zomg lateness @_@
...Ahahahaha. Summer classes come along. And then Suikoden V.
At least my Muse has kind of decided upon what she wants to do.
98. Don’t Make a Sound. Citrus Avenue, boys’ side.
They had argued over Alistair, and as much as he hated to admit it the reason why they weren’t speaking now was because he was a stubborn bastard about things. He was making an issue out of something that had already been buried deep for Hikaru, and bringing it out was useless and did nothing but hurt them both. Nevertheless, he had brought it up and now here he was, alone in a room meant for two.
Mikhail flicked more ash off the end of his cigarette and focused his gaze on the poster tacked to the door, noting all the details of it, absorbing nothing. It was the quiet hour between sunset and the emergence of stars, where for a few blessed minutes all forms of light seemed brighter and more precious than they really were because darkness was a shock to one’s system after hours of daylight. Downstairs, the other residents of the boys’ boarding house were having dinner. He had elected to miss it.
The door opened, replacing the image of the poster with the sight of Hikaru entering. Their eyes met for a split second before they both broke away, Hikaru to pull off his shoes and Mikhail to the window. The older student listened to his roommate shut the door and cross over to his computer, discarding the things of the day as he went. His step was light, and his fingers barely grazed the keyboard buttons when he typed. The boy crossed his vision once again, briefly, like a ghost. Then the shower came on.
Mikhail had reached the last one in his pack, the wish stick, by the time Hikaru stepped out, half-naked and clean and toweling his hair dry as he walked to their closet. The boy let it hang there around his neck as he rifled through his clothes. Mikhail had to push this aside once he stepped forward, to kiss the back of Hikaru’s neck. He knew he was forgiven in the next kiss because the words lingered, soft and silent, on the boy’s lips.
Neither of them would be alone that night.
99. Afterglow. Citrus Avenue, girls’ side.
Making love to Emir was all about exploration, and making all that was familiar and lovely to her thrilling and new. Neeka liked to close her eyes when they were tangled together on the bed and stretch her fingers out over this new surface of softness and curves to search for landmarks of previous expeditions, and then mark them with the flags of her kisses. Beneath her hands Emir was a work of living art, unthinking but feeling every moist moment with the wholeness of her being. She knew that she had discovered something precious whenever Emir would gasp, or moan, or murmur some sweet wordless thing into her ear.
They had taken to using toys recently, and whenever the vibrator was in the picture the position was always missionary, with Neeka on top to work things and Emir beneath. Of course, Emir was hardly passive. She always managed to reciprocate everything she was being given to the best of her abilities, in the way her fingers tangled through Neeka’s hair, or how she would pay loving attention to her roommate’s breasts with lips, teeth, breath and tongue. Neeka excelled in the art of loving another girl, and Emir was her best student.
Sometimes, in their quiet sessions together under a common set of bed sheets, they would consider the future. Then, after a little while, they would leave care to the wind and dive into each other again.
100. Hourglass. Final Fantasy 7. Advent Children.
Now I don’t propose to know everything about the Geostigma disease, so let me play around a little here. :3
From the moment President Shinra had brought him back from Wutai and into the service of the Turks and the Corporation, Tseng possessed the uncanny ability to remove his emotions from any of his actions, his words, his observations. He knew they lingered there somewhere at the back of his head and heart and lungs, but most days he was able to ignore it. This was how he had survived the grueling curriculum and the discrimination of colleagues and instructors alike in the Academy. This was how he had risen from dirt to clouds in the Corporation hierarchy, becoming leader of the Turks.
The Geostigma challenged all of this. Moving through the slums of Midgar was like traveling through a fallout shelter, or worse, a week-old, fully stocked crypt. Recall the girl with the melted fingers. Recall the boy with one eyeball hanging from a muscled string. Recall the baby with the missing face.
For a time he was able to move through the day and witness all of this by pulling the shutters over his eyes and rehearsing to himself the old mantras on duty, honor, and commitment. Being a Turk meant being something beyond a citizen, common employee, a spy, and a SOLDIER. It would shame the force if their leader, so recently returned from the dead, was found kneeling by a gutter, dispersing his breakfast every time he was on a survey of the city for the President. For this reason he tried to politely disregard the signals of disease in his leader and let him continue his breakneck pace down the grand road to recovery of the Shinra Corporation and all of Gaia. Then one morning he walked into the President’s office to find the young man curled up on his side and he knew that he could no longer ignore it.
