posting

Silly quizzes

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:59:23 GMT

I don't know why I did this, but the results were amusing enough to justify it.

You are The Moon

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.

The Moon is a card of magic and mystery - when prominent you know that nothing is as it seems, particularly when it concerns relationships. All logic is thrown out the window.

The Moon is all about visions and illusions, madness, genius and poetry. This is a card that has to do with sleep, and so with both dreams and nightmares. It is a scary card in that it warns that there might be hidden enemies, tricks and falsehoods. But it should also be remembered that this is a card of great creativity, of powerful magic, primal feelings and intuition. You may be going through a time of emotional and mental trial; if you have any past mental problems, you must be vigilant in taking your medication but avoid drugs or alcohol, as abuse of either will cause them irreparable damage. This time however, can also result in great creativity, psychic powers, visions and insight. You can and should trust your intuition.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

True Love™

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 12:43:21 GMT

Drabbles (R, Byaren)

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:11:47 GMT

I don't do memes usually. This one is making me write something, and combines fic and music, and therefore here I am. I picked it up from metalpen whose excellent example inspired me. The songs all come from corposant's masterful September soundtrack put on shuffle mode.

1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it's over. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do ten of these, then post them.

1. Anne Ternheim - To Be Gone

There is the sound of splashing water somewhere.

It is Renji's foot breaking through the ice behind him. The sound echoes around the crystal cavern, and the inside of Byakuya's scarf seems to freeze around his neck. He cannot breathe. He doesn't turn. He doesn't turn.

Renji goes without much struggle. Then there is deafening silence again, the kind of silence he is used to.

2. The Weather Machines - Stains of Saints

Renji's laughter is like the sound of rusty metal, or the scrape of ice. Renji's voice in the distance sounds like something ever so distant, as if blurred behind a liquid curtain. He can see Renji's outline, his smear of red and tan, the white of his robes. Renji is whispering. There is an insistent rhythm to his voice, sad and haunting. The shadows seem to lengthen insistently around them.

The water goes splash splash in a way that disturbs him. The sound sounds like a question. It sounds like. Why, taichou, why?

Byakuya runs his hand over the cool sheet between them but he doesn't feel anything. (Renji would laugh at that, certainly.) But then even that sound fades away.

3. The Mary Onettes - Explosions

A tinkling in the distance, like Senbonzakura's pieces scattering and wrapping around them both. It makes his heart stop, the sight of taichou with the glint of the metal reflected in his eyes. He doesn't look human anymore. Renji wants to reach out and touch him, to steal Rukia from him, to steal his power and his energy, and the way his voice faints to a whisper when he talks about Hisana.

They are sitting in the hospital room, where they've been sitting for days and days, and Renji still hasn't recovered from the sight of Byakuya with his hair falling into his face, looking searchingly out of the window, hands smoothing down his bedcovers over and over and shaking almost imperceptibly. Renji comes and stands by his taichou and takes his hands in his, and for a moment they simply are each other.

4. The Submarines - Modern Inventions

Renji often grins and sings to him in the evenings, when they are getting drunk together on nights that only his fukutaichou could initiate, that always end with Renji smirking at him and wrapping his arms around Byakuya's shoulders and resting his head on Byakuya's chest. It makes Byakuya's heart ache and skid through a beat. Renji's breathing merges with his own, the contact melting them into each other, as if they were truly one.

5. The Like - Mrs. Actually

When Renji takes off Byakuya's clothes it is with military precision, the kind that makes Byakuya wonder, during the moment before he loses all thought processes to the general taste of Renji collarbones under his teeth, Renji's teeth on him, the bodies rubbing and pressing and writhing and the breathing and touching that goes on in between. Perhaps Renji is addicted to this, as he is, the slide and flow of their bodies in some darkened room, when they can only see each other through touching, when their mouths seek each other out, like this?

7. 8mm - Quicksand

The morning afters are always difficult. Byakuya generally avoids his eyes and sits, painfully straight-backed in his chair as if he likes the discomfort, the masochist and working in silence. Renji always wants to reach out and touch him, slide a thumb into his mouth and maybe tear his scarf off and pull his legs open and-

"Renji."

