Streets Are Filled With --

FFVII Crisis Core: A July Day (Some People Know Too Much) (Tseng, Zack)

2009-07-27T16:56:17Z

Back to Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core! It's like I never left. 8D This one - and the ones that'll hopefully come after it - is meant to be part of some lazy set of lighter-hearted drabbles about Shinra. 8D WE'LL SEE HOW IT WORKS OUT. This one floats alone in the old sea of the odd Zack and Tseng drabble-era.

Prompts are perfectly welcome in the comments. The more hilarious the better!

A July Day (Some People Know Too Much)

Fandom: Final Fantasy VII (Crisis Core timeline)
Characters: Zack, Tseng; random guest appearance by Kunsel
Rating: PG
Warnings: Gen, and humour, alas!
Summary: Zack whiles away a July day, and figures that some people just know too much.

2185 words and an inability to keep things short!

Night

Thursday nights in July were warm and humid. Midgar burned in the afternoon sun, and when sunset came it burned again; neon and gil going up in flames in the real estate under-Plate. It had been a few years since Zack came out from small-town life in Gongaga and into the complicated tangle of slum-city streets, but watching Midgar blaze to life in the evenings never failed to amaze. All kinds of people crawled out of the metal work of the city's buildings and girders: office workers from the financial district would slide into bars and pubs, completely metamorphic, while executives from hallowed Shinra floors worked out side-by-side with the train graveyard steelworkers at Sector 7's sprawling gym.

Zack'd seen off-duty vets from the SOLDIER corps wander repeatedly into Little Wutai just weeks after coming back from campaigning in the War. They liked it better there, they said whenever he'd go after them. Better food.

'But it's kinda risky, isn't it?' he asked them, but they all laughed the kind of laugh that all old Midgar folks seemed to acquire and told Zack that, no, it wasn't more risky. It was probably safer than anywhere else in the city – not like any Midgar punks were going to wander in there looking for trouble, right? Besides, the people in Little Wutai were the least likely to take up arms against the beef of the Shinra Company armies.

'They know we're a lot stronger than them, for one – they pay attention to the news when most people can't be bothered. And another thing – they want to be Midgar citizens as much as anyone from anywhere wants to "be from Midgar". Don't you?'

'I am from Midgar!' Zack protested automatically. 'Sort of,' he qualified.

It wasn't really his cup of tea, though, Little Wutai. Nice place, but a little too quiet, a little too orderly; it reminded Zack a bit of someone he knew. Besides, the only occasions when he really had time to come down to Sector 7's market were his days off duty, and Zack still had a long, long list of other nooks and crannies he hadn't quite explored before. Tonight, Zack decided, was going to be the night he finally got up the guts to go where no man could really ever confess to have gone before in spite of really wanting to know what lay behind those really big and flashy pink and red and gold doors –

The Honeybee Inn winked back at Zack.

It wasn't like he was here for a girl or anything, but everyone who was anyone in Midgar knew about this place and, well, it couldn't really hurt to stand outside and watch the… action. There were plenty of girls to look at, though they weren't exactly his type (Zack didn't really know how prostitutes were anyone's type, unless they were really desperate or kinda, y'know, depraved). Funny thing about them was that they didn't all look like how Zack expected prostitutes to look (haggard, badly made up, depressed, careless). Sure, there were some of them that looked like they were in this only because they didn't know where else to go, but Zack was convinced that he saw a few girls – the ones going by in these huge and ornate and anachronistic palanquins that the Inn used, or the ones sliding by to the back doors of the Inn in big, posh cars with dark-tinted windows – who looked like they were really in-charge and smug, like it was the men who were getting ripped off and not them.

Zack whistled under his breath. 'This is one crazy city.'

'It is, isn't it?' asked a voice from just behind his neck.

'AAAAH!' Zack yelled aloud, whirling around so fast that his feet almost tangled with each other. Black suit, black tie, white shirt. 'Tseng!'

Tseng's hands were tucked neatly into his pockets, and he didn't look like he felt too out of place. 'Hello,' Tseng greeted Zack, calm as ice.

'F-F-fancy seeing you here!' Zack stammered, raising his hands in the air and laughing hysterically. 'This isn't what it looks like, man! I'm not a perv or anything –'

'But I am?' Tseng asked blithely.

'NO!' Zack yelled again, this time attracting a few more turned heads and a couple of titters from some watching girls. 'I mean, I just didn't expect to see you here! It's my day off tomorrow so I decided to come wade a little deeper into Sector 7, haha ha, ha, ha.' Zack scratched his head sheepishly. 'Gotta admit, the last person I thought I'd bump into here was you. I can sort of see someone like Palmer trotting in via the VIP entrance, but… I didn't know Turks ever stopped working, y'know? You're laughing, aren't you, you bastard. Tseng!'

Tseng chuckled. 'Only a little bit, I promise.'

'Geez,' Zack exhaled. 'What are you doing here?'

'Working,' Tseng shrugged.

Zack stared at him. 'It's twelve thirty at night. This is, uh, the Honeybee Inn. You know what this place is, right, I mean, you -'

'Turks have very flexible working hours,' Tseng cut in smoothly, his voice layered with plenty of equanimity.

Zack's eyes widened as he realised the implications of what Tseng said. He winced. 'Am I even supposed to know you're here? The way you guys work makes me think that you have some kind of "leave no witnesses" policy going on.' He shuffled his feet. He liked Tseng, and it was always weird to realise that Tseng operated on a very different level from him. Zack didn't know much about the Turks, and he really wanted to keep it that way. Ignorance was bliss.

Tseng actually laughed, which made Zack blink. 'If we had that policy, I think I'd be fired for walking into the Inn via the front door.'

'Tough boss?' Zack grinned in sympathy.

'You couldn't even imagine,' Tseng deadpanned.

'Worse than Genesis?'

'All the philosophy, none of the poetry,' Tseng surmised. 'Teaching method's probably similar, though.'

Zack, who had a very good experience of being left to run screaming through the Midgar Plains away from a field zolom while Genesis (serving in Angeal's role that day) stood back and laughed, asked, 'Sink or swim?'

'Mostly sink,' Tseng told him. 'It's apparently more interesting if we're drowning; we make more noises.'

'So what, the Bossman sends you down here for training or something?' Zack whistled. 'I'm not sure if that's cruelty or kindness.'

Tseng smiled. 'Probably a bit of both. You can come along if you want.'

Zack snapped his gaze to Tseng's face. 'In there? I'm allowed?'

'You're from SOLDIER, aren't you?' Tseng asked, starting toward the front doors and the counter just beyond.

'Yeah,' Zack nodded, jogging to catch up. 'Why?'

'Membership in SOLDIER means that you've got the life insurance policy on your head,' Tseng said, stepping up to the waiting receptionist, who had thick, careful makeup and mascara to shade her eyes. She winked at him (AT TSENG, Zack's brain provided in capital letters. BRAVE WOMAN!) and slid him a key without Tseng even opening his mouth. (OH MY GOD, Zack's brain added.) Tseng accepted it and then they were off again, winding through a staff-only door instead of the gilt corridors that the other customers were using. 'They say no one quits being a Turk,' Tseng was saying, as though they weren't striding through the underbelly of a brothel. 'But no one quits being a SOLDIER, either. Here we are,' he announced, opening the door of a room.

Zack peered in through the door way and beheld – 'Where's the bed?' he blurted out.

'I'm afraid I don't usually sleep around on the job,' Tseng said, moving past Zack and into the room, which was furnished mostly by shelves, a desk, a computer system with multiple monitors and a small conference table. The Turk looked over at him. 'Though if you want we could use the desk.'

'I hate you so much,' Zack complained, coming into the room and shutting the door behind him. 'You guys get all the cool lines.'

'We also never clock off,' Tseng reminded him, settling down at the desk. He motioned around the room. 'It's easier for me to work from here than from Shinra Building when we have business in the area,' he explained. 'It's quieter, for one. The Inn has very good soundproofing.'

'I'm getting really sort of afraid that you'll keep telling me things I'm not supposed to know,' Zack moaned. 'One day one of you guys will come after me for knowing too much.'

'We have failsafe procedures,' Tseng shrugged. 'The Shinra family is… thorough.'

'You're practically happy,' Zack accused him. 'Are you enjoying seeing me flail around in extreme discomfort?'

'Not quite,' Tseng said, and flipped on the monitors on the table.

'AAAAAH.' Zack zipped around to stand behind Tseng at the desk. 'You're watching porn on the job?!'

'You have it the other way around,' Tseng corrected him patiently, clicking around and rearranging some of the sixteen camera feeds on the screens. 'I'm watching pornography as my job.'

'This is live?' Zack asked weakly as he observed something happening on Screen 2A that he had previously thought only possible in very, very good dreams.

'This is research,' Tseng hummed. He was taking notes. Names, dates, timestamps.

'I'm going to go blind,' Zack said faintly, backing away. 'I'm not old enough for this yet.'

'It's a very good way of "wading into Sector 7",' Tseng said, calmly enlarging a screenshot of an eerily family looking man. Zack looked away; this was crossing one (million) too many work/life boundaries for his liking.

'I think I'm going to go wade in the opposite direction now,' Zack professed. 'Somewhere PG-rated.'

'Wang's is serving drinks and late-night snacks at a discount this week,' Tseng provided, eyes still fixed on his work.

'In Little Wutai?' Zack asked from his position of safety at the door. 'You go there?' Through his haze of disbelief and mild panic, he considered Tseng's looks, and the blank slate of the man's history.

Tseng looked up. He smiled. He looked back down.

'You know too much,' Zack said quietly, a hand on the doorknob.

'Good night, Zack,' was what Tseng called in reply.

Day coda

It was a Thursday afternoon in July. The Shinra Building. SOLDIER.

'I hate Thursdays,' Zack said, sluggish. 'And I hate July. I may also hate afternoons.'

'Nnngngnn?' asked Kunsel. They were in one of the inventory rooms; Kunsel taking stock, Zack taking stock. 'Please put that back,' Kunsel mumbled, eyeing Zack's hand against a set of materia. 'Those are newly mastered. Even you're not going anywhere near them, your holiness Zack-Fair-SOLDIER-Second-Class.'

'Do I sense bitterness in your voice?' Zack grinned. 'C'mon, man, you know that you'll be getting your own stripes in a few months.'

'I'm too bored to muster up the effort to be bitter about General Angeal's complete lack of bias,' Kunsel replied, ticking off a few final items on his list and uploading the document to the server. 'Too bored and too warm.' He yawned and stretched, fanning himself with one hand. 'What's up with the air conditioning? It's boiling in here.'

'S'offline,' Zack sighed as the two of them made their way to the door. 'Guess why?'

'Again?' Kunsel groaned. 'They've wrecked it again? That's the fourth time this year!'

'Surprise surprise,' Zack sang. 'Wonder what set Genesis off this time, huh?'

Kunsel tapped his chin with a finger. 'Maybe I should go investigate.'

'Didn't they...' Zack made a violent, crushing motion with his hand. '... to your camera the last time you tried that?'

'I was only trying to document the life and times of my superior officers,' Kunsel said defensively. 'Everyone says that the virtual training room is a mess whenever the Generals are done with it, but no one's ever seen the extent of the damage.'

'Genesis has a really bad-ass sword,' Zack informed Kunsel, patiently. 'And Angeal's got one too, except it's bigger. And Sephiroth, too, just longer. Do you know what they can do to you?'

Kunsel smiled brilliantly. 'Probably nothing as bad as what your unconscious attempts at metaphor just suggested to me.'

'What?' Zack spluttered. He paused. His face twisted into a portrait of agony. 'No, you did not just - just - that is gross, Kunsel.'

'You know,' Kunsel murmured, digging into the pocket of his fatigues for his PHS and tabbing madly through his folders. 'According to a Third Class who served in the field under General Sephiroth during that one skirmish on the Eastern Wutai border last year for two months, General Sephiroth's sword is -'

'I am going to sign out now!' Zack declared very loudly, striding off towards the elevators.

'Long weekend for you, isn't it?' Kunsel called after him.

'I'm not even going to ask how you know that!' Zack threw back over his shoulders.

'I know about many things, Mr. Fair!' Kunsel yelled as Zack jabbed at the elevator buttons. 'Wezly from 2nd knows certain details about Genesis because he heard from -'

Gundam Wing: Passover (6, 13; 5 & other random guests)

2009-07-23T15:24:03Z

Many thanks to voksen for the repeated cheerleading and withstanding my Unending Whine. 8D *buffs this fic* I'm really kind of happy with this one. \o/

Passover

Fandom: Gundam Wing
Characters: Zechs, allusions to Treize and 13/6 if you squint. Random guest appearances, including Wufei.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Set just after the series, but pre-Endless Waltz. Standalone part of a future series (Treize Lives!^TM).
Summary: Friendship is unnecessary; it has no survival value. Zechs lives, but that, too, is an oversimplification.

5651 words and a whole bunch of... words! Plus a summary that cannibalises a C.S Lewis quote.

When they dragged him out of the wreckage it would probably have been more appropriate if he had kicked and yelled, but he was too tired to kick and too hoarse to yell and too busy sucking pointlessly at the last of his oxygen, his oesophagus seizing inwards with every breath. He heard words - "is that-?" and a bumbling mess of medical terms, a crushing list of chemicals on order before someone screamed "stat! stat!" - and the familiar, naval, tidal pull of false gravity asserting itself behind the stomach before spreading up between his shoulder blades.

And then there was someone else yanking the tubing of his air supply away, one gasping moment of nothingness like space, and then the smell of hard plastic.

'He's breathing,' they said, their voices coming in down off a panic. 'He's breathing. Stand back and give us some room - wheel him into medical bay 6, delta deck. He's breathing,' the phrase repeated a third time like a prayer while his throat continued to constrict, silent and unnoticed and unmedicated, unmedicable.

Waking up was an entirely different matter all together. Like any good soldier in war he snapped awake, eyes first. He blinked away sealant gone crusty over his eyes, then blinked again, but there was nothing in front of him, just a spiking pain like a migraine starting at the base of his optic nerve. The space around him felt like a vacuum, blasting every part of him outwards until he had to move, but he could not sit up because his hands were strapped down. His throat still ached as if he had been screaming all day (all night?) since they rescued him out of pity and - god, he hoped – with promises of pacifism, honour and dignity for survivors.

'Please don't struggle,' a voice said, female but not feminine, hysterically like and unlike every woman that Zechs had ever seemed to got to know in his life. 'The blindness is temporary. The doctors say that even the protective UV coating on your Gundam and your visor could not block out enough of the explosion - when they found you your retinas were blown. They say to give it two weeks, maybe a month.'

Her voice was steady. Factual, but sympathetic, like she had learned to speak from speeches and therefore measured every word and knew every meaning. Zechs heard her move, and then the rattle of ice cubes against each other before a cold chip was pressed to his mouth. 'Suck,' she said to him. 'Wet your throat. We can talk - they've let me see you first before everyone else.' She pushed the chip into his mouth, which was slack. Her voice was softer when she said, 'We have a lot to talk about.'

Zechs nodded and crunched the chips, feeling the numbness go up his teeth. When the water trickled down, he swallowed and said, 'Relena?'

Relena's voice didn't quite shake when she called him her elder brother and touched her fingers to his fingers. Zechs chuckled, not knowing what else to do. 'Can you undo my hands? Or is that...' He trailed off. He chuckled again, this time louder: a laugh.

'Are you all right?' she asked him, again with that curious blend of concern beaten down by practicality. Had it been the fighting that changed her? Or had she grown up like that? In either case, Relena didn't move to untie Zechs. 'You're -'

'What are they going to do with me?' Zechs cut her off, as gently as he could after 10 years of war and order. 'Do they even have the vaguest idea?'

'They haven't decided yet,' Relena said. 'But I think it would be best if we could keep you somewhere safe.'

'Safe from whom?' Zechs asked, groping upwards to meet her hand. She clung on and he let her nails dig into his skin. 'Ghosts?' he asked, his voice finally starting to break apart from misuse and screaming. '900,000 dead soldiers? Myself?'

'Mostly the latter,' she said reluctantly, as though she knew exactly how he felt being strapped to a bed and feeling vaguely post-traumatic. Maybe it was natural - they were brother and sister - but he barely knew her and she barely knew him, and if they wanted that to change they needed more than a few minutes post-Apocalypse, with less than one of them a wanted man. 'There's a good facility, close to Sanq -'

'An asylum's an asylum by any name,' Zechs said, letting Relena go when he felt her pull her hand back. 'Put a man in there for some time and they'll find something wrong with him. But it's fortunate - I'm not well, and I haven't been well, and because I do not think that I am going to get better they will be very impressed by my sanity and let me go eventually, sometime after they have dug up the stories they want to hear about the world ending three times, four times -- I've actually lost count now. That, and how it was like to fly in a world with Gundams, and Gundam pilots, the whole damn sky alight and dying. You really had to look, not just listen, because once there's a hull breach or airlock compromise their voices get stolen and the screaming stops, abruptly. Did they all live?' he asked, abruptly.

'What?' Relena started. Zechs heard a clatter of something, maybe a syringe coming off a metal tray.

'Did they all live?' he asked her again. 'The five pilots.'

'Yes,' Relena replied, cautiously. 'They did. They're all doing well, as far as I know. But you're not – forgettable the way that they are, brother. They were the pivotal heroes for the colonies but they have forgettable names and no families--'

'I'm not sure who the main characters of this story even were,' Zechs shrugged, lying back down. 'Or what the plot was, or who betrayed whom, or if all of us were loyal to the end.'

'Milli-'

'Not yet,' he said to her, grinding his head back against the pillows of whatever they had strapped him onto and feeling the crunch of his hair beneath his scalp. 'Perhaps not ever any more, for that name. Did he live?'

'Who?' Relena asked, but she didn't sound half as confused as she did before. Little wonder – it was a simple process of elimination, wasn't it? If Zechs wasn't asking after the five Gundam pilots and if he wasn't asking after Noin, who else was left? Zechs felt anger change his voice. 'Did he live.'

'I'm going to inject a sedative into your IV, brother,' she told him, changing the subject completely. 'We'll transfer you while you sleep. Thank you for your understanding and no,' she said, as the world tumbled up into star-bright colours behind his bandages. 'I'm sorry. I do not think that Treize lived.'

Zechs imagined that the most cruel thing they could have done to him was to have put him in a cell neighbouring Lady Une's, but apparently the new United Earth Sphere Alliance – or whatever they called themselves – were better at unusual forms of torture than he'd expected. They didn't put Une anywhere near him at all, unless Zechs was going to count the gradually increasing number of times that her name appeared on news reports and on the television.

The facility/hospital/asylum/holding cell was the sum total of a small white building an hour and a half's land transit from Sanq, funded by political earmarking as far as Zechs could tell. No other way to explain its existence – if he had any fellow inmates they weren't permanent enough for him to notice who they were. His doctors didn't so much lock him in a padded room as much as they just let him roam aimlessly through white halls and stare out of broad windows across green fields.

The blindness, as promised, faded with time. Zechs barely noticed it going: they had him under so much medical care for the first two weeks that his vision returning was just one incident in a series of many.

Early on, his doctor told him, 'I'd be shocked at what you've done to your body,' as he calmly scrawled things onto a clipboard, 'except that you're already grazing your early twenties, which is a half-decade better than what those kids got.'

'You treated the Gundam pilots?' Zechs asked, sitting up and consenting to be poked and prodded and scanned and documented.

'Someone had to,' the doctor shrugged. 'I'm not really interested in war-mongering or politics. My family has a few acres out in the old country, a vineyard or two, and after I'm done with you I think they'll have paid me enough that I'll go happily and silently into my fields. Buy a few cows, become a geriatrician. I've had enough of the war-dead and war-dying.'

Zech thought of the men he had under his command, both military and mercenary, and stiffened. 'How bad has it been?'

His doctor rapped him on the shoulder. 'Breathe out, Mr. Merquise – if you draw your spine in like that you'll snap from the tension one day, you know.' Zechs exhaled, noisily for emphasis. The doctor sighed. 'Every fight has its casualties, boy. For the most part the hospitals on the colonies are filled with the usual – everything from burns to post-traumatic cases. Give it a few more months and my sort of people will have nothing more to do. We'll pass it on to the gravediggers and the psychiatrists, and that's the hard and honest truth.'

Zechs was silent.

The doctor pushed an oxygen mask towards his face. 'That's the price everyone pays, isn't it?' he said brusquely.

'If the price is high enough this time, maybe the world will learn to read labels,' Zechs murmured, pulling the mask on. 'Caveat emptor.'

'Buyer beware,' his doctor said, yanking the straps of the mask over Zechs' head with more force than was strictly necessary. 'Prolonged exposure to high levels of g-force, excessive radiation, extended periods of time away from Earth or simulated levels of Earth-gravity, sleep deprivation, malnutrition and overt and hapless physical exertion may result in the following symptoms: inability of the blood to carry sufficient levels of oxygen, shrinkage of the heart, severely elevated or depressed blood pressure, growth inhibition - especially for males undergoing or coming out of adolescence – not to mention an erratic heart rate and a increased risk of both grey-out and black-out during aerobatic or, in your case, hysterically risky flight patterns.' The doctor activated the flow of oxygen. 'That's just the general prognosis,' he added, growling cheerfully. 'And if the whole world just counted the symptoms rationally, we'd all be able to table up a dozen and one reasons why training pre-teens in the art of war is stupid and non-essential.'

Zechs coughed. 'The "art of war" is a poetic way of describing military training, doctor,' he said from beneath the mask.

'Don't talk, all you do is spew carbon dioxide,' his doctor told him. 'But it is an art to you people, isn't it? Flying farther and faster and for better reasons than the next man. Maybe not glory, but honour, justice, beauty – big nouns, bigger adjectives.'

Zechs narrowed his eyes faintly. 'You're not from a noble family, are you, doctor?'

'My family's had ties to Romefeller for longer than I bother to recall,' the man told him, dismissing it off hand. 'I watched Colonel Treize and you rise to power like binary stars. I'm no mind-reader, but I'd go at your psych file with gusto if I thought you had any idea what the hell it is that you've been doing with your life these last ten years. It's a nicer view, watching your sister.'

'She's lived a different life,' Zechs said, holding the oxygen mask up away from his face and breathing raggedly. 'That's what we were fighting for.'

'Peacecrafts fighting Khushrenadas,' the doctor snorted. Zechs didn't bother to correct him. 'Nobility! An euphemistic classification for a bunch of bored inbreeds. We live like we own all the currency in the whole damn world, including human lives. Maybe it'd have been better if we'd all been born paupers instead.' Jotting down a few more notes on his board, he told Zechs, 'Keep sucking down on that. I'll put your body back together, then you can go see what you want to do with your wreck of a mind, Mr. Merquise.'

After that the doctor left Zechs able-bodied, lucid and alone. As the days went by, Zechs found himself replacing the thought of an anonymous new government at a loss of what to do with a war criminal – that mysterious they in the sky – with the memory of Relena's voice at his bedside. No one else seemed to be bothered by his state of yes-no-maybe existence: is Zechs Merquise/Milliardo Peacecraft dead/alive?

All things said and done, Zechs felt his stay was more like an exercise in bureaucracy (delete whichever inapplicable) crossed over with a physics lecture (does anyone give a damn about Schrödinger's cat; they've already got his equations) than a real problem. War was over. Capital punishment was out of fashion.

There was no pushing things, though. There wasn't much to do at all – Zechs had no one to hide from, no one to seek out, no one to protect and no one to fight. He couldn't remember another time like this in his life, except for a distant past filled with hazy memories of etiquette lessons, his father's study and the Sanq Kingdom, home. There wasn't much to remember, and even if there had been Zechs was sure that time and experience had done a good job of eroding it away. Things had come into focus only after the attacks on his family; then things had begun to matter. Everything had begun to matter, from who he was and who he spent his time with, to where he was and where he was going to be. Zechs had never had the luxury of not thinking, or the pleasantry of spare time, or the simple aimlessness of not having a goal, and now that he did he wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

Silence and spare time weren't particularly frightening, nor were the nights, which Zechs found temperate and easy to pass with either a book or sleep. The days Zechs passed in the rehabilitation wing, working on physical therapy and then on simply keeping his body fit while his mind wandered. They/Relena didn't send in a psychologist, as his medical doctor had predicted they would – what would have been the point? Zechs had piloted the Epyon and survived a brief foray with suicide. Jung and Freud were not going to be helpful. Someone else came instead; someone more qualified, and whom Zechs had heard of and could, without chagrin, respect.

