[hughes] fanfiction post; bokurano (one-sentence theme set)
Author: digi_dragon
Title: across the stars and universes II
Fandom: Bokurano
Pairing: Waku/Machi
Rating: Ranging from G to PG-13 (implied and explicit violence, death, implied and mild sensuality)
Disclaimer: I do not own Bokurano.
Summary: Life goes on from Earth to Earth, some outcomes horrible, and some...some outcomes wonderful...
Notes: Again, this is based off the Bokurano roleplay setting I am in. The main characters live many lives and can and often do remember at least some parts of past ones. The Creation is once again mentioned, the process in which, after the destruction of an Earth, the next one, two, or several are made from its remains. It is between life and death, and that's all that needs to be understood.
#01 - Walking
His eyes linger for a moment too long; he tells himself he’s a dirty person and he’s going to hell, but he still doesn’t look away (even though there’s nothing to stare at).
#02 - Waltz
At the end of Creation, she stands among the stars, just beyond Zearth, and with a sudden impulse she turns and grabs his hand, pulling him out there with her and breathing out more of the cosmos with her question, “wanna dance?” and the world sparkles in her eyes.
#03 - Wishes
When she blows out the candles, her eyes are closed, so she doesn’t see that there’s one left lit; because he knows for sure what her wish is (one more birthday, just one more birthday), his hand shoots forward and snuffs it out, because even silly superstitions mean something sometimes.
#04 - Wonder
It isn’t obsession; that’s what he tells himself as he makes a mental note to watch her closely over the next few weeks, because how can one girl be just that intriguing and also that dangerous?
#05 - Worry
“I told you, I’m fine so just stop looking at me like-- like th--” But she breaks down before she can finish her latest lie.
#06 - Whimsy
They’ve tried planning things out before, but it always just falls apart, so usually the average night out or day in or afternoon between just starts and ends with so what next?
#07 - Waste/Wasteland
As they stand in front of it -- the little house by the river, boarded up and abandoned -- he knows she’s lost in her head, overlaying this Earth with that one and getting lost in birthdays and buried toys, lost childhood and stolen innocence, death and destruction, and in the end, he knows a simple hand on her shoulder or hug won’t be enough (can never be enough).
#08 - Whiskey and rum
They can’t help but celebrate it, because opportunities like this are so rare, so when they graduate high school, they steal some of Shirou’s liquor and by the end of the night there’s empty bottles strewn around the kitchen and way too many toasts, and she’s such a lightweight that she’s out before midnight but that’s okay because the next morning he’ll be just as exhausted and they can have hangovers together.
#09 - War
As days stretch into months, he starts to doubt that he can keep his promise; there’s no way he’ll be coming back alive.
#10 - Weddings
She’s had about way-too-many lifetimes to plan her perfect wedding, so naturally the day it finally happens, the day she finally can experience it, nothing goes right, from missing rings to late caterers to Anko calling to say she and half the others won’t be there for another hour to Shirou getting drunk and almost stabbing her fiancée in a relapse-fit of “she’s my baby sister” and in the end, they’re sitting next to each other, breaking ten thousand wedding day rules, watching their parents try to put out the fire that’s burning down the perfect church; a puff of smoke escapes his mouth (god, she made him promise, her wedding day too--) and when he says, “fuck, let’s just elope,” she doesn’t even care that he tastes like tobacco, because that’s the best suggestion she’s ever heard.
#11 - Birthday
“Happy fourteenth,” he whispers into her hair, and she can’t stop smiling through her tears.
#12 - Blessing
When she finds out she’s pregnant, even though it’s halfway through graduate school and they only just got married, she cries -- a sob mixed with a laugh mixed with a disbelief so beautiful and so wonderful that it stops her cold -- and they know whatever happens they’ll get through it together.
#13 - Bias
The sixteen of them have a great discussion on if cats or dogs are better, and Tsubasa candidly declares that Machi doesn’t get a vote, because she has a horribly obvious bias.
#14 - Burning
That Earth stays with her for a long time after, and she doesn’t tell anyone that she sometimes still wakes up screaming for fear that her right hand has melted off and the room is collapsing around her, but one night when she falls asleep against him, the nightmares return and she wakes up not thrashing but confined in his arms; it’s only after she finishes crying her raw tears that he asks why, after all this time, she keeps even this to herself.
