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Dec. 5th, 2010 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
what_we_dreamSong Meme: Magic Kaitou (2), One Piece (1), Gintama (2) Band of Brothers (2), Saiyuki (2)
Pairings: Vaaaaaague Gintoki/Zura I suppose
Rating: PG
Notes: I can't seem to do anything more than start writing something, get 2 pages in, and get stuck. So a few drabbles to keep my hand in.
Magic Kaitou Impossible Dream - Man of La Mancha
Kaitou dream big.
Kid’s goal isn’t the glittering trinkets he steals, or the mockery of the police he causes, or the fan base he builds up with effortless skill. He doesn’t need anything so cheap.
Kid wants two things: revenge for his father’s death, and Aoko’s forgiveness for his fully knowing trespass.
It’s only in the early morning when the world is dark and he knows that he is one teenager trying to accomplish a police department’s work, one teenager trying to win over a hatred seated not in logic but emotion, that he wonders whether they might not be impossible dreams.
Burning the Floor - DDR
“Are you sure?” asks Aoko, standing beside him. In light from the match’s tiny flame, Kid’s monocle shines blood red.
He answers in a flat tone without looking at her. “You know what they did. You know what they’ll do, if they can.”
She nods, mute. All around them the smell of gasoline floats, sickeningly sweet.
“Then go. I’ll be right behind you.”
Aoko squeezes his shoulder. Turns, and walks out of the empty mansion through the open French doors. Behind her, she hears Kid take one step backwards, and then the whoomph of the flames. And then the night is no longer dark.
One Piece Believe – One Piece
Vivi knows Chaka and Pell as the guardian spirits of Alabasta before she knows them as men. They are the two men with the strongest faith in the country, tasked with judging and sentencing Alabasta’s enemies without ever flinching or failing. She lies in their laps as a mewling infant while her name is read into the long lists of Alabasta’s royalty and the guardians pledge their loyalty to her and her heirs; she grows tall in their shadows as they stand between her and the boiling desert; she sneaks past their grave faces to the open seas as they try to keep peace against mounting odds.
She returns to watch them struck down again and again, by Miss All Sunday, by Crocodile, by a time bomb even the combined forces of the Straw Hats couldn’t stop. And she realises, as they claw their way to their feet again and again with bloody fingers, that it isn’t their faith that gives them the strength to get up again. That it’s the love of this country, just as it is for her.
Gintama Bakuchi Dancer - DOES
The two of them spin together, back to back, picking up their feet in quick rhythms as if to the beat of an inaudible drum. Their swords flash in the noonday sun, bright steel shining with the grace and fluidity of fans. Around them scarlet blossoms bloom in mid air, showering them with spots large as rose pedals. Without ever looking at the other, they move to precisely fill the space left by the other, twisting and cross-stepping with the surety of a pair who have known each other for years.
War is no dance, but sometimes it looks very much like it.
Sadness and Sorrow - Naruto
Gintoki has no time to contemplate feelings of loss or sorrow. As soon as he wakes he is moving, ignoring Otae’s pursed lips and the hot pain in his shoulder. As soon as he arrives at the forge he is off again, cutting through the streets on his scooter with the blacksmith girl shouting in his ear. And then there is the ship, and the monstrous sword, and Zura. Zura, who is supposed to be dead, whose hair he saw swinging like a hanged man from that bastard’s hand, the pain of whose stupid fake death he nearly died trying to blot out.
On the long way down to the harbour, he tells Zura that he didn’t bother mourning him. That he stopped Shinpachi buying incense because they have better things to spend their money on, dammit.
He doesn’t tell Zura he never mourned him because he never began, and that it’s just as well, because he’s not sure that once he’d begun he would be able to stop again.
Band of Brothers Nakushita Kotoba - No Regret Life
At night, the light flares shoot overhead and fall slowly over the dark forest like shooting stars.
“Hey look,” says Julien, the new kid in Babe’s foxhole, as the white phosphorous light drifts by overhead. “Make a wish.”
“Wish we don’t get goddamn shot tonight,” mutters Babe, hunkering down. Julien sighs, and curls up around his rifle.
They don’t; Julien doesn’t bite it until the next day.
The next night another one goes up; Babe watches it from under the cover of the larger covered resting hole with Roe and Spina lying close against him as if they could comfort him by their presence. He watches the flare fade as it falls back to earth, and wishes he could’ve done right by the kid.
