ATTENCION!

So, hey. I like Blogger. I've been using Blogger for five years. It's a good service. Solid. User friendly (okay, except for the widget thing. Still dunno what's up with that.)

But! All good things must come to an end, and this blog has moved, once again! Check it:
solaveritas.notorietysquad.com/blog

I'm not taking down this site, so if you came here looking for any of my fannish crap, it's still here. But it's also over at the new blog, and there won't be any new updates here. (And I don't have a tracker up here anymore, so you should go visit the new blog, anyway, because it feeds my ego to know how many people are visiting my site. >.>)

Crossovers that should never be, part 1!

"D'you think they'll be okay together?" Marcus looked anxiously over Blaine's shoulder at the two girls playing beneath the trees. "Amata hasn't exactly had what you might call a...normal upbringing."

Blaine slumped down on the bench and covered his face with his hand. "Well, I don't know, Marcus. Birdie plays with knives and dreams of growing up to be a mass murderer some day."

"I think 'Mata is the reincarnated soul of my brother," Marcus said somberly, eyes wide. "Also, she can set things on fire with her mind."

"I think they'll get along just fine." Blaine gestured to the chessboard between them without removing his hand from his face. "It's your move, Your Grace."

"We never really used titles like that," Marcus muttered. He peered at the chessboard, eyebrows swooping together. The tiny bells hanging from his eyebrow rings jingled. "I was always just 'High Priest,' generally...sometimes 'Lord of the Seventh Hour,' if people were being really formal. You know, I think you're going to win this one." He moved a bishop, and raised an eyebrow with a faint chime.

Blaine looked down at the board, then at Marcus, then back down at the board. "I think you might be right." His mouth quirked to the side, an almost smile. "I thought you were some sort of warlord? Master tactician and strategist, that sort of thing?" He was getting that uncomfortable, itchy sensation in the back of his head that meant he was probably being flirted with. He hated that feeling.

"I...I was, once. I think." His eyes went slightly out of focus. "You start to...lose track of the details, after the first dozen lifetimes or so."

"Hm. I wouldn't know." He moved one of his knights, capturing a rook and cutting off Marcus's bishop. Marcus's well meaning glances were making him twitch; he took out his wallet and started rolling a cigarette.

Marcus stared at the board, frowning again. "I'm usually better at this, really." He glanced up as Blaine began rummaging through his pockets for a match or a lighter. "Here, let me." He held out his hand, offering a flame on the tip of his finger.

Blaine froze, staring at Marcus's hand. This was really not his area of expertise. Images of Greymalkin flashed through his head. "I-"

Behind him, a tree exploded. He dropped his unlit cigarette and vaulted over the back of the bench, heading towards the sound of hysterical giggling at the center of the smoke. Marcus was right behind him.

He was never more thankful for Foxbird's ability to get into trouble.

-----

Ahahaha, I just remembered Marcus was full of ridiculous body mods as well. WHAT, ME, PREDICTABLE? NEVER. He's only got a bunch of ear and eyebrow piercings, though.

It's just- they're both single fathers, their kids are redheaded prodigies, and they're high priests of corrupt religious orders.

Blaine gets so uncomfortable when people act like they're attracted to him, it's hilarious. The more hilarious part is that Blaine really isn't Marcus's type- but Marcus gets attached to anybody who seems to have thier shit together.

Heh. Stay tuned for CTSNB part 2- Boffo vs Toggle: When Stupid Acronyms Attack!

Internet! Why have you not provided me with dozens upon dozens of angry Jeffrey Coho/Brad Chase rival slashfics? Because seriously. They need to screw and get it over with already.

*sigh* I should not, perhaps, mainline this show quite so heavily. And the third season is nowhere near as good as the second- more stupid gags, fewer sharp political statements. The midget thing got old very, very quickly. And the way they wrapped up the Daniel Post thread was weak and mildly upsetting. And Alan has felt out of character since the beginning- though it occurs to me that I need to finally watch The Secretary, if only to see if James Spader is attempting to reprise his role in that.

Love to have your cake and eat it too

Their voices are a little off; I've gotten used to writing them as adults, and not as teenagers. But they are- Tyler is seventeen, Opal is sixteen. And in this version of the story, they've been dating for two years- since Opal's freshman year of highschool.

I would like to rewrite the whole story eventually. A lot of the original revolved around the changing dynamic between Opal and Tyler- but that original dynamic was based a lot in where I was, emotionally, in ninth grade, and I like them much better like this, even if the lack of awkwardness is, perhaps, unrealistic. I'm reasonably certain I've matured a bit since then- and if not, at least my writing has.

(That said, I hadn't quite realized the two of them were so...musically inclined.)

====================================================

"Hey, babe." Tyler lounged in the doorway, smirking.