Sally Po came in with her sympathy and her military experience and asked him questions, steadily but gently, until Zechs got tired of being polite and asked, 'Do you think I'm mentally unsound?'

'No, I don't think you are,' Po said to him, without preamble. 'But then, you have said by your own admission that you weren't in your right mind when you led the White Fang.'

It's complicated, Zechs would have said honestly, but instead he said, 'I got better.'

'It seems you have,' she agreed. 'I've seen something strikingly similar happen, which adds to your credulity. Lady Une –'

'She's doing very well, I see,' Zechs interjected softly. By sheer force of habit he had kept up with her to the best of his ability: the newspapers and the net casts and even the radio. 'Working with the government and heading the Preventers. With her track record and loyalty to His Excellency, Lord Khushrenada –'

'I'm sensing some sarcasm in your tone, Mr. Merquise,' Po commented. Zechs shrugged; Sally Po was a Preventer, which made Une her superior. 'No one doubts that the Lady Une has been through a lot. I believe at the end of the day it was decided that it was in the best interests of the new alliance that the blame not be placed on either the colonists or Lord Khushrenada's army.'

Zechs leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms. 'Then what am I doing here?'

She cleared her throat. 'We're ascertaining that you're not post-traumatic, or a risk to others, or a risk to yourself. That's what they called me in to do.'
Sally Po had long hair and a gentle nature, and Zechs momentarily wondered why he could only see a multitude of weaknesses when he looked at her.

'I think I fail to qualify for trauma,' Zechs said. 'You have to have come from a position of relative stability to be knocked off of it, and I haven't. My family's always been involved with war, one way or another. After all this time, do you think I'd waste all of my effort by killing myself, or anyone else?'

Po was quiet. Then she said, 'You can't rationalise everything, Mr. Merquise.' With a sigh, she gathered her things and stood. 'I respect your confidentiality, but might I suggest something?'

Coolly, Zechs said, 'Yes?'

'There're people more experienced than myself in this field,' she said. 'I can forward your file to a few who do have experience, in every sense of the word. Their opinions will be respected more than mine will, I wager.'

'Who are they?'

'People like you,' she said. 'Child soldiers. Please don't get up, Mr. Merquise,' she held up her hand. 'In terms of cynicism, your doctor assures me that you must be thrice as old as I am. So?'

Zechs nodded, yes. 'Ms. Po,' he said softly just as Sally turned to go. When she looked back at him, he said, 'Tell my sister that –' He paused. 'No. Nothing. Please, feel free to leave.'

'You're a sharp one, Zechs,' she said, a look carefully framed away from pity in her eyes. 'Relena cares about you. She doesn't know what to do with you, and I think she's afraid that if she lets you out of here you'll prove to be perfectly non-traumatic, perfectly unwilling to hurt anyone and perfectly unwilling to die, and perfectly predisposed to doing all of the three somewhere far, far away from here.'

Zechs tugged his lips up into a smile. 'Thank you, Miss Po.'

Sally patted him on the shoulder with her hand. 'Give her time,' she advised. 'You've plenty of it, after all. This is better than a court martial. I'll see about getting someone in here to talk to you next week.'

Whomever he might have expected Sally Po to send, Chang Wufei had not admittedly been high on Zechs' list of potentials.

It hadn't been a very long list.

Zechs had assumed that she'd send Maxwell, or maybe go a step further and try Yuy, but it was black hair and belligerent eyes and a silent, unimpressed expression that waited for him in the airy hospital lounge.

'Well, well,' Zechs said to himself from where he'd paused in the corridor.

The staff had shown Wufei a seat and given him a tray of drinks. The former he'd taken, the latter sat untouched on the table in front of him. He sat waiting; very still, and very straight, dressed in a plain white shirt and suitably anonymous black pants. Seeing Wufei like that left Zechs feeling disjointed, as though something had been wrenched out of a socket and left to dangle. Without the largess of space and two Gundams to separate them, it seemed strange to Zechs that Wufei wasn't in military fatigues.

He shook the thoughts out of his head and strode into the lounge. 'Chang Wufei,' he said quietly, coming up to a chair next to the boy and setting a hand on the backrest.

'Zechs.' Wufei got up, his eyes sweeping in Zechs' appearance. He didn't try to disguise either his curiosity or his appraisal.

'You're not being very subtle,' Zechs observed lightly. With a war behind them, it wasn't as if either of them could stand on ceremony, though Zechs could damn well try. Maybe it was his breeding; or perhaps he just wanted Wufei to feel as on edge as he did.

'You're pale,' was Wufei's succinct conclusion.

'They keep me on a short leash,' Zechs said.

'You look weak,' Wufei shot back.

Zechs shrugged it off. 'I probably am,' he said, giving up on their rally and sitting down. He was getting tired of fighting battles with words and without armour. He gestured at the room. 'Otherwise I wouldn't be here, would I?'

Wufei laughed, sharp and full of ridicule. 'You're naïve if you believe that, Merquise,' he announced, and sat down as if he'd been forced into giving ground.

Zechs couldn't help but smile at that. 'It's not as though they let me go piloting as a rehabilitation activity.'

'Then do something else,' Wufei dismissed, putting his arms akimbo. 'Run. Train. Lift weights. You can't tell me that that woman made me come here just to tell you that you're throwing your life away.'

'It's not my body they're trying to fix,' Zechs said, leaning forward and picking up the pot of tea on the lounge table. He poured himself a cup. 'Want one?'

'No,' Wufei said, strongly. 'You are wasting my time, Merquise.'

'I didn't ask for you.' Zechs poured out another cup anyway. 'Someone requested for Sally Po to talk to me, and then Sally Po requested that I let her recommend someone else for my case. I don't enjoy being passed around like an explosive that might go off at any time, if that's what you're thinking. Nor do I want to be pitied. I want to get out of this hospital,' Zechs said, setting the tea pot down with supreme calm. 'I want my autonomy back. I do not want other people to decide for me whether I am sane or not.'

He looked up at Wufei, lifting one of the cups. 'One sugar or two?'

Wufei looked at him. 'One,' he said shortly, and then shut his mouth.

Zechs opened the sugar sachets in silence. When he passed Wufei his cup, the man accepted it without protest. 'It's not my body they're trying to fix,' Zechs repeated, tightly controlled. 'But I hear that there's peace now. No need for soldiers or,' he cast his mind for the phrase, 'child soldiers any more.' He saw Wufei tighten his hands around his untouched cup, and felt vicariously victorious. 'I wasn't a Gundam Pilot. They don't hail me as a hero – I'm a terrorist and a deserter and a political time bomb.'

Wufei cut in. 'What were you fighting for?' he asked, his voice low and almost angry. 'One moment you were fighting for Earth and the next you were with the White Fang. Now you're telling me all of this, but what's the point? I'm not an important person – there's nothing I can do.'

'I don't know what the point is, speaking entirely for myself,' Zechs said. 'I wasn't supposed to live this long.'

'But you're alive,' Wufei said, voice rising. He'd never been trained to keep his cool, Zechs assumed. Lucky him. 'You lived through your war and now you have to deal with how your war has left the world.'

'My war?' Zechs asked politely.

'Merquise!' Wufei snapped.

'It left the world at peace!' Zechs snarled, with equal ferocity. 'I fought my war as honourably as I could and as long as I could to end all wars. It didn't matter which side I was on, and it didn't matter who I was fighting for. As a soldier, I was ready and willing to die that day, and I should have.'

'Why?' Wufei's eyes blazed. 'So that you could leave the work of establishing peace to the people you left behind?'

Zechs had no answer for Wufei that would have made any sense to the boy: I was supposed to die, too, were the only words on his lips and those were too much for him to say. The only other response was instinctive. 'What place does a soldier have outside of war? And I'm nothing but a soldier.' He held Wufei's gaze.

Wufei held his for a moment, but not past that.

'Damn it,' Wufei swore, slamming his cup onto the table and looking away.

Zechs felt achingly tired, and too exhausted to be as angry as Wufei could. Talking with him was like looking back at the world through an inverted mirror of unpleasant truths. 'Why did you come here?' he asked Wufei, wearily.

'I wanted some answers,' Wufei said, dully resentful and equally aware of why they were both so quick to anger. 'I thought you'd have them.'

'You can still ask me,' Zechs said, turning away as well and fixing his gaze on the far wall. 'If you'd like. I'm sorry – I've made you uncomfortable.'

'Don't make me laugh, Merquise,' Wufei retorted. He waited a beat. 'That day. I fought Treize.'

'Oh?' Zechs said. They hadn't told him this. They hadn't told him anything about Treize. 'Again?' he asked, forcing the word out of his mouth.

'Aah,' Wufei nodded. 'We needed to finish things.'

'He probably felt the same way.'

'He didn't hold back,' Wufei went on. 'He fought well. But on that final attack, he saw me move, and for someone like Treize it would have been child's play to calculate the necessary trajectories in time to dodge or feint. He knew what I was going to do, and he could have blocked it. He didn't.'

Wufei was silent. Zechs was glad. It gave him time to breathe.

'Why?' Wufei asked.

'Why what?' Zechs asked, defensively droll.

Wufei turned. He reached around to Zechs and grabbed him by the arm. 'Why didn't he block?' Wufei demanded, shaking him, and Zechs let himself be shaken. 'You knew him better than anyone else, Merquise – why didn't he block?'

Numbly, Zechs heard himself say, 'You're mistaken.'

Wufei stopped. 'What?'

The laugh that bubbled its way up Zechs' throat took them both by surprise. 'You think that I knew Treize better than anyone else?' Zechs laughed, unable to help himself – it was that or cry or shout, and there wasn't any point in doing either. He yanked his arm free, sending his tea clattering to the ground in the process. 'That man drove me insane – the two of us were fighting a war where there weren't any real enemies and where there were no real sides and where the only goal was to live long and then die young. Why do you think I have any idea of how his head worked?' Zechs brought a hand up to his mouth to stop himself; his fingers were trembling minutely.

Wufei pulled his arm back. 'Merquise...'

Zechs bent down to pick up his tea cup and wipe up the mess. 'This isn't a hospital,' he said, kneeling. 'It's not my body they're trying to fix.' He set the cup down on the table, and placed his hands there, too.

'The woman wants a report from me,' Wufei said at last.

'Ms. Po?'

'No, the other woman,' Wufei said, slowly. 'The girl.'

'Ah,' Zechs said, nodding.

'I'll tell her you're wasting your life here,' Wufei told Zechs, standing. 'You are, you know, you bastard. You're pale and you're weak. Go run, train, lift weights.'

'Thank you,' Zechs said, still kneeling.

'I'm not doing this for you or your pride,' Wufei snapped. 'You're a broken man who can't do anything for himself – it's pathetic – but if that's what happens to hypocrites and turncoats, then I won't be the one to condemn you to a life of staring at walls and waiting on the word of paranoid and untested women. Go do something with yourself. You disgust me.'

Zechs knelt up. 'You should consider counselling if you're ever need of a profession in this new world, Wufei.'

Wufei snorted, and left.

'So I heard that they were letting you out,' his doctor said to him on the morning that Zechs was scheduled to leave. He turned up at Zechs' room door, unasked for and sans his medical equipment but with all of his usual bedside manner.

Zechs had a bag packed. There wasn't much in it – a few sets of clothes, some money. He zipped it up before saying, 'I believe the correct term is that I'm "being discharged".'

'Semantics,' the doctor waved it off, leaning against the doorjamb. He squinted at Zechs through his spectacles. 'What are you now, a politician?'

'Not everyone has such a noble profession as yours, doctor,' Zechs said, slinging his bag over a shoulder.

'You're drier than a desert,' his doctor huffed. He nodded at Zechs' getup. 'Well then, where are you going to go?'

'I don't know yet,' Zechs replied with a shrug. 'Are you here to tell me?'

'If I wanted to give instructions I'd have joined the army same as you. Doctors mostly live for disobedient patients.' The man reached into the breast pocket of his well-cut suit and withdrew a slim folio of papers. 'What you have in front of you are some choices, young man,' he announced, flipping the soft leather open with quick hands. 'If only we were all so fortunate to be able to pick and choose like this.'

'What are those?' Zechs asked, spotting a flash of paper. He didn't have any of his documents on him – just thinking about identifying himself made Zechs wince. Merquise's documents had probably been destroyed alongside any of his other military paperwork. Miliardo Peacecraft's existence was an even trickier issue. 'My papers?'

'In a manner of speaking,' his doctor nodded whimsically, flipping through them. 'On one hand we have these,' he said, holding up a few sheets. 'Carte blanche. Choose your own name, your own birth date, your own favourite colour – fill in the blanks. Very primary school.' Then he held up another set of papers. 'While on the other we have these, issued in either one of your old names, and they come with all the baggage attached.'

Zechs narrowed his eyes. 'The choice is a little too obvious, if you ask my opinion.'

'I know,' the doctor bemoaned quietly. 'There are so few caveats that I'm actually a little disappointed. No price of admission for a free ticket to anywhere? Hah!'

'I'm not even going to try to correct your oxymorons, doctor,' Zechs pointed out.

'We'd be here all day if you did,' the doctor agreed wholeheartedly. He folded the papers, neatly, and slotted them into the folio once more. 'They've frozen all your old accounts,' he told Zechs. 'One way or another, they'll move the money and liquidate the assets so that you'll be able to become an obedient, high-bracketed tax-paying member of society no matter where you end up.'

'May I access my records?' Zechs asked. 'I haven't seen them in a while.'

'It's not nice pretending to be poor, Merquise,' the doctor chastised. He handed over the folio. 'There's a print out in there. No sense in having you log in personally to check if you choose to be a dead man five minutes later.'

'Thank you,' Zechs said, receiving the folio. He opened it and flipped through the papers – typical legal documentation for the most part, until it came to his statements. Property valuations and assorted titles from his time and investments during his tenure in OZ, yes. Then another few sheets, and a bank balance that was astronomically larger than anything he had expected. Zechs' hand paused on the page. 'Doctor,' he said quietly.

'Noticed that, have you?' His doctor made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat, which came out like a laugh. 'Mumbo-jumbo and rigmarole and dancing in the dark,' he muttered, digging into his jacket once more. 'Here,' he said, handing Zechs another letter. 'The will was executed into your estate – you were alive in public healthcare for long enough that the Khushrenada lawyers bit the heads off of anyone who tried to get their hands on your share. Not that there were many. They're bad blood even by our standards now.'

Zechs took the letter, but didn't bother glancing very much farther than Treize's family crest and watermarks.

'Game, set, match?' his doctor asked.

Zechs folded Treize's will in with the rest of his papers. 'His victories were always crushing,' he said, with some bitterness.

'No secret that the two of you were friends long before you were enemies.' The doctor cocked his head at Zechs. 'What changed, if you don't mind me asking such a plebeian question? I've got a bad case of curiosity and no respect for whispering in the dark.'

'Nothing really changed,' Zechs reflected. He thumbed idly through the documents. 'The circumstances did. There wasn't enough time in the interim to figure out both friendships and allegiances.'

'Aren't they the same?'

'Not at all,' Zechs shook his head. He set his shoulders. 'I guess you're here to sign my obituary, doctor?'

His doctor withdrew a pen. 'So that's what you've decided?'

Zechs handed over his old identity in silence.

The doctor lifted a shoulder in a shrug, and pushed his sleeve back to check his watch. 'Time of death,' he announced. 'Two fifty one p.m.'

Zechs smiled. 'Now you're being crude.'

'My favourite part of the job,' the doctor said brightly, signing the sheets. 'Here,' he said, capping his pen and offering the papers to Zechs. 'Don't run too far. One day someone might come looking.'

'I'll go just far enough,' Zechs said.

The doctor pushed himself away from Zechs' door. 'I'll be seeing you, then.'

Zechs exhaled. 'Maybe in a different life.'

RAWRRGHHHHHHHHH

2009-07-15T14:19:34Z

*CRY OF RAGE* It's it's it's one of those months! Where there are WORDS but no WRITING comes out; there are like these IDEAS stuck in my head the way PARSLEY STICKS IN TEETH but no output because they have no SOULS. They are like ZOMBIES. D: FANDOM ZOMBIES. I've got a Batman Beyond fic on the burner and a Gundam Wing fic that won't end, BUT ALL I WANT TO DO IS COME HOME TO FINAL FANTASY VII, where the WILD GEESE RUN FREE and the STREETS ARE DARK, COOL AND CALM.

/totally useless post! *BEAMS*

*sob* Fact of the matter is, is that out of all of the tiny little draft ideas that I have, the ones I love best are still in FFVII, and/or in Nasdack, oh god, I am homesick for a fandom, this is clearly a call for Ben & Jerry's.

[edit] THIS. THIS IS WHAT I FEEL LIKE, THIS SONG: Jim's Big Ego - Stress.

I love to work I love to run I love to waterski snowboard
jetski skydive parasail handglide rollerblade mountainbike
bungee jump well I mean I love to do these things if I had the time
I love to work I love to work I love to work after work
I love to spend a little time with this woman that I'm seein
cause we never get the time to spend together
so we call each other up and we talk about work
but I think id really love is to get up by myself on a tiny little island
in the middle of the ocean with just me a book and a cellular phone
and a personal computer in case something came up
and I'd eat and I'd drink and I'd run and I'd sleep
and do nothing but swim all day
except I don't know how to do laps in the ocean
where are the SHARKS where are the SHARKS!!!

[edit again] Oh, screw it all:

From areyougame:

August 12 - Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, Tseng/Zack: Longing - Finding you in the land of the lost

August 16 - Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, Tseng/Lazard: Clothes fetish – Meat makes, and clothes shapes, but manners makes a man.

unbearably lazy bugger

2009-07-13T05:34:07Z

So, a couple of things have taken over my life recently, and all of them seem to somehow involve me completely ghosting over my DW. It's magic! :D "Must go grab a matcha latte - whoops, no time to cross-post to DW!" "How about I watch Crows Zero a third time instead of opening a new browser window, yeah!"

\o SO I SHALL SUMMARISE THUSLY THE EVENTS OF THE PAST FORTNIGHT:

My job, I have quit it! Celebration and glee!
My visa, I has it! University, here I come!
Crows Zero, the movie! I love it!
Gundam Wing, I am rewatching it! Treize and Zechs, how much do I love you? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.

And because I am now free from the blighted octopi-hands of work, I can crosspost my posts in bits and pieces too!

I hereby request humbly that any Gundam Wing fans stab the comments with AU scenarios.

I need about 10 - that's a happy number! - for an Insane 13-6 Marathon^TM. 8D Suggestions: teacher!AU; pirates; diplomats; mud-wrestlers! \o THIS FANDOM REQUIRES OLD-SCHOOL CHEESINESS.

\o/! Off to go do some productive things now!

Gundam Wing versus Trek knockout battle!

2009-07-02T15:22:58Z

Drabble Battle #2! Unfortunately, the Discworld prompt somehow managed to fling itself off the Elephants and go thundering elsewhere, so for the moment the battle rages between Space and Space. 8D voksen is to blame for the Gundam Wing, and everyone else is to blame for Trek.

Again, word count is not an indication of bias (FOR SERIOUS THIS TIME), and nothing is really read through or fully thought out. Experimenting with a few new styles, too!

Gundam Wing: Treize lives! But Zechs takes huge political falls.

When they dragged him out of the wreckage it would probably have been more appropriate if he had been kicking and yelling, but he was too tired to kick and too hoarse to yell, and too busy sucking pointlessly at the last of his oxygen, his oesophagus seizing inwards with every breath. He heard words - "is that -" and a bumbling mess of medical terms, a crushing list of chemicals before someone screamed "stat! stat!" - and the familiar, naval, tidal pull of false gravity asserting itself. It always starts behind the stomach before spreading up between the shoulderblades. And then there was someone else yanking the tubing of his air supply away, one gasping moment of nothingness like space, and then the smell of hard plastic.

'He's breathing,' they said, their voices coming in down off a panic. 'He's breathing. Stand back, give us room - wheel him into medical bay 6, delta deck. He's breathing,' the phrase repeated a third time like a prayer while his throat continued to constrict, silent and unnoticed and unmedicated, unmedicable.

Waking up was an entirely different matter all together. Like any good soldier in war he snapped awake, eyes first. He blinked away sealant gone crusty over his eyes, blinked again, and again, but there was nothing in front of him, just a spiking pain like a migraine starting above the bridge of his nose. The space around him felt like a vacuum, blasting every part of him outwards until he had to move, but he could not sit up, because his hands were strapped down and again his throat ached as if he had been screaming all day, all night, since they rescued him with pity and - god, he hoped - promises of pacifism, honour, dignity to survivors.

'Please don't struggle,' a voice said, female but not feminine, hysterically like and unlike every woman that Zechs had ever seemed to got to know in his life. 'The blindness is temporary. The doctors say that even the protective coating of your Gundam and your visor could not block out enough of the explosion - when they found you your retinas were blown. They say to give it two weeks, maybe a month.'

Her voice was steady and factual, but sympathetic, like she had learned to speak from speeches and drafts and could therefore measure every word, know every meaning. Zechs heard her move, and then the rattle of ice cubes against each other before a cold chip was pressed to his mouth. 'Suck,' she said to him. 'Wet your throat. We can talk - they've let me see you first before everyone else.' She pushed the chip into his mouth, which was slack. Her voice was softer when she said, 'We have a lot to talk about.'

Zechs nodded in lieu of words, and crunched the chips to feel the numbness go up his teeth. When the water trickled down, he swallowed and said, 'Relena.' Relena's voice didn't quite shake when she called him her elder brother and touched her fingers to his fingers. Zechs chuckled, not knowing what else to do. 'Can you undo my hands? Or is that...' He trailed off. He chuckled again, this time louder: a laugh.

'Are you all right?' she asked him, again with that curious blend of concern beaten down by practicality. She didn't move to untie him. 'You're -'

'What are they going to do with me?' Zechs cut her off, as gently as he could after 10 years of war. 'Do they know?'

'They haven't decided yet,' Relena said. 'But I think it would be best if we could keep you safe. Somewhere safe,' she said again.

'Safe from whom?' Zechs asked, groping upwards to meet her hand. She clung on and he let her nails dig into his skin. 'Ghosts?' he asked, his voice finally starting to break apart from misuse and screaming. '900,000 dead soldiers? Myself?'

'Mostly the latter,' she said, as though she knew - as though she knew exactly what he knew, that they were brother and sister but he barely knew her and she barely knew him, and if they wanted that to change they needed more than a few minutes post-Apocalypse, with less than one of them a wanted man. 'There's a good facility, close to Sanc -'

'An asylum's an asylum by any name,' Zechs said, letting her go. 'Put a man in there for some time and they'll find something wrong with him. But it's fortunate - I'm not well. I'm not well, and I haven't been well, and because I do not think that I am going to get better they will be very impressed by my sanity and let me go eventually, sometime after they have dug up the stories they want to hear about the world ending three times, four times, I've lost count now. That, and how it was like to fly in a world with Gundams, and Gundam pilots, the whole damn sky alight and dying. You really had to look, not just listen, because once there's breach and compromise their voices get stolen and the screaming stops, abruptly. Did they all live?'

'What?' Relena started. Zechs heard a clatter of something, maybe a syringe.

'Did they all live?' he asked her again. 'The five pilots.'

'Yes,' Relena replied, cautious. 'You're not -'

'I'm not sure who the main characters of this story even were,' Zechs shrugged, lying back down. 'Or what the plot was, or who betrayed whom, or if all of us were loyal to the end.'

'Milli-'

'Not yet,' he said to her, grinding his head back against the pillows of whatever they had strapped him onto and feeling the crunch of his hair beneath his scalp. 'Perhaps not ever any more, for that name. Did he live?'

'Who?'

Zechs got angry. 'Did he live.'