#15 - Breathing
Afterward, when it stops being awkward and starts being nice, she lays on top of him and he drifts off eventually, his slow breaths moving her entire body up and down and for that moment, she can forget how many of her friends have died.
#16 - Breaking
What starts as bad luck turns into tragedy when her family moves away from Shinagawa when she’s young but something triggers the memories, and the nightmares are so intense that when she looks into the mirror she sees a thousand scars and a hundred burns and no right arm and pain and pain and pain-- and by the time he finally finds her, years later, only a shell of the girl she once was remains.
#17 - Belief
A constant throughout all realities is her strong persuasion towards reincarnation and his intense hope that she’s right.
#18 - Balloon
As they pass by a balloon kiosk, the man running it hands Waku one of the most colorful ones; when he says it’s for his “little sister,” Machi gets so enraged that she blacks out and the next things he knows, her fists are full of Waku’s color and her tongue is halfway down his throat.
#19 - Balcony
After Moji serenades Chizu (Chizuru) with Romeo and Juliet one day, Waku is visibly annoyed, and when she finally pokes him so hard he’s sure she’s left a bruise, he cryptically responds, “stupid dead playwrights always use three syllable names,” and goes back to brooding.
#20 - Bane
“This thing’s gonna kill us,” Waku says for the thousandth time, and even though he can see the solemn look in her eyes, he can scarcely believe life can be that fragile.
#21 - Quiet
“Why is it,” she asks to break the silence, curled up against his side on the roof of his house, the moon illuminating her skin, “that every time we gather at your house, it’s always us left awake?”
#22 - Quirks
It was decided -- by the others, not them -- a long time ago that their snipes and jabs at each other aren’t actually genuine but in fact foreplay.
#23 - Question
“Mommy, how’d you and Daddy meet?” asks a Fumie one day, her little legs dangling and kicking back and forth, and Yoko bites back her question-response (“Which time?”) to ruffle her youngest daughter’s hair.
#24 - Quarrel
More often than not, their fights are intermixed with killer right hooks, hair ruffles, sudden lifts from the ground, biting remarks, sudden yells, more right hooks, and then, between all of it, a few tender kisses and sweet comments...before they start all over again.
#25 - Quitting (Prequel to Wedding)
She’s given up telling him that they’ll kill him one day, so when he shows up with a nicotine patch the day before her last class of the year, she knows something’s up; when he pulls out the ring, it’s a bit easier to put everything together.
#26 - Jump
It’s not like he was cautious or anything before, but being around her makes him almost...impulsive -- makes him ready to take the leap.
#27 - Jester
“Dork,” she says between her giggles, and he mentally counts this -- making her laugh -- as a victory.
#28 - Jousting
Out of the blue, Ushiro comments that their banter and arguments remind him of a scene from an old, medieval anime, and none of them can shake the image.
#29 - Jewel
Even though he could come up with some really simple compliment about her eyes, like how they sparkle like the ocean or look like some kind of gem, he likes to go the extra mile and figure out a really creative way to praise her; it’s not his fault that they often tend to be a little bit...macabre.
#30 - Just
Sometimes wondering what thoughts belong to her and what thoughts are planted there by Fakir pushes her to such a brink of insanity that she holds on to the knowledge that if nothing else, he can’t force her in and out of love; that alone is hers.
#31 - Smirk
“One day your lips will not go back to normal and I won’t do a single thing to-- ...I’m sorry, what were we talking about again?”
#32 - Sorrow
It only takes simple thoughts or sights sometimes -- like reminders that there won’t be a next birthday or overheard conversations between happy couples about the future -- to send that crippling but numbing pain through his whole body.
#33 - Stupidity
She’s got a few favorite words when it comes to him, and none of them are usually flattering -- dork, moron, idiot -- but considering the varying degrees of endearment in which she says them, they all start sound like “I love you” after awhile.
#34 - Serenade
He’s lost track of how many sets of memories he has when he finally -- finally -- convinces her to sing for him; all he has to do is threaten to serenade her with sweet, sweet loving and she cracks pretty easily.
