(no subject)
Title: Homework and Belief
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: G
Warnings: Spoilers for Order of the Phoenix.
Summary: Susan just wants to do her homework. She ends up discussing Harry's innocence with a Ravenclaw that she doesn't actually know...
The only table left in the library that isn't full of people desperately trying to get some DADA knowledge that will actually help them in their OWLs is a small one, with a vaguely familiar Ravenclaw boy sat reading what looked like the book for this week's History of Magic homework.
The book that she needs.
So, instead of losing her temper -Hufflepuffs rely on patience and he'll probably be finished with it soon anyway- she sits down and smiles at him.
"Hey. Doing your homework?"
He smiles back and closes the book.
"It doesn’t matter that much. Did you want this? I think it's the last copy in the library."
And patience wins the day. Well, patience and the amazing reading speed of the average Ravenclaw. Her smile grows a little wider and she nods.
“Yeah, I’m doing the role of witchcraft in the Chartist movement as my topic and I can’t seem to get all of these dates right in my head.”
“That actually sounds quite interesting. I’ve gone a bit earlier and done the abolitionist movement instead. I suppose that would be easier, since it was more successful...”
They chat for a while, during which Susan finds the passage that she needs and takes notes -only brief ones, nothing like the ones that the other student has strewn over his part of the desk- in which that she finds out that the boy’s name is Terry, and that he’s actually been in most of her classes since first year.
Eventually she comes right out and asks the question that’s on her mind.
“So...are you worried about your DADA OWL?”
“Are you kidding? I’m more worried about what killed Diggory. Or who,” he adds in a slightly quieter tone of voice and she leans over.
“You believe Potter then?”
Terry looks around for a while, not meeting her eyes. Then he finally nods.
“I don’t really know Potter, but Granger’s in my Arithmancy class. If this was a lie, or the ramblings of a madman, she would be clever enough to see through it. If she backs him and Dumbledore, then there must be at least some truth to their story. And," he looks somewhat sheepish at that, "it doesn't hurt that my best friend's dating Ginny Weasley. How about you?"
He looks at her as if he’s trying to stare right through her and she averts her eyes. Ernie and Justin had already asked her this -they had a different reason to agree with Potter, after falsely accusing him about both the Heir of Slytherin and Triwizard controversies, they felt that he had proven himself trustworthy in their eyes- but she was still on the fence.
She didn’t know Potter. But he had freed the French girl’s sister in the Triwizard Tournament, even though he didn’t know her, in front of dozens of merpeople, all in their element and prepared to fight him. He had stopped the Heir of Slytherin and possibly saved everyone at Hogwarts, even when those same students had spent the year making his life hell.
In comparison, the Ministry -excluding her aunt, of course, who was nothing like Fudge or Umbridge- had done nothing. There were still Death Eaters that had never been captured, not through lack of evidence, but from orders from Fudge not to proceed. She remembered Amelia showing her the case that she had once been about to make against Lucius Malfoy when she was much younger, and shivered.
She didn’t know Potter. But she did know the Ministry.
Her eyes meeting Terry’s, she nods.
“I suppose that I believe him too.”
Title: Rebellion
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Probably AU, spoilers for Deathly Hallows.
Summary: Theodore is getting rather fed up with people that think that they know him solely on the basis of his family and his house.
He came back, eventually.
He still didn't have a Dark Mark (hexed his father quite thoroughly when he tried to force him to take it last year) and he still had an important choice to make. Most people would assume that he had made that choice back in first year, when the Sorting Hat put him in Slytherin (he didn't much care, actually, and would have enjoyed seeing his father's reaction to finding out that his only son had been put in Hufflepuff, and the Howlers that probably would have followed), but he failed to see why he should be judged on something that he did at the tender age of eleven, or for that matter, on his father's rather absurd tendencies.
After seventeen years, Theodore Nott had become rather irritated about being judged on what his father believed. No-one ever seemed to ask him if he agreed with it, it was just assumed that he did and left at that.
Well...that wasn't entirely true. The peculiar blonde Ravenclaw girl (her father was the editor of the Quibbler, apparently, but he'd never bothered to learn anyone's name unless he absolutely had to talk to them) had asked him once, during his second year. Just wandered up to him while he was sat in the library, vegetables dangling from her ears, and carried on a conversation with him as if they had known each other all their lives. No, not like that -because he had known Draco all of his life too, and they still had trouble talking to each other on friendly terms- but...
She had talked to him as if he wasn't in Slytherin.
He had proceeded to tell all of the Slytherin students in his year, the year below him and four of the years above (because there is absolutely no use in being a member of a Death Eater family if he couldn't use it to threaten people into submission) that if they hurt her in any way, he'd skin them alive and turn their mangled, still bleeding corpse into an Inferi to terrorise their families with.
Not particularly kind of him, he knew, but it had worked.
The first thing he did upon returning to Hogwarts was take off the heavy robe to reveal his normal Hogwarts uniform. There were two reasons for this: the robe was too hot and he didn't want it to distract him from whoever his enemies ended up being.
The second, of course, was because either he wasn't on the Dark Lord's side and therefore had no right to be wearing it, or he was and it may be slightly harder for one of Potter's side, particularly the members of Dumbledore's Army that had stayed behind to fight, to kill someone who wasn't just another faceless enemy.
So, which side?
Knowing that Potter hated all Slytherins on principle (which was fine, as Theodore wasn't going to be doing this for his sake), he'd probably be arrested after the battle anyway, no matter what side he was on. This was providing that he survived the battle, which...was unlikely, he had to admit. However, he had yet to find a Death Eater that he actually liked, while if the girl had returned...
Of course, he had no idea if she even felt the same way as she had done then. After spending a year running for her life due to being captured, tortured and her father held captive...he's not sure that he'd be particularly friendly either, under the circumstances.
It didn't matter.
People had claimed that he'd made his choice by being Sorted into Slytherin, and it was sort of true.
However, one of Salazar Slytherin's main features was that he never did what was expected of him, by the very reason that it was expected of him to do it. He had been the rebel among the Founders, and Theodore was just going to follow his example.
So, he decided to start by torching those Inferi, who were moving towards that group of sixth-year Hufflepuffs...
What he really hadn't expected was that one of those Hufflepuffs would remember what he'd done and had summoned a Patronus for him ten minutes later when he was cornered by a Dementor (he'd never had the opportunity to learn that particular trick, and he had seriously regretted it). She had even offered him a hand up from the floor afterwards.
He strongly doubted anyone on the other side would have done that.
During the pause in the fighting, the girl had thanked him and he'd given an awkward and vaguely appreciative mutter in reply, then after she had ran off, he had just wandered around, looking for some dark corner where no-one could see his uniform clearly enough to ask who he was and what he was doing there.
He had found the Ravenclaw girl instead. To his surprise -although, he should be used to her eccentricities by now, he supposed- she had actually smiled at him, instead of trying to hex him or asking him why he was there.
"Oh, hello, Theodore! I saw you earlier, but I wasn't sure..."
He raised an eyebrow. She had changed. Just a little, but she wasn't quite as trusting as she used to be, her hand was just a fraction of an inch closer to her wand.
"...Wasn't sure whose side I was on?"
"I guessed, because you weren't wearing those heavy robes, but you've not really been yourself this year, so I didn't know. I do now though, and I'm glad..."
Eyebrow went higher, but he kept his expression decisively neutral.
"You're glad...of what?"
Smile faded and she finished, in a more nervous tone than he had ever heard from her.
