surskitty

One, I freaking /love/ ficprompts hell yes bring them on.

Two, I honestly have no earthly idea what you were expecting out of this particular prompt, but I highly suspect this wasn't it. well. whatever.

Three, I realized I have no idea whatsoever about the ages of anyone in your fic (and only vague guesses of them in actual canon; I know they're meant to be in middle school but come. on., neither Gokudera or Yamamoto, at the least, look thirteen-fourteen. try sixteen-seventeen. anyway.), but I imagined 'regular' aka tylSpanner for this. Soooo yeah. (I mean, from your notes thing, he'd probably have to be tyl-age to have done all the stuff he's done already. So I suppose I'm probably right.)


[ winning the red queen's race ]

He's got his headphones on, in the middle of fine-tuning the frequencies and rhythms on one of his many side-projects, but despite his state of oblivious concentration it's hard not to notice when his office door swings open and slams hard enough to rattle the books on the shelves.

"Hello, Hayato," he says around his sucker, without looking up from the laptop screen as he hears the boy throw himself roughly onto the couch behind him, without asking what's got him down today. He's encountered the boy in one of his 'moods' often enough (honestly, it's rarer to find him /not/ pissed off at whatever the world has seen fit to throw at him today) that he knows he'll talk when he's inclined to talk.

Right on schedule, "I'm leaving. I swear to god I am leaving this fucking hellhole today."

There's a refrain he's heard often enough. Though it's been more and more frequent within the past month. "What is it this time? Something blow up in your face?" He drops the headphones to his neck, patient enough to show polite interest in his troubles. The two had a semi-friendly rapport, at any rate, and Spanner didn't mind playing the part of oniisan when it came up.

"Tch." Amazing how the scornful half-syllable carried all the sarcastic tones to say 'don't insult me' without saying it. "It's these fucking grunts. They think if they suck up to me they can get in good with my father, or some shit like that, so they're tripping over themselves trying to 'help', breathing down my neck so I can't get any goddamn work done!" He can sense more than see the boy's arms thrown up in exasperation. "No help at /all/ on the porygon project; wouldn't know the difference between semtex and C4 if I shoved it up their asses and lit a match..." he grumbles more softly to himself, crossing his arms petulantly.

"I imagine that would make it difficult to discern between the two," he says blandly, dropping the beats per minute slightly and watching the visualisation adjust in kind. "Some people might be jealous of your ability to attract willing minions, Hayato." Nearly every time he uses the boy's given name, he has to resist the urge to tack on 'kun'. His first impression of the boy, however many months ago, came from hissed rumours through the robotics department's common room. He was a genius, he was a menace, he was absolutely terrifying, he was going to overthrow his father and conquer Silph and split it from Team Rocket and their division would be first against the wall when the revolution came.

Today Spanner could see how the first three were based in reality, but anyone who really knew the boy could never come to the conclusion of the fourth. 'Filial piety' was hardly the first (or second, or fortieth) phrase that came to mind to describe the father-son relationship there, to be sure, but Hayato didn't hold those sorts of ambitions.

(He wasn't sure what sort of ambitions the boy /did/ hold, and he didn't think Hayato knew either. Perhaps, on reflection, that was the cause behind his general restlessness.)

So when the boy had wandered in to the observation room one day as Spanner was knee-deep in trying to cut down on water resistance for a smokescreen torpedo, and offered a couple profanity-laden suggestions after looking at the problem for five minutes that solved what he had been pulling his hair out over for the past five days, he had known nothing about him besides that he was a part of Silph, intelligent, and liked giant robots. (Of course, the last one was no surprise. Who /didn't/ like giant robots.)

None except the pure amusement of it.

I fished this out from an ancient topic:

this bit isn't entirely done (I've fallen out of the writing-every-day habit, sob) but have a hooray-to-the-fickle-gods-of-flashdrives couple of paragraphs?


The breakers lap against their ankles as they walk along the coast, heading towards nowhere at a lazy pace. Haru's arms are crossed behind her head, and she digs her toes into the wet sand as she steps, with the occasional bubbling hole divulging the location of shellder beneath their feet.

