Once upon a time the Discord chat convinced me that doing an Ocean’s Eleven/Fast and Furious homage/crossover AU would be a good idea. I threw in a generous dash of Magic Mike for fun.
[Ocean’s Eleven/Fast & Furious AU for Resbang 2015] Marie Mjolnir
left prison with a plan. Medusa had burned down her strip club, framed
her, seduced her husband, and taken her foster children. Luckily the
kids are all grown up and are more than willing to help her achieve
revenge via the kind of casino heist you only hear about in movies.
Unfortunately, Medusa’s into a lot more than gambling, and the price of
failure might be very high indeed (though not, Soul thinks, as
unbearably torturous as Black Star’s kazoo playing or Maka’s backseat
driving).
After several years of working at a failing branch of a multinational fast food franchise, Black☆Star still doesn’t know where he’s going with his life, or if he’s going anywhere at all. The job sucks, his boss is eerie but affable, and his best friends are mostly in one place. So it’s tolerable, at least. But when a courtesy call from a government employee informs him that his estranged father has been sentenced to death, Black☆Star is forced to come to terms with the family he has, and to make the best of being directionless at twenty-four. Avoiding fights is recommended, but not entirely feasible, and there are some things that you’ve just got to tackle yourself.
Warnings:
alcohol use, passing mentions of murder, character death, references to the death penalty, mild gore thanks to Stein’s ‘totally legal’ hobbies, past child abandonment, slight violence, general bad parenting.
One final thanks to @enchillama for giving me the idea for this ridiculous au in the first place and talking about it with me enough that I could have the passion for it to write all this nonsense about it. This is your doing, Grace. Enjoy the consequences of your actions.
It’s finally here! I’ve been waiting to post this for weeks and I’m so excited to finally share it with everyone. Thanks to the Mods for all their help and encouragement throughout this process
and Richa for the amazing art she’s done and all the kind things she has had to say.
Summary:
Maka Albarn, vampire, can’t remember when she was a human, or the first hundred years of her vampire life. It isn’t until she meets Soul Evans, a human with an odd sense of familiarity and knowledge about Maka’s life that she realizes she might have known him once upon a time. As they grow closer, the mysteries behind Soul’s own life unravel, creating a rift between the two. When Maka’s memories return and she realizes her mistakes, she races to find Soul. But can they reconcile both past and present issues, and work toward a new life together?
tries an old writing style and maybe fails a little
this is AU, in a way
–
She has her hair down for the first time in months. It is curled at the ends, like loosened ribbons of sanded-blonde. Her eyes are stuck to the road before them (as if entranced by the double yellow lines) the emerald hue in their corners emphasized by the rampant moonlight. The jacket he draped over her small shoulders swallows her up in the passenger seat of his sedan. He wants to crawl in it with her and forget the night.
Classical music she doesn’t recognize flows from the radio, soft but dark. Sounds to her like something he would play, especially in his youth.
She feels his eyes on her every so often but continues to look forward, unsettled and stomach burning. The taste of his lips lingers like the last notes of the song, stained to her mouth like wine (the color of his eyes). She refuses to speak first, as if the silence in the car is glass and could be shattered with just one word; fragments falling on them, cutting their exposed skin down to the aching bone. The world they’ve formed is the most fragile she has ever existed in.
He turns the knob and changes the station a few more times. Unsatisfied with the funk of Saturday night radio, he chooses silence.
She curls further into his jacket. His scent is in every thread of it: something like November chill and cinnamon.
“Are you cold?” he asks, his hand hovering over the heat dial.
“Sort of,” she responds, her voice tired (sizzling with the aftertaste of champagne and sharp teeth).
“I’m happy for Black Star and Tsubaki,” he continues. “They actually managed to have a wedding without him hanging from the chandelier by the end of it.”
Her smile is faint. “Our childish behavior is far behind us, Soul.”
He wants to say he sometimes still sees it in her: when she throws him her genuine smile, in her bouncing laughter, in her tiny hand in his in the moments she gets anxious and forgets (forgets, especially, the effect it has on him). He chooses silence once again.
She opens the window a crack. The air is like ice.
He can see their home in the distance. He slows down. “Maka,” he says.
She turns to him. Their eyes meet for one quick moment then disconnect (a firefly’s flicker of light, a chord in a song). “Yeah?”
He grips the steering wheel tighter. “What…are we?”
