Well, I know I haven't been keeping up with the schedule for the FATE/Change Dusk and Rogue Bunny threads, and unfortunately, it looks like I'm not going to improve much in the immediate future. Partly this is due to the fact that I've just replaced my computer's old, damaged video card and have yet to get over the fact that I can once again play, well, anything, but a bigger factor has been my discovery of an opportunity to bribe Aishuu/Lady Quicksilver into returning her work, Renaissance, to her active list... since that fic has been one of my favorites ever since I first read it, you can imagine that I've jumped at the chance.
How's it going? Wellll...
KAMAKURA, JAPAN, 2012
Hikari groaned and instinctively tried to burrow into her pillow, away from the hand shaking her shoulder. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and the buzzing in her ears soon resolved into her grandmother's voice. "Hikari! Kanzaki Hikari, you wake up this -instant-!"
With a mental sigh, she gave in to the inevitable and pushed herself into sitting mostly upright. "Ugh... Right, sorry, Gran. I was up too late last night. Homework."
Kanzaki Rio nodded, appeased, and then stood back a little to address her only grandchild as firmly as possible. "There'd have been plenty of time if you'd been home earlier," she said.
Hikari refrained from rolling her eyes, but it took an effort. Gran meant the best, certainly, and she was a wonderful woman, but she was constitutionally incapable of seeing something 'wrong' and not trying to fix it, and for the last ten years her granddaughter's ongoing study of the martial arts had rated high on her personal list of problems. It actually wasn't the cost or violence she objected to, so much as the fact that the school her daughter had enlisted the child in was - in her opinion - far too concerned with the mechanics of obsolete means of murder, rather than the improvement of the student.
When her mother was alive, Hikari had never really noticed the way the ongoing argument simmered perpetually between parent and grandparent, which had done a lot to worsen the disaster that had blown up when she had had to step up to defend her studies herself. The fact that she wasn't nearly as reconciled to her mother's death as her careful self-discipline had made her seem had been responsible for most of it, though, since having that connection, the thing in her life that had always made her mother smile most warmly, threatened out of sincere - and, even then, clearly recognized - concern had been much less upsetting than the fact that she hadn't even seemed to have the decency to wait until her mother's body was in the ground before making the attempt.
The crash had been nearly two years ago, now, and it had taken up until her most recent birthday - seven months past, now, in January - for them to get back on speaking terms. "The trains didn't quite connect, Gran. I got back as soon as I could have," she said, taking her master's advice on how to divert the conversation away from becoming another fight.
Rio had never been a fool and at fifty-one was still well short of senility, and she gave her granddaughter an unamused look before she let the evasion slide and let her demeanor soften. "I suppose not," she said. "Anyway, if you eat like a barbarian and run to the bus stop, you should be able to make it to school on time without skipping breakfast."
Hikari swatted her bangs out of her eyes - it was time and past time for a haircut - and tugged the ribbon holding the rest of her pitch-black hair in its ponytail out to let it fall loose. "Okaaaaay," she said, and hauled herself upright to start on getting dressed. Shucking out of her nightshirt took only a moment, and pulling on her school uniform not much longer, so that barely a minute had passed before she was shoveling the stack of completed assignments into her bookbag and kissing her fingertips to press them against the glass protecting the occupant of the display that sat in pride of place on top of the desk. "Miss you, Mama," she whispered.
The small golden disc gleamed behind her in the morning light shining in from the window as she went down to breakfast.
Ja, -n
(edited 'cause Hitomi didn't live in Tokyo)
===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
How's it going? Wellll...
KAMAKURA, JAPAN, 2012
Hikari groaned and instinctively tried to burrow into her pillow, away from the hand shaking her shoulder. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and the buzzing in her ears soon resolved into her grandmother's voice. "Hikari! Kanzaki Hikari, you wake up this -instant-!"
With a mental sigh, she gave in to the inevitable and pushed herself into sitting mostly upright. "Ugh... Right, sorry, Gran. I was up too late last night. Homework."
Kanzaki Rio nodded, appeased, and then stood back a little to address her only grandchild as firmly as possible. "There'd have been plenty of time if you'd been home earlier," she said.
Hikari refrained from rolling her eyes, but it took an effort. Gran meant the best, certainly, and she was a wonderful woman, but she was constitutionally incapable of seeing something 'wrong' and not trying to fix it, and for the last ten years her granddaughter's ongoing study of the martial arts had rated high on her personal list of problems. It actually wasn't the cost or violence she objected to, so much as the fact that the school her daughter had enlisted the child in was - in her opinion - far too concerned with the mechanics of obsolete means of murder, rather than the improvement of the student.
When her mother was alive, Hikari had never really noticed the way the ongoing argument simmered perpetually between parent and grandparent, which had done a lot to worsen the disaster that had blown up when she had had to step up to defend her studies herself. The fact that she wasn't nearly as reconciled to her mother's death as her careful self-discipline had made her seem had been responsible for most of it, though, since having that connection, the thing in her life that had always made her mother smile most warmly, threatened out of sincere - and, even then, clearly recognized - concern had been much less upsetting than the fact that she hadn't even seemed to have the decency to wait until her mother's body was in the ground before making the attempt.
The crash had been nearly two years ago, now, and it had taken up until her most recent birthday - seven months past, now, in January - for them to get back on speaking terms. "The trains didn't quite connect, Gran. I got back as soon as I could have," she said, taking her master's advice on how to divert the conversation away from becoming another fight.
Rio had never been a fool and at fifty-one was still well short of senility, and she gave her granddaughter an unamused look before she let the evasion slide and let her demeanor soften. "I suppose not," she said. "Anyway, if you eat like a barbarian and run to the bus stop, you should be able to make it to school on time without skipping breakfast."
Hikari swatted her bangs out of her eyes - it was time and past time for a haircut - and tugged the ribbon holding the rest of her pitch-black hair in its ponytail out to let it fall loose. "Okaaaaay," she said, and hauled herself upright to start on getting dressed. Shucking out of her nightshirt took only a moment, and pulling on her school uniform not much longer, so that barely a minute had passed before she was shoveling the stack of completed assignments into her bookbag and kissing her fingertips to press them against the glass protecting the occupant of the display that sat in pride of place on top of the desk. "Miss you, Mama," she whispered.
The small golden disc gleamed behind her in the morning light shining in from the window as she went down to breakfast.
Ja, -n
(edited 'cause Hitomi didn't live in Tokyo)
===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"