It's a bit hard to make out -- yes, depth perception continues to elude her, but she manages to get by -- but she can see their campsite of sorts in the distance from here. A bit surprising that the gentle westerly shift of the waves was able to push them this far, but Chrome is in no hurry and hardly minds the walk. Thankfully the keystone appears to have remained -- she knows she's captured him in a pokéball before for insurance against just this situation, but she also knows spiritomb have the odd quality of turning up in large groups with no one knowing quite how they got there (least of all the spiritomb; it would not be Mukuro's choice to leave her for a gathering of people, certainly), and the two of them are hardly the largest group on the beach.

She runs that sentence through her head, surprised at herself. It would not be Mukuro's choice to leave her. Thinks the words again. Mukuro would not leave her by choice. Worries the thought through her mind until it's faded and tattered at the edges. If Mukuro had the choice, he would choose to remain with her.

Was it true? Could she allow herself to believe it? One of the truths she had learned in her years, one of the invariable axioms of life, was that people leave. Her friends would leave, every year, going on journeys of their own. Her parents had managed to leave her while they were all still living in the same house. Haru hasn't left, not yet, but Chrome can imagine a thousand reasons why it's still coming.

A tiny inner tube nudges her foot, and she glances right to see two little kids constructing some sort of impenetrable fortress already beginning to topple on one side, and they laugh and shriek and dig a moat to shore up the wall as she passes by. Nothing good can last forever, and she remembers the phrase now, inscribed on the flyleaf of one of the books written by a sage.

/Omnia mutantur, nihil interit./ Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost. When she makes companions with humans reincarnated into pokémon, isn't that the most obvious lesson she should have learned?

friggin message length counter thing.


One day, Chrome is going to disappoint Haru. It won't be on purpose, but it will be inevitable. Nothing good can last forever (she half-remembers an old phrase from an ancient book, what was it?) and she just can't be this person Haru thinks she is -- though some days it might be nice if she was.

The realization takes her breath away -- it's overwhelming, like being pulled under by a ripcurl, but she's still above water for the moment and she takes a breath, surprised to find it steadies her. The girl of her thoughts looks for her now, waves with a wide grin across her face, silently checking up on her.

If she's lucky, it will happen later rather than sooner, but it will happen. Disappointment, Haru will learn the truth about who she is -- whoever /that/ is -- and it will hurt her past the breaking point, and then she will leave.

At least it won't be a surprise now, when it happens. Small condolences.

Chrome responds with a smile of her own, and it feels more genuine than any she's given in a long time.

words words words, so much sound and fury signifying nothing


"Come on!" Haru had raced forward, of course, but paused at the coastline to wait for her. The girl takes her wrist in her hand, and it's as gently as possible but she knows Haru will be able to feel her lock up at the touch. It is the bare minimum of physical contact, but Chrome can't remember the last time anyone touched her like this. Not even a time when Nagi was touched like this. Not even by her parents.

Haru's still smiling, but her throat tensed nearly imperceptively when Chrome flinched. "It takes a minute to get used to, but the water's great! There's no big rocks or wild pokémon you have to worry about, if you stay inside the buoys." She tugs slightly, wary and careful, but when she does Chrome's arm doesn't fall off and nothing sounds broken so she tugs again slightly harder.

A hesitant step and her ankles are cold too. Two steps, three -- Haru lets go and turns back towards the horizon, and when she turns so does Chrome, looking over her left shoulder at the only thing that mattered on the whole expanse of beach in front of her. For a fanciful second, she imagines running back, carrying the keystone with her into the ocean. Ridiculous, of course, and she turns her back to him; no matter Mukuro's power to shift its weight, hauling around a bowling-ball-sized rock would hardly improve her already meager swimming skills, not to mention what if she should drop it.

Besides the physical technicalities ... there was still the matter of whether Mukuro-sama would even care for the idea. Yes, she was just reading his distantness onto him, but... He was a rock, even if that didn't mean rock type. Not to mention he was probably napping again, not to mention even ... Chrome imagines that even when her pokémon was a perfectly normal human boy (or at least as close as he ever came to the description), Mukuro would have dismissed business such as ocean-swimming as frivolous.

And then there was the other girl. Her reaction would be easy enough to predict -- she doesn't think she would /actually/ try to knock him out of her arms into the water but she would definitely think about it very hard, and Mukuro would get death glares of death and Chrome would get that disappointed sad-shinx 'My Friend Is Broken' look and so it was easier to just. Leave it.

Chrome thinks of herself as observant despite/in spite of her handicap, but she can still manage to do things like walk up past the breaking waves to Haru's side while lost in thought.

