Tag: wrapped up in you

been awhile since I posted any fic stuff. So I’ll be posting a couple of ‘em tonight.

prompt: LAST RITES
series: Wrapped Up In You
timeline:  Waiting for the End 
characters:  Chibi-usa, Setsuna, Demon
words: 891
summary: (It falls to her now)

———————————————

It has been far too long.

This is not the first time that she has seen the ritual in play, seen the lengths that the Guardian would go to in order to ensure that she and her world would come into being. Pluto has invested so much of herself into this course of action, that it comes as no surprise that she would bind her life and divinity to it to hold everything together when her beloved mother faltered along the path. She has been the Witness to the trances and rituals of the Guardian of Time for seven hundred years, one of the few duties her mother allowed her to have while her growth was halted. 

Normally, the need to hold the timeline together lasted a few hours here and there. There are rare but memorable times where it took a day, and once even two; after wards, Setsuna would untangle herself from the weave. Destiny would march ever on wards as was it’s wont. The End would always arrive on time, and with it came the Rebirth. It had to, if only because she was born after the Rebirth.

This time, however… this time something was so terribly wrong. The guardian has become undeniably enmeshed into the weave of Time. She has spent three long years using her life and her divinity to force it to remain on the path it needs to take, and yet the timeline still jumps and bounces. There are branches where the Rebirth did not happen, and the End went on into eternity. In others the End was pushed back a year or a thousand years and destruction was wrought across all time. There were even a handful of times where the End did not come at all, and humanity rose to heights unimaginable. 

She thinks that might be better for all concerned, but she is greedy. She does not wish to be wiped from all time, a child unborn; something she thinks would be worse even than death. In death, at least, there is the chance to be reunited with family and friends. 

Fear curls in the bit of her stomach whenever she looks upon the Guardian. She can see the strain in her face, in the dullness of her eyes and in the graying of her hair. She sees it in the way that Setsuna’s shoulders slump under an invisible weight, and in the length of time it now takes her to just to sit up.

It is heart breaking and terrifying and Small Lady doesn’t know what to do.

When the day comes that Setsuna cannot even make herself get out of bed, she understands that her mother has fallen. There is no way for her to know what she has fallen to, or how to fix things, but she understands. When the Guardian’s eyes close and she turns all focus inwards towards ensuring the present comes to pass, she knows that the burden of fixing this mess is now hers. All she has available to her are the libraries of Castle Charon.

This is hardship only as she does not know where to start; Pluto has been gathering the greatest works of man and pagan, demon and monster, and adding them to her libraries. There are texts there that have not seen light on Earth since writing began, and others that would have been lost during Lucifer’s reign had it not been for the Guardian. Surely there is something in the collection that can give her some idea of how to repair the damage done, to raise her mother back up to the Goddess Queen that guides the Rebirth. 

It takes a year, but she finally finds the ritual in one of the older works. It is an ancient spell of summoning, something that would bring forth a being of power that would be willing to aid her.

It takes longer still for her to find a suitable site for the ritual. Within the walls of Castle Charon she is safe from the jumbled mess that the time stream has become; the palace of the Queen of Pluto stands outside of time itself. A single step beyond the walls of the castle, however, and Small Lady would be torn to pieces and put back together a hundred thousand times, with a hundred thousand different histories and personalities. She would be destroyed as surely as everything else had came into being after Lucifer’s defeat of Michael. 

As surely as so much is destroyed and reborn and destroyed again along the timeline to the confrontation. The flexing and fracturing of the timeline has rippled backwards as well, going so far as to wipe out entire human populations and taking their passages, pathways, and roads with them. There was no time after the End that she would be able to summon one of these beings, wiped out as Lucifer had wiped out so much. 

She is forced to use the Key the Pluto had long ago gifted her with to find a site stable enough in the past. The back-ripples of the damage were stunning in their reach, and Small Lady is forced to step back several hundred years before her mother’s own birth to find a suitable crossroads.

Long minutes pass, and even as she decides that she did not do the ritual correctly, a voice comes from behind.

“Hello child.”

sitting here in a half lit room, trying not to think about the resume that’s in the other window. hmm. obviously this means I should write some wrapped up. 

