Snippets

× Fanfiction Snippets •

Battle of Powers (Final Fantasy XI)

From  the drabble “In Which the Sibyl Writes”

Dear Semih,

It is good to know your little family is doing well. You’ll be glad to know that the guard is doing quite fine, and Nanaa’s “kittens” are as good as always. Windurst is, thankfully, sounding much more peaceful than Aht Urhgan is; I cannot say that I have heard of these “Misfits” you speak of, or the one called Havaranaa.

Although I would assume you were joking, I decided to take it to heart. We have several chocobo chicks being raised alongside our star trees, belonging to mostly the guard, and some of the staff. I myself have a young female, newly hatched, named “Starfall.” When she’s grown a bit more, I think I’ll move her to my quarters.

I wish you luck with Wayward and the Misfits. Keep an eye watching them – I know I don’t have to warn you and that you will out of instinct. It’s just that anyone with those sorts of names just means trouble.

Tell Nanaa I said hi.

Your Star Sibyl

PS – Attached are some notes from Nanaa’s kittens. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to see them!

Black Suits (Men in Black/Doctor Who)

From chapter 1:

“Scum of the Earth probably lurking about in space right now ready to blow Earth out of the galaxy, and we’re absolutely out of the loop! Why? ’cause you had to go an’ get us lost in Manhattan’s sewer system, more worse than the damn subway. Don’t even have the heart to look guilty. I mean really, would that be so hard to show a little emotion in a time like this…”

Agent Jay sloshed through the foot-deep sludge, grim and as pessimistic as possible, wandering almost blindly through the tunnel, save for the small, makeshift lantern they tossed together after their last, useful one, had been eaten. That’s right. Eaten. Although, they might as well have been completely blind – that was how Jay saw it – because they had no idea where they were right now. The simple solution to this would be, of course, to surface. That would be the plan if the sewer system they were in wasn’t alien-made by some so-called ‘Rat King.’

Damn, it was a king of rats, alright. Though it was a bit more like Teenage Mutant Ninja Rats, with really, really big teeth and an unpleasant habit to swim through sewage and try to eat their leg off from the knee-cap.

Kay merely gave his partner a dark look in response.

“Psh, alright, man, I changed my mind. Go back to your neutral look. Hate the I-could-kill-you thing. Save that for the king. If we ever find the guy. I’m getting real sick of his flunkies. Damn, Zed probably thinks we’ve keeled over by now.” Which probably wasn’t true. Zed had enough faith in their abilities over the years. He’d be worrying, though. That’s what happens when their communicators can’t breach the walls. Couldn’t even call for backup, not that any would want to come.

This was just about as worse as the time when he went swimming in cockroach-goo. Now that was an unpleasant story that he would make absolute sure was never retold. Seriously. Even Kay knew better than to bring it up.

He had too many 9.0s on his “Weird Shit Meter” that he didn’t remember what “normal” use to be like anymore. Normal was more like… chasing down skimmers and making conversation with the twins, or reading the daily tabloids and occasionally pulling a rookie out of a dumbass situation. Ah, and of course the threats against Earth’s very survival. But that normally had something during it that ranked a 9.0. Unfortunately.

Destiny Contorted (Final Fantasy IX)

Mesmerized (Men in Black)

Of Black Holes and Sundials (Doctor Who)

From chapter 1:

He’s awake. For the first time in – how long? Why can’t he sense it? Is his mind in that much turmoil? – he’s awake again. He’s reaching out first with those psychic waves that he hates using unless it’s because of situations such as these. Finding someone, anyone, an explanation – oh, right, that’s what he needs the most right now. He thinks he catches a stray vibe from the TARDIS, but she seems focused elsewhere – why not on him? And why does he hear her, slightly, anyway? The last thing he remembered –

The last thing he remembered, he realizes, is something he didn’t really want to remember at all. He grits his teeth at that flared sense of betrayal and finally forces his eyes open to use his other senses. He needed his wits about him, quickly. It’d do him no good if he was laying flat in a bed with a possible enemy fluttering nearby.

He remembers that his mind bumped against another nearby, much closer to reach than the TARDIS. “Hello?” he calls out, and cringes when he hears his voice rasp. He tries to sit up, but his limbs disagree and yes, it’s been awhile since he’s woken. Still, time is strange. Like an out of placed thought. Like it should exist – almost exists – but doesn’t. He finds it disturbing.

