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here's an old fanfic
ONCE UPON A TIME (late 2013) I came up with an idea for a wild idfic ZE AU where a bunch of the cast were child test subjects at an experimental FTS-run school. To keep everyone sibs Junpei and Phi were adopted sibs and that is legit one of my fave crazy-ass fanon things I've come up with since. I worked on it for like three years in multiple iterations. There was gonna be a lot more because the fic followed them as adults trying to solve mysteries related to their time there, but the idea died because of creative debt in 2016. RIP.
I did write one last experimental ficlet for it tho and posted it privately, unbeta'd first draft, on beattheblackdog. This was post-ZTD so I added Carlos and Diana for fun. Idk if I'd ever post this on AO3 but w/e here it is:
Title: ten blind mice
Fandom: Zero Escape
Characters: Diana, Clover Field, Akane Kurashiki, Aoi Kurashiki, Light Field, Junpei Tenmyouji, Phi, Sigma Klim, Carlos
Ships: Hints of The Usual Suspects with me (aka Carlosdi, Aoilight, and Phikane).
Rating: PG
Length: 1,855 words
Summary: This is how it is and this is how it always will be at school.
It is 5am, and time to wake up for school even though it's December-dark-and-cold outside.
Diana wakes and dresses first, because she's the grown-up in charge of a room of ten little girls who sleep in ten little beds in two rows along the walls. She claps her hands and turns on the lights and says "Gooood morning!" in a loud, cheery voice she doesn't believe in, before going around and shaking the girls who put their heads under the pillows or pull the blankets over their heads.
"Time to get up, sleepyhead," she teases Clover, hiding under her pllow, before tickling her under the chin, which never fails to make her shriek and sit up. Clover is 10 and not too old for that yet. Sometimes, Clover sings loud, off-key nonsensical lyrics to the tune that Diana's music box plays, and it always makes Diana laugh even when she wants to cry.
("I want them to have normal lives," she cried to her friend Carlos once. Carlos just held her hand. "It's not fair that they can't go home." She'd looked into his eyes and saw them crinkle with sadness, but he didn't put his arms around her like she dreamed about sometimes.)
Clover dreamt she was riding a dragon high, high over the desert. She watched the school shrink and become a dot on the horizon, and she laughed as it did. The sunset was purple and orange, and her brother Light, sitting behind her on the dragon, held her tightly.
Clover woke up here, in the school dorm, with Diana tickling her. Clover wants to go back to sleep.
See Akane, getting dressed in the gray sweater, gray skirt, white shirt, and red tie that is her school uniform. She wore a pink sweater and red tie when she came here, but they took away her clothes and gave her this uniform and she's worn it every day for a year now.
Akane's stomach hurts because it's empty, and because yesterday the doctor gave her thick, sour medicine to drink and all night she threw it up. Phi woke up with her and held her hair every time she threw up. Phi became her best friend when Akane hid Phi's brooch in her sock so the adults who brought them into the school wouldn't take it.
The adults took everything else: her clothes, her brother, her home, her language, even her name. She doesn't think anyone has called her Akane except the other kids, in secret. They're supposed to call the boys "Brother" and the girls "Sister" because individual names are worldly. Worldliness will poison them. The school, built on the words and ideals of Brother, is the only world they need now.
But as they get dressed Phi whispers "Good morning, Akane," and Akane whispers "Good morning, Phi," and they hold hands as Diana ushers them downstairs for breakfast.
Akane waves at her brother Aoi in the dining room, and he gives her a little smile and waggles his fingers just above the tabletop, so no adult sees. She wants to say "Good morning, Aoi," but she doesn't want them to get in trouble again.
This morning, Aoi's arm hurts. It's covered in bruises and needlemarks from yesterday's tests, when he was restrained in a chair and injected with something that made his head heavy and tingly. He watched a bunch of videos with puzzles and had to write the solutions on the screen with his finger. He solves puzzles faster and faster every test, which means he's getting good at finding the answers in the morphic fieldset and Akane is getting good at sending the answers through the fields.
