[Guilty Gear fic] Fifty Sol/Ky sentences
Sep. 15th, 2008 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopChallenge-fic, written for theme set Epsilon from the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
1sentenceorder. Fifty sentences, each based on a one-word theme - some silly, some serious, a few quite distinctly smutty; spread all over the GG timeline, generally unconnected and as likely as not to contradict each other. As long as it fits the theme, pretty much anything goes here. aphelion_orion gets credit for (accidentally) putting me on to the challenge and egging me on, thanks also to velithya for betaing.
Pairing: Sol/Ky
Rating:: R
Word Count: 3600
Warnings: As noted above, a fair few are of the mildly-to-seriously smutty persuasion. Those of you who've been around a while may notice this makes this about the first time I've seriously attempted to write anything which needed an R rating for that reason, so uh, yeah. Be warned for that too.
Also be warned for semi-colon abuse, excessive hyphenation and other cheap tactics to compress what should really be several sentences down into one. Part of the reason I tried out this challenge was that I thought it would be a good way to practice getting something across in one sentence without getting overly wordy or trying to cram too much in. The irony is not lost on me.
Other Notes:
I'm hoping it'll be fairly obvious whereabouts most of them came from, but for the record, here's a quick list of which was meant to be set when:
Set in the present era: #8, #13, #20, #24, #26, #27, #30 (specifically the first GG game), #35, #38, #45
War era: #1, #2, #3, #5, #9, #12, #14, #17, #18, #19, #21, #23, #29, #31, #32, #33, #34, #36, #39, #41, #44 (whoo boy, clearly I am not over my fixation on that era yet)
GGX Drama CDs: #8, #24 (loosely inspired by)
Side Black AU: #7
And for those that might not catch it, #10 contains reference to their shared battle stage.
#01 – Walking
A casual stroll around the grounds of the Order headquarters is one of the simpler luxuries Ky affords himself when off duty, though Sol is generally more inclined to find some obscure corner where he’s not likely to be found to lounge in; and when they do encounter one another (more often than probability should really allow for) both invariably blame the other for getting in their way.
#02 - Waltz
The Holy Order ball was enough of a joke to begin with, what with half the guests constantly looking over their shoulders half-expecting the whole affair to be interrupted by a surprise Gear attack any second, but what made it for Sol was the discovery that even if Ky might fight like a trained dancer, the endless string of trodden-on toes and hasty apologies to that equally long string of hopeful girls that the pretty young captain was always too polite to turn down proved beyond a shadow of doubt that Ky couldn’t actually dance to save his life.
#03 – Wishes
The closest thing to an honest answer about what he wanted most during the war years that anyone could ever have gotten out of Sol would have been, “Justice’s body at my feet”; from Ky, “Peace” would have done, though neither of them would have had any more idea than the other what they would have done next after they got it.
#04 – Wonder
After so many engagements ended with the battlefield enveloped in flame, so many half-glimpsed moments of inhuman power that took his breath away and made him question his own memory, so many lost matches between them, even the headband he knew was more than a simple accessory, Ky had to wonder how he hadn’t realised sooner that Sol was more than human.
#05 – Worry
The trouble with the question, “Were you worried about me?” is that all possible answers were equally bad – “Yes” admitted far too much, “No” would have proven he’d known all along that the kid was nowhere near out of his depth, and the problem with “Why would I have been worried?” was that the odds were Ky already had too much idea about the answer.
#06 – Whimsy
There was one time when he’d been half-asleep that Sol caught Ky playing with his hair, which got him a bright red, flustered bed-mate, a burst of awkward stuttering that sounded something like an admission about liking Sol’s hair, and the more private admission in the safety of his own head that maybe he didn’t mind having his hair played with a bit if the rest of this scene was what came with it.
#07 - Waste/Wasteland
Ten years commanding that godforsaken army – ten years watching what was left of the world crumble into ruin faster than ever before, but Sol didn’t even realise just how much he’d given up on the inside until the day he saw Justice torn apart by his own hands and it dawned on him that even if this was the end it wasn’t his victory, and the person he’d been fighting for these last years wouldn’t even be around to see them win.
#08 - Whiskey and rum
If Sol had cared enough to set that bothersome woman from the bar straight, he would have had to tell her the truth was his sexual preferences were only the beginning of why he wasn’t interested, because she also wasn’t blond with a weird fixation on white and blue clothing, wasn’t French, wasn’t in the police and hadn’t ever lead an army, wasn’t a religious nutjob, couldn’t kill a dozen Gears in under three minutes, had no overblown hero complex he was aware of, had never tracked him halfway across the world to challenge him to one unwinnable duel and would need to know him at least another five years to become nearly as annoying - so in reality it was a good thing Sol was a long way short of being drunk enough to say anything on the subject at all.
#09 – War
It was like some kind of fucking joke – when no-one in this kid’s generation or even two or three before him had known anything but war, and yet he was still so determined he’d been born just to end it; but the punchline – the really good bit – was that he just might have been right.
