Oneshots and Excerpts

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Because quite often, I'm too chicken to post them on fanfiction.net, and I want somewhere to keep them in the event that my computer crashes.

So yeah. I'll probably post a few oneshots here every now and then, which may or may not end up on my fanfiction.net account later on.

Edit: Feel free to reply to this thread with reviews, suggestions, anything, really. Really, I don't mind anyone posting in any of my journal threads. Everyone always asks me, and I don't mind, I promise!!

Edit 2: I'll also post excerpts here that I wouldn't mind having reviewed and/or critiqued from longer works. If the whole work is posted anywhere, then I'll offer a link to it. If not, then I won't, though I will edit in a link if it gets posted anywhere in the future.

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Aaaaah, random bursts of inspiration for videogames I haven't played in ages.

This... yes, it is a Kingdom Hearts x Portal/Half-Life Universe crossover. I do not suggest you ask me how or why, just accept that my Muses are a bit on the weird side and either read or ignore.

It takes place in the timeframe where Demyx, the ninth member of Organization XIII, was the newest member of their ranks. His first recon mission, needless to say, has gone horribly wrong, and he has a gun. I would suggest that everyone hide.
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Vexen was the first of the pair to stomp out of the Corridor of Darkness and tell Saïx to tell Xemnas exactly where he could stick any future orders he felt like giving regarding the new guy. Saïx didn’t have any time think of a reply before Demyx exited the Corridor between the castle and the newly discovered world as well, carrying with him his regular “weapon” of choice—a sitar that didn’t really inflict much damage on anything—and a rather large, rather unusual gun. Vexen glared pointedly at the second-in-command in explanation, but Saïx failed to notice, as he was a bit busy eyeing the gun Demyx was carrying, which was no doubt the reason he was looking even more cheerful than usual.

Saïx finally looked at Vexen and spoke. “So, the mission—?”

“It was awesome, check this thing out!” Saïx looked back at Demyx as he held up the large white gun. “It’s a portal gun!”

“Weren’t you instructed to leave the world in the state it was found in?” Saïx asked him.

Demyx’s grin faded into a look of mild disappointment, and he lowered the gun to his side. “But don’t you want to know how—?”

“I want to know how the mission went,” Saïx said firmly, before turning to Vexen again. “So?”

“Total disaster,” Vexen assured him. “Any decent information I managed to gather was completely destroyed when this total moron took that damned gun.”

“And before?”

“Before—? Oh, yes. The world was called Black Mesa, apparently, quite technologically advanced, computer systems all over the place straight out of any decent scientist’s dreams—”

“Yeah, loads of robots and radiation poisoning,” Demyx said, waving the portal gun around dismissively. “Now check this out!” Vexen gave a resigned sigh as Demyx set his sitar on an unoccupied couch near two chairs that were currently occupied by Axel and Xigbar, both of whom looked around to see what was going on upon noticing that someone seemed to have given Demyx a gun.

Demyx held the gun up. “All right, first, you make a blue portal, which it’s already set to do… let’s see…” He aimed the gun at the floor and cocked it—a shot of electricity hit the floor, and a blue oval appeared there. “Okay, you just flip this to… or… up… oh, this, you flip this, and it goes orange, right?” Indeed, the electricity between the three black arms at the end of the gun had turned a burnt-orange color. “Right, so now you shoot it somewhere else—” He shot towards a wall, “—and another one appears. So, look into the orange one, you see the ceiling, and you look into the blue one, you’re seeing us through that portal. So, that means—”

“It means if you jump into that one, you’ll come out at the other, could you get this over with so I can finish my report?” Vexen interrupted impatiently.

“This is part of the report, though, this thing came from Bl…” Demyx trailed off upon noticing the look he was receiving from Vexen. “Right. Uh… hold this for a second.” He handed the portal gun to Saïx, who looked on somewhat curiously with the others in the room as Demyx jumped, feet first, into the blue portal.

His feet were also the first things to come out of the orange portal on the wall, and due to the very subtle differences between jumping and flying, he landed on the floor in front of this portal in a crumpled heap. Axel and Xigbar were the only ones laughing and Axel, a glint of inspiration in his eye, was the first to stop. He hopped over the side of his chair and took the gun from Saïx, examining it as he walked over to Demyx.

Vexen once again glared at Saïx pointedly. “Now,” he said. “There were two primary locations in this world, both military science facilities. One called Black Mesa, the other Aperture Laboratories. The Black Mesa Research Facilities were under siege from some lifeform apparently unknown to that world when we arrived. Aperture was significantly more peaceful on the other hand, if not a little too peaceful. The central computer system had killed all of the employees, and tried to kill us as soon as Number Nine stole the gun and refused to return it. We barely made it back to the Corridor of Darkness, and both facilities were mostly in ruins by then.”