'I'm going to inject a sedative into your IV, brother,' she told him, in her own way forgiving. 'We'll transfer you while you sleep. Thank you for your understand and no,' she said, as the world tumbled up into star-bright colours behind his bandages. 'I do not think that Treize lived.'

Trek: Flying-o-phobic McCoy, meet Starfleet!

'Do you know what's out there?' his first professor of the year - his year, whatever year it was that they'd put him in - asked his class - whatever class it was that he was in. McCoy had no real idea: he wasn't some untrained boy coming in with no experience under his belt, but then again his sum experience with non-human life forms rounded up to a big fat zero. They must have put him somewhere, because he wasn't learning about basic biology all over again, but when someone opened a lecture with "DO YOU KNOW WHAT'S OUT THERE", McCoy's first reaction was that they'd put him in with the freshly minted Hippocrateses, all eager to please and woefully lacking in cynicism.

Disease, he wanted to scream, fingers curled tight around his datapad to stop himself from itching at his brand-new and irritatingly starchy red collar. Disease and danger wrapped in darkness. Because it was true. Space was huge, empty in a lot of places, and too full wherever else it could accommodate. This being Starfleet, the professor was probably going to say something about Enterprise (the whole campus was obsessed with that word now that it'd come out that the new flagship was only a few years away from completion) and Discovery and New and Excellent Worlds.

The professor slapped the podium he was standing at. The loud noise made McCoy look up - it was one oddity after another oddity, what with the 100 year old whiteboard and honest-to-god markers behind the man and what looked like a paper-and-spine medical reference to his side that looked like it could date back to the days of Ibn Sina.

'Disease!' the professor announced, thumping the tome. 'And a lot of danger. Though the latter isn't your problem as medical officers, unless it stems from the former, in which case it is your job.' He stormed to the board, and fielded a marker. 'Because space is huge, class. It's gigantic and it's vast and you never know what may be beyond the next warp. Which is exciting, yes -' He scrawled a giant '4001: INTRODUCTION TO STARFLEET MEDICAL PRACTICES' on the board, and then turned around. '- but I hope it terrifies the shit out of all of you too.'

Which was probably when, for the first time since his first mock-field test (where, in a fit of motion sickness, he'd spewed up all over one lower-ranked cadet), McCoy looked to Starfleet and saw something more than a dole or a cloud-castle in the sky just solid enough to give him room to sleep at night.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS:

View poll: Gundam Wing v. Star Trek knockout battle!

ALSO WIK!!!: it is imperative (see the number of exclamation marks I used there?) that you give me your addresses for the Great Mailer if you wish to receive mail! SHYNESS IS NOT AN OPTION. I love sending mail, so indulge my sad little life and go paste yourself there. 8D

Fic/poll: HP versus FFVII knockout battle!

2009-07-01T18:47:59Z

Adapted from the poll earlier this week because K:

Doesn't have the brains to write a full fic yet
But wants to write bits and pieces
And is totally unashamed of subjecting 2 totally unrelated fandoms to a knockout poll to see which one gets written first

8D THE WORD COUNT IS NOT AN INDICATION OF MY BIAS. Not at all. Note: everything is written as-is: no grammar/logic/fun checks for me at 234am!

HP: Marauders fic! In which Peter is not stupid, and neither is James, and neither is Sirius uncouth, oh and Remus is a badass

2 past midnight, and they're in their rooms. As a whole they're quieter than other Gryffindors expect them to be, but you can't live with crashes and bangs all the time, and crashing and banging should really only take place at timed, precise intervals. Noise without laughter is just panic and mayhem and an overall lack of professionalism. It's not on. It's irritating.

'Prongs -' Sirius says, leaning over the edge of his bed.

James can barely see him through the darkness of the room with his glasses are off. 'What?' he replies, voice low. Remus is either asleep or thinking. Peter's out foraging. The rest of the tower is still.

'Schedules,' Sirius hisses back. 'D'you have them?'

Jame feels about his bedside table until his fingers touch his wand. 'Not for this month,' he says. 'Lumos.' A twist of his wrist and a low light fills the room. James gropes for his glasses and waits for Sirius' face to resolve itself into clarity. 'Why?'

Sirius shrugs one shoulder, a half-smile on his lips. He taps a finger against his temple. James laughs, quietly. 'All right,' he says. 'Peter's on it this month.'

Sirius grins, propping his back up against his bedframe. 'Maybe he won't mess it up the way you did.'

'Nothing ventured nothing gained,' James retorts with great dignity.

'Except detention,' Sirius snorts, wriggling under his covers. 'Night.'

'Night,' James says, and then he flicks his wand about and the curtains whisk shut around him. The room falls into contemplative stillness. Nothing for sleeping now: the expression on Sirius' face was a challenge and a tease. James ducks out long enough to reach under his bed, then crawls back in and settles down to read.

FFVII: Tseng under Creepymanpedo Veld!

It never really used to rain in Midgar. It never really used to rain where Midgar is now - Reeve once read the reports from the founding days in a curious day that was full of malaise and boredom. They're technically out in the middle of plain territory: everything in moderation, especially precipitation. The sky used to be too open thereabouts for anything more than showers, passing and preliminary but never serious until storm season rolled in over the low pressure zones, growling and charging the air.

The city brought with it an oddball assortment of phenomena: trinket-sellers, bankers, immigrant settlers. When people couldn't spill into the city, they loitered around. Lazy, capitalist demand brought in chocobo farmers, who suddenly had patrons willing to pay hundreds of thousands of gil for stabling and rearing a Mideel Black that they had no interest whatsoever in actually ever riding. Farmland came up everywhere, sprouting from imported soil and Science-department initiative. People planted trees for the sake of neighbourhooding and aesthetics. Kalm became an attractive weekend spot, and speak of the devil --

'Rough night to be wandering out.' Veld draws up next to him, dark and quiet like the falling night. Reeve throws a glance behind them - there's no one else tagging along this time. The wind whistles down the empty sector corridor, dragging with it garbage and a vague smell of motoroil, tar and a whiff of spice and heat from the curry shop two streets down. The sky overhead is deeper than just twilight black.

Reeve tucks his hands into the pockets of his billowing coat and hums. 'Same could be said of you,' he tells Veld, raising his voice a little to be heard. 'It's going to come down hard.'

Veld looks up. 'The rain?'

'Odd how nature compensates for human expansion,' Reeve points out. He's used to Veld's unassuming appearances, and how their conversations are fated to go byzantine. 'Forty years ago and you wouldn't hear of off-monsoon storms coming down like this.'

'Well.' Veld chuckles like a practised cynic. 'If nature didn't keep up Shinra'd have it by the throat piping in water all across this half of the continent.'

Reeve nods. 'Touche, touche.'

Veld tosses him a look. 'Engineering would enjoy that, wouldn't it?'

'Which part?' Reeve asks, dry as bone. 'The prospect of economic monopoly, or the idea of being given millions of gil and free reign to design specific and new frontier technology that'd help improve the lives of thousands?'

'Your charm is in your humour, Tuesti,' Veld tells him just as the first fat raindrops hit the ground. He drags his collar up, but doesn't move to head off. As Reeve tugs his own coat closer to his body, he observes how very much like Veld that is. Rain or shine or fucking meteorfall and he's always going to be the same. Asking questions like: 'Not just here to sing in the rain, I presume?'

Reeve scuffs a boot on the floor and watches the storm creep closer to them. The rain's starting to come down hard now, clattering off the corrugated iron roofs that make up the spill of temporary sites up and down the Sector's construction areas. 'Came down to see how this is all shaping up,' Reeve shouts over the noise. 'If I stare at one more blueprint I think my migraine will turn permanent. You?'

'It's a good night for hide and seek,' Veld replies, his voice watery and destroyed.

'What?' Reeve yells. 'I'm not sure I heard you right the first time!'

Veld turns to him. 'Hide and seek,' he repeats, louder. Reeve's expression must have been sceptical enough, because Veld's eyes go as bright as they ever do just before he turns back away to face the empty death-zone of buildings in front of them. 'I'd have loved a playground like this, twenty years ago,' Veld says, gesturing widely. 'Dark and wet and full of ways to fall. It's good -'

'If you say "training",' Reeve says, huddling into his coat as the cold and wet really start to seep in. 'If you say "training", I'm docking points off the score of your humanity, Veld.'

'The President doesn't employ me to be humane.' Veld's eyes are concentrated somewhere in the northern sector, where work on a new tower is going up over 20 stories now.

'The boy's going to slip and kill himself if you're not careful,' Reeve warns. 'We don't build scaffolding and safety lines for jaunts through stormy weather. For god's sake, Veld, call him off - you can torture him with something else. Kalmic history, maybe. "How To Be A Good Chocobo Farmer And Other Tales For Growing Boys."'

Veld's laughter resounds with the rain. Reeve barely manages to catch himself from rolling his eyes. 'All right then, have it your way.'

'You know the point about Shinra is that we're not very good people,' Veld tells Reeve, reaching over to pat him on the shoulder. 'You do a passable job hiding that conscience of yours -'

'Thank you!' Reeve yells.

'- but at the end of the day you're even better at tucking your hands into your sleeves and letting the rest of us deal with the human aspect of the company. Which is strategic -'

'Thank you!' Reeve yells again.

'- but it doesn't make you any less involved or responsible, Tuesti.'

'Thank you,' Reeve yells, slightly louder this time. 'I was afraid you'd give me your lecture on relative morality and the company's mission statement.'

'Frown at me any more and I might,' Veld retorts.

Reeve shrugs. 'I'm only good at creating infrastructure,' he points out. 'I leave the economic robbery to the President and you. You're both better prepared, and I'll be damned if the two of you aren't better hands at raising children.'

Veld takes that as a compliment, Reeve suspects, because he says, 'When the day comes that Rufus puts a bullet through my head and sticks my body in a coffin, he'll thank his father for enabling to do so, and Tseng'll know why I taught him how to run well and hide better.'

'Optimistic view of the future!' The rain's so hard now Reeve can just barely make out the silhouette of the first building. He has no idea how Veld or Tseng are conducting their little training session in this.

'I'm only trying to be as practical as you are,' Reeve hears Veld say, and he feels more than sees the man start to move away. 'Call a car. Go back.'

'Don't want any witnesses around?' Reeve can't resist saying.

'If you catch your death in my presence, no one will believe that you died stupidly of pneumonia,' Veld says. 'Go.'

DECISION TIME:

View poll: HP v FFVII Knockout Round

Oh, New York, New York

2009-06-29T16:01:05Z

From the NYT:

Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years in Prison

Bernard L. Madoff on Monday received the maximum sentence for perpetrating one of the biggest investment frauds in Wall Street history and will spend the rest of his life in prison.

NOT A TYPO. 8D 8D Some things in RL are better than things in fic. nasdack, heeeeeeeere I come. >:D

[edit] BECAUSE I AM RIDICULOUS AND EASILY EXCITABLE BY FINANCIO-POLITICAL NEWS, I AM OPENING THE FLOOR FOR PROMPTS IN ANY FANDOM so long as they include FINANCIAL/POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS. Extra points for great hilarity. GO!!!!!!

Dear Alex &co:

2009-06-27T16:25:29Z

It's 12.16am in the morning; Franz are once again the be-all end-all of my mind and existence. (Feel the Pressure - a remix of What She Came For from the June-released Blood dub-cover-remix of Tonight.)

If I could have filthy, gorgeous sex with Alex K's brain, I would. In an instant. Jesus. I am sorry I ever resisted.

Listen to this track. Feed yourself it intravenously. Inject it into your bloodstream. Turn the lights off. Put the speakers to blast. Then, tomorrow morning, if you have slept at all, go into your nearest record store and buy Blood.

Woah. Look out / you're what she came for
Knows what she came for / no question, no doubt

Star Trek XI: Mind Bullets (Kirk, Bones, Pike)

2009-06-26T17:20:27Z

The great and wonderful charlie_d_blue is responsible for all the awesome in this fic, and that is true.

Mind Bullets

Fandom: Star Trek XI
Rating: PG
Characters: Kirk, Bones, Pike
Warnings: Set directly before the Romulan attack, in the glory days of peace.
Summary: Kirk versus a machine versus his mind:

'One more,' Bones growls. 'One more, Jim, and then you stop doing this to yourself because it's ridiculous and it's out of hand and you can't win this, this isn't a game.'

'I don't believe,' Jim says sweetly, 'in no-win situations.'

6017 words and Kirk's turn at introspection! In a manner of speaking!

One day, Bones brings a dongly machine thing into Jim's room and sets it up on Jim's table and then looks Jim in the eye and says, 'Jim, quid pro quo.'

Jim looks back at Bones, features schooled into a careful imitation of wily blankness, but then McCoy glares at him like he won't sneak Jim into the sickbay ever again to fix those small little scrapes/bangs/bruises/nasty rashes in unusual places. Damn it. Jim casts a doubtful look at the box on his desk and sighs. He wonders what it is this time – old-school blood pressure measurement experiments? Or maybe more genetic marker hide-and-seek games that Bones will bug him about for weeks afterwards – the last time that happened, he stalked Jim all over the place insisting he not eat shellfish or something, just in case some dormant something somewhere became active somewhen. Go figure.

Since Bones is a merciless doctor type, he drives his point home before Jim can argue: 'You still owe me at least three favours at the moment – there's Gaila, and then what's-her-name from where's-the-place, and then the second time you fa-'

'Okay!' Jim cuts in. 'Okay, I surrender. Hook me up to... whatever that thing is.'

Bones is busy unpacking. 'You want the medical terminology, or the translation?' The box opens up to reveal, yep, a dongly machine thing, but also a few bottles of some sort of gel and a couple of wires and a board and a bunch of... ball bearings. Kinky.

Jim leans back in his chair and gets comfortable. 'Hit me with whatever.'

'This,' Bones pats the dongly machine, 'is an electroencephalogram for smart people and that,' he points to the board with the ball bearings, 'is the part that keeps the less smart people entertained while the smart people do their field research.'

'Cute,' Jim says. 'What does it do?'

'Measures brain waves and monitors neurological activity,' Bones shrugs, snapping out a bottle of gel. 'I'm supposed to be gathering a sample size of about a hundred Academy undergraduates. Good work for the medical officers – we get to find out exactly how brain dead the student population really is. Push back your fringe, please.'

Jim obliges, holding his hair up and out of the way. 'So, what do the balls have to do with it?' He tries very hard to put as much offensive stupidity into his grin as possible.

Bones sends him a withering look while he slathers the gel all over Jim's temples. A couple of electrodes get stuck there, and then a few more at the back of his head and at the crown of his forehead and all over the place, really. 'It's part of a game,' Bones says. 'Gives you something to focus on so that I'll have something to write about the effect of conscious thought on the brain's activity. We'll get you set up, then I'm going to put a ball bearing on the centre of the groove in that board. The levels of theta and alpha waves you produce will affect how the ball moves. Long story short: the calmer you are, the more the ball moves.'

Jim shoots Bones a look. 'I'm going to move the balls with my mind?'

Bones grunts. 'Sort of. The higher the theta/alpha readings, the more the ball gets pushed away from you.' He finishes messing around with Jim's scalp (okay, right, definitely going to have to get a shower after this) and goes over to his dongly machine, which he stares intently and lovingly at for a minute or two. And then he frowns. It begins! 'Jim?'

'Yeah?'

'Your brain's a mess.'

Jim throws him a look. 'Ha ha ha, Bones.' He's heard this one before, though usually not so politely phrased.

'No, seriously,' Bones says, his brow furrowing. Uh oh, trouble in paradise. 'Your beta levels are way off standard range. Are you...' He looks up at Jim. 'Uncomfortable? Stressed?'

'Yeah, I'm really weirded out that my best friend is shoving one more of his draws-non-definitive-conclusions med experiments on me,' Jim says, contrite. 'Because you're totally scary, Bones. What if you touch me in bad plac—'

'Okay, so you're not stressed out, just psychotic,' Bones says, giving up. He taps a few things into the dongly machine, probably to save Jim's records somewhere where he can frown at them more in private. 'Control part's over. Now I'm going to hook you up to the board – just try and relax as much as possible. Theta waves generate when you're drowsy or extremely relaxed; alpha waves when you're calm.' He swaps the connection over, and puts his hand on the activation button. 'Ready?'

Jim tucks his hands behind his head and slouches deeper into his chair. 'Zap me up.'

Bones hits the button.

Nothing happens.

Bones hits the button again.

The ball quivers a little. After a while it rocks back and forth like a crying child before goes still. It maybe inches forward maybe half a centimetre.

Bones consults his EEG thinger, then looks at Jim.

'What?' Jim asks. 'It isn't me!'

'Are you trying to relax at all?' Bones demands.

'Will you listen to yourself?' Jim shoots back. 'Trying to relax? That's like making an effort to chill out – Bones, I'm not kidding. I'm not doing anything.'

'Lie back,' Bones sighs, pushing Jim further down in his chair and fussing at the electrodes. 'Try closing your eyes and taking deep, cyclic breaths. Or whatever it is you do to calm down.'

'Usually I go run a few rounds around the quad,' Jim murmurs, obeying.

'Not helping.'

'Yes, doctor.' Jim can hear Bones doing something with the machine; a quiet tapping of fingers on the console, the almost-silent beeps of the system recognising new inputs, then the expectant silence that characterises someone waiting for something to happen. Bones breathing. Every once in a while there's an almost indistinct scrape of metal over plastic – the ball bearing moving, probably. The rush of air from the central ventilation system.

'Jim?' Bones says a trillion years (or maybe twenty minutes) later. 'Stop paying so much attention to every damn thing. It's not helping.'

'I'm calm,' Jims mutters, discontent, scrunching up his face for Bones to see. 'I'm also bored. Am I winning yet?'

'No,' Bones tells him. 'You're losing spectacularly against yourself. Given this much time everyone else usually manages to push the ball 80% of the way out, if not the whole length of the board. You've gone maybe two inches.'

'What?' Jim snaps his eyes open. The ball bearing winks back at him, a cheery silver thing sitting a scant way away from the indicated starting point. A slow breeze could have pushed it farther. Jim glares at it. The ball bearing is unafraid, and undeterred, so Jim glares at Bones instead. 'Maybe your enceladusamacallit is broken.'

'Enceladus is the sixth moon of Saturn,' Bones says, huffily.

'Yeah, and it's really shiny and bright, too; highest albedo of anything in this system.' Jim waves it away. 'Your encephalogram, yeah, that. Broken?'

'Not broken,' Bones says firmly. 'I've done sixteen tests so far this week, every one of them within range of the standard deviation.' He yanks an electrode off of Jim's temple with no warning. ("OW!") 'Your head's just a huge junkyard. Too much stuff firing off.' He yanks the others off with slightly more ceremony, though Jim has an uncanny feeling that it's more because Bones cares for the state of his equipment than for the sake of Jim's follicles. 'Maybe you should cut back on the porn, it might help. Thanks for your help – looks like I've got my first outlier.' The look on Bone's face could almost be smug. Almost.

Jim says, 'Can I borrow that thing?'

Bones looks down at the EEG. 'No,' he says, carefully. 'It belongs to the department, and they cost a bomb to manufacture.'

'Oh,' Jim says, thoughtfully.

'Jim,' Bones says, but before he can dole out the doom/gloom/death-to-thieves-and-dumbasses speech, Jim slaps him on the back and slings an arm across the shoulders, saying, 'Well, that was fun, but you still need more guinea pigs, am I right or am I right? Well, Bones. It's you and me and the girls dorms, right now.'

---

Bones warns him that doing medical experiments is more difficult than just walking into a dorm lobby and asking for volunteers. 'Look, Jim,' he says as they invade the student lounge nearest to the quad. 'It's not like I've got money to bribe people into participating the way clinics usually do. People don't want gunk put on their face and electrodes stuck all over their head – it's creepy, even I think so.'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' Jim nods, snagging a table from a bunch of students heading off to class. He sets the EEG down with a clunk and hunts around for a power point to plug it in to. 'Teach me how this goes. Does the dongly thing connect directly to the bally thing, or what?'

'Hey!' Bones slaps Jim's hand away from the machine. 'These things are hardier now than they were a few decades ago, but you don't go throwing them around like a tricorder! They're delicate!'

'I'm a command track student, not a doctor,' Jim beams at him.

Bones snatches away a bunch of electrodes. 'For normal cases you start with a survey,' he says, digging out his datapad to transfer over a spreadsheet to Jim's. 'How much did the subject sleep last night, are they on any sort of meds, have they been taking alcohol or mind-altering substances - though everyone just lies about that part - and whether or not they've had caffeine in the last 8 hours.'

'Caffeine? Here? At the academy?' Jim asks. 'Never.'

'Shut up,' Bones grumbles. 'This is how you apply the gel.'

Jim snags a tube. 'Squirty,' he says, pinching some gel out onto his fingers, and after that Bones just gives in and doesn't try to bother him with pessimistic theories about how hard it is to smile at people and not act like you're going to fry their brains to a crisp with a few electrodes.

The first few subjects are easy to come by. Jim knows a lot of people on campus, and a lot of people on campus know Jim, so all he has to do is sidle up to people sitting around with 90% empty food trays and say, 'You owe me for that thing in the place last term with the whosit professor,' and they come along quiet and guilty looking. Being a genius is sometimes pretty useful. Jim hooks them up and makes a small spectacle out of it, so that their friends start to gather around and the next thing Bones knows, there's a small queue of about a dozen people waiting to see if they can beat the other guy's timing when it comes to shoving the ball bearing clear across the board.

'Jim,' Bones hisses, 'this is meant to be a trial, not a competition!'

'Whatever works, right?' Jims hisses back. 'It's not like I'm bribing them or anything the way it's usually done in clinical trials!'

'I hate you so much, do you know that?'

'Yeah, love you too, man,' Jim beams. 'Do me a favour? Go steal that signboard out front where they put up the daily specials.'

'What for?' Bones frowns.

'Just do it,' Jim says. When Bones drags the thing over Jim hotwires the thing so that the neat rows of CHICKEN TURNOVER – VERY TASTY!!! and NEW: MYSTERY MEATLOAF! get wiped out and replaced with TOP TIMINGS and a list of the cadets who've managed the fastest times.

'I'd like to point out,' Bones huffs as he watches the queue double and Jim's grin evolve into a smirk, 'that even the slowest, most unsuccessful ball bearing pushers have still outdone you.'

'I believe in the law of averages,' Jim says with great serenity. 'There's always someone worse than you, and someone better than you.'

'In this case,' Bones says, because Bones is evil and bitter and unwilling to admit that Jim's way better at this trial thing than he is, 'that would be 28 cadets better than you, and none worse than you. Good average.'

'You may go away now; you're no longer needed,' Jim tells him.

'Yes, captain,' Bones lips, before he legs it off to class, where Jim hopes he'll be forced to do something nasty, like listen to a professor talk about how healthy everyone in this system is.

After the lunchtime crowd dissipates, Jim takes a break to let the machine burble and to grab something to drink. He grabs a coffee and safe-ish looking salad from the store vendor whose sign he's commandeered, and huddles down with the spreadsheet results. He taps through a bunch of blank replies, a bunch of ludicrous replies (who sleeps 12 hours a day on campus?) and a bunch of replies that read like an attempt at Klingon poetry ("DRUGS I NEED NO DRUGS I WANT NO DRUGS DRUGS ARE FOR THE WEAK MINDED!!"). Not unexpected, but Jim needs a little more than this to run with. Well, Bones probably does too, but Jim's got other things on his mind; too many things, apparently.

'Okay,' Jim says to himself, tapping his fingers on the table. 'Time to improvise.'

---

'Hi,' Jim says to the first new victim of his now more personalised EEG-test process.

'Hi?' Gaila says in cautious return. 'Jim, is this going to take a long time, I have class in twenty minutes and I can't afford to skive again –'

'Relax,' Jim says, tapping open the spreadsheet. 'Just lie back and answer these few questions for me.'

'Okay,' Gaila says, sceptically.

'How long did you sleep last night?'

'Around... 6 hours?'

Check. 'Have you been on any meds lately?'

'Nope.'

Check. 'Alcohol in the last 12 hours?'

'Uh, no?'

Check. 'How about mind-altering substances, ever used those?'

'Like, ever?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Um.'

Jim leans his elbows on his knees and moves in a little bit closer. 'I could end up using the wrong gel if you don’t tell me the truth, you know. Depending on what you took, the standard application'll fry nice little bra—'

'There was that one time I took Cardassian S at some party,' Gaila squeaks.

Check.

---

'You did eighty seven trials?' Bones sort of yells at him when he comes to pick the machine up from Jim's room later that day. Jim sighs. Jealousy can be so petty. 'Eighty seven?'

'Sorry I couldn't hit a hundred,' Jim – legs propped up on his desk and crossed at the ankles - says with true, earnest regret.

Bones looks like he wants to throw his stack of medical datapads at Jim. 'How did you – do I want to know how –'

'Sorry I couldn't hit a hundred, but,' Jim says.

Bones covers his face with a hand, and it's really kind of adorable that, after all this time, Bones still hasn't learned how to deal. Jim hopes he never changes. 'I knew it. There had to be a but.'

'-but I have appointments booked way up all over tomorrow. There'll be a hundred.' Jim swings his legs off the table and comes over to pat Bones on the back. 'Don't worry, your baby EEG will be safe with me. I'll tuck it into its protective casing and sing it lullabies. Promise.'

'It's not the EEG I'm worried about,' Bones growls, but he doesn't swat Jim's hand away. 'Jim, I'm glad that you're helping me out, but you could just give the thing back to me.'

'Lighten up,' Jim says, pulling Bones over to the door of his dorm and gently nudging him over the threshold. 'The big bad machine isn't going to crawl into my bed and have its wicked way with me while you're not here.'

'It's not your bed I'm worried about, it's your obsessive, unknowable head, you stupid-'

'Night, McCoy,' Jim chirps, and shuts the door in his face.

---

With Bones out of the picture, Jim can think. It's too dangerous to do that around McCoy, whose tendency to act like a damn hypochondriac sometimes does grant him a sensitivity that picks up on other things. So, thinking around McCoy, not so much; too high a dosage of that and Jim's pretty sure the both of them will lose it, so it's a good thing as any that the medical faculty's building is halfway across campus from Jim's own.

Puttering over to his desk, Jim hooks his data pad up to the student intranet and gets the day's work downloaded. There's nothing else to do until his roommate – a really decent, quiet, kind of boring guy named Rez – gets back, so he starts on the day's astronav problems and tries to ration them out. Third year stuff is harder than what they've done in the first two years combined, but the thing about textbook problems is that they're always going to be textbook problems. Textbooks have routine, routines have standard parameters, and after that it all goes down to plugging in variables and letting the equations churn themselves out. Jim's not bored, but the maths isn't exciting, either ---

Jim shoots a look at the EEG resting in its corner. He spins his stylus about his thumb thoughtfully, then momentarily abandons the EM wave problem he's working on to drag the board onto his desk. He sets the ball bearing in place, applies enough of the electrodes to be sure of getting a reading, and leaves the monitor humming quietly to the side. Jim turns so that the thing is just out of range of his peripheral vision, and goes back to the maths.

It takes Jim forty minutes to go over his homework, after which he flips through his datapad and does the one other thing that brings him a kind of joy that borders on great serenity: deleting messages from his student inbox. There are two from Prof. E, who's so used to Jim skipping out of class that one of the messages is just advanced copies of next week's work and the other is a note that Jim mentally translates into one giant "D:". Captain A, who's probably spent more time following orders than Prof. E has, sends his regards and instructions to turn up the next day for the test on Xenotopography or risk either failure or death by paperwork inquiry. Jim loves these messages. He loves the little crinkled paper noise they make when they get deleted. ":D!"

None of it makes the feeling of being watched go away, so when Jim turns to confront the ball bearing, he isn't really surprised that it's moved maybe three inches this time. Jim concedes to tactical retreat; he yanks the electrodes out and goes to take a shower. There's enough gunk in his hair now that Jim's pretty sure he could flatten it out into a decent imitation of Commander-Better-Than-Thou Spock. Live long and suffer! He laughs, and twists his hair up into a mohawk instead.

When Rez comes back to their room, Jim's chilling out on his bed. 'Augh,' Rez mumbles as he fits himself through the door, lugging his viola in after him. He's involved in the student string quartet, which practices every other night. Jim feels for his fingers. 'How did rehearsal go?' he asks.

'Terrible,' Rez mutters, toeing off his shoes and putting his viola case down on the bed. 'Snapped a string near the end, so now I've got to tune things back.' He gets the instrument out and looks at it balefully before tossing a look at Jim. 'Mind if I...?'

Jim waves a hand in the air. 'Go on ahead.'

Rez flashes him a smile, and sets on getting his viola back in tune. It takes a while, which Jim doesn't really care about, except that Rez doesn't have perfect pitch while Jim does, and it makes hearing off-notes feel like having Pythagorean theory wrenched right out of synch. It just feels wrong, as though there are neat, perfect partitions between the keys that Rez just can't see and keeps missing. 'How was class?' Jim asks above the noise and scrape.

'Pretty cool,' Rez says, frowning at his strings. He looks up. 'Didn't see you there at lectures, though. Again. '

Jim just grins. Rez throws a rag from his case at him, but Jim just catches it and says, 'Hey, I've got a proposition for you.'

'Not interested,' Rez sings. 'You've got your hands full chasing skirts, Kirk – you can leave me out of those equations.'

'Not that kind of proposition,' Jim flings the rag back into Rez's face. 'How about this: lemme stick a few electrodes onto your head for tonight, and I'll do your homework.'

Rez pauses somewhere between a C and a D. 'Are you twelve?' he asks Jim, kind of incredulous, maybe because he knows exactly how lucky he is that Jim's offering, or maybe because he thinks Jim is out of it, or probably just both. 'Am I going to wake up with my brain in a vat if I say yes?'

'Nope,' Jim says, blinking expansively. 'It's harmless. You can ask –' he takes out his datapad '- Ailes, Montgomery; Ang'l, Krawley; A'rid, Grotherr; Azir, Mahmoud; Brown, Roland; Burns, Mister; blah blah; MacAlister, Elaine; McKay, Rodney; M'tak; M—'

'Sign me up,' Rez says, hitting the note at last. The viola disappears into the case, and he stands up with a yawn. 'I'm going to go take a shower first, though. My datapad's on my desk – just do me another favour and screw up on a couple of the questions, okay? It'll be really, really, really obvious otherwise.'

Jim rolls his eyes. 'Who gets called out for having too many correct answers, anyway?'

Rez pretends to think. 'Uh, people like me who get called up for failing, as opposed to people like you, who get called up for still scoring in the 90th percentile even when you skip class all the time?'

'I'm not that good,' Jim says.

Rez grabs his towel out of his closet. 'Yeah, right,' he laughs, en route to the door. 'Whatever you say, genius face. You're too smart to be normal, and too weird not to be good. That's why you're here, right? Old Man Pike and his theory of initiative? Well, the rest of us mere mortals, we fuck up more often. I'll be back for your electrodes!'

'Well, in medical terms I've fucked up 87 times,' Jim says to the empty room, then amends, thoughtfully: 'And technically, plus 2.'

---

Rez sleeps very differently from Jim, and Jim doesn't think that just because Rez now looks like something out of one of Bones' Great Medical Phenomena of the Last Century vids. Hooking him up hadn't taken much time – just a few dabs of gel here and a few electrodes there and Jim talking about time's arrow travelling in a straight line until it approaches the event horizon of a black hole in which case Rez shall no longer give a damn and therefore fall asleep almost instantaneously. No tossing, no turning, no silence, just a three minute progression from alertness to inertness. Jim doesn't know how Rez does it, so he waits for half an hour just in case before he turns the EEG on, and then the ball practically beams over to the far side of the board. Squiggly delta waves scribble themselves all over the monitor.

Jim kills time by reading stuff about the thing off the old internet via the backlight of his datapad in the darkened room, articles about how you could rig EEG mindforms. Sleep less, the article cheerfully advises. And wash your hair, in case your shampoo messes up electrode sensitivity. Pot will also help, either beating your head in with one (physical) or beating your head in with some (hallucinogenic). The hours tick past. Every time Jim resets the ball bearing, it just drifts back across the board, obeying an inevitable law of causation that Jim's own head doesn't seem to follow.

In the darkness, Jim purses his lips and wonders if things would've turned out different if he hadn't ever left Iowa, where the whole damned world was just a blur of dust and cornflower blue shaded atmospheric sky, and where he lived by a code of the mundane and got excited by bar fights. Three years ago he laughed at cadets because he was afraid he would turn out like them: studying for half of forever before being catapulted out into some meaningless region of space where only the gravity of earth-bound politics would keep them spinning. Earth-bound politics, and disciplinary notes from teaching faculty, and that stupid, niggling, returning sense of failure that comes with a mind that was born out in orbit, moving beyond the escape velocity of old earth before being set back down in Iowa, screaming. Back down, away from those hundreds of lives, those thousand lost pluralities.

Jim snaps back awake, and turns the EEG off quietly, a loud sound as he waits for earthrise.

---

'Jim, what the hell happened to you?' Bones rounds on him the next morning when Jim staggers (in a dignified kind of way – he's walking in a straight line!) down to the quad for a combined school thingamajig. Someone is mumbling something on stage ajslfjlbnmmmm.

'Slept late last night,' Jim mumbles. 'Slept.... yesterday, actually.' He squints at the person at the podium. 'Or was that the day before yesterday?'

'You're your own damn kryptonite,' Bones complains. 'What were you doing this time? Can you even tell me – is it safe for public consumption?'

'Ohhhh yeah,' Jim mutters, leaning half on Bones to stop from swaying. 'Really hot dream. It was like –' he makes a few violent gesticulations with his hands that could either represent a) a voluptuous figure, b) explosions in the sky or c) a very large patch of seaweed. 'Mhmm. Mmmmmmmmhm.'

'You should go back to your room,' Bones mutters, propping Jim up into a more comfortable position where Jim's less likely to drool all over his shoulder.

'And miss important school functions, doctor?' Jim tsks, his syllables coming out all lazy. 'But that would be against the rules!'

'Shut up and nap,' Bones sighs.

'Gotta do more experiririments later,' Jim sing-songs, taking a list out of his pocket. 'Volunteers are ready and waiting. Sleep dep, by the way? Helps a little bit. I wrote that down in your spreadsheet so that you would know. That's right. Yes. Uh huh.' He beams once at Bones, then settles. 'You've got nicely padded shoulders,' he says intelligibly. 'Wake me up when the dude up there stops talking about.... stuff.'

'Why do I put up with you?' Bones asks, but Jim is already asleep. "Knocked out" is probably a better description – Jim usually wakes up when someone does something like dumping him unceremoniously on a chair. There are circles underneath his eyes that, in his professional opinion, take more than one night of staring at a machine to produce. It's only obvious when Jim stays still, but how often does Jim stay still? Bones looks around him and spots a hint of green. He decides it's about time someone gives Jim treatment as opposed to diagnosis. 'Gaila,' he calls out in a whisper. She turns around from her place two seats in front of him. 'Look after this guy for me!' Bones whisper-shouts, pointing down at Jim.

Gaila comes over, crouching down to avoid drawing attention. 'What did he do this time?'

'Damned if I know,' Bones says, getting up. 'Here, take my seat, I'll be right back.'

'Where are you going?' Gaila mutters, swapping places with him.

'If anyone asks, my stomach's killing me,' Bones replies, before slipping out of the quad and heading straight for Jim's dorm room.

The two of them aren't just good friends because Bones is a sucker for lost causes and Jim is a sucker for suckers. Sometimes they rub off a little on each other, which means to say that sometimes Bones has learned that being a sneaky little bastard has its advantages. "First, do no harm" can be a very powerful directive when coupled with Jim's complete lack of any conscience whatsoever. The door to Jim's room doesn't open with a knock, but it does open with the codes that Bones got off of Rez the last time the two of them got drunk together.

'Where'd you put it,' Bones mutters to the room at large, rifling around Jim's bedside. He finds the EEG case inside the bottom cabinet of Jim's desk under a pile of old vids and a few spare shirts and a stack of old datapads. He opens it up. The EEG's not there, but there is a note:

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:

'Son of a bitch,' Bones mutters, after which he tries very hard to put everything back exactly the way it was before under the watchful, censuring eye of Jim's father staring out at him from the holograph on Jim's desk, after which Bones slinks back to the quad in defeat.

---

Bones doesn't say anything to Jim about the EEG after that, though he does drop by after Jim goes through his final list of volunteers.

'How're you doing?' Bones says pointedly when he comes down to watch Jim pack up the things in his room. He'll be damned if the man'll actually talk about anything that's bothering him, but he'll be equally damned if he doesn't rub it into Jim's face nonetheless in hopes that something gets through.

'102 in the bag,' Jim announces, producing his datapad with the spreadsheet on it. Bones gives it the bland look he reserves for all of Jim's attempts at diversion. Jim leans in and taps on a highlighted column. 'It'll be 103 if you count me, but statistically speaking I'll sway your average way to the left.'

'Yeah, 'cause Jim Kirk and "average" have so much in common,' Bones says stonily, switching the datapad off. He reaches his hand out to grab the handle of the EEG's case, but Jim's there before him pulling it out of the way. 'For god's sake, man, will you just let this go? An EEG isn't some indication of your normalcy –'

'Maybe it's an indication of sub-normality,' Jim shoots at him, dancing around the subject like it's some huge game when Bones knows it's damn well not, that Jim has things he needs to sort out in his head that transcend more than just alpha-delta-theta-beta wave levels.

'Flip that argument around and you've got yourself your special position in medical history if you like,' Bones snaps. 'How about this, Jim: maybe you're better than everyone else at being stubborn, okay?'

'I've got one more person on my list,' Jim says, completely sidelining everything that's just come out of Bones' mouth. Bones would punch him, if he thought it'd be of any use at all. Truth be told Jim'd probably enjoy it if he did. God.

'One more,' Bones growls. 'One more, Jim, and then you stop doing this to yourself because it's ridiculous and it's out of hand and you can't win this, this isn't a game.'

'I don't believe,' Jim says sweetly, 'in no-win situations.'

---

The one last person on Jim's list is a lot harder to get to than everyone else. It takes a bit of creative thinking about how to get around the usual protocol issues that are involved in arranging a meeting with the guy, but the problem turns out to be easily solved by a visit to the open lawn and a convincing smile or two.

'You guys done with your game?' Jim asks a couple of fellow cadets who are lazing around, sweating through their PE attire. 'Could I borrow your equipment for a sec?'

Thusly armed with a titanium-enforced baseball bat, Jim consults the campus floor plans and narrows down on the window in question that he's been looking for. Then Jim finds a big rock.

'Cadet Kirk,' a member of campus security intones at him about five minutes later. 'Please accompany us to Captain Pike's office immediately regarding a breach in security and protocol.'

'Yeah,' Jim says, pulling a face that screams regret. 'Sorry about his window, that was my fault completely. I've got terrible aim. I'm going, I'm going,' he says, and then he legs it up to the lifts in double-time, the EEG tucked inside his satchel.

The door to Pike's office is already open when Jim gets there, so he's spared the inconvenience of knocking. Pike's at his table, seated behind his desk and tossing Jim's chosen rock up and down with one hand. He doesn't look angry at all; there's nothing on his face but the usual tolerant expression that Pike seems to use for everyone from academy darlings to deep space invaders. It's one hell of a lucky chance, Jim reflects, that he's managed to catch Pike in his office at all – Pike isn't usually on the teaching rotation, and spends more time off-world than most of the Starfleet officers assigned to Earth.

'Cadet Kirk,' Pike says when Jim hovers in the doorway. 'I understand that a rock through my window is already a notch down from starting a four-against-one pub brawl, but the next time you want to get my attention, just call and save us both the trouble. I assume you wanted to talk to me? Come in.'

Kirk shuts the door behind him when he slides into the office, glass from the broken window crunching underfoot. He seats himself in one of the chairs in front of Pike's desk, and reaches into his satchel for the EEG. Pike raises his eyebrow when he sees the machine, but doesn't comment. Jim discovers that he doesn't know the words that are meant to come in here to fill the space, so instead he just sets up the machine. He plugs in the monitor. Attaches the electrodes to the system. Connects the board. Places the ball bearing with definite precision on the centre marking. Afterwards, Jim exhales. His breath goes out of him for a moment, leaving a gaping, aching cavity in his chest full of pressure and hope and frustration. He opens his mouth to explain.

Pike cuts him off with a hand held up in the air, two fingers extended in a request for silence. The Captain's eyes are sharp and focused and dark, and he looks at Jim and does not relinquish Jim's gaze. Jim feels the years drop off, three years of study and waiting and cabin fever suddenly evaporating into this moment; everything he doesn't understand balanced on a fulcrum with the past countervailed against the future. Pike leans forward across the desk to the board, touches the tip of his finger to the ball bearing, then pushes it all the way down along the groove of the board.

Jim's jaw snaps shut. The corners of Pike's lips curved upwards. 'I heard this was a test you were conducting. Well, I hoped I passed.' The Captain leans back into his chair. 'Cadet Kirk?' he says.

'Yes, sir?' Jim replies, his mouth oddly dry.

'Good luck with your third attempt at the Kobayashi Maru,' Pike says.

Jim stands up sharply to attention and salutes.

Very quietly, and with a smile, Pike says, 'You're dismissed.'

---

Jim meets Bones on the front steps the next day. Bones looks angry, but hey, Bones always looks angry, so, here we go, angry rant: 'Jim, the med faculty just tore me apart because my EEG got found floating in a dorm toilet – why the hell are you so happy?'

They patter down towards the lawn together, past their fellow cadets and Officers and all. Jim grins, his mind moving and moving and moving. 'I'm taking the test again,' he says to Bones, clapping his friend on the back. 'I want you there.'

(post of seriousness) Growing up + growing wiser

2009-06-23T05:16:11Z

Interceding into fandom time - caveat lector for discussions on race and identity!

A while back ago, good people put up the 2nd Asian Women Blog Carnival, and called for submissions. The AWBC is an awesome thing! Around that time - slightly earlier - I'd put up a few personal thinky-thoughts posts at bromatheon, one of which was a product of a discussion my brother and I had. It's a very emotionally confusing post even for me, and I tried to put down as much of what had been said verbatim in my attempts to understand my brother's view. The good charity and will of my friends saw that post (and one other) getting sent to the AWBC - I didn't know about it until after, but I was totally cool with it either way. ♥

Unfortunately I am a silly eggchick - in an attempt to round of the post and get a better night's sleep at the end of it, I stepped way too much in the opposite direction and drew conclusions that have turned out to hurt and offend others. Even after I realised that the post had gone on to a larger forum, I didn't go back to read through it and make proper comment. colorblue (DW) wrote explaining how that post was an example of intra-racial whitewashing. Our host, the good oyceter, also made a post afterwards bringing up how the post outlined my POV but, in the process of doing so, blindsided other people's POVs.

I'm very grateful that these posts were made calling my thoughts out - and again I would like to extend my apologies for having made posts so unthinkingly. My intentions may have been in place but the results of my thinking, when logically drawn out, prove to be shortsighted and damaging.

Thanks to these thoughts and many good friends, I've spent some time and a few more words trying to learn from this and grow. ♥ Ergo this sort-of follow up, sort-of new-ground covering post at bromatheon.

Once more, my deepest apologies to anyone my earlier post may have offended, and I take full responsibility for it, and my attempts at trying to grow up a better person.

In point form:

2009-06-20T16:02:48Z

While bureaucracy is very fun to write fic about, waiting 3 hours for a 2 minute interview at the American Embassy is not. D:
Discussing the philosophy of mathematics is a bit like a snake trying to eat it's own tail. *insert FMA reference here*
Retail therapy sort of fixes everything
On my to-read list:

[x] Haruki Murakami - After Dark
[x] Neil Gaiman - Coraline (WHY YES I AM SLOW ON THE UPTAKE)
[] Homer - The Iliad books 12-24
[] John Steinbeck - East of Eden
On my to-procure list:

[] Terry Pratchett - Nation
On my to-complain list:

[] Boss being unbearable
[] Quitting now moving up on list of priorities

And, for fandom exercising, DIALOGUE MEME - comment with a character, a situation, a prompt, and I'll write you a one-line bit of dialogue! Feel free to PARRY/BANTER/COUNTER BACK. :D TARGET THE FOLLOWING FANDOMS FOR EXTRA POINTS: Discworld's Moist and Lu Tze books, Lucifer.

[edit] ALSO, everyone should go read today's xkcd, and then Wiki Erdos number, and THEN wiki Erdos-Bacon numbers (as in, Kevin-Bacon-the-actor Bacon), because that article is hilarious for the following paragraph:

* for an individual who had co-authored an academic paper with Paul Erdős to appear in a movie with Kevin Bacon;
* for Bacon to co-author an academic paper with someone with an Erdős number of 1, which would give Bacon an Erdős–Bacon number of 2;
* for anyone who appeared in the documentary N is a Number along with Erdős to appear in a film with Bacon, which would posthumously give Erdős an Erdős–Bacon number of 2;
* for Kevin Bacon to appear in a film that also uses stock footage of Erdős, giving Erdős an Erdős–Bacon number of 1;
* for a heretofore unknown joint academic paper by Bacon and Erdős to be published, giving Bacon an Erdős–Bacon number of 1.
* for Kevin Bacon to be revealed as Paul Erdős in disguise, giving Erdős-Bacon an Erdős-Bacon number of 0.

Also, the new Fullmetal Alchemist:

This is why I put off watching it for so long:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

*rocks back and forth* I KNEW IT WAS GOING TO HURT ME, I KNEW HUGHES WOULD TAKE MY HEART AND STOMP ALL OVER IT LIKE IT WAS NOTHING; I KNEW THAT WATCHING HIM AND ROY AND GRACIA AND ELYSIA WAS GOING TO HURT; I KNEW THAT ED WAS GOING TO MAKE ME MENTALLY EXPLODE; I KNEW THAT IN SPITE OF LOVING OKAWA TORU FOREVER THAT MIKI SHIN WAS GOING TO TAKE ROY AND DEVELOP A FACET OF HIM THAT MAKES ME WANT HIS ROY AND OKAWA'S ROY TO BE IN THE SAME ROOM VIOLENTLY MAKING OUT AND AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH

To the flist in general--

2009-06-17T07:34:45Z

I just wanted to say ♥ and that I love you guys for being the caring, insanely talented and heartfelt people that you are. ♥ It's always blown my mind away how a shy girl who talks too much from this corner of the globe has been able to get to know all you crazy and fantastic people from all over the place - you guys have been a bright damned light, full of lessons of life, politics, writing, love, joy. I'm honoured and lucky to call you guys my friends. ♥ ♥ And will always look forward to getting to know you guys better, regardless of how much we talk right now.

Also, a huge thank you to anyone who's dropped a word for me over the last few days of epic crap-time, and hearts out to everyone who's been going through hard times or Workfail or tiredness. As ~~Ocean's 12~~ the movie said, HANG TIGHT.

♥

/public service announcement

(ALSO ellynx CHECK YOUR EMAIL THERE IS GREAT HILARITY WITHIN)

From bessemerprocess:

DETOX

You know those old Pornbattle prompts you saved, because they were awesome, but you couldn't figure out how to make them porny? The kink_bingo squares you thought should totally be written for BFFS? All the prompts with a / where you wanted a &?

DETOX is the challenge for you. June has been a porn heavy month for the flist, and the twitterites talked me into doing something about it.

-You can use any prompt you want.
-Turn the prompt into something Gen. No steamy scenes or porny plots! Tell me about Best Friends and Crazy Antics.

Drive by update on life, Iran

2009-06-16T16:08:58Z

Heya guys. This is K, reporting in from Supremely Burnt Out Tired Land. Work is really taking it out of me - the last month has just been this mad rush of getting things done for the office, or being zoned out in the office. UNHAPPY FACE. Friends have also been kinda \o /o as we flail towards university; everyone's jittery, and we try to go out and support each other as much as possible, but that's taken most of my days off and turned them into huge social exercises that, while really cool!, have left me feeling sort of like a Swiss roll that's been run over by an 18-wheeler. So I'm really sorry if I haven't been keeping up with fic - especially the original stuff that people are posting! - or entries down here on DW; even keeping my brain in order on LJ has been bleaaaaaaargh. I hope everyone's been doing good! ♥

In other, more important news:

If you are reading this right now, you have more luxury than someone in Iran could ever hope for right now. If you are watching TV or a video on youtube, updating your status on Facebook, Tweeting, or even texting your friend, you are lucky. If you are safe in your home, and were able to sleep last night without the sounds of screaming from the rooftops, you need to know and understand what is happening to people just like you in Iran right now.

They are not the enemy. They are a people whose election has been stolen. For the first time in a long time, a voice for change struck the youth of Iran, just as it did for many people in the United States only seven months ago. Hossein Mousavi gained the support of millions of people in Iran as a Presidential candidate. He stands for progressiveness. He supports good relations with the West, and the rest of the world. He is supported with fervor as he challenges the oppressive regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On Friday, millions of people waited for hours in line to vote in Iran's Presidential election. Later that night, as votes came in, Mousavi was alerted that he was winning by a two-thirds margin. Then there was a change. Suddenly, it was Ahmadinejad who had 68% of the vote - in areas which have been firmly against his political party, he overwhelmingly won. Within three hours, millions of votes were supposedly counted - the victor was Ahmadinejad. Immediately fraud was suspected - there was no way he could have won by this great a margin with such oppposition. Since then, reports have been coming in of burned ballots, or in some cases numbers being given without any being counted at all. None of this is confirmed, but what happened next seems to do the trick.

The people of Iran took the streets and rooftops. They shout "Death to the dictator" and "Allah o akbar." They join together to protest. Peacefully. The police attack some, but they stay strong. Riots happen, and the shouting continues all night. Text messaging was disabled, as was satellite, and websites which can spread information such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and the BBC are blocked in the country. At five in the morning, Arabic speaking soldiers (the people of Iran speak Farsi) stormed a university in the capital city of Tehran. While sleeping in their dormitories, five students were killed. Others were wounded. These soldiers are thought to have been brought in by Ahmadinejad from Lebanon. Today, 192 of the university's faculty have resigned in protest.

Mousavi requested that the government allow a peaceful rally to occur this morning - the request was denied. Many thought that it would not happen. Nevertheless, first a few thousand people showed up in the streets of Tehran. At this point, it is estimated that 1 to 2 million people were there. Mousavi spoke on the top of a car. The police stood by. For a few hours, everything was peaceful. Right now, the same cannot be said. Reports of injuries, shootings, and killings are flooding the internet. Twitter has been an invaluable source - those in Iran who still know how to access it are updating regularly with picture evidence. People are being brutally beaten. Tonight will be another night without rest for so many in Iran no older than I am. Tonight there is a Green Revolution.

For more information:
PICTURES:
here and here
NEW INFORMATION:
Here - near constant updates
Here - ONTD_political live post
ON TWITTER:
@StopAhmadi, @IranElection09, @persiankiwi, @NextRevolution, @Change_for_Iran

دنیارابگوییدچطورآنهاانتخاباتمان دزدیده اند
Tell the world how they have stolen our election

- original post by one_hoopy_frood

</div></div>

JAlksfjlk comments are dangerous

2009-06-09T06:34:45Z

Because ellnyx wrote about Tseng being a filer, and now I want to write huge amounts of Tseng looking dispassionately or not-so-dispassionately at his own files; UNIVERSE PLEASE INDULGE ME.

fkjaslfjalsf so much for brains

2009-06-08T04:47:33Z

Only I would be able to live under the illusion that today is the 8th of June and not the 7th, thereby missing the remixredux9 signup deadline completely. Oh, brains, you do me such good turns. 8D Snap for busy days!

to-do before work ~~after work~~ ~~at work~~:

[x] Pick up mathematics/aesthetics and give them a read through
[] Japanese notes/homework
[x] Get cheques done
[x] Email collaborator
[] pick up Lucifer

I AM AFRAID OF MY WORK EMAIL.

[edit] It took way too much time for me to open that combination safe. Way too much time.

[edit] I have work, and what do I do instead? I fix my CSS so that karanguni is more readable, I write posts about the Iliad in allcaps, and general Fail At Life(TM).

[edit] THINGS FOR WORK

[] email person #1
[] email person #2
[] draft document to leave in the mailbox of ViceBoss
tomorrow
[] call up person #3

Star Trek XI: New, And Stumbling Forward (Spock; Pike, Crew &c.)

2009-06-05T18:39:42Z

I never thought I'd put the words "Spock" and "internal monologue" together in the same phrase, but HERE WE GO ANYWAY. 8D

New, And Stumbling Forward

Fandom: Star Trek XI
Rating: PG
Characters: Spock; Pike, Scotty, Chekov, Uhura, Kirk
Summary: After Vulcan, Spock recovers his footing. Genfic.

2508 words and lots of Spock?

'I would like to express my concern about a matter of the ship's crew,' Spock says to the Admiral. His hands are tucked behind his back, as is respectful, but even then he feels that it is somehow inadequate. Inadequate because he stands taller than the Admiral right now; he feels like sitting, so that some balance might be restored. It is strange to hover above a man he respects so unequivocally.

For a moment, Admiral Pike looks at him, his eyes older than how Spock remembers them being. Spock has the impression that he is being studied, but it is not unwelcome. It feels paternal, patriarchal, stable. The Admiral cocks his head and says, 'Why don't you walk with me for a little while, Mr. Spock?' before nudging his fingers against the console of his wheelchair, so that Spock has to keep up a slow gait to match the chair's forward glide. 'You were saying?'

'It has been brought to my attention that most of the crew of the Enterprise is not being reassigned to other commands,' Spock states. 'This in spite of the fact that the ratio of fresh Academy graduates is unusually high. Since the Starfleet flagship will soon be commissioned for duty once more, I thought that it might be prudent to lend voice to my observations.'

'Not unjustified,' Admiral Pike nods, leading them down the hallways of the Academy, headed for the lawns outside. 'And very logical, Mr. Spock. Starfleet Command did take notice of that, but we've decided to leave things as they are.'

'We have a dearth of senior officers, sir,' Spock objects, quietly.

'Yes,' the Admiral nods, bringing his wheelchair to a silent stop at the front steps of the Academy. He gestures. 'We have a dearth of everything.' The lawn beyond is emptier than Spock can remember it ever having been. It's startling even now, the absence, the negative space. So much has happened since the Romulan attack that sometimes it's easy to default to other, more palatable explanations: public holidays, perhaps, or term break. Something that explains the silence of the student quads, the dorms, the lecture halls.

Spock says, 'Admiral.'

'We need senior officers here,' Pike says, not looking at Spock. 'They're necessary; they're our only resource. I think you understand.'

'Yes,' Spock says, his fingers tightening around each other.

'Besides,' the Admiral adds, a different note in his voice. 'The Enterprise has something that helps to compensate for its lack of experience.'

'And what is that, sir?' Spock asks.

'Morale and unity,' Pike says, resting his hands on his useless legs. 'Tempered by the most violently administered dose of humility that any Starfleet flagship has ever had to suffer. They'll make do, Mr. Spock. You'll make do.'

Spock says nothing. The Admiral turns his chair so that they face each other, and now the difference between them is absolute, and perfectly hinged. 'Remember what Starfleet is, Commander, and what she does. To boldly go, after all. Once upon a time, long ago, we all stumbled out into the darkness, naive and unguided but brave.' A bell rings, signalling the end of the day's classes. Pike leads them both out of the way of the main doors, asking Spock, 'We all learn, one way or another. Do you think Starfleet Command did the wrong thing?'

'No,' Spock shakes his head, as a small trickle of students and graduates shift their way across campus. 'Starfleet Command did what was admirable.'

Spock is glad for the rush of work that accompanies the Enterprise's second voyage out. As First Officer, there are any number of things that he must do to establish order within the ranks of the crew; now that they are not chasing after temporally-displaced madmen or saving worlds from imminent destruction, protocol must be soothed into place. The fight is not in maintaining discipline, as Spock imagines it might be for any other command: this crew is fiercely proud of what they accomplished by defeating Nero, fiercely proud but also grimly dissatisfied. Their fight against Nero was not a victory. Everyone on every deck lost friends in the attack; friends and loved ones – the approximation of basic affection and closeness that, in some ways, accounts for family. Discipline is a way of grieving. Everything on the Enterprise is aggressively well-kept, from the fiercely efficient systems to the devastatingly regular scans and reports. Everyone is reaching out. Everyone is looking for something, in the void that they are sailing off into.

The greater difficulty is in finding a fit for all the present personalities: almost a thousand men and women are abroad. Spock spends the first few weeks assigning shifts and talking to the senior crew members, learning more about the microcosm of space that comprises their ship. He does not have much spare time to think, in this period. He uses techniques that he learned years ago, in school, to memorise names, faces, facts. This, Spock thinks, is the Enterprise's culture, its history, its people. They are present. They are here. They are alive.

The Bridge crew is far easier to understand and assimilate to. Spock comes to appreciate the way they speak less and less with each other as the days go past and the missions start to queue. At first things are a mess of sound, babbling reports coming in from all sides, an overload of information. The Captain's favourite phrase for a while is "shut up", the sting of which he cures with pithy remarks and sarcasm: "did we really need to know that, Mr. Chekov?" and "fourteen languages and you can't deliver something in simple Standard, Lt. Uhura?", until they stop talking and start communicating. They need less from each other as time goes on, perhaps because they know each other more.

It is in that silence that Spock starts to feel the rest of the world rush in, filling in the spaces where work and newness once dominated. Travelling at warp, there is little that can keep Spock from thinking about the when instead of the where - of New Vulcan, of his father, and his mother, and his race. Spock does not know how one deals with loss on this scale. The challenges in life that he is used to facing are and were different: others teasing his ability he could always go on to disprove, and those who insulted his heritage he could learn to ignore. This he can neither ignore nor disprove. His home is gone.

The older members of the crew are the ones Spock goes to first, not in any overt way of seeking out advice, but simply because they have lived more, and there is some comfort in being around those used to the grievances of mortality. When he is not on duty, Spock goes down to Engineering to visit Mr. Scott, who very rarely spends time away from his post. They talk for very long periods of time about conversion rates and warp technology; Spock offers whatever insight on mathematics he has, and Mr. Scott very quickly comes to use him as a sort of convenient, talking reference for the more obscure formulae that he cannot remember and that Spock, by virtue of being Vulcan, cannot forget.

'You're a wonder with equations, you know,' Mr. Scott tells him one day.

'I suppose that it is a product of my training and natural capability present in Vulcans,' Spock replies.

'Your Science Academy produce–' Mr. Scott says, before he cuts himself off awkwardly, as though he does not know which tense to use. 'I mean,' he recovers with a shrug, 'it's no wonder you guys always end up kicking the arses of everyone who tries their hand at anything science.'

'We find it imperative to be methodical,' Spock admits. 'And to not rely on external sources as much as possible, for the sake of speed and convenience.'

'I could never figure how Vulcans got around their maths,' the Engineer says thoughtfully, in one of those moments of his that Spock finds interesting and honestly profound. 'No offence, but I've seen people much better at thinking out of the box – yet Vulcans produced some of the most groundbreaking theories of the last fifteen years or so.'

Spock considers that for a moment, before saying, 'I suppose that logic, when extended to its thorough and uncompromising conclusion, can yield propositions so elegant that it approximates what anyone else might describe as creativity.' It feels like a description of his race, a prescription of what they were and what they should be. Spock feels a momentary flash of discomfort.

Mr. Scott blinks at him, and then laughs. 'Okay. I'll be damned if you can't do poetry in numbers, Commander.'

At that, Spock smiles marginally, but it seems to him as inappropriate a kudos to the recent, damning past as any generalisation about Vulcan consequence as there might ever be.

He shares his emotional difficulties to some greater extent with Nyota, who understands him well enough by that point that she does not press the point. She does not ask him whether he wishes to speak about the matter any more – instead she does her work efficiently, and waits for him to choose whether and when they should spend time together. For that, he is grateful. Nyota is stable and as regular as clockwork; something familiar in a sea of unknowns. One day Spock speaks to her in Vulcan, just to hear the sound of it coming off of his tongue again, and she replies in the language and they talk for a while. Their speech is formal, an old, old dance around grammar and syntax and order and logic. Spock must stop. She takes his lead, but does not drag him forward.

Spock thinks that Admiral Pike was absolutely correct: he is naive like this, he is unguided, he is stumbling through space. There is no one he thinks of as characteristically older and wiser whom he might go to – and Spock thinks that it might be useless even if there were. This is his own history.

Then one day he finds himself on the bridge during one of the later shifts. It is a few hours before ship's morning, and the Captain and most of the senior crew are off duty and sleeping. They are in warp – there is nothing much to be done or seen – and there is no one else but Ensign Chekov there with him.

The Ensign is no longer as jittery and nervous around him as he used to be be, for which Spock is grateful. Chekov keeps to himself and does not chatter; instead he works with a small personal datapad, sketching out graphs and charts. He does that often, Spock has noticed, and so he mentions it: 'Ensign, what is it that you're working on?'

'This, sir?' Chekov asks, holding the pad up. 'Oh, it is not anything really, ah ha,' he says, going a bit red. 'Just a few mathematical paradoxes and theories, you know? The ones that they give at the end of lectures at the Academy, well, I copied them and I work on them when there is nothing else to do.'

Spock leans forward in his chair. 'May I see your work?' he asks.

'It is wery messy,' the Ensign warns, reddening further, but he hands the datapad over.

Spock lets his mind take over from there, leaping the mathematical operators and traversing the numbers: it is a race, a run. He discusses a few points with Chekov, whose blush eventually fades, and they spend a few minutes getting involved with the methods and the ensign gets excited and scribbles new working everywhere. It is Chekov's first command, so it is not surprising that he takes a while to loosen up around officers – Spock is glad that he manages it now.

They share a few more shifts like this, Chekov apparently liking the hours as much as Spock does himself. Against his own expectations, Spock finds their sessions more pleasant than he expected. They discuss old-world conundrums ("I do not know who the Cretans were but they are very frustrating, Mr Spock!") and new-world developments, debate different theories and pick apart the reasoning of old ones.

One day, Chekov asks him, 'Do you miss the Academy, Mr. Spock?', which startles Spock for a moment.

'Not particularly,' Spock answers, truthfully.

'Oh,' Chekov says, quietly. 'I do. I had many friends there.'

Had, Spock notes. 'I am sorry,' he provides.

'I guess you must miss Wulcan?' Chekov inquires, with so few barriers of etiquette and so much honest concern that Spock is again surprised when he admits, 'Yes.'

'I thought I would show you this, sir, if you do not mind,' Chekov murmurs very quickly, and he takes out the datapad and opens a file, linking it up with the main computer system to project a series of images up on the larger viewing screens. 'Look,' he says, pointing at a series of time-delayed planetary simulations. Spock recognises it immediately, and loses the ability to speak. 'It is the universe remembering, Mr. Spock.'

The images there are of the moons and bodies around the space that Vulcan once occupied. Freed from the planet's gravitational pull, they have begun to drift apart. The time-delayed images show their creeping motion: the centre of the suddenly disappeared nub of gravity is made obvious this way when it would not be otherwise. It is a portrait of the galaxy reacting, the children of his home planet's system flung free.

At last, Spock can only find the words 'Thank you.'

Ensign Chekov quirks his lips into a smile that animates his entire face.

He, Spock thinks, he is truly brave.

As they move onwards into space, going to places unknown, Spock finds in the Enterprise a new centre of gravity. One day the Captain calls him into his room, and says, 'You know, I have access to all the captain's logs on this ship, Spock, which means that I know what you put down back then.'

'And what,' Spock replies, an eyebrow raised, 'part of my records are you referring to, Jim?'

In their shared privacy behind closed doors, the Captain says, 'The part just after we lost Vulcan. "I am a member of an endangered species,"' he quotes, without mockery this time, without his fingers crooked in the air the way he might have about anything else Spock might have said.

'Yes,' Spock says. 'I did say that.'

Jim says, 'You're on this ship. You're on my ship. You're on our ship, in the middle of the exceeding loneliness of space, where we barely know what the hell we're doing some days.' He stops there, his eyes fixed on Spock: bright and not nervous, but expectant.

'Yes,' Spock says, 'I am.' And then he, too, stops, and joins his gaze to Jim's with a new serenity achieved in the face of infinity extending out in every direction. 'And I am glad to be here.'

Star Trek XI: To The Enterprise: of Warp Barriers, Captains, and Other Scary Things (Chekov, &c.)

2009-06-03T14:25:56Z

For bessemerprocess's prompt: Star Trek Reboot, The Crew, what tradition does Star Fleet have for crew members crossing the warp speed barrier for the first time? How does this get celebrated on the Enterprise?

To The Enterprise: of Warp Barriers, Captains, and Other Scary Things

Fandom: Star Trek 2009
Rating: PG
Characters: Chekov, Scotty, Kirk, Spock
Summary: Mr. Spock's eyes flick towards the blatantly huge and complicated (and exciting) and blatantly huge mathematical and engineering schematics on the console screen. Chekov can practically see the cogs in Mr. Spock's mind whirr - he is very, very fast at telemetry, which means there is probably no getting around the fact that what they have here is a plan to break the current warp speed record into many small pieces. Pavel wonders if that is the only thing that will be broken.

2734 words and lots of fail!invented!maths. 8D

Getting assigned to a command is nothing like living through your years at the Academy. Back on solid ground, you follow a routine as old as the Federation itself: you go to classes, do a bit of research, find an area to specialise in, make a few friends, pass a few exams, take a few trips into localised space and - if you're lucky or good enough - spend part of a semester on a deep-space mission. Sometimes there are textbooks and, when things are slow, the archives to look through for the old Millennium Problems and so it is not so bad at all.

The traditions down there are reliable. You do not talk about Dr. Methoussan's hair. Or about Admiral Twrong's tentacles. If you want to pass Instructor Chang's Advanced Xenolinguistics lecture series, you make very sure that you become really good friends with the librarians. You buy people drinks on your birthday, not the other way around, but they'll buy you two rounds the day before you go in for your round of physio every year. Or they buy you a lot of chocolate if you are not yet old enough to drink. It all balances out, somehow.

Ensign Chekov took a few years to learn Standard before he came to the Academy, and then he spent a few more months being very confused about the system, but eventually it all smoothed out and because he is very good at maths in the few months before everything exploded he did not even need to talk to his professors, which was excellent, very excellent.

'Wellm then how did you get by, laddie?' Mr. Scott waves a flask of not-very-strong alcohol at him.

Chekov shrugs, sheepishly. 'The wiewscreen,' he admits. 'I wuld vrite the equations, and then the graphs, and Mr. Scott I think you understand how -' Chekov motions, snapping his fingers. 'How you do not need Standard wen talking about subspace temporal loops in warp continuum!' He remembers how he used to leave little notes on the Department board and sometimes when Chevok walked past there the next day he would hear the sounds of people weeping quietly or arguing.

'Aye, aye.' Scotty nods sagely. 'I've got your meaning.' He sighs and drums his fingers on the table. 'I wish everyone else shared that opinion, though. Not very friendly, some instructors, and sometimes not very good at physics, either.' He scowls.

Chekov likes Mr. Scott very much, because even though his drinks are not very good, Mr. Scott has a lot of drink and does not have the same illogical prejudice that the other crew members have about giving an underaged Russian some of their stash, and Mr. Scott also is as very good at maths while at the same time not being as scary as Commander Spock. Chekov thinks he could get used to the Enterprise and doing this all year round in far space - just him and his console and all this space to extrapolate.

'You been on many missions, Chekov?' Scotty asks.

'The Enterprise is the first command I have been assigned to, Mr. Scott.' Chekov points at his Ensign insignia.

'Right,' Scotty nods. He props his boots up on the table that they're sharing, and leans back in his chair. 'Well, lemme tell you one thing: it gets a wee bit boring after a while.'

Chekov looks out of the depolarised viewports that line the side of the mess lounge - the stars wink back at him, inviting. 'Boring?' he says, sceptical.

'Mmhmm.' Scotty closes his eyes. 'Just you wait.'

'Ensign Chekov, the scans for the area, please.'

'Nothing ahead, Mr. Spock,' Chekov reports, tapping his fingers across the navigation console. 'Nothing anywhere for the next twenty parsecs, sir.' He pauses, biting his lip. 'I am thinking we are not anywhere near anything, no?'

'No,' Mr. Spock says, turning to look at him, very calm. 'It would seem like we are not, Mr. Chekov.'

'We've been going through this corridor for four days,' the Captain says from his chair, bored. There is a moment where everyone just stares at the stars going past, the same view that they've been looking at for what feels like forever, and then he slaps his palms down and says, 'I'm gonna go talk to Scotty.'

Chekov sees Mr. Spock open his mouth, ready to object, but then the Captain beams at him and says, 'First Officer, you have the bridge,' and Mr. Spock's eyebrows move a little bit and by then the Captain is in the turbolift and gone.

The bridge is deathly silent when the turbolift hisses shut.

Mr. Spock clears his throat. 'Mr. Sulu, Mr. Chekov,' he intones, and Chekov feels his spine try to straighten itself in a fit of biological self-preservation. 'How long more before we clear the Farmonion Corridor and re-enter established Federation space?'

Sulu and Chekov glance, as one, at the centre console, which reads out in neat, bright lettering EIGHT DAYS TWELVE HOURS AND THIRTY SIX MINUTES. Sulu looks at Chekov. Chekov looks back at him, desperate and pleading. Sulu raises an eyebrow, which is the universal expression that says I am the senior officer here so it's YOUR responsibility to tell the Vulcan exactly what he already logically knows but does not want to hear.

'Going at current speed we have eight days twelwe hours and thirty six minutes until we reach our destination sir,' Chekov says very quickly.

Mr. Spock does not sigh, but then again Mr. Spock does not do a lot of things but that does not make him any less terrifying that he is.

'Captain to the Bridge,' the Captain's voice rings cheerily out into the horrific, soundless gulf. 'Chekov, I want you down here in Engineering.'

'Yes sir!' Chekov chirps in relief, and Sulu shoots him a dirty look but he does not care, Engineering is beautiful and far away from the bridge and therefore far away from Mr. Spock and therefore likely to lower the probability of him being condemned to gamma watch for the rest of his seventeen year old life. 'With your permission, sir?' he asks Mr. Spock, and the moment Mr. Spock nods Chekov is out of there and speeding down the decks.

'Yes Captain Kirk, I am here, Captain Kirk!' Chekov announces himself, skidding into main Engineering. 'You called?'

The captain is bent over the warp drive core with Mr. Scott, looking alive for the first time in a while. For most of the last week, the Captain either sat in the chair through most of the shifts yawning until Mr. Spock got angry, or patrolled the different decks looking for something to do. That made Mr. Spock angry as well, now that Pavel thinks about it – after a while the crew got so paranoid of the Captain conducting a random spot check that they started to work overtime, and then Dr. McCoy threatened to give the Captain a sleep aid "before the rest of this damn ship comes looking for me because of insomnia, you twit". That argument had been very loud and on the bridge and he remembers trying very hard not to laugh, because while it was funny Chekov thinks that he does not want to spend the rest of his career mopping floors on the lower decks.

'Our Russian whizz kid arrives,' the Captain looks up, a really wide smile on his face. Chekov feels a sudden moment of doubt – he has very good self-preservation instincts most of the time, and they are telling him that that is the same smile that the Captain had just before he blew up the Romulan ship and almost had them all sucked into a black hole. But there is no running away; the Captain claps him on the shoulder an practically drags his face right up next to the warp core, and for a moment Chekov is distracted because it is such a beautiful warp core.

'New and precious like a baby,' Mr. Scott comments, seeing the expression on his face. 'I tuned her up myself before he got out of dock, now she works so smooth you could break warp 6 without her even shuddering.'