#10 – Weddings
There are only the two of them in the setting of the ornate old church on this day – no minister, no guests nor anything else to mark the occasion, yet Ky knows beyond words or meaning that what lies between him and his opponent is something deeper and more sacred than anything else ever celebrated in this place before.
#11 – Birthday
It was all so sudden – Sol showing up at his home out of the blue and uttering only the briefest of explanations before shoving him up against the nearest wall and demonstrating very effectively over the rest of the evening just how much of their antagonism over the years had always been no more than poorly repressed sexual tension, simmered to truly dangerous levels after so long – that Ky never did quite get around to asking Sol why now of all days; was someone's eighteenth birthday supposed to mean something?
#12 – Blessing
In an ideal world where black and white were as clearly defined as the scriptures had always taught him, it would have been easy to write off the disciplinary nightmare known as Sol as the curse on the Order’s ranks he had always clearly been, but in an ideal world, he wouldn’t have just had to save Ky’s life for the second time that year, either.
#13 – Bias
The officers at the IPF have come to understand that if a case comes up involving a Badguy-comma-Sol (wanted in connection with the exchange of money over several distinctly non-state sanctioned bounties, for theft, arson, aggravated property damage, aggravated assault and more arson, extremely dangerous, do not approach without backup and full air support) then Captain Ky is to be notified before anyone else, allowed to take charge of the case and even order everyone else off it if it comes to that – but that’s perfectly fine and sensible, because no-one else knows nearly as much about Sol as he does, and he’d know how to handle things sensibly with a cool, objective head, wouldn’t he?
#14 – Burning
Ky is the only one who was present at the sealing of Justice who came away with an image burned into the back of his retinas of a man wreathed in flame, but for all that no-one else recalls seeing anything of the sort, he’s never doubted that was exactly what he saw.
#15 – Breathing
Whereas Sol can drive him crazy with little more than one lingering touch, it’s frustratingly difficult for Ky to evoke any so obvious reaction with anything he does to Sol – but that’s not all bad, it also means that the rare moment when he does find a way to get so much as a telltale hitch in his breathing, it’s all the more satisfying.
#16 – Breaking
Only once - when the final showdown against the Gearmaker was coming to its close - has Ky seen anything come close to breaking Sol, and it seems horribly selfish to admit even to himself that he'd felt his whole world had nearly shattered too in response to that moment.
#17 – Belief
"You're late again, Sol," was all the kid said when he shoved the carcass off him and yanked him to his feet, which was sheer nonsense because it wasn’t like Sol had even been planning on coming to bail him out until two minutes ago so there was no way in hell the boy could’ve had any idea he was on his way at all.
#18 – Balloon
There are worse ways to go than Gear-gas – the child he finds with one hand still tangled in the string of the gently bobbing balloon looks almost peaceful; but they’re here to look for survivors, not bodies, so Sol never has to justify his failure to mention to his Commander what he found down that alleyway.
#19 – Balcony (set after ‘Waltz’)
Ky is so stressed and frazzled by the time he stumbles out on to the balcony that it takes him nearly a minute to realise he’s not alone, but the colour his face turns when he realises that Sol is not only there but has been watching his failed antics for most of the evening is well worth the interruption to the quiet smoke he was enjoying.
#20 – Bane
A lot of people would laugh if they heard that the person Sol lately considers the bane of his existence is no longer Justice or even That Man, but the thing was, he'd never had either of them on his back every single day, had he?
#21 - Quiet
With so many people crammed in between too few walls, privacy is a luxury not even the highest ranked Holy Order officers enjoy; but in deference to what little there is to be salvaged, the following morning, no-one asks why Ky’s bottom lip looks like it’s been bitten long and hard to keep any sound from escaping.
#22 – Quirks
The trouble with expressing your disbelief over someone else’s fixation on music by a band close to two centuries deceased was that your own well-known hobby of collecting decorative pieces of drinking china didn’t give you much ground to stand on.
#23 – Question
A lot of people might have questioned the wisdom of Kliff’s decision to put a disrespectful ex-bounty hunter under the command of a teenaged religious fanatic, but that only went to show that there were some things anyone without fifty long years of hard experience could never hope to see.
#24 - Quarrel
“Ahahaha, oh the Chief and me we go way back, and between you and me,” said Axl, swinging a conspiratal arm around the latest annoying woman’s neck while Sol quietly wished a painful death on both of them, “him and his sweetheart, they have these awful little domestics to-dos, if-you-get-what-I-mean, and he’s never fit company for anyone until they make up, so why don’t we just leave him to sulk into his beer for a bit, huh?”
#25 - Quitting
It’s well known that love makes you stupid, and a smoking habit doesn’t even count as stupid when you’ve got Gear-physiology to guarantee your health, so it wasn’t until he'd been turning down his own cigarettes for two weeks solid after no more than a couple of coughs from Ky that Sol realised quite how far gone he was.
