Eighth day, one day late and...I swear I will tag these at some point. D:
Title: The Art of Playing the Ukulele
Fandom: Crossover, Yu-Gi-Oh GX/Martian Successor Nadesico
Rating: G
Warnings: AU, spoilers for part of the Seven Stars arc (GX).
Notes: One of my RL friends bet me that I couldn't write this. *shrugs* It isn't my fault. Um, the jokes probably won't make any sense. They're not really supposed to.
Izumi's parachute landed on the beach of a tropical island.
This was nothing new -after all, they were at war- but she was still a little irritated, even if she didn't show it.
She was going for Ryoko's record of ten weeks without crashing into something. Accidentally, that is. Ryoko had deliberately crashed her armoured foot or hand into Tenkawa's Aestivalis a few times, of course.
Fortunately, since it was night-time and most of the students at the nearby academy were in bed, there was only one person on the beach when she crashed.
When Izumi had recovered from the shock -of course she wasn't hurt, cats always land on their feet, after all- she heard the familiar sounds of someone playing the ukulele. Her favourite instrument.
She hadn't been able to talk much about it to any of the other people on board the Nadesico -the petals to the flower, she thought and then started laughing- because the only two people that would carry a conversation with her were Hikaru and Ryoko. Hikaru would listen politely and then randomly talk about what was going on in her latest anime fixation and Ryoko...well, was Ryoko, and was convinced that just because she felt unable to do anything but kill people, all of the other pilots must think that about themselves too.
So she followed the music to the young man on the other side of the beach. He wore an unusual and unfamiliar uniform and smiled at her when she walked up to him.
"Hi! I...uh, haven't seen you around before, are you a new student?"
He was so...cheerful.
None of the Nadesico crew were cheerful, although Hikaru and Yurika liked people to think they were, and when they tried to be, Izumi could always tell that they were faking it. This kid -because he was probably younger than her by a couple of years, and definitely less experienced in the way of the world- was actually happy.
"No. I crashed here by accident. I'm Izumi Maki, here from the Nadesico to bring some flower power to everyone's life!"
Everyone else hated her puns, so it surprised her when the guy actually smiled.
"I'm Fubuki Tenjoin. Unfortunately, there's not much use for a blizzard on a tropical island like this..."
She snorted and his grin grew a little wider. She gestured to the instrument in his hands.
"So, you play the ukulele?"
"Yeah. When I've got time. What about you?"
She sat down beside him and started to play as a response. About half-way through the melody -which she'd made up on the spur of the moment- Fubuki started singing. Actual rhyming lyrics too, involving love and joy and the sort of things that you would expect to be singing about if you were ridiculously cheerful all of the time.
So...she decided to experiment, making the melody suddenly a lot more sinister and menacing, to see if he could keep singing along.
He did, but the lyrics changed to match the music. One minute he was singing about love and flowers and the next...she caught something about being consumed by hatred to the point where he didn't even know his own name. And there may have been a couple of lines about threatening to burn his sister to a crisp with a huge black dragon...she wasn't entirely sure that she'd heard that part right.
Maybe he wasn't as innocent and naive as she had assumed.
"So, Izumi. Having fun?"
Ryoko and Hikaru had managed to land their Aestis on the other side of the beach and had came up behind Izumi and Fubuki while they were busy making music.
"Yes, actually." She handed Fubuki his ukulele back and he winked at her.
"Thanks. You know, if you find yourself crashing on the island again, I'll probably be here for the next year or so..."
She smiled, an actual honest-to-god smile, and nodded.
"I'll try, but I'm not sure that I can promise anything."
He waved to her as she took off. Ryoko and Hikaru teased her afterwards for an hour or so, before Izumi changed the subject to Ryoko's ongoing attraction to Tenkawa, which was hotly denied by her green-haired squad leader and everything returned to the way it was supposed to be.
Title: A Conversation With a Complicated Hat
Fandom: Crossover, V7OC does Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Warnings: AU,
Notes: The 'V7OC does Harry Potter' concept was originally anbyrobanby's idea. I'm just borrowing it for the sake of making up numbers.
He didn't much care for the place.
Sure, the students seemed more interesting than he was giving them credit for, he liked the charms on the ceiling (and wondered if he could adapt them to work on his bedroom at home, because he was sure that having an accurately starry sky on the ceiling would help with any Astronomy project that he had to do in the near future) and the syllabus looked challenging enough, but the teachers looked nuts, his five cans of spray-paint (both Muggle and magical) and his pack of Kama Sutra tarot cards had already been confiscated and he had the horrible feeling that he knew just where that cursed hat was going to send him...and he didn't much relish the prospect. After all, both his sister and Masafume had been in Slytherin, and he wanted as little to do with either of them as humanly possible.
Besides, he hated the colour green. Always had.