“Any Heartless?” Saïx asked.

Vexen shook his head. “We failed to encounter any. As interesting as that world was, I’m afraid it won’t be of much use to us.

“Is there even any pint in asking for a report on Number Nine’s performance in Reconnaissance?” Vexen stared at Saïx, an expression of utter detestation on his face that perfectly summed up exactly what he thought of the whole situation. Saïx nodded. “Fine. He will be kept away from recon missions in the future.”

“If we ever need any worlds destroyed, however, he would be the person to send,” Vexen said venomously.

“… an orange one here, and a blue on here?” Vexen and Saïx looked around to see Axel holding the portal gun over his shoulder. It seemed he had just put an orange portal on the ceiling directly above a blue one on the floor—Demyx was looking up and down between the two, a thoughtful expression on his face.

“So... if I was to jump into that one,” Demyx said slowly, “I’ll fall out of the one in the ceiling, back into the one on the floor, then out of… whoa. That… is awesome.”

“So are you going to—? Never mind.” Demyx had already jumped into the blue portal halfway through Axel’s question, without a second thought on the matter. He stepped back from the portal a bit and looked at Saïx and Vexen. “So, general freefall rate?”

“Doesn’t apply here,” Vexen said. “The portals have barriers so the landing in a situation such as this will be more or less like falling from a window between the second and third floors of a house, at the worst.”

“So if I was to move the blue portal before—or after—or… All right, let’s just say, if I was to move the blue portal, I wouldn’t be a murderer?”

“No,” Vexen said, and sighed. “Unfortunately not.”

Grinning, Axel flipped the fun back to its blue setting, and reloated the blue portal to a wall. Moments later, Demyx landed on the ground in a rather undignified and—judging by the cracking sound and the yelp—rather painful manner. A collective flinch went across the room at this.

“Well, that concludes today’s lesson on stealing,” Axel said, handing the gun to Saïx and walking over to Demyx. “No matter how ‘awesome’ it looks, just leave it alone and stick to the mission. Got it memorized?”

And with that, he walked towards the hall, Demyx yelling swears and death threats after him.
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Aaaaah randomness. You have provided me once again with random crossover oneshots that I'm too afraid to post anywhere but here!

On a side note, I hate to say it, but I have SO many friends that remind me of Demyx, it's ridiculous. I'm like their collective common-sense source. It's sad and amusing at the same time. xD

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This'un's called Spare Change. Was from a prompt from the challenges community right here on WTRP.

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Without warning a window washer arrives, from nowhere. The flat cap set slightly askew atop his skull houses a head full of what appears to be grimy, matted blond hair, and the cap itself matches the faded blue jumpsuit covering him from shoulder to toe. A patch sewn to the left side of the chest states that he is Jack, while black embroidery names his employer as Johnson’s Windows & More, a phone number with a local area code embroidered below in slightly smaller letters that old Mrs. Mason can’t quite make out without her glasses.

She never saw him move to the window; one moment she was glancing out the window as Mr. Johansen across the street was checking his mail, the next moment this stranger was running his squeegee over the window like he had been called here. It’s more likely, she thinks, that she merely lost herself in thought for a moment and didn’t notice him come to the window.

Perhaps he had been called to her home, Mrs. Mason thinks to herself, and does that ever perturb her; for the love of Christ, she can wash her own windows! Ever since she turned sixty or so, her children seem to be set on helping her with everything, or hiring someone or other to help her with everything. As far as she’s concerned, there is absolutely nothing she needs to do that she can’t. If she needs the help of those younglings, she can call them.

She supposes she should dismiss the boy; she’s certainly not going to be paying him. As Mrs. Mason arrives at the window, a closer look shows her that this Jack isn’t much older than her oldest grandson. Maybe ten at the most. Shaking her head, she unlatches the window and opens it outward to look at the boy; he goes on washing, washing that one window; it’s perfectly clean and she can hardly see why he hasn’t moved on yet. Spaced out, likely. Kids these days…

“Excuse me, son?” Not even a glance over. Mrs. Mason pokes her head a bit further outside, looking straight at the boy. Clearing her throat, she speaks a little louder. “Jack, isn’t it?” she says. “I don’t believe I called you here. You can go on to your next house.”

He looks at her, and his eyes give her a start. There’s something missing from them—life. Pale blue, set in a face as dingy as his outfit—which she now sees is much too large on him, held in various places by clothespins to keep it from falling off of him—those dead eyes look at her, look through her, and the boy speaks to her in a monotone.

