[PSOH] One-Liners;
Another one-liner meme that is just pretending. Two ficlets in here, and no small number of drabbles. All PSOH-related, in honour of Shin Petshop v5. And... there are a number of different AUs in here. I've tried to group the related ones, but you know how AUs spiral out of control. XD
pon-chan, vesca; on the subject of bratz dolls (au) for chibify
The first day that Vesca had seen Pon-chan in her human form had been interesting for all involved; she was dainty enough in her own way, he supposed, but she was also a thief and a rascal and if he’d been asked to think of her as a person, his mental image would certainly not have been of golden locks and bright blue eyes.
Living with the toutetsu was simple enough for Chris; the creature did listen to him, and made meals he was sure people would die for (although no longer literally). The problems arose whenever Leon came to visit. There was something about Tetsu that Leon just didn't like, and the feeling was mutual. The order to let Leon go right now was the only one Chris ever had to repeat, and he hated it-- but he had to admit that Tetsu wasn't the only one at fault; if Leon stuck to calling Tetsu 'hairball' instead of less polite epithets, maybe this wouldn't be such a problem.
“You’re so old,” he says, and his voice is wondering. The toutetsu makes a point of reminding Chris on a regular basis that his age has nothing to do with infirmity or the approach of death – usually with a full-body tackle and some well-placed nips – but every time Chris says it, the toutetsu is forcefully reminded that he is the immortal, here, not Chris, and that one day, he will be once more a relic without a master.
vesca, chris, hon lon; imprisoned (au) for chibify
“Look, Dee said you’d be fine on your own,” Vesca said, setting both palms to the door of the Crystal Chamber. “I’m just here because she’s been in here a long time and she gets a little grouchy when she thinks she’s being neglected.”
It was sheer chance that it even came up, especially to Howell, but oblivious as Leon was (or tried to be) he couldn't miss the sharpening of Howell's eyes when, queried on who the Norma Langley impostor had been after, on her strychnine spree, Leon answered, "The owner of a petshop in Chinatown. Count D."
sofu d/wu fei; deceit 50 words exactly for feather_qwill
His breath failed as he crumpled, hands clutching at air as he fell, but Lao Wu Fei’s own breathing did not concern him. Lao Wu Fei could see the elder D’s eyes. Gold was never meant to freeze; these eyes, never meant to hold tears.
But they were.
They did.
leon/wu fei; revenge is a dish best served cold for phoenixstorm
Leon had run this through his head a thousand times; the ways it could pan out, the ways he wanted it to. He could tell that D hadn’t by the way his eyes widened for a split second when he saw Leon in the door, duffel and all, before his mask dropped into place, and he bent to set an elegant china mug in front of a Chinese guy in the armchair, who even now was twisting to stare Leon down, dark eyes narrowed.
Leon recognised that look. He’d only worn it a thousand times. He grinned, knowing D knew it was a nasty grin, anticipating his response with a kind of glee. He stopped anticipating, knew with an odd little flare in his chest that he had won, when D smirked at him, dropped a hip against the other guy’s shoulder where he was craning to see past the chair, and said, “It’s been a long time, Mr Detective.”
“Yeah, it has,” Leon agreed, rummaging in his duffel. “Spent a lot of time tracking you down, you bastard, you could have stayed in Munich for more than a month.” The words should have been angry; they wanted to be. Leon had enough bottled anger for an army, but he’d learned to keep it bottled, recently; he knew how he wanted to beat D, now, and it wasn’t by being louder or more offensive. So the words came out calm, and he strolled forward instead of striding, and when he brought the paper out to give to D, folded in precise quarters, he flipped it out between finger and thumb instead of shoving it into D’s chest with one palm. “You forgot something, asshole, and you made my kid brother cry. Don’t leave it behind again.”
“Who is this?” The Chinese guy sounded non-plussed; Leon guessed he was getting decent at Mandarin if he could understand that already. Must have been all those months looking for fucking pandas in the wilderness, said a voice in the back of his head, and he stepped on it. He knew how he wanted to win.
