Drabble Games from Nezu
When two or more Fallen Leaves writers end up in the same room together, we like to play drabble games. We put prompts in a hat — character names, scenarios, concepts, emotions — and then draw three, and have twenty minutes (ish) to write something from those prompts. These are from drabble games I played with Phi, JB, and Dark a year and more ago. Note they are unedited — this is what Fallen Leaves first drafts look like. And some of the ideas are perhaps a little cracktastic.
Collaborate Imprecision Delight - NC-17!!! "Are you sure about this?" Raidou asked. He looked down at his hands, and the bare torso beneath them. Genma's torso. Tan skin taut over supple muscle, marked with faint white lines and brighter red-purple furrows where edged steel had bitten in and left its mark again and again. Here was an old scar even Genma didn't remember, and here was one of the newest, still tender to the touch; still evoking a sight Raidou wished he could banish from his mind's eye forever.
"Rai, it's not brain surgery. And I promise, I'm sure. Here, you want me to help?" Genma's voice held laughter and honey, and promise. His eyes held something more earthy and direct. It broke right through the anxiety and apprehension, right through memories and pulled Raidou into the present. Into now, and yes, and please, and just like that.
"I can do it. I'm not a virgin," Raidou said sulkily. The catch in his voice betrayed him, and Genma laughed, reaching out to take Raidou's hand with one of his own. It was a gesture that still sent a shock through them both, no matter how many times it happened. His hand, Genma's hand... Raidou stared again, and saw more scars than whole skin; saw distortion and angularity and strength. Genma was the one who hated having his broken-mended-broken-again hands touched, but it was Raidou who felt a shiver of fear every time Genma reached for him. A moment of fear, followed by a warm thrill of delight. I'm the only one allowed this touch.
"Just like that, Rai. See?" Genma was squeezing cold slick gel onto Raidou's fingers from the tube. Guiding Raidou's hand with his own, to smear it where it was needed. Guiding Raidou to touch him, and looking so debauched and eager when the fingers he'd positioned flexed and followed his direction, that Raidou gasped.
"See?" Genma laughed. He pulled his legs higher, resting a calf on Raidou's shoulder. Hand still on Raidou's hand. "You're a natural." He let his head fall back: clean-shaven throat still edged in a tatty lacework of fading bruises and faintly-scabbed lines. Before Raidou could lose himself in memories again, lose the moment -- and how could he lose the moment, when Genma was there beneath him, legs apart, wanting him, touching him? -- Genma grinned. "It just takes a little collaboration."
Education Jiraiya Sasuke "No." The Frog Sage's refusal was as flat as the expression on his face. "It's a bad idea; it's bound to come to ruin; it's not in the best interests of the village or the child--"
"Which child?" Sandaime asked.
"You know which child," Jiraiya sputtered. He crossed his arms over his chest and paced the small room, deliberately treading heavily on the chirping planks of the nightingale floor in the hokage's study.
"Kakashi isn't a child anymore, Jiraiya." The old man's voice was gently chiding. "He hasn't been a child since the day--"
"You don't need to tell me that," Jiraiya groused. He paced back, jerking his gaze from the window outside, and the sandstone silhouettes of Konoha's leaders, to the portraits hanging on the wall: the stern and forbidding glare of the first hokage, his brother the second's creased eyes that had seemed to hide some secret delight, the third, Sarutobi, younger, but no keener in his photograph than he was now in person, with his piercing gaze and too-gentle words. And the fourth. Minato. Laughing and serious, focused and determined. The ideal hero. Ideal because he'd died too young to show any flaws.
All of them, the assembled leaders of Konohagakure, indicted Jiraiya with their eyes.
"You were the one who set the boy's brother on that mission. What possible benefit was there to letting one damaged Uchiha child survive?"
"Do you question my motives, Jiraiya, or my methods?" Pipe smoke wreathed around Sandaime's head. Sarutobi-sensei. The professor.
"Both," Jiraiya answered. He clomped away again, wood-soled geta clacking like percussion in a Noh play. "And while we're at it, what the hell do you think you're doing about Tsunade-chan? And that bastard Orochimaru."