"I'm glad that I didn't have to fight you. I had to knock out Zabini, and I was going to levitate him to a safe corner or something, but I got attacked by someone else and by the time I turned back to do it, a giant had already stepped on him, and...I didn't mean to kill him, but if I hadn't..."
"If you hadn't, he might have killed you. That's the way it goes in war. Unless you were thinking that it was all spraying graffiti on the walls and running away like a frightened Mooncalf. And it is probably healthy that you have regrets about it, but either you died, or he did. It was that simple. It doesn't make you a bad person."
She smiled again, but it wasn't as bright as the one earlier; or the ones that she had given him back in second year, back when there was no war and he was just focused on getting his NEWTs and moving as far away from his father as he could; and caught him just before he collapsed from exhaustion.
Being a rebel was hard work.
Title: The Tide
Fandom: Losing Christina
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers for all three books, particularly the ending of 'The Fire'.
Summary: Christina will always remember why she had to do it. Sometimes, she will even remember just what she did.
Sometimes Christina Romney looks back and remembers what she did, back when she was only a seventh-grader. That she stopped them -she doesn't even like to remember their names these days, as if remembering that detail will bring them back, bones bleached from the fire they started to burn her and Val out; not even appearing to be human anymore but pure forces of Evil wanting to finish what they started, to finally close her file- from driving Dolly to insanity like so many other girls all over the country.
That she had managed to help both Anya and Val to recover -and Val had returned the favour and saved her at the last moment, where and when she had thought that she had finally, irrevocably, lost her mind to the flames and the sea and the whispers of that house, now only ashes on her tongue- and forced all of the adults that hadn't listened to her because she was a child, because she was strange and wild and spoke for herself, all of the people who had thought that she had been lying when she told them that the matches had been planted by someone that wasn't her, that she hadn't burned her wardrobe, that Anya hadn't gone insane due to the stress caused by being overambitious about her grades; she had forced them all to wonder what would have happened if she hadn't been quite as forceful. If the sea hadn't been kind to her and taken its payment from them instead.
If the tide hadn't turned, just when she had needed it...
Room 8 would have been full of cold fire, with decorations that glowed brown, gold and silver.
The colours of her hair.
And then there would be no more Christina, not really.
Just a shell -the alone, Val had called it, back then, and she can still remember exactly what the older girl had meant by that, even after all of these years- with her soul trapped in a painted room that was nothing but an echo of her own psyche. And then they would have kept going, repeating their pattern, again and again. If she hadn't stopped them, how many other girls would they have managed to strip of their personalities before someone else had finally realised what was going on?
Where and when would it have stopped?
She still doesn't dare ask.
Title: An Unwanted Rescue and a Small Amount of Payback
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers up to about two-thirds of the way through the game (I'm sorry, if I'm more specific than that then my spoiler warning will contain spoilers).
Summary: Neku rationalises his kindness through spite.
He wants to walk past them.
After all, the pair of tired looking Reapers barely holding their own against the Taboo Noise are the reason that Rhyme's gone, that Beat isn't acting like himself...the only things he can't blame them for is his own death (because he knows that was Joshua's fault, and Joshua knows that he knows it...and they could keep going with the 'I know you know that I know' thing all week if they had the time, but they don't) and Shiki's capture (because that was his fault for caring so much about her that Kitaniji could use her as his entry fee, and Kitaniji's fault for actually taking her) and he's sure that the pair of them can take care of themselves, but...he can't quite bring himself to leave them there.
He keeps flashing back to the previous day, with Joshua obliterating that Taboo Noise in a way that most definitely was not legal. And how Kariya had winked and let the pair of them go afterwards when he should have just erased them there and then...
Besides, after erasing the pair of them, that Taboo Noise will just come after him and Joshua anyway...and Uzuki, being a lot more narrow-minded than her partner and a lot more focused on doing her job, would seriously hate it if a pair of her targets came to her rescue...
He decides to go for it. He wants to see the infuriated look on Uzuki's face when he saves her.
***
Uzuki Yashiro is not happy.
To be entirely honest, this is not a rare occurrence, as she is well known for being both ambitious and temperamental to a fault. However, after being attacked by Taboo Noise created by Game Master Sho Minamimoto -who she tried talking to once but couldn't understand a word he was saying and decided to stick with her own partner, who she could at least understand most of the time, if not agree with him- and then getting rescued, of all things, by a pair of Players, one of which being that kid with the headphones that she spent an entire week trying to erase...she is not happy.
At all.
To make it even worse, her partner, far from being as upset as Uzuki herself was, actually went to the trouble of thanking the two -maybe she could amend the earlier statement about being able to understand Kariya- and even tried to convince her to do the same under the grounds of basic politeness.
If they want to be kind or polite, they are in entirely the wrong job for it.
Although...she had said please when she'd tried to erase the kid with the headphones for the first time last week, so maybe she could be a little more polite next time...no. She can't believe she's actually thinking about it.
She blames Kariya.
Just because she can -and because he seems to enjoy it when she starts yelling at him, just so that he can tell her to calm down and take it easy before...he usually doesn't finish that sentence, seeing as how both of them have already died once in order to become Reapers in the first place, but she understands what he means- and because she has a suspicion that he's powerful enough that he could probably erase the pair of Players without much of a fight, but just chooses not to, out of some bizarre mixture of curiosity, laziness and kindness.
Title: A Kindness or an Insult
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for Seasons 2&3 of the New Series and the 'Trial of a Time Lord' story arc of the Classic Series, is most likely AU.
Summary: Melanie did not need a check up and, after a while, she wishes that he had never came.
She's older now.
She's 43 to be precise (and she usually is, which makes her such a good engineer for the Nosferatu II) and after spending some time in the Time War (she wasn't time-sensitive, so she shouldn't have been there in the first place, but they'd rigged up a time-travel device on their ship so that they could evacuate people from worlds targeted by the Daleks) in which she couldn't tell if time was going forwards or backwards.
One minute she'd be in the 1980's -back before the Doctor took her from Brighton, back when he was still blond and had a worse dress sense than she did- and the next she'd be hundreds and thousands of years after her own death.
At first, as he steps out of his TARDIS, she's nervous. What if this isn't the Doctor at all? It's been a while (twenty years by her count, she has no idea how long it's been for him) and that regeneration must be coming up soon. The one adventure that both of her Doctors had told her never to mention -and she had never mentioned it, not even when one of the Trion refugees that had escaped onto her ship revealed that he was familiar with the Doctor as well; not even to Ace, who she'd picked up from Gallifrey just it ceased to ever have existed- and the one that had haunted her first Doctor for the remainder of that lifetime.
But then the man grinned -different man, younger-looking with different teeth and so skinny that she starts to regret forcing her first Doctor to do all of that exercise- and it's a more friendly grin than she'd expected, even as she started to suspect that this one wasn't all there in the head.
She doesn't think that he's the Valeyard -although, she was never known for being a good judge of character, so she'll keep the laser pistol in her back pocket, out of sight- and his companion seems happy enough, so she smiles back and starts chatting to the girl (who turns out to be a medical student, so Mel doesn't feel quite so weird asking about the changes in nutritional science during the twenty years that she's been gone) while the Doctor goes to do whatever he came there to do.
He asks her about Glitz, later, and she has to tell him that the space pirate got shot in the head not long after the Time War, when a deal went south. She asks him about Ace and he admits that he hasn't seen her since he left her on Gallifrey. She talks about her life as a capable head engineer on a ship that Earthlings won't develop the technology to create for another sixty years, and he talks about the companions he's had since Ace.
He pays particular attention to someone called Rose, and then adds that they wouldn't get along (as Rose apparently ate a lot of chips, which Mel would have been extremely disapproving of) and then starts talking about what he's been doing.
She notices it during his retelling of his actions on Satellite 5, with the man -barely a boy, really, by either of their standards- called Adam who had stolen technology.
"So you just left him on Earth like that?" She's become better at not letting anything show on her face, but her voice gives away the revulsion that she's feeling. Not just for the action, but the lack of emotion on the Doctor's part as he talks about it. She knows that he's lost companions -she had to coax her first one into telling her about Peri, and he was still extremely touchy about her fate then- but her Doctor, both of them, had at least regretted their mistakes.
This Doctor is not the Valeyard, but for the first time in her life, even having heard what he did as a result of the Time War, she can see the resemblance and she wishes that he hadn't come here.
Even if she liked Martha -and she did like Martha, because she was clever and almost on the same wavelength as Mel was, even though twenty years divided them and it had been so long since Mel had seen another Earthling- she wishes that he had been kind enough to leave her alone and not shown her just how much he had changed from the men that she had known.
She wonders if he'll feel any regrets when Martha leaves.
Maybe he'll abandon Martha like he abandoned that 'Adam' he was talking about. She'll probably never know.
She'll probably never see either of them again.
At least she hopes not, because she knows where it will all end.
Title: Paradoxical Conversations
Fandom: Doctor Who Unbound: He Jests At Scars (It's an AU audio play)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers, again, for the Trial of a Time Lord story arc, AU as in response to the actual series, but in canon as to the play itself.
Summary: He was only trying to show them the truth. If they stuck to their own delusions, it wasn't his fault.
Notes: The italic part at the beginning is quoted directly from the play.
"I travelled back in time to prevent my past selves from making mistakes. I tried to show them how they were passing up the opportunity to attain real power. But each one of those fools preferred their self-consciously noble, ultimately unsatisfying lifestyles. All of them argued with me, tried to thwart my plans. So I erased them."
He decided to pay his sixth incarnation (his most vulnerable, no matter how smug and confident he appeared to be) a visit after they had already met at the trial. Technically, this was impossible, but the Valeyard had already destroyed his fourth, tenth and eleventh incarnations at this point (he had been sure that Ten, being unstable and somewhat ruthless in his own dealings, would go along with his plans, but apparently he didn't know himself as well as he thought).
His younger self -and Melanie, who he had left in the web of time (or maybe he hadn't, as he'd ruined so much of that web that she might never have existed)- came into view. Through the bizarre snarl in the...how did his former tenth incarnation put it? 'Timey-wimey ball' or something similarly preposterous? Because his sixth incarnation had met Mel at the trial, and that version of Mel had been left to be picked up by her Doctor before the earlier Doctor had ever met her in the first place, meaning that while he had met her, the companion had yet to meet him.
And, as he had picked a time period between his sixth self inviting Mel into the TARDIS and the trial, while his previous self knew him on sight and looked briefly terrified before covering it up with a glare, she just gave him a curious look.
"Fancy meeting me here."
He smiles. It is not a manic smile, like his tenth self had...has...will never have; nor is it anything like the bitter and self-deprecating smile of his ninth body. It is cruel and sharp -and he wonders if the Master, his old forgotten foe, enjoyed smiling like this as much as he does- and there is nothing in it like any of his other lives, because he is not like them.
He is unique. He does not have to follow the absurd restrictions on morality as his counterparts had, because there are no Time Lords to stop him and -unlike his grieving ninth persona and morally ambiguous tenth- he does not need a companion to show him right from wrong.
Because, after everything that has happened in his long lifetime, he has learned that there is no such thing as either. He is merely trying to save his younger selves a lot of pain and misery by informing them earlier in his lifetime.
His sixth self argues with him for hours. He hadn't expected anything less of that incarnation, as -while he was the most vulnerable of his previous lives- he was also the most determined to hold by his particular set of arbitrary values because he was afraid of what he could become. So finally, when the black robed prosecutor becomes bored of his more colourful parallel, he reaches out with the power of the space-time vortex and there.
The Doctor never had a sixth incarnation. Melanie Bush died in Brighton in 2012 from a brain tumour, having worked for Torchwood One until the Canary Wharf Incident (or maybe she didn't. Maybe Torchwood never existed because he destroyed his tenth incarnation before he provoked Queen Victoria, or maybe she became a Cyberman during the incident...he doesn't know anymore, he's done so much damage to time -and therefore space- that it doesn't matter anymore).
Another thread cut.
Funny, how none of them seemed to understand the kindness that he was trying to show them.
Title: On Why Theft Can Be Kind
Fandom: Battle Royale II
Rating: PG
Warnings: AU, spoilers for most of the movie.
Summary: He was sure that it wasn't theft to steal insulin for a diabetic who didn't have the opportunity to get it legally, or the experience to get it herself. Okay, maybe it was, but it was a different kind of theft.
He broke into a hospital when they got back to civilisation.
It isn't a random action of violence, nor is it terrorism -because he still hates Nanahara and doesn't want to be associated with him at all- but Haruka's running out of insulin. As in, she's pretty much finished her stock, and he doesn't particularly want to see her die, not when they beat the odds so many times already by making it to this point.
Besides, Kyoko needs stuff for the baby, and since he's the best at breaking and entering (in that he's both done it and doesn't have a record for it), he volunteered to do it. It's not a hard job, get in, steal the goods -he's got a list written on the back of his hand in one of the glow-in-the-dark pens Kenji originally brought to draw on people's faces with during the trip, which of course did him a lot of good when his partner got herself blown up on the tripmines...and he's not even going to get into that, because it still kind of hurts when he thinks about it- and get back out again.
Easy.
He comes back with his school bag full of insulin-filled syringes -he did check first, because he doesn't want to give her morphine instead, he doesn't hate her that much- and various other bits of medical stuff that they might need and, for possibly the first time in Tetsuya's life, someone actually looks happy to see him.
If he wasn't such a hardened delinquent and all, he might even faint with shock.
She counts them out and totals them, obviously trying to find out how much time he's bought her by stealing them -and he wonders briefly what will happen to the people that were supposed to get those injections, but it's not something that he really wants to know, so he ignores the thought- and then she smiles at him and tells him that this will be enough for two weeks.
Two weeks.
They'll be in China by then, hopefully.
Maybe he can steal her some insulin then, because he actually kind of likes it when she smiles at him.
Title: Birthday Cakes
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Rating: G
Warnings: Possibly AU (as in, I have no idea if any of this is actually canon, as it never comes up).
Summary: Reapers age if they want to. It's all part of the job.
Reapers age if they want to.
That's the first thing Conductor Megumi Kitaniji tells any new recruit that joins them, as well as the basic rules, what can and can't be done, what will annoy the more experienced Reapers (he does it mostly as a warning, but after Minamimoto memorised it for the sole purpose of irritating everyone but Kitaniji himself, he's wondering if he should keep that part of his little induction speech in)...
But he needs to keep the aging part in, seeing as how Kitaniji himself is somewhere over three hundred years old. He isn't sure how much older because he couldn't count back before he died (something Konishi likes to remind him of) and it didn't matter anyway. After all, you couldn't stick three hundred candles on a normal sized birthday cake, and it wasn't like he was going to die of old age anytime soon, so he tends to just leave it be.
Most of the older Reapers do.