“Ah, sorry. Leon Orcot. Ex-detective, LAPD.” He jerked his thumb at D, who seemed riveted by the paper in his hands, as though he remembered what it contained, but was reluctant to see it again. Good, thought Leon, and held out a hand for the other guy to shake. “I see you’re looking after the Count, now.”
The guy reddened, stood up, and turned to shake Leon’s hand. He was shorter than Leon, but not by enough to brag about. “Lao Wu Fei,” he said shortly. “I own the building.”
“Ah,” said Leon, and tried not to smirk too hard when he looked back at D, still dithering with the paper. “Nice choice, D. I bet you can afford the candy a lot better than I could,” he added in Mandarin to Lao, who was looking stymied that Leon had made D’s expression twitch, and he couldn’t understand what Leon had said to make it so. The comment didn’t look to make Lao any more comfortable, but there was a gleam in his eye that Leon recognised, too – the gleam Leon had no doubt had, the first time he’d got a real lead on the Count. Leon had his plan.
“Why don’t we go out for a drink, get acquainted?” he asked, just this side of a leer, and D’s fiddling with the paper slowed. Leon could feel his eyes, violet and gold, on the side of his face, and he ignored them. He was good at that; he’d always been good at that, for better or worse.
Lao’s eyes narrowed, considering, assessing. Leon already knew curiousity about D would override his caution. Leon jerked his chin, nodded politely to D and the stillness of his hands and his expression as he took a few steps backward, expectantly, and Lao followed.
They left D standing there with tea on the table and a folded piece of paper in his hands, and Leon was never surer of his victory.
D had entertained the thought only briefly, but he had thought, should Lao and Leon ever meet, that they would be at odds, that they would bristle at each other like animals finding each other on contested territory. He had been wrong, it seemed. And when he ran again, he left behind a man who knew him well enough to trace his movements without the aid of the police department’s mortuary records, and a man with the financial power to let him.
“It’s just a camping trip,” Tetsu said gruffly, hands on narrow hips, gold eyes narrowed, pupils slit with impatience or frustration at Chris’s tears. “You’ll be back in three days. What are you worrying about?”
It was probably the only time Leon had ever been allowed to retaliate when Tetsu buried his teeth in Leon’s forearm; D and Chris cheered him on from a safe distance while he cursed and dumped another bucket of soapy water over the sheep-tiger’s head. Tetsu howled, and bit harder. Leon cursed. “Keep your damn eyes closed, then!”
This was the last damn time he listened to D about getting a pet to go along on Chris’s camps. The burrs had been annoying enough.
What scares him most, what spurs him on, is that he could do what D said, he could pretend this was all a crazy dream, a smoke-hallucination, and he could go back to what he was, what he thought made up his world, and he could forget about it all. He could forget, and Chris would have no one to remind him, and soon the man who had returned his voice to the world would be nothing but a memory of smoke and incense. What scares him most, what keeps him running, is that Leon’s mother is already a faded ghost in his mind; he can’t let go because if he does, D will be the same. Worse. And he can’t have that.
It wasn’t D he found first, or at least, it wasn’t the D he was looking for. He’d walked into the shop full of triumph, and come face to face with a younger D, not quite eleven, with hair short enough that he almost looked male, for once. Leon pulled up too quickly, startled, and the younger man smiled at him in the way they all had, hands clasped in front of him.
“Welcome to Count D’s pet shop,” he said simply, violet eyes gleaming, and Leon knew a moment of fear before the smooth voice continued, “Father isn’t here right now, but perhaps I can be of service?”
Father, Leon thought in some confusion. Not grandfather. Not great-grandfather, either. Should he be running? “I was looking for... uh. The one with different eyes,” he finished, gesturing helplessly between his own, unable to explain any better, and the younger D blinked.
“I can’t tell you where to find him,” he said, a little wistfully. “My father and his grandson have had little contact since I was born. But his last card was from Germany.”
“Why are you helping me?” Leon asked, just above a whisper, bewildered, and the boy – clearly much younger than the Count or his grandfather, now – frowned.
Dee just watched as his son stared, wide-eyed with wonder, as a chemical rainbow across the bubbles’ surface caught and shimmered in the air above his head. True, most of Vesca’s games did not catch D’s interest, but when they did, they were a hit, and could occupy him for hours.