Aoi thinks this place and these tests are bullshit, but he's happy whenever Akane is safe from the adults "negative reinforcement." Aoi never thought he'd say he missed real school. At least he gets to wave at Akane at breakfast before he goes back to stirring runny oatmeal and sipping a thick, bland nutrient shake.
He sees Clover bouncing on her feet in the breakfast line and doesn't know how she has so much energy in the morning. "Somebody tucked Clover's shirt in and straightened her tie this morning," he murmurs to Light, sitting beside him on the bench. Light nods and his shoulders relax now that Clover's safe from a scolding.
Light helped Aoi get dressed in a bathroom stall this morning because his arm hurt so much he couldn't move it. Light buttoned Aoi's shirt to his throat, smirked, and pecked him on the lips. Aoi'd reared his head back and smacked it on the stall wall, and Light'd chuckled smugly before helping him pull his vest over his head and knotting his tie. "Fuck you," Aoi'd said, before returning his kiss.
Aoi thinks he and Light wouldn't be friends if they met in the outside world, but being sixteen and older than most of the kids here is enough to bond them. He still rolls his eyes and groans to drown out Light rambling about physics and Light still pinches Aoi's inner elbow when he swears in front of the kids, but at least they can make each other laugh and steal kisses like they're normal kids in a normal school.
People think because Light can't see, Light is stupid. He's put up with it since the accident, and he doesn't let anyone get away with it. He raises his hand the most and answers the most questions in class, talking about theories of consciousness and thought experiments and philosophical meditations that they study. He talks about how these theories relate to the experiments with the morphic fieldset, and he thinks he can hear the teachers' eyes widening and mouths falling open when he does.
But today they're talking about quantum mental states again, and Light is bored and worried about Clover, so he traces his finger in circles on the tabletop.
Light thinks about how some nights he sneaks out of the boys' room and sits in a big picture window in the hall and presses his cheek to the cold glass. It clears his head and he thinks about how someday he'll be back home in his real bed, playing his harp, reading interesting books, and going clover-hunting with his sister. He doesn't have to fight for respect in class, he doesn't have to take tests, he doesn't have to pretend he's brave and calm. He can just be.
When Clover sneaks out to find him, he pulls her into his lap and tells her about all the things they'll do when they go home. He never lets on that he's not sure if they'll go home.
Light's distracted when something hits the back of his head, and he fishes the offending object out of his collar. A triangular, light paper football. Without turning his head, he throws it over his shoulder the way it came, and hears Junpei's grunt of surprise as it bounces off his face.
Junpei hides the paper football under his book and shakes his head at Sigma when the other boy gestures to flick it his way. Later. Junpei doodles in his notebook until it's time to go outside. They go outside for just a half-hour before and after lunch, and even though it's just a sandy, rocky fenced-off square, Junpei loves it. Diana and Carlos watch them and they don't care if they roughhouse and sometimes lead them in dodgeball.
Today they're left to their own devices, shivering in black coats and gloves, and standing close together. When he spots his sister Phi, talking to Akane by the fence, he sneaks up behind her and picks her up, spinning her around until they almost fall. She yells and hits him but it's worth it.
He laughs at her scowl, and they tussle again until Carlos pulls them apart and makes them apologize to each other. "We weren't really fighting," Junpei grumbles, but Carlos is unconvinced.
Junpei can't have any fun here.
Phi steals Sigma's pudding cup as she walks by the boys' table at lunch. When she sits at the girls' table, she sees him glaring at her, and she peels the top off the cup and licks the pudding off it in front of him.
Beside her, Akane giggles and Phi smiles because she made her laugh.
Sigma would like many things back -- his bed, his Dad, his cat, his old life -- but right now his pudding cup is at the top of the list. It was his thirteenth birthday last week, and nobody acknowledged it because "nobody is an individual here." He can't even have some pudding?
"Your sister sucks," he tells Junpei, and Junpei shrugs.
"You should've been watching your food around her. One time she stuffed a whole eel fillet in her mouth before our mom noticed."
Why is getting kids to bathe such a chore? Carlos is about to hose them all down if they don't stop dragging their feet and arguing with him. "Come on, you stink." He nudges a sullen-looking Junpei toward the shower. "And if I find out you just wet your hair instead of washing it, you're doing it again."
