More SSAE fic
Dec. 2nd, 2002 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petronia(![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
supacat - take this as a beta section. I'll send you the full ur-text once I'm done with it. ^_^)
More Supersonic Angel Engine (there was a friends-only at some point...). Tell me if I've done anything horribly obviously wrong to FF2, as I haven't played that game in geological eons. I would also like to make it clear that I absolutely adored Edward. It's just that, um, he's not the Square character that scores the highest ass-kicking quotient. You have to admit.
It makes a change from the Laura Ashley femminess of the other one, anyway.
That week it rained for three days straight, no breaks. Sumire woke reluctantly every morning to the sound of raindrops drumming on the balcony, and the slanted slate roof across the alleyway. It was disorienting, because the sixteenth-floor penthouse he called home for lack of a better word had neither. Then his eyes would focus on the white slash of wing adorning the wall, and Renji would shift and mutter on the other futon, and he'd remember. Remember, groan, grab his pants, kick Renji in the hip to wake him up, stagger off to the bathroom. Run the water. That was the only blip. It was actually nice to have someone around for once, that wasn't one of the bozos from the angelic consortium. And the damned thing made a better wall hanging than anything else.
The rest was same old. They'd wend their way to class by second period, fighting for space under a shared umbrella as they walked. Wait out the school hours mired in anarchic boredom in an attempt to keep up their cover identities as disaffected high school students mired in anarchic boredom. Eat conveni bento for lunch. On Monday they cut afternoon classes, but Tuesday and Wednesday they stayed the whole day. Soccer practice was cancelled due to the rain. Sumire didn't need to do homework to make his grades, and Renji was similarly known for a lost cause. They rented Capcom fighters, went back to Renji's place and played them until they passed out. And then they did it again.
On Thursday there was a respite in the weather, and they went hunting. The immediate impetus, apart from Renji's shrinking energy-drinks-and-chips budget, was a powder blue Toyota MR2 that had splashed them the evening before when they'd been standing on the curb waiting for the light to change. It was deliberate. Sumire's trousers were soaked through. Renji got a glimpse at the driver, and thought he recognized him. Some senior year at Naninani Koudou Gakuen a ten-minute bus ride away from their own school, an angel obviously - Sumire had no idea how Renji would know the guy, and didn't care. That much was enough.
It turned out they got the right guy, or at any rate the right car. Or the right make of car. Any high school senior who owned an MR2 had it coming to him, anyway. They found the aforementioned vehicle parked on a side street, and let the air out of the tires. Then they smashed the headlights. Then to emphasize the point, and because the guy hadn't shown up yet despite the fact that it was getting dark, they smashed the headlights of every other car parked along that block. Then they had to run, because some jackass called the cops. The time spent was not, however, a dead loss: they caught up with their target in a deserted side street five blocks down, walking in the opposite direction - so maybe it wasn't his car after all, but by then the point was moot. He was an angel, and so were his two buddies, whom Renji took down with contemptuous ease. Sumire thought about how bloody annoying it had been to walk all the way back from Denny’s in drenched trousers, and went for the ribs. A few well-chained combos with a length of lead pipe, and the target collapsed in a shuddering heap on the wet concrete. Sumire mopped his lips on the back of his hand and watched him try to crawl. A whack at the base of the skull would finish him off, critical-hit style, but that wasn't the point of the exercise.
“Five thousand,” Renji was counting. “Ten thousand... Shit, thirty thousand. What the fuck are you guys made of, huh?” There was glee in his voice, as if his enemies had literally exploded into a shower of gold coins upon defeat. Their original target groaned and leveraged himself up onto elbows and knees.
“Are you done?” asked Sumire. “Guy’s getting away.”
“Like hell he is.” And he wasn’t, really. They were onto him. Nevertheless, he’d reached the lamppost, and was pulling himself slowly to his feet, not even looking at Sumire. That eager to escape. Sumire caught a glimpse of his face, distorted into a rictus of terror so uncomprehending it didn’t look real. The echo of an itch bloomed in his thorax between his lungs and his shoulder blades, and he hefted his pipe.
