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firstlightI went to bed I think around ten because I was feeling a little tired and a little unwell. I was going to read! I was! Then... it was 9am. Uhm. I guess I... needed some more sleep. I dreamed about chasing cats. O_o;;;
I'm feeling a little generally uneasy about life but... *shrugs* what's new?
Have some random rough snippets from stuff which I wish I could make go somewhere. 2 x Tenipuri, 2 x Saiyuki, almost all outrageously AU. Not edited. (Hah, I jump on Pez's WIP-sharing bandwagon. It's not like I have anything else to share lately.)
1. Cyberpunk D1 snippet
"Where the fuck are we?" Niou asked, sliding back into consciousness, blinking his eyes open to the greyness of the sky maybe an hour before dawn, almost shivering from the cold that went with the tail end of the night. He was vaguely aware that the slightly elderly car engine had just stuttered down to silence, leaving them alone with the constant urban hum of wherever they were.
"Chiba," Yagyuu said. He was staring straight ahead through the faintly grimy windshield, as though he was looking for something. Someone?
The last communication they'd received had been pretty clear, if brief, and it hadn't involved Chiba at all except maybe Narita airport, which this sure as hell wasn't. Still, he might've slept through some other message, with things as they were - he felt blank, cut off, alone in his head. No link, no internal background noise. Isolated from the system.
"Yeah?"
"I know a man here who may be of assistance."
Niou kept silent, burrowed his way further down into the seat, pulled his jacket tighter around him and stared at the blank dashboard, guessing what the readings would've been if it was on. Five o'clock in the morning, maybe, and somewhere around freezing point. They'd no heating now the engine was off, and his breath was just beginning to cloud in the air - great. Wonders of modern technology. There had to be twenty quicker ways of getting where they were going, and in more comfort, but... well, there was something to be said for sliding under the radar. Especially right now. They could wait for Yagyuu's man.
He was a long time coming. Niou, eyes closed again on the grounds that there was fuck all to look at, counted the minutes.
Somewhere around three quarters of an hour, with the world getting brighter even through his closed eyelids, he was beginning to wonder.
"Who're we meeting, Yagyuu?"
"Just... a man. He is rather unusual, I believe."
"You believe."
"He is a contact from the hub. He's done work for me on several occasions before, but I do not know him in person except by, ah, reputation."
It felt counter-intuitive to conduct this conversation out loud, where any random person could overhear. Niou suppressed the urge to kick his link into life; it wouldn't respond anyway and he'd just give himself a fucking headache. Some random person overhearing mattered less than the possibility of more specific people tapping in to their conversation.
Anyway, great. They were meeting some guy Yagyuu kind of knew, and while Yagyuu pretty much knew what he was doing when it came to this shit there was more than a bit of automatic paranoia built into Niou's system. Assuming everyone was a potential threat saved time and sometimes bloodloss. He liked to think of his basic mistrust of humanity as a job skill.
2. Gojyo/Hakkai sci-fi AU
This is a world in high contrast. Clinical, clean, white – that's what they show you on the brochures – but then if you turn the wrong corner, walk down the wrong street, you find the places that got forgotten. No street names, no lights - just half-destroyed shells of buildings and people who, for one reason or another, don't like to go out into the brigher areas.
Gojyo's got enough reasons, and hiding in the darkest corners he can find has bought him a fair bit of time, but sooner or later things tend to catch up with you. People tend to catch up, too. They must've learnt from the last team they sent after him, because there's a hell of a lot of them - and they're well armed.
That doesn't stop him taking a couple of them down, giving a few more scars to remember him by before they have time to get him – tranquiliser, he thinks, slumping helplessly. They built him well, but they built in enough weaknesses too.
So that's that, pretty much.
When he wakes up he doesn't open his eyes to the inside of a laboratory. That's the first mystery.
Only the first.
"Ah. Please lie still," a voice tells him when he goes to stand. "I am afraid you will find movement disorientating for a while."
He's never been one to take people at their word, but trying to sit up proves the mystery voice's point pretty quickly. He gives up, settles for turning his head to the side to see more of the room.