“Ah! Oh… wow… you’re awake,” a boy’s voice calls back from across the room in surprise.

Disagreeing limbs aside, the Doctor puts all his effort into them and manages to push his body up. Fluff up the convenient pillows and settles back. He wants to get up and about, but he has some limits. The boy across the room blinks at him, and the first thing the Doctor takes in with a flicker of annoyance is the color of his hair. Ginger. Figures. The universe mocks him, yet again. Seemed to enjoy that particular pastime, as though universes had pastimes. “Where is this place?” he steadies himself to a single, simple question. Closes his mouth before he can ramble off the others: who are you, where’s my ship (because he can’t tell), who’s in charge, when are we.

“… Well actually, I haven’t really gotten that much… I haven’t been really awake much myself. Been sleeping a lot, but at least I have woken up. But um…” the boy looked up at the ceiling, a cloudy white swirl of marble. “Sorry, I’m not being much help to you, huh? But I really don’t know.”

“Fine,” the Doctor grumbles. He ran a hand through his hair. “That’s fine. Alright then. Who are you?” One at a time. Take it easy… Pull yourself together. Then figure out what the hell is going on when he should most certainly be very, very dead. Still, even that was borderline something-he-didn’t-want-to-think-about and he tried to be more careful.

“I’m Marcus. You?”

“The Doctor.”

“Oh.” Marcus looked back at him, ginger curls falling over his face. He looked confused as though he was missing something, and the Doctor could relate, very, very much. “I think I’ve heard that name, maybe. In passing, anyway. Can’t… really remember. Things are still fuzzy…” He looked troubled.

“How’d you get here?” Because he didn’t know himself, and maybe an outside opinion would help. His mind still bounced around, trying to find someone else beyond this room, someone more knowledgeable, but there was too much burning and yellow and gold that distracted him. Maybe that was why he barely heard the TARDIS. But she wasn’t trying to reach him. No comforting thrum to the corner of his mind reserved for her. Maybe the burning distracted her, too.

“I told you,” Marcus sighed with an edge of annoyance, “things are fuzzy. There was this –” he shut his mouth, and went silent. He looked down and curled his hands into the blanket.

“What?” the Doctor wasn’t meaning to sound impatient. He wasn’t. But his body was catching up to him, in own, internal time, and it was scratching calculations into his thoughts – and it couldn’t be right, it couldn’t –

He didn’t sleep for a week. It just wasn’t something his body did. Not even for a restorative coma. So, he just couldn’t have –

“Th-there was this… um…” And finally, Marcus seemed to shove down all his unease, and said sharp and quiet, “there was this black hole.”

And the Doctor couldn’t block out that brilliant swirl of nothingness now, that loomed over above him, nearly contained and he couldn’t figure out how they did it, these ancient people, containing a black hole! The TARDIS tried to sing him to sleep and the Doctor didn’t want to succumb; they were standing back, beyond the sundial that he was trapped on, beyond that invisible wall that he was stuck within, watching that nothingness, watching his demise –

And she wanted him to sleep through it!

He slept for a week. He didn’t want to admit it, but oh had he slept.

Marcus laughed a bit, stretching back, oddly relaxing now. “I said it. I told her, other universes beyond black holes!”

“That’s just the movies. They just eat,” he said unconsciously. He couldn’t justify this.

“Yeah… she said the same thing too…” Marcus glanced away, already uneasy, again.

“Who’s this?” the Doctor asked. He looked around, confirming that they were the only two there.

“Oh, the woman I was working with. She… I know she came here with me but they…” he shook his head to clear it, or to try and remember, or even an odd mix of both. The Doctor didn’t want to prod beyond words. “I haven’t seen her. I heard them talking – the… people, I guess. They said she glowed like the sun – and I haven’t seen her since,” he burst out, frustrated, anxious. The only one he knew, and they took her away. A lot of things burned here, it seemed.

The Doctor really needed to take a vacation and find a planet or six made of snow and ice. A good comet would even do.

“I’m sure your companion is fine.”

“What – oh, god no, she’s nothing like that to me!” The boy’s face scrunched in offence, though he blushed a bit.

“Traveling companion,” the Doctor reiterated.

“Well… even that…” Marcus slumped back. “It was my first mission into the stars, too.”

“Really?” The Doctor clicked his tongue, always interested about journeys to the stars. He, too, settled back to get a bit more comfortable. His body was more insistent now, and if they boy had at least seen the people here and they hadn’t harmed him, then the Doctor would worry less now. Slightly less, that is. “Where’d you journey from?”