“Wash yer windows for some spare change, ma’am…”

Without waiting for a reply, he turns back to the window and continues.

Mrs. Mason watches for a moment, then slowly pulls her head back inside, closes the window and the curtains. He’s only a ten-year-old boy; is there really anything to be afraid of from him? Arms crossed tightly in front of her, she eyes the boy’s silhouette through the curtain shrewdly. Those eyes appeared strangely lifeless, but she had seen it before; the product of drugs, life on the streets. Probably mugged an unsuspecting man on his way to a job, stole his clothes and equipment.

All she can think to do is call the police; she has seen on television what drugs can do to kids. Make them insane, give them bursts of strength; she knows full well she can’t handle this situation herself.

Mrs. Mason hurries to the end table next to the sofa and grabs the phone and quickly dials 911, still watching the sluggish silhouette of the boy.

“Emergency services—”

“This is Mrs. Kimberly Mason of 124 Maple Avenue, there is a boy here washing my windows who looks like he might be… on something. He—”

The boy is gone. Just like that, quickly as he appeared.

“Ma’am?”

“I—I’m sorry, it seems he’s… just left. Thank you…”

“Wash yer windows for some spare change…”

A gasp escapes Mrs. Mason’s lips as she whips around, dropping the phone; the boy is standing there, still holding the squeegee, dripping over the clean carpet. How in the world did this boy make it inside her house? How—?

“…ma’am…”

He looks up now, and her eyes aren’t on his, but on a hole—not in his tattered clothes, but in his throat, the very front, dried blood encrusted around it. She’s seen it before, when her youngest son was killed in the war—a gunshot wound.

It’s obviously a deep wound; how can he speak so clearly? His eyes stare into hers, not drugged out, but dead.

“…some spare change, ma’am…”

“I—of—of course, stay right there. Right there.”

She hurries past the boy and into her kitchen—in the drawer below the key rack, she finds her change purse. She turns and stumbles back with a gasp—the boy is there again, head downturned, hand stretched towards her.

“Wash yer windows for—”

“Yes, I know! Here! Take it!” Mrs. Mason shoves the change purse into his hand—a hand as cold as though it had been submerged in an ice-bath for a day—and quickly draws her own hand back, watching him. After staring at the purse for a moment, he turns and shuffles away, leaving Mrs. Mason to gawk after him—more holes on his back, crusted over entirely with dried blood.

She watches as he walks through her closed front door, disappears beyond it. Pulling herself together, Mrs. Mason walks slowly to the living room, hangs up the phone from which the 911 operator is still trying to speak to her, and sits on her sofa, mind blank and hands shaking.

Perhaps Mrs. Mason wouldn’t mind the help of her children a little more often.

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Well, let's get a little fancy here, since I already made a cover for this for the site I posted it on...

[atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,5,true][atrb=border,0,true]

White Rabbit

[/color][/size]A child psychiatrist struggles with his grip on fantasy and reality
after his young niece suffers a head injury and subsequently seems
to become lost in a land of make-believe herself--but is it really
make-believe at all? A new and modernized look at Lewis Carrol's
brilliant classic "Alice in Wonderland" for the Justine Magazine
contest on Figment.com.[/td][/font][/size][/tr][/table][/center]

A headful of pale blonde hair rested on one bent knee, tilted slightly to one side. Peeking around the platinum locks were two bright, unfocused blue eyes with drooping lids. Occasionally they would blink, the only movement their owner had made in perhaps half an hour. One foot was in her chair, one on the floor. One hand rested upon her cheek, and the other hung limply at the end of her arm. The cafeteria of St. Andrew’s was loud with the regular lunchtime nonsense, but none of it disturbed Alice; she was miles away, maybe playing a game of croquet, maybe drinking tea.

Sighing a little at the catatonic, occasionally mumbling girl across the table from him, Dr. Carter Tiller struck a match and held the flame to the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. It seemed Alice was under more and more often lately, lucid less and less. He knew how intense these spells of hers were, but occasionally she could be brought back.

After taking the first pull on his pipe, Tiller turned his head away from the table to exhale the smoke. He bit down on the mouthpiece of the pipe. Policy was to let catatonics come back down on their own, to let whatever medications they were pumped full do their job without disturbance.

Gazing back across the table at the girl, his dark eyebrows lowered over a pair of narrow blue eyes, Tiller silently damned the policy.

“Al? Allie, can you hear me?”

This was why Tiller received so much complaint from his superiors as of the late. Words like “favoritism” and “unethical” littered their incessant soliloquys, words that didn’t really sting him any worse than the prick of a pin. He already was considering resigning soon, looking for work in a different hospital, a hospital where wouldn’t have to watch his own niece slip further away from him every day.