It's… weird. It's like nothing he's ever seen before. Chaotic, but not in the decayed way of the forgotten places - just cluttered with pieces of technology he half-recognises, pieces he doesn't recognise at all, broken things, things that maybe never had much of a purpose to start with. In his limited line of sight there's barely a flat space without stuff piled on it.
His rescuer (or captor), though, is remarkably ordinary – though admittedly in a really pretty sort of way, if he actually gave a damn about that in a guy. Soft-looking dark hair, a vague sort of smile. There's eerie familiarity there, too. He can't place it. Has this guy been in the news? Have they met before?
"Who're you?" he says, or tries to say – the words slur like hell. Sedatives still in his system, maybe.
"I'm…" a pause. Too much of a pause, the kind you might get at a party, trying to introduce someone whose name you'd forgotten. Like someone would just forget their own name. "Hakkai."
Not so normal, maybe, Gojyo amends. Really weird, but in a quiet sort of way. "Don't sound too sure."
"That's a rather long story, I'm afraid. Please try to get some rest."
And Gojyo is alone again, staring around at mad collections of vaguely technological things he can only begin to guess at the purpose of, some of which maybe don't even have a purpose at all.
He doesn't really wanna think about what could happen next. He always figured he wasn't afraid to die, but he finds he is afraid of what else the world might do to him. Just a little bit.
By evening he can stand. He recovers fast, gets things out of his system fast; it's one of the perks. Not that there'll ever be enough perks to make up for all the shit he has to deal with.
He isn't actually locked into the room, so he shuffles through to investigate the rest of what turns out to be what is probably a pretty normal flat for the nice part of the city, tidy and clean and bright. A bit of experimentation lets him get into what proves to be a bread-bin, but when he tries to make himself toast the damn toaster wants nothing to do with him.
"Fuck you too," he mutters, wonders briefly about a society where you need permission to use a damn toaster, settles down to drink the kind of warm beer which was sitting on the work-surface. There might be something else in the fridge, but he probably doesn't have clearance to open it.
He hasn't moved from the kitchen table by the time Hakkai or whoever the hell he is comes back.
"Would you like something to eat?" he asks Gojyo, who shrugs. "Ah… you do…?"
"Yeah," Gojyo snaps. "I eat. I breathe. I bleed. I get knocked out by fucking tranquiliser darts. Next question?"
He's being unfair. But he's had a really bad day.
"Do you like chicken?" Hakkai offers. He's still smiling in that vague sort of way, but it's rather... fixed. He could be thinking anything, behind a smile like that.
Gojyo subsides, slumps in his chair. "Yeah. Sure. Whatever."
He doesn't get it. Any of it. He figured he had a pretty good handle on what was going on when he hit the ground out in the slums, but failing to wake up to a series of experiments in a sterile lab seems to have kind of thrown his theory out of the window. Not that it's a bad thing, but understanding what the shit is going on would be good.
They eat in silence. Gojyo is too busy being weirded out to think about asking questions, and Hakkai doesn't seem to feel like talking either. Maybe he's worried he'll offend Gojyo again. Shit. He probably shouldn't have shouted.
"I'm sorry for all this," Hakkai says at last. "I, ah, I should probably let you go back to your home."
Right. Like he's got one of those. He should just make a break for it now, though – Hakkai is offering him an out, he can just leave, go back, live in whatever burnt-out shell he can lay claim to and wait for something to break without the careful attentions of the lab staff to smooth out any 'irregularities.'
"Why'd you rescue me in the first place?" he asks, because whether he's about to go or not he bloody well wants to know the answer to that. Quiet, weird Hakkai with his flat full of technology and his little smile and something else, something important that Gojyo hasn't quite grasped yet. What does he want? No-one does something for nothing. He's learnt that the hard way. "You, uh… did rescue me, right?"
"Yes. It was a rather… reflexive decision, I'm afraid," Hakkai says, as though this really is something he should be sorry for. "It seemed as though I should."