Chekov reaches out a hand to touch the side of the core. Oh, it's warm, and hums with a just detectable frequency. Mr. Scott is right – and there is nothing more amazing than the latest piece of Federation technology singing beneath your palms. Chekov has not yet really been in love (he was too busy trying to work through Euler and Riemann while he was in the Academy, and they were very interesting!! And also very time-consuming), but he thinks that this feeling probably comes close. 'Ah,' he says, stupidly, grinning. 'Um.'

Mr. Scott laughs. 'Get the stars out of your eyes, Ensign. You and she will be very good friends in the future, if you treat her right.'

'I hope so, sir,' Chekov says, dreamily. He's trained in Navigation, but Chekov thinks that the whole fields of study of Astrophysics and Mathematics and Telemetry and Awesome are simply all part of one greater, Federation family.

'You were saying we could break warp 6 without a sweat, Scotty?' the Captain asks, nonchalantly. Chekov doesn't really hear him, being too busy staring at the readout on the power conversion panel.

'Aye,' Mr. Scott is saying.

'How about warp 8?'

Chekov looks up. Warp 8? Regulations usually keep ships below warp 7 unless there is a severe emergency --

Mr. Scott is grinning, too. 'Shouldn't be a problem.'

The Captain cocks his head. '8.5?'

'This ship's new enough and we're in clean enough space that if you were wanting to go that fast, well, yes,' Mr. Scott says, starting to look a bit dubious.

Chekov looks up in time to see the Captain laugh. 'How about 9.5, Scotty?'

'Captain!' Chekov feels the sudden and overwhelming need to hold the core close to protect her. It. Yes.

'What?' the Captain asks, patting the reactor as though it is an old friend (some part of Chekov screams that the Captain probably didn't even major in Warp Technology! Was this right?!). 'We've got nothing to do for the next god knows how long, this corridor is so empty that a meteor field would be a welcome distraction, and you've got the biggest brains and the fastest engine anywhere in this sector, and I bet you're as bored as I am. Am I wrong?'

'W-ell,' Mr. Scott says.

'Great.' the Captain pounces. 'Make some magic with the schematics. I've got to go back up before the pointy eared one comes after me, but I'll see you guys in my ready room at dinner, okay? Bye!' And he's gone.

'Um,' Chekov says, staring at Mr. Scott with his eyes very, very wide. 'I - Warp 9.5?'

'You know, I really like this ship.' Mr. Scott rubs his hands together. 'It's really exciting.'

'Eef if I am right, Mr. Scott, then maybe if we change course to this point and mark then we awoid the Nardassian Field and it is free space, Mr. Scott, free space for -' Chekov taps frantically at the console, his stylus moving in a blur '- about 12.4 light years and --'

'-- and we'll have nothing to obstruct the way, I get it, aye, no incidental brushes with wee star systems scattered hereabouts.' Scotty nods, chewing contemplatively on a sandwich. He waves the bacon-and-lettuce at a region of space. 'So if we ease into warp 8 there, how long do we have to break the barrier and come back down without throwing the inertial dampeners halfway to hell?'

More frantic stabbing. 'Forty minutes, Mr. Scott, with some buffer for --'

The Captain holds up his hands. 'Okay, guys, nice technobabble. Very enlightening. Can you do it?'

Chekov shoots Mr. Scott a look. Scotty inhales the rest of his sandwich and wipes his mouth with a ragged old handkerchief. Burping once, he says, 'Aye, Captain. We can do it. Plus we might be moving fast enough that I can try out this little experiment of mine, so…'

'Okay then,' the Captain says. 'You know the drill, Scotty.'

Mr. Scott radios Engineering. 'Laddies!' he says. 'You remember the new procedure - so that's sub-routine 8 and reroute power from the shield grids to mains, punch it in and put a time delay on it. Of about -' he cocks his head at the Captain, who holds up his fingers in a little v-sign, like he's one of Pavel's strange classmates who take those funny pictures -- 'Two minutes, boys. I'll be down in a bit! '

The door to the Captain's ready room chooses that moment to glide open with dramatic, well-oiled silence. Mr. Spock comes in and Chekov can already feel the blood in his fingers drain down and away to safer arteries. Captain Kirk, being very brave, is smiling. 'Mr. Spock, how nice of you to join us.'

Mr. Spock's eyes flick towards the blatantly huge and complicated (and exciting) and blatantly huge mathematical and engineering schematics on the console screen. Chekov can practically see the cogs in Mr. Spock's mind whirr - he is very, very fast at telemetry, which means there is probably no getting around the fact that what they have here is a plan to break the current warp speed record into many small pieces. Pavel wonders if that is the only thing that will be broken. Mr. Spock's eyes narrow. 'Captain,' he says. 'I would inquire if this is an example of yet another human prank on your part, but over time I have come to suspect that you take the whole of life to be a practical joke, so I will skip my usual questions and instead say just one thing.'

Captain Kirk's mouth is twitching; Chekov wonders if it is because his cells know fear even if his mind doesn't. 'And what is that, Mr. Spock?'

Mr. Spock tilts his head. 'No.'

'I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with your call,' the Captain objects, languorously. 'This mission is necessary, Mr. Spock.'

The eyebrow! Chekov thinks through a haze of panic as Mr. Spock says, 'This mission, Captain?'

The Captain gestures grandly at Mr. Scott. 'Tell Mr. Spock that I'm right, Scotty.'

'Oh, aye, sir,' Mr. Scott beams. 'It's a rescue mission we're doing here. Very important.'

'A what?' Chekov squeaks at the same time that Mr. Spock says, 'Excuse me?'

'We're working by the book this time, Mr. Spock.' The Captain is radiating offensive levels of innocence. 'Regulation says that we should never leave any Starfleet officer behind - or any member of the Federation, if it comes to that.'

'And whom are we saving, precisely?'

The Captain glances at the chronometer on the wall. 'Ooh,' he says. 'Two minutes.'

Mr. Scott moves subtly towards a wall, murmuring into his communicator. 'Transporter room, on my mark, be ready now -'

And then the whole world lurches forward.

From the transporter deck, there comes a sound.

'Bark!'

'It was the inertial dampeners at the end of the day,' Mr. Scott says. 'Tricky things.' Another sandwich, this one four layers big and courtesy of a very reverent kitchen crew.

They're in the general mess lounge, and it is packed, and it feels like they could be back at the Academy again before everything went wrong - everyone is here, as many of the crew as they could fit and they are all listening to him! 'And then Mr. Spock, well, he was not sitting down or holding on to anything, so,' Chekov babbles into the vodka that some very generous member of Engineering gave him earlier. 'Mr. Spock just fell into the Captain's lap!'

'And we hit 9.899 without the slingshot effect,' Mr. Scott adds, above the sound of the entire room struggling to decide whether it is worth the risk to laugh. 'Which is something we can explain. We can't really talk about what happened after Mr. Spock fell into the Captain's lap.'

'But,' Chekov adds brightly. 'All is well that ends well, right, Mr. Scott?'

'Aye,' the engineer agrees. 'To the Enterprise, Mr. Chekov!' he lifts his drink in toast, and Pavel grins as Admiral Archer's prized beagle hops, with Vulcan dignity, onto Mr. Scott's lap and licks Mr. Scott on the cheek.

A flash of an old memory

2009-06-03T12:12:38Z

Randomly surfing through local street names and places for both work and pleasure, and I hit up a few walking tours. One of them talks about red lanterns, which is a hoity kind of euphemism for the old, long-gone prostitution areas near Chinatown, but I clicked on it anyway and it listed the sites -

The Street of the Dead, it listed. It made me stop for a little while because no one calls it that - or, at least, I don't remember ever having been introduced to the street in English. I hear it in Cantonese in my head, sae yan gaei, which is far more damning - Dead Man's Street. They left sick people in those shophouses there to die, way back when.*

I don't remember why I remember these things. My country sneak attacks me! Does anyone else's country sneak attack them? ♥

[edit] *AND BECAUSE I AM WHO I AM this story actually comes with a crucial bit of hilarity. The word "street" and "chicken" in Cantonese are so tonally similar to my ears that I can't differentiate the two most of the time. There's meant to be more of a vowel-sound inflection on one of them - "gAI" as opposed to "gaEi" - but I can never get them right, and my parents think it is hilarious. I mean, Dead Man Chicken. DRAMATIQUE!!

Final Fantasy VII/Highlander: The Business of Fear

2009-05-27T18:52:07Z

The Business of Fear

Fandom: Final Fantasy VII (OGC)/Highlander (/Baccano!)
Characters: Rufus, Methos; cameos by Tseng and Luck
Rating: Soft R
Summary: Rufus needs men who are know something of the business of fear.

Notes: Runs in the same line as New Men (Baccano!/Final Fantasy VII), but you don't need to read it to read this! Written for the no_true_pair prompt: Rufus is bound and blinded -- does Methos try to help, or take advantage of the situation?

4952 words and Rufus doing some recruiting!

Methos spends eighteen months in the shadow of the upper Plate; eighteen months from the day that he came into the city like a thief in broad daylight, stealing in with the endless migrant crowd eager to find work, a new home, a place where they'll find themselves and consequently be forgotten. Midgar rears upwards, fifty metres of space and slum territory complemented by over fifty trillion gil worth of property and trade balances that sit neatly atop 60% of the population, all of whom live below the behemoth of the nouveau riche.

The air below is stifling, but rich with an infusion of Mako and the filth of the honest. Smell always gives a place character, and in this case Methos decides that the slums must have a dramatis personae the size of one of Dante's little epics. Angels and demons inclusive – daylight sends everyone scurrying, but come night time and the air is rife with the smell of vice and its foolish younger cousin, virtue.

Before he came to Midgar he was in Kalm, doing the modern-day equivalent of shovelling horse shit: chocobo farming. Not the bravest or boldest of occupations, but a humble one. Very soothing, except for when the birds tried to peck him to pieces – other than that the days went by with the easy, endless slide of a slow century. Methos watched Midgar haul its way up from the ground and take over the horizon. When they started on Junon, he packed his bags, and came.

Midgar is one of the first of the truly changed cities of its time. Nothing like it has been ever seen before, and nothing like it etcetera, etcetera. Methos arrives, in his own time and for his own reasons. Firstly because it's tactical; secondly because he's truly tired of feathers and tack; and thirdly because it is much harder to swing a sword at another person in an urbanised ants' nest than it is out in open country. Harder to get away with it, anyway; it's never stopped anyone from trying, but you can't have everything all of the time.

If there are any other sword-swingers in the city besides the SOLDIERs that tramp about the on-Plate sectors, Methos hasn't been holding any open houses to try and find them. He keeps to Sector Seven, where the neighbours are considerate and quick to jump to the gun the moment anything so much as glints in the dim light. If it's gil they'll take it from you wholesale, but pull a blade and they'll likely label you Shinra, and bring down an entirely different level of hell on your head. Methos has always enjoyed populist responses to dictatorship: it always gives everyone such fervour.

When young Rufus Shinra ends up his inherited throne, the air shifts, even down in the slums. There's something about that boy that really brings to mind the fact that Shinra is an electric company. The atmosphere is charged, crazy. Rufus wants to rule with fear, but it's fear alongside a healthy sum of the local energy supply and one of the prettiest faces and glibbest tongues that Midgar has ever had the proud opportunity of producing. What does the world think he wants them to be afraid of? Sephiroth? SOLDIER? Or the fact that Rufus Shinra's face looks out on you from every poster and every television screen, smiling, quiet, convincing. The world would seem a lot darker without Mako and his smile. The boy and his toys do make for excellent street theatre. Rufus isn't quite content with sitting up in the sky, in which he differs very greatly from his father.

Methos takes a few nights off every week to crawl through the wonderful cesspit of life that is the marketplace, weaving through the shops and waiting up at all hours in the bar. He likes watching the people: the ones who are about to go to the Honeybee, the ones who've just come out of the Honeybee, the top-siders who have it printed all over their faces. Eighteen months ago there would have been a general rumble of discontent and everyday complaints; today there is tension, deliberation, fizzing. Rufus Shinra is due below-Plate, rumour has it. Maybe to visit the Don. Certainly not to visit the Don's girls – they say Rufus Shinra never cries, so it's probably he doesn't fuck, either. Not those girls, in any case. (Methos has his own doubts.) Perhaps he's here just so he can feel like a real king. Royalty is nothing without the peasanthood, after all.

Whatever the scenario, it's no longer unthinkable that a Shinra come wandering down here in the dead of the night. Rufus seems to take a sordid kind of pleasure in running the gauntlet in the Sector Seven slums. Whether it's because he likes to carry out his policies first-hand or whether he simply enjoys the danger of walking, impervious, down the streets where his name is a swearword, Methos won't try to guess. The boy must be either fascinatingly cocksure or self-assuredly immortal.

It's the latter that worries Methos.

Since knowledge is the mother of all well-born retreats, Methos stays out at the marketplace's favoured watering hole and waits. The drinks aren't terrible, the company is only mildly pungent, and the place is so bright and crazy with life that no one pays any mind to a man who wears a trench in all seasons. Rufus has practically brought layers back into style, thinking about it. Methos is, of course, eternally grateful. He's been at this game three months now, and he's still only seen wisps and shadows. Mostly men and women in black suits. He doesn't try for their attention; neither does anyone else in this part of town, not if they know what's good for them. Turks are bad news in any book. Methos chooses, with some caution, to see them as a particularly well-kept breed of crow. Carrion-fowl. Harbingers. Heralds.

When the first suit walks in through the door that night, Methos knows that he's in on some luck. The crowd surges, hit with the shock of his arrival, before resettling into a wary pattern. Another Turk comes in. There's a flash of white, and maybe gold.

'That's my cue,' Methos grins at the bartender, snagging his drink and sliding off his seat. 'Gotta go.'

The bar doubles up as a club, and whichever way Methos looks at it, he's been in better – the place is noisy in a way its sound systems can't make up for, dark and unbearably crowded. But beggars aren't picky, and it's done an admirable job of trying to emulate the Plate-side elitism that everyone down here hates: there's a cordoned off area on the mezzanine for the VIPs of the VUP world. Usually home to the Don or the top dog of the moment, but today the moth-eaten red velvet area-cordons are being drawn back for Rufus-fucking-Shinra.

Methos times it perfectly. It's the Slums, it's dark, he's just one of a million faces, and one of a thousand that carry drinks around in this place. The littelest Shinra is being a neatly wide girth, just the amount of space needed to – ah, yes – trip neatly over one's shoes and up-end ---

Methos gives the Turk credit: he moves like he's paying attention, and sacrifices those neat black lapels to the after-effects of whatever alcoholic mix it is that Methos accidentally tosses in Rufus' direction. 'Whoops,' Methos declares, a grin on his face wide enough to insinuate a drunken stupor. It's not hard to believe – only a inebriated idiot would've done what he just did.

Then it hits him, full in the stomach and ringing in his ears, but also strange. Methos blinks. He knows he's not sensing a full-blooded Immortal, but whatever it is, it doesn't feel pre-Immortal either. He looks up and catches a glimpse of cold blue eyes. Rufus keeps eye contact with him for half a second, and then there are hands pushing him upright, and the neat, efficient press of a gun barrel seeking out one of the spaces between his ribs.

'That's not very friendly of you,' Methos says to the Turk holding him back.

'I apologise,' the Turk replies, pressing the gun down further against Methos' chest. Out of the corner of his eye, Methos can see the other one round up next to Shinra's side.

'But then again,' Methos amends, 'it was very clumsy of me.' He hears a laugh from behind the Turk; Rufus apparently finds it very funny when people don't lose their heads around his goons. Excellent. Methos extends a hand. 'I can do friendly, though. I'm Pierson. Adam Pierson.'

The Turk doesn't raise his hand to shake. 'Luck Gandor,' he replies, and for a split second Methos thinks that the Turk actually looks perturbed.

There is a beat. Noise rushes in to fill the silence. Then another beat. That's one beat too long. The gun is still there, far too present for any of their likings.

'I didn't know Turks had last names,' Methos says with a smile that is all teeth.

'We don't,' replies Luck Gandor, still blocking his President.

'Luck,' Rufus says, bringing up one hand to brush pale fingers up against the side of Luck's arm. Luck steps, automatically, aside. When Methos sneaks a downward glance, he can't see the gun anywhere. It disappears between folds of white and black.

Rufus comes forward. 'No need to get offended. I'm sure Mr. Pierson's accident was unintentional.' He does not look at Luck as he speaks.

'I'm sorry,' Methos says, articulating his words far too clearly for a drunk man. The buzz is still there, at the back of his mind, itching.

Rufus' lips curve upwards. The next moment, he brushes past Methos and goes up the stairs. The Turks follow, and Methos loses them to the darkness of the cloistered mezzanine.

The sense of discomfort at the back of his head disappears along with them.

Because they are consummate professionals, they do not talk in public. Instead, Luck takes the directive from Tseng to stay next to the President, while the Director heads off to the floor. Rufus sits, neatly and expansively, back in his seat and watches Luck from behind clear eyes. Tseng comes back three minutes later, with drinks. The drinks settle themselves: two on the table, one in Rufus' hands.

'So?' Rufus asks softly, sipping. His eyes coast over the people, the darkness, the lights.

'Gone,' Tseng replies, and with a suit that black he almost blends into the background when he comes to stand at loose attention behind the President.

'Mm.' Rufus nods, then gestures at the remaining drinks. 'One for you, Luck?' He catches Luck's gaze over his glass. 'Or should I call you "Mister Gandor" again, since you seem so set on the name tonight?'

Luck reaches for one. 'Luck, sir,' he says, just loudly enough to be heard and just quietly enough to sound as discomfited as he feels. 'Just Luck.'

Questions now answered, Rufus lifts his glass in toast before turning his attention back to the world at large.

Tseng, on the other hand, has more patience. He opts not to drink, and waits out the three, four hours that Rufus wishes to spend away from the Tower in silence. If he notices Luck fidgeting, he does not mention it. It is not until Rufus is returned to his rooms and the two of them are alone on the lounge on the 68th that he turns and says, 'Explain.'

Luck reaches up to loosen the knot of his tie. 'It is a condition,' he says, slowly. 'Born of the elixir, or of the alchemical immortality. In the presence of another immortal I must declare my true name.' He swallows, thirsty from the alcohol and the night. Tseng notices – Tseng notices everything. The Director opens a small fridge and passes Luck a bottle of water. Luck breaks open the seal and drinks. Better. 'I've never seen him before, sir,' he admits at last.

'Adam Pierson?' Tseng asks, eyebrow raised. 'Not in all of your years?'

'No, which is what worries me,' Luck says with a small shake of his head. He wets his lips. 'There may be a complication.'

Tseng crosses his arms. 'What kind?'

Luck casts his eyes upwards. 'If you require him removed –'

Raising one hand to stop Luck, Tseng laughs, a raw and very quiet noise. 'Removing someone of that much potential is the last thing we would think of doing. I'd have thought that you, of all people, would know that, Mister Gandor.' Luck narrows his eyes. Tseng smiles. 'Keep an eye on him. Rufus has his interest piqued.'

'Sir.'

'If and when we choose to try to kill him, though, I hope that your techniques will be inventive as opposed to fatal. Dismissed.'

Methos would be the first person to call himself paranoid, but the problem with paranoia is this: the other people have to be right only once, you have to be right all of the damn time. Making contact that night was strategic, but knowing the enemy is only one half of the battle. If it comes down to numerical superiority, the odds are stacked so highly against him that the first order of the day should be to get out of Midgar, get out as fast as he can. The only problem being that the city is surrounded by nothing but blighted desert and farmland: clear, even plains for miles out. There isn't a lot of sense in taking the needle out of the haystack before the game even begins.

Hide and seek is something Methos has come to be good at over the years, but he has absolutely no illusions about playing against the Shinra Company: they only own every piece of public property in the city. He lays as low as he can; keeping to the crowds, moving in the daylight hours, avoiding common occupations, staying off the trains. It works, or seems to work, for a week. Then two weeks, three weeks, a month. Nothing. No sense of the pseudo-presence, no associations with Shinra.

The first night he goes back to the watering hole, nothing happens. Same for the second night. He dares a drink on his third night, then a smile for his seat mate on the fourth weekend. A little bit of a flirt a few days after that,, just to release the tension. By the time a new month rolls around he's calmer. He has a boy, to celebrate a successful evasion and the superior bastardry of Midgar that keeps Shinra above and the general population below. The boy's good looking, a requisite when it comes to working for the Don: blond hair, blue eyes, icy enough all over that Methos rather enjoys peeling off his layers and watching him fall apart.

The irony of it doesn't escape Methos when he realises that it's the boy who sells him out. He's getting his clothes back in order when there's a polite knock on the door. Half a second later and the door comes crashing down, and a Turk comes through. They don't come in with guns blazing, Methos observes dispassionately. Their shots are very, very precise. Through the heart, this time. If only it hurt less every time he died.

He topples, breathing through and with the pain, waiting for his vision to start to blur up. In the meantime he sees the boy stand to pocket something from the Turk – gil, perhaps? - then everything starts to go black. Methos almost enjoys this part, now. It'll take him a minute or two to revive from a shot like that, and with some hope the Turks will use their famed efficiency to conclude that he is, in fact, very boringly dead, and maybe go away. Oh, optimism.

When Methos blinks open his eyes, it's to see his own sword in the hands of one of the Turks. Same one from the night before, the one with the shorter hair. The buzzing is back. So it's not Rufus Shinra. Interesting. Methos coughs up a little bit of blood, wiping it away with the backs of his fingers. 'Could I have that sword back?' he asks the Turk, his voice hoarse.

The Turk steps forward, glancing sidelong at the blade. 'Yes,' he says, and then he plunges it through Methos' heart.

Damn it.

There are a number of reasons why Methos doesn't like dying by the sword, one of which is that a sword must first be removed before anything else can happen. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out; only some experimentation, and more pain on his part than he's inclined to ever feel first-hand. When he returns to consciousness this time, it's to the feel of metal resting alongside the inside of his guts. The Turk did him the courtesy of returning his sword through his abdomen. Hazy with pain, Methos gropes for the hilt. His hands, at least, are unbound. Deep breaths. One. Two. Fuck.

Methos' hands are clammy enough that he drops the sword. It clatters to the ground. Somewhere at the back of his mind, Methos registers the dull, clattering noise of metal on cheap concrete flooring. It takes a while for everything to come back to him, but when his nerves fire tentatively back into obedience his fingers go, instinctively, to his chest. The whole left side of his shirt is ruined; they must have ran him through the side as well, to keep him down long enough to move him here, wherever "here" is.

'I would apologise,' a voice calls out, bouncing words off the far walls. Methos snaps his head up. 'But I've been told that I am not very good at the business of repentance.'

They are still below-Plate. There isn't enough room up above for a warehouse this size, and even if there were, Methos doubts that Urban Development would allow anything so unkempt. The windows have been methodically knocked out and covered over. Cardboard and black electrical tape, mostly, and dust everywhere. The height clearance suggests that this is one of the old storage facilities that held generator parts while the city was still fledging. Tri-level. Expansive ceiling. Balconies on the upper floors. Methos chuffs a resigned sigh. 'It's all right,' he calls over. 'I'm quite comfortable now.' Sword in hand and foot in mouth. As good a proposition as any, Methos supposes.

Rufus Shinra sits like a scar of white in the middle of the dirty floor, seated in a rickety metal chair. The intonation of his words comes sharp after two years of street slang and Eastern colloquialism. But the truly interesting part of this encounter, Methos thinks, is that he – a known Immortal – has a weapon in his hand, while Rufus Shinra – the most expensive man in the world – has hisown hands linked neatly behind his back. Methos taps his fingers along the hit of his sword, considering. 'Are you comfortable, President Shinra?'

Rufus shakes his wrists demonstratively, rattling metal cuffs against the chair frame. 'Quite. Call me Rufus,' he says. 'Or Rufus Shinra, whichever suits you better.'

Methos takes a few steps towards the man. They had propped him up against the far wall while waiting, and left Rufus in the centre. Too much room for any sudden moves. 'Well, Rufus Shinra,' Methos says, lightly balancing his blade on the rise of one shoulder. He throws a quick look behind him. The wall is sticky with drying blood. There is a copper stink in the air. 'You left me in a bit of a mess.'

