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stillness-in-green · 11 months

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First Sentence Game

The Rule: Share the first sentence of your ten most recent fics.

Personal Caveat: Since nine of my ten most recent fics have been for event weeks or prompt lists, I'm cheating a little and just picking one favorite first sentence from any given "set" of stories. Otherwise, these are presented from most recent to farthest back.

Tagging: @codenamesazanka, @robotlesbianjavert, @leftofrevolution, @desultory-novice, and anyone else who wants to play!

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10) It’s so hard to tell anything apart—what’s inside, what’s outside, what’s real when everything, everything, itches just the same. —Spinaraki Week Round 3, Day Two: Flesh | Resentment

9) “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” —Inheritance Deferred, aka the Magical Gang Reviver Eri-chan AU

8) It starts with blood on your hands, a sticky wetness you can smell but can’t see. —MLA May AUs, 5/3, Tokoyami: you’re lost in the labyrinth

7) Ten minutes to close, the health store is quiet, nearly deserted, with the cashier eyeballing his only two remaining customers when they aren’t looking. —Bad Example, the most recent Brogaraki installment

6) “What’s so impressive about him? You were the only one of us who was there.” —Mors Certa, in which Trumpet tries and fails to explain what it was like to be at The Crater

5) “Rise and shine, princess. Breakfast time.” —Moon Shot Aim, the Overhaul/Nemoto soulmate+bodyswap AU principally narrated by Lady Nagant

4) “I’m not saying I want to be stuck with a fake one, but the whole point was to—” —Discussing the Merits of Clones, i.e. stillness processing the Clone!Re-Destro reveal

3) Raltiiru Station was not always a miserable shithole of a place to live. —Spinaraki Week Level 2, Day One: Chase | Space

2) The first cup of tea he ever serves her, with eyes as gentle as his assumed name, is the first black tea she’s ever tasted, and though she loves everything about him, still she winces back from the strength of it. —Tonight I Love You Less (Than I Will Tomorrow Morning), the one where Gentle and La Brava adjust to togetherness, as tracked through the tea they have along the way

1) He hears tell of it from a man in distant Koya, of the secret stone, the pit at the heart of fragrant, fleshy Omelas. —A Blessing Count in Funeral Toll, aka the fusion AU with LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, in which condemnation begins with a kindness

#memes #my writing #ficcing #mainly what collecting this told me is i need to write more fic #also that i start a lot of stories with dialogue #would love it if more people would read the Omelas fic #SO pleased with that one #“It's an allegory” i say as i allegorically explain why Hero Society brought this on itself

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stillness-in-green · 2 years

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Spinaraki Week Round 3, Day One: Reunion

This is how I would like to see canon going in the next few chapters, please and thanks.

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That was the moment that decided everything that would come next. I didn’t understand it at first. When it happened, it took almost too long to figure out what had changed.

When the black gate swirls into existence in the middle of the field, a collective gasp tears itself from the throats of everyone on it. Izuku, nerves and senses both alight with One For All’s power, reacts before he can think, already catching the falling Shigaraki with a length of Black Whip. The images and facts pile up behind his eyes—Toga almost turned the tables by pulling him through a portal, and he can’t let it happen again by letting someone pull Shigaraki through another one; but Warp Gate severs things when it closes—as his gaze jumps from one horror-stricken expression to the next (even from a distance and through the electromagnetic barrier, he can see Monoma’s mouth moving), then to the triumphant grin slashing a smile onto Shigaraki’s face, a red curve of blood-smeared teeth.

Familiar yellow eyes open on the gate, then close again as someone comes through—a woman, strips of hair like paper streamers, eyes wide over no visible mouth. As quickly as Izuku can take in her features, someone else follows—then another, and another, then too many to keep looking at as, suspended from Black Whip, Shigaraki wheezes out a hateful laugh (All For One, Izuku knows, but the cadence of it is so much like Shigaraki that he still struggles to believe it).

He didn’t think Danger Sense could get any more strident, and it doesn’t jump, not all at once, but its electric whine in his skull climbs smoothly and slowly higher, like Jirou turning up the volume knob on an amp. In his ear, a jumble of words he can’t pick apart: Mandalay, Fourth, Second, First, Fifth.

