BLAST IT WITH FIC (Pt. II)
KHR!fic rarrararara~ including Aqi's Xmas presents that I promised her (xPPPPP)
Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
vi. Title: In a collapsing hall of mirrors
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing: 69Fran
Warnings: Blood, weirdness.
Word Count: 177
Summary: Seduction and death. Hazards or fringe benefits?
It happened too fast for words, actions in quick succession between light and darkness, smears and drops of blood.
Fran always found it fascinating, how his master’s real illusion could bleed; like the real thing, the body half dead, floating vengefully in suspended animation. Why waste your time, creating needless illusions? Perhaps his master is just thorough like that. Perhaps. Perhaps, it’s not his master’s blood at all.
The world around them spins in a tumult of thunder and stars, dark blue flames begin to lick crooked paths through the flowers.
Fran stumbles toward Mukuro, a plea already formed and hanging from his lips; earnest, this time, without any semblance of courtesy or sarcasm, Fran has no room for them, only pain. He makes it halfway before his knees buckle.
“Ku fu fu. Perhaps, little one, you are learning.”
He loses everything in a swirl of flame and flower petals (lotus flowers), a crush of skin, everything burning red and blue around him, like the world and what’s going to happen when it ends, or merely changes.
vii. Title: She Sings In The Morning
Characters/Pairing: Fran, 69, 96, implied 6996 and 69Fran
Warnings: Spoilers for Ch. Whatever, and the passages alternate from Fran’s POV to Mukuro’s POV. ‘She’, however, is always Chrome.
Rating: K+
Word Count: 781
Summary: A butterfly, an angel, a goddess, a woman. Such a disappointment.
Hours pass in great sweeps, in heavy, invisible strokes by those that sow their winds and reap their quiet hurricanes. She passes by them like a butterfly caught in this invisible tide, her pale wings wide fans of alarm. She is his counterpart, his predecessor. In time he will come to revile her, in the casual way he regards all his enemies, a few words of sparkling contempt veiled in gossamer green layers of sarcasm.
She is no high-heeled femme fatale, crackling in red and boldly inked, an apparition of the pulp novel like some aspiring M.M. Chrome has no wiles with which to ensnare, only delicacy, the allure of her white arms angled sharply over rice paper or a teakettle, the soft waves of her dark hair swept up in careless elegance, errant strands clinging to her cheek, the side of her neck. Simple.
She’s grown out of the chaste, sun-striped days of her youth, her hips bound to a fuller skirt, longer, more demure. Her inept quietude has lapsed into careful, measured silence; when she speaks, her even voice laps at his ears like sea foam settling gently over his toes. Not a day goes by where he does not marvel at her, drinking in her silences, her fluted wrists and long hair, moved by the power that constantly ebbs from her body as regularly as the circumlocution of blood in her veins, power she has honed and strengthened beyond measure in the ten years since his absence. He wonders, thrilled, on edge, almost on his guard, even as she says nothing to him, continues eating her dinner as if he weren’t even there, the two silver skulls on her patch winking at him churlishly from across the table.
In actuality, he is jealous of her. She comes and goes as she pleases, or she only goes when he tells her to; she has the privilege of doing both with equal serenity and no complaint. He is still not used to it, has already discounted the orders of his master as unnecessary, lashes with his barbed tongue and frowns deeply at the bumps and bruises on his head afterwards. And yet she bows to his master, her throat open and exposed, her eyes bright with clarity, with understanding. In their companionship is a trust that he will never know, can only guess, can never replicate, only follow. The dark blue pool threatens to drown them both, its coldness cruel, and its depth incalculable. Yet she continues to wade, ten years of it, the water closed over her head long ago. And he stands in the green of the shallows with waves crashing against his knees, shivers and stands alone.
Eventually he comes to terms with her, ceases to treat her like a treasure or a child. They are equals and yet nothing like equals, neither one of them interchangeable like they have been for so many years. This realm, he has decided, is no longer kind to him. Too long he has been in stasis, in a body not his own. In the other realms, he has no cause to worry about forms. He can be a leaf in the wind, a mirror-blue pool, a curl of burning mist. There are others like him, smoke and vapor, shadow and flickering light, most of them malcontents, most of them embittered, with stolen faces and cruel smiles. Some of them tell tales of other Paths, other worlds to conquer, other people to corrupt. Perhaps the time has come for him to walk again.