So, when he put the hat on his head, he let it know exactly what he was thinking, and proposed a solution that wouldn't involve him coming back with a pair of charmed scissors. The hat put up a bit of an argument first, but he overruled it by saying that he'd consider it a challenge and that he really was qualified enough to go there instead.
Eventually, the hat agreed, somewhat sullenly, with his conclusion, and he ended up sitting next to a rather annoying and overbearing student who turned out to be one of his roommates -and the one that he was closest to, for that matter. And he found out in a hurry that teachers expected rather more than the average quality of homework from him due to his house, but at least he could revel in the Howler that he got from Masafume later that week (the first of many, each one to be listed and treasured as a small victory).
And this meant that he didn't have to be the hero or the villain in someone else's story -because Gryffindors all had that ridiculous hero complex and Slytherins tended towards getting forced via peer pressure to end up being either completely idiotic or outright psychopaths (or both, in the cases of his sister and her boyfriend)- but could just stay in the background being an insufferable asshole to everyone.
He kind of liked that idea, actually.
Title: No Future For You
Fandom: Battle Royale II
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU, ties into 'On the Difference Between Forgiveness and Pragmatism' (day 5, number 4).
Summary: Nao isn't sure she likes being a Program survivor. She's not alone in that thought.
The fire burned, as Nao Asakura sat alone under a starry sky.
She tried not to think that two of her friends were on that fire. They hadn't found Wataru's body, but they had found both Shugo and Asuka (she hadn't seen it because she had gone to retrieve the bodies from the tripmine area instead, which had been slightly better as she hadn't known any of them particularly well) and they burned.
After the Wild Seven member fired his rifle into the air, Kurosawa had repeated the action with his own weapon, justifying it by the fact that Shimura and Maezono would have preferred a salute by him to one by their enemies.
Jo offered her a cigarette, which she refused. Good thing too, because after a few minutes of him looking in his jacket for them, he sighed and sat down glumly next to her.
"I forgot, I gave my last packet to Kenji on the coach. Fuck."
She gave him a sympathetic look -after hearing him talk Kurosawa out of going nuts and getting himself killed earlier, she's been inclined to feel a lot more friendly towards him in general- and nodded in the general direction of where most of the others were huddled. "I'm sure Masami has some he could lend you."
Jo shrugged.
"In that case, I'll take the nicotine withdrawal. Don't trust Shibaki not to poison the damned things."
She laughed a little at that, before realising that the other student was actually serious.
"Masami wouldn't do that. Mainly because he'd forget which ones were poisoned and smoke them himself by accident."
Another shrug. Making conversation seemed to be like pulling teeth at the moment -although Nanami was worse because at least Jo usually gave some indication that he had actually heard her- and after a while, she curled up and tried to get some sleep. After all, they had to try and escape from the military the next day.
To think, she had done her Christmas shopping early to avoid massive amounts of stress.
Title: No Stars in the Underground
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some spoilers for Shiki's week, happens pre-game.
Summary: Uzuki has a routine when she isn't working.
The rules of physics didn't apply to the UG.
Depending on where in Shibuya you were, you could go from one place that would be blindingly bright, the sun shining as if it was noon, to a place that was pitch black, with the only light being the shapes of the Noise and the glow of projectile and pyrokinetic based pins as the game played itself out.
So whenever Uzuki was off work -she hated being back in the RG, because she knew exactly how fake it was, just why that shop was teeming with customers while the one next to it was bare and empty- she always took time to watch the sun rise and set. So that she knew that days were more than a way to collect points and keep herself alive by erasing Players.
She had asked Kariya if he did it too, once -even though her partner was always talking about how he loved being off-the-clock, he'd never tell her exactly what he did in his free time, and always be quite evasive when she asked- but he hadn't quite understood what meaning that particular little habit held for her.
Not that she'd expected him to, since he didn't much pay attention to the time even when it was important -he'd actually been late for work the first time she'd met him, and Conductor Kitaniji had apologised politely and explained that not only was her partner to train her in the rules, skills and general basic knowledge that Reapers were expected to have, but he was hoping that her drive and ambition would prove to be infectious- but she had felt a little better telling him about her routine and having him not dismiss it as crazy.
The next time they had met in the RG (most Harrier Reaper teams tended to avoid each other in the RG because they spent too much time together in the UG, but she wasn't sure that she could spend too much time with him, particularly as she didn't actually have that many friends in the RG anyway), she had looked up and thought of her job, while he pointed out the patterns that the stars made ("Hey, Uzuki. That one looks like a shark Noise." "Kariya, there aren't any shark Noises." "We should create some and hum the theme from that American movie whenever it shows up, aight? The Players'll never see it coming.") and, for a few moments at least, she would rather stay there under the stars with him than work.
And then the feeling would be gone, she'd get irritated over the fact that she had been passed over for promotion again and everything would be back to normal.
