xxxHOLiC AU requests - first batch
Jul. 9th, 2007 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopRepeating what I said in my 'stuff in the works' post, I have been having terrific fun with these requests. There are *eight* different worlds mixed up in the latest pages of my notebook, none of them less than a few hundred words long. Since there's quite a few to get through, I'll be posting them in batches of a couple at a time as I get them all neatened up and finished off.
So, without further ado, here's batch one:
1. Pirates!
Aspects of this were kinda-sorta requested by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
factorielle and mushroom18, though the truth is I cheated because I had the first two scenes written long before I ever got around to asking for requests. There’ll be a third scene to follow these as well - probably should be up with the next batch.
It said a lot about how much Doumeki had enjoyed his voyage to date that coming under attack from the famed Dread Pirate Yuuko, terror of the seven seas (etc, etc) was the undisputed highlight so far. He didn’t regret surrendering, not when he knew what happened to everyone who didn’t, but the first mate – the only human other than Captain Yuuko herself he’d yet seen among the pirates – had taken some kind of offense at his behaviour. Said first mate had been staring at Doumeki through the bars of his prison cell ever since throwing him down here. Maybe he thought his captive needed guarding. Or maybe he was looking for an excuse to revoke his hostage status and have him thrown overboard. Doumeki thought he made a rather odd sort of pirate.
And while he may have had no qualms about staring, he was less pleased by others staring back. “Just what do you think you’re looking at?”
“That’s not a parrot,” said Doumeki, conversationally.
“It’s a pipe fox,” the pirate snapped back at him, as if this was something he had to explain a lot and was thoroughly sick of being asked. “Why does everyone think I’m supposed to have a parrot instead? Do parrots breath fire?”
That, Doumeki decided, had to be a rhetorical question. “Do you really need that eye patch, or is it just for show?”
“That. Is none,” the pirate hissed. “Of your business.”
“Aren’t you supposed to say ‘Arr’ more?” Doumeki asked, strangely fascinated.
“Have you missed the part where we could have you walk the plank if you don’t behave?” said the pirate angrily. “We could have you tortured to death! You can’t even begin to imagine the kind of tortures the Captain can come up with!”
“But I surrendered,” said Doumeki. “Even pirates are supposed to treat their captives humanely. And you’re supposed to feed me as well.”
“You’re going to be on a bread and water diet if you’re lucky!” snapped the pirate. “And you’re going to be fighting rats even for that much privilege!”
Doumeki peered around the other corners of the hold. “Are all those barrels full of rum?”
“Don’t talk to me about rum,” said the pirate, with a long suffering look.
(Sometime later on)
Up close, the costume favoured by Captain Yuuko was composed of so many tassels, beads and frills that it was amazing she didn’t jingle more obviously every time she moved. They gave Doumeki the vague impression that if you undid the wrong catch, the whole thing could fall apart like a matchstick house. Possibly, that was the intended impression. More possibly, this was not a wise train of thought to be entertaining when the Dread Pirate herself was leaning into your face.
“Well then, Mr Doumeki!” the captain boomed, with a truly wicked smile. “Do you have the courage and fortitude to follow orders and stay true in the face of danger and almost certain death?”
Doumeki had to take a moment or two to parse this statement. “Sure.”
“Wait, what!?” Watanuki burst out. “You… you can’t put him on the crew!”
“Oho?” said Yuuko. “Is that mutinous talk I be hearing from ye? Ye’ve surely been at sea enough months to be remembering the Captain’s word is law, savy?”
“Aye Aye, Captain,” said Watanuki weakly.
Watanuki watched his captain flounce away up to the main deck until she was out of earshot. “She only talks like that because she knows it annoys me,” he said petulantly.
“Really,” said Second Mate Doumeki.
2. Vampires!
No soulmates as such, and I don't know that there's anything particularly TRC in here either. But I got the vampires, so that's alright, isn't it? =D
Doumeki had heard that it wasn’t unusual for people to panic a bit after they woke up. It wasn’t unusual for them to panic a lot. Even so, this particular newly-reborn boy seemed to be taking things a bit hard.