“Oi, Renji-”
White wings bloomed in the darkness, slashing out toward the sky, and Renji dived past Sumire, moving so fast he was a blur even to angel eyes. Laughing. Arm raised.
Exacto knife grip a neon shard in the circle of lamplight.
(They have to try to fly, have to start their engines for us to claim our prize-)
Sumire watched for a couple of seconds, then stumbled away and threw up behind someone's trash can. His stomach didn't take to his current lifestyle nearly as well as his head did. It was exhilarating, though. Arguably better than flying, even if his digestive system turned inside out on him every time. It was a finer line than he knew how to tread, between stimulation and nausea, pleasure and pain...
"Hey. Hey, Sumire." Renji. There was a hand shaking his shoulder, gingerly because he was kneeling in front of a pool of vomit, and there was no point getting closer than necessary. "Are you all right?"
Sumire nodded. Mopped his lips on the back of his hand again. "Yeah…" He felt emptied out, strangely relaxed. Simple and clean is how you make me feel tonight... "I'm hungry."
"Dude," said Renji with feeling. "That's fucking sick." He bent, making something rustle, and ducked his head under Sumire's arm to help him up. "But then again, so am I. C'mon-"
"'M okay," said Sumire quickly. Renji's hair was tickling his neck. He disentangled himself, not glancing at the dark plastic garbage bag Renji was dragging along the ground with his other hand, and bent to pick up his pipe. "Denny's?"
Renji nodded. "Dude," he said again. "Hungry like the wolf. Let's get a move on." He slung his arm around Sumire again, over his shoulders this time. The contact was warm through both their windbreakers, and Sumire didn't shrug him off.
***
The thirty grand in crisp bills went toward rent. The loose coinage came to... more than a dozen bottles of Dekavita C, anyhow. There was even change left over for Pretz and ramen cups. All in all a good day.
Renji squeezed through the door with his load of ersatz groceries and found Sumire in the exact same position as he'd left him, slumped down on the couch as if he hadn't budged an inch in the interim. The TV input had been rewired to the Super Famicon, though, and Sumire was levelling up one of Renji's old Final Fantasy IV saves with the volume turned up. He looked intensely bored.
"Shit, that's retro," Renji said.
"Okaeri," Sumire muttered reflexively. Renji dropped his stuff off in the kitchenette and unscrewed a bottle of Dekavita with his teeth (he was working on using his forearm, but always managed to slop liquid on himself). He gulped down the energy drink and wandered back to the sofa, ruffling his wall-mounted trophy with his hand in passing. It was the only one he'd kept whole. The thing had dried like that, no shedding or rotting, and now when you ran your finger over the sawed-off edge the marrow yielded like porous white plastic. Objectively speaking it was beautiful, and had been even more beautiful as part of Sumire, but as such had served as a constant reminder of the hated Them. Got on his nerves. Now Sumire had one, and he had one, and they were even. They had been good friends before, but Sumire's hunting had - Renji felt - renewed their relationship, and on the correct footing this time. He was glad he'd thought of it.
Then again, live seventeen years and you were bound to come up with one great idea sooner or later. Demonic DNA or not. It was just a matter of odds.
"Budge," he said, and flung himself down in front of the TV, head on Sumire’s knees for support. Sumire made an annoyed sound, but twitched his controller cable out of the way. From this angle his expression was violently foreshortened, but Renji could tell he was drooling slightly. He pondered briefly whether to point it out, and whether he risked being dripped on if he didn't, but gave up the train of thought out of apathy. Instead he chewed Pretz and watched Sumire tear through Mount Hobs.
"That guy's useless," he said after some minutes. "Why's he in the party?"
"He's just there," Sumire said. "And he's not totally useless. He heals."
"Fuck that. That's so gay."
A flock of flying monsters died a gruesome 32-bit death. The usual fanfare blared out perkily. "Look, I just don't have the white mage chick right now, okay? They have to give you some way of healing your people, and you just have to deal with it. It doesn't matter if the dude is gay or not."
"By that logic," said Renji, "you might as well do Karen fucking Juri. If, like, you didn't have a chick around right now."
There was a pause while they considered this.