The two are bouncing slightly now, the waves not anything close to surfing levels and so far she's managed to come out of it with just the tips of her hair wet and her eyepatch left unscathed. (Saltwater probably wouldn't hurt it terribly, but there was no reason to find out if she didn't have to. And taking it off was never considered as an option.) The water is deep enough to stand during troughs and kick off during crests, clear enough that she can just make out the shadows of what must be her feet through the murk. "This is my favorite part, behind the breakers," Haru says cheerfully. The girl jumps high at the next surge, betraying years of summer vacations at the beach doing just the same thing. Chrome doesn't quite remember where or when or how she learned to swim, just a faint memory of flailing and floating and eventually understanding that she couldn't breathe underwater, small bubbles replacing hacking coughs.

It kind of feels that way now, sometimes, on her journey. Learning to breathe again.

Haru is playing with the waves, paddling out to just before the breaking point and laughing at the unbridled energy just trying to pull her away, again and again, and Chrome wonders what it /is/ about this girl. So full of life, and she thinks she might be a ... friend, maybe. But Mukuro-sama has called her nosy and controlling, and Haru has not exactly kept her detest for Mukuro a secret, and how is she expected to know, where her loyalties should lie? Will she be forced to choose?

If she had to... Her first choice would be to stay together, just like this, but if she had to decide...

Well, Haru was kind and friendly, and most importantly didn't appear to hold any ulterior motives to treating her that way. No hidden agendas or plots of ways she would be required to repay her; it was more than possible such thoughts had never crossed her mind. And she seemed to always think of Chrome in the best possible light, even if she doesn't deserve that. Not at all.

Good girls don't talk to ghosts, good girls don't listen to spirits, good girls don't take their names from corpses. She is in some ways a very bad girl, even if she thinks Haru would disagree.

I KNOW IT SUCKS RITE???

I don't blame you for not wanting to look through it.

I have to find Waldo to find Waldo D'=

It sounds stupid kind of.

I only had one wheres waldo but idk where it is.

Knew it.

IS it as hard?

Does it focus mainly on detail of the places/stories than actually finding the dumb kid?

And how exactly does it tie in with the bible?

Are you looking for Sammy-channeling Waldo on Noah's Ark instead of an Airport?

Bible-themed Where's Waldo?

Eh, perhaps they characterized her differently in the Japanese version.

It took me a while to get used to the battle system, but by the end (when I had mastered playing on manual enough to take out the final boss) it was a lot of fun. Keeps things interesting.

I don't think she's supposed to be ambiguous, no; the game treats her pretty definitively as a girl.

Heh, thanks. I think you're pretty awesome, too.

Ah, TWEWY. Worth a play to see what everyone else is talking about, at least. I hope you end up enjoying it.

[ a short history of almost something ]

Chrome and Haru both agree that a very loud man with long white hair alternately shouting at and /headbutting/ a sharpedo is a ridiculous sight. They choose to forget about it lest it ruin their otherwise nice day at the beach. This is for the best.


[ seven on a scale from dead to breathing ]

"... Sasagawa-san, correct?"

"Hey! What's up?! You're that friend of Miura's, right?"

"I was wondering if you might help me with a ... favor."

"Of course!! What can I-- Whoa, that's, like, an extremely long crowbar! You carry that with you?"

"Hold this. Thank you. Now ... break this rock."

"Huh, really? I thought you must extremely like this rock since you always have it around!"

"Kufu... Do you think you can't break it?"

"Huh?! Hey, I /extremely/ didn't say that! Watch me, I don't need a crowbar; I'll punch this rock to dust! HNGH! JUST WATCH! OOF! TAKE /THAT/, YOU ROCK!! POW! Hey, I think I kind of--"

"Hyah! Hahi~~!! Chrome-chan I am SO SORRY but I had to!"

"Whoa, Miura! That was an EXTREME flying kick! You have to teach me these moves some time! ... But why did you knock out your friend to the limit?"

"It's ... It's a long story, oniisan. Just. Um. Stay away from this rock, okay?"

now your profile page is entirely too long and it is /all my fault/ woe.


Haru floats and bobs and paddles as well as any buizel, and beckons for Chrome to follow her into the tides. The girl makes no inclination to move, and Haru frowns, coasts up gently on the waves; when she returns to their towel the bottoms of her feet are caked with powdered sand. "What's the matter, Chrome-chan?" Her voice is all sincere worry and upset, and Chrome knows that if she asked to leave the girl would start packing up in a heartbeat, without question or complaint. She cares so much, in her way, and Chrome just feels ... inadequate. Out of her depth. She has lived on the outside looking in; she studies pinned beautiflies and is left entirely unprepared when one dances through the skies into her life.