***
Uzuki Yashiro still celebrates her birthdays. She's seventeen -and looks it, because she wants to stop aging at about thirty, so that she looks mature and authoritarian enough to scare Players- and she's probably one of the younger Reapers in Shibuya. Not that it matters really, because most of them won't talk about their actual ages anyway.
She knows that Minamimoto's only a little older than she is -because he said some odd string of numbers when she asked him his age that added up to about 18 years- and she's sure that Kariya's a lot older than him, but she can't prove anything because her partner is determined to maintain the illusion that he's still nineteen, which would be a lot more believable had he not said that he was nineteen when they first met, two years ago.
Unlike her, he doesn't celebrate his birthday -she'd asked him once and he'd paused for a moment as if he wasn't entirely sure of it before giving her a straight answer- and her one attempt of trying to celebrate it for him failed due to being in the middle of a game and having two angry Players (wearing the party hats that she had bribed the GM into making them wear) interrupt them, chased by the Noise she'd made that looked somewhat like a birthday cake.
In her defence, he had found it pretty hilarious.
These days, she usually bought him a few lollipops and treated him to a bowl of ramen (as opposed to playing a game with him for it, which was their usual routine) for his birthday, and he usually got her a small gift and then took her out for another bowl for hers.
And in case one of them forgot their own birthdays, the other one was always going to be there to remind them.
Even if, in her case, she'd probably never know how many birthdays he'd had before it.
Title: One Last Game of Us and Them
Fandom: Crossover, Battle Royale (manga) with Power Rangers elements.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Severely AU, will make absolutely no sense.
Summary: She had to leave eventually. Might as well make it count.
Notes: This happens later in the storyline than anything else (so late, in fact, that this fic happens after the point that I got up to with the original script-fic, and therefore versipellis hasn't seen it either).
This had never been part of the rules.
Not that she cared, because she had never followed the rules back when there were still rules to follow, and pretty much everything she had researched (and now no-one would ever know that she could do that much research on something) on the subject of time travel implied that even if she didn't pop out of existence as soon as the timeline changed, in order to create an optimum reality, the catalyst (which would be her) needed to eventually be removed.
And she'd always wondered what a heroic sacrifice felt like.
Screw it, she'd always wondered what being heroic felt like in general. Besides, there was nothing in those rules about futuristic Rangers playing substitute for their ill colour counterparts -mostly because whoever wrote the rules apparently wasn't a fan of science-fiction clichés, despite the universe being ran on those same clichés, and apparently because heroes apparently could never get ill (Shinji, being currently abed with flu, might have something to say about that, if he hadn't lost his voice), which made no sense- so she could do it if she wanted to.
It might wreck the Zord, but they still had their alien guide to help them rebuild it -she doesn't like to admit that her team didn't have a Zord for their Blue Ranger anymore, because Yuichiro had crashed it so many times that there was nothing left of it, and he tended to ride with Shuuya in his- and...it wasn't like they needed her around now. She had been kind enough to warn them, it wasn't her fault if they refused to listen.
She was just complicating things by being around anyway.
Particularly as her past self (or was it more accurate to call her a never self, as that Hirono would never become her and therefore they had no connection anymore, despite being technically the same person) was even more awkward around Shinji than she remembered, slightly more demanding of Megumi with regards to her hand-to-hand combat (this was a good thing, as it might save Megumi's life in the long run) and slightly kinder towards Yutaka (although, they still really didn't get along at all, and she can't even remember why anymore).
It wasn't just her.
The team were more awkward around each other than she had remembered. Maybe, if she left, they'd return to something approaching normal.
It wouldn't be completely out of her way to find out.
Title: Of The Year That Never Was
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for the finale of Season 3 of the New Series.
Summary: Harriet believes in protecting England. However, even she has to admit that there is a point where there is nothing left of England to protect.
She spends the first month driving.
Gets out of England -that country that had loved her and betrayed her and was now suffering because of it- and into France without stopping long enough to flash her ID and reveal her identity. She doesn't do that anymore anyway, Saxon wants her captured so he can use her to gloat against the Doctor, because if he hadn't caused her to resign, he would never have become Prime Minister, but...she can't blame the Doctor for it.
After all, it had been a different Doctor that had let her take the job in the first place (he had promised her a Golden Age, and after Saxon's reign of terror, she's wondering if he had meant that she was going to be a great Prime Minister or whether he had known, even then, that her successor would be so terrible that anyone would be an improvement) and she will admit, in hindsight, that she may have gone too far with the missiles.
But, equally so, she had been obligated to protect the United Kingdom. That was her job -and unlike him, she had been elected to do it, instead of just deciding to go overboard with a hero complex and a time machine- and to punish her for taking chances in order to protect her country would imply that he has never overreacted, always managed to save the universe without killing anything by persuading the attackers to surrender.
She knows that isn't the case.
She had been fortunate (or misfortunate, depending on which way she looked at it) enough to have a conversation with Jack Harkness, leader of Torchwood Three and former travelling companion of the Doctor's, after she lost her seat.
He had told her about the Time War (he hadn't particularly wanted to, but she did still have ties within the government itself, and she could have launched a rather...unwelcome public investigation into Torchwood's practices -she vaguely remembers threatening to have him arrested for the murder of Suzie Costello, and his medic arrested on two charges of sexual assault, among others...the things that Jack and his team usually covered up, but she had done her homework before the meeting and had copies everywhere, in case he slipped that amnesia drug into her tea and his hacker friend erased the files on her computer- so he had eventually given up and told her a little of what she wanted to know) and how the Doctor had apparently wiped out both his own race and the Daleks in order to protect the universe.
There was a difference between the Doctor's actions during the Time War, and her act of retaliation against the Sycorax. Since she had destroyed their ship, they had not attacked again. The Daleks had. Many times.
If she was a more cynical woman -but she wasn't, because backbenchers weren't supposed to be cynical, and she'd never planned to be anything more than that- she would have argued that the reason why he had been so angry with her was because her attempt at violence had succeeded and his hadn't. However, it was also possible that he hadn't wanted her to do it because he didn't want her to become like him -which was certainly possible, as the first Doctor she had met had certainly been bitter enough, if capable of greater kindness, perhaps, than his successor- which was the interpretation that she was holding to.
She meets the other woman in the barren wasteland that used to be Lithuania.
Unlike Harriet, she isn't travelling alone. There's a boy with her, who she claims is her son. They know each other by sight -her because of Harriet's former status as Prime Minister, Harriet because of the woman's connections with another Doctor, several decades ago, and her work as a journalist- but they have never met before.
"Would you like to join me? You look tired, and I could use the company."
She has food as well, which she shares with the pair of them on the trip to...wherever they're going. Harriet was planning on getting as far away from Saxon's Britain as she can and starting to form a resistance movement (guess she isn't as loyal as she thought she was, but the Toclafane killed the Queen and now she has no country, so the only thing she can be loyal to is herself), Sarah Jane admits that she was planning the same thing and they share stories until her car runs out of petrol. Then they get out and walk (making sure to avoid Toclafane activity at all times).
By the time that Martha finds them, three months later, they have formed quite a powerful underground movement -as Sarah Jane's charisma and Harriet's determination has pulled off what both would consider a miracle- and they help her, as much as they can. But they make it perfectly clear that they aren't doing it for her Doctor, and indeed, the Doctor that the pair of them are thinking of when the countdown hits zero, isn't her Doctor at all.
As a matter of fact, they aren't even thinking of the same Doctor.
It doesn't matter.