"The report."

"Yes, taichou," Renji says, and reaches over and breathes Byakuya in, breathes in that austerity and flowery smell and that dark, damp, shadowy slide of skin in his hands.

8. Temposhark - It's Better To Have Loved

When Renji murmurs to him in the dark, after they have made love, Byakuya always feels irritation creeping with revulsion up his spine. Renji's voice, so rough and dark and overfull with unspilled secrets, shuddering wetly into the back his neck as Renji's legs come up and around him, his hands on Byakuya's legs and arms and everywhere. Sometimes Renji breathes a little louder, though he is only dreaming, and whispers taichou taichou taichou while he moves against Byakuya back, the heat of it a sort of latent, pressurised thing. Byakuya's vision always goes darker during these moments, and after Renji's done with him Byakuya lies there and thinks about getting away.

9. The White Tie Affair - Tell Me What You Want

"What do you want from me, you bastard?" Renji growls into his neck, his voice punctuated with desire and short gasps and grunts of effort as he rams Byakuya into the wall, again, again, again.

But Byakuya doesn't say anything, only echoes Renji's gasping, shuddering intakes of air and runs his hands all over Renji's back in random patterns, the sheer uncontrolled fury of it pissing Renji off even further, deeper, harder. Byakuya, his head cracked back and violently kissed, growls into it with the force of scraping, jagged glass. He is all tooth and nail in this, all bite and kiss and thrusting back and yes.

10. Acceptance - So Contagious

They are walking back now. The hotel was dirty and seedy and seems to suit the oily, dirty night they are walking through now. Byakuya is walking ahead. Renji is caught between catching up and keeping up, the turn of Byakuya's head forcefully reminding him of the first time they met, Byakuya peeking at him through an ajar door in a darkened house.

Byakuya completes the turn and Reni grabs him, grabs him by the jaw and kisses him, bending Byakuya over backwards and stretching the resistance. Byakuya in his arms, yes. Byakuya shakes his head and says no just as he wraps a hand over the back of Renji's neck and draws him in with a groan. They are damp and cold and absorbed in each other, the resistance of Byakuya's lip as Renji bites into it, the smell of his skin as Renji turns him around and pulls their bodies against each other, Byakuya's back against his front, Byakuya's body.

"I have always felt this way about you," Renji growls into the back of his neck, and he's unable to resist drinking the skin there in long, slow sucks, hard enough to make him even angrier. He shudders as he fumbles at Byakuya through his clothes, as he tests the angle of Byakuya's legs and his layers of clothing. Byakuya shudders too and pulls free. He gives Renji an imperceptible, terrified stare and pulls him in again, and drags him back in for more.

ICONS. I was bored, posi/nega?

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 19:30:18 GMT

OKAY.

I am not an icon maker, buuuut... I made icons.

I was really bored and I thought that lines from Gintama needed to be iconed? So I have made a Photobucket account and everything for them and the upload was pretty painless, the link gets automatically copied when you click on it... I see there's a special Photobucket option on the LJ image inserter buuuut I'm ignoring it. For now.

Preview:

+
Please credit memopanda (that's me. I made them. Do!)
Ummm let's be friends. I mean, Gintama love unites all, right?

Guess which character said each quote!
(Don't do them all in one go though... 8D)
If you don't know any... comment anyway. Espesh if you take. Suggest some quotes for me to icon?
Oh! And don't worry.
(I really should write Gintama fic. But it's really hard...)

Bleach Fic: In Another World [G, Ryuuken, oneshot]

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:47:24 GMT

Title: In Another World
Author: memopanda
Rating: PG
Pairing/Character/s: Ryuuken
Word Count: 1140
Warning/s: None.
Summary: In another world, Ryuuken would have lived life very differently.
A/N: I really should be revising for exams. Hah! This fic is also available on fanfiction.net.
Feedback: Yes please! Be gentle.
Disclaimer: Bleach belongs to KT.

