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31_days2011-02-28 11:57 pm
treeflamingo.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2011-02-28 11:57 pm
[Feb 28] [Skip Beat!] Amnesty Day - two prompts
Title: Or Let Her Walk Away
Day/Theme: Feb 19/Marks left by the tape you used to put photos up on my wall
Series: Skip Beat!
Characters: Ren (Yashiro (Kyoko))
Rating: G
A/N: Takes place immediately after chap 171. A fairly literal take on the prompt, but the idea appealed to me in a fairly literal fashion, so.
Or Let Her Walk Away
It wasn’t the same after that. She looked so beautiful that night, but she wouldn’t let go of Kijima’s arm. As though he were her most important accessory and she would be naked without him. Ren got the distinct impression that she was hiding next to him, in plain view but protected. The thing she wanted protection from was Ren. He could feel it.
It made him want to scream.
All he had done was accept her offered comfort. She held out to him the source of her courage and he’d grasped it with both hands. (He was ignoring the fact that it had been a strange and forward request from him that brought her to his house at all; she’d called first anyway.) How did that make a villain of him? (What he was not ignoring, because he did not know, was that his crimes against her heart were much older than that, that this had been a long time coming.)
Days stretched to weeks and it became obvious that she was avoiding him. Obvious in harshly glaring ways that very few people noticed. She interacted with him normally as Setsu – as intrusive and trusting and handsy as always – but when they were not in character she was strictly professional. She treated him with her patented (pain-in-the-) graceful deference when they met in the hall – but she abandoned her usual haunts, all the places he knew to find her. She didn’t ask him for any assistance, and didn’t question him about his roles.
She was walking away from him, and he had no idea how to stop her.
Yashiro was beside himself. “What. Do. You. Mean. You don’t know how to stop her?!? Are you or are you not a man?!? Let’s drop the fact that you’re the Number One Bachelor, the perfect image of a gentleman and cavalier, and pretty much the single most desired man in the entire country, and focus on the fact that you’re a man and she’s a girl. You catch her when she’s alone, you take her slim little body in your arms, and you kiss her! Even if she’s Kyoko-chan, she’s still a woman! This may be your last chance to break down the wall of ice around her heart! Power through it with the heat of your love, Ren!”
“Yashiro-san,” Ren had responded. “That is possibly the stupidest thing you have ever suggested I do.”
And it was. And Yashiro probably knew it, because he didn’t mention it again. But let it never be said that Yashiro Yukihito was a man who did not connect with his clients; he was about as desperate as Ren was, and if it were him he probably would have made exactly the epic blunder he was recommending to Ren.
Instead, Ren opted for a different epic blunder. He resolved to let her walk away. As the weeks swelled into a month, he stopped even looking for her. Lory eyed him with a marked air of disgust, but Ren withstood it like the iron curtain of a man he was. He had never expected to win his suit anyway.
But he still missed her. No amount of telling himself that he didn’t deserve her stopped her absence from wearing away at him. No amount of overwork, quick conbini meals and powerful nightcaps made the panicky little sense of desperation disappear from his gut.
That was how he found himself one evening lurking like a coward in his own guest room. She used to stay there occasionally…
He was startled to notice a certain odd texture on the top of the empty dresser. Two little strips of sticky ran from the front edge to about half an inch in. Time had collected atop them and stayed there, darkening the bright varnished wood by just a smudge; the cleaning lady only ran a quick duster over the room, as he had instructed – Nobody stays in there anyway – and she had apparently never noticed it.
A smile quirked at his lips.
“What could she have taped up there?”
His heart began to beat a little faster – calm down, fool, this is probably ages old by now – and his curiosity ramped up with it.
Despite himself, he let his smile broaden.
Then, with a quick movement, the way a boy jumps suddenly into a pool that he is quite sure is freezing cold, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed her number.
Title: The Best Part of Dying
Day/Theme: Feb 8/Satin in a coffin
Series: Skip Beat!
Characters: BJxNatsu
Rating: T+
A/N: Notice the pairing, and notice the rating. Not a happy ficlet.
The Best Part of Dying
She was the best part of dying, and she was completely wasted on him. Like satin in a coffin. She was soft and pliable. The way her cool hands slid frictionless on his body was perverse; he made sure not to shave when he thought he’d see her, so there’d be something for her kisses to catch on. He dwarfed her. Her every appendage, every motion, every hair on her body was delicate. Fragile. Eminently breakable. But her heart was as dark and aimless and callous as his.