'I was surprised,' Rufus replies, at ease; legs lazily parted, the fall of his white jacket careless, the crease of his sleeves sharp enough to cut. 'You clean up far less neatly than what I've come to expect.'

'Oh?' Methos says, turning back and coming forward. 'Does Gandor simply...' He makes an expansive gesture. 'Clean up after himself whenever he's stabbed?' Another few steps closer. His footsteps are loud in the cavernous space, but Rufus doesn't flinch with the sound. Tap. Tap. Tap.

'Actually, yes,' says the blond. 'Some sort of evolutionary advantage I assume. He doesn't leave much of a trace at all.'

Methos comes to a stop in front of Rufus, matching Rufus' easy stance. 'I highly doubt that my kind evolve.' He swings his sword off his shoulder. It swishes idly through dead air, promising.

The president of Shinra tilts his head up, laconic, to look at him. 'Physically, no,' he murmurs.

Methos cocks an eyebrow. 'Allow me to offer you a piece of advice –'

'Please.'

'— I have lived,' Methos enunciates, 'for a very long time, Rufus Shinra, and I got tired of having people play mind games on me, oh --' Methos squints upwards, thinking, before he looks back down. 'More lifetimes ago than I care to remember. I'll be the first to admit: I'm easily amused.' An easy smile. He complements it with the sharp edge of his sword against the yielding skin of Rufus' neck. 'And I'm also very easily frustrated. What do you want.'

Rufus tilts his head to the side. 'That didn't sound like a question, Mr. Pierson.' Methos applies more pressure. Rufus strains away just enough to avoid having blood drawn. 'I'm trying very hard to be diplomatic, Mr. Pierson,' he chastises.

'Ironically, so am I,' Methos agrees with great cheer, pressing down further. Rufus tilts the chair back onto its hind legs to maintain distance. 'I'm also trying very hard to be patient.'

Rufus clears his throat. 'You could say that I like to do my recruiting first hand.'

Methos keeps his hand very steady. 'Maybe I'm going deaf in my old age. Excuse me?'

Rufus slowly, slowly, slowly brings his chair back down onto all four legs. He resettles. The edge of the blade matches the sharp line of Rufus' lips. 'I gather you don't get job offers very often?'

'I'm terrible at customer service,' Methos says. 'And very picky about my perks.'

'I'll give you immortality,' Rufus drawls, his eyes half-closed.

'Immortality I already have, thank you,' says Methos, gently drawing the sword across the plane of Rufus' neck, letting the blade run its course until the tip flirts with the bump of Rufus' adam's apple. 'What else do you have to offer?'

'Not anything that I think would interest you.' Rufus shrugs, the audacious bastard: he lifts one shoulder and lets it drop again. Methos can practically feel his pulse, steady and undisturbed, anchored by the danger instead of swayed by it. Methos has seen his breed before; the rare creatures that tore across the world, frontiering and conquering because the alternative was unthinkable. 'Money,' the President lists idly, 'power, an office with a view, travel opportunities, etcetera. When I said immortality, Mr Pierson, I didn't mean it in the way I think you imagined.'

'Oh?'

'They won't remember your name,' Rufus says, casting a quick glance beyond Methos' shoulder, towards the rest of Midgar. 'Everyone in this city; anyone in this city, or any city. "Adam Pierson" probably isn't even who you really are – do you even like who Adam Pierson is? Do you recall what it felt like to walk past the brave new world – what were your words? – "more lifetimes ago than you care to remember", when you were yourself? How they felt?'

'No, not particularly,' Methos says, evenly. 'What do you assume it felt like?'

'Fear.' Rufus' eyes are bright, solid blue.

Methos' eyes are old. 'I'm not sure I'm in that business.'

'Well.' Rufus presses his cheek against the flat of Methos' blade, his eyes sliding closed. His breath leaves condensation on the cold surface. Inhale, exhale, inhale. Methos watches Rufus' mouth move with the shape of his words. 'You seem to be enjoying this. If you're going to live forever anyway, Mr. Pierson, you might as well -'

'Methos,' Methos cuts in. 'If you're going to buy me you might as well know it. Caveat emptor.'

Rufus' eyes snap open. 'Methos,' he corrects, the name coming slow and familiar to his lips. 'If you're going to live forever in any case, you might as well keep living.'

'And is living synonymous with survival for you?' Methos brings his sword away from Rufus face. He touches the blade with the pads of his fingers: the metal is warm.

'A fair question.' Rufus jerks his hands to his side. 'Next to my chair. It's a guarantee,' he says as Methos walks over, cautiously bending to the side to pick up a simple black case. 'An offer made in trust.'

It would be the height of idiocy to think that Rufus Shinra is not still a dangerous man while tied to a chair. Methos keeps his sword held loosely in one hand while he throws the catches on the case with the other. There is a hiss of decompressing air as he lifts the cover, and then Methos catches sight of a faint, liquid glow of deep green and yellow. 'Mastered,' Rufus comments as Methos strokes the materias' brittle curves

Methos curls his fingers under a ball, bringing the materia up out of its individual pocket to view it in the dying light. 'Very impressive.' It's beautiful the way that the pinnacle of modern technology in any age is. Whole cities live and die by this same kind of energy, which Shinra took and compressed into globes that now fit into the palm of a man's hand. He throws a thoughtful glance at Rufus. 'How many of your men are watching us now?'

Rufus laughs, throaty. 'Including you? I have four men here.'

Methos throws a look around the room, spotting no one. 'You presume I've said "yes" to your offer.' He shakes his head and snaps the black case shut. He pushes one of his sleeves up, revealing a bracer equipped with a single red globe. He inserts his chosen new materia, listening for the soft click as it secures itself in position. He turns his wrist a few times, waiting, and then he feels the burn of power go up his arm. Tendrils of deep colour wind around Methos' fingers. 'I haven't,' he tells Rufus.

'I'm open to negotiation,' Rufus says as Methos comes in close, kicking Rufus' feet apart to stand between them. Methos brings his hand up to the side of the young Shinra's face, feeling skin and feathery wisps of hair. 'Very open,' Rufus breathes, still relaxed. He reminds Methos of all the men that new history has forgotten: the Alexanders and the Caesars, the Qins and the Ci Xis, the men and women who made empire and who believed in it, and who made others believe as well – whether through faith or through fire. Methos digs his fingernails into Rufus' temple.

Rufus' throat isn't the only one that hitches when the shot of Manipulate hits him. Mastered, the materia heats pure and runs smooth, a science refined into magic that feels so close to a Quickening that Methos can feel the currents of energy slide down his forearm, draining and eddying. He watches Rufus' eyes change. Blue irises wrap around the edges of pupils, black wavering before going shot and spreading, dilating, then spreading again. Rufus' next breath is haggard, as though he's struggling to suck air into seizing lungs. Methos smiles and cups his cheek. 'Answer very carefully, Rufus Shinra,' he murmurs, letting his sword go as the simmer of materia starts to settle deep as his bones. 'Do you trust your men?'

Rufus' head lolls to the side as though he's been drugged. Methos watches him as Rufus struggles against the influence, sweat beading on his forehead as he jerks himself back upright. The materia shorts his nerve endings, a veridical twenty times as strong as any Methos has ever seen induced chemically. The blond's tongue seems thick in his mouth as his jaw works, silently, for a few seconds without producing any sound. 'Do you?' Methos asks again, patiently soothing Rufus' hair out of his face as he skims his fingertips over aristocratic cheekbones.

'I trust,' Rufus Shinra slurs, his head hitting the back of his chair as he slides it back to look up at Methos. 'I trust my men to enjoy themselves.'

Methos glances up for one last time at the shadowed floors above where Rufus' men are watching but also waiting. He has Rufus so high that their President would dance off the Plate if Methos so much as uttered a word, but still there is no movement, no protest. Rufus' own legs are spread wide and unresisting. He's not even fighting. Methos knows from experience that men like him only stop when they've won. 'Why am I not surprised that you have no problems with exhibitionism?' he asks Rufus as he cracks the materia case open a second time.

'No problems with exhibitionism, sir,' Rufus whispers, blinking rapidly against the influence.

Methos efficiently arms a Silence. 'Sir,' he repeats in a resigned and expectant drawl. As he feels the materia charge, Methos settles his fingers around the base of Rufus' throat.

Rufus laughs, hard and honest noises that vibrate through all his body and that end in a trickle of energy and gasping, wordless noise.

Methos receives instructions, two days later, to return to the same warehouse. It's empty this time, no Presidents and no ambushes, just the chair that Rufus had sat in with a perfectly fitted suit and tie hung onto it, and a pair of open handcuffs dangling slowly back and forth.

Odd thoughts on people who matterb

2009-05-22T17:10:37Z

Sudden urge to go back to my old school, attach myself to my teachers, and never let go. These people have changed my life in ways they - and I - can't even imagine. What I am is 50% part of what they made me. The rest is just what I did with that 50% in the time that's come after. How do I ever say good-bye to these people, now that some of the really important ones are leaving? It doesn't make sense. It doesn't compute. They've change the course of my life; it seems illogical to just float on.

Tell me your stories, guys? Who has changed your lives? Did you keep in touch afterwards, if you parted ways? Or did you keep quiet, your silence your sort of tribute? What did you say? Anon comments, as always, are on. ♥

Spinning girls, Spock, Tseng, a certain amount of masochism, con crit, and prosperity.

2009-05-21T15:06:16Z

Concrit on the writing meme, watching Trek for the second time, three day "weekend" that involves a lot of public speaking, darkrooms, Photoshop and code: my favourite brew.

>:D Writing is so happening tonight, even though (especially because) I have to be up at 7 tomorrow morning.

Live long and prosper.

*GLEEFUL*

[edit] Also, hilariously enough, I don't know how I get the dancer to change directions, but once I do I can't change her back, and now I am FIXATED.

[edit] To get her to swing counter I get her to swing out her leg; to get her to swing clockwise I get her to squeeze down on her crotch. OR IS THAT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. HELP.

[edit] AUGH and I can only do it with my laptop tilted 90 degrees clockwise!

[edit] Am now getting her to do some sort of retarded on-the-stop forward facing can-can competition with herself, though I usually default to clockwise. Must... stop... looking... It's all in the back of the calves!

[edit] LAST EDIT I SWEAR. It is sad, but thinking of porn makes her swing clockwise, and thinking of square roots swings her anti. I'm sure that if I was told that clockwise = left brain instead of clockwise = right brain, the opposite would be true. DONE NOW. Tomorrow, Evil Spock/Tseng in action flick style fic... somehow with plot!

Oh hei, a meme!

2009-05-21T01:26:17Z

Because mostly I am spending this week failing to do anything but getting up and going to work. 8D

THE ANONYMOUS WRITING FEEDBACK MEME

RIP ME APART LIKE A BODICE, GO! It's on LJ, but there are anonymous commentseses, so you can go suck their server power if you'd so like! 8D

Must... catch... up... with... fandom... this... weekend...

Final Fantasy VII: Year One (Reeve, Veld, Lazard, Tseng, Rufus, Midgar, &c.)

2009-05-17T08:32:20Z

This fic officially took my brain, injected a thousand CCs of politics into it, beat it up and left me staggering about wildly. I haven't written something like this, I think, since Empery.

The last (and crowning) jewel of the Honourable Men triple bill (they're all standalones, though, so no need to read through).

I humbly request that you give this one a try. ♥ Okay going to go expire from exhaustion now.

Year One

Fandom: Final Fantasy VII (BC through CC)
Characters: Lazard-Tseng-Rufus, Veld, Reeve, does the City of Midgar count?
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Spans through Crisis Core and Before Crisis backstory. You don't need to know BC, but it helps, and there's a tiny appendix at the bottom of the fic to help you if you'd like.
Summary: From the journals of Urban Development, filling in the lives and empty spaces in Midgar.

7575 words and Midgar being alive.

From the journals of Urban Development, over the years:

1. newly into Midgar

The tar here smells so new that moving in feels like invasion. A funny feeling, stemming from somewhere deep within the marrow of bones. This is Midgar; it's not like any other city in the world. There are roads everywhere, leading here and there. Strategic, v. strategic: one way to Mideel (widened especially - cargo out and produce in etc), another way to the West and sufficient foundation underneath everything that we won't have to rip up old pipes to lay down excess capacity in the future. No dirt here yet. But plenty of dust, from very last parts of construction work coming off S. 7; when the sun lies low at the end of the day the whole sky does magnificent orange because of it. Human pollution can too give character. We're not a farming town, or an industrial one; if it weren't for Mako, we'd probably not be environmentally sustainable at all. Midgar is a city.

But her growth is organic, slow. The computers and systems have to go in first. Department gets priority, for obvious reasons - leaves Pr. Gast & Hojo less than satisfied, but they have Nibelheim and Icicle for now, until the generators run fully stable and the Tower starts to come up. Hollander and Pr. H can fight it out in the rural areas until then. The President knows resources have to be optimised, for now. Urban Development is v. efficient, v. efficient. My earmarks are pittances. Genomes aren't my forte. Next to Science's budgeting, all we are is hammers and iron girders. Good.

Meanwhile in what V calls "the old country" they are bringing everything else up to speed. Since S1 is fully operational, they've halved it. Residential on one side and service on the other: finance mostly, things that can be channelled back and forth. Migrated practically the whole of central Kalm into new office spaces. Better connectivity and brighter lights. They get to keep their homes. Transit back over the weekend is simple and inclusive in employment packages. Midgar barters gil, for now, gil & large industry.

S2 is not optimised for warehousing/manufacturing, but that's easily ceded to the benefit of having 50 stories of vertical space in below-Plate. Filled instead with shop fronts; most likely early investors just sitting on property, waiting for the next five years. G. & Assoc. have commandeered a twenty-level automated system a few thousand feet beneath their flagship establishment, leveraging off the trains. Now that they're done providing the brick-and-mortar they're selling off the excess at a bargain price and reaping the benefits. The stuff goes out to all the neighbouring -- villages? settlements? everywhere seems a bit parochial now in comparison. Now getting a lot of truckers and waymen; it's cheap for them under-Plate, nothing much provided for except sanitation and proper insulation, but they like the crowd, gives the whole place some character. President may try to move them Platewards, keyword may. Maybe he does not want to share space with greasemonkeys and the trades. Will see. Digressing --

S3 is military. Self-defence force, the Army. The two have old barracks; now going on 4, 5 years since the early Plate stress-tests, and they've been here longer than anyone else. Guarding something - President thought perhaps sabotage, or theft of -- secrets? How do you hide a city from prying eyes? The structures are all mostly internal, and the internal areas mostly circuited to 24-7 feeds. But not out of place for him to have someone guarding something. It has a good sound "guarding"; and as Midgar became Midgar its army needed to grow. Now we have a force full flush. The ones that Heidegger will find extraneous we simply release into the newer sectors. They are all young men coming in from far places, looking for a town with more than five hundred and some space. We sympathise. The President gives them housing, and gives everyone something to do. If there are schools there will be students, if there are workplaces they will be filled.

And if they don't want to work and don't want to study there will be wars, or "attempts at expansion"; we are already so close to Wutai.

2. AResearch/Science

V back from various ventures abroad, had drinks with him. Eternally a better drunk than I am. Maybe he has a training regime for that too; would not be surprised if so. Asked if there were any new additions to his band of merry men, what w. V2 off guarding women in isolated laboratories from - himself, probably. V found that joke particularly sour. He would. Increasingly he finds nothing funny at all. Would be inclined to agree with his worldview, but then would just be a fatalist. There's no point in that.

Or maybe it is middle age catching up with us both. Youth wasted on the young, etc. We had some v. good ideas in that time. Designs! Knives in the dark! Maybe we were both too bored, living out in the country. Irony cuts quickest.

3. bastard sons

The best kept secrets are the ones you keep out in the open: that way everyone who hears them becomes a co-conspirator. Suppose I should feel some sense of pride: one knows a city has come of age when it gets itself its first whores. No doubt that in a few years time the place will become some below-Plate syndicate with a horrendous name and equally horrendous clientele. Don't know what they might call it, but at least I'll know their customer base. The President is not v. discreet. But he controls the flow of energy and weapons everywhere, so he doesn't need to care much what his subordinates think of him.

Not every day that you see a no-name entrant into Shinra's elite education system (children are trophies for rich men to put on shelves in this place) -- but rumour has it that there's a young boy newly admitted. Anonymous father, and a mother that would've been better off anonymous. Deusericus will be a name to keep track of, when there's time to look away from the log reports. Am very determinedly not looking. Ignorance etc etc. The President is not subtle but he is also not stupid. The head that sticks itself out will get cut off; in all likelihood this is one of those tests of loyalty (how much will we take, can we keep his secrets secret...) Will leave that (secrets & head cutting) to V. It's his job, not mine.

Poor child.

4. genetics, V2

Pr. G perhaps watches too much of the commercial broadcasts; derives inspiration from the adverts directed at housewives and the now truly noveau riche (em. on riche)? Graceful ageing, applied with by a factor of what, 3? 4? 5? To stem cells and alien matter? Am a simple brick-and-mortar man, but know well enough what happens if I put 5 times the load on a floor meant to bear only so much. Who knows if Sephiroth will be stable enough to be the "perfect Soldier" (sic). But this is the future; four generations ago the world still relied on the derivatives of crude (ha!) oil. In the same breath, I think I'll still hedge my bets. V's always been a better gambler than me, and he still---

Scribbling things down on paper makes everything flatten out into a simple forward progression, but life is not like that. Am a coward who records, and cowards don't make many friends. Good thing, too. V2 is gone. V won't be looking for him, but whether that's because of directives or because of his own desire to think that Valentine died an at least dignified death is anyone's guess. Personally hope that V2 is dead. No other way to wish him well, now.

5. legitimate heirs

From the grapevine. New development in the works, and this one not here at home. Competition? Doubtful - seems to be a place targeted mostly at tourists etc etc, anyone with a few hours and a few gil to waste: "The Golden Saucer", managed by a Midgar offshoot, if you'd imagine it. Dio wasn't here long, but he was here long enough to double his fortune and put it to good use. Property, property, property.

Young Rufus Shinra is born. An heir to the throne, officially recognised and cementing P Shinra's authority. Anyone foolish enough to have dreamed of succession now slinks off into the shadows and pretends loyalty and dedication when they probably had been planning assassination and financial bankruptcy. The President is far smarter than they give him credit for. The news is full of him holding the baby in his arms and smiling. R Shinra's first memories will be of very, very bright light and noise and a lot of clamour. V. appropriate for one of the first of Midgar's true bloods, I suppose.

6. recruitment and theory

Patriotism is an excellent way to cover for defection, and that is next on the Company agenda.

In spite of recent birthings, no one comes from Midgar just yet; she's a child. We raise her, not the other way around. But good politics means being fiercely territorial. Ever since the green light from the President, H&H have been at their Bunsen burners. Money and management is v. good for the graduates coming in off East, but what do you do with the boys from Corel and Gongaga? They won't open-handedly abandon their places of birth and call themselves "from Midgar", unless Midgar gives them a reason to. I'm not from here myself, neither is anyone that I know. But we're all the city has. We don't need them (new migrants, that is; not trying to be protectionist, just patriotic), I think, but the Company's not willing to wait 45 years for a generational cycle to fill in the gaps. "If we're bringing brighter futures, we bring them to everyone", i.e this is a monopoly. Monopoly over what? I'm better off with building blocks, so they don't tell all, but board meetings can't disguise everything. Heidegger's now got competition (maybe the P thinks he has grown too much in the wrong direction?) -- the word "SOLDIER" is floating in the air, and not all of it (none of it) refers to the Army.

They move to human trials next week, starting in Banora. Hear they have good apples there, whatever the quality of their men (or women). V currently there on a visit, very casual naturally, strolling through. The candidate list will come from him, not them. Can't imagine what he's feeling. Pr. Hojo seems distracted, Hollander ecstatic. Worth noting, and worth staying away from.

Meanwhile the wheel continues to turn. Urban Development finally starting to live up to its title "urban": the affluent take up all the space on the Plate, and use it all to fence up gardens that do not grow. Midgar is a a block of metal; we have no topsoil, and no good drainage, and anyway anything that is planted will probably take root and suck up all sorts of mineral content &c &c that will leave them ravaged and terrible. At the same time there is overcrowding down below Plate, especially in Sector Seven, where you can now find anything from hotpot (40 gil cheaper and just as much more tasteful than what you get in the staff canteen here, if you're willing to barter the train ride down and possibly your wallet to a pickpocket en route to get there) to what is now the Honeybee Inn. Don't know if that's more terrible or more funny than what I thought it could've been named. To be fair, think am obliged to quite like the place: their Don is a lecherous but spineless man who withers every time V even breathes in his vicinity. Sometimes being a Turk sounds like much more fun than being an engineer-cum-city-planner.

(Speaking of V, he says that Lazard Deusericus no longer a student: having zipped past his examinations years forward of his class, he's gone and graduated and come to bang on the doors of the Company, which have mysteriously slid open for him. He starts next week at an intern in one of Heidegger's offices. We'll see if he stays there long.)

Back to the topic at hand (overpopulation): I can't move all those people. Don't want to, in fact. Right now the only rent they pay is to themselves; move them Platewards and everything they own will get "redistributed" through land taxes alone, and then where will the character and service workers of Midgar be? No, better to suck dry the sons and daughters of industrialists and corporate magnates. They can afford it, and their maths is so much worse than the average "slum" kid's that they'd never notice if you twisted a few figures here and there. Not my business, again, but it's v. interesting.

(REMINDER: CHANGE REACTOR CORE IN 2/4/6/8 TO PHASE II/GRS-T2-44K (retrain team 2 to new system UI))

7. V does it again?

Impossible has at last happened: V has acknowledged his age, and is finally cranking the gears that made him such a great Director to begin with. Not everyone does well in Administrative Research (incredibly high turnover rate, reason for leaving sometimes being "death"), but Shinra took him out of a chocobo farm in Kalm (derogatory, but with Midgar being so viciously proud of herself these days there's this urge to take one for the city) and made him into a man more politically adroit than any of the other Directors combined. My lessons all came out of his book.

V's been around too long, I think. Been around almost as long as I've been alive, and that does something to people. Was afraid that he was just going to keep on going forever without a contingency plan, but obviously I underestimated him (once again). V probably knows better than I that, in Shinra, you have to plan your own succession otherwise someone will plan it for you -- he's old, not getting any younger, and he needs someone out on the field where he can't be. Be his eyes. See what's on the ground. I've my own ways, but they wouldn't work too well with the Turks.

But the cat dragged in something new this week. Something young and something, I suspect, new to the city, fresh from below-Plate in from somewhere abroad. One of a thousand migrants, probably bartered off by his parents in exchange for secrecy and the careful eradication of his last name. He's not from around here (Kalm, Mideel, etc).

V says he's from Wutai, and his name sounds it too.

8. Mako theory

Did some research, on a hunch. Interesting and pragmatic thought: multiple locations require Mako energy, and multiple locations possess Mako energy. Needing refinement, energy must first be passed through a reactor. Reactors must first be built. Factor: the number of locations requiring Mako energy now tends towards infinity, or - more realistically - a number substantially higher than the number of locations possessing Mako energy. Factor: the disequilibrium between the locations of demand/supply can be abrogated by the quantity of demand/supply. President Shinra writes directives based on a perfect market in a perfect world: so long as the Company holds sole control over a reactor in any area and links the reactor to the main continental pipelines, Mako can travel in any quantities from anywhere, to anywhere.

In other words, it's perfectly plausible and completely logical to channel excess Mako supply from one region, via pipeline, to regions that either a) do not have natural resources or b) have insufficient resources. Following that logic, one single reactor (built to scale) in one, single region can power anything between 5 - 10 regions of a similar size, should the Mako resource that it sits upon be sufficiently rich. 5 - 10 times the reach with 1/5 - 1/10 times the effort.

Fact, not factor: Wutai sits upon a resource so rich that, if they had our technology, a single reactor in their capital alone could power the entire Western continent.

One gets the impression that we shall soon be bringing them brighter futures as well.

