Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial
Wc: 835
Fandom: Life series
Characters: Life series winners (including April Fools)
Ao3: Here!
When Scott appeared in a new world after Simple Life, he was not expecting what met him.
Warning for body horror, though you don't see it happen.
Seeing Double
Tiny Scott was born from light into a new world. Both his eyes closed and his arms extended, a gust of air caressed his face in a welcoming gesture.
With a content smile, he slowly opened his eyes, ready to take in his new surroundings. The first few moments of calmness before the start of a new game were always important to him. It was never good to start the game with an unsteady foot forward.
That short game he just finished had been a good change of pace. He felt truly refreshed after that. He couldn’t wait to-
The world wasn’t grass or sand, there was no sky — and very few people surrounded him. Not nearly enough to constitute a-
Something crashed, and Joel was yelling, pointing at him, but his eyes were set on the others.
He looked strange. Much… taller — disproportionately so. His torso seemed normal, but his legs and arms…
“You said there were no repeats! That’s not fair! And why does it have to be Scott, of all people?”
“Ouch? What did I-” he said, at the same time as another familiar voice said: “I’m still here, you know?”
It was his voice. Or as close to his voice as could be, distorted to his own ears. He was behind a counter, crystals refracted from his eyes, but they didn’t meet his own.
“And why are you complaining? Finally realizing I could’ve actually won against you?” Grian’s voice came out smug from behind him, at the other side of the room. “From what you said, it seemed pretty close…”
“It was not! And you didn’t win, anyway,” he rushed to say, “so I don’t know why you’re trying to brag about it!”
Grian looked wrong as well. More obviously than the others, covered head to thighs in feathers, and his face, it was-
“Oi, you’re all scaring him. Look at the little guy! He’s practically trembling!” Pearl said as she approached him — he twirled around to face her, and he shouldn’t have. Her figure towered over him more with every step. “Hi Scott!” She looked down at him and smiled. “Didn’t think I’d see a second of you here. I’m assuming you’ve learnt your lesson since we last met?” Pearl’s smile bore fangs.
His poor body’s heart was going faster than it did even with this size at the start. Faster than even the exertion of the chase when he was still of his regular height.
“Ah, I see someone forgot to sacrifice himself this time around?” Scar said slowly, followed by a sip of his mug, sitting by the counter. Way too many flowers grew from his face, though only one flower would’ve counted as too many.
“Or to team up with the wrong people.” Martyn said, equally as scarred by coral, if not more. One of his eyes had sprouted into colorful tendrils, no hint of what had once been there. There were gaps in his smile. “Had a fun run? Not sorry for cutting your win short back then, by the way. It had to happen.”
Once everyone stopped talking, there was a brief moment of silence. Scott took this time to bring his heart rate down a notch.
“Scott!”
Oomph- a body crashed against him, sending him back a few steps — he barely managed to keep himself on his feet. Hands and a torso sandwiched his body and half his face like a hug, but no arms surrounded his body- no, he had to turn his head away from the body to breathe, and only the first fourth of an arm squished his face, the rest of it missing. The hands behind him pressed even harder into the hug for a second, then the whole body released him and held his shoulders when he stumbled back, keeping him in place. It was Cleo.
“Look at you! Hi! You’re even shorter than me! Join my short team, I’m planning on overthrowing the talls — particularly Joel,” she fake-whispered. “He let his growth spurt get to his head, but he just looks weird with the legs and—”
“I heard that!”
“That’s surprising!” they yelled back. “I don’t remember you putting a bug on me! Or did you get the ‘hearing superpower’ Martyn had?” Then they turned to Scott and their whole demeanor changed again. “How are you doing! Your head is so big, how are you even standing up? It’s like half of your body and three times wider! That can’t be stable!”
“I…”
Everyone was looking at Scott, surrounding him from every side. Each face extremely familiar, memories from many lives past coagulating, fusing into the now in a way the pieces should never fall. All of them mangled, uncanny, wrong.
But looking down to his own body, tiny legs under an even tinier torso, hands stained by void like the dirt he could never get rid of at the pond, from countless hours of thinning out the world, he realized…
Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial with the prompt FFF301 - what happened here. This fic might be an alternate universe and/or a continuity filler to the book series that might or might not happen in the lives of the Taruhi brothers: Yukima, Yukichi, and Yukiya. No spoilers herein.
—
Fandom : Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master
Characters : Yukiya, Yukima, Yukichi, mentions of Lady Azusa, Yukimasa, Lady Fuyuki, Nazukihiko/Wakamiya
Word count : 966
“THAT’S the 28th rose already. How many more are you going to get?”