#26 – Jump
It was going to be a clever ambush –Ky didn't do these things without planning them - but somehow this thing happened involving Sol moving right instead of left while Ky landed just a little too far forward, and by the time they were finished with the ensuing burst rolling and tumbling and a lot of very emphatic swearing, someone had wound up straddling someone else, several belts of uncertain ownership were loose, no-one had a grip on either weapon anymore, and suddenly Ky was finding that remembering what the plan had been originally was a lot harder than it had any right to be.
#27 – Jester
Ky had known Axl Low casually ever since the tournament of 2180, and had for the most part believed and sympathised with the man’s stories of his timeslipping plight, but always found it easier to assume mentions of The Photograph must be some sort of joke – it saved Ky having to wonder about an awful lot of things he wasn't sure he wanted the answers to.
#28 – Jousting
Every battle he’s ever fought against Ky has been a farce, the only real challenge in judging precisely how much to hold back - but Sol still has to make sure to keep on reminding himself how tedious it is just to be sure he doesn’t find himself enjoying it by accident one of these days.
#29 – Jewel
It takes far more than the ability to recognise raw material, forged to the finest structure under unearthly pressures; it has to be refined with professional care and placed in a setting that will display its true potential - potential only the most experienced of craftsmen (whether retiring commander or faceless immortal scientist) would ever have seen there at all.
#30 – Just(ice)
She was saying something to the boy when Sol threw the crushed remains of his headband aside and staggered back to his feet, something that had halted his offensive and left him frozen to the spot, but Sol didn’t hear what and sure as hell didn’t stop to ask.
#31 – Smirk
“Only the ones on the left? Why, that’s much less than half – I’ll be done with them before you’re halfway through your own claim,” Ky declares, surprised at how close he is to smiling at the sight of the solid wall of medium-class Gears massing in front of them; and when Sol replies, “Wanna bet?” with none of his usual mockery and every inch the grin of a connoisseur anticipating a really good fight, Ky takes him up on it without the slightest moment wasted on the worthless notion that battles like this aren’t meant to be treated like a game.
#32 – Sorrow
It’s part of war, there to see in the ruins of any town where they’re lucky enough to pull a few survivors out of the wreckage, and naturally Ky’s always there to offer the wounded and grieving as much comfort as they’re able; but the way he hardens the moment he turns away from them, already every inch prepared for the next chance they’ll get to make the enemy pay for what they leave in their wake – that’s always something to see.
#33 – Stupidity
He knows it’s stupid, no more than situational attraction – a teenaged crush brought on for the most perverse of reasons (and Lord knows he’s spent long enough convincing himself there’s no other possible reason why his taste could be this bad) but none of that objectivity is any use against the way his mouth goes dry at the sight of Sol striding out of battle, uniform artistically torn where it hasn’t been burned off, sweaty and as smug and satisfied after a good fight as he’s ever been.
#34 – Serenade
Even from the other side of the courtyard and with the melodious strains of Sheer Heart Attack to compete with, every word was clearly audible when Ky slammed his window open and hollered, “Sol, it is the middle of the night – TURN THAT MUSIC DOWN!"
#35 – Sarcasm
"Oh, I'm sure you just happened to be in the same town where there just happened to be three very important buildings on fire at once and... Sol, this isn't a laughing matter!"
#36 - Sordid
Later, it's going to be much harder to blame all this on a temporary lapse of judgement brought on while they're both high on adrenaline and victory - a resounding, glorious, insane gamble of a skin-of-your-teeth victory that left their uniforms so bloodied and torn there was nothing to be wasted by ripping away what was left; but right now, buried in the heat of Sol’s body, there’s no room for thought, and ‘later’ seems a very long way away.
#37 – Soliloquy
It was that private, crazy thing he'd always-never bothered seriously wishing for: an impossible scenario where he could have had the sense to see that crazy experiment for the train-wreck it was going to be before he ever made the mistake of volunteering for it, and never became anything more than human; but these days, even more privately, he's got to admit there's one or two things in that scenario he'd have missed not being around for.
#38 – Sojourn
The trail is long gone cold by the time their investigations leads them to the empty room in the cheap hotel; nonetheless, when Captain Ky personally dedicates twenty minutes to examining every corner before declaring, “He was here,” no-one doubts him for a moment.
#39 – Share
After ten minutes, he was so fed up with feeling Ky’s eyes boring into him that he actually proffered the whiskey bottle and said, “What, you want some?” and startled his watcher so much that he actually got a polite refusal out of it rather than a lecture on the evils of drinking.
#40 - Solitary
He was a man admired by millions, all but worshiped by those directly under his command; a hero who had never allowed fame to strip him of his charisma or induce him to forget to treat every member of his fellow men with manners and respect; and yet even with all such qualities it was strange to note how few people could have said they really knew him, or how few would have felt they had the right to call him a friend.
#41 – Nowhere
Ky had already had his men search every corner of the Order’s headquarters three times over by the time news of the theft of the Fuuenken reached his ears, but by then it came as no surprise, no more than confirmation of what part of him had known from the first moment Sol failed to appear that morning – he was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.