He has grown tired of this world, of the disappointments of its men and women. Its people were too fragile. Eventually they ceased to amuse him. This, at least, was what he told himself.
In the end, they came to be something almost like friends. He would pass her in the hallways, in her mob boss suit, in her clingy sundresses, in her billowing skirts. She towered above him, she brushed right by him. He called her back, once, certain she could see the sweat drying on his bare shoulders, could smell the dark blue scent on him.
He said something, and crunched her bones between his teeth.
She half turned, so he could just see her profile, her eyepatch, the silver embroidered stars winking at him from beneath the dark rake of her hair, and he could have sworn she saw her lips twitch in the faintest giveaway of a lovely, careworn smile, before she turned away from him, and walked smoothly to an even beat that was so unmistakably her own.
viii. Title: The Faltering
Characters/Pairing: 699669
Warnings: None
Rating: K+
Word Count: 237
Summary: Conjugal visits underwater.
/drown in me/
The powerful flood of his ambition overtakes them like waves of dark blue ocean water, an overwhelming crush. Unremitting. She is an antique birdcage, a string of pearls, an old wineglass. She twists and turns and bends beneath his power, a useless body, a perfect mind.
In the deepest parts of her she tries to remember what it was like to live before him. Until she remembers that she didn’t.
Yamamoto may have been the first guardian to try his hand at suicide, but Nagi did it far better.
In the unconscious world, a realm of sleeping power in silver and black like the multitudinous facets of faraway stars, she casts her real illusions like a volley of burning arrows. They flicker and skip between the dark places, hold fast to whatever they find. And they always find him, drawn into him like butterflies to candle flames, they find, in perfect liquid stasis, his chrysalis of pain. She wraps her arms around his drowned man’s neck and whispers into his ear, promises of the world she will give to him.
And only to him.
In the end, though, her embrace is only light reflecting through the water, her words only a stream of bubbles floating cautiously upwards, like a string of pearls caught in awkward, uncontrollable flux.
/and I’ll make you mine forever/
ix. Title: A threepenny opera
Rating: K+
Characters/Pairing: Belphegor
Warnings: None
Word Count: 189
Summary: It’s raining. Bel contemplates piracy, for a moment.
The heavens, in a fit of envy, have conspired against him. On the one hand, he feels unusually justified in his egotism: he always knew the gods were jealous, and here is the proof. On the other hand, well. Let’s just say it’s not his first choice.
In fact, he despises the weather. There is no cacophonous aria of thunder while the wind screams around the castle corners like his dead mother; the lightning refuses to dance for his enjoyment. There is only rain, pouring down in endless sheathes, turning the grounds into a grumpy, burbling swamp.
The village below is deserted, the valley a perfect bowl of gray rainwater. Through the pine he can see rooftops rendered into a curious archipelago. Even the churchyard is overtaken; he is the first and only witness to the coffins floating freely in the waterlogged streets, like happy little boats. The sight alone is enough to coax a crooked smile from the abandoned despot. He imagines commandeering one, a corsair prince piloting his macabre ship, in charge of an entire flotilla of flat black barges, captain of a crew of dead men.
x. Title: Crowned
Characters/Pairing: Belphegor, Belphegor’s mother
Warnings: None
Rating: K+
Word Count: 231
Summary: Romulus and Remus
She was a wise woman, or she was simply insane, like most mothers often are. She was a mother of kings, and wolves always did breed the best royalty, in all the worlds many fables and reflections.
When he tries to remember his mother’s face, he finds that he can no longer picture it. She comes to him in a blue of fantastic synesthesia: the smell of her gold hair, the sound of her smile (so like a scream). She was hair and silk and diamonds, a Queen and an Empress, or a madwoman with blood on her lips and the sharpest of teeth.
(In time he begins to wonder if she ever had a face at all.)
She was the one who taught them to grow their hair long in the front, like a veil in front of their eyes. Never let them see you face, she would whisper, never let them look you in the eye.
She never said why, but Belphegor would always try to guess. Because no one else was equal to them. Because if nobody sees your eyes, ever, eventually they will stop believing you have any. Because that way, no one will ever know you-you shall be invincible, indestructible, unable to be harmed. They will only fear you.