“I’m a…you’re a… I’m a… you made me into a WHAT?!”
“I could always have let you die instead,” Doumeki pointed out. He’d thought that would be more of a clincher on the matter.
“This is your idea of rescuing someone?” Watanuki protested. “Instead of being dead I’m Undead?! That’s supposed to be better?”
Doumeki thought this was a slightly unfair assessment. “You still get to move around,” A lot, he couldn’t help but notice. He wondered if he should mention that even vampires couldn’t actually fly, so there really wasn’t any point in Watanuki waving his arms around like that. “I could still kill you. If you’d prefer.”
The newborn vampire hesitated, then his mouth snapped shut with an audible click. Doumeki took that as a ‘no’. Good enough, he hadn’t ever expected to get a thankyou out of this.
“It’s not all bad,” he said, aiming his voice for ‘comforting’, but unsure how close he was getting.
“I’m going to have to drink blood, aren’t I?” said Watanuki, as though he had a checklist he was going through and this was the item at the top.
“Sometimes.”
“Blood from people?”
“That’s the idea.”
His new acquaintance considered this for a minute, and made a face. “Well I’m sorry but I’m really not seeing the upside here yet,” he complained.
“We don’t age,” said Doumeki. “A lot of people would consider that an upside.”
Watanuki’s eyes widened in horrified realisation. “You mean… you mean I’m going to have to spend – eternity – with you?!” Without even waiting for Doumeki to reply, he let out a wail so loud that people blocks away would probably be wondering who was being murdered.
Doumeki wondered briefly whether he had actually made the wrong decision back there, but found he didn’t have it in him to regret this yet – even now.
He’d have to be the first to admit that eternity can send you a little odd. Immortality was all very well in principle, but it did tend to get a bit dull after the first few centuries. You spent so much time waiting for nothing much to happen that when something did catch your attention, you sometimes got a little impulsive. Particularly if the only alternative was to let the most fascinating person you’d met in longer than you could remember die in an alleyway.
Anyway, Watanuki was bound to see things differently after he’d gotten over his initial panic and had some time to adjust. Doumeki could wait – he had all the time in the world.
3. Piffle World/Land of Personal Assistents
Didn't quite get Watanuki in as a chef or Doumeki in as a bodyguard in the end, but I trust this is an acceptable compromise. (Also Yuuko = Older Tomoyo = so. utterly. true.)
Whatever else might be said about him, it had to be said that Watanuki was good at his job. There were a few reasons for this – firstly, he was a perfectionist, prepared to work long, neurotic and sometimes grossly over-caffinated hours to make sure things stayed perfect, secondly because he was fully prepared to yell loudly and at considerable length at anyone who got in the way of the level of perfection he was aiming for – everyone, that was, with the exception of his boss Daidouji Tomoyo, which was a very good thing because it was doubtless one of the crucial factors which had allowed him to keep his job at all. For her own part, Tomoyo (who had attained the label ‘eccentric’ before she’d attained the age of twenty) had never found herself with the slightest reason to be displeased with his work, though it was a source of some distress to her that her wonderfully efficient personal assistant was going to high-blood pressure himself into an early grave – the only question around the office was how long it would take, and who’s job it was going to be to clean up the mess afterwards, since clearly no-one who lived as loudly as Watanuki did could ever die by means as peaceful as simply as keeling over quietly where he stood. And now, after the preliminaries of the dragonfly race had gone so much less than smoothly and the finals looked set to make even the preliminaries feel like just a standard day on the job, Watanuki was looking set to boil over any second.
Her dear assistant was taking on far more work than any one man could be expected to deal with. Clearly, with the finals only a week away and her whole staff running raged trying to track down the saboteurs before it was too late, it was time to bring up the subject of hiring more help again.
Fortunately for all involved, the first fifteen minutes of the interview were all she needed to decide that Doumeki Shizuka was exactly the man she was looking for.
