InsaneJournal

Ironman week 1 - Painfic
This... is a really weird set of stuff. Not objectively weird - okay, maybe the Light/Mikami one is objectively weird - but weird for me. I mean, the prompts screamed at me for most of these, but seriously: FF8, it's been nine months since the one time I wrote it before. Death Note is a bit more standard except that they're both late-series, which I haven't written and had no plans to. FMA - it's been a while and it intimidates me. House I have no excuse other than that I've been watching it and it was hard to come up with another idea around kittens.

I guess we'll see next week if the weirdness is because of the format or just because of it being the Week of Woe. Anyway, it made it probably a good thing that I didn't set myself a list of fandoms to write. As it turned out, my only extra rule for myself is that I must write in multiples of 100 words.

All ficbits carry warnings for woe, probable spoilers and possible rough writing.

The path that I have chosen now has led me to a wall, and with each passing day I feel a little more like something dear was lost.
Final Fantasy 8, Zell->Squall. 400 words.
Something Dear

Zell wakes up bolt upright and panting. He knows he was dreaming, somehow, but he doesn’t remember any of it. It’s not the first time.

Squall grunts, the next bed over. “Y’alright?”

“Yeah,” he says, shakily, then breathes and tries again. “Yeah, great. Go back to sleep.”

Zell lies back down, but he’s far too wired to sleep now.

Suddenly it occurs to him that the GFs are like this, kinda. They destroy memories, dammit, and sometimes he wants to scream and ask why the things are still in all their heads, except that he knows the answer. They need them.

Just, sometimes, that doesn’t seem like enough. Sometimes he worries. He worries that he’ll wake up one day and not know why they’re trekking around the world. And worse than that – it’s ridiculous, that anything could be worse than that, because forgetting what they’re doing could mean the end of the world. But worse than that, in Zell’s mind, is the idea that in a few years he might not remember this. Not that they saved the world, even if they manage that, but this, just the feeling of banding together, of having a real mission, a focus, and a group of people who all understand that as well as you. He could forget about that, about them, even about Squall.

“Zell,” Squall says, muzzily but sternly, and Zell jumps. “Settle.”

He realizes he’s been turning back and forth repeatedly for a while. “Sorry, man.” He holds himself still with effort, hands clenched in the bedsheets.

Because the other thing is, worrying about all that seems stupid when they could die tomorrow. That prospect makes it seem like a pretty damn good idea to go over to Squall’s bed and press him into the mattress, to stifle any stupid protests with a kiss. He might not even get kicked out; Squall might even not protest. There’s been a certain raw look in his eyes for the past few days that says he might not. But there’s just no way that wouldn’t ruin them, their team, and he can’t risk that. He can’t. Not now.

He realizes his eyes are focused hard on the dark blob that he knows is Squall, and he forces his eyes shut.

Sometimes Zell worries that he’ll wake up and look at Squall and forget why he can’t do anything.

Sometimes Zell wishes he would.


The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath.
Fullmetal Alchemist, Martel (and Law, Dorochet). 300 words.
Stone Cold

“Still alive, Martel?” came the gruff grunt from the corner. She couldn’t remember anymore if Law’s voice had always been that deep. That sort of thing wasn’t much, comparatively.

“Like hell I’m dying before Dorochet over there,” she said, and Dorochet proved that he wasn’t as asleep as he appeared by snorting lightly into the floor.

She hadn’t been terribly close to them, before. Amiable, of course; they all knew that all of them were ridiculously good at what they did, and they got along fairly easily because of that. But they would never have been the ones she sought out to talk to when the war got to her, the ones she almost called friends.

She couldn’t call those people friends now, of course. They were gone. You couldn’t call someone a friend who you had last seen twisted and screaming, bones growing at strange angles, or utterly silent for days, oily scales spreading like a rash across their skin. It would only hurt worse if you tried, hurt worse than the cold of the stone cell seeping deeper into her bones than it should be able to go, lancing her veins with ice.

So she built her bonds where she could, and that meant Law and Dorochet. She was beginning to doubt if there were any others left. Their last cellmate had been taken away days ago, his body normal except for a tuft of hair at his spine and the fact that he was stone dead. She hadn’t heard sounds from the other rooms lately, either, not even screams.

They were alive, though. In the war that hadn’t been enough, but here it was everything.