The girl is watching her now, cautiously, but her eyes flit down to Mukuro-sama every few seconds. The spiritomb has been uncharacteristically quiet since their arrival, and Chrome finds herself on a precipice she hadn't before noticed, holding her breath until he says so. He is her pokémon and she is his trainer, and when, exactly, had that changed?

"... Mukuro-sama?" she says quietly, for some reason wishing the girl wasn't around to hear. It feels like terrible weakness. Maybe she should work on her telepathy, see if she can send him mental messages the way he does, even if he is part dark and not psychic.

What is he thinking about? Usually he's more than happy to let his opinions be heard: about the futile efforts of wild attacking pokémon, the detailed faults of her self-proclaimed traveling companion, the minor follies and failings of every trainer or ... anyone, really, that impeded their progress of Rokudou Mukuro's Grand Master Plan. But since their arrival on the beach perhaps two hours ago, he hasn't said a word to her. Swallowing, she brushes the sand from around his talisman, the thought striking her foolishly that the grains from what once were much like his rock remind him of his impermanence. She dismisses this out of hand; Mukuro-sama is as much an invariable, overwhelming natural force as the pull of the tides happening right in front of her.

Her touch seems to waken him; she mentally feels him stirring more than anything she could visually perceive. //... Hn?// Of course, he was just resting. How sad of her not to realize, to presume it was something that she had done. As if anything she could do would mean a thing to him. To anyone.

"... I'm going for a swim." Forget that she was going to ask for permission, originally.

//Have fun.//

Chrome stands up, faster than she had intended, and tries not to falter as blurry spots overcome her vision. Deep breaths, and the other girl who had been in a staring/frowning contest with the rock since Chrome had addressed him now looks up to her with worry in her eyes. It seems to be her default expression when studying her -- the knotted brow of uncertainty, as if she's a porcelain festival doll, fragile: handle with caution. Not quite pity, and though the clichéd phrase is 'I don't need your pity,' Chrome finds she holds no strong emotions towards what feelings Haru may hold for her. And that's okay.

A half-smile in an effort to convince the girl that she's okay, really, and the dark-haired girl grins widely (though she never quite forgets about anything completely, Haru is good at quickly changing her expression to match the atmosphere). "I'm fine," Chrome says, and she is well-aware that she is very nearly right. "Let's go."

Have... a preview! First bit of the second bit and yes. Retroactively deciding Haru's bit is titled 'hold on tight to what you know' and this Chrome bit is 'can't hold back; you've got to let it go'. Because if you're using lyrics from Japanese songs, I can use lyrics from the English ones.

I have a bit in my notes.txt that reads "mention how this wouldn't mesh up at /all/, really -- most of the fic is pretty much 'what if /these/ characters meet' with a dash of 'now this is happening to this character', and this fanficfic is mostly character study if you replace 'study' with 'trying-too-hard ramblings' and 'character' with 'some other character that shares the name but none of the personality of the actual character'." And as far as I am concerned I am completely and utterly right.

Thank you for actually coming up with the prompt! Even if drunks punching sharks or whatever it actually was never came up. (My very first train of thought actually was "Okay! Sharks! Let's see, what is Tsuna doing... Hey. Why not make it Bechedel-approved? ... Well, I guess that leaves me with Chrome and Haru. That's all right! Hey, they never actually got mentioned in the beach day bit..." ... etc.) That really spurred me on to start writing something every day, which I have been ever since! Now I just need to keep it up... I'll keep practicing, and maybe one day I'll be in your league! ... That day won't be any time soon, but. It's good to have ambitions.

RIGHT um story ish. first two bits.


/(On that day a lifetime ago, when she asked the wrong question and received the right answer, the newly-christened Chrome returned to her house for the last time.

She removed her papers and books from her randoseru, there being nothing else better for the job. When she pulled out a group project from ancient times, labelled at the top with four familiar girls' names, she paused and stared before setting it aside. They had all been her friends, she thought -- but she would leave.

(She had done all the work on that project, anyway.)