And then you will be King.
The son of the wolf smiles, or simply bares his fangs.
Aqi's Christmas Presents
TT____TT....ughhhh so late....I also have a TYL!Basil doodle to scan for you, which I drew on New Year's because I felt so bad >///<
xi. Title: Boys That Bide Their Time
Rating: K+
Characters/Pairing: 69Fran
Warnings: Spoilers for Ch. Whatever where you find out Fran freed Mukuro from the Vindice prison
Word Count: 283
Summary: A boys’ game, post-coitus. An offer is refused.
A/N: OMG AQI I’M SO SORRY. I’M SORRY THIS IS LATE AND I’M SORRY IT SUCKS AND LAKFJALDFJA BLAH
Fran stretches, writhes beneath the sheets, aching down to his very bones. He is almost wanton, like this, roused to conduct the most childish games: he casts the kinds of illusions little boys’ dream about, speckled lizards that skitter back and forth along the walls, dragonflies shooting like arrows from the palms of his hands.
Mukuro turns from the mirror (he casts no reflection, no matter how real his illusion), looks critically at the sunlight catching their iridescent wings. He lets one get closer. “Not bad,” Master says loftily. He looks at Fran when he snatches it, catlike, out of the air, crushing it into nothing, into an errant twist of blue. “But dragonflies aren’t people, little one.”
Fairy tale notions are for pretty girls, and prison breakouts are the stuff of sensationalist newspapers. Plus, there’s mafia politics to consider: if the Independent Assassin Squad emancipated the man lawfully judged as the destroyer of two Cosa Nostra famiglias with a well-known vendetta against the Vongola, there’s the possibility it might just be misconstrued.
“I could do it, master. I could free you.”
It would be a proper final exam for him, Mukuro contemplates, before banishing the thought. His student is not ready; he does not have half of Chrome’s experience in battle, and nothing of her devotion. His eye flashes -ni-and a large, surly frog appears at the foot of the bed, plucking dragonflies from midflight with its flashing tongue, croaking balefully.
Fran yelps, dislodging it with a swift kick; the frog gives a great pathetic flop, croaks once in farewell and makes its way clumsily out the door.
Mukuro chuckles malevolently, Fran blushes, scowling, feeling more than slightly peeved.
xii. Title: Pretending To Be
Rating: K+
Characters/Pairing: Fran, Mukuro, and Chrome
Warnings: None
Word Count: 266
Summary: An exercise in domesticity. Fran sulks.
A/N: Also dedicated to Aqi since the first one was so awful, and this one is kind of adorable.
“Is Hell really such a bad place, Master?”
Mukuro doesn’t even bother looking at him, just pauses in the busy peeling of his breakfast-a single orange, his digestive system hasn’t completely recovered-and smacks his apprentice on the back of the head with his free hand. Fran’s hat acts as a shock absorber, he is almost grateful for it.
“Ow.”
“Don’t let Fran cry at the breakfast table, Mukuro-sama,” Chrome says calmly, spreading jam neatly over the top half of her muffin. “He’ll get salt in the butter dish.”
“I wasn’t going to cry,” Fran says, slightly miffed. “It’s not even noon yet.”
“Good,” says his Master indifferently, “Now eat your breakfast.”
Fran contemplates the stack of toast on the plate in front of him, morose.
“It’s whole wheat,” Chrome tells him helpfully. “It’s good for you.” She smiles at him, sweet as maple syrup.
Fran glares frostily at his Vongola counterpart. It’s no secret that they detest each other: Chrome is just better at disguising her hatred with very good manners.
“It’s raisin bread,” Fran complains. “I don’t like raisin bread.”
Mukuro pops an orange slice into his mouth.
“Ow.”
“You’ll eat it and like it, little one.” He glances at his apprentice with the side of his spooky red eye. “Or maybe you’ll get to see for yourself, whether Hell is really such a terrible place.”
As discreetly as possible, Chrome flicks an orange pip at him from across the table. It bounces off of Fran’s nose and lands in his glass of milk.
PHEW. OKAY. SO. THERE YOU HAVE IT. OY.