It never happened.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: G
Warnings: Spoilers for Order of the Phoenix.
Summary: Susan just wants to do her homework. She ends up discussing Harry's innocence with a Ravenclaw that she doesn't actually know...
The only table left in the library that isn't full of people desperately trying to get some DADA knowledge that will actually help them in their OWLs is a small one, with a vaguely familiar Ravenclaw boy sat reading what looked like the book for this week's History of Magic homework.
The book that she needs.
So, instead of losing her temper -Hufflepuffs rely on patience and he'll probably be finished with it soon anyway- she sits down and smiles at him.
"Hey. Doing your homework?"
He smiles back and closes the book.
"It doesn’t matter that much. Did you want this? I think it's the last copy in the library."
And patience wins the day. Well, patience and the amazing reading speed of the average Ravenclaw. Her smile grows a little wider and she nods.
“Yeah, I’m doing the role of witchcraft in the Chartist movement as my topic and I can’t seem to get all of these dates right in my head.”
“That actually sounds quite interesting. I’ve gone a bit earlier and done the abolitionist movement instead. I suppose that would be easier, since it was more successful...”
They chat for a while, during which Susan finds the passage that she needs and takes notes -only brief ones, nothing like the ones that the other student has strewn over his part of the desk- in which that she finds out that the boy’s name is Terry, and that he’s actually been in most of her classes since first year.
Eventually she comes right out and asks the question that’s on her mind.
“So...are you worried about your DADA OWL?”
“Are you kidding? I’m more worried about what killed Diggory. Or who,” he adds in a slightly quieter tone of voice and she leans over.
“You believe Potter then?”
Terry looks around for a while, not meeting her eyes. Then he finally nods.
“I don’t really know Potter, but Granger’s in my Arithmancy class. If this was a lie, or the ramblings of a madman, she would be clever enough to see through it. If she backs him and Dumbledore, then there must be at least some truth to their story. And," he looks somewhat sheepish at that, "it doesn't hurt that my best friend's dating Ginny Weasley. How about you?"
He looks at her as if he’s trying to stare right through her and she averts her eyes. Ernie and Justin had already asked her this -they had a different reason to agree with Potter, after falsely accusing him about both the Heir of Slytherin and Triwizard controversies, they felt that he had proven himself trustworthy in their eyes- but she was still on the fence.
She didn’t know Potter. But he had freed the French girl’s sister in the Triwizard Tournament, even though he didn’t know her, in front of dozens of merpeople, all in their element and prepared to fight him. He had stopped the Heir of Slytherin and possibly saved everyone at Hogwarts, even when those same students had spent the year making his life hell.
In comparison, the Ministry -excluding her aunt, of course, who was nothing like Fudge or Umbridge- had done nothing. There were still Death Eaters that had never been captured, not through lack of evidence, but from orders from Fudge not to proceed. She remembered Amelia showing her the case that she had once been about to make against Lucius Malfoy when she was much younger, and shivered.
She didn’t know Potter. But she did know the Ministry.
Her eyes meeting Terry’s, she nods.
“I suppose that I believe him too.”
Title: Rebellion
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Probably AU, spoilers for Deathly Hallows.
Summary: Theodore is getting rather fed up with people that think that they know him solely on the basis of his family and his house.
He came back, eventually.
He still didn't have a Dark Mark (hexed his father quite thoroughly when he tried to force him to take it last year) and he still had an important choice to make. Most people would assume that he had made that choice back in first year, when the Sorting Hat put him in Slytherin (he didn't much care, actually, and would have enjoyed seeing his father's reaction to finding out that his only son had been put in Hufflepuff, and the Howlers that probably would have followed), but he failed to see why he should be judged on something that he did at the tender age of eleven, or for that matter, on his father's rather absurd tendencies.
After seventeen years, Theodore Nott had become rather irritated about being judged on what his father believed. No-one ever seemed to ask him if he agreed with it, it was just assumed that he did and left at that.
Well...that wasn't entirely true. The peculiar blonde Ravenclaw girl (her father was the editor of the Quibbler, apparently, but he'd never bothered to learn anyone's name unless he absolutely had to talk to them) had asked him once, during his second year. Just wandered up to him while he was sat in the library, vegetables dangling from her ears, and carried on a conversation with him as if they had known each other all their lives. No, not like that -because he had known Draco all of his life too, and they still had trouble talking to each other on friendly terms- but...
She had talked to him as if he wasn't in Slytherin.
He had proceeded to tell all of the Slytherin students in his year, the year below him and four of the years above (because there is absolutely no use in being a member of a Death Eater family if he couldn't use it to threaten people into submission) that if they hurt her in any way, he'd skin them alive and turn their mangled, still bleeding corpse into an Inferi to terrorise their families with.
Not particularly kind of him, he knew, but it had worked.
The first thing he did upon returning to Hogwarts was take off the heavy robe to reveal his normal Hogwarts uniform. There were two reasons for this: the robe was too hot and he didn't want it to distract him from whoever his enemies ended up being.
The second, of course, was because either he wasn't on the Dark Lord's side and therefore had no right to be wearing it, or he was and it may be slightly harder for one of Potter's side, particularly the members of Dumbledore's Army that had stayed behind to fight, to kill someone who wasn't just another faceless enemy.
So, which side?
Knowing that Potter hated all Slytherins on principle (which was fine, as Theodore wasn't going to be doing this for his sake), he'd probably be arrested after the battle anyway, no matter what side he was on. This was providing that he survived the battle, which...was unlikely, he had to admit. However, he had yet to find a Death Eater that he actually liked, while if the girl had returned...
Of course, he had no idea if she even felt the same way as she had done then. After spending a year running for her life due to being captured, tortured and her father held captive...he's not sure that he'd be particularly friendly either, under the circumstances.
It didn't matter.
People had claimed that he'd made his choice by being Sorted into Slytherin, and it was sort of true.
However, one of Salazar Slytherin's main features was that he never did what was expected of him, by the very reason that it was expected of him to do it. He had been the rebel among the Founders, and Theodore was just going to follow his example.
So, he decided to start by torching those Inferi, who were moving towards that group of sixth-year Hufflepuffs...
What he really hadn't expected was that one of those Hufflepuffs would remember what he'd done and had summoned a Patronus for him ten minutes later when he was cornered by a Dementor (he'd never had the opportunity to learn that particular trick, and he had seriously regretted it). She had even offered him a hand up from the floor afterwards.
He strongly doubted anyone on the other side would have done that.
During the pause in the fighting, the girl had thanked him and he'd given an awkward and vaguely appreciative mutter in reply, then after she had ran off, he had just wandered around, looking for some dark corner where no-one could see his uniform clearly enough to ask who he was and what he was doing there.
He had found the Ravenclaw girl instead. To his surprise -although, he should be used to her eccentricities by now, he supposed- she had actually smiled at him, instead of trying to hex him or asking him why he was there.
"Oh, hello, Theodore! I saw you earlier, but I wasn't sure..."
He raised an eyebrow. She had changed. Just a little, but she wasn't quite as trusting as she used to be, her hand was just a fraction of an inch closer to her wand.
"...Wasn't sure whose side I was on?"
"I guessed, because you weren't wearing those heavy robes, but you've not really been yourself this year, so I didn't know. I do now though, and I'm glad..."
Eyebrow went higher, but he kept his expression decisively neutral.
"You're glad...of what?"
Smile faded and she finished, in a more nervous tone than he had ever heard from her.