Opal made a face at her boyfriend and tightened the tuning pegs on her cello. "What's up?" Her bow slid across the strings with an eerie shriek.

Tyler fliched at the noise and wiggled a finger in his ear. "You're sharp."

She stuck out her tongue at him. "So's your face." She fixed the string. "Seriously, what are you doing here? I thought you were leaving for Florida or Italy or somewhere ridiculous."

"And leave my favorite person in the whole wide world behind? You must think me a cad! Or something." He pushed off the doorway, closing and locking it behind him. Her bed squealed with protest when he flopped across it. "Plans got changed; dad's coming home for Christmas this year. Wanted to know if you wanna hang out or something- and you're invited for Christmas, of course, and New Years. Unless, of course, you have some other dashingly handsome man to spend it with."

"Well, there was this guy passing me notes in math." She raised an eyebrow. "I don't know that I would consider him dashingly handsome, but he's certainly not bad."

"Pshaw, you're not going to settle for "certainly not bad" when you could have me."

She rolled her eyes and opened the folio on her music stand. "Variety is the spice of life." She ran through a few quick arpeggios, fingers moving easily across the strings.

"Yeah, whatever. Are you going to play, or can we just skip straight to the sex?"

She glanced at him sharply; he was still sprawled across her bed, with his t-shirt rucked up above his navel. She bit her lip, eyes flickering from her music stand to the strip of exposed skin above his jeans. He grinned.

"I'm only teasing, babe. As music is the food of love, play on!" He made a grandiose gesture with one arm. "Not that I'm gonna object to the sex later. But right now, I'd like to hear you play. And you've got that audition coming up, so you should practice."

Opal could feel her face turning red. She still wasn't entirely used to Tyler's open appreciation of her, for all that he'd be doing it for years. "I was thinking I'd warm up with some Hindemith before moving on to the Paganini."

"Mmm, Hindemith. I love Hindemith." His voice had turned low and gravelly around the edges. Opal shivered slightly.

"That's because you're weird," she muttered, and did not look over to her bed. Instead, she began to play, and the rest of the world- the empty house below her attic bedroom, the boy lounging on her bed, the trees beyond her window- just faded away.

Outside, it began to snow.

Watching Boston Legal again- picking up the rest of season two, so I can move on to season three. Haven't been able to obtain season one, but I'm hoping I can netflix it at some point in the future.

I dearly love this show- the actors all seem to have so very much fun, all the time. And Allan and Denny are so completely in love with each other, it's adorable. ...completely in love. "Denny's my friend. He takes me nice places, buys me nice things...we dress up together."

And I dearly love Allan, in general. "I'm sorry, I sort of pencilled in sex for five thirty, and now that I've missed out on Jessica, I'll have to have it alone, which is fine, just- predictable."

However, episode 21 pings on a couple of issues that are twitch points for me- polygamy and video games. The polygamous trio is portrayed as being healthy, stable, and committed- kids and everything. It's a bit awesome. I'm less a fan of the video game bit, which is about video games being physically addictive, and dangerous.

It seems like the polygamous plotline is mirroring the gay marriage debate; given that the show takes place in Boston, I'm assuming this episode was filmed and aired before Massachusetts legalized gay marriage. (Also, LoL, Boston Marriage, even if that's not what this is.)

Love this show so, so much.

Now I'm just spamming

Watching Master and Commander. May now be slightly in love with Russel Crowe? This is strange for me- but on the other hand, he's being really gay with Paul Bettany, and I really like Paul Bettany, and also his drunken delivery of the line "In the service, one must always choose the lesser of two weevils" is absolutely fucking brilliant.

Of TWO WEEVILS!

Oh, also? ALSO? You know what's really bad for musical instruments? DAMP AND COLD and FAST TEMPERATURE SHIFTS. Basically, being on a ship.

And yeah. Aubrey and Maturin? Really gay.

Nothing is real 'til it's gone

Well, this ended up being about six times longer than it needed to be. >_< AS USUAL, AUGH. I need to start seriously doing 50sentences prompts, because my inability to say things succinctly is getting irritating. And shit, but I do suck at endings something awful.

Orrin is a spaz, but he also tends to be very logical and methodical in his thought processes, if not in his actions. (He lacks organizational skills something fierce.) And he suffers from the affliction of incurable curiosity, which will undoubtedly get him into terrible trouble at some point in the future.

He knows Silverlock as Rien, and has a hard time thinking of him by any other name.

--------------------------------------------

"What are you doing?" Orrin squinted blearily at Rien, and tried to figure out where the clock had landed the night before.

"Nothing, go back to sleep." The other man sat beside the bed with a cup of coffee balanced on one knee and a sketchpad on the other.

"That doesn't look like nothing." He rubbed his eyes until his vision cleared and leaned over the edge of the bed to get a better look at the sketchpad. "What're you drawing?"