Well, as normal as things can be when you happen to be a pink-haired woman with wings who has spent the last two years erasing dead people in order to extend your own life, armed with the ability to create monsters and attack with pins that look ridiculously like something from a children's anime series and give their user special powers.
So...sort of normal, anyway.
Title: Conflicting Memories
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for pretty much the entire normal game (which means I'm excluding the Secret Reports and Another Day)
Summary: Eri isn't sure what she remembers anymore. But she does know that Shiki should know about it.
Sometimes, Eri remembers that Shiki died.
Not just spent three weeks in the hospital, while Eri wrung her hands and apologised to Shiki's unmoving body about what she had said before the accident happened, that she didn't actually mean to hurt her feelings, but that she actually died. She remembers telling Yuko, one of her other friends, that Shiki was dead and that she was so sorry because she really thought that she'd hurt her feelings by saying that she wasn't cut out to be a designer -because she was the best seamstress that Eri had ever seen, professional or not- and Shiki had died thinking that Eri hated her.
But Shiki was alive, wasn't she? And Yuko hadn't remembered their conversation, although there was something in her tone at that moment that made Eri think that she hadn't imagined it, that they did talk about Shiki's death, but Yuko just couldn't remember it. And there was something about those red pins...no. Her memory didn't quite stretch that far.
She had met three people in the hospital -that was her story, but Eri had never seen any of them visit her when she had been there- and she glowed with happiness when she told Eri about meeting up with them outside for the first time.
There had been something...different about Shiki when she had came back too. Before the accident, she had always needed Eri to agree with her, give her advice on her designs, choose what project the pair of them were going to be working on next and now she didn't really seem to need Eri anymore. Sure, they were still friends, but Eri had liked the fact that Shiki had been dependent on her -even though she knew that it worked the same way, since she couldn't sew anywhere near as well as her friend did, and had told Yuko that too- and now she wasn't, really.
So, one evening, four weeks after Shiki was released from hospital -after Shiki had been around Shibuya with Neku, one of her new friends- the pair of them were walking around 104 when Eri had decided to finally ask the question that had been itching at the corner of her mind, in that little place where she knew everything but couldn't quite remember it.
"Shiki, you know when you were in the hospital?"
Shiki had smiled and nodded and asked Eri to get on with what she was going to say.
"You died, didn't you? I remember it happening...and I was talking to Yuko about how much I missed you, but...she doesn't remember? And the doctors told me that you were unconscious for the entirety of your hospital stay, so how could you have met Neku, Raimu and Daisukenojo?"
She giggled. Not quite the response Eri was looking for.
"It's Beat. He gets really annoyed when people call him Daisukenojo. And...uh...I think the doctors said that I flatlined once or twice while I was unconscious, so maybe that's where you got the idea that I died? Although...I was awake a few times through the stay, so I don't know why they told you that. Raimu was in the bed next to me, Beat's her brother, so he came in to visit her often and Neku...Neku's one of Beat's friends. He decided to go and make sure that Beat didn't do anything stupid like use an gurney as a skateboard or something like that."
Eri didn't think that Shiki was telling the truth. It didn't matter that much -because Shiki would talk about it when she wanted to talk about it, and Eri had expected her to dodge the question anyway- but at least Eri knew that she wasn't crazy.
Shiki had died. But Eri had wished more than anything -upon every star in the night sky- that she could have her friend back, and now she did.
There was no need to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Title: The Girl in the Lighthouse
Fandom: Battle Royale (movie)
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers, obviously up until the lighthouse scene.
Summary: Yukie had always hoped that an evening alone with Shuuya would be romantic. She hadn't expected it to be anything like this.
She had always assumed that, should she ever manage to get some alone time with Nanahara (which had never been an option really, as she was too forceful and had a horrifying tendency to scare most people away that really wasn't her fault and besides, everyone at school liked him, including some of the boys, so she really had no chance, it would be under a starry sky and they'd eat a romantic dinner and then talk for hours.
Well...she was alone with Nanahara.
And the sky was starry -Haruka had told her that, when she came off her watch in order to get some food- and...well, she was talking. Nanahara, being unconscious and horrifically injured at the time, wasn't talking back.
She wasn't sure how to treat bullet wounds. She'll admit that much. She had to shake Satomi out of her paranoia-induced depression and force her to help -because Satomi knows everything, and that's the one thing that Yukie can count on not having to do herself, having to know anatomy and the physics involved with shooting a gun...not that she would, of course, even if there's one right there in case Sugimura was wrong and Nanahara's snapped and decides to repay Yukie's kindness by trying to kill her...and she can't be thinking like that.
Nanahara will help them when he wakes up. She's holding on to that one bit of hope as if it was a handful of sand running through her fingers. With every hour that he stays unconscious, one more hour before this place becomes a danger zone and she has to make the choice of burdening them with his limp body or just leaving him to die, a little more sand trickles through. But he will wake up, she's sure of it.