In case you missed it: loveheartsalone is my new ~*personal journal so you can add me there if you wantttt
Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
vi. Title: In a collapsing hall of mirrors
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing: 69Fran
Warnings: Blood, weirdness.
Word Count: 177
Summary: Seduction and death. Hazards or fringe benefits?
It happened too fast for words, actions in quick succession between light and darkness, smears and drops of blood.
Fran always found it fascinating, how his master’s real illusion could bleed; like the real thing, the body half dead, floating vengefully in suspended animation. Why waste your time, creating needless illusions? Perhaps his master is just thorough like that. Perhaps. Perhaps, it’s not his master’s blood at all.
The world around them spins in a tumult of thunder and stars, dark blue flames begin to lick crooked paths through the flowers.
Fran stumbles toward Mukuro, a plea already formed and hanging from his lips; earnest, this time, without any semblance of courtesy or sarcasm, Fran has no room for them, only pain. He makes it halfway before his knees buckle.
“Ku fu fu. Perhaps, little one, you are learning.”
He loses everything in a swirl of flame and flower petals (lotus flowers), a crush of skin, everything burning red and blue around him, like the world and what’s going to happen when it ends, or merely changes.
vii. Title: She Sings In The Morning
Characters/Pairing: Fran, 69, 96, implied 6996 and 69Fran
Warnings: Spoilers for Ch. Whatever, and the passages alternate from Fran’s POV to Mukuro’s POV. ‘She’, however, is always Chrome.
Rating: K+
Word Count: 781
Summary: A butterfly, an angel, a goddess, a woman. Such a disappointment.
Hours pass in great sweeps, in heavy, invisible strokes by those that sow their winds and reap their quiet hurricanes. She passes by them like a butterfly caught in this invisible tide, her pale wings wide fans of alarm. She is his counterpart, his predecessor. In time he will come to revile her, in the casual way he regards all his enemies, a few words of sparkling contempt veiled in gossamer green layers of sarcasm.
She is no high-heeled femme fatale, crackling in red and boldly inked, an apparition of the pulp novel like some aspiring M.M. Chrome has no wiles with which to ensnare, only delicacy, the allure of her white arms angled sharply over rice paper or a teakettle, the soft waves of her dark hair swept up in careless elegance, errant strands clinging to her cheek, the side of her neck. Simple.
She’s grown out of the chaste, sun-striped days of her youth, her hips bound to a fuller skirt, longer, more demure. Her inept quietude has lapsed into careful, measured silence; when she speaks, her even voice laps at his ears like sea foam settling gently over his toes. Not a day goes by where he does not marvel at her, drinking in her silences, her fluted wrists and long hair, moved by the power that constantly ebbs from her body as regularly as the circumlocution of blood in her veins, power she has honed and strengthened beyond measure in the ten years since his absence. He wonders, thrilled, on edge, almost on his guard, even as she says nothing to him, continues eating her dinner as if he weren’t even there, the two silver skulls on her patch winking at him churlishly from across the table.
In actuality, he is jealous of her. She comes and goes as she pleases, or she only goes when he tells her to; she has the privilege of doing both with equal serenity and no complaint. He is still not used to it, has already discounted the orders of his master as unnecessary, lashes with his barbed tongue and frowns deeply at the bumps and bruises on his head afterwards. And yet she bows to his master, her throat open and exposed, her eyes bright with clarity, with understanding. In their companionship is a trust that he will never know, can only guess, can never replicate, only follow. The dark blue pool threatens to drown them both, its coldness cruel, and its depth incalculable. Yet she continues to wade, ten years of it, the water closed over her head long ago. And he stands in the green of the shallows with waves crashing against his knees, shivers and stands alone.
Eventually he comes to terms with her, ceases to treat her like a treasure or a child. They are equals and yet nothing like equals, neither one of them interchangeable like they have been for so many years. This realm, he has decided, is no longer kind to him. Too long he has been in stasis, in a body not his own. In the other realms, he has no cause to worry about forms. He can be a leaf in the wind, a mirror-blue pool, a curl of burning mist. There are others like him, smoke and vapor, shadow and flickering light, most of them malcontents, most of them embittered, with stolen faces and cruel smiles. Some of them tell tales of other Paths, other worlds to conquer, other people to corrupt. Perhaps the time has come for him to walk again.