——- prompt: CHOICES ——-

January 24, 2001.

She could say that is was a day that she would never be able to forget. She could claim that she knew exactly what she had been doing, what she had gotten herself into, and who she was dealing with. She could probably even bluff her way through it, but the truth of the matter is that only a couple of weeks later the details have mostly faded away. 

The point where things start to get blurry is pretty easy to recall. She can remember crawling out of her bedroom window and dropping down to ground level. She remembers the rush of unleashing her magic and assuming her true form. She remembers the frantic rush to the temple as a vague blur of rooftops and leaps. The fear that had pounded in her heart, the worry that she would be too late to save her friends… those she remembers clearly.

It’s when she gets to the shrine that things go sideways. She doesn’t remember the fight. Not the landing and speech, not the first blow either by her or to her. Nothing remains, not even to form the bones of her nightmares. It is as thought the battle never happened.

After the battle, though… she remembers standing in the tree behind Hikawa Jinja, her breath coming in harsh gasps. She remembers seeing her teammates, her dearest friends and allies, laid out around her. She remembers the certainty that they were healed and whole, with no chance of dying and leaving her again. She doesn’t remember why she was so certain. 

She recalls sinking down onto her knees, half sobbing, when he stepped out of the air in front of her. She doesn’t remember what it was that he said to her as his introduction, but she very clearly recalls being annoyed. Annoyed and no little amount relieved. It was a feeling that burrowed so deeply into her the only thing she was about to compare it to is the feeling of comfort and family that the Senshi had always given her. 

She had known him once, in a life before her current one, obviously. Known him and trusted him.

She can remember his name being on the tip of her tongue, and trying to greet him. She also remembers how he had barely let the first syllable of his name escape her before he covered her mouth with one hand. 

“No,” is the first clear memory she has of his voice. “We’ve already sent out signal flares with that little light show of ours. Try not to dig me any deeper here, babe.”

She distinctly remembers knowing that, when she finally pulled his hand way from her mouth, it was only because he had let her. 

“Why do I know you?”

The man looks so indescribably sad at the question, and it leaves her heart aching with sympathy for him. She can remember wanting to take the words back as soon as they had left her mouth, despite how desperately she wants to know how they are connected. 

“Well I was just inside of you.”

She can only remember bits and pieces of the conversation that followed that declaration. The clearest images in her head are of a smirk and a laugh.

“You said ‘yes’ to me, once, a long time ago.”

There is an ancient weariness to him, and a heart break that could only be described as godforsaken. Something in that turn of phrase digs at her with sharp thorns of half remembered rage.

“You gave me shelter when there was no one else.”

More than likely, the reason that she doesn’t have clear memories of that night is because of how it ended. He had stepped in close, hands settling on her face. She knows that he was closer than she let anyone outside of Mamoru get to her, and remembers just how unnerving his golden-brown stare was. Remembers the slide of fingers up the side of her face before resting on her forehead.

“I will only ask this once. Yes or no. Do you want this?”

She doesn’t remember what part of the conversation they were at, or even what the conversation was about. She doesn’t quite know what the question was referring too, either. She knows, however, that she said yes to him once again. She knows this because she knows who he is. She knows what he is. She knows what she once was.

This is knowledge that has been seared into her very soul as surely as the brand under her left breast. It looks a little like a feather, shiny and white with a shimmer of magic to it.

She can’t remember her life as Laufey, but she remembers Laufey’s choice. Her memories of Serenity’s life are as filled with holes as they ever were, but she remembers Serenity’s choice. She even remembers Gabriel’s choice, curled as it is around her human soul. It is in the warmth and light and kindness that has bound them together since the first time her soul said “Yes”

—————————-

and now I am going to bed. rawr 

whoops, missed 700 because I was catching up on the while-i-was-sleeping happenings. And then there was the magic of Illegally dead… So, lets see what I will post this time…

Oh I know. that Mamoru & Usagi piece that was pissing me off all week. Finally managed to finish it. S’probably the longest one yet.