House of the Rising Sun - The Doors
The replacements are green, but they’re not stupid. Unfortunately the Toccoa men have had more than a year’s time to get to know each other, and they can all cheat blindfolded at any game anyone would care to name. Roe sits in a corner of the Upottery bar sipping his beer, watching Compton, Guarnere and Toy rob the new boys blind at darts, pool and gin. He doesn’t chalk the kids’ continuing to accept the experienced soldiers’ challenges up to stupidity but rather pride – pride and nervousness. Eventually the game turns to poker, and Heffron and Garcia both buy in. Roe watches one hand go past – a hand in which Compton palms an ace to Toye, and Guarnere deals off the bottom unobserved – before sighing and stepping in. It’s less concern than selfishness – the more the kids lose, the more they drink, and he doesn’t need anyone copying Dog Company’s stunt of breaking limbs in drunken searches for the latrine.
“Deal me in,” he tells Compton, dragging his chair over. The two replacements look at him with mild curiosity, the old hands with surprise.
“Why Roe, gonna show us some of that famous Louisiana gambling?”
“Maybe I show you some of that famous Louisiana courtesy, huh?” He gives them a low grin, and picks up his cards.
In two hands, the rookies’ luck changes miraculously from poor to amazing, while the old timers’ hands degrade in relation, particularly Toye to Roe’s left. The game finishes at the end of the second hand, more than half the pool going to the replacements. Roe shuffles up the deck and puts it back in its beaten box, tosses it to Heffron. “You boys take a bit of advice, and learn not to play with the big men ‘til you know how the cards stand.”
They’re more confused than grateful, but at least they go back to their bunks with most of the money they came in with, and the only injury Roe has to deal with is Toye’s head after Guarnere accidentally bangs it into the wall.
Saiyuki Full Circle - Lorenna McKennitt
Through his adolescence, Sanzo harboured a secret, buried grudge against Koumyou. Hidden away deep in his heart, it was all feeling and little logic. A kind of cold discomfort that made him twitch and shift when any traces of it rose to his notice, like ice crystals under his skin.
It seemed like it would have been easy to hate Koumyou for dying, but Sanzo can’t hate his master anymore than he can voluntarily stop his heart, and in any case it’s a hell of a lot simpler to hate the bastards that took him from this earth.
Still, he does hold the grudge, even if he’s hardly even consciously aware of it. Koumyou was the worst priest he ever met, no good at lessons, hardly any formal training, complete crap at most temple duties and lazy to boot. And yet, despite his complete lack of pretentions and philosophies, he spread his arms and gave his life to save a boy who was in all ways so much less than him. Sanzo begrudges that hypocrisy, begrudges the fact that only in a moment when Sanzo could never have predicted it did he choose to find a principle.
It’s only much later on a rainy evening in the mud that Sanzo realises there was no principle, no last-minute philosophy. Only instinct, deeper than bone and far stronger than his heart.
Freedom - Saiyuki (this runs completely counter to the drama CDs, in which Sanzo is a mic-hog at karaoke when drunk)
Goku never hears Sanzo sing.
Gojyo sings all the time, and it’s a fucking pain. In the shower, getting dressed, stopping for a piss at the side of the road; any time the kappa’s bored, he starts singing. He has a decent voice, but all he knows are dirty bar songs, and apart from the fact that they require more harmony than he can produce on his own, Hakkai doesn’t like them and that means Goku gets farther and farther on edge while Gojyo continues on obliviously, until Hakkai snaps and brings out the angry smile.
Hakkai sings with a teacher’s sense of duty – with an air of polite obligation at festivals, or of polite awkwardness in spontaneous pub songs. He doesn’t sing particularly well, but since he only does it out of courtesy in the first place no one really minds. The only time he produces any sort of music of his own accord is when he’s immersed in cleaning, when without noticing he sometimes makes a thin, airy tuneless whistling through his teeth.
Even Goku himself sings, far more rarely than Gojyo but with more energy and willingness than Hakkai, usually old folksongs he hears in the villages, the kinds with easy rhythms that work their way into his brain so that he often sings the whole thing through twice before he realises he’s singing a washing song.
But in all the years Goku knows Sanzo, he never once hears the man sing, until long after they recover the second sutra. After Gyuumaou’s defeat they return to Sanzo’s old temple, the one where Koumyou Sanzo died and Genjyo Sanzo was born. Only then, standing in the ancient graveyard while the dawn sun shines down on them and turns the mountains gold with the temple’s bell tolls slow and sonorous in the background, does Sanzo sing. It’s a low, rolling tune he’s never heard before, smooth and sorrowful in places and quick and uplifting in others. It reminds Goku of a river, flowing slow and grave in some places and fast and rough in others, and all shades in between. And for all that he’s never heard Sanzo sing before, the priest’s voice carries powerfully, is stronger and more beautiful than he could have imagined, so pure it’s nearly cutting. The naked emotion there makes Goku’s throat tighten in sympathetic response.