#42 – Neutral
Between Justice’s (preliminary) defeat and the day Sol came back to do the job properly and commit to tracking the Gearmaker himself down once and for all, those five years of ‘peace’ were some of the dullest of his life, spent mostly tracking down the odd stray Gear or unexciting bounty and putting off several inevitable reunions he should have known were lurking somewhere in his future – Justice’s only one of them.
#43 – Nuance
The first time it happened, Sol was actually surprisingly tentative with every touch, as if he didn’t quite remember how this was supposed to work and didn’t quite believe it was happening at all; but apparently there was a variant of reverse psychology even for the most intimate of situations, for rather than reinforcing his own doubts, Ky found himself savouring every brush of fingertips all the more for that, modulating every sound he let escape to let Sol know that this was alright, that there was nothing he wouldn’t give for every moment of what passed between them, nothing he could imagine wanting more than this.
#44 – Near
By the time Sol got Ky back after the battle of Rome, the boy was so close to being asleep on his feet that it was easier to carry him than keep propping him up every time he stumbled – and once off his feet he really did fall asleep almost before he’d finished protesting, which could only dump Sol in the uncomfortable surprise conclusion that the brat really had been out of it enough to mean what he’d said back there about feeling safe as long as he knew a certain someone was around.
#45 – Natural
The occasions when Sol shows up voluntarily wanting something more intimate than their meetings out in the world are rare, unpredictable and triggered by nothing Ky can begin to guess at, nor have they done anything to resolve their antagonism during daylight hours, but neither has it ever once seriously occurred to him to turn Sol away.
#46 – Horizon
There was one night when Ky watched the horizon ahead of them for an hour from the airship’s deck, noting absently the way they’d be able to go on travelling towards it forever without ever reaching it, but never quite managing to put his finger on why the thought seemed so familiar.
#47 – Valiant
Ky calls it their duty - to take every risk and make every effort to save even a single human life; Sol calls it pointless heroics; and the other men watch them argue the same old argument for the hundredth time, carefully not voicing aloud the guilty thought that they might have to agree with their beloved Commander’s enemy, even just a little, if only it meant they didn’t have to see the Commander himself risk life and limb so very often.
#48 – Virtuous
The clause about virtue which appeared in one of the more poetic parts of the Order’s code was probably the last piece anyone else would ever have credited Sol with following, but after three seriously frustrated years of not jumping their teenaged commander every other minute, Sol thought he about deserved a fucking medal for it.
#49 – Victory
Ky’s sure he should have been more disturbed when his matches against Sol started regularly devolving from honest combat into sweat and torn clothing, matches that became competitions only to see who could make the other come faster – especially given he’s no better at winning this new variant; and yet, somehow, even from second place, the look on Sol’s face when Ky’s efforts finally do bring him over the edge might feel more like victory than anything he’s ever experienced before.
#50 – Defeat
It seems like at least a thousand times over now he’s felt it, the burn of shame hotter than Sol’s fire, those casual words (you’re still a boy, give it up already) dismissing the skill he’s spent so many years refining without his effort ever bearing fruit; and yet, it’s never once weakened his resolve that next time – next time – they’ll settle this the way he’s always known it’s meant to end.
1sentenceorder. Fifty sentences, each based on a one-word theme - some silly, some serious, a few quite distinctly smutty; spread all over the GG timeline, generally unconnected and as likely as not to contradict each other. As long as it fits the theme, pretty much anything goes here. aphelion_orion gets credit for (accidentally) putting me on to the challenge and egging me on, thanks also to velithya for betaing. Pairing: Sol/Ky
Rating:: R
Word Count: 3600
Warnings: As noted above, a fair few are of the mildly-to-seriously smutty persuasion. Those of you who've been around a while may notice this makes this about the first time I've seriously attempted to write anything which needed an R rating for that reason, so uh, yeah. Be warned for that too.
Also be warned for semi-colon abuse, excessive hyphenation and other cheap tactics to compress what should really be several sentences down into one. Part of the reason I tried out this challenge was that I thought it would be a good way to practice getting something across in one sentence without getting overly wordy or trying to cram too much in. The irony is not lost on me.
Other Notes:
I'm hoping it'll be fairly obvious whereabouts most of them came from, but for the record, here's a quick list of which was meant to be set when:
Set in the present era: #8, #13, #20, #24, #26, #27, #30 (specifically the first GG game), #35, #38, #45
War era: #1, #2, #3, #5, #9, #12, #14, #17, #18, #19, #21, #23, #29, #31, #32, #33, #34, #36, #39, #41, #44 (whoo boy, clearly I am not over my fixation on that era yet)
GGX Drama CDs: #8, #24 (loosely inspired by)
Side Black AU: #7
And for those that might not catch it, #10 contains reference to their shared battle stage.
#01 – Walking
A casual stroll around the grounds of the Order headquarters is one of the simpler luxuries Ky affords himself when off duty, though Sol is generally more inclined to find some obscure corner where he’s not likely to be found to lounge in; and when they do encounter one another (more often than probability should really allow for) both invariably blame the other for getting in their way.
#02 - Waltz
The Holy Order ball was enough of a joke to begin with, what with half the guests constantly looking over their shoulders half-expecting the whole affair to be interrupted by a surprise Gear attack any second, but what made it for Sol was the discovery that even if Ky might fight like a trained dancer, the endless string of trodden-on toes and hasty apologies to that equally long string of hopeful girls that the pretty young captain was always too polite to turn down proved beyond a shadow of doubt that Ky couldn’t actually dance to save his life.
#03 – Wishes
The closest thing to an honest answer about what he wanted most during the war years that anyone could ever have gotten out of Sol would have been, “Justice’s body at my feet”; from Ky, “Peace” would have done, though neither of them would have had any more idea than the other what they would have done next after they got it.
#04 – Wonder
After so many engagements ended with the battlefield enveloped in flame, so many half-glimpsed moments of inhuman power that took his breath away and made him question his own memory, so many lost matches between them, even the headband he knew was more than a simple accessory, Ky had to wonder how he hadn’t realised sooner that Sol was more than human.
#05 – Worry
The trouble with the question, “Were you worried about me?” is that all possible answers were equally bad – “Yes” admitted far too much, “No” would have proven he’d known all along that the kid was nowhere near out of his depth, and the problem with “Why would I have been worried?” was that the odds were Ky already had too much idea about the answer.
#06 – Whimsy
There was one time when he’d been half-asleep that Sol caught Ky playing with his hair, which got him a bright red, flustered bed-mate, a burst of awkward stuttering that sounded something like an admission about liking Sol’s hair, and the more private admission in the safety of his own head that maybe he didn’t mind having his hair played with a bit if the rest of this scene was what came with it.
#07 - Waste/Wasteland
Ten years commanding that godforsaken army – ten years watching what was left of the world crumble into ruin faster than ever before, but Sol didn’t even realise just how much he’d given up on the inside until the day he saw Justice torn apart by his own hands and it dawned on him that even if this was the end it wasn’t his victory, and the person he’d been fighting for these last years wouldn’t even be around to see them win.
#08 - Whiskey and rum
If Sol had cared enough to set that bothersome woman from the bar straight, he would have had to tell her the truth was his sexual preferences were only the beginning of why he wasn’t interested, because she also wasn’t blond with a weird fixation on white and blue clothing, wasn’t French, wasn’t in the police and hadn’t ever lead an army, wasn’t a religious nutjob, couldn’t kill a dozen Gears in under three minutes, had no overblown hero complex he was aware of, had never tracked him halfway across the world to challenge him to one unwinnable duel and would need to know him at least another five years to become nearly as annoying - so in reality it was a good thing Sol was a long way short of being drunk enough to say anything on the subject at all.
#09 – War
It was like some kind of fucking joke – when no-one in this kid’s generation or even two or three before him had known anything but war, and yet he was still so determined he’d been born just to end it; but the punchline – the really good bit – was that he just might have been right.
#10 – Weddings
There are only the two of them in the setting of the ornate old church on this day – no minister, no guests nor anything else to mark the occasion, yet Ky knows beyond words or meaning that what lies between him and his opponent is something deeper and more sacred than anything else ever celebrated in this place before.
#11 – Birthday
It was all so sudden – Sol showing up at his home out of the blue and uttering only the briefest of explanations before shoving him up against the nearest wall and demonstrating very effectively over the rest of the evening just how much of their antagonism over the years had always been no more than poorly repressed sexual tension, simmered to truly dangerous levels after so long – that Ky never did quite get around to asking Sol why now of all days; was someone's eighteenth birthday supposed to mean something?
#12 – Blessing
In an ideal world where black and white were as clearly defined as the scriptures had always taught him, it would have been easy to write off the disciplinary nightmare known as Sol as the curse on the Order’s ranks he had always clearly been, but in an ideal world, he wouldn’t have just had to save Ky’s life for the second time that year, either.
#13 – Bias
The officers at the IPF have come to understand that if a case comes up involving a Badguy-comma-Sol (wanted in connection with the exchange of money over several distinctly non-state sanctioned bounties, for theft, arson, aggravated property damage, aggravated assault and more arson, extremely dangerous, do not approach without backup and full air support) then Captain Ky is to be notified before anyone else, allowed to take charge of the case and even order everyone else off it if it comes to that – but that’s perfectly fine and sensible, because no-one else knows nearly as much about Sol as he does, and he’d know how to handle things sensibly with a cool, objective head, wouldn’t he?
#14 – Burning
Ky is the only one who was present at the sealing of Justice who came away with an image burned into the back of his retinas of a man wreathed in flame, but for all that no-one else recalls seeing anything of the sort, he’s never doubted that was exactly what he saw.
#15 – Breathing
Whereas Sol can drive him crazy with little more than one lingering touch, it’s frustratingly difficult for Ky to evoke any so obvious reaction with anything he does to Sol – but that’s not all bad, it also means that the rare moment when he does find a way to get so much as a telltale hitch in his breathing, it’s all the more satisfying.