Rien looked vaguely embarrassed, and tilted the sketchpad out of Orrin's view. "It's just a sketch," he said, taking a sip of his coffee. "I picked up the habit a few centuries ago, but art has never been my strong suit."

"Come on, let me see." Orrin put on his best pleading expression; the only person he'd met who was consistently immune to it was Eleth, but Eleth didn't count as a whole person, anyway.

Rien thwacked him upside the head with the sketchpad and tossed it on the bed. "Fine, brat. But I'm no artist, so don't complain if you look like a cow. I'm making more coffee."

"Bitch," Orrin said affectionately. He picked up the sketchpad and began flipping through it. "Put the kettle on for tea? And make some pancakes?"

"Does this look like a bed and breakfast to you? Make your own godsdamned pancakes," Rien shouted from the kitchen.

Orrin snorted. Rien was an excellent artist- not professional quality, perhaps, but Orrin recognized his own face easily among the dozens of sketches in the book. There were several other pictures of him, in various states of unconsciousness, including one of him asleep in the lab, drooling on his notes. "Charming," he muttered. There were sketches of other people, most of whom he didn't recognize.

Rien sauntered back into the bedroom with his coffee in one hand and Orrin's tea in the other. Orrin took the tea with a grateful smile.

"These are all pretty good, you know. Maybe you should try drawing people who are awake to appreciate it."

"People's faces are more honest in sleep." Rien settled back into his chair and propped his feet on the bed. "And the majority of the people I draw wouldn't appreciate it."

"Huh. Really?"

"Security risk. And some of my older sketches are of people who were very self conscious."

"Mm. So, who's this?" She was young- younger than him, definitely- but her face was twisted in weariness.

"Anna DeLavrey."

"You had sex with Anna DeLavrey?" He couldn't decide if he was surprised or horrified.

"No. I spent several years as her body guard, however." Rien looked thoughtful. "That was done the night her mother died."

"Oh." He looked at the picture again. Anna DeLavrey was responsible for his soul, in a way, and though she'd been dead for years, he still felt grateful to her. "And this?"

"Zizi Menelek. He's an old friend, and the artist who did the linework on my face."

"You sleep with him?"

"On occasion." Rien shrugged. "I don't keep a log of my bedroom conquests in my sketchbooks, Orrin. It's more a record of the people I care about than anything else."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

"When they're not in my hands, they're in a locked box in my workroom."

Orrin still had yet to see the inside of Rien's workroom; there were enough magical wards on the door to give him a headache if he thought about it for too long. "Fair enough." He tilted his head to the side. "You have other pictures, then?"

Rien smiled mysteriously. "You're going to be late for class, you know."

"What?" He caught sight of the clock, lying on its side by one of the windows. "Fuck! Why didn't you warn me?" He scrambled out of bed, gulping the rest of his tea in the process and only spilling some of it on his chest. "This is the third time this month- my students are going to riot. Crap, crap, crap- where are my pants?"

"Your clothes are in the bathroom, on the counter, as usual." Rien leaned back in his chair, a serene expression on his face. "There's toast on the kitchen table, and your briefcase is by the door."

Orrin hurried to get dressed, any further thoughts of sketchbooks banished from his mind.

---

A week later; he'd managed to be late to class only one day, which was possibly a new record. His students had taken to showing up even later than he did, and as a result, the entire class was about a chapter behind schedule. If they all failed the final, he would probably have a lynch mob on his hands, and his department might take away his fellowship grant.

Well, that was fairly unlikely. But if he pissed off his advisors too much, they might downgrade his housing options. And he liked his apartment, for all that he didn't see the inside of it very often these days. It was optimally located for him to steal food out of Faraz's fridge.

Of course, Rien had plenty of space if it came to that, but Orrin wasn't sure he wanted to move in with the other man. It would mean putting a formal name to their arrangement, and he wasn't quite willing to do that yet. (He could hear Jay in the back of his head, using his most condescending therapist voice. "How does it really make you feel, Orrin?")

He kicked open the door to Rien's apartment, feeling slightly irritable, and ignored the sound of Jay's voice in the back of his head.

"Bad day?"

"Not really. Class is behind, as usual; they all blame me and not their own unwillingness to read the fucking textbook, as usual. What the hells are you doing?" He dropped his briefcase by the door, kicked off his shoes, and stepped across the mess Rien had made across the carpet, heading towards the kitchen.

"Indulging in nostalgia. I hadn't realized I'd collected so many sketchbooks over the years."

"Seriously?" Orrin found some cheese in the fridge and wandered back into the living room, gnawing absently. "I thought a filing cabinet attacked you or something."

Rien was leaning against the couch, surrounded by notebooks and photo albums and hundreds of sheets of heavy drawing paper, napkins, bits of newsprint, parchment, and what might have been vellum. Each page glittered with aether: preservation and protection castings.