"I am watching them. And that is not the question on the table."
"There's no way Kakashi should be leading genin. And especially not those genin." Jiraiya flicked a finger at the file folder on the hokage's desk, sending the pages ruffling, and profile photographs cascading to the floor. One blue-eyed towhead who looked far too much like his dead father, and far too much like the Demon Fox. One sweet-faced girl with green eyes shining innocence and pink hair like some kind of confection. One glowering, dark-eyed boy, the last scion of the failed Uchiha line. "And don't tell me it's about the Sharingan. You don't even know he has it."
"He has it," Sandaime said mildly. With finality. "And Kakashi is the only one who can teach him to use it. It's time for Kakashi to grow up, Jiraiya."
"I'm not having any part of it. I know what he'd think, if he were here to see this." Jiraiya's head jerked back at the blond portrait, at the far-seeing sandstone eyes.
"But he's not." The words were mild, the undertone as hard-edged as the brittle blade of a Wind Country katana. "So we move on. Maybe it's time for you to grow up as well, student of mine."
"Screw you, old man." There was a blur of orange smoke, a scent, faintly, of burning oil, and the hokage was alone in his office.
He stared at the wall, at the faces of his predecessors, then down at the photographs of the genin. A fourth picture was hidden beneath. A masked face, with one deadly serious, heavy-lidded grey eye. "Indeed," he said, and tucked the files back carefully into their folder.
Tsunade Horror Sickness The first few cases were just that: isolated cases of what seemed to be a flu. A trio of chuunin came back from a mission with it, coughing, fevered, tremblingly weak. They reported in sick, handed in their mission reports, and took to their beds. It was only a week later that Tsunade even heard there was a problem, but by then it was looking much more serious. One of the chuunin had died, clutching his head, bleeding from nose and mouth. A second was in the ICU on life support, flu turned to pneumonia turned to something else. The third was still at home, nursing his own increasingly dire symptoms alone. When the medics requisitioned the chuunin's mission report, and read the details therein, only then did they alert Tsunade.
Poison, maybe? That was the first though to cross everyone's mind. A team of ANBU including a poisons expert were sent to the town the chuunin's mission had taken them to. What they found, what they reported back, was shocking even to their jaded eyes. No villager was left alive. No mammal, anyway. Chickens still clucked in the yards, and birds chirped in the trees, but every man, every woman, every child, every dairy cow and drover's team, every sheep and pig and goat, every dog, every cat, every rat from the barns, was a rotting, festering carcass. Gouts of dried, decaying blood lay around each corpse. If it was poison, the ANBU's report said, it was no poison they'd seen before.
They took exceptional precautions, scrubbing down, burning the clothing they'd worn on the mission. Wore masks and gloves the whole time they were in the town. Didn't stop to bury the dead, but instead razed the whole village in a pyre that could be seen for miles.
By the time they returned to Konoha, the second chuunin was dead, and the third was fast dying, alone in an isolation room at the hospital. Hyuuga medics watched in horror as the patient's chakra coils putrefied from the inside. As something alien crawled through their bloodstreams. Poison. It had to be poison. Tsunade herself worked night and day to find a cure, to find an antidote.
On the twelfth day, the third chuunin died. His funeral was on the fifteenth.
On the seventeenth day, out on another mission, Genma coughed.
His funeral was two weeks later. So was Raidou's.
Kakashi's was ten days after that, just one in a mass rite, hastily conducted, for the eighty-seven dead that week.
There was no funeral for Tsunade. There was no one left to attend it.
Raidou Ginta Fine Restaurant The Lotus Lounge was reported to be one of the best places to eat in all of Fire Country. Just saying you had eaten there was, to the food snobs, a sign you had taste, and to the regular snobs, a sign you were willing to spend ungodly amounts of money on a meal. Saying you'd taken a date there was as good, in some circles, as bagging a movie star. You had to have pulled some serious strings, and you had some extremely serious clout as far as romance was concerned.