Watanuki did not precisely see things the same way, but Tomoyo was well prepared to talk him into the idea.
“What?!” he said, looking at Doumeki as if he might turn into a frog (or worse, reorganise his paperwork) at any second. “But… but Daidouji-san, you must realise this has got to be the worst possible time we could choose to start bringing on new staff! There’s far too much he’d have to be brought up to speed on, and that’s even after we get through all the standard orientation period, and…”
“…and that’s just why we’re so lucky to have found someone as perfectly qualified as Doumeki is.” Tomoyo beamed. Watanuki fidgeted. Doumeki looked from one side of the room to the other as though this might be a show worth waking up for.
“But… but you know how much trouble we’ve always had with hiring additional assistants,” Watanuki protested helplessly. “The last four…”
Tomoyo appropriated the most innocent look of concern and disappointment imaginable. “Oh yes, didn’t they all leave in under a week citing extreme work related stress as the cause?” In his corner, Doumeki raised an eyebrow.
“Exactly!” said Watanuki quickly.
“Watanuki,” said Tomoyo severely, “of course, you know very well how fond of you I am, and how pleased I am you do such a wonderful job, but don’t you think it’s possible you might have been just a little hard on some of them…?”
The panicked look Watanuki took on was a familiar one. It meant he wanted to get out of this situation by yelling a someone, only there was something about being in Tomoyo’s presence that make all his rant circuits short out simultaneously. “No… really, I mean – it’s just this job that’s the problem! Not that I mind remotely,” he said very fast, “I can’t even imagine working anywhere else, but when everyone else tries it, the stress just gets to them. It’s a very stressful job, you see.”
“Is it really?” said Tomoyo.
“Oh, it really is! But never fear – for Daidouji-san’s sake and the future of Piffle Princess, the great Watanuki Kimihiro will brave through a mountain of paperwork!”
Tomoyo beamed. “Well then, that settles everything!”
“Of course!” said Watanuki, thinking this meant he’d won. “So clearly…”
“Clearly the fault here is mine," said Tomoyo seriously. "I see now how terribly irresponsible of me it has been to anyone to shoulder so much work alone. But I’m sure Doumeki is exactly the man you need to help you out.” Tomoyo clasped her hands together in victory.
Watanuki didn’t move a muscle, so it was very impressive just how visually something in his expression slide sideways off his face.
(sometime in the next day or two)
The first thing Tomoyo had made clear to Doumeki at the interview was that no matter what might be written down on paper about his employment, his main responsibility was going to be to get Watanuki to go home and get some sleep once in a while. There had even been the implication that if he could get this up to the unprecedented rate of once every night, there could well be some kind of significant financial reward in it for him. It was the sort of information that made a lot of shortcuts he’d take at work over the first couple of weeks almost too easy to justify.
“…no, she’s called that off,” Doumeki interjected, halfway through Watanuki’s spiel of Tomoyo’s upcoming engagements.
“What? When?”
“She says she’s spending that morning with that Sakura girl from the race. Something involving tea. Possibly cake too. She sent me a note about it this morning.”
“She sent you a note?” Watanuki exclaimed, furious with betrayal. “But I’m the one she’s supposed to send important messages like that!”
“Not anymore,” Doumeki reminded him.
“But…”
“She probably thought you were too busy to deal with it. You were right in the middle of yelling at the race coordinator at the time.”
“You could have said something earlier!”
“It hadn’t come up yet,” said Doumeki dismissively.
“Is there anything else on there I should know about?” said Watanuki tersely, clearly expecting the answer to be ‘yes’.
Doumeki handed over the note with a shrug and waited while Watanuki’s eyes scanned frantically over it, line by line.
“But… this means we’ll have to reschedule practically everything!” he bemoaned.
“Dragonfly race takes priority,” agreed Doumeki, with another shrug. “That and tea with Sakura a couple of times a week.”