"I thought you might like to see some of them." Rien's smile was distant. "Since you were so fascinated last week."

"Sure." Orrin sat on the edge of the couch and picked up a piece of parchment. "How much energy does it take to maintain these castings?" He turned it over and rubbed at it with a greasy finger; the spell shimmered, and the stain crumbled away.

Rien snorted. "Engineer."

Orrin blinked owlishly. "What? Some of these are hundreds of years old, right? And they're all in really good condition, and I bet you could set them on fire and they wouldn't even get singed. And there's a lot of paper here- the energy expenditure has to be enormous. They don't use spells this thorough in the library except in the classified archives." He pulled out his glasses. "You must have some sort of aether-dampening field working, too, because there's no way a spell this powerful would be so quiet."

A crumpled up ball of paper hit him on the nose. "I'm almost tempted to make you figure it out for yourself, but you'd probably try to deconstruct it, and that wouldn't be healthy for you or my sketches." Rien pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed heavily. "Do you want me to spoil it for you?"

"No! That takes all of the fun out of it." Orrin lit the tip of his finger on fire and held the paper over the flame. The casting shimmered, and the flame went out. "That's so cool."

"I'm glad you're amused." Rien began sorting through the papers, arranging them in neat stacks. "The casting uses some magicrafting techniques. I'll introduce you to Bellicose and Prufrock at some point, and they can explain the basics of crafting to you. Who knows, you might even have some talent for it."

"That would be awesome." Curiosity temporarily sated, Orrin turned the sketch over and adjusted his glasses. "So, who is this?" The sketch was old, if the date in the corner was to be believed. It was done with an amateur's hand, but lovingly- the young woman slept with a smile on her face.

"Sarila An'astri. My sister." Rien was looking out the window, away from Orrin.

Orrin's eyes widened. The date in the corner wasn't lying, then- and the woman was young, which meant Rien had been young as well. "How old were you?"

"Twenty three. I gave that to her when it was finished; it was found among her possessions after her death. Her husband's children were kind enough to let me keep it."

"She's hot." Orrin grinned.

"The most beautiful woman in the world," Rien agreed, grinning back. "She was the only sister from my age group to survive her indenture. The others killed themselves when they left the House, along with two of my brothers."

He set the sketch down, carefully. "That's...kind of terrible."

"Emotional enslavement usually is."

Orrin had nothing to say to that; slavery had been abolished for centuries, and the dwindling half elf population no longer bothered with the old traditions. Their god was dead, swallowed by the tower, and none of the Kin alive now remembered what it meant to wear a collar- none of them, except Rien.

He picked up another sketch; it was easy to forget, sometimes, exactly how old Rien was. "Who's this?" It was another very old sketch, though not quite as old as the first. A scar cut across the woman's right eye, and she slept with tension carving lines into her forehead.

"Ayanna DeLavrey. She put an end to the Fourth Era Riftwar by killing her brother and the Guildmaster of the Assassins' Guild."

"I've read about her- Eleth has some sort of weird historical crush on her."

Rien laughed. "Eleth has too much free time, but he certainly does have good taste. She was an amazing woman, and I loved her dearly- more than I should have, really, but she was...kind enough to not hold that against me. It's because of her that I've kept so close to the DeLavreys over the years."

Her features were strong, and she was older, probably in her fifties, but she'd clearly been quite beautiful once. "She reminds me of someone." He couldn't quite say why- there was nothing about her face that was familiar, but she reminded him of someone nonetheless.

Rien laughed again, but without humor. "Does she, now?" Mocking, slightly bitter.

"Ass," Orrin muttered. He hated when Rien did that- that irritating, I-know-something-you-don't-know tone of voice and smile. He set the sketch of the Lady DeLavrey aside and picked up another. It was from around the same time as the other two, of a man with scars across his mouth and nose. Orrin stared at the picture. This was familiar, too, and he had no idea why.

"He never knew I drew him." Rien nudged a stack of sketches towards Orrin, all of the same man. He was older in many of them, though curiously lacking the scars in some. "Towards the end, I filled an entire book with him, and I never told him, never showed him any of them."

Orrin looked through the stack of pages- there were hundreds of drawings, and couldn't shake the feeling he knew this face. "Who was he?"

"Someone else I loved more than I should have. It's something of a recurring theme in my life." Rueful, then sly. "He reminds you of someone, too, doesn't he?"

"Yeah." Orrin set the sketches aside and looked at Rien searchingly. "You're never going to tell me, are you?"

He shook his head. "You don't need to know."

"That isn't your choice to make." It angered him. It fucking pissed him off, actually, because he hated it when people knew things he didn't know, hated when information was witheld.