And then, maybe, after they've met up with Mimura's group and escaped from the Program, she might actually be able to live out her fantasy of spending a more romantic night under the stars with him.
Maybe.
She could only hope.
Title: A Rather Peculiar Guardian
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for the entirety of Season 3, including the finale.
Summary: Matt doesn't think that he understands Hiro or Ando, but he doesn't need to. Even if he can't read their minds.
He doesn't know what happened between Daphne and the two Japanese men (he met Ando Masahashi once, as part of the investigation into Kaito Nakamura's death, but this had been the first time he had met Hiro Nakamura in person and there was clearly some tension between the three of them) but he wasn't going to read their minds in order to find out.
He couldn't understand Japanese anyway, and he trusted Daphne enough to tell him about what was going on if it was important. He could tell, however, that Daphne trusted them not to try anything -because Hiro was the typical hero in almost as many ways as Peter Petrelli had once been and, while Ando wasn't quite as heroically-minded, he didn't seem much of a threat to either of them- and that was good enough.
Besides, he'd caught the look on Ando's face after Hiro teleported out without him, seen the younger man take an injection that might not work, and had clearly left him in agony for some time afterwards to take the slim chance of being able to rescue his friend and the frustration on his face when he'd assumed it hadn't worked.
They'd swapped stories before the starry night (well, the sun was a star, and technically an eclipse counted as night, at least according to all of the vampire movies that he'd ever watched), and apparently Ando went after Sylar with nothing but a sword once, to protect Hiro. It hadn't worked, and Hiro had been forced to save him afterwards, but Matt was still somewhat impressed at Ando's nerve.
Not quite enough to call Ando a 'guardian angel' though, because that would imply that the majority of his rescues worked, which wasn't entirely the case.
Title: Neither Pink, Nor Red But A Shade In Between
Fandom: Crossover, Battle Royale (manga) with Power Rangers elements.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Severely AU, will make absolutely no sense.
Summary: Okay. *facepalms* This happens chronologically before all of the other fics I've written in the future!timeline except 'Murphy's Law' (day 3, number 2). In the huge script-fic, you don't actually get this bit, since the 14 inch flashback is from Hirono's point of view, and this isn't.
She hates her uniform. Not just her school one -although she's not very fond of that either- but her Ranger outfit was just...annoying.
Sure, the bright pink and white armour had its uses -unlike Hirono and Yukie, everyone that saw her knew that she was a girl without having to hear her voice, and it did protect her from most of the monsters that the government could throw at them- but none of them could really blend into a crowd wearing any of their uniforms.
Not that Mitsuru, Shinji or Hirono were really that capable of blending into crowds when they were off-duty anyway, but the point still stood. Particularly as her and Yutaka could only stand out in their uniforms...well, it would be more appropriate to say that Yutaka had only been able to stand out because he was apparently dead now and she really didn't like that.
Mitsuru was dead too. She wasn't there when he died, but she knows about it. After he terrorised the rest of his gang -murdered Sasagawa and Kuronaga and she hates herself for thinking, even briefly, that this may be the one good thing about him becoming a villain, because she never liked either of them anyway- Kiriyama and Hiroki teamed up and ended up killing Mitsuru.
She isn't that bothered about it -she didn't get along with him much anyway, and he had been evil- but she's not sure that she likes what this implies about Shinji. She knows that Hirono's going to try to kill him -they've been setting that fight up since their coin-toss for leadership, and she saw Yukie swap the coin so Hirono couldn't win, but she's never said anything about it- but...she knew that Hirono had liked Shinji, back when there were still seven of them in the team and the only person that had been brainwashed before was Yutaka.
Megumi hates to say it about her team leader, but she doesn't think that Hirono will be able to kill Shinji. She'll beat him in a fight -or maybe not, Megumi's not entirely sure who would win that one- and then Shinji will trick her into believing that the defeat broke the brainwashing or something cliché like that and kill her while her back's turned.
"You would think that your team had learned their lesson by now and not leave its members to walk home all by themselves."
Megumi keeps walking. She might be able to run into that old abandoned construction site over there and hide in one of the corners until he gave up looking for her. Or, if he didn't seem to be giving up, take the time to morph and proceed to fight him.
Although, fighting Shinji would not be the wisest action she ever made, since if she doesn't know if Hirono can beat him, and she's never beaten Hirono in a training session...she doesn't think that she has much of a chance.
But she won't hesitate to kill him. She knows that he'll try to trick her, and she won't fall for it.
By night-time -a beautiful starry night, while Sakura and Kazuhiko decide to have an impromptu picnic in her garden, and Yoshimi notices just before Yoji starts getting angry again- Megumi has already died.