These days, they were one of the few birds that D was not perfectly content to be around. They brought back memories, messy hair and strangely captivating eyes and a walk impeded by flippers, and D had no time for the memories; his son was running out of time.
leon, vesca; should have known better for tokoyami
The kid hadn’t been expecting it; Vesca could tell, though he had to ask, anyway. Whether Orcot had tipped D off. Whether the Count had been acting strangely. He had to ask, even though the kid was already tearing into the back room, just one, small and dingy like any other in China Town. Not a maze of corridors Vesca has never seen, but has heard of from a hundred near-victims, and hates every time he hears them. He looks at the kid and he hates him just a little for not doing his goddamn job. Orcot should have known better. They both should.
Count D visited his ‘daughter’ as often as he was able, all too aware that no matter the affectations of Shuuko and Kanan, Junrei, at least, showed her misery plainly. He had taken to leaving Q-chan behind, however, when he entered the Crystal Chamber of late; there was something about the way Kanan eyed the tiny creature that reminded D of humans greedily eyeing treats at a cinema.
count d, vesca; sitting in a tree (PRETTY WELL AU, WHAT) for chibify, who clearly wants Vesca in a whole lot of trouble. XD
“I confess, Vesca, I am torn. But after all else I have gone through for my son’s sake, could you ever think it would be otherwise?”
The toutetsu seemed to watch him with sinister promise, at first, as though waiting for Leon to break a clause. But there were no clauses – or none that applied to Leon; D appeared to have made sure of that, at least – so either Tetsu just liked to make Leon nervous (a distinct possibility) or Leon was imagining things.
“I know Chris’ll be glad to see you,” he grumbled at it. “But I still have no idea why the hell D left you with me.”
The creature gave him a look, which Leon interpreted as don’t ask questions, and rested his chin on his front paws, moody. Leon had wondered before how long it would take before he understood Tetsu well enough to get an answer out of him; more often, now, he wondered if Tetsu knew any better than he did.
As it turned out, it took until after Chris visited for the first time – nearly six months later – before Tetsu (at Chris’s behest) deigned to allow Leon to see his true form. It creeped Leon right out when he woke up to a horned man making breakfast, and Chris swinging his legs at the table, chattering the toutetsu’s ear off. Tetsu had given him a sullen glare, which looked strange from slitted sheep’s eyes, and refused to say a word to him until Chris used his big blue eyes and wobbly lower lip to force a temporary truce.
While Chris was in the shower (Leon’s apartment didn’t have a bath), Leon stood in his kitchen and dried the dishes, feeling very strange about having his pet goat-tiger hand him the pots and the pans. Tetsu was shorter than Leon was, and kinda scrawny, too. He never looked underfed when he was covered in fur, but maybe Leon wasn’t feeding him enough.
He and Chris went grocery shopping together later, Chris carrying the basket rather than riding on Leon’s shoulders, these days, and Leon wondered aloud as they perused the meat section, whether Tetsu’d stay human when Chris had gone home. “Must be boring as shit for him in that apartment,” he admitted, feeling faint traces of guilt, mostly because Tetsu hadn’t bitten him once since the contract had been drawn up. “At least if he stayed human he could talk to me.”
Mentioning this to Chris, of course, pretty much settled matters as far as the toutetsu went. The first thing Leon brought up was the issue of boredom; Tetsu had eyed him for a long time before he cautiously requested baking supplies, and Leon was ever after supplied with needlessly intricate and entirely-too-delicious-to-have-been-made-by-a-furball pastries to go with his coffee before he headed into the station of a morning.
The second thing he brought up was about a month after Chris had gone home again, and it was D. Tetsu looked at him a long time then, too, but when he spoke, he didn’t sound cautious. He sounded kind of like Leon felt, when he thought too long about how weird it felt, not to be drinking tea in that underground parlour, enveloped in cool perfumed air and surrounded by the small sounds of a dozen hidden animals.
“You didn’t wanna meet the Count’s grandfather,” he said, voice full of teeth. “Neither did I.”
Leon nodded, but thought Tetsu agreed with him when he said, “Bastard could have let me decide that for myself.”