"It is, actually- possession is nine tenths of ownership, and that applies to information as well as anything else. If I told you who you were, you would live every moment of your life wondering if your thoughts or actions were your own, or those of someone who died well before you were born." He reached up and pulled Orrin's glasses from his face. "You are yourself, Orrin. Not any of them." He gestured to the stacks of paper. "And you might be able to believe that now, if you let yourself. If I tell you which of these faces might have been yours once, you never will."

"That isn't fair- I have the right to know." It wasn't just morbid curiosity, and it wasn't just because of Rien- even though he knew- knew, no matter what Rien said- that if it weren't for his soul, he wouldn't be in this- relationship, or whatever it was. He needed to know, because he could remember the Time Before, and he still woke up at night gasping, afraid that it was gone, that the bleakness would return.

He owed someone's memory a debt that he might never be able to repay. And if he had learned one thing in his life, it was to pay his debts.

Rien shook his head. "Jaden agrees with me on this- knowing would do you more harm than good." He took Orrin's chin and pulled him down so their faces were close. "And I am being selfish, Orrin. If I tell you where your soul came from, you would leave. I'm rather fond of you, for any number of completely unrelated reasons."

The kiss was less of an attempt to manipulate him than he expected.

"Please, just trust me- and if not me, trust Jaden."

"If I promised to stay, and if I told you I would leave if you didn't tell me-"

"It wouldn't change anything," Rien said gravely. "I'm selfish, but I'm not that selfish. Knowing would do you more harm than good."

Orrin leaned closer, so their foreheads touched. He liked his life. He liked his job, he liked his friends- he even liked his therapist. And he liked this- arrangement. Relationship. Whatever it was. He liked raiding Rien's kitchen and he liked the fantastic sex and he liked pancakes at three in the morning and waking up next to someone who remembered where he'd put his things the night before.

He still wanted to know the truth about his soul. But he wasn't a fool. "I trust you."

"Thank you." Rien sounded relieved- and Orrin wondered if he could push hard enough, if the other man would cave eventually. It was something to think about.

He sat back on the couch and picked up another sketch, this one of a woman with scaly shadows on her face and some sort of headdress or jewelry with a large cabochon stone centered on her forehead. It was dated about a hundred years after the others. "Who's this?"

Rien crossed his arms over Orrin's knees and leaned to get a better look. "Ah, that lovely lady is Her Holiness Manikarnika, Avatar of Venani. Brilliant woman, one of the most well read scholars of her time. Also one of the most amazingly flexible people I've ever met, though I do attribute that to her being half snake."

"Ugh. Snake? Seriously?" Orrin shuddered. "Scales and slithering- that's disgusting. Seriously disgusting."

Rien stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter.

"Oh, screw you." The next sketch was of two people, an almost completely nondescript man and a fae-looking woman. "Who are they?"

"That's Lady Foxbird Torkehaav, City Walker and Guildmaster of the Assassins' Guild, with a lieutenant of the City Watch. I never could remember his name- I don't think she could, half the time, either." He picked up another stack of papers. "I did draw her awake several times, at her insistance. She was always particularly skilled at getting what she wanted."

Orrin knew he was slow sometimes, but he usually figured things out eventually. The fact that Lady Torkehaav's face was familiar to him was irrelevant. "Tell me more about her?" He held out the sketch.

Rien smiled all the time; he said it was a good way to put people off guard and that he was, by nature, a cheerful person. Orrin thought this was bullshit, generally. He'd gotten to know Rien well enough to tell when his smiles were hollow and when they were true, or rather, not quite as empty. The hollow, untrustworthy sort far, far out numbered the others.

He was smiling at Orrin now- a smile that barely reached his mouth, but one that lingered in the corners of his eyes. It was, Orrin realized, probably the first truly honest expression he'd ever seen on the other man's face.

Ha! Take that, sad lack of productivity!

Or, y'know, something. I should, perhaps, be spending more energy on finding employment and clearing up the mess with my previous employment than clearing out my collection of unposted drafts on Blogger. But. This entire year has been shit for my creativity, and that's frustrating. I mean, I didn't even post at all during April, and my average posts-per-month this year has been five. Even last year, I managed more than that, though things went to shit in the latter parts of the year, when my computer died.

I've gotten more writing finished this month than I have in nearly a year, which is a nice feeling. Granted, most of what I've posted was stuff I'd started nearly a year ago, but a few of those pieces are new. The dream fragments are, at any rate, though I doubt they'll go anywhere.

The Technotist dream was quite awful, though the Technotists themselves remind me a bit of Dreamscape's Rat Trappers. People capable of hacking the electrical signals in the brain, usually to the end of creating mass hallucinations. Some of them just do it for the hell of it, because they can; some of them are hired by marketing agencies. Others are anarchists, causing trouble where they can. Most are criminals. Many are gang members. In the dream, Chris and the others just got caught where they shouldn't have been- in the middle of a Technotist war.