“Come on, Alice. You haven’t even touched your sandwich.” Alice blinked once, slowly, and mumbled something about a rabbit.

The white rabbit. He was probably late for something.

Tiller felt his lip twitch a little, but couldn’t discern whether it was toward a smile or a grimace, or perhaps some combination of the two. That rabbit, always with that damnable rabbit. He took another pull on his pipe, puffed the smoke off to the side of the table in an exasperated sigh, and looked back at his niece. One little fall, one little bump to the head at a family picnic. That’s all it was. Kids bumped their heads occasionally; it was one of many unspoken rules of life. Kids bumped their heads, and nothing terrible ever came of it, excepting when something terrible did come of it.

Excepting Alice.

The hand holding his pipe trembled. Laughing a little to himself, Tiller pulled an ashtray from one pocket, dropped it on the table, and dumped the burning tobacco into it. Stamping the embers out with the bowl of the pipe, he heard his own voice speak, a little shakily. “I guess that’s all for now, sweetheart. Have fun with your rabbit.”

“The rabbit’s gone.”

These words made Tiller jump so badly he nearly tipped his chair over; then his head jerked up. Across the table, Alice stretched her arms. Her pearly white grin offered the impression that she was a perfectly normal seven-year-old girl, and the same fleeting hope as always burned in her uncle. Maybe this time she wouldn’t slip away again, maybe she would remain lucid, realize that her make-believe world was just that: make-believe.

If it was make-believe.

“Hi, Uncle Carter! Is Daddy coming today?”

Tiller swallowed reflexively and forced a smile, trying to push his thoughts back to the here and now. “After work, like always,” he answered.

“Five o’clock?”

“Around five.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his tired, aching eyes with one hand, before sliding the clipboard sitting at the edge of the table over to him, pulling the pen from its metal clip. “So. You saw a rabbit today?”

“The white rabbit with the waistcoat.”

Tiller’s lip twitched. “Was he late?”

“Oh, very. And he mistook me for his maid and made me go fetch his gloves!” Alice, crossing her arms, sat back huffily in her chair. “It isn’t my problem he’s late. He should fetch his own gloves! Shouldn’t he, Uncle Carter?”

“Oh, definitely,” Tiller agreed automatically, nodding. “Now—”

“Oh, and there was a caterpillar!” He glanced up from his clipboard at Alice, eyebrows raised; there had been no caterpillars before. “He was just in front of me when I came back to the cafeteria, just where you are now, except he was sitting on a mushroom instead of a chair. He even had a pipe!”

“Oh?” That fleeting hope reignited a little. “And did he say anything?”

“He asked who I was.” Quite suddenly, Alice sat forward to examine the sandwich on her lunch tray. She lifted the top slice of bread, and apparently approved of its contents, for she picked up the sandwich and took a large bite. “I told him,” she went on through the mouthful of food, “that I wasn’t quite sure.”

The embers of hope were doused once again. “Why…would you say that?”

“Well, because I’m not quite sure.” She stared at her sandwich thoughtfully. “Mister White Rabbit thought I was a maid named Mary Ann. I can’t remember stories or poems I used to know, they’ve all gotten mixed up and turned around. Maybe I’m someone different, or not even someone at all. Maybe you’re really a caterpillar, Uncle Carter.” Alice giggled a little before taking another bite of her sandwich, and Tiller forced a smile before putting the tip of his pen to the paper. “Maybe,” Alice said, and Tiller froze, “Wonderland is real and this place isn’t. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

Though Tiller smiled and agreed with her, his mind shouted his own true disagreement at him. It would be wonderful for her, perhaps, if she really was lost in some magical foreign land—and what was there saying she wasn’t? All because something was too fantastic to be scientifically explained, it was a mental health problem.

Yet if medicine couldn’t explain it, medicine couldn’t ever fix it. This had to be fixed; his niece couldn’t be gone forever.

These thoughts had plagued him for a couple weeks now, still plagued him as he walked out the front door that evening and down the sidewalk lined with its neatly trimmed hedges, pushing him all the closer to resigning.

When a white rabbit hopped out of the hedge and onto across the sidewalk front of him, Tiller tripped and fell. He barely caught himself on his hands, and stared after the rabbit that had worn upon his last remaining strains of optimism for as long as these completely mad considerations of Wonderland had. For one more day, he would convince himself it was all a coincidence, that the rabbit really hadn’t been around that much, that it really hadn’t been wearing a waistcoat and gold pocket watch.

For one more day, he would; and if the creature showed itself to him tomorrow evening, Dr. Tiller would follow.