Watanuki was barely listening, pads and calendars and at least one extra keyboard were appearing around him like magic. “Why couldn’t she have only let me know sooner? Of course the race takes priority, but we can’t just put everything else off indefinitely. I’m gong to have to find space the week after for…”
“Why?” said Doumeki.
“Why what?” Watanuki did not remotely appreciate the intrusion on his thought process.
“Why can’t we just cancel everything?”
Watanuki glared at him. “We can’t just go around cancelling important meetings! Things have to be booked! Confirmed! There are half a dozen different people I’ll need to personally phone to get every one of these cancelled! The very reputation of the Daidouji empire is at stake!”
“So?” said Doumeki. “With the media circus around the dragonfly race, we’ve got reputation to burn. Cancel any of those meetings now and tell them we can’t reschedule until the end of the month, and they’ll come charging back at the first chance you give them begging for any time you might available.”
The look this earned him was shrewd and surprised, like it had only just occurred to Watanuki that their new personal assistant’s personal assistant might actually be in possession of a working brain, and he hadn’t quite decided wither this was a good thing yet.
“Plus, this way we can go home early,” Doumeki added, which may have been a mistake.
They didn’t get out of there early that night. The mere suggestion of leaving early was such utter blasphemy to Watanuki’s personal work-based religion that Doumeki lost all the points he’d had towards the recognition of his brain-ownership, and didn’t get them back for some time.
It was a fair while before the subject of leaving early came up again.
(How Doumeki eventually convinces Watanuki to take some time off work to relax, how Watanuki responds to his attempts and whether any of this ever takes place in the office supply closet I leave to the capable imaginations of my readers. ^_~)
More shall be coming soon. ^_^
ETA: Quick links to the other two batches
Round 2: Movies, medieval times and hired gunmen (and more pirates)
Round 3: Superheros and lands post apocalypse (and more Piffle Country)
So, without further ado, here's batch one:
1. Pirates!
Aspects of this were kinda-sorta requested by
factorielle and mushroom18, though the truth is I cheated because I had the first two scenes written long before I ever got around to asking for requests. There’ll be a third scene to follow these as well - probably should be up with the next batch.It said a lot about how much Doumeki had enjoyed his voyage to date that coming under attack from the famed Dread Pirate Yuuko, terror of the seven seas (etc, etc) was the undisputed highlight so far. He didn’t regret surrendering, not when he knew what happened to everyone who didn’t, but the first mate – the only human other than Captain Yuuko herself he’d yet seen among the pirates – had taken some kind of offense at his behaviour. Said first mate had been staring at Doumeki through the bars of his prison cell ever since throwing him down here. Maybe he thought his captive needed guarding. Or maybe he was looking for an excuse to revoke his hostage status and have him thrown overboard. Doumeki thought he made a rather odd sort of pirate.
And while he may have had no qualms about staring, he was less pleased by others staring back. “Just what do you think you’re looking at?”
“That’s not a parrot,” said Doumeki, conversationally.
“It’s a pipe fox,” the pirate snapped back at him, as if this was something he had to explain a lot and was thoroughly sick of being asked. “Why does everyone think I’m supposed to have a parrot instead? Do parrots breath fire?”
That, Doumeki decided, had to be a rhetorical question. “Do you really need that eye patch, or is it just for show?”
“That. Is none,” the pirate hissed. “Of your business.”
“Aren’t you supposed to say ‘Arr’ more?” Doumeki asked, strangely fascinated.
“Have you missed the part where we could have you walk the plank if you don’t behave?” said the pirate angrily. “We could have you tortured to death! You can’t even begin to imagine the kind of tortures the Captain can come up with!”
“But I surrendered,” said Doumeki. “Even pirates are supposed to treat their captives humanely. And you’re supposed to feed me as well.”
“You’re going to be on a bread and water diet if you’re lucky!” snapped the pirate. “And you’re going to be fighting rats even for that much privilege!”
Doumeki peered around the other corners of the hold. “Are all those barrels full of rum?”