The Capellae reminded me of the Stella Matin dream, when Theron first appeared in my head and turned an endive into a bird of paradise. Callum is a charmsmith in training; Penny is a girl with more charmskill than most. Money is made out of chips of charmstone- gaea are small currency, made of spent or flawed charmstone. Capellae are large currency, and very rarely seen outside of major cities. The quality of the charmstone and the crafting of the capella determine its value; the one Callum found for Penny was probably worth hundreds, if not thousands of gaea, though he didn't know that at the time.

There was more to the dream- something to do with elementals and earth and water being corrupted, and Penny being able to fix things, or at the very least, exercising a great mastery over fire and air. In that respect, she's a bit like Radrezyne, which is kind of funny. Nowhere near as crazy, though. She's just a nice girl, and Callum is a nice boy, and the two of them can pull of some remarkable charmwork together. Standard derivative fantasty dreck, for the most part, as opposed to Technotist's standard deriviative cyberpunk dreck.

Been having other dreams lately, too, but none of them as interesting or as good.

You will be the father of something terrible

Perhaps he should have been intimidated by the wolf, but Blaine was a son of the city, and the feeling that nondomesticated animals were a myth had been bred into him.

The wolf shook itself, and shifted. Harbard as a man probably should have been just as intimidating as Harbard-the-wolf- he was a hulking, scarred, beast of a man, covered in a thatch of hair nearly as thick as his wolf pelt. But Blaine could no longer be bothered with fearing anything on this plane, or any other, for that matter. There was too much of the serpent left in him for that.

"Huh." Harbard stayed in a low crouch, and scratched behind his ears. "You still smell like a thief."

"Really?" That made Blaine smile, inexplicably. He supposed it was good, that Tyrin wasn't completely dead. "I haven't been one of those in years. Decades, really."

Harbard made a noise halfway between a snort and a growl. "Like a criminal, then. What do you want?" He surged to his feet, and stalked across the room to a cupboard against the far wall. He took out a set of clothes and began dressing. "I was sleeping."

Blaine leaned against the desk, and thought that, as far as these things went, Harbard wasn't bad looking. Older, yes, but not so many years older than Blaine himself, and nowhere near as old as Silverlock. He was, by all reports, a good man. Fair with his men. Loose enough with his morality to, if not condone, perhaps at least to understand what it meant to be an assassin. And he was a Malestri, which meant more than the rest combined in the end.

But Blaine wasn't the one in danger of marrying the man, so he supposed it didn't really matter.

"I want you to stay away from my daughter."

Harbard finished pulling his tunic over his head, and laughed. Clothed, he looked less like some sort of creature born out of snow and jagged rock, but there was still something feral in his laughter, something a little too like the sound of howling on a moonless night.

Blaine crossed his arms, fully well aware of how thin he was now, and how Harbard could, theoretically, snap him in half one-handed. Theoretically. The other man would have to catch him first. "It wasn't my intention to be entertaining."

"I'm sure it wasn't, little man. I'm sure it wasn't." Harbard's eyes in human form were meant to be blue, but right now they were golden, and a little too round. Wolf eyes. "But you're no more her father than I am, and have even less right to be saying such things to me." There was a snarl in his voice.

"What I am to her exactly is of little relevance, I think." Blaine could hear the edges of the serpent curling his tongue. He hadn't intended to get into a pissing contest with a captain of the Watch, but he'd never been overly fond of bullies. "The fact remains that she is my family, and your attentions are unwanted. So: stay away from her."

"Or what, little criminal? I could have you jailed for threatening me. I could have you jailed as an accessory to murder a thousand times over, too." Harbard stepped closer, his height and bulk overshadowing Blaine. The growl in his voice became more pronounced. "Or I could see how you fare against the wolf. She's not your responsibility, human. She's Malestri."

He smirked, and forced the serpent back- he had no need for it here, now. "She's an assassin, Captain Halverness. First, last, and above all else. I'm not threatening you- I'm warning you. After all, if you don't leave her be, there's nothing I can do, save put you back together, perhaps- but she's more than capable of taking care of herself."

Harbard actually looked startled, and seemed to shrink slightly in his surprise. Blaine's smirk deepened. Bullies. He pushed past Harbard, toward the door. "Have a nice day, Captain Halverness."

Outside Harbard's office, the Liutenant managed to look completely casual, as though he hadn't just had his ear pressed to the door, listening. Tim was not quite so suave, and nearly caught the door with his face when it opened.

Blaine rolled his eyes. Kids. "Good evening, Lieutenant, Tim."

"Evening, Your Holiness!" Tim scrambled back to his desk, blushing fiercely.

The Lieutenant nodded, still pretending to be engrossed in paperwork. "Bright welcome to you, Mister Torkehaav." He looked up, and tapped his pen against the desk thoughtfully. "If you see Miss Foxbird-"

"I'll tell her you said hello."