“Just Earth.”

The Doctor blinked. Since when did Earth send boys as young as he to the stars? “What year?”

“2008.”

“… I must have missed something the last time I was there.” Though he had become rather avoidant of the planet. Even the TARDIS let him have his way in that case. Painful for them both, perhaps?

“Well, Torchwood’s been at it for quite a bit now, ever since we got the cybermen all squared away. Rose and I were just on a scouting mission, but the black hole got us. What happened to you?”

It wasn’t Torchwood. It wasn’t the cybermen. It was Rose that caused the Doctor to stiffen – “She glowed like the sun” – and after an uneasy moment, the Doctor managed a quiet, “What?”

“I asked what happened to you.”

“… No, no, not that – what…” He shook his head, his mind suddenly jumbling again and he was trying to keep everything from falling out of line, nice and neat and straight and it couldn’t be. But the TARDIS was distracted, finding someone else to weave her song towards and the Doctor was offended but if it was to Rose – and it couldn’t be. It just… it… “Who?”

“Um…”

“Your… colleague – whatever! Her name. What is her name?” His eyes were wide and wild when he looked at Marcus, body tense.

“Rose… Rose Tyler…”

The Doctor no longer gave a damn about his body; it would survive. He was stumbling out of bed, ignoring Marcus’s background protests of “That’s probably really unhealthy!” and “You should rest!” as he found himself briefly on the ground. But he shakily got to his feet, found the wall, and used it to guide himself along to the doorway. He didn’t care that his aching muscles were burning in pain, or that his mind throbbed completely over the weak link with the TARDIS, or that when he finally looked at the center of the room at a golden sundial he saw again the black hole that ate the life above him to create nothingness – and it still, even as he looked away, blurred his vision as he remembered.

He didn’t care one bit about anything, except finding Rose Tyler.

Past Endeavors (Final Fantasy XI)

She turned her head at (several) calls of her name, eyes widening in surprise at the odd group of six that had come her way, which included her two kittens, two other of her Thieves, a Beastmaster, and Semih Lafihna. They stopped behind her, looking a bit bewildered (which could be equally shared).

Even to Romaa.

Well, this could be problematic (although luckily no one was stupid enough to call Nanaa by her last name, though the first probably wasn’t much better), and it needed fixing. Quick. No slipups, or Nanaa would lose this opportunity. She grabbed the closest one to her and turned to them with a growl (internally fairly amused by the turn of events, as it had been Semih). “How many times do I have to remind you to call me ‘Captain,’ Lafihna? It’s rrreally not that hard!”

Semih gave her a skeptical look, all set to snap at her in return, but was pushed away and Nanaa quickly went on. “Sorry about that interruption. You do grow a bit use to a regimen like them, though. You were assigning us somewhere?”

“Yes, well. We could use a unit out in the northern area of the fort. Word is that the yagudo won’t sit back long before striking there again, as if that’s anything new. Organize your mercenaries immediately and head out.”

“Right! Of course, we’ll be on it.” Quickly, Nanaa turned away, pushing the six other mithra along and getting far, far away from her mother. She didn’t stop pushing until they were outside again, and sighed in relief. “That could’ve gone much worse.”

“How the heck do you assume any of this is good?!” Madravel snapped, staring at her in shock. Nash and her had come as fast as possible to get Hiru and the others into the past. She hadn’t expected to be drafted into battle. “May as well just signed our death warrant!”

“Rrrelax, what’s the problem?”

“Nanaa, the Mithra Mercenaries expect to have at least a hundred in a unit! Not SEVEN!”

“…”

“Mihgo,” Semih growled.

“Well then, back to our time, hm?”

“We can’t just leave,” Nash brought up, “they’re expecting someone to be there. The yagudo will destroy the fort if no one is.”

“Sooo… we go get ourselves killed. Sounds great! Let’s get going!” Cha bounced with fake excitement.

“Fine mess you got us into, Mihgo,” Semih snapped at her.

“No one asked any of you to come!” she yelled back.

Searching for a Heart (Kingdom Hearts)

Stargazing (Men in Black)

He’s sure that he’s been looking up at the stars ever since his apparent release from the mental facility that he doesn’t really remember being in. They remind him of something, some memory he can’t quite reach, and he sometimes wonders if they drugged him a lot in this facility. He needs to blame the loss on something, after all.