It was, in other words, way, way out of Raidou's league. And therefore something Genma would never, not in a million years, think of suspecting, when Raidou told him he wanted to take a trip to the Rokugawa river gorge. Genma was expecting, and had packed for, camping. Rock climbing. A few nights under the stars.
Raidou packed a few extra things, including that rich blue silk shirt of Genma's that made Genma's eyes look like they were lit amber from within. And a lot of money. But he'd been saving for a rainy day, and his brothers had gotten pretty much every spare ryou for years. It was a ridiculous luxury to go to the onsen, to eat at the Lotus Lounge, but it was, after all, for Genma. That made it worth it.
A little after noon on their first day in town, while Genma was soaking in the sulfurous fumes of the town's famous volcanic water, Raidou apologized, told Genma the water was making him sleepy, and went to "take a nap in the garden." Genma'd offered to accompany him, of course, but Raidou pushed him off with such finality that Genma eventually conceded to stay behind. That, Raidou was sure, would last all of twenty minutes, if he was lucky.
He hurried to the Lotus Lounge to try to secure a reservation.
"I'm so sorry, sir," the receptionist told him, peering over wire-rimmed spectacles at Raidou as if he were some sort of insect. "We have no tables free for the next several months."
"I can make it worth your while," Raidou offered, lifting a jingling leather purse of heavy, high-value coins.
"I'm sure you can, but the fact remains, we have no available tables."
"Look again," Raidou snarled, leaning on the table and letting the edge of a kunai glitter from his cuff.
At once, two heavies moved in. Not just any heavies. No, these were ninja. Free-lancers, but...
But a fight with free-lancers over dinner reservations was hardly going to impress the Hokage, and there were far too many potential witnesses to simply cover it up.
Raidou scowled, trying to think his way through this problem.
"Hi!" A cheery voice at shoulder-height. Below shoulder height. Raidou tensed and bristled, but the heavies, surprisingly, stepped back. Blond hair and bright, glittering blue eyes. A smile that said I know you're up to something, but so am I.
"Sakamoto-san?" Oh, mother of all fucks, what was Genma's fuck-buddy Ginta doing here? Raidou's scowl deepened. Not that Genma had been-- well, you know. Lately. Since he and Raidou had...
That wasn't the point. He shook his head. Ginta was saying something.
"... Surprised to see you here, but then I thought, I know that look. That's the look Sayori-san always gives people who try to get a table at the last minute. So where's Genma?"
"Uh..." Crap. Busted.
"He totally doesn't know about this? You two are a thing now, right? I mean, you've been a thing for months, but Genma wouldn't admit you had a thing, but I'm pretty sure he does now. Everyone's saying so, and you obviously have a thing. This is about Genma, right? Because if you're trying to take someone else out to eat here I'll have to break your legs."
Raidou coughed.
"Don't underestimate my ability to break your legs. You're tall, they're easy targets."
"Genma's at the onsen. And don't you dare say a word--"
"How sweet! So romantic. Oh my god, he's going to swoon. I can totally see it. But they turned you down. You did turn him down, didn't you, Sayori-chan?" Ginta batted his eyes at the receptionist, who blushed and demurred.
"OK, you guys can have my reservation. That means you're getting the Clay-baked duck. I hope you like duck, because that's what I ordered. Okay? Have fun. Sayori-san, give them my reservation. That's at eight."
Raidou started to protest, but Ginta was already gone.
And here are a few more from a year before that, including some serious crack that has nothing to do with Fallen Leaves
Genma, Jason Bourne, Karaoke The mission target was someone with training, that much was clear. His stance, his intensity, everything about him screamed ninja. Genma consulted his notes one more time. Name: there were several. Affiliation: unknown. Age: mid-twenties. And the reason he was wanted dead? Did an assassin ever need to know why?
Genma tailed his target, and within seconds he knew the man was aware of him. "Aborting," Genma said softly into his headset. He translocated away, just as the other man turned to follow him.