"Fuck. How'd you rescue me?"
"I, ah, offered a persuasive argument against them keeping custody of you."
"A persuasive argument?"
Hakkai lifts one wrist by way of explanation and Gojyo spots the telltale signs of implants. He hadn't been paying much attention to crap like that earlier.
"Fuck."
People can get into so much shit for pissing off the corporations. Gojyo is discovering that he doesn't actually really like the idea of that happening to Hakkai, though why the hell it should matter is beyond him. He doesn't know the guy.
He doesn't know the guy and Hakkai killed a bunch of people to save his sorry ass.
"You really should go home," Hakkai says, that damn apologetic smile still in place, and yeah, it's true – he should. Go, anyway.
3. Saiyuki AU - Hakkai is outright melodramatic
Sometimes it seems as though red is the only colour they are allowed. An artistic spray of bright blood against a monochrome backdrop, a woman's lips painted just the same shade curving in an invitation he is nowhere near foolish enough to accept. Tattered scarlet flowers left tied to a railing, in memoriam. (In reality there are other colours: the sodium-yellow of streetlamps, the dimly-visible colours of shop signs, of clothing. But he lives in stories, sometimes, and the stories are black and white with hints of red.)
He is not a photographer but he often imagines the photos he might take, frames them in his mind. Even in his imagination most of the images are over- or under-exposed, detail lost in the wash of light or shadow, but once in a while something stands out in perfect black-and-white sharpness, highlighted and accented in that one inevitable colour.
Her hands had been the sharpest thing, in his memory: the elegant lines of long fingers curling around the handle of a gun, nails no longer neatly-trimmed but skin still smooth. They hadn't shaken at all; if they had, he thinks, the image would have blurred.
He imagines the line of her mouth might have faltered but his memory of the event is a series of photographs, each one immobile. He cannot say for certain. He wants to imagine that she hesitated.
There were words, too, but he doesn't remember what they were.
At the time he rather hoped he might not have to remember anything ever again.
So much for that.
4. Sanada/Yukimura futurefic
He meets Yukimura at Narita airport, off a plane from somewhere in France with a name he can't pronounce. Yukimura is smiling and waving almost before Sanada notices he's arrived, half-running towards him.
"You have no idea how good it is to hear people speaking Japanese," Yukimura tells him, coaxes Sanada to say more things, anything. He spends most of the journey to Kanegawa talking, while Yukimura nods and listens, intent, as though Sanada's family is the most interesting thing he's heard about in a long time.
Yukimura's trick, the reason everyone loves him, isn't just placing himself at the centre of other people's worlds. If he feels like it, he can make other people believe that they're the centre of his world too. It's something Sanada both loves and hates. It's somehow difficult to see it affecting other people, selfish as that thought is.
"There were rumours that you were the one taken ill," Yukimura says when they're almost there, Sanada's news mostly used up - at least the bits he wants to talk about on the train. "You should have just done some interviews."
"It's no-one's business why I had to come back to Japan," Sanada points out, irritable.
"It's mine. Even if you told me, seeing the speculation was..." Yukimura shrugs, an almost embarrassed expression flitting across his face. Sanada wants to ask why, but he can't think of a good way, anything that doesn't sound awkward, pushy.
They stop off at the hospital before they go back to Sanada's home, though Yukimura has bags with him. Yukimura insists, though Sanada can see that he really doesn't like being there - not even years later. It might seem weird, to insist on visiting someone else's relative - but then again, Yukimura practically grew up in the Sanada household.
"The house feels empty," Yukimura comments while they're carrying his bags up to the spare room.
"I suppose you're right."
It's something Sanada has been avoiding, even in his own mind, but it's undeniably true. His grandfather in hospital and his brother long since moved out; this place is too big for just his parents. But his grandfather will be back, of course.
Sooner or later.
Yukimura has obviously been homesick; he's been spending so much time all around the world, training, playing tournaments. Sanada could have sympathised until recently. Right now, though, he'd take any amount of homesickness over being more or less confined here by his sense of duty.
