I Believe In the World Right In Front of Me

Never in the entirety of her second life had sleep been capable of sneaking up on Fianna, and when it finally caught her in its chokehold and robbed her of consciousness, its spell could never conquer her for a whole night.

Its record lay between seven hours and eight, but its usual grip could barely last for half of that painfully average number. The woman ran on a humble handful of sleep that many would call a nap’s worth, barely three hours would pass from the moment her head rolled back into her pillow and her fingers lost touch with the book in their grasp, to the moment her eyes fluttered open and attuned themselves to the dark. An early bird by nature, Fianna could race and best the sun without a second thought, with hours left to spare before it finally caught up.

This morning had been no exception. Her lantern was shifted from the desk to her bed to accompany the dog-eared book she had dropped in her sleep, and now that dawn had begun to give chase to the dark, shared with its owner the doorway that she had gently, almost silently, slid open, the pair of them now exposed to the inky black silhouette of the horizon and the first sign of dawn.

All of this, according to the silver pocket watch beneath her pillow, before four in the morning.

The three quarters mark in her novel was fast approaching by the time the dawn gained her full attention. Hands flecked with scabs gently returned the book to a closed stance without the supervision of her eyes, enchanted by the glow of the sky. The warm tropical green tint of dawn crawled up from behind the horizon whilst the ultramarine night claimed the farthest stretch of the celestial sea, tiger-striped with midnight blue clouds, like ripples carved into the sand by a rising tide. Not a single sparkle from a single star punctured through the heavy cloak of heaven, the moon itself sheltered in a sanctum of clouds.

Yet in spite of an absence of the key elements necessary to create a picturesque nightscape, the sight remained spectacular, and as she placed her weight against her door frame and inhaled deeply in the hopes that a breath from such a sky would feel just as glorious as merely observing it, Fianna pondered unto herself - wondered if somewhere in the court, between the ivory towers that dressed the horizon, someone else’s eyes were opening at this ungodly hour to appreciate the sky as she did.

You'll Burn In Hell While They're Digging You Out

Another Bleach post. A bit of exposition is required for this one. Mid-tournament post, Fi and another guy versus an arrancar with the attitude and the appearance of a (vicious) little girl. With this guise of hers, the arrancar managed to single the guy out and crippled him by pretending to be a little kid in trouble. Fianna was not very happy about finding one of her friends with a massive gaping hole in his chest. Post opens up in the middle of her dive-bombing into a pseudo-explosion.

Oh, and Zantetsuken = Fi's sword. They all have fancy names in this 'verse.

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In spite of dropping down to earth like a lead weight, the rapidly approaching ground seemed to be the least of Fianna’s worries. Glacial optics were focused all too intently upon the cloud of flames, daring the petit figure that lurked beneath their cover to leap from her burning asylum and reveal her form in the hopes that she could strike her back down to the ground in the same second.

The blade that lashed out at her trim stomach muscles was slapped off course by an equally sharp, equally vicious steel fang, a parry formed by a blend of pure luck, sprinkled with reflexes that had expected aggression from something so perfectly dastardly. If there had been time to spare, a window of opportunity which could have been leapt through, the shinigami would have aimed to swipe her blade once more at the figure – or perhaps, if the spare time was particularly sparse in nature, she would have settled for swinging the blade back, not to slice, but to impede, to plant the steel cap that adorned the tip of Zantetsuken’s hilt into the stomach of the girl and hammer the breath out of her petit lungs.

But time was not sparse for Fianna – it was virtually nonexistent. Opportunity’s hypothetical window had been boarded shut and there was no time to pry it open. It was not striking their foe that she was concerned with; it was the ground, the hastily-approaching, extremely solid and unrelenting ground. She had once concentrated upon the flames, and even took the time to focus on her target when she reared her deceptive head, but the time to worry about the ground was at hand, for if she failed to act, she would soon be incapable of doing anything – worrying included.

Even though instinct was no more than the whipping boy to her resilience, the natural impulse that craved self preservation still existed, and when faced with the unyielding thought of death at the hands of something other than combat, the impulse concluded that the time to reveal itself was imminent.