“Don’t talk to me about rum,” said the pirate, with a long suffering look.
(Sometime later on)
Up close, the costume favoured by Captain Yuuko was composed of so many tassels, beads and frills that it was amazing she didn’t jingle more obviously every time she moved. They gave Doumeki the vague impression that if you undid the wrong catch, the whole thing could fall apart like a matchstick house. Possibly, that was the intended impression. More possibly, this was not a wise train of thought to be entertaining when the Dread Pirate herself was leaning into your face.
“Well then, Mr Doumeki!” the captain boomed, with a truly wicked smile. “Do you have the courage and fortitude to follow orders and stay true in the face of danger and almost certain death?”
Doumeki had to take a moment or two to parse this statement. “Sure.”
“Wait, what!?” Watanuki burst out. “You… you can’t put him on the crew!”
“Oho?” said Yuuko. “Is that mutinous talk I be hearing from ye? Ye’ve surely been at sea enough months to be remembering the Captain’s word is law, savy?”
“Aye Aye, Captain,” said Watanuki weakly.
Watanuki watched his captain flounce away up to the main deck until she was out of earshot. “She only talks like that because she knows it annoys me,” he said petulantly.
“Really,” said Second Mate Doumeki.
2. Vampires!
- Requested by
crown_celestial (original thread):I want a TRC!Watanuki&Doumeki, and the whole 'soulmates' thing. :D
No soulmates as such, and I don't know that there's anything particularly TRC in here either. But I got the vampires, so that's alright, isn't it? =D
Doumeki had heard that it wasn’t unusual for people to panic a bit after they woke up. It wasn’t unusual for them to panic a lot. Even so, this particular newly-reborn boy seemed to be taking things a bit hard.
“I’m a…you’re a… I’m a… you made me into a WHAT?!”
“I could always have let you die instead,” Doumeki pointed out. He’d thought that would be more of a clincher on the matter.
“This is your idea of rescuing someone?” Watanuki protested. “Instead of being dead I’m Undead?! That’s supposed to be better?”
Doumeki thought this was a slightly unfair assessment. “You still get to move around,” A lot, he couldn’t help but notice. He wondered if he should mention that even vampires couldn’t actually fly, so there really wasn’t any point in Watanuki waving his arms around like that. “I could still kill you. If you’d prefer.”
The newborn vampire hesitated, then his mouth snapped shut with an audible click. Doumeki took that as a ‘no’. Good enough, he hadn’t ever expected to get a thankyou out of this.
“It’s not all bad,” he said, aiming his voice for ‘comforting’, but unsure how close he was getting.
“I’m going to have to drink blood, aren’t I?” said Watanuki, as though he had a checklist he was going through and this was the item at the top.
“Sometimes.”
“Blood from people?”
“That’s the idea.”
His new acquaintance considered this for a minute, and made a face. “Well I’m sorry but I’m really not seeing the upside here yet,” he complained.
“We don’t age,” said Doumeki. “A lot of people would consider that an upside.”
Watanuki’s eyes widened in horrified realisation. “You mean… you mean I’m going to have to spend – eternity – with you?!” Without even waiting for Doumeki to reply, he let out a wail so loud that people blocks away would probably be wondering who was being murdered.
Doumeki wondered briefly whether he had actually made the wrong decision back there, but found he didn’t have it in him to regret this yet – even now.
He’d have to be the first to admit that eternity can send you a little odd. Immortality was all very well in principle, but it did tend to get a bit dull after the first few centuries. You spent so much time waiting for nothing much to happen that when something did catch your attention, you sometimes got a little impulsive. Particularly if the only alternative was to let the most fascinating person you’d met in longer than you could remember die in an alleyway.
Anyway, Watanuki was bound to see things differently after he’d gotten over his initial panic and had some time to adjust. Doumeki could wait – he had all the time in the world.