"I'm glad that I didn't have to fight you. I had to knock out Zabini, and I was going to levitate him to a safe corner or something, but I got attacked by someone else and by the time I turned back to do it, a giant had already stepped on him, and...I didn't mean to kill him, but if I hadn't..."
"If you hadn't, he might have killed you. That's the way it goes in war. Unless you were thinking that it was all spraying graffiti on the walls and running away like a frightened Mooncalf. And it is probably healthy that you have regrets about it, but either you died, or he did. It was that simple. It doesn't make you a bad person."
She smiled again, but it wasn't as bright as the one earlier; or the ones that she had given him back in second year, back when there was no war and he was just focused on getting his NEWTs and moving as far away from his father as he could; and caught him just before he collapsed from exhaustion.
Being a rebel was hard work.
Title: The Tide
Fandom: Losing Christina
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers for all three books, particularly the ending of 'The Fire'.
Summary: Christina will always remember why she had to do it. Sometimes, she will even remember just what she did.
Sometimes Christina Romney looks back and remembers what she did, back when she was only a seventh-grader. That she stopped them -she doesn't even like to remember their names these days, as if remembering that detail will bring them back, bones bleached from the fire they started to burn her and Val out; not even appearing to be human anymore but pure forces of Evil wanting to finish what they started, to finally close her file- from driving Dolly to insanity like so many other girls all over the country.
That she had managed to help both Anya and Val to recover -and Val had returned the favour and saved her at the last moment, where and when she had thought that she had finally, irrevocably, lost her mind to the flames and the sea and the whispers of that house, now only ashes on her tongue- and forced all of the adults that hadn't listened to her because she was a child, because she was strange and wild and spoke for herself, all of the people who had thought that she had been lying when she told them that the matches had been planted by someone that wasn't her, that she hadn't burned her wardrobe, that Anya hadn't gone insane due to the stress caused by being overambitious about her grades; she had forced them all to wonder what would have happened if she hadn't been quite as forceful. If the sea hadn't been kind to her and taken its payment from them instead.
If the tide hadn't turned, just when she had needed it...
Room 8 would have been full of cold fire, with decorations that glowed brown, gold and silver.
The colours of her hair.
And then there would be no more Christina, not really.
Just a shell -the alone, Val had called it, back then, and she can still remember exactly what the older girl had meant by that, even after all of these years- with her soul trapped in a painted room that was nothing but an echo of her own psyche. And then they would have kept going, repeating their pattern, again and again. If she hadn't stopped them, how many other girls would they have managed to strip of their personalities before someone else had finally realised what was going on?
Where and when would it have stopped?
She still doesn't dare ask.
Title: An Unwanted Rescue and a Small Amount of Payback
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers up to about two-thirds of the way through the game (I'm sorry, if I'm more specific than that then my spoiler warning will contain spoilers).
Summary: Neku rationalises his kindness through spite.
He wants to walk past them.
After all, the pair of tired looking Reapers barely holding their own against the Taboo Noise are the reason that Rhyme's gone, that Beat isn't acting like himself...the only things he can't blame them for is his own death (because he knows that was Joshua's fault, and Joshua knows that he knows it...and they could keep going with the 'I know you know that I know' thing all week if they had the time, but they don't) and Shiki's capture (because that was his fault for caring so much about her that Kitaniji could use her as his entry fee, and Kitaniji's fault for actually taking her) and he's sure that the pair of them can take care of themselves, but...he can't quite bring himself to leave them there.
He keeps flashing back to the previous day, with Joshua obliterating that Taboo Noise in a way that most definitely was not legal. And how Kariya had winked and let the pair of them go afterwards when he should have just erased them there and then...
Besides, after erasing the pair of them, that Taboo Noise will just come after him and Joshua anyway...and Uzuki, being a lot more narrow-minded than her partner and a lot more focused on doing her job, would seriously hate it if a pair of her targets came to her rescue...
He decides to go for it. He wants to see the infuriated look on Uzuki's face when he saves her.
***
Uzuki Yashiro is not happy.
To be entirely honest, this is not a rare occurrence, as she is well known for being both ambitious and temperamental to a fault. However, after being attacked by Taboo Noise created by Game Master Sho Minamimoto -who she tried talking to once but couldn't understand a word he was saying and decided to stick with her own partner, who she could at least understand most of the time, if not agree with him- and then getting rescued, of all things, by a pair of Players, one of which being that kid with the headphones that she spent an entire week trying to erase...she is not happy.
At all.
To make it even worse, her partner, far from being as upset as Uzuki herself was, actually went to the trouble of thanking the two -maybe she could amend the earlier statement about being able to understand Kariya- and even tried to convince her to do the same under the grounds of basic politeness.
If they want to be kind or polite, they are in entirely the wrong job for it.
Although...she had said please when she'd tried to erase the kid with the headphones for the first time last week, so maybe she could be a little more polite next time...no. She can't believe she's actually thinking about it.
She blames Kariya.
Just because she can -and because he seems to enjoy it when she starts yelling at him, just so that he can tell her to calm down and take it easy before...he usually doesn't finish that sentence, seeing as how both of them have already died once in order to become Reapers in the first place, but she understands what he means- and because she has a suspicion that he's powerful enough that he could probably erase the pair of Players without much of a fight, but just chooses not to, out of some bizarre mixture of curiosity, laziness and kindness.
Title: A Kindness or an Insult
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for Seasons 2&3 of the New Series and the 'Trial of a Time Lord' story arc of the Classic Series, is most likely AU.
Summary: Melanie did not need a check up and, after a while, she wishes that he had never came.
She's older now.
She's 43 to be precise (and she usually is, which makes her such a good engineer for the Nosferatu II) and after spending some time in the Time War (she wasn't time-sensitive, so she shouldn't have been there in the first place, but they'd rigged up a time-travel device on their ship so that they could evacuate people from worlds targeted by the Daleks) in which she couldn't tell if time was going forwards or backwards.
One minute she'd be in the 1980's -back before the Doctor took her from Brighton, back when he was still blond and had a worse dress sense than she did- and the next she'd be hundreds and thousands of years after her own death.
At first, as he steps out of his TARDIS, she's nervous. What if this isn't the Doctor at all? It's been a while (twenty years by her count, she has no idea how long it's been for him) and that regeneration must be coming up soon. The one adventure that both of her Doctors had told her never to mention -and she had never mentioned it, not even when one of the Trion refugees that had escaped onto her ship revealed that he was familiar with the Doctor as well; not even to Ace, who she'd picked up from Gallifrey just it ceased to ever have existed- and the one that had haunted her first Doctor for the remainder of that lifetime.
But then the man grinned -different man, younger-looking with different teeth and so skinny that she starts to regret forcing her first Doctor to do all of that exercise- and it's a more friendly grin than she'd expected, even as she started to suspect that this one wasn't all there in the head.
She doesn't think that he's the Valeyard -although, she was never known for being a good judge of character, so she'll keep the laser pistol in her back pocket, out of sight- and his companion seems happy enough, so she smiles back and starts chatting to the girl (who turns out to be a medical student, so Mel doesn't feel quite so weird asking about the changes in nutritional science during the twenty years that she's been gone) while the Doctor goes to do whatever he came there to do.
He asks her about Glitz, later, and she has to tell him that the space pirate got shot in the head not long after the Time War, when a deal went south. She asks him about Ace and he admits that he hasn't seen her since he left her on Gallifrey. She talks about her life as a capable head engineer on a ship that Earthlings won't develop the technology to create for another sixty years, and he talks about the companions he's had since Ace.
