which is OMG 22 pages long and being betaed and will never have a place to be posted. It even has the inevitable lesbian subtext that follows Kyoko like the plague, which I actually managed to tone down by the final draft of this.
Also, I play Sailor Pluto a lot of the time like I write Kyoko and I really think they'd have a lot in common, so I gave them a little interlude in season 1.
Title: Not Drunk Enough for This
Author:purplekitte
Theme: Meioh Setsuna--Bar
Genre: Angst
Version: Manga
Rating: PG-13
Sailor Pluto’s aimless jump forward in time put her somewhere in Tokyo, sometime in the late Shadow Millennium, next to a bunch of smoking German exchange students who didn’t notice her. It took her half a minute to notice one of them was Japanese under the orange dye job and didn’t seem to speak a word of German or English.
“That’s rather futile,” she muttered. She was wrong, though. The girl was doing a great job of entertaining the girls around her between puffs of her cigarette despite having no common language. “Why even bother?”
The girl had noticed her and replied, “You need a lot more drinks than you’ve had,” in harsh male yakuza Japanese. Waving an enthusiastic farewell to the other smokers, she dragged Setsuna across the street to a string of bars that operated as neighborhood restaurants during the day.
Setsuna didn’t know why she’d been picked up by some yankee but all thoughts of resisting seemed to involve yelling for her to get away and the resultant fight would just be too much.
It wasn’t a sleazy part of town but they didn’t check ID. Most of the customers were odd-duty salarymen, college students, and a rowdy group of American exchange students in the corner, not yakuza or prostitutes. The orange-haired girl leaned her elbows on the bar and ordered them both beer, a glass of brandy for Setsuna and sake for herself, some of those peanut things, a bottle of their cheapest alcoholic beverage, and a rag.
Setsuna blinked as those last two items were brought and she was grabbed by the arm and pulled close to the gangster trench coat.
“It’s not bad or nothing but I thought you’d want this cleaned.” Soaking the bar rag in alcohol she started cleaning a cut on Setsuna’s upper arm and shoulder that she hadn’t noticed was there. She felt it now with it burning and stinging and the girl reaching her nails in to remove little shards of glass.
Shards of glass… The main dome of the Moon Palace collapsing. That must have been when she got this. No matter how many times she went back to watch it she could never change anything. One of the standard textbook things Sailor Pluto could not change, the Fall of the Silver Millennium, right next to killing Hitler and preventing Julius Caesar’s assassination.
With talk not forthcoming from her companion, the girl started telling about her boyfriend. “So, he’s kinda evil, which doesn’t bother me one bit. But he has this boss and she’s crazy. So I’ve gotta rescues him and then we can run off together and we’ll be runnin’ because we’ve gotta make sure she never finds us. One of her other generals tried to run off with his girlfriend and yet another general had him killed. ‘Course, I’m still on the rescuin’ stage. But I don’t know where he is. And I’m only hoping he’s alive.”
“Now that is futile,” Setsuna said as she put down her empty beer glass. “You have no idea what the hell you’re doing and you don’t have a chance and you’re just going to get yourself killed, alone.”
The gangster nodded sagely but argued only the point, “I’m alone because I don’t want to put my friends in danger over my personal problem. Except for this big gapin’ hole of empty inside my chest from a demon I think had been livin’ inside me all my life, but that just makes me sound drunker than I am yet.”
“I… I’m the only one left.”
“There, that’s your problem.” She pulled Setsuna close so they were eye to eye. Her dark eyes were serious and, Setsuna could believe, as old as her own. “Living.”
“I always live.”
“Ain’t that always the kicker? And what they died for, it never seems worth it, if they died for anything at all. You’ll hate their replacements; they’ll never be good enough. You should get some.”
“Replacements? That’s the answer?”
“The answer is to live and no man is an island and all that jazz. The answer to this minute is: Hey barkeep, Sex on the Beach, two, and shots of whiskey and keep them coming.”
“That’s it?”
“You want some of my peanuts too? But, yeah. Every life you take, everyone you loose, you gotta live that much harder ‘cause you’re livin’ for them too. Don’t make loosin’ make you never love again, ‘cause then you’re not doing anyone any good.”
Setsuna clinked their glasses together. That was an answer.
This reminds me of Stitch in Time which is OMG 22 pages long and being betaed and will never have a place to be posted. It even has the inevitable lesbian subtext that follows Kyoko like the plague, which I actually managed to tone down by the final draft of this.
Also, I play Sailor Pluto a lot of the time like I write Kyoko and I really think they'd have a lot in common, so I gave them a little interlude in season 1.
Title: Not Drunk Enough for This
Author:purplekitte
Theme: Meioh Setsuna--Bar
Genre: Angst
Version: Manga
Rating: PG-13
Sailor Pluto’s aimless jump forward in time put her somewhere in Tokyo, sometime in the late Shadow Millennium, next to a bunch of smoking German exchange students who didn’t notice her. It took her half a minute to notice one of them was Japanese under the orange dye job and didn’t seem to speak a word of German or English.
“That’s rather futile,” she muttered. She was wrong, though. The girl was doing a great job of entertaining the girls around her between puffs of her cigarette despite having no common language. “Why even bother?”
The girl had noticed her and replied, “You need a lot more drinks than you’ve had,” in harsh male yakuza Japanese. Waving an enthusiastic farewell to the other smokers, she dragged Setsuna across the street to a string of bars that operated as neighborhood restaurants during the day.
Setsuna didn’t know why she’d been picked up by some yankee but all thoughts of resisting seemed to involve yelling for her to get away and the resultant fight would just be too much.
It wasn’t a sleazy part of town but they didn’t check ID. Most of the customers were odd-duty salarymen, college students, and a rowdy group of American exchange students in the corner, not yakuza or prostitutes. The orange-haired girl leaned her elbows on the bar and ordered them both beer, a glass of brandy for Setsuna and sake for herself, some of those peanut things, a bottle of their cheapest alcoholic beverage, and a rag.
Setsuna blinked as those last two items were brought and she was grabbed by the arm and pulled close to the gangster trench coat.
“It’s not bad or nothing but I thought you’d want this cleaned.” Soaking the bar rag in alcohol she started cleaning a cut on Setsuna’s upper arm and shoulder that she hadn’t noticed was there. She felt it now with it burning and stinging and the girl reaching her nails in to remove little shards of glass.
Shards of glass… The main dome of the Moon Palace collapsing. That must have been when she got this. No matter how many times she went back to watch it she could never change anything. One of the standard textbook things Sailor Pluto could not change, the Fall of the Silver Millennium, right next to killing Hitler and preventing Julius Caesar’s assassination.
With talk not forthcoming from her companion, the girl started telling about her boyfriend. “So, he’s kinda evil, which doesn’t bother me one bit. But he has this boss and she’s crazy. So I’ve gotta rescues him and then we can run off together and we’ll be runnin’ because we’ve gotta make sure she never finds us. One of her other generals tried to run off with his girlfriend and yet another general had him killed. ‘Course, I’m still on the rescuin’ stage. But I don’t know where he is. And I’m only hoping he’s alive.”
“Now that is futile,” Setsuna said as she put down her empty beer glass. “You have no idea what the hell you’re doing and you don’t have a chance and you’re just going to get yourself killed, alone.”
The gangster nodded sagely but argued only the point, “I’m alone because I don’t want to put my friends in danger over my personal problem. Except for this big gapin’ hole of empty inside my chest from a demon I think had been livin’ inside me all my life, but that just makes me sound drunker than I am yet.”
“I… I’m the only one left.”
“There, that’s your problem.” She pulled Setsuna close so they were eye to eye. Her dark eyes were serious and, Setsuna could believe, as old as her own. “Living.”
“I always live.”
“Ain’t that always the kicker? And what they died for, it never seems worth it, if they died for anything at all. You’ll hate their replacements; they’ll never be good enough. You should get some.”
“Replacements? That’s the answer?”
“The answer is to live and no man is an island and all that jazz. The answer to this minute is: Hey barkeep, Sex on the Beach, two, and shots of whiskey and keep them coming.”
“That’s it?”
“You want some of my peanuts too? But, yeah. Every life you take, everyone you loose, you gotta live that much harder ‘cause you’re livin’ for them too. Don’t make loosin’ make you never love again, ‘cause then you’re not doing anyone any good.”
Setsuna clinked their glasses together. That was an answer.