3. Piffle World/Land of Personal Assistents
- Requested by
cheloya (original thread): If you've been reading Tsubasa, I imagine you're aware of the world in which Tomoyo is the President of a massive company... I say, Watanuki is her personal chef and (since she appears to have purely female bodyguards for herself) Doumeki is the guard she prescribes to Watanuki!
(Because we all know that Yuuko is basically Tomoyo when she grows up, right?)
Didn't quite get Watanuki in as a chef or Doumeki in as a bodyguard in the end, but I trust this is an acceptable compromise. (Also Yuuko = Older Tomoyo = so. utterly. true.)
Whatever else might be said about him, it had to be said that Watanuki was good at his job. There were a few reasons for this – firstly, he was a perfectionist, prepared to work long, neurotic and sometimes grossly over-caffinated hours to make sure things stayed perfect, secondly because he was fully prepared to yell loudly and at considerable length at anyone who got in the way of the level of perfection he was aiming for – everyone, that was, with the exception of his boss Daidouji Tomoyo, which was a very good thing because it was doubtless one of the crucial factors which had allowed him to keep his job at all. For her own part, Tomoyo (who had attained the label ‘eccentric’ before she’d attained the age of twenty) had never found herself with the slightest reason to be displeased with his work, though it was a source of some distress to her that her wonderfully efficient personal assistant was going to high-blood pressure himself into an early grave – the only question around the office was how long it would take, and who’s job it was going to be to clean up the mess afterwards, since clearly no-one who lived as loudly as Watanuki did could ever die by means as peaceful as simply as keeling over quietly where he stood. And now, after the preliminaries of the dragonfly race had gone so much less than smoothly and the finals looked set to make even the preliminaries feel like just a standard day on the job, Watanuki was looking set to boil over any second.
Her dear assistant was taking on far more work than any one man could be expected to deal with. Clearly, with the finals only a week away and her whole staff running raged trying to track down the saboteurs before it was too late, it was time to bring up the subject of hiring more help again.
Fortunately for all involved, the first fifteen minutes of the interview were all she needed to decide that Doumeki Shizuka was exactly the man she was looking for.
Watanuki did not precisely see things the same way, but Tomoyo was well prepared to talk him into the idea.
“What?!” he said, looking at Doumeki as if he might turn into a frog (or worse, reorganise his paperwork) at any second. “But… but Daidouji-san, you must realise this has got to be the worst possible time we could choose to start bringing on new staff! There’s far too much he’d have to be brought up to speed on, and that’s even after we get through all the standard orientation period, and…”
“…and that’s just why we’re so lucky to have found someone as perfectly qualified as Doumeki is.” Tomoyo beamed. Watanuki fidgeted. Doumeki looked from one side of the room to the other as though this might be a show worth waking up for.
“But… but you know how much trouble we’ve always had with hiring additional assistants,” Watanuki protested helplessly. “The last four…”
Tomoyo appropriated the most innocent look of concern and disappointment imaginable. “Oh yes, didn’t they all leave in under a week citing extreme work related stress as the cause?” In his corner, Doumeki raised an eyebrow.
“Exactly!” said Watanuki quickly.
“Watanuki,” said Tomoyo severely, “of course, you know very well how fond of you I am, and how pleased I am you do such a wonderful job, but don’t you think it’s possible you might have been just a little hard on some of them…?”
The panicked look Watanuki took on was a familiar one. It meant he wanted to get out of this situation by yelling a someone, only there was something about being in Tomoyo’s presence that make all his rant circuits short out simultaneously. “No… really, I mean – it’s just this job that’s the problem! Not that I mind remotely,” he said very fast, “I can’t even imagine working anywhere else, but when everyone else tries it, the stress just gets to them. It’s a very stressful job, you see.”
“Is it really?” said Tomoyo.
“Oh, it really is! But never fear – for Daidouji-san’s sake and the future of Piffle Princess, the great Watanuki Kimihiro will brave through a mountain of paperwork!”
Tomoyo beamed. “Well then, that settles everything!”