---

In another world, Ryuuken would have been a much more precise man. He would have awoken at 6AM every day and only spent five minutes smoking every morning instead of fifteen, and his day would have been divided into equal segments instead of slices, getting thinner and thinner and more meager until it wasn't there at all.

II.

In another world, Ryuuken's life would be a simple routine of sleeping and eating, and pumping life back into people in between. As it was he didn't get much of the first two. The first was because he didn't keep a clock in his room (he hated the sound of time ticking away in the silence) and because of the dreams.

Ask a doctor and he'd tell you that dreams were the just the result of a phase of REM sleep; ask a man who suffered recurrent nightmares and he'd tell you they were ghosts from the past. Ryuuken often found himself jerking awake and watching those ghosts, splattered against the ceiling, his hands clenched in the sheets.

They sometimes spoke-

"Father!"

"Goodbye, son..."

"Oh, Ryuuken."

He had once had a disturbing dream in which Uryuu had died repeatedly. The dream had ended with a flash of pure white. He'd told the boy not to go to Souken after that: it hadn't done much good.

Sometimes Ryuuken had that same dream, except Uryuu was older, taller, still as innocent as ever. And sometimes he'd wake up and he'd be paralysed with fear, the fading image of his dying son burned onto the back of his eyelids.

These would be Uryuu's dreams one day, if he managed to live. They were a burden of being the sole survivor of a centuries-old war between the living and the dead, the burden of embodying the fears and hopes of a massacred race. They were the burden brought forth by the powers of the Last Quincy. If he wanted them so desperately, Ryuuken thought bitterly. He could have them.

III.

The lighter made a short, sharp zzst! as he lit a cigarette.

In another world, Ryuuken's fingers would not look so grey in the early hours, and the morning would be filled with warmth and sunshine instead of the concentrated heat of a lonely bed and pale, wintry shadows. And the strip of light that fell across his sheets would not fall through him, leaving him empty, hollow.

The bedroom was huge, the space made daunting by its bare, white walls. Ryuuken had been in moratoriums more cheerful than this room, or any of the rooms in this house, save for the one little room that had been carefully painted in eggshell blue fifteen years ago.

In a house of this size, the whiteness was troublesome: dust gathered in the corners and stained the shadows, and the doors were patterned with ash-coloured fingerprints. Ryuuken regularly spent hours on his knees cleaning away the grey to leave the white spotless again, but it never lasted. It was his own fault for smoking indoors, of course. (The smoke settled everywhere, leaving the air hazy and grey.) It was a habit he had given up after his son had been born. But. That had been in the past.

IV.

Ryuuken used the singed remains of the first stick to light a second.

The water filled the bathroom with a roar that was deafening. Steam hissed as it curled off his skin and his hair clung to his forehead. Hair which, in another world, would not have turned grey so quickly and so easily. It was a stark, rather sad reminder of his own mortality. It was one thing to see the spirits of dead people, and to witness living people dying; it was quite another to see your own body grow old, fall to pieces and turn to dust.

He shivered at the sharp sensation of icy water trickling down his neck. The water was always steaming hot for five minutes, before turning cold: it was a test of endurance, perhaps, or the fact that the water supply was so notoriously uneven. Ryuuken swept his hair out of his eyes and turned the faucet off.

The water gurgled down the drains, the sound echoing off white marble, taking evidence of smoke, dirt and sin down with it.

VI.

ven though he owned a car, Ryuuken tended to use Hirenkyaku to get from place to place, simply because it was more efficient. It was also a way for him to keep up his powers, which were barely used otherwise. He had stopped responding to surges in Hollow reiatsu after the first time he had felt Uryuu going after them.

In another world his car would have been used more often and his wife would still be alive; in another world, his parents would have been locked up in a retirement home. In another world, his son wouldn't have been a hero.

I have never cared for other worlds anyway, Ryuuken thought, as entered his office via the window. He had stopped bothering to check whether his secretary was inside.