It sprinted down the web of nerves spun through her sword arm, burrowed into the cables of flesh that ensnared the bone, and commanded it in no more than a fraction of a second to shift. Her blade’s point had been aimed downward, threatening the explosion with a silent growl, before charging into the turbulent ribbons of flame. They did not part politely. Instead, they recoiled at the influx of substance, of a sudden draft of air, but before they could cling greedily to the imposter, she had dropped out of their clasp.

As soon as Zantetsuken fell through the flames, he punctured the ground. The brunt of the fall accompanied him, leaving the pearl-haired warrior with the chance to relinquish her grip upon the blade, to hurl her form into a roll across the singed ground to break her hasty fall. Gloved hands and adamant heels were the brakes that halted the sharp slide across the ground, until the legs that formed much of her body swiftly sprang her back in the direction she had tumbled from. The fiery canopy was soon regarded as a double-edged sword, the smouldering sheet of cover that it offered to the woman who crouched out of its reach deemed a hindrance and not a help.

An automatic gasp of air was promptly discharged from her lips before it could blister her mouth, but the breath was ignored as her fingers coiled themselves around the richly coloured hilt of Zantetsuken, and the strength of her arm uprooted him from the ground. Eyes like boat lights skimmed across the ground in search of her foe, and surely enough, beneath the blazing blanket a dainty pair of feet landed upon the ground, a red rag to an infuriated bull, given their distance from another familiar figure.

The woman lunged, a predator for a split second, to aim a swipe at the creature’s unsuspecting shins, which fell out of reach with the help of a well-timed leap, leaving Fianna to cleave through the air, to turn what might have become an inelegant and unsteady stagger for an inexperienced death god into an immaculate series of tumbles sans the use of her palms, until her colourless form was carried out of the blaze in a monochrome blur. The first clean breath of air was as sweet to her lungs as the finest confectionary would have been to her tongue.

But not five seconds after her feet struck the ground for the final time in her routine did a forceful bolt of sound ricochet through her skull and command her torso to twist around. Her eyes should have been captured by the vision of her companion’s pitch black blade hanging in the air, a banner of desperation he brandished before his attacker, but so morbid, so accustomed to carnage was Fianna that she could not focus upon the obvious. She found her eyes gravitating towards the hole in his torso, the appalling wound that she continued to wish was her own upon sight. Slender fingers throttled Zantetsuken at the mere thought of the trap that the creature, who had the audacity to tell them, not claim, that the act of protecting their home was punishable by death – had ensnared him with. She had preyed upon his benevolence. Fianna would have preferred it if the thing had simply preyed upon her.

It was only after she found herself observing a portion of that reprehensible thing’s uniform through the cavity that Fianna realised that she was not examining the wound, but peering through it.

It was a ghastly tragedy; It was also a makeshift window.

And windows could be leapt through.

Before the charcoal-coloured blade could carve through the creature’s skin, she moved. The bat of an eyelid passed at a snail’s pace compared to the almost immediate step that closed the distance between her and her foe, but not entirely.

Aki Nai still stood between Fianna and their attacker. There was no ambush from behind. There was no desperate shove to knock him out of the woman’s path so that she might reach her target without bringing him further harm, as was probably expected of her at that point. In any other scenario, the pearl-haired shinigami’s choice to end her swift steps behind her comrade would have been seen as nothing short of a complete waste of her effort. If she had the time to mull over the thought – which she did not – Fianna would have imagined that the creature would have shared the same sentiment.

That would have, of course, been before she felt something cold and dreadfully sharp perforating her torso, somewhere around the region where her heart resided. The complication with confronting Fianna, was that her determination fuelled her creativity. Desperation tinted her vision, transformed every little thing into an option, a chance with which to gain the upper hand. Even wounds could be distorted into weapons; into opportunities.

This was why her weapon of choice could be found passing through the chasm in man’s chest before it vanished into its intended target. An unsympathetic twist of the hand that guided the blade drove it further up and through the immature, feminine body, to impale on a diagonal, to skewer and pin her in her place.