And now there are only two Rangers in the way of the government's plans.
Fandom: Crossover, Yu-Gi-Oh GX/Martian Successor Nadesico
Rating: G
Warnings: AU, spoilers for part of the Seven Stars arc (GX).
Notes: One of my RL friends bet me that I couldn't write this. *shrugs* It isn't my fault. Um, the jokes probably won't make any sense. They're not really supposed to.
Izumi's parachute landed on the beach of a tropical island.
This was nothing new -after all, they were at war- but she was still a little irritated, even if she didn't show it.
She was going for Ryoko's record of ten weeks without crashing into something. Accidentally, that is. Ryoko had deliberately crashed her armoured foot or hand into Tenkawa's Aestivalis a few times, of course.
Fortunately, since it was night-time and most of the students at the nearby academy were in bed, there was only one person on the beach when she crashed.
When Izumi had recovered from the shock -of course she wasn't hurt, cats always land on their feet, after all- she heard the familiar sounds of someone playing the ukulele. Her favourite instrument.
She hadn't been able to talk much about it to any of the other people on board the Nadesico -the petals to the flower, she thought and then started laughing- because the only two people that would carry a conversation with her were Hikaru and Ryoko. Hikaru would listen politely and then randomly talk about what was going on in her latest anime fixation and Ryoko...well, was Ryoko, and was convinced that just because she felt unable to do anything but kill people, all of the other pilots must think that about themselves too.
So she followed the music to the young man on the other side of the beach. He wore an unusual and unfamiliar uniform and smiled at her when she walked up to him.
"Hi! I...uh, haven't seen you around before, are you a new student?"
He was so...cheerful.
None of the Nadesico crew were cheerful, although Hikaru and Yurika liked people to think they were, and when they tried to be, Izumi could always tell that they were faking it. This kid -because he was probably younger than her by a couple of years, and definitely less experienced in the way of the world- was actually happy.
"No. I crashed here by accident. I'm Izumi Maki, here from the Nadesico to bring some flower power to everyone's life!"
Everyone else hated her puns, so it surprised her when the guy actually smiled.
"I'm Fubuki Tenjoin. Unfortunately, there's not much use for a blizzard on a tropical island like this..."
She snorted and his grin grew a little wider. She gestured to the instrument in his hands.
"So, you play the ukulele?"
"Yeah. When I've got time. What about you?"
She sat down beside him and started to play as a response. About half-way through the melody -which she'd made up on the spur of the moment- Fubuki started singing. Actual rhyming lyrics too, involving love and joy and the sort of things that you would expect to be singing about if you were ridiculously cheerful all of the time.
So...she decided to experiment, making the melody suddenly a lot more sinister and menacing, to see if he could keep singing along.
He did, but the lyrics changed to match the music. One minute he was singing about love and flowers and the next...she caught something about being consumed by hatred to the point where he didn't even know his own name. And there may have been a couple of lines about threatening to burn his sister to a crisp with a huge black dragon...she wasn't entirely sure that she'd heard that part right.
Maybe he wasn't as innocent and naive as she had assumed.
"So, Izumi. Having fun?"
Ryoko and Hikaru had managed to land their Aestis on the other side of the beach and had came up behind Izumi and Fubuki while they were busy making music.
"Yes, actually." She handed Fubuki his ukulele back and he winked at her.
"Thanks. You know, if you find yourself crashing on the island again, I'll probably be here for the next year or so..."
She smiled, an actual honest-to-god smile, and nodded.
"I'll try, but I'm not sure that I can promise anything."
He waved to her as she took off. Ryoko and Hikaru teased her afterwards for an hour or so, before Izumi changed the subject to Ryoko's ongoing attraction to Tenkawa, which was hotly denied by her green-haired squad leader and everything returned to the way it was supposed to be.
Title: A Conversation With a Complicated Hat
Fandom: Crossover, V7OC does Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Warnings: AU,
Notes: The 'V7OC does Harry Potter' concept was originally anbyrobanby's idea. I'm just borrowing it for the sake of making up numbers.
He didn't much care for the place.
Sure, the students seemed more interesting than he was giving them credit for, he liked the charms on the ceiling (and wondered if he could adapt them to work on his bedroom at home, because he was sure that having an accurately starry sky on the ceiling would help with any Astronomy project that he had to do in the near future) and the syllabus looked challenging enough, but the teachers looked nuts, his five cans of spray-paint (both Muggle and magical) and his pack of Kama Sutra tarot cards had already been confiscated and he had the horrible feeling that he knew just where that cursed hat was going to send him...and he didn't much relish the prospect. After all, both his sister and Masafume had been in Slytherin, and he wanted as little to do with either of them as humanly possible.
Besides, he hated the colour green. Always had.