The first time he saw her she was flaunting her high school uniform in a smoky live bar beneath Shibuya. She had a pomegranate martini in one hand and a matching blood-colored gem glinted at her throat, drawing attention to itself. It looked like she was trying to decide which of the crowd of men that surrounded her she would sleep with that night. He caught her eye for the same reason he caught all eyes in every room he walked into – his impossible height, and the black and violence which clothed him.
He ordered a gin and suddenly she was at his elbow. The look in her eyes frightened him – not the girl herself, but the feral bloodlust. He’d never seen eyes like that before except in the mirror. Eyes that looked for pain – preferably yours, but anyone’s would do. (And ultimately, eyes which sought their own destruction, the windows to a soul that feared only the unmarred white of innocence, feeding a heart that wanted to be broken just to prove that it existed at all, because it had never really felt anything.) He looked past her and saw the men she had abandoned in order to make a bid at him. And he knew – if he turned her down she’d take one of them just as quickly, scurry into the nearest love motel and ride him until her nerves screamed alive.
She was the first Japanese girl he’d ever met who looked good with false blonde hair. She had a manicured hand on his bicep. He flexed. She squeezed. For a brief moment – just the first sip of gin – he wanted to protect her. He wanted to lift her from her sins in the way that no one had ever done for him (because it was impossible – you can’t save someone who doesn’t believe in salvation). But at some point – maybe at the second sip – this desire changed and he wanted to hear her scream.
He brought her home that night.
She wasn’t a screamer.
A few nights later he came back from a job – sweat-and-bloodied – to find her sitting in front of his door smoking a cigarette and looking bored as hell.
He was prepared to throw her bodily out (to threaten, to maim) if she showed the slightest sign of fear; if she questioned where he’d been, what he’d been doing; if she tried to make him bathe first. But she climbed on top of him as soon as he sat down to take his boots off. Awhile later, afterwards, when he went to take a shower, she followed him in, and he pounded her into the tile wall while the water steamed over them both. She dug her nails into his back, tipped her mouth open in silent, gasping crescendo.
But he still wanted to hear her scream.
Their rendezvous were frequent but never regular. She never talked about her family, although she mentioned friends occasionally – Kaori, who was reliable and unflinching; Yumika, who turned out to be more vicious and imaginative than she had thought at first.
“She’s interesting,” she laughed once. It was the only compliment she ever paid anyone, the only virtue she acknowledged. Interesting. And being boring was the cardinal vice. (He was fascinating – she told him so.) When she said it she was sitting on his window sill, unimpressed by the cold skyline (except for her small breasts, which stood at attention beneath her white camisole, so he knew she felt the cold anyway), chipping polish off her finger nails. Her hair was still a little matted from sweat and his pillow.
“Natsu,” he said, and she didn’t look at him but he knew he had her attention. “Come over here.”
“Okay.” She stepped out of her panties on the way to the bed, settled on top of him and set to work like it meant nothing. (And it didn’t – she was always like that – nonchalant and willing, like it was just a hobby they shared. The only thing they shared. They never exchanged phone numbers or last names, and all the secrets and confessions that passed between them were obliterated by the sex that came before, during after.) He kissed her when he felt like it and told her about his day until her body blanked out everything else.
On another occasion she told him, “You’re the only man I’ve slept with who’s killed anyone.” This seemed to please her. He gave her no rest that night.
Then one night he came home to find her waiting for him, but he was too badly injured. There were bullet scars in his clothing and blood spattered dark against the black. Somebody had smashed a metal chair into his side and he was pretty sure it had broken a few ribs. An errant screw head had punched through his skin and left a ragged tear among the purple welts.
She stripped him, helped him bathe and dress his wounds. He kept little in his apartment, but there was one cupboard that was always well stocked – the one that held the bandages. When she finished she traced a hand over his jaw, looking concerned, as if such an emotion had any home in her heart.
He caught her fingers and kissed them, wincing, because moving his arm so quickly was painful.
She opened wide eyes at him. “BJ,” she said, “you wanna skip tonight?”
He smiled and placed a hand on her face. “Don’t leave, though.”
They slept together for the first time that night – the first time they actually slept. He lay on his back with her tucked carefully against his good side. She had her head on his shoulder and he stroked a hand through her hair for a long time after she had fallen asleep. It felt like spun silk. She law with him like she trusted him (and she did, obviously, stupidly, but with reason – she was probably the only person in the world who could trust him, because she wanted nothing from him but what he was willing to give). He considered that it was the most innocent thing he had ever done – to submit to the care of a woman, then warm her in chastity while she rested from her labor. He considered that she was still wearing her uniform skirt – that she was so young.
He considered that this was probably the last time that he would be with her. If the internal bleeding didn’t kill him by morning, then his current job would kill him before the next.
She shifted in her sleep and he dropped his hand to her waist, turned his head to better catch the scent of her. She smelled clean, untarnished.
