Fic Scraps

FF7
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Making a thread for misc scraps of fic I have spread across various devices that are too messy to go on Ao3 but may still entertain others.

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“So, what’s this about, Tseng?” asked Rufus.

“Songs, sir. Protest songs. Anti-Shinra.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Tseng played the video. Guitars gruggered out, fast and uneven. A group of people were whooping with laughter and drunkenly shout-singing along. The lyrics were as follows:

“Fuck Shinra!”
“Fuck Shinra!”
“Fuck Shinra!”
“Fuck Shinra! Fuck Shinra! Fuck Shinra!”

“It continues like that,” said Tseng.

“I’d have more patience for this if they’d used a metronome,” said Rufus.

“Wouldn’t that disqualify it from being punk?”

“Suppose Reno’s the expert.” Rufus turned to Reno. “Well?”

Reno squinted at him. “Fuck’s a metronome?”

“There, I’m right,” said Tseng.

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: I love it! And that music! :heart:

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Thanks! :) I intended to make a version with actual shouting, but I never did track down a suitable group of louts.

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“What makes you so sure?”

Your fics always make me laugh out loud.

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Thank you! I used to enjoy the headcanon that Rufus composed his own welcoming ceremony theme so I was pleased to discover it could so easily be twisted into a punk song.

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Have posted elsewhere but not ao3 unless my memory’s even worse than I thought.

Sea Captain Lambert was a worried man. This new young President with his parades, his talk of ruling with fear, his idolisation of military might-- Lambert had met men like that before, long ago, in his navy days. Lambert had always regarded the Wutai war as a necessary evil, but men like that… Lambert was inclined to think that men like that were the source of the evil.

And now, a man like that was President. The old President had valued stability, wealth, growth-- and therefore, once the spoils had been collected, had encouraged peace.

The son was different.

But what could Captain Lambert do? He was nobody important, despite his vast collection of medals. He’d mostly won them by not dying, and that had been down to chance. Now, steering with his one good arm, he captained the ferry that took top Shinra personnel from Junon to Costa Del Sol and back-- a prestigious job, to be sure, but not one with any sort of power. He didn’t even choose his own crew; Shinra allocated him men; half the time he didn’t recognise their faces until he was almost at the port. He was practically a figurehead. He supposed he could still run the ship aground, crash into some rocks. But that would be an extreme reaction to a bad feeling, any Presidential successor might be even worse, and besides, Lambert had his family to think about. He’d gone to war to protect them in the first place. They still needed his pay.

Lambert looked out over the deck, anxious. Maybe he was worried over nothing. Times had changed, after all…

He blinked. Times had changed! Over there, near the cargo hold-- a Wutaian sailor! A girl, from the looks of things, just beginning to find her sea legs. His heart swelled with pride. Shinra had come so far from even ten years ago; there wasn’t a ship in the docks that would have hired her then. They’d have jeered, called her a Wutaian dog, told her to get off the ship before they started shooting-- but now! Well, it just went to show. All prejudices were fleeting. Given enough time, people returned to their natural, welcoming state. He’d always known.

He strolled back to the engine room, whistling. He oiled the gears, polished the handles, and was just standing back to admire his handiwork, when a young sailor bumped into him.

“S-sorry, Sir!” The sailor saluted. “Um… I-I need to ask you about something…?”

“What is it, lad?” Captain Lambert beamed at the boy.

“Um… I-I thought you should know… on the ship, th-there’s a dog in a sailor suit?”

Lambert’s blood ran cold. A ‘dog’. Even now. “What, lad?” He hoped from his tone the boy would take the hint.

But, instead, the boy repeated, “A-a dog, sir, we don’t know how it happened and Larry said not to tell you b-but I thought seeing as how it’s the president’s ship and how it’s high security and all of that I-I thought you ought to know sooner not later–”

“Get gone, lad.”

“B-but the dog–”

“That word is banned on this ship. The next man to use it loses his job. Tell your shipmates, and go swab the decks!”

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Sometimes I suspect there’s a bit of a theme running through your fic of well-intentioned people trying to do the right thing and getting it completely wrong. Happily, in this case Captain Lambert’s mistake yields the right result. Would he be sympathetic to Avalanche, I wonder?

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Double post, sorry.
I just wanted to say I have now watched so many Korean historical dramas that I feel I could write one (although tbh they’re not all that different from a Shakespeare comedy.) However, I don’t want to set it in historical Korea because I’m lazy and it would be far too much pfaff to learn all that history. I think I will set mine in Wutai and make up the history as I go along.

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Oh well, I double-post all the time! :smiley:

I think Cap’n Lambert would be sympathetic to AVALANCHE if he heard the whole story from start to finish, though he’d disapprove of the attacks on the reactors that killed civilians. I’d imagine that, despite his sympathy toward Wutaian people expressed in this fic, he’d still see a big difference between AVALANCHE’s behaviour in Midgar and Shinra’s behaviour in Wutai if Midgar were his hometown. And perhaps he’d be disquieted by Cloud’s defection, if as an ex-military man he put great stock in the value of the chain of command… but then I think I thought of him as more halfhearted and cynical about it all than that.

I apparently gravitate toward it for comedy/tragedy, but tbh it’s not a theme I give a lot of conscious thought; it may just be a trope I lazily fall back on…

Please do! (This is a big part of what I <3 about fanfic; you can get straight to the story without checking details like that and potentially getting lost in research and running out of energy to write the thing.)

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They were playing a boardgame. It was something involving a lot of cards, tokens, dice and rules Vincent couldn’t follow, not that it mattered because his character was already dead. Bertram Chesterton, paranormal investigator and village heartthrob, had been dispatched not three minutes in by a mysteriously overpowered zombie plague rat. Hojo had sternly informed Vincent that there were no second chances.

“Mary Beth picks up the arcane diary,” read Hojo, now, moving Lucrecia’s character counter three spaces. “Inside, she finds a note from Sir Geoffrey-- ‘Tonight, I will summon the Ancient One, tearing apart all reality, and its powers will be mine.’”

“Well, that’s stupid,” said Lucrecia.

Hojo regarded her, plastic counter still held between his fingers. “You wouldn’t take the opportunity to summon an ancient god?”

“Not if it was going to eat me.” Lucrecia swept her hair out of her face, then cocked her head. “Why, would you?”

“I’m surprised you wouldn’t.”

"But why?’

“Just to see it.”

“You’d die horribly, though.”

“But I’d see something noone else had ever seen. Imagine it, Lu, witnessing the birth of a God. In just a moment, it would blow through your whole understanding of the world.”

“If I wanted that, I’d just take psychedelics.”

“Pshah.” Hojo dropped her counter on the board. “You just lack imagination. If it were in front of you, right now, you’d open the door. You’d want to see. I know you, Lu.”

(we were playing a D&D kind of thing and it occurred to me that Hojo would relish the role of Dungeon Master. May expand into an actual fic sometime.)

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