"Juri's not..." Sumire shifted uncomfortably, aware that he was leveraging himself into an indefensible tactical position. "Juri's not that gay. All the same."
"Oh, fuck that."
"No, I mean… not bard gay. Like, no one's. Really. That useless." Renji just stared up at him, and Sumire sighed. "Okay, fine. Whatever." He turned his attention back to the screen.
Renji snorted, but did not pursue the point. Sumire devoted himself to hunting down treasure chests, the expression on his face indicating a determination to ignore further heckling from the peanut gallery. A boss fight was picked, and won. Renji finished his Pretz box and tossed it into a corner. He could feel Sumire's warmth through his jeans – or possibly it was his own body heat. It was hard to tell. He ran a finger down the outside seam of Sumire's left leg, from knee to ankle, but Sumire didn't seem to feel it. He didn't even twitch.
More minutes passed.
Eventually they hit a story sequence. Sumire scrolled through with rapidity, murmuring under his breath: "Yeah, yeah, crystals, yadda yadda..." A rather evocatively symphonic piece began to play in MIDI.
“Mute it and put on some music,” Renji said. “Some real music.” Sumire didn't move, so neither did he. “Couldn’t you play something with, like, actual blood?”
“I like this game,” Sumire said. “What exactly is your problem anyway?”
Renji blinked, and digested this for a few seconds. "My problem...?" He jumped up, tore the controller from Sumire's unprepared grasp, and drop-kicked it into the wall. The game went felicitously to menu and stayed there. Renji swung a knee onto the sofa and planted his hands with a thump in the cushions on either side of Sumire's face. "You asshole," he said into Sumire's startled gaze. "It's my game. My console. My apartment. You're bumming a futon and eating my food, playing my games, in my apartment."
Sumire blinked once, one dark sweep of swallow-plume lashes. In a voice made squeaky by indignation he said, "Yeah, but it's your fault I have to in the first place, isn't it?"
Renji stared. (You mean, if you could...?) "Shut up," he said finally. And then, because Sumire had taken a deep breath and was opening his mouth, "No. Shut up." And leant forward and kissed him, hard.
***
supacat - take this as a beta section. I'll send you the full ur-text once I'm done with it. ^_^)More Supersonic Angel Engine (there was a friends-only at some point...). Tell me if I've done anything horribly obviously wrong to FF2, as I haven't played that game in geological eons. I would also like to make it clear that I absolutely adored Edward. It's just that, um, he's not the Square character that scores the highest ass-kicking quotient. You have to admit.
It makes a change from the Laura Ashley femminess of the other one, anyway.
That week it rained for three days straight, no breaks. Sumire woke reluctantly every morning to the sound of raindrops drumming on the balcony, and the slanted slate roof across the alleyway. It was disorienting, because the sixteenth-floor penthouse he called home for lack of a better word had neither. Then his eyes would focus on the white slash of wing adorning the wall, and Renji would shift and mutter on the other futon, and he'd remember. Remember, groan, grab his pants, kick Renji in the hip to wake him up, stagger off to the bathroom. Run the water. That was the only blip. It was actually nice to have someone around for once, that wasn't one of the bozos from the angelic consortium. And the damned thing made a better wall hanging than anything else.
The rest was same old. They'd wend their way to class by second period, fighting for space under a shared umbrella as they walked. Wait out the school hours mired in anarchic boredom in an attempt to keep up their cover identities as disaffected high school students mired in anarchic boredom. Eat conveni bento for lunch. On Monday they cut afternoon classes, but Tuesday and Wednesday they stayed the whole day. Soccer practice was cancelled due to the rain. Sumire didn't need to do homework to make his grades, and Renji was similarly known for a lost cause. They rented Capcom fighters, went back to Renji's place and played them until they passed out. And then they did it again.
On Thursday there was a respite in the weather, and they went hunting. The immediate impetus, apart from Renji's shrinking energy-drinks-and-chips budget, was a powder blue Toyota MR2 that had splashed them the evening before when they'd been standing on the curb waiting for the light to change. It was deliberate. Sumire's trousers were soaked through. Renji got a glimpse at the driver, and thought he recognized him. Some senior year at Naninani Koudou Gakuen a ten-minute bus ride away from their own school, an angel obviously - Sumire had no idea how Renji would know the guy, and didn't care. That much was enough.
