3 tarot cards and a story...

[canonical_insanity]

Title: Viewpoints.
Fandom: Battle Royale II
Characters: Asuka Motomura, Shintaro Makimura and Kenji Maezono.
Claim: General.
Prompt: Three of Swords.
Word Count: 341 words.
Rating: PG-13/12/T
Warnings: Implied slash, threesomes, death, spoilers until half-way through the movie.
Author's Notes: I've wanted to write this fic for over a year. I know it's only 341 words, but I'm proud of it.



They're not sure where it all went wrong.

The first person believes that it was the point where the third person chose to leave, where they had their big argument and she cowered in the corner as the other two said things that they couldn't take back. That they would never take back.

The second person thinks that it was a point just before then. When the third person came back to Shikanotoride after the Christmas holidays. When he started keeping secrets and wouldn't meet his eyes. When his personality changed dramatically and he became more vicious and reclusive. That started off the final argument when both of them said things that they didn't mean, but just thought that they did.

The third person knows roughly when it was. He would place it at a point on Christmas afternoon, when his family got told that his father had been trapped in the Shinjuku buildings when Nanahara Shuuya waltzed in there and blew the place up. By the time that he'd gone back to school, he'd made a decision. He didn't want them to care if he died. So he set up the whole thing, started lashing out whenever he could see a point in it, knowing that the second person -do-gooder that he was- would eventually get upset at his behaviour and ask him to stop it. That would turn into a full blown argument and end with him walking out of their lives.

And it worked.

But it worked too well.

Because of this, the first person died alone on a boat, because she had outlived the second person and the third had rejected her. Her name was Asuka Motomura.

Because of this, the second person died for what he believed in, because the first person didn't need him and the third person didn't want him anymore. His name was Shintaro Makimura.

Because of this, the third person died knowing that his death didn't break their hearts, not least because he watched them die first. His name was Kenji Maezono.


Title: Cages.
Fandom: Battle Royale II
Characters: Risa Shindo and Naoki Jo.
Claim: General.
Prompt: Eight of Swords
Word Count: 261 words.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for one particular point in the movie.



It was a cage. It twisted around her, telling her that she couldn't move. If she moved she'd die, trip one of the wires and the mines would cut her to ribbons. She didn't have long enough legs to reach over the cage, she knew that as a fact.

Her hand moved involuntarily to the collar around her neck. Another cage that seemed inescapable. But it was a part of the problem and that made it part of the solution, right?

She hoped so.

"Jo, can I have some help here?"

"What's the magic word, Shindo?"

If she wasn't trapped by a dozen wires, she'd laugh at the idea of being told to be polite by a gang-member. But she was hurt, angry and more upset than she had ever been before, so she snapped back at him.

"There is no magic word. The magic phrase is 'if you don't, I'll trip these wires,' and I don't think you need to see anyone else die. Especially seeing as you'll die a couple of minutes later when your neck gets ripped open."

He reached his hand over and she held on to his wrist for balance as she stretched her leg over. Then they ran like hell as the world around them exploded into screams and spurts of blood. But they didn't let go. If anyone had asked them, they would both have given the same excuse, something about not wanting the other person to lag behind and risk the collars detonating.

The truth was that they didn't want to let go.


Title: Before and After.
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Character: Quistis Trepe.
Claim: General.
Prompt: The High Priestess.
Word Count: 434 words.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for quite a lot of the game.
Author's Note: I'm not really used to writing Final Fantasy VIII fics, so this might turn out a little wrong.



Before the Second Sorceress War, before Ultimecia had chosen to compress time, before Squall even became a SeeD, there was a girl in cadet's uniform walking towards the Fire Cavern. Later in her life, she would become a great teacher, and a hero in her own right. But at this point in time, she was a slightly nervous cadet about to defeat Ifrit in order to take her exam the next morning.

For some reason, the instructor wasn't her usual teacher. This was a man that she'd never met before.

"Name?"

"Cadet Trepe, sir."

He ticked off a box on his clipboard. Without looking up, he asked her several more questions, nodding as she answered them correctly.

"Do you have a Limit Break, cadet?"

This was something she'd been dreading. She'd looked up every book in the library about Blue Magic and not found any satisfactory explanations of the details behind how it worked. She'd even pored over the books on Sorceress power -even though she knew that was a completely different brand of magic to hers- to give her some ideas.

She had theorised that her power came from her unconscious mind -which would explain why she couldn't use it when she wasn't injured, unlike Sorceresses, who could consciously use their power at any time- and that when she was confronted with an item belonging to certain forms of monsters, she understood how they worked magically at an intuitive level. Of course, this was only a basic theory, but she'd have time to expand on it later.

Hopefully.

"Yes, sir." She waited for the question that might cost her this part of the exam preparation, but it never came. Instead he nodded,

"Very well. Cadet, lead the way."

When I become an instructor, and she would, she knew it like she knew that the sun would come up again tomorrow morning, I'm going to be a lot nicer to my students than him.

She defeated Ifrit fairly easily -all of that training had paid off- and passed her exam the next day as top of her class.

Her theory, once it had been cleaned up and expanded a bit -of course, because she had more important things to do, this happened several years later, after she had become an instructor twice, taught a lot of students and incidentally, helped to save time itself from compressing- was eventually published with the help of a group of Estharian scientists and became an influential thesis on the basis of Blue Magic.

Although she never did find out why her normal teacher hadn't decided to show up.

And, because I forgot to move this to my journal, here's the final Andrew fic. :D

TITLE: Guilt.
AUTHOR: rushikayu13
FANDOM: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
CHARACTER/PAIRING/TRIAD: Andrew Wells.
GENRE: Gen.
TABLE: Dark
PROMPT: #4 -Hopeless.
RATING: PG
WORD COUNT: 231 words.
SUMMARY: *ignores the comic season 8, which she hasn't read yet* Post 'Chosen'.
WARNINGS: None serious.
DISCLAIMER: ...Nope. I wish I did, but I don't. :D



At this point, if he opened a dictionary to the entry on 'hopeless', Andrew Wells was pretty sure that there'd be a picture of his own face beaming up at him. He had fucked up so badly, so many times. Because he was a coward, Jonathan had died. Because he wasn't fast enough, he had lost Anya.

And this is not counting the massive mistake that he made in joining the Trio in the first place. He thought it'd be fun, hanging around with people that actually liked him. And it was, at first. And somehow, that just became so twisted, so dark.

So wrong.

And maybe -he starts thinking this in the dark hours, when he dreams of Warren and can't get back to sleep- maybe he was supposed to be their conscience. And he failed at that too. But they never told him. If they had told him, then maybe he'd have done a better job. Maybe...

Maybe they didn't know what would happen either. Maybe everything just went wrong for them too and they had no idea of how to stop it.

Maybe it was their fault too, as much as it was his. But they were dead. He wasn't. He had to live with his amount of the responsibility. With the guilt.

If he lives long enough, he might just manage to outgrow his own incompetence.

Hopefully.