Gray, she thinks. They are gray. They are somewhere between all other colors. They do not fit into any particular category. The happy couple in old photos all torn to bits, maybe burned in places. The pictures are no longer clear. They cannot be taped together because they are so tattered, so indistinct to the human eye. Blurry. Raindrops on a windshield. Something like storm clouds. Something like sunlight through a butterfly’s wing. There, but not. An illusion. A lot of jumbled feelings; moments of misplaced intentions. They are two people in love who are always being thrown in opposite directions. Something like star-cross’d lovers. Something like not-meant-to-be but wants-to-be.
Their childish behavior, she realizes, is not so far behind them: her dreaded fear of commitment instilled in her from the angry voices of her parents; his inability to tear down his walls for fear of being hurt put on him from a high pressure to succeed, to honor his prestigious family.
“We are what we’ve always been,” she murmurs. She tastes his lips again on her own in memory. She remembers their sudden disappearance at the reception. Their sudden appearance in a broom closet somewhere away from the din of a drunken crowd, riled up and celebrating a meant-to-be and can-be sort of love. The sort of love that can exist outside of dark corners, outside of hidden touches (never mentioned again, only remembered in burning skin and skipped heartbeats) and quiet drives on empty roads.
“Somewhere in-between,” he says, as if stating a well-known fact instead of a sad reality.
Their hands intertwine. Always unspoken movements with them, always natural but with hidden complications.
She follows him to his room. They choose something like silence (and their hands do not unwind).
this is a commission for the totally awesome @floraibun and it’s like a week late because i’m trash, SORRY SORRY omg life got crazy eugh i feel pretty bad about that oh boy 😦 but whew i hope you like this still odat!! she wanted a continuation to THIS soulxmaka mermaid and wizard drabble I did a while ago, with some smut, so NSFW AHEAD guys. it probs won’t make much sense if you don’t read that drabble, too.
i really appreciate you commissioning me odat, honestly, thank you so much!! and i tried to think about stuff i know you like in fic as i wrote this, so fingers crossed haha ❤
Wizards
were odd creatures, Maka decided yet again. She blew a derisive
bubble at Soul, who threw up his hands.
“It’s
not my fault
there’s no meat today, okay, go take it out on the cook, not me!”
he shouted, oversize sleeves flapping all about. “I’m the world’s
first involuntary
vegetarian,
thanks to you, you beggar!” What a whiny baby. She hadn’t even
splashed him.
She
scowled up through the water at the rippling, stained-glass blur of
him. As always, she wished she could get him out into deeper water;
like this, half-crippled in the rocky shallows, she felt like a pet
goldfish at his mercy.
He
pulled off his floppy, pointed wizard’s hat, bent down, and plunged
his face into the water when she crooked a finger. She smiled a
little (he couldn’t help but stare at her double-row of sharp
teeth, so nearly like his own and yet so different) and said sweetly,
“Are you going to throw up again if I go catch myself something
fresh?”
Soul
went vaguely green, but gargled bravely, “No! Shut up!”
Crystalline bubbles like polished opals flooded from his mouth, a
jewel for each word. It was appropriately fairy tale-like, she
thought, considering how ethereal he looked right now,
half-submerged, his handsome, frowning face haloed in dancing
sunlight.
Maka
laughed out loud, glad that for once he could hear it,
and released his ears when she noticed his eyes lingering on her
lips. She couldn’t stop the pleased way her tail flipped around,
though, which was embarrassing.
well so first of all others have done the mermaid au before and better than i ( awesomeasusual in particular has one going rn!!! and uhhh there’s a GREAT one called ‘the delta sun burns bright and violet’ it’s AMAZINGGGG), but i’m humbly throwing my hat in the, er, au ring. but yes there is LOTS MORE MERMAID out there if ye be interested
edit: holy shit looking back at this it fits your prompt only in the absolute most abstract sense sorry idfk what happened man
A flash of iridescent gold, like sunset on the deep water, and two big, emerald eyes surfaced to peer at him, framed like the most beautiful of spellbook illustrations among all the lush forest greenery.
He put on his very best scowl and aimed a finger at her. “You are laaaaate.”
She hissed toothily and spat water at him. He tried and failed to dodge, as usual, and then sat down resignedly on the stony edge of the river, mopping his face with his sleeve. Maka only snickered soundlessly and raised up higher, folding her arms on a stone, the better to prop her face up so she could stare at him.
“I hate that,” he said futilely, deciding it was probably a better choice not to compare her to his master’s hungry hounds, begging for a scrap. “Stop looking at me. Weirdo.”
She flipped the end of her shimmery tail up out of the water for a moment, looking haughty; somehow, he got the feeling she’d just flipped him off in mermaid. He handed her half his ham sandwich anyway, sighing as she tossed the bread out to the fish and began devouring the meat.
