1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the timeframe of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts and stop when it's over. No lingering afterwards! [I confess: inveterate beta that I am, I did go back and edit a bit--but I did not write more! I swear! I only fixed typos and so on.]
4. Do 10 of these, then post them.
--
10. Vienna, by The Fray
Miroku watched Sango as she waited for Kirara to arrive. It was raining, fittingly enough.
"Sango…" he flubbed.
"Miroku?" she feigned ignorance of the situation with her calm tone.
Kirara appeared, closed in.
"I…" What could he say? What could they say? After all this, they'd failed. Was there anything either could ever say to change that or make either feel better? For all his skill with words, he was at a loss. Out of contact.
Maybe in a few years, this could be better. But now…it was too sore. It hurt, too much. The wounds…they were too fresh to re-open, even to clean out with honesty.
She mounted Kirara, still listening to him, but not looking at him.
He watched as she flew away.
This is the end, isn't it, he thought with futility.
--
A/N: I'm sorry...I've messed up the numbering somewhere along the line of posting these. The last drabble was not the 8th, but the 9th. As in, this is the last one of this series.
However, the game was too fun not to play again. So I have another series to post after this one, if people are interested...
As for this specific drabble, I did edit the last line to put Miroku's thoughts into present rather than past tense. I have a really bad habit of writing the thoughts of my characters in the third-person past tense that I use as a writer in general, and I didn't think it would be such an awful lapse of the game's rules to change this so readers understood what I meant...As for the song Vienna, I did my best to match its own sense of despair. It was hard to make myself to commit to it, as I'd hate for such a thing to happen, but I tried my best. There's this flash of hope when he thinks of the future, but it's supposed to be a delusion that tricks him into letting her go in the first place: it is a show of his weakness, that he listens to the weaker part of him that just can't take the sharper pain but condemns the rest of him to a dull, empty ache for the rest of his time without her...Not that I think this is all on Miroku. But in such situations, I think it's best for the author to pick one character for the reader to understand, and let the other character be like a normal person whose thoughts you do not know; it's much more real, to only know the thoughts of one person in any situation (yourself) and to be forced to wonder at those of others. And the more unknowns, the more fear and confusion and chance of mistakes...
I hope some of that made sense. I don't tend to when I lecture. I'll feel no hurt whatsoever if no one reads that thing. Anyway, I hope you liked this drabble, sad or not. Reviews are always appreciated.