He can't say how grateful he is to Yukimura for taking even a little time to visit him.
Okay. Yeah. That's about it...
*needs more tea*
I'm feeling a little generally uneasy about life but... *shrugs* what's new?
Have some random rough snippets from stuff which I wish I could make go somewhere. 2 x Tenipuri, 2 x Saiyuki, almost all outrageously AU. Not edited. (Hah, I jump on Pez's WIP-sharing bandwagon. It's not like I have anything else to share lately.)
1. Cyberpunk D1 snippet
"Where the fuck are we?" Niou asked, sliding back into consciousness, blinking his eyes open to the greyness of the sky maybe an hour before dawn, almost shivering from the cold that went with the tail end of the night. He was vaguely aware that the slightly elderly car engine had just stuttered down to silence, leaving them alone with the constant urban hum of wherever they were.
"Chiba," Yagyuu said. He was staring straight ahead through the faintly grimy windshield, as though he was looking for something. Someone?
The last communication they'd received had been pretty clear, if brief, and it hadn't involved Chiba at all except maybe Narita airport, which this sure as hell wasn't. Still, he might've slept through some other message, with things as they were - he felt blank, cut off, alone in his head. No link, no internal background noise. Isolated from the system.
"Yeah?"
"I know a man here who may be of assistance."
Niou kept silent, burrowed his way further down into the seat, pulled his jacket tighter around him and stared at the blank dashboard, guessing what the readings would've been if it was on. Five o'clock in the morning, maybe, and somewhere around freezing point. They'd no heating now the engine was off, and his breath was just beginning to cloud in the air - great. Wonders of modern technology. There had to be twenty quicker ways of getting where they were going, and in more comfort, but... well, there was something to be said for sliding under the radar. Especially right now. They could wait for Yagyuu's man.
He was a long time coming. Niou, eyes closed again on the grounds that there was fuck all to look at, counted the minutes.
Somewhere around three quarters of an hour, with the world getting brighter even through his closed eyelids, he was beginning to wonder.
"Who're we meeting, Yagyuu?"
"Just... a man. He is rather unusual, I believe."
"You believe."
"He is a contact from the hub. He's done work for me on several occasions before, but I do not know him in person except by, ah, reputation."
It felt counter-intuitive to conduct this conversation out loud, where any random person could overhear. Niou suppressed the urge to kick his link into life; it wouldn't respond anyway and he'd just give himself a fucking headache. Some random person overhearing mattered less than the possibility of more specific people tapping in to their conversation.
Anyway, great. They were meeting some guy Yagyuu kind of knew, and while Yagyuu pretty much knew what he was doing when it came to this shit there was more than a bit of automatic paranoia built into Niou's system. Assuming everyone was a potential threat saved time and sometimes bloodloss. He liked to think of his basic mistrust of humanity as a job skill.
2. Gojyo/Hakkai sci-fi AU
This is a world in high contrast. Clinical, clean, white – that's what they show you on the brochures – but then if you turn the wrong corner, walk down the wrong street, you find the places that got forgotten. No street names, no lights - just half-destroyed shells of buildings and people who, for one reason or another, don't like to go out into the brigher areas.
Gojyo's got enough reasons, and hiding in the darkest corners he can find has bought him a fair bit of time, but sooner or later things tend to catch up with you. People tend to catch up, too. They must've learnt from the last team they sent after him, because there's a hell of a lot of them - and they're well armed.
That doesn't stop him taking a couple of them down, giving a few more scars to remember him by before they have time to get him – tranquiliser, he thinks, slumping helplessly. They built him well, but they built in enough weaknesses too.
So that's that, pretty much.
When he wakes up he doesn't open his eyes to the inside of a laboratory. That's the first mystery.
Only the first.
"Ah. Please lie still," a voice tells him when he goes to stand. "I am afraid you will find movement disorientating for a while."
He's never been one to take people at their word, but trying to sit up proves the mystery voice's point pretty quickly. He gives up, settles for turning his head to the side to see more of the room.