——- prompt: WEEKS ——-

She is camped out at a table in the Market Square Cafeteria, and he is a Med Student. While she may have been willingly been tempting fate, it still comes as a shock when Mamoru sits down across from her. It’s been five weeks (3 days, 6 hours, 12 minutes, but she’s not counting) since the last time she saw him, and Usagi isn’t entirely sure of what to say or do. Her notes and textbooks are spread out all over the table, but the twisting in her stomach makes it impossible to concentrate on them.

“Usako…”

She refuses to life her head. Instead, she lets the fall of her hair cover her face; she’s had it in pigtails for so long that she had almost forgotten that she could even do that. It may be silly, but having that thin barrier between the two of them does so much for settling her nerves. She takes a deep breath… and then another… and then she does her best to focus on her schoolwork.

Usagi has never been the most dedicated student, but if it helps her to ignore Mamoru then she’s damn well going to give it a shot.

“Usako. Look at me.” That voice… she almost almost looks up. Aside from Brady and a handful of calls home, she hasn’t heard anyone speak Japanese in a month and a half. It’s just another painful reminder that she came to this country for this man, and now it’s all in pieces. She has to bite her lip not to give in and just look at him. 

It doesn’t help. Mamoru leans forwards and cups her chin to lift her face. Her heart gives a painful lurch at her first true glimpse of him in months. This man is so beautiful, and she has loved him for so long; but he has hurt her so deeply too many times and she doesn’t think that she can handle it again. 

His eyes thought… those beautiful eyes she has spent hours staring into are filled with pain and bewilderment, and she can’t handle that either. The honest confusion in his face as he searches hers for answers that her silence doesn’t provide. His hand slips from her face then, his fingers tangling in her hair.

He can see a pink tinge in the hair around her face, and for the first time ever he can actually see the dark roots of her hair. There is a moment of guilt as he realizes that he’s never actually questioned her hair color. He had always just assumed that it was some sort of magic hold over from Serenity, and before they’d discovered their history together he hadn’t known her well enough to care.

There is a note in his voice that almost shatters her heart all over again when he finally breaks the tense silence that has fallen between them. “Usako… why didn’t you tell me?”

The question shouldn’t baffle her the way it does, and she can’t help that it slips out: “Tell you what?”

“About this! About being here!” and he gestures widely: to their surroundings, to the cafeteria, to Stanford and Palo Alto and California and the States in general she thinks. “You’ve obviously been here since the start of the semester. Why are you avoiding me?”

The laughter that bursts out at that is just a shade off of hysterical and entirely bitter. “Really? Really? Mamoch… Mamoru, I did go to see you.”

There’s a sharp stab of pain in his heart, ragged and painful with the use of his full name. He has been ‘Mamochan’ for so long that hearing her say it just feels wrong. It feels as though that something between them has cracked and broken; feels as though he needs to fix everything now before it breaks any further. The problem is that he doesn’t know what it is that needs to be fixed, and all he can do is stare at her.

Usagi lets the highlighter she’s holding fall to the table and the clatter it makes sounds so terribly loud in the tense silence around them. After what feels like an eternity, she breaks his gaze and lets out a shuddering breath. 

“I went to see you,” she repeats, her voice soft and ragged and just so broken that his heart clenches in sympathy. God knows just how much he loves this woman, and seeing her in this much pain only inspires it in himself. That it is he who apparently caused this agony, that has caused her to stew in her doubts and worries instead of coming to see him, only causes him more pain. 

The girl that he had left in Tokyo would have been up in his face, wailing and begging like a child. The woman in front of him now looks just as wreaked as that girl would be, but she isn’t advertising it. There is no great temper tantrums and sobs, nothing outwards that shows her heart break anywhere near as much as her eyes. She’s grown up somewhere along the way; she’s had five weeks to work through this agony and yet he’s only known that she was even in California for one.

“You were busy,” and the words are bitten out, all sharp and harsh and in English and it makes Mamoru start. Intellectually, he knows that she knew English in order to come to Stanford, but it’s just another unexpected change between the girl he loved and this woman that he doesn’t know. “with your ‘lab partner’.”

