petronia

My entry for Truth or Drabble. Yes, okay, I'm lame, I know! But I can't change my writing habits (i.e. three days of thinking for one day of typing). If I could I would have, long before this. T_T

Challenge here, as it's rather difficult to explain (and I think I got the details wrong, but... okay XD). The truly alarming part is how characters from yet other series just started to sort of crop up in the proceedings.

***

An Evening's Entertainment

"Oh, we're sober men and true, we sail the ooooo-cean blue. Dum-dee-dum-dee-dun-dun-dun-duh..."

The piano capped the tune with a stirring chord. Sparse claps sounded from the wings. Susumu sat front row centre in the otherwise empty hall; he markedly did not twitch.

(Somewhere, far away, someone snickered, accompanied by the faintest echo of gurgling liquid.)

"Anyway that's the idea," Tetsu said, loosening his school tie with one hand while trying to disentangle hopelessly snarled puppet strings with the other. The erstwhile shanghaied "sailor" plushies (business suit, blond yarn hair, dumpy and bespectacled) jerked and slid across the stage in what Susumu thought was a rather morbid fashion. Exeunt omnes, bearing corpses.

(In a different place, where it was nearing sunset - not that there was any way of telling with the windows masking-taped over - Byers woke and groaned. He'd fallen asleep at the table, poring over grainy photos, and his back was killing him.

Whatever the dreams had been, they'd taken a terrible toll.

After a moment he identified the awful racket as a combination of Frohike's whuffling snores and "Hey Jimmy" emanating from Langley's headset, which had slid down as he slumbered in his computer chair.)

Something of Susumu's train of thought must have shown on his face despite his best effort, because Tetsu added hastily, "Of course there'd be more actual people doing the, um, voices. Like, uh, a chorus. Right, girls?"

"Right," Yuma said decisively from stage left. She glanced at Saya, and they both giggled. The trunk belonged by rights to the drama club but had been hauled out of the manga club's storage closet, where it had lain for schoolgirl-generations. Angels couldn't have paid Susumu enough to tread where Tetsu was currently rummaging, but that was par for the course. He watched the next round of victims – UFO-catcher dolls, hand puppets, was that a pink Gundam? – being propped on the edge of the stage. Courage, he mentally harangued them.

"I mean, it's a hit for sure," Tetsu was saying. "There's dancing, everyone likes dancing, right, and--"

"The story."

"What?"

"The story," Susumu said. "What's the story again?" Saya gave him a sympathetic look from the piano bench.

"What – oh!" Tetsu grabbed a brace of random dolls. "Okay, then this guy Ralph comes in, and he--"

"No, no, Tetsu-kun," Saya said kindly, "the next song is Little Buttercup."

"Ahaha. So it is!"

(Yet somewhere else, Ginji propped his arm on the rolled-down window sill of the Subaru 360, tucked his chin against the crook of said arm, and gazed at the lights of the city twinkling below. The other arm hung outside desultorily. He was humming under his breath without really noticing it, the same snatch of melody over and over.

In the seat behind him, Ban twitched in his sleep, muttering.)

"Oh, I'm called Little Buttercup," Tetsu sang in an alarming falsetto, flapping the arms of the floppy tare-doll while marching it awkwardly across the stage. "Dear Little Buttercup, though I could never tell why, but still I'm called Buttercup, poor Little Buttercup, SWEET LITTLE--"

Susumu stood up. To his credit Tetsu stopped singing immediately, peering downstage with an expectant air.

"I'm not really feeling the scene," Susumu said.

(Ban jerked awake and upright, the muttering becoming a full-blown sentence. "HategilbertandsullivangoddammitwillyouSTOPSINGINGTHAT?"

"Singing what?" Ginji said, alarmed. Ban batted him over the head.)

There was a pause. "Sorry," Susumu appended as an afterthought, even though he wasn't. Tetsu glanced up and brightened.

"Okay," he said, "how about this then? Pirates!"

***

Kimihiro slid a plate of boiled peanuts and rice crisps onto the side table, with a glare in Yuuko's direction. The woman didn't spare him a glance. She'd been lounging on the chaise longue the entire evening with her eyes glued to her hand mirror, alternately downing glasses of sake and chortling like her reflection'd done something witty. Recipe for headache on the morrow, stomach ulceration and whining fit to split the heavens; Kimihiro had to cook out of sheer self-defense.

"Glad you're keeping entertained," he snapped. Yuuko snickered again, low in her throat, and brushed a strand of hair off her bare shoulder.

"Oh," she said. "Always."

***