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Jun. 24th, 2006 11:16 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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kh_drabbleChallenge: [067] Irony
Title: Chance
Word Count: 700 exactly. Dayum.
Spoilers: Very vague for the creation of Nobodies.
Rating: PG for violence, nudity.
Notes: This is very very long. Possibly the limit. I remember seeing somewhere that 700 was the limit. The userinfo, however, suggests 300, but that doesn't seem to be standard.
All across the universe, hundreds of thousands of clashes like this. The field of battle is any war-torn world where the two sides have been staking their claims. The actual location is irrelevant, as it will soon be utterly destroyed anyway.
It goes like this --
A bowl of desert. A city once thrived here. Its ruins are all that remain. A few unlucky survivors. Not for long.
A Heartless is here. It wanders across the sand belt, unconcerned. The fragile strands of humanity remaining will succumb on their own. It is here to stand watch. It is just one pair of peripheral eyes for the mind of the hive.
A Nobody is here. It swirls meanderingly across the sand belt, a poor replacement for the sidewinder snakes that once did so here. It is scouting. Always someplace now, the master is sending it. Keep looking. More information means better logic.
Wandering. Meandering. They meet. Pure accident. One sidesteps innocently into the other's path. They freeze. The wind blows over the sand, whistling through the husks of dead buildings, around the husks of dead people. A moment of dead stillness.
They react. Call back to the hive mind -- call out to the master -- commands for reaction. They go at each other in the same moment, after the same communication, and hundreds of their brethren materialize in the air around them. To fight.
A great brawl is set in motion. Yet the only sound heard still is the creaking of the wind over the sand. These creatures may be many things, and many opposites, but thereis one thing both are not, and neither has the capacity to be, and that is vocal. Vocalization is too much a trait of personality. The clash occurs in silence.
Wherever Heartless and Nobodies should happen to meet, they fight. It is in their nature, in their mold, in the idea that created them and their living prototypes. It is a conflict essential to humanity. Man versus himself. His desires versus his actual physical potential. Mind over matter. It is so definitive of his nature that it clings beyond mere death. They must clash. They are fated to.
On this battlefield, on this day, a Dusk attacks a Shadow. An unlikely thing transpires here, but a thing that is not so rare. Their outstretched arms touch. For these two individual beings, time, of which they have little concept anyway, ceases to be entirely. They are cut off from the hive. They connect.
For you see, once upon a time, in a world very far from here, there was no difference between them, this Dusk and this Shadow. They were part of the same singular being. One living soul, before death brought them to their current shared existence.
They reconnect. A flash of light, like the explosive meeting of matter and antimatter, curiously in reverse. A few combatants on either side are knocked away. Nothing truly major. And left there, where there once were two beings, now lies only one.
A young girl. Very young. Conscious, naked to the wind. She looks around at the battle passing over her head, and is afraid, and does not understand. There is no purpose to be understood.
She does not, cannot understand, and so she cries as all young children do in the face of hardship without explanation. She cries, and the wind scrapes coarse sand across her bare skin, and she is alone. And alone is the sound of her crying, alone in the moaning of the wind.
A Heartless notices her, or a Nobody -- it doesn't really matter. Slashes her open, another target on the battlefield. She screams, a solitary noise, and the wind kicks up and screams across the sands along with her, and carries her screams and its screams to the frightened, weary remains of humanity in the ruined city. But she remains, suffering, alone. She, newborn, newly reborn, has no means to understand the cruelty that chance and fate have played upon her. And true death takes her, mercifully, at last.
The universe is a large, cold place, and this same cruelty is replayed far too often for anyone to accuse it of being fair.
Title: Chance
Word Count: 700 exactly. Dayum.
Spoilers: Very vague for the creation of Nobodies.
Rating: PG for violence, nudity.
Notes: This is very very long. Possibly the limit. I remember seeing somewhere that 700 was the limit. The userinfo, however, suggests 300, but that doesn't seem to be standard.
All across the universe, hundreds of thousands of clashes like this. The field of battle is any war-torn world where the two sides have been staking their claims. The actual location is irrelevant, as it will soon be utterly destroyed anyway.
It goes like this --
A bowl of desert. A city once thrived here. Its ruins are all that remain. A few unlucky survivors. Not for long.
A Heartless is here. It wanders across the sand belt, unconcerned. The fragile strands of humanity remaining will succumb on their own. It is here to stand watch. It is just one pair of peripheral eyes for the mind of the hive.
A Nobody is here. It swirls meanderingly across the sand belt, a poor replacement for the sidewinder snakes that once did so here. It is scouting. Always someplace now, the master is sending it. Keep looking. More information means better logic.