He has grown tired of this world, of the disappointments of its men and women. Its people were too fragile. Eventually they ceased to amuse him. This, at least, was what he told himself.
In the end, they came to be something almost like friends. He would pass her in the hallways, in her mob boss suit, in her clingy sundresses, in her billowing skirts. She towered above him, she brushed right by him. He called her back, once, certain she could see the sweat drying on his bare shoulders, could smell the dark blue scent on him.
He said something, and crunched her bones between his teeth.
She half turned, so he could just see her profile, her eyepatch, the silver embroidered stars winking at him from beneath the dark rake of her hair, and he could have sworn she saw her lips twitch in the faintest giveaway of a lovely, careworn smile, before she turned away from him, and walked smoothly to an even beat that was so unmistakably her own.
viii. Title: The Faltering
Characters/Pairing: 699669
Warnings: None
Rating: K+
Word Count: 237
Summary: Conjugal visits underwater.
/drown in me/
The powerful flood of his ambition overtakes them like waves of dark blue ocean water, an overwhelming crush. Unremitting. She is an antique birdcage, a string of pearls, an old wineglass. She twists and turns and bends beneath his power, a useless body, a perfect mind.
In the deepest parts of her she tries to remember what it was like to live before him. Until she remembers that she didn’t.
Yamamoto may have been the first guardian to try his hand at suicide, but Nagi did it far better.
In the unconscious world, a realm of sleeping power in silver and black like the multitudinous facets of faraway stars, she casts her real illusions like a volley of burning arrows. They flicker and skip between the dark places, hold fast to whatever they find. And they always find him, drawn into him like butterflies to candle flames, they find, in perfect liquid stasis, his chrysalis of pain. She wraps her arms around his drowned man’s neck and whispers into his ear, promises of the world she will give to him.
And only to him.
In the end, though, her embrace is only light reflecting through the water, her words only a stream of bubbles floating cautiously upwards, like a string of pearls caught in awkward, uncontrollable flux.
/and I’ll make you mine forever/
ix. Title: A threepenny opera
Rating: K+
Characters/Pairing: Belphegor
Warnings: None
Word Count: 189
Summary: It’s raining. Bel contemplates piracy, for a moment.
The heavens, in a fit of envy, have conspired against him. On the one hand, he feels unusually justified in his egotism: he always knew the gods were jealous, and here is the proof. On the other hand, well. Let’s just say it’s not his first choice.
In fact, he despises the weather. There is no cacophonous aria of thunder while the wind screams around the castle corners like his dead mother; the lightning refuses to dance for his enjoyment. There is only rain, pouring down in endless sheathes, turning the grounds into a grumpy, burbling swamp.
The village below is deserted, the valley a perfect bowl of gray rainwater. Through the pine he can see rooftops rendered into a curious archipelago. Even the churchyard is overtaken; he is the first and only witness to the coffins floating freely in the waterlogged streets, like happy little boats. The sight alone is enough to coax a crooked smile from the abandoned despot. He imagines commandeering one, a corsair prince piloting his macabre ship, in charge of an entire flotilla of flat black barges, captain of a crew of dead men.
x. Title: Crowned
Characters/Pairing: Belphegor, Belphegor’s mother
Warnings: None
Rating: K+
Word Count: 231
Summary: Romulus and Remus
She was a wise woman, or she was simply insane, like most mothers often are. She was a mother of kings, and wolves always did breed the best royalty, in all the worlds many fables and reflections.
When he tries to remember his mother’s face, he finds that he can no longer picture it. She comes to him in a blue of fantastic synesthesia: the smell of her gold hair, the sound of her smile (so like a scream). She was hair and silk and diamonds, a Queen and an Empress, or a madwoman with blood on her lips and the sharpest of teeth.
(In time he begins to wonder if she ever had a face at all.)
She was the one who taught them to grow their hair long in the front, like a veil in front of their eyes. Never let them see you face, she would whisper, never let them look you in the eye.
She never said why, but Belphegor would always try to guess. Because no one else was equal to them. Because if nobody sees your eyes, ever, eventually they will stop believing you have any. Because that way, no one will ever know you-you shall be invincible, indestructible, unable to be harmed. They will only fear you.