Genjyo Sanzo stands singing before his master’s grave, the Maten and Seiten sutras on his shoulders, and even though no trace of it shows on his face Goku knows that for the first time in his life he feels free.
Pairings: Vaaaaaague Gintoki/Zura I suppose
Rating: PG
Notes: I can't seem to do anything more than start writing something, get 2 pages in, and get stuck. So a few drabbles to keep my hand in.
Magic Kaitou Impossible Dream - Man of La Mancha
Kaitou dream big.
Kid’s goal isn’t the glittering trinkets he steals, or the mockery of the police he causes, or the fan base he builds up with effortless skill. He doesn’t need anything so cheap.
Kid wants two things: revenge for his father’s death, and Aoko’s forgiveness for his fully knowing trespass.
It’s only in the early morning when the world is dark and he knows that he is one teenager trying to accomplish a police department’s work, one teenager trying to win over a hatred seated not in logic but emotion, that he wonders whether they might not be impossible dreams.
Burning the Floor - DDR
“Are you sure?” asks Aoko, standing beside him. In light from the match’s tiny flame, Kid’s monocle shines blood red.
He answers in a flat tone without looking at her. “You know what they did. You know what they’ll do, if they can.”
She nods, mute. All around them the smell of gasoline floats, sickeningly sweet.
“Then go. I’ll be right behind you.”
Aoko squeezes his shoulder. Turns, and walks out of the empty mansion through the open French doors. Behind her, she hears Kid take one step backwards, and then the whoomph of the flames. And then the night is no longer dark.
One Piece Believe – One Piece
Vivi knows Chaka and Pell as the guardian spirits of Alabasta before she knows them as men. They are the two men with the strongest faith in the country, tasked with judging and sentencing Alabasta’s enemies without ever flinching or failing. She lies in their laps as a mewling infant while her name is read into the long lists of Alabasta’s royalty and the guardians pledge their loyalty to her and her heirs; she grows tall in their shadows as they stand between her and the boiling desert; she sneaks past their grave faces to the open seas as they try to keep peace against mounting odds.
She returns to watch them struck down again and again, by Miss All Sunday, by Crocodile, by a time bomb even the combined forces of the Straw Hats couldn’t stop. And she realises, as they claw their way to their feet again and again with bloody fingers, that it isn’t their faith that gives them the strength to get up again. That it’s the love of this country, just as it is for her.
Gintama Bakuchi Dancer - DOES
The two of them spin together, back to back, picking up their feet in quick rhythms as if to the beat of an inaudible drum. Their swords flash in the noonday sun, bright steel shining with the grace and fluidity of fans. Around them scarlet blossoms bloom in mid air, showering them with spots large as rose pedals. Without ever looking at the other, they move to precisely fill the space left by the other, twisting and cross-stepping with the surety of a pair who have known each other for years.
War is no dance, but sometimes it looks very much like it.
Sadness and Sorrow - Naruto
Gintoki has no time to contemplate feelings of loss or sorrow. As soon as he wakes he is moving, ignoring Otae’s pursed lips and the hot pain in his shoulder. As soon as he arrives at the forge he is off again, cutting through the streets on his scooter with the blacksmith girl shouting in his ear. And then there is the ship, and the monstrous sword, and Zura. Zura, who is supposed to be dead, whose hair he saw swinging like a hanged man from that bastard’s hand, the pain of whose stupid fake death he nearly died trying to blot out.
On the long way down to the harbour, he tells Zura that he didn’t bother mourning him. That he stopped Shinpachi buying incense because they have better things to spend their money on, dammit.
He doesn’t tell Zura he never mourned him because he never began, and that it’s just as well, because he’s not sure that once he’d begun he would be able to stop again.
Band of Brothers Nakushita Kotoba - No Regret Life
At night, the light flares shoot overhead and fall slowly over the dark forest like shooting stars.
“Hey look,” says Julien, the new kid in Babe’s foxhole, as the white phosphorous light drifts by overhead. “Make a wish.”
“Wish we don’t get goddamn shot tonight,” mutters Babe, hunkering down. Julien sighs, and curls up around his rifle.
They don’t; Julien doesn’t bite it until the next day.
The next night another one goes up; Babe watches it from under the cover of the larger covered resting hole with Roe and Spina lying close against him as if they could comfort him by their presence. He watches the flare fade as it falls back to earth, and wishes he could’ve done right by the kid.