Wandering. Meandering. They meet. Pure accident. One sidesteps innocently into the other's path. They freeze. The wind blows over the sand, whistling through the husks of dead buildings, around the husks of dead people. A moment of dead stillness.
They react. Call back to the hive mind -- call out to the master -- commands for reaction. They go at each other in the same moment, after the same communication, and hundreds of their brethren materialize in the air around them. To fight.
A great brawl is set in motion. Yet the only sound heard still is the creaking of the wind over the sand. These creatures may be many things, and many opposites, but thereis one thing both are not, and neither has the capacity to be, and that is vocal. Vocalization is too much a trait of personality. The clash occurs in silence.
Wherever Heartless and Nobodies should happen to meet, they fight. It is in their nature, in their mold, in the idea that created them and their living prototypes. It is a conflict essential to humanity. Man versus himself. His desires versus his actual physical potential. Mind over matter. It is so definitive of his nature that it clings beyond mere death. They must clash. They are fated to.
On this battlefield, on this day, a Dusk attacks a Shadow. An unlikely thing transpires here, but a thing that is not so rare. Their outstretched arms touch. For these two individual beings, time, of which they have little concept anyway, ceases to be entirely. They are cut off from the hive. They connect.
For you see, once upon a time, in a world very far from here, there was no difference between them, this Dusk and this Shadow. They were part of the same singular being. One living soul, before death brought them to their current shared existence.
They reconnect. A flash of light, like the explosive meeting of matter and antimatter, curiously in reverse. A few combatants on either side are knocked away. Nothing truly major. And left there, where there once were two beings, now lies only one.
A young girl. Very young. Conscious, naked to the wind. She looks around at the battle passing over her head, and is afraid, and does not understand. There is no purpose to be understood.
She does not, cannot understand, and so she cries as all young children do in the face of hardship without explanation. She cries, and the wind scrapes coarse sand across her bare skin, and she is alone. And alone is the sound of her crying, alone in the moaning of the wind.
A Heartless notices her, or a Nobody -- it doesn't really matter. Slashes her open, another target on the battlefield. She screams, a solitary noise, and the wind kicks up and screams across the sands along with her, and carries her screams and its screams to the frightened, weary remains of humanity in the ruined city. But she remains, suffering, alone. She, newborn, newly reborn, has no means to understand the cruelty that chance and fate have played upon her. And true death takes her, mercifully, at last.
The universe is a large, cold place, and this same cruelty is replayed far too often for anyone to accuse it of being fair.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 05:42 pm (UTC)What a horribly amazing concept. Do you write longer fiction, ever? I want to see this idea stretched out and woven into something that doesn't leave me scrolling for more at the end of a mere 700 words.
Your chosen form for this is perfect, the italicised intro at the beginning with 'It goes like this --' was, I think, a very appropriate tone setter.
*loveslovesloves* *memories*
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 06:38 pm (UTC)Wow. I'm amazed you loved this so much. And I'm very glad. This is probably the thing I'm most pleased with this entire month.
I am exceedingly honored you enjoyed this so much. And memories! Thank you so, so much. I admire you a great deal.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 09:33 pm (UTC)You should be very pleased with this, but not amazed that it is loved. XD
I admire you a great deal. Hee, I'm all melty and gooey inside now. Thank you very much - getting such a compliment from a talented writer is gonna make me floaty all day. I'm going to hunt down your long fic now, eheheh.
!
Date: 2006-06-25 10:05 pm (UTC). . . ahaha. Roxas/Axel. Yeah. The thing. You'll NEVER FIND IT.
Actually, I've been working the last month or so on re-editing it, because I was (rather correctly) informed that it was losing its touch. There's also a whole whack of canon screw-up because this was written in large part as speculation, before I discovered the actual true canon material (i.e. novelizations). So you probably want to ignore it, if you have any sort of good opinion of me. But nevertheless, here (http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=emptybackpack&keyword=Sleep&filter=all). Although I'm sure there's a better version of "Sleep" hanging around on a comm somewhere. Here (http://community.livejournal.com/axel_roxas/16981.html#cutid1)'s one, I think.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 09:54 pm (UTC)Just wow.
I'm guilty of giving tought to what would happen if the heartless and the nobody of the same person ever got together, but the way you fitted this into a drabble, and the whole ambientation and the ending of it made this piece something really wonderful.
Excuse me while I add this too.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-01 09:22 pm (UTC)No words. No words at all. This was so perfect, in so many ways that I can't even list them. The concept, and the way the story flowed...it's just amazing. Magnificent work!
no subject
Date: 2006-07-02 12:15 am (UTC)