He considered that he had still never heard her scream, and that this would be his only regret.
Day/Theme: Feb 19/Marks left by the tape you used to put photos up on my wall
Series: Skip Beat!
Characters: Ren (Yashiro (Kyoko))
Rating: G
A/N: Takes place immediately after chap 171. A fairly literal take on the prompt, but the idea appealed to me in a fairly literal fashion, so.
Or Let Her Walk Away
It wasn’t the same after that. She looked so beautiful that night, but she wouldn’t let go of Kijima’s arm. As though he were her most important accessory and she would be naked without him. Ren got the distinct impression that she was hiding next to him, in plain view but protected. The thing she wanted protection from was Ren. He could feel it.
It made him want to scream.
All he had done was accept her offered comfort. She held out to him the source of her courage and he’d grasped it with both hands. (He was ignoring the fact that it had been a strange and forward request from him that brought her to his house at all; she’d called first anyway.) How did that make a villain of him? (What he was not ignoring, because he did not know, was that his crimes against her heart were much older than that, that this had been a long time coming.)
Days stretched to weeks and it became obvious that she was avoiding him. Obvious in harshly glaring ways that very few people noticed. She interacted with him normally as Setsu – as intrusive and trusting and handsy as always – but when they were not in character she was strictly professional. She treated him with her patented (pain-in-the-) graceful deference when they met in the hall – but she abandoned her usual haunts, all the places he knew to find her. She didn’t ask him for any assistance, and didn’t question him about his roles.
She was walking away from him, and he had no idea how to stop her.
Yashiro was beside himself. “What. Do. You. Mean. You don’t know how to stop her?!? Are you or are you not a man?!? Let’s drop the fact that you’re the Number One Bachelor, the perfect image of a gentleman and cavalier, and pretty much the single most desired man in the entire country, and focus on the fact that you’re a man and she’s a girl. You catch her when she’s alone, you take her slim little body in your arms, and you kiss her! Even if she’s Kyoko-chan, she’s still a woman! This may be your last chance to break down the wall of ice around her heart! Power through it with the heat of your love, Ren!”
“Yashiro-san,” Ren had responded. “That is possibly the stupidest thing you have ever suggested I do.”
And it was. And Yashiro probably knew it, because he didn’t mention it again. But let it never be said that Yashiro Yukihito was a man who did not connect with his clients; he was about as desperate as Ren was, and if it were him he probably would have made exactly the epic blunder he was recommending to Ren.
Instead, Ren opted for a different epic blunder. He resolved to let her walk away. As the weeks swelled into a month, he stopped even looking for her. Lory eyed him with a marked air of disgust, but Ren withstood it like the iron curtain of a man he was. He had never expected to win his suit anyway.
But he still missed her. No amount of telling himself that he didn’t deserve her stopped her absence from wearing away at him. No amount of overwork, quick conbini meals and powerful nightcaps made the panicky little sense of desperation disappear from his gut.
That was how he found himself one evening lurking like a coward in his own guest room. She used to stay there occasionally…
He was startled to notice a certain odd texture on the top of the empty dresser. Two little strips of sticky ran from the front edge to about half an inch in. Time had collected atop them and stayed there, darkening the bright varnished wood by just a smudge; the cleaning lady only ran a quick duster over the room, as he had instructed – Nobody stays in there anyway – and she had apparently never noticed it.
A smile quirked at his lips.
“What could she have taped up there?”
His heart began to beat a little faster – calm down, fool, this is probably ages old by now – and his curiosity ramped up with it.
Despite himself, he let his smile broaden.
Then, with a quick movement, the way a boy jumps suddenly into a pool that he is quite sure is freezing cold, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed her number.
Title: The Best Part of Dying
Day/Theme: Feb 8/Satin in a coffin
Series: Skip Beat!
Characters: BJxNatsu
Rating: T+
A/N: Notice the pairing, and notice the rating. Not a happy ficlet.
The Best Part of Dying
She was the best part of dying, and she was completely wasted on him. Like satin in a coffin. She was soft and pliable. The way her cool hands slid frictionless on his body was perverse; he made sure not to shave when he thought he’d see her, so there’d be something for her kisses to catch on. He dwarfed her. Her every appendage, every motion, every hair on her body was delicate. Fragile. Eminently breakable. But her heart was as dark and aimless and callous as his.
The first time he saw her she was flaunting her high school uniform in a smoky live bar beneath Shibuya. She had a pomegranate martini in one hand and a matching blood-colored gem glinted at her throat, drawing attention to itself. It looked like she was trying to decide which of the crowd of men that surrounded her she would sleep with that night. He caught her eye for the same reason he caught all eyes in every room he walked into – his impossible height, and the black and violence which clothed him.