He pays particular attention to someone called Rose, and then adds that they wouldn't get along (as Rose apparently ate a lot of chips, which Mel would have been extremely disapproving of) and then starts talking about what he's been doing.
She notices it during his retelling of his actions on Satellite 5, with the man -barely a boy, really, by either of their standards- called Adam who had stolen technology.
"So you just left him on Earth like that?" She's become better at not letting anything show on her face, but her voice gives away the revulsion that she's feeling. Not just for the action, but the lack of emotion on the Doctor's part as he talks about it. She knows that he's lost companions -she had to coax her first one into telling her about Peri, and he was still extremely touchy about her fate then- but her Doctor, both of them, had at least regretted their mistakes.
This Doctor is not the Valeyard, but for the first time in her life, even having heard what he did as a result of the Time War, she can see the resemblance and she wishes that he hadn't come here.
Even if she liked Martha -and she did like Martha, because she was clever and almost on the same wavelength as Mel was, even though twenty years divided them and it had been so long since Mel had seen another Earthling- she wishes that he had been kind enough to leave her alone and not shown her just how much he had changed from the men that she had known.
She wonders if he'll feel any regrets when Martha leaves.
Maybe he'll abandon Martha like he abandoned that 'Adam' he was talking about. She'll probably never know.
She'll probably never see either of them again.
At least she hopes not, because she knows where it will all end.
Title: Paradoxical Conversations
Fandom: Doctor Who Unbound: He Jests At Scars (It's an AU audio play)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers, again, for the Trial of a Time Lord story arc, AU as in response to the actual series, but in canon as to the play itself.
Summary: He was only trying to show them the truth. If they stuck to their own delusions, it wasn't his fault.
Notes: The italic part at the beginning is quoted directly from the play.
"I travelled back in time to prevent my past selves from making mistakes. I tried to show them how they were passing up the opportunity to attain real power. But each one of those fools preferred their self-consciously noble, ultimately unsatisfying lifestyles. All of them argued with me, tried to thwart my plans. So I erased them."
He decided to pay his sixth incarnation (his most vulnerable, no matter how smug and confident he appeared to be) a visit after they had already met at the trial. Technically, this was impossible, but the Valeyard had already destroyed his fourth, tenth and eleventh incarnations at this point (he had been sure that Ten, being unstable and somewhat ruthless in his own dealings, would go along with his plans, but apparently he didn't know himself as well as he thought).
His younger self -and Melanie, who he had left in the web of time (or maybe he hadn't, as he'd ruined so much of that web that she might never have existed)- came into view. Through the bizarre snarl in the...how did his former tenth incarnation put it? 'Timey-wimey ball' or something similarly preposterous? Because his sixth incarnation had met Mel at the trial, and that version of Mel had been left to be picked up by her Doctor before the earlier Doctor had ever met her in the first place, meaning that while he had met her, the companion had yet to meet him.
And, as he had picked a time period between his sixth self inviting Mel into the TARDIS and the trial, while his previous self knew him on sight and looked briefly terrified before covering it up with a glare, she just gave him a curious look.
"Fancy meeting me here."
He smiles. It is not a manic smile, like his tenth self had...has...will never have; nor is it anything like the bitter and self-deprecating smile of his ninth body. It is cruel and sharp -and he wonders if the Master, his old forgotten foe, enjoyed smiling like this as much as he does- and there is nothing in it like any of his other lives, because he is not like them.
He is unique. He does not have to follow the absurd restrictions on morality as his counterparts had, because there are no Time Lords to stop him and -unlike his grieving ninth persona and morally ambiguous tenth- he does not need a companion to show him right from wrong.
Because, after everything that has happened in his long lifetime, he has learned that there is no such thing as either. He is merely trying to save his younger selves a lot of pain and misery by informing them earlier in his lifetime.
His sixth self argues with him for hours. He hadn't expected anything less of that incarnation, as -while he was the most vulnerable of his previous lives- he was also the most determined to hold by his particular set of arbitrary values because he was afraid of what he could become. So finally, when the black robed prosecutor becomes bored of his more colourful parallel, he reaches out with the power of the space-time vortex and there.
The Doctor never had a sixth incarnation. Melanie Bush died in Brighton in 2012 from a brain tumour, having worked for Torchwood One until the Canary Wharf Incident (or maybe she didn't. Maybe Torchwood never existed because he destroyed his tenth incarnation before he provoked Queen Victoria, or maybe she became a Cyberman during the incident...he doesn't know anymore, he's done so much damage to time -and therefore space- that it doesn't matter anymore).
Another thread cut.
Funny, how none of them seemed to understand the kindness that he was trying to show them.
Title: On Why Theft Can Be Kind
Fandom: Battle Royale II
Rating: PG
Warnings: AU, spoilers for most of the movie.
Summary: He was sure that it wasn't theft to steal insulin for a diabetic who didn't have the opportunity to get it legally, or the experience to get it herself. Okay, maybe it was, but it was a different kind of theft.
He broke into a hospital when they got back to civilisation.
It isn't a random action of violence, nor is it terrorism -because he still hates Nanahara and doesn't want to be associated with him at all- but Haruka's running out of insulin. As in, she's pretty much finished her stock, and he doesn't particularly want to see her die, not when they beat the odds so many times already by making it to this point.
Besides, Kyoko needs stuff for the baby, and since he's the best at breaking and entering (in that he's both done it and doesn't have a record for it), he volunteered to do it. It's not a hard job, get in, steal the goods -he's got a list written on the back of his hand in one of the glow-in-the-dark pens Kenji originally brought to draw on people's faces with during the trip, which of course did him a lot of good when his partner got herself blown up on the tripmines...and he's not even going to get into that, because it still kind of hurts when he thinks about it- and get back out again.
Easy.
He comes back with his school bag full of insulin-filled syringes -he did check first, because he doesn't want to give her morphine instead, he doesn't hate her that much- and various other bits of medical stuff that they might need and, for possibly the first time in Tetsuya's life, someone actually looks happy to see him.
If he wasn't such a hardened delinquent and all, he might even faint with shock.
She counts them out and totals them, obviously trying to find out how much time he's bought her by stealing them -and he wonders briefly what will happen to the people that were supposed to get those injections, but it's not something that he really wants to know, so he ignores the thought- and then she smiles at him and tells him that this will be enough for two weeks.
Two weeks.
They'll be in China by then, hopefully.
Maybe he can steal her some insulin then, because he actually kind of likes it when she smiles at him.
Title: Birthday Cakes
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Rating: G
Warnings: Possibly AU (as in, I have no idea if any of this is actually canon, as it never comes up).
Summary: Reapers age if they want to. It's all part of the job.
Reapers age if they want to.
That's the first thing Conductor Megumi Kitaniji tells any new recruit that joins them, as well as the basic rules, what can and can't be done, what will annoy the more experienced Reapers (he does it mostly as a warning, but after Minamimoto memorised it for the sole purpose of irritating everyone but Kitaniji himself, he's wondering if he should keep that part of his little induction speech in)...
But he needs to keep the aging part in, seeing as how Kitaniji himself is somewhere over three hundred years old. He isn't sure how much older because he couldn't count back before he died (something Konishi likes to remind him of) and it didn't matter anyway. After all, you couldn't stick three hundred candles on a normal sized birthday cake, and it wasn't like he was going to die of old age anytime soon, so he tends to just leave it be.
Most of the older Reapers do.