#35 - Sarcasm
So he didn’t mean to lose his virginity when he woke up that morning, but at one point over the years maybe his sardonic comments and his serious ones had gotten so intermixed that she couldn’t tell he was joking, and once it was out there you couldn’t simply take it back (so here they were).
#36 - Sordid
It’s a trip to Kyoto this time, and when Shirou and Mayako sneak off to presumably have sex in the laundry room, they both gag and roll their eyes, and declare that that will never be them, not in a million years, except there’s a little lingering glance and, well, a million years (in moronspeak) actually translates to about ten.
#37 - Soliloquy (sequel to Balcony)
When he opened his window that night, he didn’t expect to see her in a stupid gay beret (probably from Moji) and hear her reciting Shakespeare, replacing the Juliet's with Takashi's and prancing about with a ridiculous grin on her face (and he’d be damned if he didn’t enjoy every single minute).
#38 - Sojourn
They were her kids; it was her family she saw, in that future, in that good Earth, and everyone was alive, everything was good, so even if she was going to die in only a few short weeks, she would hold on to that.
#39 - Share
“Favorite kitchen utensil,” she presses in the early hours of the morning, and he laughs because they’ve really already talked about everything else, haven’t they?
#40 - Solitary
She vows before she meets the people who would become her best friends that she will not make any connections, that she will cut herself off to stop hurting, but then their eyes meet and all bets are off.
#41 - Nowhere
There’s a whole entire World of Thought before him, but no matter how much he calls and cries, he can’t find her, because he is alive and she is dead.
#42 - Neutral
When he compartmentalizes his emotions, gets rid of them, he knows rationally that she would hate him for it, for abandoning their friends and living like a robot for his last months (or rather intending to, because Kana fixes all of that--); but he can’t even feel torn up over the thought of her hating him, because he can’t feel anymore.
#43 - Nuance
He admits he zones out when she talks sometimes; he’s too busy noticing the way her eyes sparkle or the little curl of her lips when she has an idea or even how her freckles dot her face to fully listen to what she’s saying, so much so that he nods along when she tells him something about a game with superheroes or aliens or robots needing beta testers and how all of them should play together, how it would be fun.
#44 - Near
Later, he defends himself to Maria, stating with utmost certainty that he only walks her to school each morning because she lives close and it’s on the way and there is no other reason whatsoever so she can just shut up and stop teasing him.
#45 - Natural
One of them grabbed the other’s hand at one, but they don’t even realize it until they’ve arrived at school.
#46 - Horizon
He’s sure the skyline is as beautiful as everyone later tells him it is, he was just, at the time, a little bit preoccupied with the promise of making out on top of Chutenro Tower.
#47 - Valiant
Even though he couldn’t beat the boy who lurks in her subconscious and haunts her thoughts, Machi later tells him how brave he was to try and save her.
#48 - Virtuous
“So,” she says, starting toward him and slipping out of her white dress as she does, “it’s gonna be easier to get you into my pants now that you can’t fall back on that old ‘we aren’t even married’ excuse, right?”
#49 - Victory
It never gets any easier because she’s dead again or why couldn’t I have gone first? and even though there’s another life, the one left over still has a corpse to cradle when it’s all over.
#50 - Defeat
In one lifetime, she never meets him, never leaves that one Earth, grows up and date around, always dumping the boys that court her, drifting from group to group to group, stating that she’s just a loner at heart, dies at a ripe old age (and she knows in the In-Between that that is the worst possible reality she’s ever experienced).
Prompt related notes: Some of these sentences are more interconnected and interrelated than ones in the past prompt, and some are even connected to ones in that. Prompt #10 and #25 are having a one-shot expanded around them. Some prompts reference a boy in Machi's mind, and while this gets complicated, it has to do with the subconscious and a new aspect called the Otherworld, which is essentially the afterlife, but if one partakes in basically astral projection, he or she can reach it and somehow delve into one's own mind. To understand prompts #30 and #47, the only thing that needs to known of this is that the main characters made a journey to there and had to face their own subconscious to try and end the Game. In Machi's mind was a boy in knight's armor who held an extreme grudge against her for something she did on the very first Earth. This boy is named Fakir, and yes, he's from Princess Tutu. AUs. Wonderful things. He influences her self-loathing thoughts at times and is the reason why on many Earths her life is designed to be horrible.