The Lieutenant nodded, and turned back to his work.

Blaine shook his head as he left the Watchquarters; kids, indeed. He was getting old.

bad dreams

Oh what the fucking fuck, subconscious? Seriously. There will be none of that. Absolutely none of it.

Rewatching the Buffy musical episode fills me with the urge to watch the rest of the sixth season so I can find a better context for Buffy and Spike's relationship. It's the sort of bitter, broken thing that I'm usually a huge fan of, but I'd like to know if it's actually as one sided as it looks. I think I'd honestly prefer it that way; I can find Spike's attachment to her reasonable and believable, but I don't see her returning that.

Maybe I just dislike Buffy as a character. *shrug* That's often what hapens with heroes- no one ever likes the main character. They're not there to be likeable- they're there to move the plot and move the rest of the cast.

Dunno. Still not that huge a fan of Buffy-the-series, though I'm fond of parts of it.

good dreams?

He knocked tentatively on the door of the hostelroom- it was really just a closet, but that was all they could afford for a hundred gaea. "Penny? Miss Penny?"

The door opened a crack, and a blue eye stared out. "Oh! Callum!" The door opened the rest of the way. He could see the cracked and peeling white paint on the walls behind her, and the tiny scrap of space between the bed and the wall. "Come in!"

He rubbed the back of his neck, nervous, and stepped into the tiny room. There was nowhere to sit but on the bed. "I brought you a capella," he said, holding out the palm sized swirl of charmstone. "I thought it might- you might- well, your hair. The villagers are starting to talk, about how pale you are and, well. Corwin says I should let you work the charm on your own."

"It's lovely." She took the capella and turned it over in her hands. It was a fine one, pale and luminous, and carved with a perfect snailshell spiral. "You didn't need to get this for me just so I could fix my hair- a few gaea would have done just fine."

He shrugged, uncomfortable. "I was just doing some charmwork over in the square- someone was generous, that's all." It had taken him hours to earn enough gaea to trade for the capella, but she didn't know that. "Miss Penny, could I- could I watch you do it? I haven't learned any changing charms yet-"

"Of course!" She smiled brightly, and the capella brightened in response, the charmstone reacting to her power. Penny sat beside Callum on the bed and closed her eyes. The colors of her hair shifted, melting away- from brown to black to white, then to red and all the colors of the rainbow. The shifting stopped at a deep violet, and the capella flickered.

Penny opened her eyes, and the purple melted away, leaving a completely unremarkable brown in its wake. The capella flickered again, and its light dimmed until it looked like a pretty bit of soapstone.

There was nothing special about her hair now, but Callum still wanted to touch it.

Naruto, What Remains

I watched a few episodes of the Naruto dub last week; they were doing a marathon in preparation for the hundreth episode. I saw the lead in to the Chuunin exam, and half of the written test part of it. Whoever they have doing Lee and Gai's voices are fantastic, and that's all I've really got to say about that.

I won't lie, watching the show did bring about a certain nostalgic twinge. I haven't been keeping up with any of the fan communities and I have no idea what's going on in the manga, except that, possibly, Tobi actually is Obito, and he's very evil? I don't know. But thinking about Obito got me thinking about that crazy AU I started writing a million years ago, back over here, that eventually turned into What Remains. You know, the one where Kakashi was standing a little to the left when the rocks came down. Obito lives, but loses his leg. Rin dies. Life continues, as it tends to.

This was a scene from much later on in that series- Obito is 19, Kakashi is 17. (I'd forgotten how much I enjoy completely-broken!Kakashi.) It's still a little rough- my Naruto headvoices don't really talk to me anymore.

And Obito, for the record, remains straight like a really straight thing.
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Kakashi usually stopped by his place after missions; Obito wasn't sure why, since they saw enough of each other every day when Kakashi wasn't on assignment. He got used to his friend showing up on his doorstep at odd hours, sometimes grinning with one eye, sometimes half dead from exhaustion and bleeding.

So it didn't come as a surprise when he heard the door open at two in the morning; he wasn't an active shinobi anymore, but he kept in condition as best he could, and he knew Kakashi was due back. His friend had a spare key, but Obito met him at the door anyway.

"You look like shit," he said bluntly. "How badly are you bleeding?"

Kakashi's Anbu mask hung by its strings from lax fingers; his cloth facemask was stained with blood. "Internally or externally?"

"Your sense of humor still needs work. C'mon, lean on me." They hobbled into the bathroom, where Obito helped Kakashi out of his clthoes. He hissed in sympathy at the bands of bruises that wrapped around Kakashi's chest and abdomen. "What happened?"