It turned out they got the right guy, or at any rate the right car. Or the right make of car. Any high school senior who owned an MR2 had it coming to him, anyway. They found the aforementioned vehicle parked on a side street, and let the air out of the tires. Then they smashed the headlights. Then to emphasize the point, and because the guy hadn't shown up yet despite the fact that it was getting dark, they smashed the headlights of every other car parked along that block. Then they had to run, because some jackass called the cops. The time spent was not, however, a dead loss: they caught up with their target in a deserted side street five blocks down, walking in the opposite direction - so maybe it wasn't his car after all, but by then the point was moot. He was an angel, and so were his two buddies, whom Renji took down with contemptuous ease. Sumire thought about how bloody annoying it had been to walk all the way back from Denny’s in drenched trousers, and went for the ribs. A few well-chained combos with a length of lead pipe, and the target collapsed in a shuddering heap on the wet concrete. Sumire mopped his lips on the back of his hand and watched him try to crawl. A whack at the base of the skull would finish him off, critical-hit style, but that wasn't the point of the exercise.
“Five thousand,” Renji was counting. “Ten thousand... Shit, thirty thousand. What the fuck are you guys made of, huh?” There was glee in his voice, as if his enemies had literally exploded into a shower of gold coins upon defeat. Their original target groaned and leveraged himself up onto elbows and knees.
“Are you done?” asked Sumire. “Guy’s getting away.”
“Like hell he is.” And he wasn’t, really. They were onto him. Nevertheless, he’d reached the lamppost, and was pulling himself slowly to his feet, not even looking at Sumire. That eager to escape. Sumire caught a glimpse of his face, distorted into a rictus of terror so uncomprehending it didn’t look real. The echo of an itch bloomed in his thorax between his lungs and his shoulder blades, and he hefted his pipe.
“Oi, Renji-”
White wings bloomed in the darkness, slashing out toward the sky, and Renji dived past Sumire, moving so fast he was a blur even to angel eyes. Laughing. Arm raised.
Exacto knife grip a neon shard in the circle of lamplight.
(They have to try to fly, have to start their engines for us to claim our prize-)
Sumire watched for a couple of seconds, then stumbled away and threw up behind someone's trash can. His stomach didn't take to his current lifestyle nearly as well as his head did. It was exhilarating, though. Arguably better than flying, even if his digestive system turned inside out on him every time. It was a finer line than he knew how to tread, between stimulation and nausea, pleasure and pain...
"Hey. Hey, Sumire." Renji. There was a hand shaking his shoulder, gingerly because he was kneeling in front of a pool of vomit, and there was no point getting closer than necessary. "Are you all right?"
Sumire nodded. Mopped his lips on the back of his hand again. "Yeah…" He felt emptied out, strangely relaxed. Simple and clean is how you make me feel tonight... "I'm hungry."
"Dude," said Renji with feeling. "That's fucking sick." He bent, making something rustle, and ducked his head under Sumire's arm to help him up. "But then again, so am I. C'mon-"
"'M okay," said Sumire quickly. Renji's hair was tickling his neck. He disentangled himself, not glancing at the dark plastic garbage bag Renji was dragging along the ground with his other hand, and bent to pick up his pipe. "Denny's?"
Renji nodded. "Dude," he said again. "Hungry like the wolf. Let's get a move on." He slung his arm around Sumire again, over his shoulders this time. The contact was warm through both their windbreakers, and Sumire didn't shrug him off.
***
The thirty grand in crisp bills went toward rent. The loose coinage came to... more than a dozen bottles of Dekavita C, anyhow. There was even change left over for Pretz and ramen cups. All in all a good day.
Renji squeezed through the door with his load of ersatz groceries and found Sumire in the exact same position as he'd left him, slumped down on the couch as if he hadn't budged an inch in the interim. The TV input had been rewired to the Super Famicon, though, and Sumire was levelling up one of Renji's old Final Fantasy IV saves with the volume turned up. He looked intensely bored.
"Shit, that's retro," Renji said.