The eyes that peered down at the girl over the man’s shoulder were glacial not just in colour, but also in spirit. They were not windows into her soul, but bright mirrors that reflected the sunlight in their glossy films. They failed to speak the words that she would sooner choke upon, but in the absence of expression upon her alabaster features, a distinct lack of remorse shone like the worn face of the sun.

If insidious little Aya felt no guilt over preying upon a man’s compassion, then Fianna would feel no guilt in preying upon a child’s misconceptions.

Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting

Because it is quite clear that I cannot drabble to save my pitiful life, I figured I might as well use this blog to toss up neglected posts that I was, for some reason, particularly fond of. Until I can get the hang of drabbling, that is. This one was from a thread in a Bleach role play. It never got finished, and I had just begun to look forward to the outcome, too.

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'Well,' she thought to herself in words bare, stripped of all their usual decorum, for her manners served no purpose in her head. 'That’s our night ruined.'

Her first genuine evening out after her release from the infirmary; now that her ribs were once again whole, and her brain no longer lurched lethargically in the throes of a concussion, and it had been running - to her mind - fairly well. She had relished her company both for his entertainment, and the opportunity he had given her to combine manners and cheek into a handful of glances and words which, whilst greatly appreciated, remained unrequited. She had even enjoyed the fragment of an introduction he managed to belt out before trouble descended upon them once more. A single, solitary drink with minimal disturbance may have sufficed, but no, it was not to be. A single, solitary sip from out of her tankard was all she could extract, and even that one taste had been experienced after disruption, what she now knew to be an ill omen. Hikaru may have missed the halls of the eleventh division and their casual violence, but Fianna most certainly did not.

Whilst her jaw lay paralyzed in an omnipresent smile, the upper half of her face despaired, wide eyed as swords were hastily drawn and fingers were promptly broken for their troubles; And once the chaos began to spread through the bar not unlike an airborne disease, and her eyes grew weary of observing the senseless show of violence laid before them, she would lean across the counter and tip her eyes down to project an apology at the barkeeper - who had wisely taken shelter behind the impenetrable bar - over the commotion.

"I’m really very so-” she would begin to inform him; not in a bellow, but in her usual gentle tone – only far louder, projected like an actor’s own upon a stage. But before the all-important word, the one all apologies revolved around, could be spoken, a tankard thrown blindly into the air arced towards the bar and descended upon the officer whilst she stood distracted. The sudden impact kissed the side of her pearly white skull, yet - disappointed with its landing - the tankard rolled over her head and tumbled into the barkeep’s lap with a meek ‘thunk’.

The man, gingerly picking the makeshift projectile up in his clammy hand to survey its sorry state, was just as surprised that the tankard housed a deep-set dent in its side as he was to observe, as not a single muscle of the woman’s alabaster face bothered responding to the blow – all it had managed to do was impede her apology – which she once again resumed after examining the very same mug from her position, balanced over the bar. “... sorry for all this. The bones of your customers can, and will, heal... but I can’t say the same for your furniture.” and it was on that note that coincidence led a stool on a short journey through the air ending in a scream which, if it was to be believed, informed the whole bar that one of its legs had landed in someone’s eye.

It was with another apology that the officer bid farewell to the barkeep and returned to her upright position, all smiles, her affinity for sarcasm cloaked almost entirely by a perfected, demure tone; and Fianna may have said a little more – not much, but a touch more- if not for Hikaru, because before the first syllable could leave his mouth entirely, her attention had latched onto it like a limpet to a rock. Not because she possessed an unhealthy obsession that orbited around her companion, but because she had been waiting for him to utter one verb in a series of words since the advent of the ruckus. ‘Fix’. Her head craned down, an unseen half-bow, half-glance to her medic and her friend.

Those smiling eyes of hers surveyed the madness every wounded party had been carelessly swept into, unfazed by the tides of muscle, the shouts, the occasional flying chair and the even rarer flying table. Impervious, undaunted, Fianna’s smile tipped itself down to her favourite redhead, the absolute centre of her attention.

“Let’s get a path cleared for you, then.”