#16 – Breaking
Only once - when the final showdown against the Gearmaker was coming to its close - has Ky seen anything come close to breaking Sol, and it seems horribly selfish to admit even to himself that he'd felt his whole world had nearly shattered too in response to that moment.
#17 – Belief
"You're late again, Sol," was all the kid said when he shoved the carcass off him and yanked him to his feet, which was sheer nonsense because it wasn’t like Sol had even been planning on coming to bail him out until two minutes ago so there was no way in hell the boy could’ve had any idea he was on his way at all.
#18 – Balloon
There are worse ways to go than Gear-gas – the child he finds with one hand still tangled in the string of the gently bobbing balloon looks almost peaceful; but they’re here to look for survivors, not bodies, so Sol never has to justify his failure to mention to his Commander what he found down that alleyway.
#19 – Balcony (set after ‘Waltz’)
Ky is so stressed and frazzled by the time he stumbles out on to the balcony that it takes him nearly a minute to realise he’s not alone, but the colour his face turns when he realises that Sol is not only there but has been watching his failed antics for most of the evening is well worth the interruption to the quiet smoke he was enjoying.
#20 – Bane
A lot of people would laugh if they heard that the person Sol lately considers the bane of his existence is no longer Justice or even That Man, but the thing was, he'd never had either of them on his back every single day, had he?
#21 - Quiet
With so many people crammed in between too few walls, privacy is a luxury not even the highest ranked Holy Order officers enjoy; but in deference to what little there is to be salvaged, the following morning, no-one asks why Ky’s bottom lip looks like it’s been bitten long and hard to keep any sound from escaping.
#22 – Quirks
The trouble with expressing your disbelief over someone else’s fixation on music by a band close to two centuries deceased was that your own well-known hobby of collecting decorative pieces of drinking china didn’t give you much ground to stand on.
#23 – Question
A lot of people might have questioned the wisdom of Kliff’s decision to put a disrespectful ex-bounty hunter under the command of a teenaged religious fanatic, but that only went to show that there were some things anyone without fifty long years of hard experience could never hope to see.
#24 - Quarrel
“Ahahaha, oh the Chief and me we go way back, and between you and me,” said Axl, swinging a conspiratal arm around the latest annoying woman’s neck while Sol quietly wished a painful death on both of them, “him and his sweetheart, they have these awful little domestics to-dos, if-you-get-what-I-mean, and he’s never fit company for anyone until they make up, so why don’t we just leave him to sulk into his beer for a bit, huh?”
#25 - Quitting
It’s well known that love makes you stupid, and a smoking habit doesn’t even count as stupid when you’ve got Gear-physiology to guarantee your health, so it wasn’t until he'd been turning down his own cigarettes for two weeks solid after no more than a couple of coughs from Ky that Sol realised quite how far gone he was.
#26 – Jump
It was going to be a clever ambush –Ky didn't do these things without planning them - but somehow this thing happened involving Sol moving right instead of left while Ky landed just a little too far forward, and by the time they were finished with the ensuing burst rolling and tumbling and a lot of very emphatic swearing, someone had wound up straddling someone else, several belts of uncertain ownership were loose, no-one had a grip on either weapon anymore, and suddenly Ky was finding that remembering what the plan had been originally was a lot harder than it had any right to be.
#27 – Jester
Ky had known Axl Low casually ever since the tournament of 2180, and had for the most part believed and sympathised with the man’s stories of his timeslipping plight, but always found it easier to assume mentions of The Photograph must be some sort of joke – it saved Ky having to wonder about an awful lot of things he wasn't sure he wanted the answers to.
#28 – Jousting
Every battle he’s ever fought against Ky has been a farce, the only real challenge in judging precisely how much to hold back - but Sol still has to make sure to keep on reminding himself how tedious it is just to be sure he doesn’t find himself enjoying it by accident one of these days.
#29 – Jewel
It takes far more than the ability to recognise raw material, forged to the finest structure under unearthly pressures; it has to be refined with professional care and placed in a setting that will display its true potential - potential only the most experienced of craftsmen (whether retiring commander or faceless immortal scientist) would ever have seen there at all.
#30 – Just(ice)
She was saying something to the boy when Sol threw the crushed remains of his headband aside and staggered back to his feet, something that had halted his offensive and left him frozen to the spot, but Sol didn’t hear what and sure as hell didn’t stop to ask.
#31 – Smirk
“Only the ones on the left? Why, that’s much less than half – I’ll be done with them before you’re halfway through your own claim,” Ky declares, surprised at how close he is to smiling at the sight of the solid wall of medium-class Gears massing in front of them; and when Sol replies, “Wanna bet?” with none of his usual mockery and every inch the grin of a connoisseur anticipating a really good fight, Ky takes him up on it without the slightest moment wasted on the worthless notion that battles like this aren’t meant to be treated like a game.
#32 – Sorrow
It’s part of war, there to see in the ruins of any town where they’re lucky enough to pull a few survivors out of the wreckage, and naturally Ky’s always there to offer the wounded and grieving as much comfort as they’re able; but the way he hardens the moment he turns away from them, already every inch prepared for the next chance they’ll get to make the enemy pay for what they leave in their wake – that’s always something to see.