It went like that for three days. He escalated his stealth techniques until he was using invisibility jutsu that drained so much chakra they made his stomach hurt, and still, every time, the target made him. By the fourth day he was obviously being hunted right back.
On the sixth day one of the target's traps--some crazily improvised thing made out of a garbage can, a red flannel sack, a pound of nails, and thirteen cans of spray starch--nearly blinded Genma.
On the ninth day there was a chase through a deserted seven story office building that ended when the whole thing violently exploded and collapsed. Genma was lucky to get out of that with a sprained ankle and a blistering burn seared across his shoulders.
On the tenth day the target nearly caught Genma. There was a hand-t0-hand fight, full of taijutsu that even Maito Gai would envy. And it was in that hands-on moment that Genma got the shock of his life: his opponent had only a civilian's chakra.
By the twelfth day Genma was ready to give up.
On the fifteenth he did. He gave up, and he and Aoba hit the bar. Genma limped in on crutches, bandaged and miserable in his defeat. They took a table in the back.
"You'll love this place, Gen," Aoba told him. "People sing. It's hilarious. Ought to cheer you right up."
People did indeed sing. Including Aoba, though he couldn't persuade Genma to join him. And then a slender man mounted the stage.
Genma nearly fell out of his chair.
"That's him! That's the one!" he hissed.
The music started. The singer, Genma's target, opened his mouth. And in that moment, as the most lethally bad karaoke performance began, Genma knew why Jason Bourne had been slated to die.
Batman, internet, public display of affection Within a few months of recovering from the transition, Ibiki was already assimilating very well with this world. The internet, he decided, was the greatest tool for information gathering and misinformation dissemination ever, far beyond even his wildest dreams. The computer itself was a little baffling, and he had to rely on his subordinates to keep it working, but as long as he had signal, he had leverage on this whole godforsaken society.
Leverage, as any ninja could tell you, was everything.
There were a lot of strange things in this place, not least of which was the local freak show of people who liked to call themselves heroes and dress up in costumes, running around fighting crime. They seemed to have a sort of status equilibrium with a matched set of "villains" who also liked to dress up in costume and perpetrate crimes, often after having recently escaped yet again from asylums for the insane, prisons specially designed to hold them, or exile to other dimensions.
One hero in particular, who liked to pretend he was a bat, was a thorn in Ibiki's side. They'd had several long conversations about the whole system, and at first Ibiki had thought he'd like the man. His temperament, his demeanor, everything about him, reminded Ibiki in some strange way of himself. But there was something terribly off about him. He looked too long, then turned away too fast. He loomed and lurked in a way that made even the master of creepy feel ill-at-ease. He popped up unexpectedly, and for no obvious reason.
Genma tried to tell Ibiki, but Ibiki refused to listen. "He's got a crush on you," Genma said.
"Shut up, Genma. Just because you're a fag doesn't mean everyone is."
It took Genma finding the MySpace site, and a team of Ibiki's friends forcing him to read the page Genma discovered, before he finally had to agree. There was the Bat's profile, there was a blurry photo of Ibiki. And there was a badly written poem dedicated to the scarred ninja master who fell from the sky.
Melons, porn, halitosis There is an explanation for everything, Raidou told himself. Even for coming back from a day of hard work to find Genma sitting half-naked on the floor, surrounded by melon rinds, holding another slice of cantaloupe in his hands.
"Genma..." he started, tone wary.
Genma raised a hand in a wait-a-minute gesture, stiffened his spine as if he were waiting for a blow, and bit into the orange flesh. He chewed for a moment, eyes focused on some unseen point in space, cheeks going slightly green. He swallowed, an effort that seemed monumental to Raidou's eyes. He'd seen that swallow before. That was Genma's I-am-not-going-to-puke swallow. It was usually followed in not too much time by the technicolor yawn.
"What the hell are you doing?"
""Mission," Genma answered tersely. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
"Raidou counted the rinds. There were the remains of at least ten melons there.
"What kind of mission has you eat yourself sick on melons?"
Genma leaned back against the wall, looking exhausted. "One where I have to have really foul breath. God I hate these things. They told me in intel that puke-breath from melons is the worst."