***
Uzuki Yashiro still celebrates her birthdays. She's seventeen -and looks it, because she wants to stop aging at about thirty, so that she looks mature and authoritarian enough to scare Players- and she's probably one of the younger Reapers in Shibuya. Not that it matters really, because most of them won't talk about their actual ages anyway.
She knows that Minamimoto's only a little older than she is -because he said some odd string of numbers when she asked him his age that added up to about 18 years- and she's sure that Kariya's a lot older than him, but she can't prove anything because her partner is determined to maintain the illusion that he's still nineteen, which would be a lot more believable had he not said that he was nineteen when they first met, two years ago.
Unlike her, he doesn't celebrate his birthday -she'd asked him once and he'd paused for a moment as if he wasn't entirely sure of it before giving her a straight answer- and her one attempt of trying to celebrate it for him failed due to being in the middle of a game and having two angry Players (wearing the party hats that she had bribed the GM into making them wear) interrupt them, chased by the Noise she'd made that looked somewhat like a birthday cake.
In her defence, he had found it pretty hilarious.
These days, she usually bought him a few lollipops and treated him to a bowl of ramen (as opposed to playing a game with him for it, which was their usual routine) for his birthday, and he usually got her a small gift and then took her out for another bowl for hers.
And in case one of them forgot their own birthdays, the other one was always going to be there to remind them.
Even if, in her case, she'd probably never know how many birthdays he'd had before it.
Title: One Last Game of Us and Them
Fandom: Crossover, Battle Royale (manga) with Power Rangers elements.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Severely AU, will make absolutely no sense.
Summary: She had to leave eventually. Might as well make it count.
Notes: This happens later in the storyline than anything else (so late, in fact, that this fic happens after the point that I got up to with the original script-fic, and therefore versipellis hasn't seen it either).
This had never been part of the rules.
Not that she cared, because she had never followed the rules back when there were still rules to follow, and pretty much everything she had researched (and now no-one would ever know that she could do that much research on something) on the subject of time travel implied that even if she didn't pop out of existence as soon as the timeline changed, in order to create an optimum reality, the catalyst (which would be her) needed to eventually be removed.
And she'd always wondered what a heroic sacrifice felt like.
Screw it, she'd always wondered what being heroic felt like in general. Besides, there was nothing in those rules about futuristic Rangers playing substitute for their ill colour counterparts -mostly because whoever wrote the rules apparently wasn't a fan of science-fiction clichés, despite the universe being ran on those same clichés, and apparently because heroes apparently could never get ill (Shinji, being currently abed with flu, might have something to say about that, if he hadn't lost his voice), which made no sense- so she could do it if she wanted to.
It might wreck the Zord, but they still had their alien guide to help them rebuild it -she doesn't like to admit that her team didn't have a Zord for their Blue Ranger anymore, because Yuichiro had crashed it so many times that there was nothing left of it, and he tended to ride with Shuuya in his- and...it wasn't like they needed her around now. She had been kind enough to warn them, it wasn't her fault if they refused to listen.
She was just complicating things by being around anyway.
Particularly as her past self (or was it more accurate to call her a never self, as that Hirono would never become her and therefore they had no connection anymore, despite being technically the same person) was even more awkward around Shinji than she remembered, slightly more demanding of Megumi with regards to her hand-to-hand combat (this was a good thing, as it might save Megumi's life in the long run) and slightly kinder towards Yutaka (although, they still really didn't get along at all, and she can't even remember why anymore).
It wasn't just her.
The team were more awkward around each other than she had remembered. Maybe, if she left, they'd return to something approaching normal.
It wouldn't be completely out of her way to find out.
Title: Of The Year That Never Was
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for the finale of Season 3 of the New Series.
Summary: Harriet believes in protecting England. However, even she has to admit that there is a point where there is nothing left of England to protect.
She spends the first month driving.
Gets out of England -that country that had loved her and betrayed her and was now suffering because of it- and into France without stopping long enough to flash her ID and reveal her identity. She doesn't do that anymore anyway, Saxon wants her captured so he can use her to gloat against the Doctor, because if he hadn't caused her to resign, he would never have become Prime Minister, but...she can't blame the Doctor for it.
After all, it had been a different Doctor that had let her take the job in the first place (he had promised her a Golden Age, and after Saxon's reign of terror, she's wondering if he had meant that she was going to be a great Prime Minister or whether he had known, even then, that her successor would be so terrible that anyone would be an improvement) and she will admit, in hindsight, that she may have gone too far with the missiles.
But, equally so, she had been obligated to protect the United Kingdom. That was her job -and unlike him, she had been elected to do it, instead of just deciding to go overboard with a hero complex and a time machine- and to punish her for taking chances in order to protect her country would imply that he has never overreacted, always managed to save the universe without killing anything by persuading the attackers to surrender.
She knows that isn't the case.
She had been fortunate (or misfortunate, depending on which way she looked at it) enough to have a conversation with Jack Harkness, leader of Torchwood Three and former travelling companion of the Doctor's, after she lost her seat.
He had told her about the Time War (he hadn't particularly wanted to, but she did still have ties within the government itself, and she could have launched a rather...unwelcome public investigation into Torchwood's practices -she vaguely remembers threatening to have him arrested for the murder of Suzie Costello, and his medic arrested on two charges of sexual assault, among others...the things that Jack and his team usually covered up, but she had done her homework before the meeting and had copies everywhere, in case he slipped that amnesia drug into her tea and his hacker friend erased the files on her computer- so he had eventually given up and told her a little of what she wanted to know) and how the Doctor had apparently wiped out both his own race and the Daleks in order to protect the universe.
There was a difference between the Doctor's actions during the Time War, and her act of retaliation against the Sycorax. Since she had destroyed their ship, they had not attacked again. The Daleks had. Many times.
If she was a more cynical woman -but she wasn't, because backbenchers weren't supposed to be cynical, and she'd never planned to be anything more than that- she would have argued that the reason why he had been so angry with her was because her attempt at violence had succeeded and his hadn't. However, it was also possible that he hadn't wanted her to do it because he didn't want her to become like him -which was certainly possible, as the first Doctor she had met had certainly been bitter enough, if capable of greater kindness, perhaps, than his successor- which was the interpretation that she was holding to.
She meets the other woman in the barren wasteland that used to be Lithuania.
Unlike Harriet, she isn't travelling alone. There's a boy with her, who she claims is her son. They know each other by sight -her because of Harriet's former status as Prime Minister, Harriet because of the woman's connections with another Doctor, several decades ago, and her work as a journalist- but they have never met before.
"Would you like to join me? You look tired, and I could use the company."
She has food as well, which she shares with the pair of them on the trip to...wherever they're going. Harriet was planning on getting as far away from Saxon's Britain as she can and starting to form a resistance movement (guess she isn't as loyal as she thought she was, but the Toclafane killed the Queen and now she has no country, so the only thing she can be loyal to is herself), Sarah Jane admits that she was planning the same thing and they share stories until her car runs out of petrol. Then they get out and walk (making sure to avoid Toclafane activity at all times).
By the time that Martha finds them, three months later, they have formed quite a powerful underground movement -as Sarah Jane's charisma and Harriet's determination has pulled off what both would consider a miracle- and they help her, as much as they can. But they make it perfectly clear that they aren't doing it for her Doctor, and indeed, the Doctor that the pair of them are thinking of when the countdown hits zero, isn't her Doctor at all.
As a matter of fact, they aren't even thinking of the same Doctor.
It doesn't matter.
It never happened.