And suddenly Mamoru knows exactly what she’s talking about. It’s hard not to when the memory is seared into his brain. He’s always subscribed to the idea that it wasn’t cheating if it was just fantasies. Especially if the girls had the ‘Serenity’ look to them: long blond hair, wide blue eyes, slim and athletically beautiful… in that case, it was just that he missed Usagi, that was all. But Michelle… Michelle didn’t fit into the blond and blue eyed mold.

She was a lot closer to Ami, actually, and he’d fallen into the trap of treating her like one of the girls because of it. They had always ignored any harmless flirting, knowing just how serious about Usagi he actually was. They knew how muich he loved his Princess, and they never thought of his flirting as an invitation.

Michelle’s kiss had been hot and heavy and needy and it had stunned im immobile for a couple minutes. Eventually he had managed to pull his brain together enough to push her off, but apparently the damage had already been done. 

Mamoru leans forwards, clasping her hand between his and continuing the conversation in Japanese. He had to make sure that she understood. “Usako… she kissed me. It was… a misunderstanding on her part.”

And for a glorious moment, her eyes spark with light and love and hope. For a moment… and then the sadness slips back into them. She withdraws her hand from his with a heavy sigh. “Oh Mamoru…” and there’s that pain again, that wrongness. “Mamoru, I love you. I love you more than anything else ever, but…”

“But?”

“…these last few weeks? They’ve been hard, Mamoru. Really hard.”

“There’s no reason for it to stay that way,” he finds himself saying, and isn’t that a flip? It’s always been her chasing after him, and now that she’s taking a step back, he finds he can’t just let her go. She’s tangled herself too deeply into his heart. 

She smiles so sadly at him, and there is a strange look in her eyes. “They may have been hard, but Mamoru! This is the first time in five years that I haven’t defined myself by what she was! I’m not Serenity. I’m no Moon. I’m finally finding out who I am.”

Mamoru closes his eyes. He understand the desire, and he can’t begrudge her for it. Not when he remembers the shift in perspective that had come the first time he stepped onto campus. It takes everything in him to put any sort of emotional distance between them, to understand what she’s going through. It’s harder than when he had lied to her when Chibi-Usa had first come to them.

“I’ll wait,” he says, getting up from the table. “As long as I have to. I love you, Usako.”

He can hear the sobs start as he walks away, and all he wants to do is to run back to her and fold her in his arms. He wants to brush away all the pain and agony and tears. 

But he doesn’t. She’s had five weeks to start to learn herself. A few more won’t hurt. She needs to learn that her tears won’t get her everything.

He knows he’s lying to himself.

Hmm. I haven’t posted a ficlet in awhile AND I got a request for more Waiting. TO THE NOTEPADS!

——- prompt: LIGHT ——-

It is with agonizing slowness that it begins to piece itself back together. For time uncountable, all that it is aware of is the light and warmth and comfort that surrounds itself. It takes so long for it to find the trickle of knowledge that lets it understand ‘female’, and so much longer to apply the designation to herself.

The disconnect between that and the next thought throws her for a time; as the seed of knowledge takes root and a vine works it’s way possessively through her, she wonders if this is what it feels like to be swaddled. Now she has three thoughts, confusing and tangled together: This is me! I am female! O but knowledge grows like a vine ‘round a tree! and The child is wrapped in linens and cloth for warmth.


She is grows like a weed, she thinks. The vine around the tree as pieces fit themselves together in the child, but she doesn’t need to be wrapped in linen. The longest day has come seventeen times since she was a seedling small enough to be swaddled… and now she has four tangled thoughts. What is day, and why is it long…?

Though these pieces of the past only result in confusion, she clings to each one with teeth and thorns. She won’t let them go. She can’t let them go; these are the fragments of understanding, these are the fragments of herself. These tiny scraps of being are all that remain of who she had once been.

In time her tenacity and greed pay off. Her name is Serenity. Her name is Nál. Possibly even Laufey. Yes, Laufey is comfortable and warm, a favorite blanket. Nál is the familiar wrap of silks and fur, the sounds of home. Serenity… Serenity is right. It is weight and duty and love so brilliant that when it dances with the light all she can see is star speckled infinity.