She pulled down her uniforms of both seasons from their hangers, and put in some other things from her closet: underclothes, socks, a spare eyepatch. The bathing suit her mother had given her after it no longer fit her, the summer fashion of three summers ago. She packed it in, looked around her small room, included her thin wallet. Walking down the hallway, she passed her parents' room without hesitation on the way to the kitchen. They were both at work.

The spiritomb watched her carefully from his spot on the kitchen table where she had left him. He was in his visible form, his normal-shaped eye following her figure as she included crackers and a jar of peanut butter in her pack, more because it felt like the thing to do than any conscious thought about future food. She looked back to him, meeting his gaze, her hidden, fake eye watching his swirling one; and she had wondered before, whether their similar ocular predicament had anything to do with their kinship, or if it was merely a coincidence.

(She may not have formally studied the arts of the mystic, but still she felt in her bones that there was no such thing as coincidences.)

She zipped up her pack and put it on -- there was no room left for his rock, so she would carry it until she could purchase a larger bag. For a short second after she touched it, it was as immovable as any boulder many times its size, until Mukuro said a silent word to the accompanying spirits, or to the shinigami, or to the laws of gravity for all she knew, and the weight became bearable.

"Where are we going?" she said, knowing it was as much his journey as hers if not moreso.

//West,// he stated. //Floaroma Town.//

She nodded, trusting him (//why?// the thought floated by, and she watched it go). Her hand was on the doorknob, and she glanced over her shoulder.

She would leave a note, but there was less than nothing to say.

Chrome left Nagi's house and did not look back.)/

No, I'm not.

USE YOUR SKOOTY POWERS FOR GOOD

(part 4/4/2 \o/)

"Oh, Mystic Abra," he intoned, closing his eyes and lightly placing his hands on the pokémon's head. The whole production would probably have seemed cornier than a berry master's yard to anyone a few years older, but the girl gripped the edge of the table with one hand and sucked on the end of her ice cream, her attention thoroughly raptured. "Tell me, in your infinite wisdom, what type do you see in this cute young girl?"

She blushed slightly at being called cute, and kicked at the stool with her heels impatiently. Suddenly, she felt a weak tingling sensation on her head, as if her scalp had fallen asleep. She rubbed at it under her pigtails.

The man nodded along in response to an unheard conversation. "Yes... Oh...? Interesting... I see... If you're sure...!" He opened his eyes and stood with a flourish as the feeling disappeared. "Mystic Abra has spoken!" he said grandiosely. The abra remained unresponsive. "He has deemed you a member most closely matching the dark type, with grass following!"

The girl blinked. He went on to describe how she would be lucky in love with a normal or dragon type, and that she would be less affected by psychic-type attacks, and how the secondary type reacted synergistically with the first, whatever that meant, but she wasn't listening. That type... wasn't what she had been expecting. She hadn't been expecting anything, but 'dark' had never seemed like an option. She couldn't be dark type, she wasn't a bad guy, and she told the man as much.

His eyes gleamed in the low light. "Ah, don't think of dark as evil! That's a common misconception. Generally darks have a sense of intuition, are quick thinkers, have a cynical sense of humor..."

Haru stood slowly and backed up towards the entrance. "No..." she said quietly, her eyes shining with unshed tears. "I'm not a bad guy, I'm not!" She shouted it to the man, to the abra, to herself, and ran out the door, the end of her ice cream thrown down to melt in the dust.

The man tucked his hand behind his head, watching streaks of light play on the ground from the fluttering edge of the curtain. "Eh, I hadn't meant to scare her..." He glanced towards his pokémon, as calm and unmoving as ever. "It's just a carnival booth game."

Outside, the girl stood off between booths to wipe her eyes. Stupid guy, she thought, sniffling. He didn't know anything about her. Haru was a good girl, always did her chores, and she was going to be a trainer and beat the bad guys. She wasn't dark.

She ran that thought over again. She wasn't dark. Miura Haru was nice, and she could be quiet sometimes, and she could get scared, but she wouldn't hide. Not anymore. Hiding in the shadows was what dark types did, and Haru was not dark.

As the months and years passed, Haru forgot the festival, the man and his abra, her fortune, but the resolve she had forged she would never forget. Haru traveled and danced and never stayed in the shadows.

So when she came across a girl, close to her age, who lived in the shadows and called them by name, she was drawn to her. The two seemed as opposite as could be, but opposing forces are not always in opposition. Besides, Haru had already learned that appearances were often more than they seemed.)/