Rufus’ eyes remained focused on him the moment Tseng stepped into the room, challenging the latter to say something about the fact that for the third time this week his President was a crumpled heap on the floor by his bed. Tseng knew better than to respond to it; he would be playing right into the younger man’s hands if he so much as twitched his eyebrow.
“You should have called me, sir.”
“The day I’m dependent on any of you is the day I shoot myself.”
The imperiousness was gone from Rufus’ tone, leaving his words and voice cold. Tseng knew at that point that he was coming dangerously close to crossing the line with his president, but there wasn’t the time to consider it. He would deal with the consequences later, if there were any.
A call to Reno and Rude cleared a path from the office to the front door of all personnel save members of the Turks; when the Geostigma had started taking its toll on him, Rufus had been quick to inform his personal task force that knowledge of his illness was to stay within their immediate circle. A Planet in shambles and a city in ruin did not need the one of its only remaining leaders struck down by a debilitating disease. Considering how much of a success they were at keeping the Geostigma a dirty little secret, doubtless people would be utterly shocked at the President’s very sudden death if the epidemic wasn’t stopped soon.
Tseng removed his thoughts from that trajectory and focused on the task of moving his President back to his residence in the first upper sector. Beside him Rufus coughed and tried not to lean on him for support as much as he could.
The President’s bedroom was often associated with warmer events in Tseng’s memory; he could no longer remember the exact point where that had ended and the nightmares in gauze and antiseptic had begun. Tseng wheeled Rufus inside, leaving the President on his own long enough for him to fetch the medical supplies from the cabinets. His superior would not look at him as he returned, and when Tseng reached out to bring him to the bathroom he brushed the Turk’s hands away from him and walked there on his own. There wasn’t any reason for Tseng to hesitate in the doorway or turn his gaze when Rufus stripped off his clothes; he had seen the younger man in various degrees of nakedness and at various ages over the years. He wondered if it was the Geostigma and soon perished the thought.
Ten minutes stretched themselves out into something that felt like an hour of leaning against the wall just beside the doorway, listening to the young man on the other side move as little as possible in the water to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. Tseng lit up a cigarette, finished it in five. He was no longer used to smoking. Rufus’ voice drew him away from having another one, his second in years. Sitting in the tub amidst all the white and teal blue tiles and mirrors, he couldn’t remember ever thinking his President looked so small.
When Rufus reached out with thinning arms to hold on to his neck and bury his face into his chest, Tseng said nothing and did not move. He would pretend he did not taste the salt of tears on those lips. He would pretend that Rufus wasn’t shaking and he would take it into himself so that know one would ever know. In the morning after and the days to follow Rufus would go on with his life as though the Geostigma had always been a small inconvenience that he had learned to mow over and Tseng lock away the memory of the other night in a place only he could reach, and he would not bother looking for it.
101. The Riskbreaker, on the Proper Use of the Void. Endtimes.
“Aw, c’mon, man! All of that cosmic power has got to go somewhere, you know!”
“…There is no chance in hell of me doing that, Duskrider.”
“But it’ll be educational, Clayce!”
“For the last time, I am NOT going to use the Void to channel surf for porn!”
102. A Circle of Echoes. Thick as Thieves.
This one is a mood piece, and I doubt it makes any sense. It’s long too. -_-;
They were connected by a bond that was thicker than blood, higher than heaven and deeper than sin. That was the most un-poetic description that one could give to a relationship like theirs and he still hesitated to look at it that way. The nature of human communication was that it was erratic and as far from constant as promises and fulfillment were from each other. Following their very first encounter, when his superiors had approached him on a battlefield littered with monsters he had killed to present the boy in black with the violet eyes and the crooked smile, they had been together. In a week they were inseparable, and in less than two years they were, in the crudest sense, two halves of a whole, superior to most others when they were apart, and divine perfection when they were together. By name they were Malice. By rites of combat, they became the Malice Kings.
Strangely, it was not their decision to sleep together that he remembered most vividly; instead, it was a collection of small snapshots, some of them brilliantly sunlit and others shrouded in the odd half-dark of twilight. The boyish turn of that face. The depth of that look. The smoothness of that skin, his smell. His words, his laughter. Their being together seemed like the most natural thing to do, and the only ceremony Rui ascribed to it was he was to become Hikaru’s first time and he would not stand for making it unpleasant. He loved the boy, the other half to their Duality, too much for that, but maybe love was an insufficient word.