9. ec. theory (sometimes bore even myself)

Planetary observations: if an object is of sufficient mass, it generates its own gravitational field. Funny thing about natural history is how much it serves a metaphor for sociology (maybe everything does fall into place according to scientific laws?) - in any case Midgar now more than "showing symptoms". Besides dominating 59% of financial industry (even if we don't see your companies, we fund them, so long as you are anywhere within the continent) and 89% of energy (across the continent, not just locally), Midgar now also the main source of demand for refined industrial materials. Coal, while no longer useful as an energy source (broadly speaking), is still a key a component of a variety of important processes, esp. cooked steel. Of which the Company uses much of - when it's not the sectors it's the reactors, when it's not the reactors it's the infrastructure (and when it's not the pipeline IF it's PHS stations, standalone backup generators, desalination plants & related industries, and soon-to-come: Junon, etc etc), and when it's not one of those it's something else.

With R now providing an excuse for the creation of an empire, P Shinra looks to expand. Economic imperialism: where one region condemns a certain other area to a full and total reliance on the parent region's demand. To simplify: Midgar the parent region, Corel the dependent area. With Midgar (read: Shinra) requiring 70-80% of Corel's output of coke in any given year, Midgar (read: Shinra) plans a contract that runs something like this: a long-term agreement to buy an almost excessive base amount of coal at bulk(cheap) prices over at least 10, 15 years. Initial sum of contract is released to Corel, which experiences a temporary boom as it expands its mines, upgrades its equipment, etc etc, pouring the new liquidity straight into such overheads while paying existing employees the same amount. Any excess goes into hiring new employees (rational: you don't need a bureaucracy to mine some coal, et al).

A year or three later and the initial monetary input has dwindled, but Corel continues to do well under the auspices of Shinra-led demand. The township specialises in coal, nothing but coal, everyone is a coal miner, and everyone gets the same wages, meanwhile Shinra takes their cheap coal, puts it through processes, and produces high-end manufactured goods that sell for at least 10 times the original unit price (black gold versus new aluminium patents, patents win). Shinra's tactics remain the same: it buys it bulk for cheap, otherwise it does not buy at all, therefore Corel does not sell to very many other people in fear of losing more than half of its (now sole) industry, etc etc. Shinra resells coal that it doesn't need/use, becoming - ironically - the second largest coal distributor on Gaia.

Give or take a few years and Shinra will have stockpiled enough coal and (courtesy of R&D and H&H) found ways of cutting down the need for pure coke in manufacturing. Result: cutbacks on Corel, which automatically goes from colony once well taken care of to abandoned outpost of once earnest frontiersmen. To add insult to injury, urban drift theory soon settles in: the middle aged and younger generations will start moving towards Midgar in search of better jobs and -- the rest is history and company policy.

Shinra's brand of bastardry has always been particularly refined and elegant.

Need a shower. Gives at least the illusion of cleanliness.

10. rising star(s) of Shinra

Coffee during lunch hour always my favourite activity. Blueprints and cross-table conversation (not eavesdropping if they speak in public). Tidbits from the lounges: new VR engine installed in preparation for the new batch of SOLDIERs, and L. Deus. is rubbing shoulders with the genetic engineers. He's a hundred years too young for how high he's risen, though personally not begrudging him the notion. Intelligent to a fault, full of logic and a tremendously good speaker for being so young. Not to mention how closely he's come to know the men; V & sidekick might hunt potentials down and drag them back to the labs (willing and ready to receive not only genetic treatment but also fully-paid room/board and a salary for even new Third Classes that is at least 2, 2.5 times higher than the average "Army grunt"'s take), but it's Deusericus that talks to them and plans the tactics, training routines, etc. according to the different personality types in each contingent. SOLDIER's small enough for him to know every one of them by name. (And with names like Sephiroth/Rhapsodos/Hewley...)

He's not a Director yet, but it's imprinted on his forehead. Maybe it is the colour of his hair. Not many blonds in this Company, cynically speaking.

R Shinra followed P Shinra to work today, probably more his idea than his father's. And his hair is very blond, and his intelligence very sharp for a boy that young. Not much more than a decade old and he has thoughts and ambitions. Does it run in the family? Or, more likely is it something in the air -- R has the look of a new age, a new kind of people. Midgar -- there's an old saying, "if you do not want to create the monster, do not turn on the electricity".

11. a city complete

Reason to celebrate: final sector reactor has gone live, out of beta at last. They built Kalm in 13 years but we built this place in 10; little wonder Science's budgeting now through the roof. They must be patting themselves on the back, and now directing their attentions away from boring structural physics to their own favoured modes of research (and knowing H&H...)

Midgar generates enough light to be seen from the other continent, I'd wager. President having field day with the speeches; the metaphors come easily when there's a beacon to be seen. Nay-sayers now silent - not that they weren't right. City's not natural. You don't come in with a design for a metropolis; designs aren't truly made for macroscopy, they're there for buildings, complexes, neighbourhoods. Puzzle pieces. Cities aren't buildings, they're amalgamations. You need human input for that: innovation, community, the endothermy of a few hundred thousand souls. Midgar, by its blueprints, is an empty shell. But they forgot this, that we were laying pipelines everywhere. Midgar goes underground over 3 continents to almost every community in over 280 major locations. Shinra sublets substantial flow from 2nd degree rural reactors out to third party developers and then they extend our network further, and all of this has to come back somewhere, doesn't it?

Midgar was a rich materia hinterland and a swamp before we came digging and laying. After a while it just becomes cheaper to come closer to the best source of energy possible. Economy attracts. Freedom attracts even harder. Shinra isn't paternal, it is materialistic - so we've got ourselves citizens of a city with no real constitution and a tyrannical capitalist corporation for a government. Everyone tremendously happy, of course. The only surprising thing is how orderly everything is. Population census - informal, naturally - comes up to maybe 0.9, 1m now. Maybe it's not surprising. Money, energy, education, job security, efficiency. No one wants to disturb those things, so everyone co-operates. Shinra doesn't have to be a nation to be a nation.

Deusericus also made Director last week. Now will call him Lazard: one Director to another. On his head be it. One of his first mail broadcasts talked about making SOLDIER a family.

Personally, I like very much living on my own, away from home.

12. fresh SOLDIERs

To give him credit, Sephiroth seems an adequately balanced -- young man. Since he is (now) a SOLDIER First Class, it is probably v. natural for him and his fellow friends to wreck total and complete destruction on the 49th's VR systems, ripping apart any piece of precision technology that their not-inconsiderable weapons can get at. Not frustrated, no, but the budgeting item will not be appearing on UD's list of necessary reconstructions.

Lazard finds this v. funny, in the way a parent or a brother might. They're all of age, of sorts. Camaraderie is a fierce thing between those with ideas like honour - concepts like that die fast in Midgar, and die ingloriously. If it were just the three of them (S, G, H) I would not be so concerned (giving room for some doubt re: Pr. H/H), but Lazard forgets things about his last name that he shouldn't forget. Deusericus? It's a cover up, but it doesn't change what he is and where he comes from. Bitterness can't be assuaged by replacement. Shinra is indelible, never mind that it's already written over most of the face of the city. Lazard is not a common man, not from a common heritage. He can try to be everything he longs to be, build the family he wishes he had, but he and his men are different people. Above the Plate and below it.

His brother certainly shares none of his desire for socialism. R Shinra (em on the Shinra) is speeding relentlessly (recklessly?) through school and sitting in on every board meeting with unnatural patience for a child. His father seems to expect it of him, though; it better buries Deusericus, and shines a better light on the family name. R fiercely interested in all things Midgar: walks into my office and Heidegger's and Scarlet's etc etc, looking young but asking questions, and because he looks young and asks questions we find ourselves obliged to answer. He asks a lot about the War, v. natural since he's grown up during it, but he doesn't just ask about facts/trivia /projected missions, he asks "what is Wutai's history" and "how many of them use Mako" etc etc, like a bloodhound.

V caught me in one of the corridors and we went out to lunch, shared news. Asked him whether R knows much about "Administrative Research", unsurprised when V said that R "watched and learned". Asked why V had his suspicions etc, V said: "He noticed Tseng." To which I said, "What, that the boy's from Wutai?" To which he gave me this look like I was stupid, and said: "No, he noticed that Tseng doesn't seem to come from Wutai, which is a lot more conspicuous."

V. good point, V. The boy thinks like you.

13. V plotting, maybe/maybe not? (ah, who isn't plotting)

Lazard & P Shinra invented the rank General yesterday; very much an Army classification, but given to SOLDIER. Heidegger probably fuming in the ranks, his thunder being stolen etc etc. He has nothing much on his side: the Army is full of young kids, most of whom want to join SOLDIER. Lazard's team v. much more "glorious", not to mention better treatment, better training, more specialisation, advanced equipment, "interesting" missions. Heidegger's Army mostly patrols the sector trains these days.

Lazard may want to take pre-emptive action, extend a peace offering of some sort. Improbably, though. Lazard's built a family in SOLDIER, and he won't break for political niceties with men like Heidegger. He doesn't need to. P Shinra now treats Sephiroth like a second son, except without the fringe benefits (i.e he does not say "please" when he calls "fetch", and unlike R Sephiroth actually listens). They have fan clubs for the generals, distributing flyers in the major shopping areas in S6, S4. The only fanmail I ever received took the form of graffiti written on walls, but I am a humble man; it suits me fine.

To go back to thoughts re: political acumen, V is doing it again. Don't know what he's doing, because V is nothing if not cloak-and-dagger (or ambush-then-materia), but he's up to something. Recruitment in his department doesn't look at all dangerous until you look at the margin: from a team of 3, 4 to a team of upwards of 10? Training for them must be personal, overseen, lacking few of the gaps that SOLDIER/the Army/Weaponry/Space/etc have (I don't speak for UD, the Universities speak for UD). Plus the frequency of missions lately, with P Shinra getting lazier and sloppier but no less ambitious... Administrative Research v. frightening. Tseng already a smoother talker than he gets credit for, even if he's got a headful of sentimentality that V has curiously not beaten out of him. (Lazard rubbing off? Next thing there'll be charity/peace/love!)

Questions, questions. V won't answer any of them (he'll tell me when/what he wants me to know, if he wants/needs me to know), but have my own theories. Heidegger can't win against a genetically modified corps, but a team of men and women in suits? But if V plans to go to war with him, the Army better watch its steps. At risk of sounding cruel, must make note that Heidegger may not even be able to see where his feet are taking him by virtue of having one too many dinners with sponsors, benefactors, the buffet table...

14. ZFair

Ran into most unlikely of recruits in hall today; had hair that made me wonder if I should be buying more gel and reading a few magazines to keep current. To be fair, ZF is exuberant and full of colour. He's not from around here, unsurprisingly. L says he'll make 2nd class soon, which he and I both found both v. funny, v. terrifying and v. much full of potential. "He's got a good heart," L said, and could not help myself by asking, "So he is under Hewley and not the other two...?" Lazard gave me Look, but his has nothing much on V's, and besides - truth is on my side. If I were a SOLDIER under either G or S I think I would defect immediately in order to keep some of either my sanity (G) or my limbs (S).

L does not look me much in the eye when we speak these days. Is it paranoia or justified cynicism that makes me wonder why he is head of SOLDIER, and why Hollander champions the experiments in spite of having lost the Directorship to Pr. H? They spend too much time talking, or I spend too much time thinking. For now Lazard seems happy winning his wars and leading his men. Every once in a while he steals T from V and everyone makes a bit of noise during lunch.

(Yes, am unfortunately v. easily amused.)

15. emergency report

We (Directors) are all v. sensible men/one woman, which means that if we do not want promotion we do not try for it (myself, V, to some extent P), or that if we desire promotion we pursue it in logical increments that can be posted to the President's table in a flurry of camouflaging paperwork (Pr. H, Heidegger, S), or that if we have other plans we play our hands close to our chest (L), etc etc etc. We are deceitful - openly deceitful - but we keep things low key. If there is a power shuffle, it is done discreetly and without fuss. We know the players and that is all that matters - make too much of a disturbance and the rest of the world begins to notice, and that kind of transparency we can all do without, whatever our ethics.

Children are cruel and do not have a sense of subtlety, and they are also very good at being single-minded and viciously intent on their goals, collateral be damned: they are the most dangerous of all, and Rufus S. very much still a child. A child with the monetary and mental capital to hire mercenaries to lash out at his own Company, his own father and his own inheritance because of what? Impatience? Frustration? Calculation? AVALANCHE is a clumsy attempt: anyone who knows V knows that he's nowhere near as crass in his methods. Leaking information to mercenaries? It is speculation on my part that R is behind all of this, but the pieces fit, and I think that if V wanted to see this Company laid low he would have done it from the inside, and done it with his own men, and done it more efficiently and with less pointless destruction.

Have to go conduct a recce, see what damage needs to be repaired. Meanwhile V has been deposed as being a "traitor" for "leaking secrets" to this mercenary group, and Tseng put in charge. Everything a mess. Heidegger silently crowing, I expect. I think it's too coincidental and obvious even for Occam's Razor. The head of Administrative Research leaking company secrets? Sounds right out of a movie script.

L is unusually silent on the matter, maybe he's sitting out and observing. His plans, whatever they are, haven't come to anything yet. Watching R Shinra's attempts at megalomania may help his own, who knows. In either case we had all better keep our eyes open and our mouths shut - or, at least, I will.

16. young men

Tseng rejected P Shinra's promotion of him to Directorship of AR - my only question to him being, are you out of your mind?

No. Something this outrageous must have been part of something sane. I must remember, whatever T's appearance and attitudes, that he is V's protege through and through, and even if it seems like he is being driven by a ridiculous amount of loyalty and a superb lack of self-preservation, there may be (is) something more. L, in his usual way, is "looking into it": I'll leave the attempts at welfare to him - I don't have the same kind of immunity that the leader of SOLDIER does. He gets more generous the older he is, an odd kind of reverse-ageing. But at least there's someone going after T.

Speaking of which, Sephiroth now being ferried from one place to another at mach speed in order to contain AVALANCHE and the fallout from the Turks being suddenly ground to a stop. Lazard in such good graces with the President that it is no wonder he sat back and did nothing. R must be furious, if I am right, but he's not showing it. Instead he seems rather smug - he would, being a full Vice President on the board, no matter that Deusericus commands a more substantial post.

P Shinra does nothing. I find it hard to believe that he doesn't have any inkling of an idea re: what is going on. Less hard to believe but def. harder to swallow is the thought that he approves of the two prodigals dogfighting with the lives of men. May the fittest survive etc etc: if R pulls this off then his succession is unquestionably sound, but if Lazard has an ace up of his sleeve I would not be surprised if his real father were to suddenly come forth...

Not my battles. I left V a few messages, mostly updates in a roundabout lingo, but I'm not looking, and anyone from UD who does will be fired in order to be spared the mayhem.

17. updates

Incredibly enough Tseng's rejection of the Directorship did not lead to his automatic incarceration. Looking back it may have been done on grounds of loyalty but there's some good reasoning behind it. If he had jumped to the post, what would the President think? No small secret how close the Turks are, not to mention T to V; and if V is a traitor then it's a small leap of logic to say the same about T, who has the added benefit of looking and being an Wutain but being blooded like a true Midgar politician. A bad combination on all fronts. He made the smarter move by doing nothing. Now he gathers the other Turks together and they sit in a brood of suits and make everyone high in the leadership wonder about the opportunity cost of just leaving them alone.

Heidegger has been put in charge of AR for now, and this may either turn out disastrous or integral. Will he use the Turks as the weapons they are, or will he make a muck of them so that his Army looks better than they currently do? (Not that the latter is hard - L still coasting, V still more politically astute than either of them combined.)

R Shinra now moving in on T, while Heidegger is preoccupied. I wonder at his persistence: is it because T was often dispatched to deal with Lazard and SOLDIER-associated missions? Or because, whether or not he's taking up the Directorship now, T will undoubtedly hold the position in the future, if he doesn't get eliminated first? Or for something else - R Shinra is unpredictable and emotional and unsentimental all at once. And he is very, very young.

Was his age when I fell in love with engineering.

18. infighting is never productive but always dramatic

Heidegger did horrendously bad job with Turks. Considering that HQ is in the middle of an infiltration from an external merc. group, all he uses an AR group for is the patrolling of various sectors? The President is apparently too preoccupied to care or intervene - again, probably waiting to see what happens. Tseng does nothing. The rest of the Turks do nothing. Their loyalty is as touching as V's sudden re-entrance to the stage: with his usual flair
for irony and good timing, he advised the President to withdraw his decision and reinstate him as Director, unless P Shinra really would like company secrets leaked.

V knows far more dangerous company secrets than R Shinra, I am wagering.

V now back as the Director, and Tseng seems to me now far more competent, self-serving and amoral than I'd originally imagined. Good for him; his training has served him well. Not too worried about what is to come from here on in: it is becoming increasingly clear that this is Rufus' attempt at, hm, teenaged rebellion? It should be expected: he grew up with all the money and power in the world, I don't think that a simple brief interlude of odd music choices/bad taste in clothes would have sapped all the venom of being young and cabin feverish out of him.

Meanwhile I wonder who is left to clean up the streets of S1-8? There are parts of buildings falling everywhere; they weren't built on the assumption that we'd take a decade to construct his city only to tear it to pieces again afterwards. At least the department is being kept occupied. No rest for the wicked; we eternally push papers and draw up new blueprints, completely felonious and threatening.

Your move now, L, I am thinking.

19. R exiled, marginally (ha!)

All calm on the Eastern front, for now. P Shinra evidently very proud of his young son's attempts at patricide: R Shinra is suffering no worse than house arrest in Junon, i.e he is attending university and being instructed to act his age. His time will come. The Turks shuttle back and forth between Midgar and the Vice President, keeping tabs. V says nothing to me about it - it's his job to say nothing to me about it - but with every passing day he looks increasingly deep set and ponderous. This could mean anything, but I hope it means something good. I asked him about T, "why him? Tseng's trained for the field -- why send him to Junon to babysit the heir?"

"Because Rufus is the heir," he told me, shuffling his files around and adjusting his tie. Long days for us both; I fixing up any number of reactor problems and he dealing with personnel changes. "And because Tseng is on the field."

I must have looked at him with some scepticism and some reservation, because V cocked an eyebrow at me and asked me if I had not enough modern scruples.

"No," I said, shaking my head at him. "But I didn't know how much the Turks indulged in prostitution." V narrowed his eyes at me, I laughed. "Do they even like each other?"

"They loathe each other," V said, leaning back. "Which is just as well - they'll get to know each other far better that way than if they liked each other's company."

"And Tseng doesn't resent the duty?"

"Tseng rarely resents anything," Veld said. "And Rufus rarely fails to resent at all."

"Are you playing matchmaker in your old age?"

Will refrain from copying V's comments in reply to that; they were vulgar, and made me laugh.

20. occurs to me that am part of a very old guard

As I was talking to Tseng the next day (subjects: ZFair, current SOLDIER movements, ramifications of the end of the War, have they changed the vending machine on 33?), something dawned on me that I should have seen before. Maybe I'm too used to being discreet, or too used to seeing everything in Shinra happen with a bang and a splash, because I must have been blind not to have seen it earlier. Bid T farewell, went straight back upstairs and looked for V, very certain about things now.

V in his office. "What is it?"

"How much of a Turk's personal life is personal?" I asked, before paraphrasing (V probably would find company policy to avoid answering the first question): "You know about Tseng and Lazard?"

No reaction from him, the wily old son of a bitch. He's a bastard, through and through. He said: "What's there to know, Tuesti?"

'It's not as though there isn't enough antagonism between him and Rufus,' I pointed out.

'Between whom?' he said, mildly, 'Rufus and Tseng or Rufus and Lazard, or Lazard and Tseng?'

'Quaint,' I told him, settling into a chair.

'The devil is in the details,' he replied.

'Really?' I said. 'Always thought that the devil's the man right in front of me.' He lifted one shoulder, shrugged it back down. I went on. 'Lazard always tries for personal loyalties. He looks after his men, and respects the ones who aren't his.' V made a "go on" gesture. 'You're being incredibly low,' I told him, 'by sending Tseng straight to Rufus when Lazard actually cares.'

'I'm sure the Director cares very much,' V said. 'About his position as well as his relationship with others in this company.'

'Does the bloodline matter that much that you're setting Tseng up in the other direction?' I asked, sharply.

'You like Deusericus,' V said directly, essentially accusing me of a crime.

'I'm getting soft,' I replied. 'And so are you: you like Tseng. But Rufus will twist him around his fingers like a tool; the boy's not even 18 and he's already gone and --.'

'Rufus is more likely to survive,' V cut in, full of his usual tact. 'And even if he doesn't, it's a lesson worth learning.'

I raised my eyebrows. 'How it's unwise to get between brothers?', and V replied, 'How it's unwise to get between Shinra, or any family at all.'

'You know, you're a hard task master,' I said, etc etc. At last: 'The city's old now. Midgar's coming of age.'

'Reeve,' V said agreeably, leaning forward in his seat and v. serious. 'We've done more than two decades in this Company. Nothing is personal and everything is political, or vice-versa. Where I send Tseng, or what Lazard's trying to get at with Tseng -- small factors, Tuesti,' he said, sounding tired. 'If Lazard wants to compete with Rufus - which he has been -'

'For many years now,' I agreed softly.

' - then this is just one more thing.'

'One more thing,' I repeated.

V nodded. 'You know,' he said, v. languorous now, all the tension gone out of us old men. 'Tseng stays away from the other Turks on purpose. It adds up, to some degree.'

Too tired to twist words, I waved a hand at him. 'Stop projecting, old man.'

He quirked a smile, deprecating. 'All right. I'd rather him stay away from the other Turks, the SOLDIERs, the men.'

'Because they're just men?' I asked, staring up at the ceiling. 'No pedigree?' I closed my eyes. 'Oh, no, no. You are going soft.' V2, I always forget V2, it's been years since then. V lost his home and his wife and his daughter and his partner. Family! What's the point? Shinra'll take it all from you, before and after.

'Yes,' he said, knowing I got the point.

'Well,' I admitted. 'There's a reason why I'm a bachelor.'

'Just that?'

'More than one reason,' I said, with too much of a sigh. 'We built this damn city.' Outside the panelled windows of his office, Midgar growled in the darkness. Lights everywhere. Reactors running, people seething, a world away from empty tar streets and an open night sky.

'Pass it on,' V advised. 'Let it go.'

We poured drinks, and toasted: to Shinra's men, Shinra's wars, and (ha!) bringing brighter futures.

APPENDIX:

1. V = Veld, V2 = Vincent Valentine, H&H = Hojo and Hollander
2. The AVALANCHE in this fic is the first AVALANCHE mercenary group, hired by Rufus in Before Crisis to sabotage his father's company. Rufus set it up so that it seemed like a Board member was leaking AVALANCHE information, framed Veld and got him fired when all along it was his crazy little head churning about.

Today -

2009-05-16T13:51:26Z

Today I really, really, really loved my country, heart and soul.

\o\ Just in case I get thrown into a cell or something

2009-05-16T03:19:03Z

Heading down to a "political" "protest" in hope of raising awareness of gay ~~rights~~ existence later today. Um, if anyone knows my country, let's just say that even though there are going to be like a few thousand of us (OR MAYBE ESPECIALLY BECAUSE THERE'S GOING TO BE A FEW THOUSAND OF US), I'm going to be wearing comfortable shoes and positioning myself in a way that makes running like mad an acceptable mode of retreat should we come to be crushed by --

Okay, okay, maybe not. Context time! Pink Dot is a Singaporean effort to just get together all the LGBT and LGBT-supportive people in this country, put them in a square, and take a photo. No politics, no protest, no action, just reaction: we love each other, and we just want to be acknowledge as human.

Though, um, part of our constitution alleges that groups of MORE THAN ONE that gather for any (pseudo)political purpose must first register their purpose with the government before gathering, otherwise that gathering OF ONE OR MORE PEOPLE is considered illegal, so PUT ON YOUR BOOTS, BABIES.

So, in celebration, memetime!

Ask me anything. 8D About where I'm from, about what I like IRL or in fandom; ask me about what I write, or just any silly thing that crosses your mind. \o\ The unknown and fear of it is what drives so much of the pain that happens in our everyday lives: so go on. Ask a question. 8D