"Anbu stuff. Classified." Kakashi leaned against the countertop and let Obito clean him off and bandage him up. His expression was neutral, but his hands were shaking ever so slightly with the effort required to keep up the facade. "It wasn't...I..."

"It's okay." Obito wrapped a spare robe around his friend's thin frame and led him into the kitchen. "It was bad?"

"Yeah. There were kids. I don't..." Kakashi was shivering. "I should- I should go."

He snorted and poured cups of sake for both of them. It probably wasn't a good idea to give an injured man alcohol, but Obito wasn't too concerned with Kakashi's injuries; he'd bounced back from worse. "It's not like I don't have a spare bed with your name on it. Here. Drink."

Kakashi was shaking so hard he nearly spilled his drink, but he swallowed the stuff just fine. Obito poured him another.

"I need to rest. Have to give my report tomorrow, Hokage needs to know what happened...I should go." He drank the second glass too, though, mouth drawn into a thin line. The scars on his face stood out against his pale skin like red ink on fine paper, criss-crossing the blue tracings of veins just beneath the skin.

"If you try to sleep, you'll just have nightmares," Obito said gently. "It's okay. You're home. You don't have to say anything- just stay. You're always welcome here, you know that. Everything's okay."

That earned him a bitter laugh that turned into something like a sob. Kakashi reached for the bottle of sake, but his hands were trembling too hard; the alcohol spilled across the tabletop, dripping onto the floor.

"Shit." Kakashi stared at his hands, all the color completely gone from his face. Since there wasn't much to begin with, it wasn't noticeable- but Obito noticed. He always did, now- no one else would. "I'm sorry, shit, shit, shit, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry oh god I'm sorry I didn't mean-"

"Kakashi!" Kakashi's mismatched eyes- on some level, it still creeped him out, even if he never, ever regretted it- were wide, pupils contracted to pinpoints. Even the sharingan was out of control, spinning wildly in either direction. This was bad; Kakashi hadn't been this broken since they'd lost sensei. Obito summoned his sharingan, and hoped Kakashi wasn't so far gone that he would see it as an attack.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so-"

He grabbed Kakashi's hands, feeling the thin, fragile bones and his friend's racing pulse. "Kakashi, look at me. Look at me." When the litany of apologies finally cut off, he continued. "Breathe. Just breathe, that's all." He stroked the backs of Kakashi's knuckles with his thumb and maintained eye contact, sharingan spinning slowly.

The hysterical pattern to Kakashi's chakra calmed as his breathing steadied. "I'm sorry," he said again, calmly.

"It's okay. It's just a little spill, no big deal. What am I here for, right?" He'd promised Rin, after all. And he'd promised sensei. "Somebody needs to take care of you."

There was something less-sane than usual in the smile Kakashi gave him. "That's not what I'm sorry for."

Obito realized that at some point, Kakashi had shifted his grip so he was the one holding Obito's hands, and just as he was realizing this, Kakashi was leaning forward, and then they were kissing. His mouth tasted like sake and blood and something sour that was probably bile, and it ocurred to him that he shouldn't be letting this happen.

He let Kakashi finish the kiss, though, because he owed his friend that much. "Kakashi...you know I'm not- I do care about you, but I don't-"

"I know. I'm sorry." Kakashi's crooked smile nearly broke his heart. "Thank you for the sake...and for everything. I'll go now."

He moved to leave, but Obito stopped him. "This doesn't change anything." He knew Kakashi, knew that he never took things as well as he appeared to, knew that he was in the sort of mood where he would do something incredibly stupid if he wasn't given a good reason not to. "You hear me? It doesn't change a thing. I'm not losing my best friend over something like this."

"Okay." Sometimes, Kakashi was a terrible liar. Obito wanted to shake him; instead, he kept his hands open at his sides as Kakashi stepped past him towards the door.

"Hey. You're buying me lunch tomorrow."

Kakashi stopped in the doorway. "What?"

Obito tried to look casual, and failed. "You owe me lunch. From last week. You left your wallet at home, and I paid for you. So you owe me lunch, and you can pay me back tomorrow." He lifted his chin stubbornly. If Kakashi thought he could go back to his apartment and, and curl up in a ball and do whatever it was he did when he was too miserable to breathe, he had another think coming. Obito didn't break promises to the dead- and Kakashi was his friend.

"I paid you back for that the next day." Despite his obvious weariness, a note of exhasperation crept into Kakashi's voice.

"Oh. Really?" Obito scratched the back of his head. So much for that. "Well, we should go out to lunch anyway. I haven't seen you in days."

Kakashi actually smiled a little. "Okay," he said again, sounding slightly defeated. "I'll see you tomorrow."

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Maaaaan. Now I'm going back over all my notes and such for Blindsided- some of the unfinished pieces of that story were really, really beautiful. I almost want to write more of it, but I can't bring myself to care about the canon enough to continue any of it. *sigh*