It's… weird. It's like nothing he's ever seen before. Chaotic, but not in the decayed way of the forgotten places - just cluttered with pieces of technology he half-recognises, pieces he doesn't recognise at all, broken things, things that maybe never had much of a purpose to start with. In his limited line of sight there's barely a flat space without stuff piled on it.
His rescuer (or captor), though, is remarkably ordinary – though admittedly in a really pretty sort of way, if he actually gave a damn about that in a guy. Soft-looking dark hair, a vague sort of smile. There's eerie familiarity there, too. He can't place it. Has this guy been in the news? Have they met before?
"Who're you?" he says, or tries to say – the words slur like hell. Sedatives still in his system, maybe.
"I'm…" a pause. Too much of a pause, the kind you might get at a party, trying to introduce someone whose name you'd forgotten. Like someone would just forget their own name. "Hakkai."
Not so normal, maybe, Gojyo amends. Really weird, but in a quiet sort of way. "Don't sound too sure."
"That's a rather long story, I'm afraid. Please try to get some rest."
And Gojyo is alone again, staring around at mad collections of vaguely technological things he can only begin to guess at the purpose of, some of which maybe don't even have a purpose at all.
He doesn't really wanna think about what could happen next. He always figured he wasn't afraid to die, but he finds he is afraid of what else the world might do to him. Just a little bit.
By evening he can stand. He recovers fast, gets things out of his system fast; it's one of the perks. Not that there'll ever be enough perks to make up for all the shit he has to deal with.
He isn't actually locked into the room, so he shuffles through to investigate the rest of what turns out to be what is probably a pretty normal flat for the nice part of the city, tidy and clean and bright. A bit of experimentation lets him get into what proves to be a bread-bin, but when he tries to make himself toast the damn toaster wants nothing to do with him.
"Fuck you too," he mutters, wonders briefly about a society where you need permission to use a damn toaster, settles down to drink the kind of warm beer which was sitting on the work-surface. There might be something else in the fridge, but he probably doesn't have clearance to open it.
He hasn't moved from the kitchen table by the time Hakkai or whoever the hell he is comes back.
"Would you like something to eat?" he asks Gojyo, who shrugs. "Ah… you do…?"
"Yeah," Gojyo snaps. "I eat. I breathe. I bleed. I get knocked out by fucking tranquiliser darts. Next question?"
He's being unfair. But he's had a really bad day.
"Do you like chicken?" Hakkai offers. He's still smiling in that vague sort of way, but it's rather... fixed. He could be thinking anything, behind a smile like that.
Gojyo subsides, slumps in his chair. "Yeah. Sure. Whatever."
He doesn't get it. Any of it. He figured he had a pretty good handle on what was going on when he hit the ground out in the slums, but failing to wake up to a series of experiments in a sterile lab seems to have kind of thrown his theory out of the window. Not that it's a bad thing, but understanding what the shit is going on would be good.
They eat in silence. Gojyo is too busy being weirded out to think about asking questions, and Hakkai doesn't seem to feel like talking either. Maybe he's worried he'll offend Gojyo again. Shit. He probably shouldn't have shouted.
"I'm sorry for all this," Hakkai says at last. "I, ah, I should probably let you go back to your home."
Right. Like he's got one of those. He should just make a break for it now, though – Hakkai is offering him an out, he can just leave, go back, live in whatever burnt-out shell he can lay claim to and wait for something to break without the careful attentions of the lab staff to smooth out any 'irregularities.'
"Why'd you rescue me in the first place?" he asks, because whether he's about to go or not he bloody well wants to know the answer to that. Quiet, weird Hakkai with his flat full of technology and his little smile and something else, something important that Gojyo hasn't quite grasped yet. What does he want? No-one does something for nothing. He's learnt that the hard way. "You, uh… did rescue me, right?"
"Yes. It was a rather… reflexive decision, I'm afraid," Hakkai says, as though this really is something he should be sorry for. "It seemed as though I should."
"Fuck. How'd you rescue me?"
"I, ah, offered a persuasive argument against them keeping custody of you."
"A persuasive argument?"