Impatient, raspy squeaking sounds punctuated his own leisurely meal. He took his time, enjoying her irritation, then kicked off his shoes and stuck his feet in the water before saying, very quietly, “My first magician’s test is in two days and I’m really freaking out. Wes told me I might have to fight a dragon. A fucking dragon!”
i was reading some good old golden-age science fiction from the 50s and 60s and i got inspired here have a superweird Soma thing (this is heavily influenced by Tor Åge Bringsværd’s wonderful short story Codemus, just fyi to give credit where credit is due haha)
The sidewalk was polka-dotted with what looked like rain, and the electric clouds overhead boiled and groaned convincingly, but nothing cooling fell, and if Soul squinted, he could see the dark, blurry corners where the weather display of this sector was failing. He wished the fake rain was louder; the tramp-tramp of the commuters swimming all around was hypnotizing in the worst way. He hunched his shoulders uncomfortably when someone going the opposite direction bumped him, and then his pocket buzzed importantly.
“You’re running late,” trilled his little black box, or BB, as he not-so-fondly called it inside his head. The official government term was ‘Life Guide’, but most people had nicknames for their boxes. It was hard not to anthromorphize something that woke you up, sang to you in the shower, walked you to work, and sliced all the eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds in your day into perfectly organized, perfectly productive beauty, after all. “Better hurry.”
“The train was running late,” Soul said irritably.
“Atomic trains are never late,” said BB slyly, buzzing again, just to annoy him. He peered down into his pocket, scowling; that strange red rust was back on BB’s left corner, marring the glossy black paint, even though he’d just scrubbed it off last night. “Hurry, hurry.”
“Okay,” said Soul, trying to move his feet faster. He stepped on the heel of the person in front of him, stumbled, and had to apologize over the annoyed beeps of the guy’s Guide.
“Hurry, hurry,” said BB, sounding delighted. Soul peered into his pocket again, frowning. When had BB’s little light turned from blue to red?
“Are you all right?” he asked cautiously.
“Never better,” BB chirped. The red light blinked merrily. “Never, never, never better. Go on, move along, you’re late. Turn left here.”
Soul turned.
“Go right.”
Soul went right. “Can you play me some songs?” he tried. Usually BB gave him the perfect soundtrack during the walk to work, but today he had been stubbornly tuneless.
“No,” said BB. “Go straight.”
This was not the way to work, and Soul paused uneasily. Someone immediately bumped into his back, and someone else ricocheted off his side, briefcase swinging. “Where are we going?” he asked. His palms were sweating, and standing like this, alone and still like a stone in the midst of the rushing human river coursing down the sidewalks like meaty clockwork, he suddenly felt nauseated.
For awesomeasusual‘s birthday (so sorry I am late!!) – The prompt was “reunion”, so please have some fluffy very-slightly-but-not-really-there nsfw ridiculousness c:
—
The hostile takeover of Soul’s bed, clothes, and iPod was
certainly not because Maka missed
him.
She looked down at herself swathed in Soul’s favorite worn New
York Yankees hooded sweatshirt, eating cereal in his bed while lounging against
pillows that still vaguely smelled of familiar cologne, all while listening to
some indie cover of Eric Clapton’s Layla
with expensive headphones. Makawas suddenly extremely glad that her
roommate was halfway across the world on a mission in Spain and not privy to
any of the embarrassing things she did in his absence.
Fine, she thought as she buried herself under Soul’s flannel
blankets and opened up one of his confusing sports ball magazines, maybe she
missed him.
Eventually the novelty of trying to figure out the rules of
baseball wore off and Maka’s Lucky Charms went soggy, so she gave in and turned
off Soul’s lamp. Only two more days to wallow in her loneliness, Maka told
herself, and then Soul would be home and the silence wouldn’t be so deafening.
She would stop going to bed at 9:30 pm because there was no one to talk with or
watch bad TV with or argue with. She would definitely stop infiltrating his
room and wearing his stupid sweatshirts because they were warm and smelled like
him.
Even if the root of her prejudice is a gigantic government conspiracy, Maka Elicia Albarn can’t help but be a little nervous around her Ishvalan dorm mate and his red eyes and white hair and dark skin.
“Let Papa know if the Ishvalan gives you any trouble!” her father chirps from over the phone line. “Nasty little upstarts,” he adds under his breath.
“Papa,” Maka hisses. “Don’t be rude!” She knows her history more than well enough to be up to date on this particular issue, and she knows in her head if not her heart that they are (mostly) a kind, gracious, and devout people.
part-time recluse 