Perhaps his mistake had been in believing that what they had was perfect and they could take on whatever stood in their way. Perhaps it had been in failing to recognize that the coldness in those eyes had been the beginnings of vengeance, or in stepping back and saying nothing when Hikaru had smiled and told him his intentions of becoming a candidate for leadership of Zangyaku, in the name of a dead Shield. All he knew was that in three months it was over. Three months, and it was as though all the years behind them meant nothing and he could not save the boy and could not stop him from wherever he was going.
Rui lived like the dead in the passage of time following Hikaru’s return, Hikaru’s ascension to leadership. His departure from Zangyaku and journey up the ranks to the position of commander within Japan’s Enforcers possessed little meaning for him, and it wasn’t long before he lived for the disruptions Hikaru would bring with him whenever he would turn up at the oddest times, imploring upon him for help. And Rui never failed to answer, every single time. He was not his own man. He had been the leader between them, the one with the voice, but whatever he possessed was reduced to ash by that gaze.
When silence pushed them apart yet again he did not react well to it, but outward there were no indications of his anxiety or his anger. Somewhere alone Hikaru was breaking apart and using the last of his strength that keep Rui away and again, Rui could do nothing. In those soundless years he moved through the days with his eyes on the horizon but his mind religiously noting every rumor, every possible signal, on what could be going on at the center of his former organization. And he waited.
They met again by accident, at a party neither of them had intended upon going to. Rui had come alone. Hikaru was with his family. They escaped the crowd and spoke in the garden with a distance between them like glass, but Hikaru was letting him back into his life and that was enough for Rui to go by until he could figure out his next move. He had never imagined that turning up at Zangyaku at Hikaru’s request would mean coming face to face with the one who had ripped them apart in the first place. He had never thought that he would be hearing Kasumi Aoi tell him that Alistair was one Hikaru loved the most.
He had every reason not to trust this outsider, but if there was anything Rui had learned after everything it was the ability to wait and see.
I'll need to get used to writing long stuff again, I think.
At least my Muse has kind of decided upon what she wants to do.
98. Don’t Make a Sound. Citrus Avenue, boys’ side.
They had argued over Alistair, and as much as he hated to admit it the reason why they weren’t speaking now was because he was a stubborn bastard about things. He was making an issue out of something that had already been buried deep for Hikaru, and bringing it out was useless and did nothing but hurt them both. Nevertheless, he had brought it up and now here he was, alone in a room meant for two.
Mikhail flicked more ash off the end of his cigarette and focused his gaze on the poster tacked to the door, noting all the details of it, absorbing nothing. It was the quiet hour between sunset and the emergence of stars, where for a few blessed minutes all forms of light seemed brighter and more precious than they really were because darkness was a shock to one’s system after hours of daylight. Downstairs, the other residents of the boys’ boarding house were having dinner. He had elected to miss it.
The door opened, replacing the image of the poster with the sight of Hikaru entering. Their eyes met for a split second before they both broke away, Hikaru to pull off his shoes and Mikhail to the window. The older student listened to his roommate shut the door and cross over to his computer, discarding the things of the day as he went. His step was light, and his fingers barely grazed the keyboard buttons when he typed. The boy crossed his vision once again, briefly, like a ghost. Then the shower came on.
Mikhail had reached the last one in his pack, the wish stick, by the time Hikaru stepped out, half-naked and clean and toweling his hair dry as he walked to their closet. The boy let it hang there around his neck as he rifled through his clothes. Mikhail had to push this aside once he stepped forward, to kiss the back of Hikaru’s neck. He knew he was forgiven in the next kiss because the words lingered, soft and silent, on the boy’s lips.
Neither of them would be alone that night.
99. Afterglow. Citrus Avenue, girls’ side.
Making love to Emir was all about exploration, and making all that was familiar and lovely to her thrilling and new. Neeka liked to close her eyes when they were tangled together on the bed and stretch her fingers out over this new surface of softness and curves to search for landmarks of previous expeditions, and then mark them with the flags of her kisses. Beneath her hands Emir was a work of living art, unthinking but feeling every moist moment with the wholeness of her being. She knew that she had discovered something precious whenever Emir would gasp, or moan, or murmur some sweet wordless thing into her ear.