The hospital. Who did we have at the hospital? Who did he send to the hospital; who did he even have left?

And then a bulk of green and shock of purple-pink come through the Warp Gate, and the world drops out from under Izuku as Shigaraki’s laughter abruptly stops.

His face contorts, twitching through discordant expressions as he stares at—Spinner, the League’s Spinner, it has to be, but huge, the size of a fully bulked out Muscular or even bigger than that, but if he had a quirk that could do that, why didn’t he use it at the training camp or at Kamino or—

But then Izuku—already hauling Shigaraki out of reach, length by length, Fa Jin coiling its strength back into his arms with every repetition—registers the spittle oozing between Spinner’s teeth, the sick glisten of it painted down the column of his throat, and his question answers itself. (Multiple choice, two memories: the way Kaminari’s eyes used to glaze over and his face go slack when he overexerted himself, and All Might speaking in a low, grim voice about the consequences of taking gifts from All For One.)

The stream of people still flows through Warp Gate, more and more packing in, a building roar of shouting. In Izuku’s peripheral vision, blurs of brown and white and red move as Mirko leaps in to engage, Lemillion and Suneater just steps behind.

And still, Shigaraki dangles at the end of Black Whip, stare fixed on Spinner as his brows knot lower and lower, the earlier rictus grin now a downturned grimace.

“Everyone shut up!” Sharp and sudden, Hatsume Mei’s voice on the comm line cuts through the white noise garble. “The engines can’t take any more weight than this! Someone get that gate closed or the whole school’s gonna crash!”

“Eraser?” Mandalay’s voice, harried.

“Not until Kurogiri comes through himself.” Aizawa-sensei’s voice, flat as bare sheetrock but cut through with a strange, wire-taut pain.

Mirko pops up through the sea of people (heteromorphs, Izuku registers of the blur of features and limbs, they’re all heteromorphs) and a body sails back through the portal, propelled by the force of her kick. But the crowd keeps thickening, even as Spinner’s advance slows and stops. It’s no one’s work—the others are still fighting the crowd, including Best Jeanist, crouched low over Kacchan (and Izuku’s throat still reflexively tightens, his gaze still wanting to freeze in place, at Kacchan’s stillness) in the center of a cat’s-cradle mesh of threads and a tightening circle of people.

“The portal goes both ways, right?” Lemillion’s voice, barely pausing before he tumbles forward into, “I can get through the crowd; I’ll get him!” The fluttering red of his cape marks an unerring path toward the swirling gate.

The next flurry of words is drowned out by a horrible groan, long and loud, rising up from the school to suffuse the air like a volcano’s plume of ash. The view of the horizon shifts, a pillar suddenly jutting across the image of distant trees where before there’d been only the hazy orange grid of the barrier. Below, the whole crowd lurches to the right.

Hatsume shrieks, “My babies!” before the line cuts to the shrill, piercing distortion of a lost signal. It hurts his ears, but distantly, barely reaching Izuku through his lightheaded whirl. What changed? What happened? I’m not out of time yet with Gearshift. I—Shigaraki—

Spinner’s head cranes upward, the motion sluggish. He sways in place when he sees Shigaraki, his mouth falling farther open. His right arm twitches upward, once and violently, then flops back down to his side. Shigaraki’s head is turned away from Izuku, white hair covering his face; all Izuku can see is the slow, trembling movements of his cracked lips.

Then Shigaraki’s head snaps back up and his hair falls back to show his eyes, blazing red and so familiar it takes Izuku’s breath away.

The city, the rain. His class—his friends. So much anger in their eyes, but, after weeks of cacophony, a silence from Danger Sense so overpowering that the sheer absence had felt like an unbroken scream.

The school lurches again, the barrier flickering and dying, and Deku’s hands make the decision for him.

Shigaraki falls. He doesn’t have to try and tear through Midoriya Izuku’s power with his bare hands because the hero did the job for him, letting go and vanishing in a zippy blur of green. Gone to where, Shigaraki doesn’t know and doesn’t care, because Sensei is still trying to stuff him back down, packed inside his own head like someone who ran afoul of yakuza and got their body added to the cement mix of a building foundation. And Shigaraki doesn’t care about that right now, either, because much more important is—

Even as out of it as he looked before, as jerky and glitching, Spinner’s arms go up and stay up. They don’t flinch when Shigaraki hits them, so for just a second Shigaraki lets himself be glad of the surgery, since without it the momentum would have folded his spine in half from the impact.