Ryuuken had a history with secretaries. He had fired two in the last month, a new record: they had spent most of the day sitting in his office and staring at him, and occasionally sighing: doctors had diagnoses for that sort of thing and they called it idiocy. (And frankly, Ryuuken had better things to do than to fulfill the fantasies of people who wore that much pink.)

So the new secretary was male. He was never on time for work, let alone early; he was short and balding (despite his young age); he was sometimes forgetful and often nervous; he was fine at answering telephone calls and telling people to go away. He was also very apologetic, and had cultivated the habit of leaving a cup of tea on Ryuuken's desk when he got in.

"Idiot." It had been an hour since he had come in through the window; the teacup had been sitting untouched on his desk for fifteen minutes. "I hate peppermint tea."

"S-Sorry sir."

"Just go away, will you."

The cup of tea was left to go cold as Ryuuken stood up and took a cigarette from his pocket. In another world he might have quit: but as a man who saved lives on a daily basis, he felt he had earned the right to throw away his own.

He always opened the window of his office when he smoked. (He wouldn't go outside- why should he have to loiter on the steps of his own hospital?) Then he'd rest one arm on the windowsill and lean out, closing his eyes and lifting his chin as he took the first taste, the best. And then he would look down with a bitter smirk, laughing, a king looking down upon the world.

End

Livejournal's Bad Policies and Learning to Write

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:26:38 GMT

I have tried to write this as coherently as possible. I should be in bed; it's unlikely.

I have been spending a lot of time on Livejournal scrambling around trying to give support to the anti-movement. The new Russian owners, SUP, honestly only care about the business side of things so it is unlikely they will change their minds about this. (They have got rid of basic accounts.) There is a strike on March 21st.

I am getting into good writing habits. I use Darkroom, and it's really excellent. I will also now start writing stories I want to read instead of looking for them (starting tommorrow, because there is no time today). As well as this, I am now waking up at 5AM every day to get some writing in first thing. I usually wake up at 6AM going on 7AM, so we'll see.

On the Road to the Future

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:12:54 GMT

Most of my free time I am staring into space turning possibilities over and over in my head.

The weekend has just ended, and I have made another breakthrough. Home. London. The UK. The western world. It's too boring. Nothing's happening here. I long ago discovered that inspiration comes from actually experiencing things but - our lives in developed countries are so sanitised. We barely experience anything.

The revelation came while I was reading a magazine at a relative's house. There was a very long and passionate article about a lawyer's battle against Guantanamo Bay in it. It was, frankly, terrifying. The worlds we think we live in are so different to the realities of those around us, people who are plucked off the streets and handed over to the US to keep diplomatic relations afloat. The worlds in which we live are not going to be the ones written about in the history books in the future.

The history books will lay out the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with damning clarity. The history books will have subsections on Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and will discuss the motives of the American government and how they were Wrong. (For an example of this phenomenon, turn to history books that mention the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2.)

The children of the future will know the harsh realities of our world better than we know it ourselves.

Because we are letting terrifying events pass us by - without even noticing. Home. Home is so boring - nothing ever happens. I sometimes wish to have lived in apartheid-era South Africa, so that I could have protested against inequality and Made the World a Better Place.

Because - nothing's wrong with the world any more, right? Everything is good in the Now.

Truth is, we're going to be judged in the future on how much action we take Now. I want to go and see this injustice for myself. Because actually, home is pretty boring. Suicide bombs don't happen every day where I live. Nobody (or so I believe) gets tortured. Life is decent.

But what about the poor kids in Iraq, blown to smithereens by their own angry countrymen? What about the mother with the sickly baby in Gaza, chased out of her own country because Israel won't give her any electricity to heat the bottle, dammit. I have to go see for myself, so I know what the hell is wrong in exact, crucifying detail. So that I can Write about it. So that at least some of the future generation will know that we weren't all stupid, all the time.

Some of us did try. Please forgive us, since it wasn't enough.

I need to get out of England. Time to magically become a war journalist?

Pilot

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 01:09:43 GMT

Welcome to my journal! I am a writer.