short dgm prompts
Once upon a time,
zephy_magnum felt that the circus outtakes didn't have nearly enough Kanda in them, and so she wrote me a Kanda prompt to fix this problem. From there, things got completely out of hand. Mask and Mirror actually began as a 500-word prompt (any!Lavi: bandanna, cereal, fireworks).
At this point, Zephy seems to be writing me 500-word prompts for everything I've ever read. o_O No, but it's fun. :)
So here are a few of the prompts. There will be more. Oh, there will be more.
(I don't own D.Gray-Man, no, no.)
Drabble request that somehow became 200 words:
circus!Kanda
sweaty, grasshopper, clouds
The weather was cloudy and stifling; everything blanketed in wet, pre-thunderstorm heat. Walker had decided it was too miserable to practice today.
Walker may have had a point, but Kanda wasn't planning on admitting it. Wasting an entire day was ridiculous. He could still throw knives, even in the heat.
And so he was leaning against the side of one of the trailers, throwing knives at a grasshopper. He waited until the grasshopper jumped, then he threw. Given how sweaty his hands were, he thought he was doing pretty well.
"I can't believe you can't hit that bug," Lavi said, settling next to him, overfamiliar as always.
"I don't want to hit the bug," Kanda snapped. "I'm not supposed to hit the girl, so I'm not going to hit the bug."
"Anyway, you're scaring the circus people," Lavi went on as if he hadn't heard a word. "They prefer to throw knives indoors, where they're less likely to accidentally maim a passerby."
Kanda thought about that. If people were scared, then people must be watching him.
He considered his audience, and then he made sure his next knife didn't miss.
He didn’t know what the rabbit found so funny. Annoying.
500 word request:
circus!Kanda
rain, lightning, clowns, mountain
It turned out that thunderstorms were no good for a circus. Kanda had never given that any thought before, and he could have done without evidence.
As fate would have it-and fate clearly had it in for the beansprout-they were on the side of a mountain when the storm hit. Well, 'mountain' was generous. 'Hill', maybe. Even so, they made their hills mean in Wales, and several of the trailers were threatening to get swept into the stream below.
Kanda would bet that stream was gorgeous under normal circumstances. It was framed in pretty banks and trees and green leafy things; it was managing to be attractive even in the storm, lit only by flashes of lightning. Somehow, that just made him resent it more.
Because of fate and the beansprout's bad relationship with it, it turned out to be the clowns' job to run ropes along the sides of the trailers between them and the edge of the road nearest the river. This was some half-assed attempt to keep the trailers from sliding into the water, though what good it was going to do when the road washed away, Kanda didn't know.
Meanwhile, anyone Jack deemed strong enough was supposed to pull on the ropes, and everybody else was supposed to tie more ropes to the front of the trailers, push, or get the hell out of the way. Kanda had been pulling ropes until he was distracted by the beansprout. Specifically, by the beansprout's various death-defying leaps and sundry attempts to drown himself.
As Jack dashed past, Kanda seized his arm and pointed toward Walker, who was leaning precariously over the edge of a trailer, reaching for a rope to thread through a metal loop about halfway up the side.
"What the fuck?" Kanda shouted.
"What the fuck are you asking me?" Jack demanded.
"Why the clowns?" Kanda clarified impatiently.
"Oh." Jack paused in his panic long enough to smile a little. "Cuz they like it. Look at them, kid. They're having fun."
Kanda looked again. Walker was now hanging upside down with his legs tangled in a tarp, throwing coils of rope to the dwarf, who was perched precariously in a tree, the better to reach the top of the next trailer back. Meanwhile, the girl clown was standing on the hitch of another trailer, trying to chuck rope around its side to the tall clown without falling into the mud.
And they were laughing.
"What the fuck?" Kanda snapped in their general direction.
"Let it go, kid," Jack advised, comfortably resigned. "Clowns are goddamn insane. Don't argue with it, just take advantage of it." He gave Kanda a long look that Kanda didn't want to understand. "It's cute that you're worried, though," he announced with a smirk, then ran off to shout more instructions.