So, when he put the hat on his head, he let it know exactly what he was thinking, and proposed a solution that wouldn't involve him coming back with a pair of charmed scissors. The hat put up a bit of an argument first, but he overruled it by saying that he'd consider it a challenge and that he really was qualified enough to go there instead.
Eventually, the hat agreed, somewhat sullenly, with his conclusion, and he ended up sitting next to a rather annoying and overbearing student who turned out to be one of his roommates -and the one that he was closest to, for that matter. And he found out in a hurry that teachers expected rather more than the average quality of homework from him due to his house, but at least he could revel in the Howler that he got from Masafume later that week (the first of many, each one to be listed and treasured as a small victory).
And this meant that he didn't have to be the hero or the villain in someone else's story -because Gryffindors all had that ridiculous hero complex and Slytherins tended towards getting forced via peer pressure to end up being either completely idiotic or outright psychopaths (or both, in the cases of his sister and her boyfriend)- but could just stay in the background being an insufferable asshole to everyone.
He kind of liked that idea, actually.
Title: No Future For You
Fandom: Battle Royale II
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU, ties into 'On the Difference Between Forgiveness and Pragmatism' (day 5, number 4).
Summary: Nao isn't sure she likes being a Program survivor. She's not alone in that thought.
The fire burned, as Nao Asakura sat alone under a starry sky.
She tried not to think that two of her friends were on that fire. They hadn't found Wataru's body, but they had found both Shugo and Asuka (she hadn't seen it because she had gone to retrieve the bodies from the tripmine area instead, which had been slightly better as she hadn't known any of them particularly well) and they burned.
After the Wild Seven member fired his rifle into the air, Kurosawa had repeated the action with his own weapon, justifying it by the fact that Shimura and Maezono would have preferred a salute by him to one by their enemies.
Jo offered her a cigarette, which she refused. Good thing too, because after a few minutes of him looking in his jacket for them, he sighed and sat down glumly next to her.
"I forgot, I gave my last packet to Kenji on the coach. Fuck."
She gave him a sympathetic look -after hearing him talk Kurosawa out of going nuts and getting himself killed earlier, she's been inclined to feel a lot more friendly towards him in general- and nodded in the general direction of where most of the others were huddled. "I'm sure Masami has some he could lend you."
Jo shrugged.
"In that case, I'll take the nicotine withdrawal. Don't trust Shibaki not to poison the damned things."
She laughed a little at that, before realising that the other student was actually serious.
"Masami wouldn't do that. Mainly because he'd forget which ones were poisoned and smoke them himself by accident."
Another shrug. Making conversation seemed to be like pulling teeth at the moment -although Nanami was worse because at least Jo usually gave some indication that he had actually heard her- and after a while, she curled up and tried to get some sleep. After all, they had to try and escape from the military the next day.
To think, she had done her Christmas shopping early to avoid massive amounts of stress.
Title: No Stars in the Underground
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some spoilers for Shiki's week, happens pre-game.
Summary: Uzuki has a routine when she isn't working.
The rules of physics didn't apply to the UG.
Depending on where in Shibuya you were, you could go from one place that would be blindingly bright, the sun shining as if it was noon, to a place that was pitch black, with the only light being the shapes of the Noise and the glow of projectile and pyrokinetic based pins as the game played itself out.
So whenever Uzuki was off work -she hated being back in the RG, because she knew exactly how fake it was, just why that shop was teeming with customers while the one next to it was bare and empty- she always took time to watch the sun rise and set. So that she knew that days were more than a way to collect points and keep herself alive by erasing Players.
She had asked Kariya if he did it too, once -even though her partner was always talking about how he loved being off-the-clock, he'd never tell her exactly what he did in his free time, and always be quite evasive when she asked- but he hadn't quite understood what meaning that particular little habit held for her.
Not that she'd expected him to, since he didn't much pay attention to the time even when it was important -he'd actually been late for work the first time she'd met him, and Conductor Kitaniji had apologised politely and explained that not only was her partner to train her in the rules, skills and general basic knowledge that Reapers were expected to have, but he was hoping that her drive and ambition would prove to be infectious- but she had felt a little better telling him about her routine and having him not dismiss it as crazy.
The next time they had met in the RG (most Harrier Reaper teams tended to avoid each other in the RG because they spent too much time together in the UG, but she wasn't sure that she could spend too much time with him, particularly as she didn't actually have that many friends in the RG anyway), she had looked up and thought of her job, while he pointed out the patterns that the stars made ("Hey, Uzuki. That one looks like a shark Noise." "Kariya, there aren't any shark Noises." "We should create some and hum the theme from that American movie whenever it shows up, aight? The Players'll never see it coming.") and, for a few moments at least, she would rather stay there under the stars with him than work.
And then the feeling would be gone, she'd get irritated over the fact that she had been passed over for promotion again and everything would be back to normal.
