InsaneJournal

Current mood:	relaxed
Current music:	The Decemberists - From My Own True Love (Lost At Sea)

Chat!ficlet
The past couple of nights, I've had the chance to chat with joannindiw and/or mendax,neither of whom I've had the opportunity to chat with in far too long. Yay, chat! for chat leads to chat!fic, and chat!fic is a wonderful thing.

Last night, mendax told me she had come up with a prompt for me to write some Gatch for her... but, woe! she had forgotten the prompt in the course of her busy day. :-( Her replacement prompt was not something I had expected. She said, I’m in the mood to read something soothing. One of those happy slice-of-life things, or moments of discovery, or connection, but I don’t know how to phrase it.

Something soothing. With Gatch. My jaw dropped - what did she think I was, a miracle worker? Then my lazy muse got intrigued - was it even possible? So I tried. This is the result, which mendax said I had to post. ^^ Beware o' slash.



It didn’t happen very often, but sometimes, they were all together and the world wasn’t about to be destroyed.

Jun really liked those times.  She liked not having the fate of the planet hanging over her head.  She loved hearing Jinpei laugh at some stupid joke and watch Ryu come out of his shell, to see Ken and Joe relax out of being the Eagle and the Condor and just… be.

It didn’t make her miss her own family any less – no one would ever really be able to take the place of her parents,  no matter how dimly she remembered them – but she still felt… warm inside when they were all like this.  They were still a family, no matter how strange.

The five of them were all settled in the living area above the Snack J, watching old movies on the vid.  The only light was that thrown from the console, flickering over them as the scenes changed and the actors moved.  Joe and Jinpei were, thankfully, silent, having taken her final warning as the final warning before bloodshed.

What it was that drew her attention to the other couch, where Ken sat and Joe sprawled, Jun wasn’t sure.  Joe was playing with his empty beer bottle propped on his knee, wobbling back and forth in the circle of his fingers, and Ken was looking at him.

No, Jun slowly realized, Ken wasn’t looking at him.  Ken was looking at him.  Even in the half-light casting his face into pale shadows, she could see that there was more than just simple affection in his gaze.  It was... want.  It was desire and exasperation and fondness and there wasn’t any part of it that was ashamed.

And she was okay with that.  That was the part that made her turn her attention back to the movie, the realization that the crush on Ken (or Joe) that she’d been talking herself into (or out of) wasn’t anything more than that, and there was no way it was ever going to work out between her and him (whichever him).  She’d much rather have this, this family-feeling, than try to break it up into something that would make everybody unhappy.

She stole another glance at them, and saw that Joe was smirking at Ken. No, he was smiling, that easy grin that she never saw often enough, and the serious lines of Ken’s face just disappeared.

They weren’t family, she thought, settling back more comfortably against the cushions.  They were closer than family.



C&C always gratefully accepted.