Kanda stormed back to the ropes, hating rain, hating the circus, and hating Jack. And over everything, he could hear crazy Allen Walker laughing.
He hated Walker most of all.
500 word request:
circus!Kanda:
flowers, paint, owls
The weird thing about Lenalee is that she still acts like a little girl sometimes. She acts more like a little girl than she did when she was a little girl, really.
Whatever makes her happy, though, because when she's unhappy, that makes everybody else useless. It'd be nice if the beansprout and the rabbit could focus on their damn jobs, but since they can't, it's best when Lenalee's happy.
That's why it's not worth arguing with her when she starts doing stuff like picking flowers with the beansprout. You might wonder what the hell is wrong with the beansprout, but it's not worth asking that either. The answer would take all day, for one thing.
Flowers tend to remind me of the damn lotus, which reminds me of stupid things I’ve done, which puts me in a lousy mood. But if they made Lenalee happy, I wasn’t going to argue. Not much, anyway.
We weren’t actually supposed to be picking flowers, surprising though it may seem. We were supposed to be repainting the trailers. The fat guy says that ugly trailers mean cheap customers, or some crap like that. Whatever. I was painting the trailers because that's what they were paying us to do. Even the stupid rabbit was painting the trailers, although not in a way that made any kind of sense. He was painting owls on them. "To impart wisdom," he said. Like there’s some great call for wisdom in a circus. Like painting owls would help with that anyway. Idiot.
But he was painting, while Lenalee and the beansprout were...whatever the hell. Flowers.
"Are you two planning to paint, or are we going to be here all fucking night?" I asked. Given the situation, I think it was pretty goddamn restrained.
"Um, sorry Kanda," the beansprout said, because he's a lying little shit. When he’s actually sorry, he doesn’t dare apologize. But he did put the flowers down and pick a paintbrush up, so I didn't care.
Lenalee, though, was having a full-on kid day. When Lenalee has a kid day, she's not just a kid; she's kind of a brat kid. Apparently she didn’t feel like painting. What she felt like doing instead was dipping flowers in a paint bucket and throwing them against the trailer, where they made flower-shaped splotches.
"Lenalee?" the rabbit asked in that annoying fake-worried voice. "What are you...trying for, there? Artistically, I mean."
"It looks like fireworks," she told him, and then she started laughing. Once she starts laughing, it is over. She won't say a single sensible thing for the rest of the day.
I haven't seen her this bratty for a long time. A long time. Not since...a couple of years after her brother took over the exorcists, maybe. Weird. She's backsliding.
Or maybe she really is happy.
"Here, Kanda," she said with her brat smile, handing me some big yellow flower. "You keep that one."
"What the hell? Get away from me," I said. "I hate flowers."
500 word request:
any!Kanda
tired, black, chips (American or British - up to you)
"For the last time," Kanda said with rapidly fraying patience, "I am not eating fish and chips. Give me my soba."
"Oh, but Kanda," Jerry said fretfully, clutching a spatula. "It's not healthy to eat soba all the time. How can you keep up your strength if you won't eat anything but those noodles? You need real food too!"
"Since when is fish and chips real food?" Kanda demanded, then shook his head, sorry he'd responded at all to Jerry's asinine arguments. "Look, give me my food, or I won't eat at all."
To Kanda's horror, this caused Jerry to tear up.
It wasn't fair. He'd had a long day. Lenalee had come running to him while he was meditating again, which...she could do, but it didn't make for peaceful meditation. Goddamn Leverrier.
After that, he'd worked more on the beansprout's fencing, but it was incredible how bad the guy was. How bad he was when he wasn't cheating, anyway.
In the meantime, the rabbit was being even more annoying than usual, and Komui was threatening to move the Order for no good reason.
Kanda was really goddamn tired and hungry. And now Jerry was crying at him.
“I do my best!” Jerry wailed. “I try and try. You’re all so young, and no mothers to watch over you! I think what your poor mother would say if she knew I was letting you eat nothing but soba, and I die a little inside! Why do you have to be so stubborn?”