Well, as normal as things can be when you happen to be a pink-haired woman with wings who has spent the last two years erasing dead people in order to extend your own life, armed with the ability to create monsters and attack with pins that look ridiculously like something from a children's anime series and give their user special powers.
So...sort of normal, anyway.
Title: Conflicting Memories
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for pretty much the entire normal game (which means I'm excluding the Secret Reports and Another Day)
Summary: Eri isn't sure what she remembers anymore. But she does know that Shiki should know about it.
Sometimes, Eri remembers that Shiki died.
Not just spent three weeks in the hospital, while Eri wrung her hands and apologised to Shiki's unmoving body about what she had said before the accident happened, that she didn't actually mean to hurt her feelings, but that she actually died. She remembers telling Yuko, one of her other friends, that Shiki was dead and that she was so sorry because she really thought that she'd hurt her feelings by saying that she wasn't cut out to be a designer -because she was the best seamstress that Eri had ever seen, professional or not- and Shiki had died thinking that Eri hated her.
But Shiki was alive, wasn't she? And Yuko hadn't remembered their conversation, although there was something in her tone at that moment that made Eri think that she hadn't imagined it, that they did talk about Shiki's death, but Yuko just couldn't remember it. And there was something about those red pins...no. Her memory didn't quite stretch that far.
She had met three people in the hospital -that was her story, but Eri had never seen any of them visit her when she had been there- and she glowed with happiness when she told Eri about meeting up with them outside for the first time.
There had been something...different about Shiki when she had came back too. Before the accident, she had always needed Eri to agree with her, give her advice on her designs, choose what project the pair of them were going to be working on next and now she didn't really seem to need Eri anymore. Sure, they were still friends, but Eri had liked the fact that Shiki had been dependent on her -even though she knew that it worked the same way, since she couldn't sew anywhere near as well as her friend did, and had told Yuko that too- and now she wasn't, really.
So, one evening, four weeks after Shiki was released from hospital -after Shiki had been around Shibuya with Neku, one of her new friends- the pair of them were walking around 104 when Eri had decided to finally ask the question that had been itching at the corner of her mind, in that little place where she knew everything but couldn't quite remember it.
"Shiki, you know when you were in the hospital?"
Shiki had smiled and nodded and asked Eri to get on with what she was going to say.
"You died, didn't you? I remember it happening...and I was talking to Yuko about how much I missed you, but...she doesn't remember? And the doctors told me that you were unconscious for the entirety of your hospital stay, so how could you have met Neku, Raimu and Daisukenojo?"
She giggled. Not quite the response Eri was looking for.
"It's Beat. He gets really annoyed when people call him Daisukenojo. And...uh...I think the doctors said that I flatlined once or twice while I was unconscious, so maybe that's where you got the idea that I died? Although...I was awake a few times through the stay, so I don't know why they told you that. Raimu was in the bed next to me, Beat's her brother, so he came in to visit her often and Neku...Neku's one of Beat's friends. He decided to go and make sure that Beat didn't do anything stupid like use an gurney as a skateboard or something like that."
Eri didn't think that Shiki was telling the truth. It didn't matter that much -because Shiki would talk about it when she wanted to talk about it, and Eri had expected her to dodge the question anyway- but at least Eri knew that she wasn't crazy.
Shiki had died. But Eri had wished more than anything -upon every star in the night sky- that she could have her friend back, and now she did.
There was no need to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Title: The Girl in the Lighthouse
Fandom: Battle Royale (movie)
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers, obviously up until the lighthouse scene.
Summary: Yukie had always hoped that an evening alone with Shuuya would be romantic. She hadn't expected it to be anything like this.
She had always assumed that, should she ever manage to get some alone time with Nanahara (which had never been an option really, as she was too forceful and had a horrifying tendency to scare most people away that really wasn't her fault and besides, everyone at school liked him, including some of the boys, so she really had no chance, it would be under a starry sky and they'd eat a romantic dinner and then talk for hours.
Well...she was alone with Nanahara.
And the sky was starry -Haruka had told her that, when she came off her watch in order to get some food- and...well, she was talking. Nanahara, being unconscious and horrifically injured at the time, wasn't talking back.
She wasn't sure how to treat bullet wounds. She'll admit that much. She had to shake Satomi out of her paranoia-induced depression and force her to help -because Satomi knows everything, and that's the one thing that Yukie can count on not having to do herself, having to know anatomy and the physics involved with shooting a gun...not that she would, of course, even if there's one right there in case Sugimura was wrong and Nanahara's snapped and decides to repay Yukie's kindness by trying to kill her...and she can't be thinking like that.
Nanahara will help them when he wakes up. She's holding on to that one bit of hope as if it was a handful of sand running through her fingers. With every hour that he stays unconscious, one more hour before this place becomes a danger zone and she has to make the choice of burdening them with his limp body or just leaving him to die, a little more sand trickles through. But he will wake up, she's sure of it.