All three are hers, and she is all three. Each piece is a fragment of her whole, she decides, although it is less a decision and more a remembrance. She remembers Serenity and Laufey and where they had come from. Nál is still a mystery to her, but as she remembers the other two her memories come faster and faster. It is the sickening lurch and spin of pagan travel, and she rests heavily on the light to steady herself.

With each spin she learns a little more of herself, and the light burns a fraction more. The warmth fluctuating now; at times it burns as though she stands in the midst of a bonfire, and she is burning up from within. At other times, the sensation is more akin to being buried in an avalanche; it is all ice and snow and a cold so deep she feels her vines wilt and shatter beneath it. This is the definition of agony, she thinks, but her suffering is proof. 

To live is to suffer, so to suffer was to live. She clung to that, and she knew.

She was Laufey. She had been crippled, but she had forged on despite it.

She was Serenity. Dead by her own hand, but determined enough to see her love again.

She was Nál. The last memory clicked into place and she called the light by name.

“GABRIEL!”

TRADITION DEMANDS FIC. 

post #600 gets you more Wrapped Up In You. Another magical adventure in times long past, and another piece of the puzzle that is Gabriel.

——-prompt: MONTHS——-

The first month following his possession of his True Vessel, Gabriel finds himself absorbed in the study of the intricate knot of soul and divinity that was Laufey. It lays cushioned and wrapped as close to the center of his Grace as he can get without causing the divinity to ‘infect’ his power. All he wants to do is protect it until he can figure it out, and burning the soul out of existence is the exact opposite of that. 

In the second month of his possession, the Messenger visits Zechariah in the Temple. He brings great news, and leaves with the old man’s voice. It is much later that he realizes that the act was one made out of spite and rage, and not because it had been part of  his Father’s great plan. He wouldn’t change his reaction in the slightest, even if Father were to command otherwise. 

In the third month Gabriel returns to Heaven. He’s not sure what is causing these minor changes and fluctuations to his Grace, and so he feels he needs the time to meditate on it. The worry that it is the Pagan’s soul that is causing the imbalance, he leaves her in the care of another angel and focuses on himself.

Two months of agonizing meditation and discussion with his brothers leaves him feeling himself again. It also leaves him with a feeling of despair growing in him; while he had been attending to his duties on Earth, Michael and Raphael had heard the pleas from a soul in the pit. As they rescued the worthy soul, their caged brother had spat invectives and abuse at them. 

Gabriel’s heart broke to hear about it, but the words had very obviously struck Michael the wrong way. It was all his older brother seemed to think about at these days.

The fifth month saw Gabriel wearing his Laufey’s form again, and visit another family in another town, about yet another child. While he had been announcing the births of kins and prophets for as long as there had been Man, the sheer number of them of late was… unusual. He knew more about his Father’s plans than the majority of the Host, but he didn’t know everything. Not that that hindered the obviousness that something big was going to be going down, considering just how many he had announced in the last year. 

He spent the sixth and seventh months getting very very VERY drunk. There had been a Pagan woman, one of the Greco-Romans if he recalled properly, who had been able to sense Laufey’s Pagan soul despite how deep it had been buried. Suprisingly, all that she had done was to smile conspiratorially at him before inviting him to a party on Olympus.

It was an ususual situation to be sure but there was something just so intriguing about the party. He introduces himself as Nal, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else around was able to feel Laufey. The party was unlike any other thing that he had seen before, let alone participated in. There was dancing and drinking, loving and laughing, and in this case a good bout of fighting, feuding and fucking. 

The rigid form of angelic society did not leave any openings for such chaos. Everything had to be perfect, to follow some invisible and predestined path. The be able to jump away from the path was something that had been given to humans and pagans, and had been left out of the angels themselves. Over the course of his ‘pagan adventure’, Gabriel finds himself wanting nothing more than the glorious freedom and free will provided by the pagans. 

He also found it terrifying.

It was a relief in the eighth month for him to be called upon to do his duty. Another woman was having a very special birth and it required his presence… his relief washed away almost as soon as it came about. The message itself was almost horrifying to behind, and suddenly not knowing his Father’s plan seems to be a blessing. 

