thuviaptarth: golden thuvia with six-legged lion (Default)
thuvia ptarth ([personal profile] thuviaptarth) wrote2004-10-29 03:44 am

Ghosts: Three Drabbles

For various ghost/Halloween challenges, cross-posted from [livejournal.com profile] 100_roadtrips, [livejournal.com profile] fuda_100, and [livejournal.com profile] x_100 respectively. 100 words each.

Unhaunted (Saiyuki)

He was born in spring and captured in summer, and the first time he sees snow he's in chains. Until spring comes, he believes the cold will last forever. Summer again, and the shackles burn his wrists red. Sun did that, too, smacked his skin so hard it peeled, but he loved it then because he had rivers and pools and the sweet green shade of trees.

He remembers sun, but not who he's lost or what he's done. All he has is solitude; all he has is now.

Haunting would be kinder, but this is, after all, a punishment.




Memorial Service, 1997 (Yami no Matsuei, GenSouKai spoilers)

Is that you? You, with her eyes, my eyes, with the same fair hair--no telling whether that would keep, her nurse told me. Yours just darkened a little with age, no longer gold, but still dully shining, no matter how much we kept you from the sun, no matter how pale you grew ...

She was a happy baby, but you, you cried from the start. You--what did you ever have to cry about? You escaped. I'm the last.

If you're here, you can go. This offering is not for you. You're not the ghost I want to see.




August 6, 1945 (X)

The dreaming princess awakens early, but calls no servants; she hasn't had the heart to tell them what's coming. At dawn she's in a tiny park in a distant city, sitting beneath a cherry tree that bears no fruit. Birds sing; fat rust-red squirrels avoid her invisible shadow. They die at 8:15, along with seventy thousand people and a number of animals and trees no one will ever count.

She cannot hear the earth cry out, but she knows it does. Her sister, not yet born, will tell her one day that this is the beginning of the end.

[identity profile] edonohana.livejournal.com 2004-10-29 10:30 am (UTC)(link)
Good on you for writing about ghosts in all three fandoms. (It was my ambition, but...) Comments in individual forums, except for YnM where I don't think I've gotten to that arc yet, unless it was in the part of the anime that wasn't subtitled on my CDs.
ext_334506: thuvia with banth (Default)

[identity profile] thuviaptarth.livejournal.com 2004-10-29 12:05 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks!

The more I look at the X one, the less sure I am that it will look like a ghost drabble to anyone else. But I was thinking Ghost of Future Yet to Come. It made sense in my head. Anyway.

GenSouKai is a manga-only arc that takes place after the Kyoto arc, and seems to have stalled three-quarters of the way through a remarkably complex and interesting storyline. (I love it because it is All About Hisoka, but there's other interesting stuff in there, too. And it finally made me see where Tatsumi/Watari shippers were coming from.) I have scanlations of random chapters, I think, and I've read translations of all of it. I don't feel like I can know it well without having seen the art, but ... I ended up writing something anyway. *shrug*
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[identity profile] springgreen.livejournal.com 2006-02-19 07:42 am (UTC)(link)
He remembers sun, but not who he's lost or what he's done.

Oh! Oh, I get it now that I've read Gaiden, and oh, it's lovely.
ext_334506: thuvia with banth (Default)

[identity profile] thuviaptarth.livejournal.com 2006-02-19 03:04 pm (UTC)(link)
:) Thank you!