So Jerry was trying to be his mother. That made a lot of sense, actually, in a mind-bending kind of way.
He wasn’t succeeding, though. Kanda could remember his mother, and Jerry wasn’t even close.
Kanda’s mother had never scolded him about food. Maybe she just hadn’t had time. She’d been small and slim-delicate, people had said. She’d had long, silky black hair that he’d always wanted to play with. She was so proud of her hair. She was probably even a little vain of it, Kanda reflected fondly. But why shouldn’t she have been? It was beautiful.
She had cooked, of course. Inarizushi and kitsune udon and hanami dango in the spring, but, for whatever reason, never soba. Maybe she hadn’t cared for it.
The beansprout ate dango all the time. It bothered Kanda, but he couldn’t say why. The beansprout was always annoying.
“Oh, honey,” Jerry whispered, and Kanda snapped back to the present, appalled that he’d let himself daydream. Now he had no idea why Jerry looked so sad; he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Here,” Jerry said softly, still with that look. “You have your soba. I’m so sorry, honey. I didn’t understand.”
Kanda scowled, seized his soba, and left. Didn’t understand what? First Jerry was trying to be his mother, then he was apologizing for…for what?
Kanda sat at his table with his soba, and vowed to forget the whole thing. It wasn’t his problem that everyone else in the Order was crazy.
500 word request (give or take 60 words):
any!Allen
humid, toenails, sink
Allen stood with his head in a sink full of cool water--or it had been cool when he put his head in it; now it was only tepid--and he ran through his litany of woe.
First of all, it was, at best estimate, about a million degrees outside, and on top of that, it was so humid that walking out the door meant being instantly drenched in sweat. You waded down the street more than you walked. He bathed twice a day, but he never felt clean, because he never actually dried off. He expected mold to start growing on him at any moment.
India. It looked so exotic and exciting on a map. And then you arrived, and you didn't have time to notice the exciting parts, being distracted by the cows and the heat and the smells and the oh my God, malaria.
Well. The cows were kind of interesting.
Next on his list was the condition of the bathroom, and, while he was on the subject, the condition of the entire inn. They weren't awash in cash; he understood that. He understood that better than anyone. But they didn't need to stay in this pit. Surely the side of the road would be better-and cheaper!-than this. Given the look of the people working here, the side of the road might be safer.
In a fit of masochism, he lifted his dripping head from the sink (which he'd cleaned before putting his head in it) to check the state of the floor. During his quick glance, he noted three enormous insects, some he-hoped-it-was-mud, and a lot of what looked to be toenail clippings.
He didn't want to know.
Having mournfully plunged his head back into the sink, he considered the last, but by no means the least, of his problems.
His stupid master.
His stupid master, who was even now drinking away money they didn't have. After all, why should it matter to him whether they had the money? Why should it matter, when he could (and would) just turn to Allen and say, "Go buy me dinner, stupid apprentice. Go rent us a room. Go pay off my debts. Go, slave, go!"
Allen burbled unhappily into the water.
At this point, Timcampy decided that Allen had used up his allotted angst time, and started nudging him with a towel. (A clean towel. Allen had cleaned all the towels. And the sheets.) Tim usually started with gentle reminders, then worked his way up to savage biting if ignored. With that in mind, Allen pulled his head out of the sink and let Tim drop the towel over it.
"I know, Tim. First we have to play cards." Allen got his hair as dry as possible (the mold, he could feel it growing), then lowered the towel to see Timcampy hovering in front of him with a dry shirt.
"Then we have to give some money to Rajesh before he breaks my kneecaps." Timcampy tugged at the shirt as Allen put it on. He wasn’t as helpful as he thought he was.
"And then we have to fish my stupid master out of whatever hole he's spending all our money in." Tim couldn't actually laugh at Allen's pain, but sometimes he distinctly gave the impression that he was trying.
"Okay, Tim," Allen sighed, resigned. "I'm ready."