"Okaeri," Sumire muttered reflexively. Renji dropped his stuff off in the kitchenette and unscrewed a bottle of Dekavita with his teeth (he was working on using his forearm, but always managed to slop liquid on himself). He gulped down the energy drink and wandered back to the sofa, ruffling his wall-mounted trophy with his hand in passing. It was the only one he'd kept whole. The thing had dried like that, no shedding or rotting, and now when you ran your finger over the sawed-off edge the marrow yielded like porous white plastic. Objectively speaking it was beautiful, and had been even more beautiful as part of Sumire, but as such had served as a constant reminder of the hated Them. Got on his nerves. Now Sumire had one, and he had one, and they were even. They had been good friends before, but Sumire's hunting had - Renji felt - renewed their relationship, and on the correct footing this time. He was glad he'd thought of it.
Then again, live seventeen years and you were bound to come up with one great idea sooner or later. Demonic DNA or not. It was just a matter of odds.
"Budge," he said, and flung himself down in front of the TV, head on Sumire’s knees for support. Sumire made an annoyed sound, but twitched his controller cable out of the way. From this angle his expression was violently foreshortened, but Renji could tell he was drooling slightly. He pondered briefly whether to point it out, and whether he risked being dripped on if he didn't, but gave up the train of thought out of apathy. Instead he chewed Pretz and watched Sumire tear through Mount Hobs.
"That guy's useless," he said after some minutes. "Why's he in the party?"
"He's just there," Sumire said. "And he's not totally useless. He heals."
"Fuck that. That's so gay."
A flock of flying monsters died a gruesome 32-bit death. The usual fanfare blared out perkily. "Look, I just don't have the white mage chick right now, okay? They have to give you some way of healing your people, and you just have to deal with it. It doesn't matter if the dude is gay or not."
"By that logic," said Renji, "you might as well do Karen fucking Juri. If, like, you didn't have a chick around right now."
There was a pause while they considered this.
"Juri's not..." Sumire shifted uncomfortably, aware that he was leveraging himself into an indefensible tactical position. "Juri's not that gay. All the same."
"Oh, fuck that."
"No, I mean… not bard gay. Like, no one's. Really. That useless." Renji just stared up at him, and Sumire sighed. "Okay, fine. Whatever." He turned his attention back to the screen.
Renji snorted, but did not pursue the point. Sumire devoted himself to hunting down treasure chests, the expression on his face indicating a determination to ignore further heckling from the peanut gallery. A boss fight was picked, and won. Renji finished his Pretz box and tossed it into a corner. He could feel Sumire's warmth through his jeans – or possibly it was his own body heat. It was hard to tell. He ran a finger down the outside seam of Sumire's left leg, from knee to ankle, but Sumire didn't seem to feel it. He didn't even twitch.
More minutes passed.
Eventually they hit a story sequence. Sumire scrolled through with rapidity, murmuring under his breath: "Yeah, yeah, crystals, yadda yadda..." A rather evocatively symphonic piece began to play in MIDI.
“Mute it and put on some music,” Renji said. “Some real music.” Sumire didn't move, so neither did he. “Couldn’t you play something with, like, actual blood?”
“I like this game,” Sumire said. “What exactly is your problem anyway?”
Renji blinked, and digested this for a few seconds. "My problem...?" He jumped up, tore the controller from Sumire's unprepared grasp, and drop-kicked it into the wall. The game went felicitously to menu and stayed there. Renji swung a knee onto the sofa and planted his hands with a thump in the cushions on either side of Sumire's face. "You asshole," he said into Sumire's startled gaze. "It's my game. My console. My apartment. You're bumming a futon and eating my food, playing my games, in my apartment."
Sumire blinked once, one dark sweep of swallow-plume lashes. In a voice made squeaky by indignation he said, "Yeah, but it's your fault I have to in the first place, isn't it?"
Renji stared. (You mean, if you could...?) "Shut up," he said finally. And then, because Sumire had taken a deep breath and was opening his mouth, "No. Shut up." And leant forward and kissed him, hard.
***
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Ooh.
Date: 2002-12-03 04:17 am (UTC)Now Sumire had one, and he had one, and they were even.