“Of course!” said Watanuki, thinking this meant he’d won. “So clearly…”
“Clearly the fault here is mine," said Tomoyo seriously. "I see now how terribly irresponsible of me it has been to anyone to shoulder so much work alone. But I’m sure Doumeki is exactly the man you need to help you out.” Tomoyo clasped her hands together in victory.
Watanuki didn’t move a muscle, so it was very impressive just how visually something in his expression slide sideways off his face.
(sometime in the next day or two)
The first thing Tomoyo had made clear to Doumeki at the interview was that no matter what might be written down on paper about his employment, his main responsibility was going to be to get Watanuki to go home and get some sleep once in a while. There had even been the implication that if he could get this up to the unprecedented rate of once every night, there could well be some kind of significant financial reward in it for him. It was the sort of information that made a lot of shortcuts he’d take at work over the first couple of weeks almost too easy to justify.
“…no, she’s called that off,” Doumeki interjected, halfway through Watanuki’s spiel of Tomoyo’s upcoming engagements.
“What? When?”
“She says she’s spending that morning with that Sakura girl from the race. Something involving tea. Possibly cake too. She sent me a note about it this morning.”
“She sent you a note?” Watanuki exclaimed, furious with betrayal. “But I’m the one she’s supposed to send important messages like that!”
“Not anymore,” Doumeki reminded him.
“But…”
“She probably thought you were too busy to deal with it. You were right in the middle of yelling at the race coordinator at the time.”
“You could have said something earlier!”
“It hadn’t come up yet,” said Doumeki dismissively.
“Is there anything else on there I should know about?” said Watanuki tersely, clearly expecting the answer to be ‘yes’.
Doumeki handed over the note with a shrug and waited while Watanuki’s eyes scanned frantically over it, line by line.
“But… this means we’ll have to reschedule practically everything!” he bemoaned.
“Dragonfly race takes priority,” agreed Doumeki, with another shrug. “That and tea with Sakura a couple of times a week.”
Watanuki was barely listening, pads and calendars and at least one extra keyboard were appearing around him like magic. “Why couldn’t she have only let me know sooner? Of course the race takes priority, but we can’t just put everything else off indefinitely. I’m gong to have to find space the week after for…”
“Why?” said Doumeki.
“Why what?” Watanuki did not remotely appreciate the intrusion on his thought process.
“Why can’t we just cancel everything?”
Watanuki glared at him. “We can’t just go around cancelling important meetings! Things have to be booked! Confirmed! There are half a dozen different people I’ll need to personally phone to get every one of these cancelled! The very reputation of the Daidouji empire is at stake!”
“So?” said Doumeki. “With the media circus around the dragonfly race, we’ve got reputation to burn. Cancel any of those meetings now and tell them we can’t reschedule until the end of the month, and they’ll come charging back at the first chance you give them begging for any time you might available.”
The look this earned him was shrewd and surprised, like it had only just occurred to Watanuki that their new personal assistant’s personal assistant might actually be in possession of a working brain, and he hadn’t quite decided wither this was a good thing yet.
“Plus, this way we can go home early,” Doumeki added, which may have been a mistake.
They didn’t get out of there early that night. The mere suggestion of leaving early was such utter blasphemy to Watanuki’s personal work-based religion that Doumeki lost all the points he’d had towards the recognition of his brain-ownership, and didn’t get them back for some time.
It was a fair while before the subject of leaving early came up again.
(How Doumeki eventually convinces Watanuki to take some time off work to relax, how Watanuki responds to his attempts and whether any of this ever takes place in the office supply closet I leave to the capable imaginations of my readers. ^_~)
More shall be coming soon. ^_^
ETA: Quick links to the other two batches
Round 2: Movies, medieval times and hired gunmen (and more pirates)
Round 3: Superheros and lands post apocalypse (and more Piffle Country)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-07-09 05:31 pm (UTC)100/10. Here, have some intarwebs. &hearts
=darkfox200
no subject
Date: 2007-07-10 02:10 am (UTC)And if you'd like more vampires from this fandom, I'm not the first to write any.