Life runs in cycles, of doing and waiting, Nino announces one day. They lie in bed, in an unremarkable hotel; the crisp white sheets with an unimaginably high thread count are creased and folded around their nudity, retaining the warmth of their skin. But I always seem to find myself in the Waiting Place, he says, turning on his side and sighing. ( Read more... )

            When Nino found Sho slumped against the wall, still wearing the green surgical gown, he felt like crying for his friend: Sho had never looked so absolutely without hope.  Nino called Sho's parents and told them as much as he could: it was a healthy girl, thirty-one hundred grams and forty-eight centimetres long but the mother had passed ( Read more... )

Title: Exercises in Humanity
Rating: PG for swears.
Notes: I got this idea from applepluspie , and I shamelessly imitated her wickedly cool formating -- all credit goes to her. Five drabbes of exactly 100 words, in 1 sentence, each centered around one member of Arashi. I asked sanctified_x for prompts and this is what I did with them. I wanted to go darker with the ( Read more... )

A pair of messengers returned from the borders with more unsettling news of sedition seeping further inwards, closer to villages and townships. A messenger from Kyoto carrying a letter bearing Kimura’s seal arrived with little more advice than, “You know what needs to be done. Do what you have to.” Being more than a week’s ride away ( Read more... )

As the wheel of the seasons turned, the equinox passed and the heavy heat of summer settled. A sullen tension had fallen over Iwatsuki castle since the arrival of the first reports of insurgence. And yet, despite the feeling of something malicious lurking over the horizon that wrapped itself around everyone in the castle, Sho alone ( Read more... )

Sho sat on the front veranda of the guest house, staring out into the darkening night. It had been four days since he and Ohno had been called to the keep for the latest report of the churning tide of unrest in the province. It had been four days since he had been granted a view of Ohno that he had never seen before. He had learned ( Read more... )

Aiba Masaki did not have a childhood.  Ever since he could remember, he had worked.  He had never thought of himself as more than a commodity.

The year his mother fell pregnant, there was a drought and crops failed to seed.  What should have been a happy occasion was met with anxiety and despair.  His father was a low- ( Read more... )

Equilibrium:
          n. an equal balance between any powers or influences; a state of mental or emotional balance.

Chapter One

Sho exhaled.  He closed his eyes and finally let his body feel the tension and strain of the four-day journey.  A member of the household staff had brought his ( Read more... )

Nino had a thing, a habit, a tendency that only four people and his mother knew about, and only because they had walked into his apartment unannounced and saw him doing it.  Nino liked to be naked.  He would sleep naked, walk out from the bathroom after a shower naked (save for the towel draped over his wet hair), lounge around his ( Read more... )