#33 – Stupidity
He knows it’s stupid, no more than situational attraction – a teenaged crush brought on for the most perverse of reasons (and Lord knows he’s spent long enough convincing himself there’s no other possible reason why his taste could be this bad) but none of that objectivity is any use against the way his mouth goes dry at the sight of Sol striding out of battle, uniform artistically torn where it hasn’t been burned off, sweaty and as smug and satisfied after a good fight as he’s ever been.
#34 – Serenade
Even from the other side of the courtyard and with the melodious strains of Sheer Heart Attack to compete with, every word was clearly audible when Ky slammed his window open and hollered, “Sol, it is the middle of the night – TURN THAT MUSIC DOWN!"
#35 – Sarcasm
"Oh, I'm sure you just happened to be in the same town where there just happened to be three very important buildings on fire at once and... Sol, this isn't a laughing matter!"
#36 - Sordid
Later, it's going to be much harder to blame all this on a temporary lapse of judgement brought on while they're both high on adrenaline and victory - a resounding, glorious, insane gamble of a skin-of-your-teeth victory that left their uniforms so bloodied and torn there was nothing to be wasted by ripping away what was left; but right now, buried in the heat of Sol’s body, there’s no room for thought, and ‘later’ seems a very long way away.
#37 – Soliloquy
It was that private, crazy thing he'd always-never bothered seriously wishing for: an impossible scenario where he could have had the sense to see that crazy experiment for the train-wreck it was going to be before he ever made the mistake of volunteering for it, and never became anything more than human; but these days, even more privately, he's got to admit there's one or two things in that scenario he'd have missed not being around for.
#38 – Sojourn
The trail is long gone cold by the time their investigations leads them to the empty room in the cheap hotel; nonetheless, when Captain Ky personally dedicates twenty minutes to examining every corner before declaring, “He was here,” no-one doubts him for a moment.
#39 – Share
After ten minutes, he was so fed up with feeling Ky’s eyes boring into him that he actually proffered the whiskey bottle and said, “What, you want some?” and startled his watcher so much that he actually got a polite refusal out of it rather than a lecture on the evils of drinking.
#40 - Solitary
He was a man admired by millions, all but worshiped by those directly under his command; a hero who had never allowed fame to strip him of his charisma or induce him to forget to treat every member of his fellow men with manners and respect; and yet even with all such qualities it was strange to note how few people could have said they really knew him, or how few would have felt they had the right to call him a friend.
#41 – Nowhere
Ky had already had his men search every corner of the Order’s headquarters three times over by the time news of the theft of the Fuuenken reached his ears, but by then it came as no surprise, no more than confirmation of what part of him had known from the first moment Sol failed to appear that morning – he was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.
#42 – Neutral
Between Justice’s (preliminary) defeat and the day Sol came back to do the job properly and commit to tracking the Gearmaker himself down once and for all, those five years of ‘peace’ were some of the dullest of his life, spent mostly tracking down the odd stray Gear or unexciting bounty and putting off several inevitable reunions he should have known were lurking somewhere in his future – Justice’s only one of them.
#43 – Nuance
The first time it happened, Sol was actually surprisingly tentative with every touch, as if he didn’t quite remember how this was supposed to work and didn’t quite believe it was happening at all; but apparently there was a variant of reverse psychology even for the most intimate of situations, for rather than reinforcing his own doubts, Ky found himself savouring every brush of fingertips all the more for that, modulating every sound he let escape to let Sol know that this was alright, that there was nothing he wouldn’t give for every moment of what passed between them, nothing he could imagine wanting more than this.
#44 – Near
By the time Sol got Ky back after the battle of Rome, the boy was so close to being asleep on his feet that it was easier to carry him than keep propping him up every time he stumbled – and once off his feet he really did fall asleep almost before he’d finished protesting, which could only dump Sol in the uncomfortable surprise conclusion that the brat really had been out of it enough to mean what he’d said back there about feeling safe as long as he knew a certain someone was around.
#45 – Natural
The occasions when Sol shows up voluntarily wanting something more intimate than their meetings out in the world are rare, unpredictable and triggered by nothing Ky can begin to guess at, nor have they done anything to resolve their antagonism during daylight hours, but neither has it ever once seriously occurred to him to turn Sol away.
#46 – Horizon
There was one night when Ky watched the horizon ahead of them for an hour from the airship’s deck, noting absently the way they’d be able to go on travelling towards it forever without ever reaching it, but never quite managing to put his finger on why the thought seemed so familiar.
#47 – Valiant
Ky calls it their duty - to take every risk and make every effort to save even a single human life; Sol calls it pointless heroics; and the other men watch them argue the same old argument for the hundredth time, carefully not voicing aloud the guilty thought that they might have to agree with their beloved Commander’s enemy, even just a little, if only it meant they didn’t have to see the Commander himself risk life and limb so very often.
