This is a challenge for a friend of mine. I apparently posted it in my LJ at just the right time, because she was having a very bad day and I successfully made her laugh, so my job is halfway done. The terms of the challenge? Um … speak for themselves.

Oh yeah. I lied about the whole self-insert thing. It wasn't intentional, I swear…

Disclaimer: I don't own Kenshin. Webfoot or the pink and purple dragon in question. I do own me, so … yeah.

---------

Mitsurugi Dragon

It was all Webfoot's fault. Well ... if she was minded to be fair, maybe it really was her fault for offering to write Webfoot something so stupid in the first place. She would say that she had spent a hundred sleepless nights on the problem, but that would be lying, because despite the niggling problem she was having it was certainly nothing to lose sleep over.

Probably it hadn't been a hundred nights, either. She was prone to be melodramatic. Not that she'd ever admit it.

"Webfoot," she muttered, "I hate you. Potato head Kenshin? No problem. Cliché fics of doom? Easy. What's the goddamn deal with the dragon?"

It wasn't that she couldn't think of circumstances in which Kenshin would turn into a small, pink and purple, fire breathing dragon with measles, provided she was willing to write something that could only be mistaken for the Ruroken canonverse if one drank twenty vodkas straight and then squinted at it sideways through a straw. (Possibly even then they'd spot the difference, but their attention would be too taken with the stomach pumping sure to follow.) But everything she thought of in the end just seemed too ... lame.

---------

MITSURUGI DRAGON (reviews)
He's called a dragon by many that know him, but what happens when an unexpected illness interferes with the rurouni's true heritage?

---------

Yeah. So much for that idea. But then, maybe she could get away with its universal lameness if she just added sex. Posting online had taught her earlier that drivel plus sex equals OMGHOTNEZZ, so she was sure people wouldn't notice the feeble quality of the story if she just layered on enough smut to turn the air blue, or something.

--------

MITSURUGI DRAGON (reviews)
He's called a dragon by many that know him, but what happens when an unexpected illness interferes with the rurouni's true heritage? Rowr! It's tanuki on dragon action like you've never seen before! Just what CAN he do with that forked tongue?

---------

God in heaven, no.

Thoughts of dragons kept her preoccupied at work the next day. Between phone calls from the cockroaches of the nation, she was thinking. Maybe it was a metaphor; that Kenshin was called a dragon was canon, and his gi did seem to change colour between pink and purple depending on the artist and the lighting ... God knew how she'd get the fire breathing part in. But really, wasn't the challenge dragon in question lifted from a Disney movie? The Sword in the Stone, wasn't it?

"Crossover," she muttered. This was bad, because it immediately cast Hiko as Merlin to Kenshin's Arthur, and the mere thought of Kenshin being the master of lethal wand drawing dredged up unpleasant comparisons to Harry Potter, and there were enough of those already. So, no.

Crud. She was running out of ideas. The problem was that she just couldn't take the subject seriously. Maybe she should try her hand at poetry. Hell, every other fan author and her dog were doing it these days...

---------

She knew that bliss would be amiss
When morning came to call
She found his old magenta gi
Just thrown against the wall
She gave a frown
And looked around
Then Kaoru screamed without a sound
And fled the room as fast she could, which wasn't slow at all.

Before the door, across the floor
A scaled head did rise
And Kenshin looked about the room
With baffled, dizzy eyes
His wife had fled
The marriage bed
Just why she had could not be said.
But something deep inside him warned of unpleasant surprise—

---------

And that just reminded her that there was a reason she was a writer and not a poet. The chances of her turning in three or four pages of that were about as great as her chances of getting a slow, painful death thrust upon her by the readers in outraged retaliation. She gave a sigh. Screw it. Maybe people would be just too blind to notice if she made one minor change to the canonverse...

---------

"You know, Kenshin?" Kaoru eyed him worriedly. "I can't help but think you're trying to hide something from me. You seem ... different somehow."

The small, multi-coloured dragon wisely kept his mouth shut. He loved Kaoru, really he did, but he was having hard enough trouble trying to hang out the laundry without accidentally puncturing the sheets with the razor sharp claws he was sporting these days. (He couldn't remember ever having trouble with them before, but he supposed that was just his fever talking.) The last thing he needed was the added distraction of Kaoru talking at him when he was already having such difficulty focusing on the laundry.

"I have it!" she finally cried, jumping up. "There's something definitely wrong with the way you look!"

"Oro?" Kenshin squeaked. "Kaoru-dono is mistaken. Maybe the weather is getting to you. You should take a bath. It should only take a few breaths to heat it up--"

"Don't try to change the subject, Himura Kenshin!" She swooped down on him with a glint in her eye that made him backpedal with another 'Oro!' and trip over his own tail. She pounced, scooping him up to hold him in the air, ignoring the flap of his wings as he desperately tried to escape.

"There!" she said. "That's what it is! You have a rash all over your stomach. Why didn't you tell me you were sick?"

---------

"No. No. HELL no!" she snarled, tossing her hairbrush at the computer. "Okay, fine! I give up! It's a HORRIBLE CHALLENGE, AND I AM UNDONE!"

Then she looked around furtively to see if anyone had witnessed her prissy tantrum, sat down and kept writing. Giving up was for losers, after all. Someone should have really explained that people who never quit and never win are idiots in their own right, but …

His mother sat him down on her knee and tried to explain. "See, Shinta, you're what's born from one of those inexplicable male pregnancies nobody bothers to explain…"

No.

"Well, when a mummy maiden and a daddy dragon love each other very much…"

No.

Himura Kenshin was just minding his own business when he was bitten by a radioactive tofu bucket…

Chuckle. Maybe…

---------

:runs really fast: