Seventh day, crossposting...

Jan 01, 2009 23:57

Title: For Want of a Program
Fandom: Battle Royale (manga)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU,
Summary: The Program never happened. Where are the students of Shiroiwa now?



It had surprised him just how much he had liked teaching.

Apart from the risk that his students would be put into the Program (which hadn't happened yet, and Shinji hoped that it would never happen, but he does have plans in motion if it ever did happen) and the fact that the majority of students didn't manage to catch his interest, due to being substantially less than awesome; but on occasion, every couple of classes, there would often be one (maybe two, if he was lucky) that would challenge everything he said on the principle that it had been someone in authority that had said it and Shinji would smirk in that familiar way, knock the kid back down with his logic and continue to watch them and give them the occasional bit of advice for the rest of their time at the school.

Sometimes, it was disappointing. The student never quite got his (or her, he has found that it was apparently just Shiroiwa that had particularly unimpressive and conformist girls) act together and eventually was forced to conform by the rest of the school. Equally so, a few of the more potentially interesting students just...vanished (and he thought that he knew where they had gone, same place as Nanahara went, but he knew that he was still forbidden to speak of it, even after all of these years) and never came back.

But sometimes, the student found a happy medium between living in the Republic and rejecting its rules, and he was always unexpectedly proud when that happened.



Another job.

She comes in early. Actually, she comes in early every morning, but there usually isn't a masked government agent in her office with all of her case files (which she had taken three hours yesterday to sort them all in chronological order because it helped her remember which file was which) lying strewn across the floor.

This isn't a good thing.

Her company is a freelance detective agency. She's been known to work with the government on some cases, but mostly she tends to work for private contractors. People that would like her to find the truth about people who have mysteriously disappeared, usually as a result of that very same government. Or people that just want to find things. Objects, people...if it's missing, she can try to find it.

The case she's been stuck working on recently is a death. Not her first. Probably not her last.

Eri Minato, aged 23. Apparently, she had been garrotted in the middle of the street and no-one saw anything. No-one could give an accurate description of Minato's killer, very few people were even willing to admit that they saw Minato herself on the street near the time of the murder, and she had been forced to work extremely fast to get the murder weapon -the murderer had been careless and left it- before the police showed up and ruined her plan.

The forensics should have finished by their analysis by now.

That is, if they weren't dead.



After he had finished his fifth series, someone asked Yoshitoki Kuninobu why all of his protagonists looked the same.

He would argue with them, point out the little differences between them, but he knew that the person was right. They did all look similar, if not exactly the same. One had longer hair, one had a mohawk, this one had more curved eyebrows, that one had narrower eyes, but the face shape was the same.

If Yoshitoki stared at them for too long, they all looked like Shuuya, all accusing him for not being a good enough friend. For not rescuing him from the internment camp -the fact that Yoshitoki doesn't know where, or indeed, which internment camp that Nanahara is being held in seems to have missed the attention of the hallucinations- for not trying to stop the government from taking him.

He tried not to stare.

For the next manga that he drew, he made sure that the protagonist was a girl -looked a bit like Chigusa, actually, but not quite as cold or as pretty- just so that the panels didn't blur together in that weird way, and the character suddenly look a lot more familiar and a lot less friendly.

Or maybe Yoshitoki had finally actually gone insane.



Another night meant another show.

He's exhausted -been driving all day to confuse the police, since his brand of comedy most definitely isn't what the government of the Greater East Asian Republic want to hear, although he was really proud of that sketch he did last night about the Program runner Kasumi Ren- and he needs something to eat desperately.

But Yutaka's got a show in three hours. Which will probably mean about an hour of lame puns, punctuated with a few jokes that were actually funny and made him look like he knew what he was doing, followed by a daring escape (he loves doing that bit, despite the fact that he's already lost two of his fingers due to a similar trick last year which hadn't quite worked out the way he planned) from the government. Back when he had started this job, he had stayed over at one of his friend's houses between shows, but after they had captured Shuuya and sent him to one of the camps...he couldn't risk putting any of his other friends in danger.

For all that Yutaka Seto isn't bad at being a comedian, his life doesn't seem to be particularly funny. He tries to think on whether or not it had ever been different and comes up blank. He can't remember. He remembers that he was happier in school, back when Shinji was the subversive one and he was the one who was always laughing about everything, but he can't remember if those laughs were real or whether he had just forced them to make people think that he was optimistic.

He takes a sandwich from the person organising the show tonight -who seemed to have predicted that Yutaka hadn't actually eaten since yesterday morning and made spares- and sits down quietly, trying to get his mind in gear. He tries never to think that every night could be his last escape, just of the money that he's collecting in a foreign bank account (Shinji opened it for him, back when his best friend still did more than teach kids how to make a webpage) that will soon be enough for a one-way flight out of the Republic.

Two more weeks like this and it will be enough.

All Yutaka has to do is keep going.



She doesn't tend to ask questions anymore.

That's the first thing they tell her when she starts -if it looks like they've been shot, stabbed or you can't actually identify the cause of the injuries, don't ask questions because otherwise you might be the next one that we treat- and most of the time, Yukie's learned that lesson.

Two or three years ago, there had been a fifteen year old girl with her entire left hand just gone at the wrist, five broken bones and enough bullet wounds to make Yukie wonder just exactly how she had managed to survive for that long -she had spent an entire night helping the surgeon who was picking bullets out of her, and she clearly remembers that some of them didn't look like they came from the same gun at all- and she had dared to ask the government agent that brought her in afterwards about what had happened to the patient.

The man had shrugged, muttered something about the Program and slouched off -she had wondered for a moment if she'd ever helped treat any of his victims, since soldiers for the Republic didn't have the nicest reputation in the world, but had dismissed it as an unanswerable question- assumedly to find a place with less talkative nurses.

The girl had been transferred to a secure mental health clinic a few months later once it was clear that she wasn't going to die anytime soon.

Since then, Yukie had looked after a number of patients with everything from machine-gun wounds (not that many of them survived it) to illnesses that looked suspiciously like poisoning (and most of them weren't poisons that could be acquired legally or easily by regular citizens either, so she suspects the hand of something higher up in that) and never said a word.

There was nothing to say. Even if she was wrong about her suspicions, no-one was ever going to tell her anything.

She was just a nurse.



God.

She hated this job.

She hated the fact that she was here, helping other women give birth to possible sociopaths, murderers, thieves, government workers...okay, she wasn't too bothered about the thieves, but she was here helping other women give birth, when she had never even had her own kid (she'd tried once, out of curiosity, back when she was still in her punk rebel phase, but had ended up miscarrying, even though she hadn't been on any sort of drugs during the pregnancy or been in any fights, which had been a record three months for her at the time) and had to spend her free time washing her arms of blood and God knew what else (the funny thing was that she did know exactly what else, but tried not to think about it because it tended to make her throw up), but...

She had wanted to work in a hospital and actually help people. Originally it had just been for the novelty of doing it, but she was earning more than enough to get by, and at least this way, people didn't try to arrest her for making a living.

She didn't have much in the way of qualifications, and most people tended to shun ex-drug dealing prostitutes with fairly long and diverse criminal records, so in retrospect, she had been lucky that she had even managed to get this job.

It still didn't mean that she had to actually like the job, though.

Particularly when she had to tell a woman her own age that the reason that she couldn't let her hold her baby was because she wasn't entirely sure that the little girl would make it through the night. Although, she reflected, at least in that situation, there was a chance that the baby would live.

She had seen worse cases.



Seven years came and went.

He forgot his name and was given a new one to replace it, forgot why he was there and was given a new purpose and then when they were finally sure that there was nothing left of the person that he used to be, they sent him back out as their tool to quietly and cleanly excise everything that did not conform to their rigorous standards.

Everyone who was different enough to warrant their 'intervention'.

Like the comedian that he had been tracking for two months now with very little progress.

Yutaka Seto -the name sparked a vague recognition, but nothing else, as if he had met the other person in a dream once, back when he still had dreams- was a troublemaker. He was seditious, and he knew that what he was doing was against the rules of society. But he had yet to catch the comedian in a vulnerable place, a place where he could kill the man quickly and without causing any attention to himself.

Seto knew how to play the game better than most of his targets, he would allow him that much respect. He would also admit that he hadn't expected him -a young and rather unattractive man with average qualifications from an unremarkable school- to be quite this experienced at avoiding the agents of the law.

There were other files in his car. Mimura, Utsumi, Noda...all three were considered low-level risks, and not quite on Seto's level at this time (there was also a connection between the four of them, so maybe he should investigate Shiroiwa Junior High School to see if the staff were purposefully training their students to become rebels against the accepted order), however, their threat levels could escalate dramatically, so he would have to consider their fates after dealing with Seto.

Of course, this implied that Seto was ever going to slip up.

character: satomi, character: shinji, prompt: seven odd careers, series: for want of a program, character: hirono, character: yukie, fandom: battle royale (manga), christmas challenge 2008, character: yutaka, character: yoshitoki

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