#48 – Virtuous
The clause about virtue which appeared in one of the more poetic parts of the Order’s code was probably the last piece anyone else would ever have credited Sol with following, but after three seriously frustrated years of not jumping their teenaged commander every other minute, Sol thought he about deserved a fucking medal for it.
#49 – Victory
Ky’s sure he should have been more disturbed when his matches against Sol started regularly devolving from honest combat into sweat and torn clothing, matches that became competitions only to see who could make the other come faster – especially given he’s no better at winning this new variant; and yet, somehow, even from second place, the look on Sol’s face when Ky’s efforts finally do bring him over the edge might feel more like victory than anything he’s ever experienced before.
#50 – Defeat
It seems like at least a thousand times over now he’s felt it, the burn of shame hotter than Sol’s fire, those casual words (you’re still a boy, give it up already) dismissing the skill he’s spent so many years refining without his effort ever bearing fruit; and yet, it’s never once weakened his resolve that next time – next time – they’ll settle this the way he’s always known it’s meant to end.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 03:37 am (UTC)But the amusing thing about that question for me is that I and a friend are going to a cosplay ball in about a week dressed as Sol and Millia. I'm making a ball dress in Millia's colours to wear, but for her, the answer to 'what would Sol wear to a ball?' has been 'just his usual clothes'. Mostly on the logic that if Sol's showing up to a ball, it's probably only because there's a bounty on someone or a stray Gear about to burst through a wall or something else similarly likely to end in things blowing up. *g*
What exactly does your WIP pile consist of?
Well, right now (in no particular order) there's about three different ideas that are virtual PWPs, one war-era fic set right after Ky gets the Fuuraiken, one that would be a bunch of scenes set during the first game, an AU idea I just started, another one set in the Side Black AU... it's all a bit daunting.
I so need to start writing faster or I'm never going to clear it all.I'm planning to show my first real smut attempt to a couple of people I can rely on to let me know if it's terrible before it gets released to the greater Internet. Given, a lot of people out there are just all 'yay smut!' whatever the quality of the writing, but I'm hoping I can do better than relying on that level.
Glad to be of help! Don't think I can advise you much there, other than to say just go with whatever option would make you feel better about the result. As for betaing, I'll probably have to see how I'm going for free time when you're done (got a seriously hectic few months ahead of me).
I'll post a list of what's to come later if you're interested
As in for that fic particularly, or general WIPs?
no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 08:26 pm (UTC)A cosplay ball? What a neat event! As for Sol dressing up for a formal occasion, again, agreeing that he'd probably not, but I do so love Tohru's suit version. (If you haven't seen it, I can upload it later. Don't currently have it in my Photobucket.)
Wow, that's quite a pile of things to write. I can't wait to read your new stuff, but take your time. (I am of the opinion that rushed writing = bad writing.)
No rush on the beta-ing, the next few months are going to be plenty busy for me too. We do still need to go over Xtra stuff too, so let me know when you're free for that (again, I understand if you're busy)
As in for that fic in particularly, or general WIPs?
I meant it in general, but if you're interested in how UMN finishes up, I don't mind sharing via email or a filtered LJ post (whichever works best for you). I'll be making a post for the general stuff later this weekend after things have calmed down a bit.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-21 05:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-21 01:37 pm (UTC)Thanks for those pics, that suit actually suits Sol better than I would have thought. *g*
We do still need to go over Xtra stuff too, so let me know when you're free for that (again, I understand if you're busy)
The way the next couple of months are looking, I'm probably going to have to try and squeeze some time for that in even while I'm busy or it's never going to get done at this rate. ^^; Been meaning to make a post about my plans for the next couple of months if I can find a minute, it's going to be pretty hectic.
I think I'd rather stick with waiting to see the finished version on UMN, but I'd certainly be curious about other WIPs.
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Date: 2008-09-22 02:15 am (UTC)Well, let me know when you've got some time and I'll see what I can do. If we can't chat about it, then there is always emails.
Glad to hear you're looking forward to the end of UMN (it's been eating at my brain for so long, I'm a little sick of it XD The other WIPs I'm focusing on right now include a SolxKy PWP and a Kuro-KyxKy multi-part story (won't be as long as UMN). There's a lot of snippets for more Sol/Ky stuff I've yet to work into full stories sitting around too >_> Maybe I'll put together a collection of one-shots or something....
no subject
Date: 2008-09-23 06:00 am (UTC)I have to admit I've never quite felt the appeal of the Kuro-Kys most of Japanese fandom turns out, but naturally I'm curious about the other one, and a series of one-shots doesn't sound like a bad idea. Often it's the best way to get some use out of ideas that don't look likely to develop into anything longer.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 02:06 pm (UTC)Kuro-Ky/Ky is just something that grew on me, and there are no multi-part fics for it that I've ever come across so why not? It'll also give me the chance to write something really dark >3
The collection of one-shots might be something I just do periodically, like once every two weeks or so? (whenever I have the time to write)
The more I work on the PWP one, the more I convince myself that I should just stick to writing fluff >.