And then you will be King.
The son of the wolf smiles, or simply bares his fangs.
Aqi's Christmas Presents
TT____TT....ughhhh so late....I also have a TYL!Basil doodle to scan for you, which I drew on New Year's because I felt so bad >///<
xi. Title: Boys That Bide Their Time
Rating: K+
Characters/Pairing: 69Fran
Warnings: Spoilers for Ch. Whatever where you find out Fran freed Mukuro from the Vindice prison
Word Count: 283
Summary: A boys’ game, post-coitus. An offer is refused.
A/N: OMG AQI I’M SO SORRY. I’M SORRY THIS IS LATE AND I’M SORRY IT SUCKS AND LAKFJALDFJA BLAH
Fran stretches, writhes beneath the sheets, aching down to his very bones. He is almost wanton, like this, roused to conduct the most childish games: he casts the kinds of illusions little boys’ dream about, speckled lizards that skitter back and forth along the walls, dragonflies shooting like arrows from the palms of his hands.
Mukuro turns from the mirror (he casts no reflection, no matter how real his illusion), looks critically at the sunlight catching their iridescent wings. He lets one get closer. “Not bad,” Master says loftily. He looks at Fran when he snatches it, catlike, out of the air, crushing it into nothing, into an errant twist of blue. “But dragonflies aren’t people, little one.”
Fairy tale notions are for pretty girls, and prison breakouts are the stuff of sensationalist newspapers. Plus, there’s mafia politics to consider: if the Independent Assassin Squad emancipated the man lawfully judged as the destroyer of two Cosa Nostra famiglias with a well-known vendetta against the Vongola, there’s the possibility it might just be misconstrued.
“I could do it, master. I could free you.”
It would be a proper final exam for him, Mukuro contemplates, before banishing the thought. His student is not ready; he does not have half of Chrome’s experience in battle, and nothing of her devotion. His eye flashes -ni-and a large, surly frog appears at the foot of the bed, plucking dragonflies from midflight with its flashing tongue, croaking balefully.
Fran yelps, dislodging it with a swift kick; the frog gives a great pathetic flop, croaks once in farewell and makes its way clumsily out the door.
Mukuro chuckles malevolently, Fran blushes, scowling, feeling more than slightly peeved.
xii. Title: Pretending To Be
Rating: K+
Characters/Pairing: Fran, Mukuro, and Chrome
Warnings: None
Word Count: 266
Summary: An exercise in domesticity. Fran sulks.
A/N: Also dedicated to Aqi since the first one was so awful, and this one is kind of adorable.
“Is Hell really such a bad place, Master?”
Mukuro doesn’t even bother looking at him, just pauses in the busy peeling of his breakfast-a single orange, his digestive system hasn’t completely recovered-and smacks his apprentice on the back of the head with his free hand. Fran’s hat acts as a shock absorber, he is almost grateful for it.
“Ow.”
“Don’t let Fran cry at the breakfast table, Mukuro-sama,” Chrome says calmly, spreading jam neatly over the top half of her muffin. “He’ll get salt in the butter dish.”
“I wasn’t going to cry,” Fran says, slightly miffed. “It’s not even noon yet.”
“Good,” says his Master indifferently, “Now eat your breakfast.”
Fran contemplates the stack of toast on the plate in front of him, morose.
“It’s whole wheat,” Chrome tells him helpfully. “It’s good for you.” She smiles at him, sweet as maple syrup.
Fran glares frostily at his Vongola counterpart. It’s no secret that they detest each other: Chrome is just better at disguising her hatred with very good manners.
“It’s raisin bread,” Fran complains. “I don’t like raisin bread.”
Mukuro pops an orange slice into his mouth.
“Ow.”
“You’ll eat it and like it, little one.” He glances at his apprentice with the side of his spooky red eye. “Or maybe you’ll get to see for yourself, whether Hell is really such a terrible place.”
As discreetly as possible, Chrome flicks an orange pip at him from across the table. It bounces off of Fran’s nose and lands in his glass of milk.
PHEW. OKAY. SO. THERE YOU HAVE IT. OY.
In case you missed it: loveheartsalone is my new ~*personal journal so you can add me there if you wantttt