The reaction was a mixture of teasing, surprise and admiration from the voice of a 10-year-old, who had the vaguest idea of romantic love.
Yukima just grinned and scratched his head. “I know, right?” He smiled at his youngest brother Yukichi, who made a gesture of smacking his forehead and continued playing outside after a girl from the village disrupted the little boy’s games. She asked hin nervously if he could pass over the red flower to his oldest brother.
Yukima stretched his legs, then dragged his feet to the storage room where his mother kept a collection of vases when he heard a pair of footsteps that seemed to stop in its tracks.
“What happened here?” Yukiya asked aghast, his eyes bulging from the heap of red, white, peach, and pink roses that landed on the engawa. He just disappeared for more than a couple of hours after breakfast, returning from helping their mother with the gardening task. Lady Azusa foresaw the planting of the gladiolus corms she received as a gift from Shinobu-san, the matriarch of the Kazemaki Village. Yukiya, who had nothing to do, volunteered to assist their mother.
Yukima turned around and noticed that Yukiya was looking at him.
“What can I do?” Said his older brother, feeling embarrassed. His cheeks had gone red that made Yukiya giggle.
It was not the oldest brother’s fault that girls practically swarmed around him especially now that he had celebrated his coming-of-age. The reason with the huge turnout of gifts from his admirers, wishing that he could take one of them as his wife and, perhaps, his concubine. Yukima was a good catch. A fine-looking young man with shiny black hair, he was poised to succeed their father to become the next governor of their town Taruhi. One could say that his future was secured. No doubt that he got his looks from his parents. Lady Azusa was a beautiful young woman from the eastern part of Yamauchi. Their father, Yukimasa, was a handsome youth once. His broad shoulders and muscled chest, with a gentle face to boot, it was easy to say that he had his fair share of people who looked up to him after inheriting the lordship of Taruhi from his own grandfather. Not to mention, the earned enemies as well. Yukimasa passed these opportunities on to his eldest son, Yukima.
He, on the other hand, was worried about Yukiya. Older by a year, Yukima knew the unfair treatment he endured and the charade he was playing at in front of their father and the rest of their relatives. Though their father never showed it as he treated his three sons equally, he must have complicated feelings when it came to Yukiya’s mother.
There also lay the question concerning the physical attributes Yukiya possessed. Different from his two brothers, he had unruly auburn catlike hair, the awake almond-shaped blue eyes that resembled Prince Gen’ya’s, his grandfather and the ruler of the North. Moreover, the quick mind that he inherited from his real mother, whom Lady Azusa once served as a young woman. As a child, Yukiya was scrawny, whose limbs could not keep up with his advanced brain development. He learned to speak difficult poetry at a very young age, while Yukima struggled. Yukiya’s real mother was also Yukimasa’s first wife, who happened to be the second princess of the Northern House in which Taruhi was part of its territory.
“Any favourite among the girls from your fan club?” Yukiya asked Yukima.
“I have one in mind…” Smile dangled on Yukima’s lips as if remembering her face.
“But?”
“I am not sure if father would accept her.” Did Yukiya hear sadness after that statement?
“Do you like her that much?”
“You can say that,” he sighed softly gazing at their mother’s garden. The peach tree began to bloom so early this year. “And I feel that she loves me. One day I’d ask her hand...”
“I would not marry based on love. Marry for love, especially for us the nobility, and it won’t hold that much water,” Yukiya declared without delay.
“Surely, like the commoners, there are happy and sad families. But how about our family? Our parents? I … I m-mean…” Yukima stuttered. The image of Yukiya’s real mother, Lady Fuyuki, came to mind. Not only that, his brother here standing in front of him, he was a living proof of a complicated childhood just because of his other side of the family. But despite all that, Lady Azusa, Yukima and Yukichi never treated Yukiya differently. He was part of the family period.
“Our parents are probably an exemption… or something like that.” Yukiya bent his head hiding the hurt and anger he was keeping inside.
“Brother, my utmost wish is that one day you could find someone you would care about…”
“What brought this on?” Yukiya gawked at his brother uncomfortably, but quickly retained his composure trying to regain the confidence he had before. “Anyway, I doubt that. Such kind of person never exists.” Yukiya turned to gaze at his older brother whose naïveté was admirable.
Yukima’s face gave off the saddest expression that day. Yukiya could never forget it.
I doubt that such person exists.
Yukima took a pity on his younger brother and vowed to support him all his life.
—
In a month, Yukiya left his village and set off to become the personal attendant to the young prince, Wakamiya, whose real name was Nazukihiko and was touted to be the real Golden Raven. He would return after a year to Taruhi for a few months only to come back again serving His Highness, who now ascended to the throne of emperor, all his life.