"You have to have bad breath for a mission?"
"Don't ask," Genma groaned. "It's payback."
"This is for that time you spliced a gay porn tape into Ibiki's staff meeting video, isn't it?" Raidou asked.
Sasuke, Dick Grayson, Poetry The ninja that came through at first were all adults. Then there were a few kids. Then something strange happened, and a few of the ninja came through with kid versions of themselves. The eggheads in Washington had an explanation for it that Dick didn't really understand.
What he did know, though, was that when this particular kid came through, he needed to be watched. The adult version had evidently been the one to rip open the fabric of space and time in the first place. And he was the kid brother of the batshit insane blind one who had obliterated half of Denver in a single spectacular explosion when the two of them had fought.
In the aftermath of that fight, despite the fact that it had been the elder brother who survived, the scientists had nearly pissed themselves in a panic when the adolescent version of Sasuke Uchiha showed up. He had the potential to eliminate all life on Earth, they said. He'd already done it in his own dimension. It was a future they wanted to avoid here, unsurprisingly. Although Dick couldn't quite see how his babysitting the thirteen year old version of the guy was going to keep them all alive.
But that was the order, so that's what he did. He hung out with a spectacularly sullen teenage Sasuke, who had hair that looked like he'd never heard of the concept of a brush, and who spent all his time talking about killing his brother.
"You know your brother is an artist now, right?" Tim asked. He was sitting with Sasuke in a MacDonalds, watching the kid eat french fries.
"My brother is a ninja," Sasuke said.
"No he's an artist, see?" Dick showed Sasuke a newspaper clipping. "The New Gothem Times called Itachi Uchiha's latest exhibition 'a poetic excursion to an alternate reality.'"
"I'm going to kill him," Sasuke said, and took another fry.
"Why?" Dick asked.
"He killed my family," Sasuke said, glowering at the half-empty, grease-soaked cardboard fry container. "And he's an embarrassment. Have you seen the crap he calls art?"
the worst thing that EVER happened to me... Sasuke, giants The perfect point of shinobi inebriation was the one at which a group of veterans could sit around telling stories about the things that had scarred them the most, and laugh. Kakashi, Genma and Raidou had reached that point nearly an hour ago, and sustained it by careful titration of alcohol and snacks.
"You ever want to quit?" Raidou asked, as he poured for his companions.
Genma reached for the bowl of spicy peanuts. "Yeah. Lots of times."
"Yeah, who doesn't," Kakashi said. "I did quit, once. Tsunade wouldn't let me though."
"Seriously? When?"
"Three years ago."
Genma and Raidou looked at each other. Three years ago when everything had gone to hell in an eyeblink.
"I had one responsibility," Kakashi said. He drained his cup and held it out for a refill, which Genma obligingly poured him. "Teach those damn kids. Every time I looked at those kids, all I could see was Sensei's face. And my own eye staring back at me."
Laughter wasn't part of this any more.
"I taught him how to use it. I taught that little bastard. And then I had to stand there at the feet of Konoha's giants, and search for a pulse in the neck of Minato's son." The bitterness in his voice could have curdled milk.
"It wasn't your fault. Kakashi," said Raidou.
"Was my responsibility," Kakashi replied, enunciating every syllable with drunken precision. "Fault doesn't come into it."
Spiderman, giant dogs of doom, unspeakable horror When the missiles launched, when the bombs fell, when hydrogen atoms fused into helium and filled the atmosphere with the light and heat of the sun itself, the lucky ones died right away. The lucky ones were incinerated in an instant, vaporized with nothing left behind but their shadows burned into stone.
Peter Parker wasn't one of the lucky ones. It was ironic that a radioactive spider's bite had made him into Spiderman. And radioactivity had now destroyed his world. Everyone he knew was dead. Aunt May had lost her hair and teeth, and died choking on her own blood, three days into the holocaust.
Mary Jane had lingered on the edge of consciousness, burned beyond recognition, for nearly two weeks, before radiation poisoning and infection finally claimed her. Peter had held her hand, whispering to her that it would all be alright, until she'd rattled out her last breath.
