FIC: Yami no Matsuei -- "The Tale of the Kun-Lun Slave, or the Prince in the Basement"

I said there were fics that popped into my head as I was finishing the 12 Days of Christmas fanfics that I wrote earlier this month and that they were like the Valentine's Day decorations that pop up in the store the day after Christmas. This is one of them and I think you'll see why. It's slashy, but it's not *that* kind of slash, since it's about unrequited love and the happiness one can find even in that.

I've also found that I really enjoy writing Tatsumi's voice: he has this very proper way of speaking and often an almost Zen-like calm (well, when Tsuzuki isn't driving him to distraction, as he often does even to those who love him). Thus, this is one of a pair of fics I've written from the POV of a certain shadow magic user (I may post the other tomorrow or in the coming days, we'll see):

Title: "The Tale of the Kun-Lun Slave, or the Prince in the Basement"
Author: "Matrix Refugee"
Rating: PG-13 (mild slash)
Pairing: hints of Tatsumi/Tsuzuki, Tatsumi/Hisoka and Tsuzuki/Hisoka
Genre: UST, mild hurt-comfort
Chapter: One-shot
Comments: Written for InsaneJournal's "porn_battle", specifically their prompt "Yami no Matsuei, Tatsumi/Tsuzuki, the fairy tale comes true", but it ended up being more unrequited love than anything else. POTENTIAL SPOILERS for the climax of the Kyoto arc. Special thanks goes to the folks at little_details for suggesting the Chinese fairy tale that inspired it.
Disclaimer: I do not own Yami no Matsuei, aka Descendants of Darkness, it’s characters, concepts and other indicia, which are the intellectual property of Yoko Matsushita, Hiroko Tokita, Manga Entertainment, Viz Media, Hakusensha, Central Park Media, et al.

( In a way, the fairy tale did come true... )

Antique shop crawl and costuming idea revisited

After Mass this afternoon, my dad decided to pop into a small block of antique shops that's a few doors down from the church we've been going to. And when I mean "antique shop" I mean the sort of combination thrift store/jumble store/shop that sells things which actually are antiques which are part of the landscape of many towns in New England. You might find anything from Chippendale chairs to Maxfield Parrish prints in tastefully distressed frames to a Regency-era armoire to a shelf full of paperbacks from 1990. On said shelf full of paperbacks from 1990, I found a three-volumes-in-one collection of Storm Constantine's "Wraethu", which has been tweaking my interest for some time. I'm hoping this trilogy doesn't run out of steam in the third volume the way her Grigori trilogy unfortunately did (not to say that the writing wasn't interesting, since I like her lush way of describing things, it's just that the plot of the third Grigori novel kind of lost its way).

Still looking for an anime/sci-fi convention to attend. I almost went to Arisia this weekend, but I found out about it a bit too late to afford it, plus I need to pay myself back for some Christmas shopping. There's always next year. I still don't think I'll be attending AnimeBoston this year since it's smack dab on the weekend of Easter and I have too much to do that weekend. But I think I've hit upon a very doable costume idea and it came to me as I was putting the final edits on the fic I posted last night: I might very well costume as Tatsumi. I've got the right hair color and the fringe over my eyes is parted about the same way, plus it shouldn't be too hard to hunt up a brown suit from one of the local thrift shops. I've even located a place in Portland, Oregon which sells sleeve garters, and I've been meaning to buy a pair for work anyway. The most costly part of the costume might be getting half-rimmed eyeglasses, but I really need to buy new glasses anyway, since my current metal-rimmed pair are falling apart and the finish has come off them. I was hunting for rimless glasses, but I discovered to my annoyance that they're rather pricey even if they've only got half the amount of metal in them as my current pair. I remember joking, "You have to be as rich as a certain crooked energy vampire to afford these damn things." One thing I won't be doing is the sapphire-blue contact lenses, but that's because I have this bad problem with not being able to get my hand close enough to my eyes to put them in without my eyes all but sealing themselves shut. I think it's because I had sooo many eye doctor appointments and sooo many drops put in my eyes during the first twelve years of my life that my eyes have decided "Okay, enough of that, nothing is coming near us ever again!"