Dorochet sat up. Martel ignored the way his movements weren’t quite right, and the liquid way the shiver slid down her spine.


Don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to.
House MD, Cameron->House. 100 words.
What did you expect

“Do you like me?”

A pause, long enough that she thought maybe—

“No.” Well, what did you expect, some eternally clinical part of her mind asked. House doesn’t like anyone.

That’s not true, she thought back wretchedly. He couldn’t live like that. Everyone likes someone, he just can’t show it. And she believed it. She did.

But hearing something like that, flat and straight, well, it did make her cold for a second. It made her doubt, made her wonder if House really was as miserable as he appeared.

She shoved the thought away and went back to work.


Ain't it hard when you discover that, he wasn't really where it's at, after he took from you everything he could steal. How does it feel?
Death Note, Light/Misa. (Or probably really Misa->Light.) 200 words.
Give Up

She hands the Death Note away with only a twinge. It’s the other part that’s hard.

Ryuk knows what’s coming, but he doesn’t comment, just cackles.

“But I don’t want to!” She says anyway, digging her heels into the carpet unhappily.

When you have three choices, and two of them are death and betrayal then death, it doesn’t take much thought to pick the third.

She believes Light that they’re in as much trouble now, really. But it seems so stupid, to throw away the partnership they’ve formed as Kira, when things have been going great for years. They’re engaged.

“I could just pretend,” she says sulkily. Slanting a glance at Ryuk, though, she knows it wouldn’t work. Misa growls and rubs at her hair. She couldn’t trick Light, and if she were captured and confined again, she couldn’t hold out forever. And Rem wouldn’t be there to save her, this time.

“Fine,” she yells. “I give up ownership of my Death Note.”

She thinks she can feel her memories slipping away before she finishes the sentence, draining her of everything real about Light. Then she forgets.

She stands, staring into blank space without knowing why, and feels strangely hollow.


All of this temptation, you know it's turned my faith to lies. Till I couldn't see the danger, or hear the rising tide.
Death Note cyberpunk AU. Light/Mikami. 500 words. (And probably not the same Death Note cyberpunk AU as I'm writing for y_c. ^^;)
Fall to Your Knees

The life of a gov prosecutor had never been enough for Mikami. They mostly worked the net these days – it was the only place they had any chance of getting judgment brought, and that only in the little corners of it that gov still had control over. As a whole, they were mediocre white-hat hackers with net-sec implants and a talent for words, pale atrophied bodies holed up in their safe gov-funded cubes building fences around tiny islands of info most people didn’t care about anyway.

Mikami had been an outsider from the moment they saw him; he kept his body in shape with regular visits to the gym, and he had enough standard physical augs to be relatively safe walking the streets to get there. More than that, Mikami knew that even in their impotence there were still things that were Right, and he saw more Wrong things on a walk to the gym than he saw judged in a year of work.

He couldn’t fight it, though. The streets were a war, and he wasn’t strong enough to do anything but take a side. He didn’t want a war. He wanted justice.

And then one day on the net – under his own uname, not his work one – he was approached by someone who knew who he was and had an offer for him. When he demonstrated what his new mod could do, Mikami agreed to meet him the next day.

He knew a gift from God when he saw it, and if the gift came at the hands of a prim, smiling boy, well, there was only one conclusion to take from that. The power he’d been given, to kill anonymously, easily, to control people, and most of all –

“The eyes are destructive,” the boy had said. “Eat away at the back of your brain. Can’t be fixed, probably will cost you half your life. Still want them?” There was a glint in his eyes that told Mikami there was only one answer to that.

“Yes,” he’d said in a breath, and then the boy had put him under –

He could see through the ridiculous pretense people wore, see who they were and how long it would be until they returned to dirt. He could lay true judgment; he could impose true law.

And if the boy called him back a few weeks later – once he’d killed enough people in the city to cause people to notice, to quiet and wonder if there was some new virus – and warned him that there was a Detective after them, that meant he was truly held in regard. And if the boy demanded his absolute obedience to his orders, that was certainly his due.

And if the boy looked thoughtful, complemented Mikami on his physical augs and pushed him to his knees for a show of allegiance – people had fallen to their knees before gods for much less, and without the reassurance of solid flesh, of hands knotting in their hair.