Still, Gabriel did as he had been bid, and went to deliver the good news to Mary.

The ninth and tenth months were spent watching over and guiding Mary and Joseph. If they were needed somewhere, it was his duty to make sure they got there, and to make sure that they stayed safe. News of the christ child would have spread quickly but for Gabriel’s intervention. 

The eleventh month was spent whispering into the ears of kings, and turning their eyes up to the stars. In turn, the twelfth month was spent partying it up with the gods of the local pantheon. It was in that moment that he realized that he had stopped thinking of his body as a Vessel; instead he had started to consider it his own physical form. 

On the 365th day after Laufey said ‘yes’, Gabriel wished for a body of his own and a life outside the confines of Heaven.

The thirteenth month began with the divinity cloaked in his Grace stirring.

alright, well. I got back from watching A Girl’s Guide to Cheating  Something Borrowed, and decided to try and wash that crap out of my head. That hasn’t worked so far, so I’ll type up one of my prompts. Paved or Waiting… hmm… Paved it is!

——- prompt: TEAMMATES ——-

The worst part about moving to a new country in order to be with your lover is leaving your life and friends behind. It only gets worse when you find all your hopes and dreams shattered in the wake of infidelity, before you even manage to get yourself settled in. The loneliness is almost too much for her; she only knows two people on campus as anything more than acquaintances. One of them is, of course, the cheating ex, while the other is a man with his own classes and life to live. 

She’s been at the center of a gaggle of girls for so long that she’s all but forgotten how to be on her own. She’s forgotten how to make friends that haven’t come as part of the “Serenity package”, and even how to separate herself from a woman who has been dead for thousands of years. It seems impossible to move past this.

Although she knows that she could easily call home and talk to her friends, she finds herself unwilling to do so. She hasn’t managed to find a job yet, not that she’s looking all that hard, and long distance calls are just so expensive. She can’t afford it, and calling on her communicator just to sob seems like a waste of resources.

She knows that she can always count on Brady. She’s been spending as much time as she can with him, but he’s in pre-med and she’s busy with politics. Their schedules don’t exactly line up with each other, and she finds herself spending a lot of time on her own. 

“Join a club or a sport or find a hobby or something!” is Brady’s suggestion when she brings it up. And after she finishes yelling at her for using her communicator for non-senshi business, Rei fully agrees with him. She needs something to be focused on, something to get her mind off of the fact that the only reason she strived so hard to get into Stanford is the man who broke her heart.

So she starts to read the notices that are taped to bulletin boards, light poles, and on the university website. She pokes her head in on a few meetings here and there, but she just can’t seem to find anything that sparks her interest. There is no one and nothing that can pull her out of her broken heart and ease her loneliness.

She’s almost ready to give up entirely, to pack her belongings and head home because she just can’t do this anymore, when she gets the flyer for tryouts. Some enterprising soul had stuffed one under the door of every room on her floor; she takes it as a sign. Some small part of her, a wisp of the girl she’d been once upon a time, jumps excitedly at the opportunity. She doesn’t let herself dwell on anything else right up until tryouts.

It turns out that a half decade of running about on rooftops and saving the world has given her a touch of gracefulness. Growing into her full height and settling into her limbs seem to have finally rid her of the clumsiness that has plagued her for so long. It helps that the acrobatics that she learned by necessity seem to translate into gymnastics routines pretty well, too.

Before she really realizes what’s going on, Usagi is at practices and meets. Her smile is steadily growing wider and brighter with every day, and she’s putting that terrible first day behind her. Her newfound teammates may not have been the Senshi that she has relied on for so long, but they are quickly finding their way into her heart right beside them.

She is a social girl, and always has been. She needs to be surrounded by people, and they need to be happy for her to be happy and bright. The girls she meets through cheerleading, through this new adventure she’s found herself in, they give her that. In turn, she gives back everything she can, throwing herself into the team and letting them take the weight off her back. 

The girls might not understand to the full extent just what left Usagi’s heart so bruised, but they understand break ups. It’s a team effort to distract her, to put her back together after the devastation left in Mamoru’s wake. To see her smile and laugh and get her life back.

Usagi always had faired better in a team than on her own.