Spinner looks down at him, dumb and drooling, sticky strands already splatting onto Shigaraki’s chest. The whites show all around his eyes, shrunk down to pinpricks, and his breath shudders in his ribs. His mouth moves, but the only thing that comes out are slurred syllables that can’t even decide if they’re Shigaraki’s name or just wracked groaning.

“No,” Shigaraki tells him, and reaches down to close his fingers around the back of Spinner’s hand.

Nothing happens. Somewhere, then, three red eyes are still glaring at him, and the rage closes his throat; I’ll pluck out their damn eyeballs for this.

Sensei doesn’t speak, doesn’t have to. His hand slides over Shigaraki’s inner gaze; everything goes cloudy white.

“No!” His voice this time sounds younger; it doesn’t feel like the voice he’s used to, doesn’t match the words his lips were making. His vision swims back into focus to find tears running down Spinner’s cheeks, his mouth still opening and closing with nothing coming out of it that makes any sense.

Tomura and the kid he used to be can both relate.

The heroes are lost in the crowd. The second Shigaraki lays eyes on, Kurogiri’s portal wavers and retracts down to nothing. Probably literal hundreds of people are shouting, so the howl from the guy who just lost a leg to a closed warp gate goes unheard.

Still no sign of Midoriya, and Sensei’s still there, but when Shigaraki looks at Spinner, just looks at him and takes a breath and lets his eyes rest there, a clean anger washes through him, the kind of thing he’s only ever felt once or twice in his life, and it muffles Sensei down to something he can ignore, for now.

“No,” Shigaraki says again, quietly, and boosts himself out of Spinner’s hands. He lost Air Walk back at Tartarus, forced by the quirk controlling him to hand it off to a sold-out, burned-out hero, but he’s pretty sure he doesn’t need it just for this.

He reaches up and wraps his hands under the edge of Spinner’s belt, thumbs hooking into the belt loops on his pants. Then he crouches as low as he can without letting go, tightens up his grip and his thighs alike, and jumps.

The barrier’s gone, he’s not afraid of falling, and thanks—again—to the Doc’s double-edged work, Spinner hardly weighs a thing.

He catches just a glimpse of Midoriya, a phosphorescent crackle of lightning hovering in the sky above U.A. at the center of a gale. He’s got more ropes of black power coming out of him than Shigaraki even bothers trying to count, lashed around the school and the barrier support pillars and the chunk of rock the whole fortress is floating on. Over the roaring wind and getting-distant-fast screaming, Shigaraki thinks he hears Midoriya yell his name.

But there’s no pursuit as Shigaraki floats across the apex of his jump and then starts to fall.

Regeneration kicks in around the same time gravity does. Someone blinked. And somewhere in there, too, Spinner found the presence of mind to wrap those huge arms around his waist and pull him up, the massive curve of his beak pressing down against Shigaraki’s shoulder.

Wind whipping through his hair, U.A. shrinking in the sky above them, Shigaraki manages a crooked smile.

“Come back,” he breathes, ignoring the resistance burning in his limbs, and reaches up to run his hand down the rough pebbling of Spinner’s cheek. "I don't want you like this."

The quirk comes loose like pulling a splinter out of a wound, and if Shigaraki could just let it fly away into nothing, he would. But that’s not how AFO works, so he just slots it away into the teeming mess that got sold to him as ultimate power and tightens his grip on Spinner as Spinner shrinks back down to the size he’s supposed to be.

He’s a good fit in Shigaraki’s arms, which is weird, but not in a bad way.

And then the only thing left to worry about is the landing.

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(Okay, in the canon version maybe they can get out via Kurogiri or Kurogiri can come through and deal with Aizawa or something. The main point is that Shigaraki should be the one to fix Spinner.)

#bnha #shigaraki tomura #iguchi shuichi #midoriya izuku #bnha spinner #no. 2 green #spinaraki #spinarakiweek2022 #my writing #ficcing #deku can have an Amecomi stopping-the-out-of-control-train moment as a treat

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