They had taken to using toys recently, and whenever the vibrator was in the picture the position was always missionary, with Neeka on top to work things and Emir beneath. Of course, Emir was hardly passive. She always managed to reciprocate everything she was being given to the best of her abilities, in the way her fingers tangled through Neeka’s hair, or how she would pay loving attention to her roommate’s breasts with lips, teeth, breath and tongue. Neeka excelled in the art of loving another girl, and Emir was her best student.
Sometimes, in their quiet sessions together under a common set of bed sheets, they would consider the future. Then, after a little while, they would leave care to the wind and dive into each other again.
100. Hourglass. Final Fantasy 7. Advent Children.
Now I don’t propose to know everything about the Geostigma disease, so let me play around a little here. :3
From the moment President Shinra had brought him back from Wutai and into the service of the Turks and the Corporation, Tseng possessed the uncanny ability to remove his emotions from any of his actions, his words, his observations. He knew they lingered there somewhere at the back of his head and heart and lungs, but most days he was able to ignore it. This was how he had survived the grueling curriculum and the discrimination of colleagues and instructors alike in the Academy. This was how he had risen from dirt to clouds in the Corporation hierarchy, becoming leader of the Turks.
The Geostigma challenged all of this. Moving through the slums of Midgar was like traveling through a fallout shelter, or worse, a week-old, fully stocked crypt. Recall the girl with the melted fingers. Recall the boy with one eyeball hanging from a muscled string. Recall the baby with the missing face.
For a time he was able to move through the day and witness all of this by pulling the shutters over his eyes and rehearsing to himself the old mantras on duty, honor, and commitment. Being a Turk meant being something beyond a citizen, common employee, a spy, and a SOLDIER. It would shame the force if their leader, so recently returned from the dead, was found kneeling by a gutter, dispersing his breakfast every time he was on a survey of the city for the President. For this reason he tried to politely disregard the signals of disease in his leader and let him continue his breakneck pace down the grand road to recovery of the Shinra Corporation and all of Gaia. Then one morning he walked into the President’s office to find the young man curled up on his side and he knew that he could no longer ignore it.
Rufus’ eyes remained focused on him the moment Tseng stepped into the room, challenging the latter to say something about the fact that for the third time this week his President was a crumpled heap on the floor by his bed. Tseng knew better than to respond to it; he would be playing right into the younger man’s hands if he so much as twitched his eyebrow.
“You should have called me, sir.”
“The day I’m dependent on any of you is the day I shoot myself.”
The imperiousness was gone from Rufus’ tone, leaving his words and voice cold. Tseng knew at that point that he was coming dangerously close to crossing the line with his president, but there wasn’t the time to consider it. He would deal with the consequences later, if there were any.
A call to Reno and Rude cleared a path from the office to the front door of all personnel save members of the Turks; when the Geostigma had started taking its toll on him, Rufus had been quick to inform his personal task force that knowledge of his illness was to stay within their immediate circle. A Planet in shambles and a city in ruin did not need the one of its only remaining leaders struck down by a debilitating disease. Considering how much of a success they were at keeping the Geostigma a dirty little secret, doubtless people would be utterly shocked at the President’s very sudden death if the epidemic wasn’t stopped soon.
Tseng removed his thoughts from that trajectory and focused on the task of moving his President back to his residence in the first upper sector. Beside him Rufus coughed and tried not to lean on him for support as much as he could.
The President’s bedroom was often associated with warmer events in Tseng’s memory; he could no longer remember the exact point where that had ended and the nightmares in gauze and antiseptic had begun. Tseng wheeled Rufus inside, leaving the President on his own long enough for him to fetch the medical supplies from the cabinets. His superior would not look at him as he returned, and when Tseng reached out to bring him to the bathroom he brushed the Turk’s hands away from him and walked there on his own. There wasn’t any reason for Tseng to hesitate in the doorway or turn his gaze when Rufus stripped off his clothes; he had seen the younger man in various degrees of nakedness and at various ages over the years. He wondered if it was the Geostigma and soon perished the thought.