And then, maybe, after they've met up with Mimura's group and escaped from the Program, she might actually be able to live out her fantasy of spending a more romantic night under the stars with him.
Maybe.
She could only hope.
Title: A Rather Peculiar Guardian
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for the entirety of Season 3, including the finale.
Summary: Matt doesn't think that he understands Hiro or Ando, but he doesn't need to. Even if he can't read their minds.
He doesn't know what happened between Daphne and the two Japanese men (he met Ando Masahashi once, as part of the investigation into Kaito Nakamura's death, but this had been the first time he had met Hiro Nakamura in person and there was clearly some tension between the three of them) but he wasn't going to read their minds in order to find out.
He couldn't understand Japanese anyway, and he trusted Daphne enough to tell him about what was going on if it was important. He could tell, however, that Daphne trusted them not to try anything -because Hiro was the typical hero in almost as many ways as Peter Petrelli had once been and, while Ando wasn't quite as heroically-minded, he didn't seem much of a threat to either of them- and that was good enough.
Besides, he'd caught the look on Ando's face after Hiro teleported out without him, seen the younger man take an injection that might not work, and had clearly left him in agony for some time afterwards to take the slim chance of being able to rescue his friend and the frustration on his face when he'd assumed it hadn't worked.
They'd swapped stories before the starry night (well, the sun was a star, and technically an eclipse counted as night, at least according to all of the vampire movies that he'd ever watched), and apparently Ando went after Sylar with nothing but a sword once, to protect Hiro. It hadn't worked, and Hiro had been forced to save him afterwards, but Matt was still somewhat impressed at Ando's nerve.
Not quite enough to call Ando a 'guardian angel' though, because that would imply that the majority of his rescues worked, which wasn't entirely the case.
Title: Neither Pink, Nor Red But A Shade In Between
Fandom: Crossover, Battle Royale (manga) with Power Rangers elements.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Severely AU, will make absolutely no sense.
Summary: Okay. *facepalms* This happens chronologically before all of the other fics I've written in the future!timeline except 'Murphy's Law' (day 3, number 2). In the huge script-fic, you don't actually get this bit, since the 14 inch flashback is from Hirono's point of view, and this isn't.
She hates her uniform. Not just her school one -although she's not very fond of that either- but her Ranger outfit was just...annoying.
Sure, the bright pink and white armour had its uses -unlike Hirono and Yukie, everyone that saw her knew that she was a girl without having to hear her voice, and it did protect her from most of the monsters that the government could throw at them- but none of them could really blend into a crowd wearing any of their uniforms.
Not that Mitsuru, Shinji or Hirono were really that capable of blending into crowds when they were off-duty anyway, but the point still stood. Particularly as her and Yutaka could only stand out in their uniforms...well, it would be more appropriate to say that Yutaka had only been able to stand out because he was apparently dead now and she really didn't like that.
Mitsuru was dead too. She wasn't there when he died, but she knows about it. After he terrorised the rest of his gang -murdered Sasagawa and Kuronaga and she hates herself for thinking, even briefly, that this may be the one good thing about him becoming a villain, because she never liked either of them anyway- Kiriyama and Hiroki teamed up and ended up killing Mitsuru.
She isn't that bothered about it -she didn't get along with him much anyway, and he had been evil- but she's not sure that she likes what this implies about Shinji. She knows that Hirono's going to try to kill him -they've been setting that fight up since their coin-toss for leadership, and she saw Yukie swap the coin so Hirono couldn't win, but she's never said anything about it- but...she knew that Hirono had liked Shinji, back when there were still seven of them in the team and the only person that had been brainwashed before was Yutaka.
Megumi hates to say it about her team leader, but she doesn't think that Hirono will be able to kill Shinji. She'll beat him in a fight -or maybe not, Megumi's not entirely sure who would win that one- and then Shinji will trick her into believing that the defeat broke the brainwashing or something cliché like that and kill her while her back's turned.
"You would think that your team had learned their lesson by now and not leave its members to walk home all by themselves."
Megumi keeps walking. She might be able to run into that old abandoned construction site over there and hide in one of the corners until he gave up looking for her. Or, if he didn't seem to be giving up, take the time to morph and proceed to fight him.
Although, fighting Shinji would not be the wisest action she ever made, since if she doesn't know if Hirono can beat him, and she's never beaten Hirono in a training session...she doesn't think that she has much of a chance.
But she won't hesitate to kill him. She knows that he'll try to trick her, and she won't fall for it.
By night-time -a beautiful starry night, while Sakura and Kazuhiko decide to have an impromptu picnic in her garden, and Yoshimi notices just before Yoji starts getting angry again- Megumi has already died.
And now there are only two Rangers in the way of the government's plans.