Hakkai lifts one wrist by way of explanation and Gojyo spots the telltale signs of implants. He hadn't been paying much attention to crap like that earlier.
"Fuck."
People can get into so much shit for pissing off the corporations. Gojyo is discovering that he doesn't actually really like the idea of that happening to Hakkai, though why the hell it should matter is beyond him. He doesn't know the guy.
He doesn't know the guy and Hakkai killed a bunch of people to save his sorry ass.
"You really should go home," Hakkai says, that damn apologetic smile still in place, and yeah, it's true – he should. Go, anyway.
3. Saiyuki AU - Hakkai is outright melodramatic
Sometimes it seems as though red is the only colour they are allowed. An artistic spray of bright blood against a monochrome backdrop, a woman's lips painted just the same shade curving in an invitation he is nowhere near foolish enough to accept. Tattered scarlet flowers left tied to a railing, in memoriam. (In reality there are other colours: the sodium-yellow of streetlamps, the dimly-visible colours of shop signs, of clothing. But he lives in stories, sometimes, and the stories are black and white with hints of red.)
He is not a photographer but he often imagines the photos he might take, frames them in his mind. Even in his imagination most of the images are over- or under-exposed, detail lost in the wash of light or shadow, but once in a while something stands out in perfect black-and-white sharpness, highlighted and accented in that one inevitable colour.
Her hands had been the sharpest thing, in his memory: the elegant lines of long fingers curling around the handle of a gun, nails no longer neatly-trimmed but skin still smooth. They hadn't shaken at all; if they had, he thinks, the image would have blurred.
He imagines the line of her mouth might have faltered but his memory of the event is a series of photographs, each one immobile. He cannot say for certain. He wants to imagine that she hesitated.
There were words, too, but he doesn't remember what they were.
At the time he rather hoped he might not have to remember anything ever again.
So much for that.
4. Sanada/Yukimura futurefic
He meets Yukimura at Narita airport, off a plane from somewhere in France with a name he can't pronounce. Yukimura is smiling and waving almost before Sanada notices he's arrived, half-running towards him.
"You have no idea how good it is to hear people speaking Japanese," Yukimura tells him, coaxes Sanada to say more things, anything. He spends most of the journey to Kanegawa talking, while Yukimura nods and listens, intent, as though Sanada's family is the most interesting thing he's heard about in a long time.
Yukimura's trick, the reason everyone loves him, isn't just placing himself at the centre of other people's worlds. If he feels like it, he can make other people believe that they're the centre of his world too. It's something Sanada both loves and hates. It's somehow difficult to see it affecting other people, selfish as that thought is.
"There were rumours that you were the one taken ill," Yukimura says when they're almost there, Sanada's news mostly used up - at least the bits he wants to talk about on the train. "You should have just done some interviews."
"It's no-one's business why I had to come back to Japan," Sanada points out, irritable.
"It's mine. Even if you told me, seeing the speculation was..." Yukimura shrugs, an almost embarrassed expression flitting across his face. Sanada wants to ask why, but he can't think of a good way, anything that doesn't sound awkward, pushy.
They stop off at the hospital before they go back to Sanada's home, though Yukimura has bags with him. Yukimura insists, though Sanada can see that he really doesn't like being there - not even years later. It might seem weird, to insist on visiting someone else's relative - but then again, Yukimura practically grew up in the Sanada household.
"The house feels empty," Yukimura comments while they're carrying his bags up to the spare room.
"I suppose you're right."
It's something Sanada has been avoiding, even in his own mind, but it's undeniably true. His grandfather in hospital and his brother long since moved out; this place is too big for just his parents. But his grandfather will be back, of course.
Sooner or later.
Yukimura has obviously been homesick; he's been spending so much time all around the world, training, playing tournaments. Sanada could have sympathised until recently. Right now, though, he'd take any amount of homesickness over being more or less confined here by his sense of duty.
He can't say how grateful he is to Yukimura for taking even a little time to visit him.
Okay. Yeah. That's about it...
*needs more tea*