House of the Rising Sun - The Doors
The replacements are green, but they’re not stupid. Unfortunately the Toccoa men have had more than a year’s time to get to know each other, and they can all cheat blindfolded at any game anyone would care to name. Roe sits in a corner of the Upottery bar sipping his beer, watching Compton, Guarnere and Toy rob the new boys blind at darts, pool and gin. He doesn’t chalk the kids’ continuing to accept the experienced soldiers’ challenges up to stupidity but rather pride – pride and nervousness. Eventually the game turns to poker, and Heffron and Garcia both buy in. Roe watches one hand go past – a hand in which Compton palms an ace to Toye, and Guarnere deals off the bottom unobserved – before sighing and stepping in. It’s less concern than selfishness – the more the kids lose, the more they drink, and he doesn’t need anyone copying Dog Company’s stunt of breaking limbs in drunken searches for the latrine.
“Deal me in,” he tells Compton, dragging his chair over. The two replacements look at him with mild curiosity, the old hands with surprise.
“Why Roe, gonna show us some of that famous Louisiana gambling?”
“Maybe I show you some of that famous Louisiana courtesy, huh?” He gives them a low grin, and picks up his cards.
In two hands, the rookies’ luck changes miraculously from poor to amazing, while the old timers’ hands degrade in relation, particularly Toye to Roe’s left. The game finishes at the end of the second hand, more than half the pool going to the replacements. Roe shuffles up the deck and puts it back in its beaten box, tosses it to Heffron. “You boys take a bit of advice, and learn not to play with the big men ‘til you know how the cards stand.”
They’re more confused than grateful, but at least they go back to their bunks with most of the money they came in with, and the only injury Roe has to deal with is Toye’s head after Guarnere accidentally bangs it into the wall.
Saiyuki Full Circle - Lorenna McKennitt
Through his adolescence, Sanzo harboured a secret, buried grudge against Koumyou. Hidden away deep in his heart, it was all feeling and little logic. A kind of cold discomfort that made him twitch and shift when any traces of it rose to his notice, like ice crystals under his skin.
It seemed like it would have been easy to hate Koumyou for dying, but Sanzo can’t hate his master anymore than he can voluntarily stop his heart, and in any case it’s a hell of a lot simpler to hate the bastards that took him from this earth.
Still, he does hold the grudge, even if he’s hardly even consciously aware of it. Koumyou was the worst priest he ever met, no good at lessons, hardly any formal training, complete crap at most temple duties and lazy to boot. And yet, despite his complete lack of pretentions and philosophies, he spread his arms and gave his life to save a boy who was in all ways so much less than him. Sanzo begrudges that hypocrisy, begrudges the fact that only in a moment when Sanzo could never have predicted it did he choose to find a principle.
It’s only much later on a rainy evening in the mud that Sanzo realises there was no principle, no last-minute philosophy. Only instinct, deeper than bone and far stronger than his heart.
Freedom - Saiyuki (this runs completely counter to the drama CDs, in which Sanzo is a mic-hog at karaoke when drunk)
Goku never hears Sanzo sing.
Gojyo sings all the time, and it’s a fucking pain. In the shower, getting dressed, stopping for a piss at the side of the road; any time the kappa’s bored, he starts singing. He has a decent voice, but all he knows are dirty bar songs, and apart from the fact that they require more harmony than he can produce on his own, Hakkai doesn’t like them and that means Goku gets farther and farther on edge while Gojyo continues on obliviously, until Hakkai snaps and brings out the angry smile.
Hakkai sings with a teacher’s sense of duty – with an air of polite obligation at festivals, or of polite awkwardness in spontaneous pub songs. He doesn’t sing particularly well, but since he only does it out of courtesy in the first place no one really minds. The only time he produces any sort of music of his own accord is when he’s immersed in cleaning, when without noticing he sometimes makes a thin, airy tuneless whistling through his teeth.
Even Goku himself sings, far more rarely than Gojyo but with more energy and willingness than Hakkai, usually old folksongs he hears in the villages, the kinds with easy rhythms that work their way into his brain so that he often sings the whole thing through twice before he realises he’s singing a washing song.
But in all the years Goku knows Sanzo, he never once hears the man sing, until long after they recover the second sutra. After Gyuumaou’s defeat they return to Sanzo’s old temple, the one where Koumyou Sanzo died and Genjyo Sanzo was born. Only then, standing in the ancient graveyard while the dawn sun shines down on them and turns the mountains gold with the temple’s bell tolls slow and sonorous in the background, does Sanzo sing. It’s a low, rolling tune he’s never heard before, smooth and sorrowful in places and quick and uplifting in others. It reminds Goku of a river, flowing slow and grave in some places and fast and rough in others, and all shades in between. And for all that he’s never heard Sanzo sing before, the priest’s voice carries powerfully, is stronger and more beautiful than he could have imagined, so pure it’s nearly cutting. The naked emotion there makes Goku’s throat tighten in sympathetic response.
Genjyo Sanzo stands singing before his master’s grave, the Maten and Seiten sutras on his shoulders, and even though no trace of it shows on his face Goku knows that for the first time in his life he feels free.