His aunty fries him up steak and eggs every Friday night and he has her watch random sci-fi movies focusing around aliens, because he’s so interested about such fantasies. But he doesn’t enjoy the silly stuff; Mars Attacks didn’t do it for him. He likes a spark of reality.

He wonders about getting a new job and who would take him. They didn’t accept him back at the NYPD unless he had a partner (to babysit his ‘off-set’ mental state, or whatever), but he had bristled at just the word for some reason and turns them down without a second thought. Now he’s jobless.

Tonight he can’t see the stars; they’re hidden behind the cloud cover, but he knows them well enough in his mind that he can map them out. It’s the only bit of peace he feels with all… this. Otherwise he’s edgy and he’s clawing through his mind to remember something. Something important.

He’s been keeping strange hours. Everyone seems asleep long before he stops fussing about in an attempt to be productive (but you can’t get anything productive out of nothing). No one has tried to correct him out of this. They decide that he’s still recovering, but won’t (or can’t?) tell him from what exactly.

Everything feels wrong. The streets are mostly quiet, oddly, as he wanders through them. Insomnia. But eventually he does pass a businessman in a black suit rushing past and he finds himself doing a double-take, stopping and turning and looking over, startled at the man. Yet after a moment or two he wonders what got into himself, because it was as though the man was just… no longer there.

Maybe he wasn’t even there in the first place.

Maybe James Edwards really had gone insane. But if he had, why had they released him?

Certainly he wasn’t any better.

They’re Not Talking About This (Yu-Gi-Oh!)

There was something in how they sat that warned people away from them. Arms folded on the back of a bench, not looking at each other, and both glaring at those who passed them by, strange looks on their faces as they looked at the bandages that covered the two, touched with blood.

They were not talking about this. Their light halves were raging in both their minds, demanding even just a bit of freedom (which even Yami no Yuugi didn’t want to relinquish right now; perhaps he had been spending too much time with the thief). No. Not talking about it at all, they would shut up, sulk, and sulk some more, and most certainly not spare one another a single glance.

“Um… are you boys –” one person finally tried to ask, approaching the bench a bit wearily, and with good reason.

“Fuck off,” Yami no Bakura barked, and the person was gone, just like that. “This is all your fucking fault,” he snapped, finally turning a glare to the one besides him. Whether it was that one person that broke their spell of silence or that he felt he needed to shout over Ryou’s still-constant demands, it was unclear. The only thing clear at that moment was that they were, at long last, speaking.

If arguing fell under the category of ‘speaking’ anyway.

“It isn’t. You overreacted. You brought us there. In fact, I’d quite imagine that the whole thing was – oh, you know – your fault,” Yami no Yuugi bit back, only he hadn’t cast his crimson gaze at all towards the thief. It wasn’t worth it. He had better things to be doing or something like that, he thought. Only if he truly had better things to do, he would have gotten up and left.

“Don’t go shafting the blame!”

“You started it,” his answer was dull. Bored. He even yawned.

“Screw this.”

Apparently, Yami no Yuugi realized, the other did have better things to do, since he stood up with a growl and began to walk away.

Shades of Three (Doctor Who)

From chapter 1:

“This ‘Donna Noble’ is a nobody. A ditz, even! What good is she to… to your sanity?!” the Master demanded to the lifeless body of the Doctor.

“Calm down,” Rose grumbled, “yelling at him isn’t going to wake him up.” She rolled her eyes when the Master glared at her. “Maybe if you give him a kiss on the lips, he will.”

“Are you mocking me, Miss Tyler?”

“Maybe,” she grinned.

“Go away,” the Master tells her, annoyed. To his surprise, she does. Barhveth and Trinnian follow after her, keeping close together. The Master looks down at the sleeping other, frustrated. He puts his hands on either side of his body and leans over him, growling low, “What makes her better than me? Why do you need her more than me? Another Time Lord, for Rassilon’s sake! It isn’t fair. I can understand your little pet wolf – I can! But that’s where it stops! Why. Her?”

As if he gets an answer. The Doctor had been out of reach for two nearly full days now. Rose and the Master went on a ‘mission’ together, leaving the cats to watch over their Doctor, to find this ‘Donna Noble’ woman. She didn’t seem anything special, although a quick glimpse in Miss Tyler’s mind was enough to see that she hadn’t been special, either.

“I wonder if this one would absorb the vortex, too,” the Master had asked with amusement, and Rose had punched him in the arm. It was interesting, at least.