He ordered a gin and suddenly she was at his elbow. The look in her eyes frightened him – not the girl herself, but the feral bloodlust. He’d never seen eyes like that before except in the mirror. Eyes that looked for pain – preferably yours, but anyone’s would do. (And ultimately, eyes which sought their own destruction, the windows to a soul that feared only the unmarred white of innocence, feeding a heart that wanted to be broken just to prove that it existed at all, because it had never really felt anything.) He looked past her and saw the men she had abandoned in order to make a bid at him. And he knew – if he turned her down she’d take one of them just as quickly, scurry into the nearest love motel and ride him until her nerves screamed alive.
She was the first Japanese girl he’d ever met who looked good with false blonde hair. She had a manicured hand on his bicep. He flexed. She squeezed. For a brief moment – just the first sip of gin – he wanted to protect her. He wanted to lift her from her sins in the way that no one had ever done for him (because it was impossible – you can’t save someone who doesn’t believe in salvation). But at some point – maybe at the second sip – this desire changed and he wanted to hear her scream.
He brought her home that night.
She wasn’t a screamer.
A few nights later he came back from a job – sweat-and-bloodied – to find her sitting in front of his door smoking a cigarette and looking bored as hell.
He was prepared to throw her bodily out (to threaten, to maim) if she showed the slightest sign of fear; if she questioned where he’d been, what he’d been doing; if she tried to make him bathe first. But she climbed on top of him as soon as he sat down to take his boots off. Awhile later, afterwards, when he went to take a shower, she followed him in, and he pounded her into the tile wall while the water steamed over them both. She dug her nails into his back, tipped her mouth open in silent, gasping crescendo.
But he still wanted to hear her scream.
Their rendezvous were frequent but never regular. She never talked about her family, although she mentioned friends occasionally – Kaori, who was reliable and unflinching; Yumika, who turned out to be more vicious and imaginative than she had thought at first.
“She’s interesting,” she laughed once. It was the only compliment she ever paid anyone, the only virtue she acknowledged. Interesting. And being boring was the cardinal vice. (He was fascinating – she told him so.) When she said it she was sitting on his window sill, unimpressed by the cold skyline (except for her small breasts, which stood at attention beneath her white camisole, so he knew she felt the cold anyway), chipping polish off her finger nails. Her hair was still a little matted from sweat and his pillow.
“Natsu,” he said, and she didn’t look at him but he knew he had her attention. “Come over here.”
“Okay.” She stepped out of her panties on the way to the bed, settled on top of him and set to work like it meant nothing. (And it didn’t – she was always like that – nonchalant and willing, like it was just a hobby they shared. The only thing they shared. They never exchanged phone numbers or last names, and all the secrets and confessions that passed between them were obliterated by the sex that came before, during after.) He kissed her when he felt like it and told her about his day until her body blanked out everything else.
On another occasion she told him, “You’re the only man I’ve slept with who’s killed anyone.” This seemed to please her. He gave her no rest that night.
Then one night he came home to find her waiting for him, but he was too badly injured. There were bullet scars in his clothing and blood spattered dark against the black. Somebody had smashed a metal chair into his side and he was pretty sure it had broken a few ribs. An errant screw head had punched through his skin and left a ragged tear among the purple welts.
She stripped him, helped him bathe and dress his wounds. He kept little in his apartment, but there was one cupboard that was always well stocked – the one that held the bandages. When she finished she traced a hand over his jaw, looking concerned, as if such an emotion had any home in her heart.
He caught her fingers and kissed them, wincing, because moving his arm so quickly was painful.
She opened wide eyes at him. “BJ,” she said, “you wanna skip tonight?”
He smiled and placed a hand on her face. “Don’t leave, though.”
They slept together for the first time that night – the first time they actually slept. He lay on his back with her tucked carefully against his good side. She had her head on his shoulder and he stroked a hand through her hair for a long time after she had fallen asleep. It felt like spun silk. She law with him like she trusted him (and she did, obviously, stupidly, but with reason – she was probably the only person in the world who could trust him, because she wanted nothing from him but what he was willing to give). He considered that it was the most innocent thing he had ever done – to submit to the care of a woman, then warm her in chastity while she rested from her labor. He considered that she was still wearing her uniform skirt – that she was so young.
He considered that this was probably the last time that he would be with her. If the internal bleeding didn’t kill him by morning, then his current job would kill him before the next.
She shifted in her sleep and he dropped his hand to her waist, turned his head to better catch the scent of her. She smelled clean, untarnished.
He considered that he had still never heard her scream, and that this would be his only regret.