Ten minutes stretched themselves out into something that felt like an hour of leaning against the wall just beside the doorway, listening to the young man on the other side move as little as possible in the water to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. Tseng lit up a cigarette, finished it in five. He was no longer used to smoking. Rufus’ voice drew him away from having another one, his second in years. Sitting in the tub amidst all the white and teal blue tiles and mirrors, he couldn’t remember ever thinking his President looked so small.
When Rufus reached out with thinning arms to hold on to his neck and bury his face into his chest, Tseng said nothing and did not move. He would pretend he did not taste the salt of tears on those lips. He would pretend that Rufus wasn’t shaking and he would take it into himself so that know one would ever know. In the morning after and the days to follow Rufus would go on with his life as though the Geostigma had always been a small inconvenience that he had learned to mow over and Tseng lock away the memory of the other night in a place only he could reach, and he would not bother looking for it.
101. The Riskbreaker, on the Proper Use of the Void. Endtimes.
“Aw, c’mon, man! All of that cosmic power has got to go somewhere, you know!”
“…There is no chance in hell of me doing that, Duskrider.”
“But it’ll be educational, Clayce!”
“For the last time, I am NOT going to use the Void to channel surf for porn!”
102. A Circle of Echoes. Thick as Thieves.
This one is a mood piece, and I doubt it makes any sense. It’s long too. -_-;
They were connected by a bond that was thicker than blood, higher than heaven and deeper than sin. That was the most un-poetic description that one could give to a relationship like theirs and he still hesitated to look at it that way. The nature of human communication was that it was erratic and as far from constant as promises and fulfillment were from each other. Following their very first encounter, when his superiors had approached him on a battlefield littered with monsters he had killed to present the boy in black with the violet eyes and the crooked smile, they had been together. In a week they were inseparable, and in less than two years they were, in the crudest sense, two halves of a whole, superior to most others when they were apart, and divine perfection when they were together. By name they were Malice. By rites of combat, they became the Malice Kings.
Strangely, it was not their decision to sleep together that he remembered most vividly; instead, it was a collection of small snapshots, some of them brilliantly sunlit and others shrouded in the odd half-dark of twilight. The boyish turn of that face. The depth of that look. The smoothness of that skin, his smell. His words, his laughter. Their being together seemed like the most natural thing to do, and the only ceremony Rui ascribed to it was he was to become Hikaru’s first time and he would not stand for making it unpleasant. He loved the boy, the other half to their Duality, too much for that, but maybe love was an insufficient word.
Perhaps his mistake had been in believing that what they had was perfect and they could take on whatever stood in their way. Perhaps it had been in failing to recognize that the coldness in those eyes had been the beginnings of vengeance, or in stepping back and saying nothing when Hikaru had smiled and told him his intentions of becoming a candidate for leadership of Zangyaku, in the name of a dead Shield. All he knew was that in three months it was over. Three months, and it was as though all the years behind them meant nothing and he could not save the boy and could not stop him from wherever he was going.
Rui lived like the dead in the passage of time following Hikaru’s return, Hikaru’s ascension to leadership. His departure from Zangyaku and journey up the ranks to the position of commander within Japan’s Enforcers possessed little meaning for him, and it wasn’t long before he lived for the disruptions Hikaru would bring with him whenever he would turn up at the oddest times, imploring upon him for help. And Rui never failed to answer, every single time. He was not his own man. He had been the leader between them, the one with the voice, but whatever he possessed was reduced to ash by that gaze.
When silence pushed them apart yet again he did not react well to it, but outward there were no indications of his anxiety or his anger. Somewhere alone Hikaru was breaking apart and using the last of his strength that keep Rui away and again, Rui could do nothing. In those soundless years he moved through the days with his eyes on the horizon but his mind religiously noting every rumor, every possible signal, on what could be going on at the center of his former organization. And he waited.
They met again by accident, at a party neither of them had intended upon going to. Rui had come alone. Hikaru was with his family. They escaped the crowd and spoke in the garden with a distance between them like glass, but Hikaru was letting him back into his life and that was enough for Rui to go by until he could figure out his next move. He had never imagined that turning up at Zangyaku at Hikaru’s request would mean coming face to face with the one who had ripped them apart in the first place. He had never thought that he would be hearing Kasumi Aoi tell him that Alistair was one Hikaru loved the most.
He had every reason not to trust this outsider, but if there was anything Rui had learned after everything it was the ability to wait and see.
I'll need to get used to writing long stuff again, I think.