In the rubble of the city, huge, savage dogs roamed in vicious packs, feating on corpses. Many of them died, too, hair falling out from blistering skin, blood dripping from their jaws, as the radiation destroyed them in silent, invisible waves.
It had no effect on Peter at all. Day after day, week after week, he watched as humans and animals alike suffered and died. His friends died. His enemies died. He found Doc Oc's body half-buried, torn apart by those roaming predators. His skull was smashed, his brains--what was left of them--rotting into black slime.
In three months, there was no-one left. He never took off his red and blue costume now. Spiderman lurched from shattered building to shattered building, swinging through empty streets from lamps that would never light again. He used a chisel and hammer to make crude gravestones for the dead, incising names and date on the granite and marble sides of banks and churches.
When he'd put in every name he could, every last one, he used the tools for one final inscription: Peter Parker.
And finally one that's almost Fallen Leaves canon.
Tattoo Genma's father died just after his son's seventh birthday. He went on a mission with a man who was his closest friend--a man who had been there for the elder Shiranui's wedding, for the births of his daughter and four years later his son. A man who was as much a part of the Shiranui family as those born to it.
Genma remembered the man, a giant in bone white armor over clinging black, with a spiral tattoo on his arm. Uncle was all he ever called him. He was a force of nature who breezed in and out of the Shiranui household with unpredictable regularity. Genma was a little bit afraid of him and a little bit in love with him, worshiping him with all the fervor a young boy could muster.
In the family bath, when Genma was four or five, he'd stared in fascination at the faded crimson ink on his father's left biceps, a mirror of the tattoo on Uncle's arm. "Papa, what's that for?" he'd asked, and watched with wary eyes when his mother bit her lip and his father covered the mark with his hand.
In his first year in Academy, Genma learned about that scarlet swirl, and the bone and black uniformed men and women who wore it. ANBU. Black Ops. The village's elite. Commandos who took the dirtiest missions and noblest missions; who struck the most terror into the hearts of Konoha's enemies. The faceless ones whose names littered the face of the heroes' stone in disproportionate waves.
"Papa, you and Uncle are ANBU?" Genma asked, wide eyed at dinner that night.
"Uncle is," his father replied. "I retired. Raising a family is more than enough hazardous duty for me." Genma's mother gave her husband a brittle smile; his older sister kicked Genma under the table, then spilled a glass of milk. With only a year of ninja training under his belt, Genma recognized a distraction technique for what it was, but he couldn't understand why.
When Genma was just shy of seven, things changed in Konoha. War had come, bringing with it the grim push that would see Genma and his classmates on battlefields and in trenches before they had even hit puberty.
Uncle had promised to be there, but he missed Genma's seventh birthday by more than a week, arriving without ceremony on a rainy afternoon, looking gaunt and harried. He'd clasped Genma's father in a rough embrace, handed him a scroll, and muttered an apology.
As the rain turned their yard to mud, Genma and his older sister sat at the table doing homework, watching the closed door to their parents' room. Listening to the rise and fall of adult voices--Mama and Papa and Uncle--straining to catch the words. When the door slid open at last, and their father emerged, he was dressed identically to Uncle, in bone white and grim black. He had a katana strapped to his back. He held a gaily-painted carnival mask in his hands.
Genma's mother followed after him, clutching baby Haruko to her chest, staring at her husband with red-rimmed eyes as if she were trying to memorize his face.
"I'll be back in a week," his father said, placing a hand on Genma's head. "You're man of the house while I'm gone."
Genma nodded and tried to smile. Tried to look strong and worthy of the responsibility. His mother leaned up and kissed his father goodbye. And then Uncle was calling and Papa was going, touching two fingertips to that blood-red ink on his shoulder in salute, and pulling the ANBU mask over his face.
When Genma got his own ANBU mask at seventeen, his sister slapped his face, then burst into tears. Genma set his jaw and reached two fingers of his right hand up, to touch the healing tattoo.