It's the close of another very long day. Diana had to tell him it was a Tuesday in December. Just like he always does, he stands by the door and watches them emerge from the stalls in their pajamas, fight over sink space to brush their teeth, fight over who is in whose way in the mirror, fight over who's using whose comb instead of their own. Were girls easier than this? Maria was.
Then it's another fight to get them all to lie down and be quiet long enough to sleep.
"Why do we have to go to bed with the little kids?" Aoi says, and before Carlos can answer Sigma retorts that he's not little and Aoi shoots back that if he's angry he must need a nap and then Junpei just has to join in and -- Carlos really needs a drink.
He wishes he were saying goodnight to Maria instead of a bunch of teenage boys who try his patience every second of the day. He knows their names, their birthdays, who likes who, and that most of them are easily impressed by his tales from his brief career as a firefighter. He wishes he was still a firefighter instead of a prisoner here, working a morally dubious job, even if it is to pay for Maria's treatment.
He wishes he could promise the boys -- all of the kids -- that this is not the way it's always going to be. That the world is so much bigger than this school and the tall fence and desert surrounding it. But for now this is his universe, and theirs, and he can make no promises.
It is 9pm, time for bed, and tonight Carlos dreams that he's walking on a beach with Maria, and Diana and all the kids are standing in the distance, wearing bright clothes and talking and smiling. They are waving to him. They are calling.
I did write one last experimental ficlet for it tho and posted it privately, unbeta'd first draft, on beattheblackdog. This was post-ZTD so I added Carlos and Diana for fun. Idk if I'd ever post this on AO3 but w/e here it is:
Title: ten blind mice
Fandom: Zero Escape
Characters: Diana, Clover Field, Akane Kurashiki, Aoi Kurashiki, Light Field, Junpei Tenmyouji, Phi, Sigma Klim, Carlos
Ships: Hints of The Usual Suspects with me (aka Carlosdi, Aoilight, and Phikane).
Rating: PG
Length: 1,855 words
Summary: This is how it is and this is how it always will be at school.
It is 5am, and time to wake up for school even though it's December-dark-and-cold outside.
Diana wakes and dresses first, because she's the grown-up in charge of a room of ten little girls who sleep in ten little beds in two rows along the walls. She claps her hands and turns on the lights and says "Gooood morning!" in a loud, cheery voice she doesn't believe in, before going around and shaking the girls who put their heads under the pillows or pull the blankets over their heads.
"Time to get up, sleepyhead," she teases Clover, hiding under her pllow, before tickling her under the chin, which never fails to make her shriek and sit up. Clover is 10 and not too old for that yet. Sometimes, Clover sings loud, off-key nonsensical lyrics to the tune that Diana's music box plays, and it always makes Diana laugh even when she wants to cry.
("I want them to have normal lives," she cried to her friend Carlos once. Carlos just held her hand. "It's not fair that they can't go home." She'd looked into his eyes and saw them crinkle with sadness, but he didn't put his arms around her like she dreamed about sometimes.)
Clover dreamt she was riding a dragon high, high over the desert. She watched the school shrink and become a dot on the horizon, and she laughed as it did. The sunset was purple and orange, and her brother Light, sitting behind her on the dragon, held her tightly.
Clover woke up here, in the school dorm, with Diana tickling her. Clover wants to go back to sleep.
See Akane, getting dressed in the gray sweater, gray skirt, white shirt, and red tie that is her school uniform. She wore a pink sweater and red tie when she came here, but they took away her clothes and gave her this uniform and she's worn it every day for a year now.
Akane's stomach hurts because it's empty, and because yesterday the doctor gave her thick, sour medicine to drink and all night she threw it up. Phi woke up with her and held her hair every time she threw up. Phi became her best friend when Akane hid Phi's brooch in her sock so the adults who brought them into the school wouldn't take it.
The adults took everything else: her clothes, her brother, her home, her language, even her name. She doesn't think anyone has called her Akane except the other kids, in secret. They're supposed to call the boys "Brother" and the girls "Sister" because individual names are worldly. Worldliness will poison them. The school, built on the words and ideals of Brother, is the only world they need now.
But as they get dressed Phi whispers "Good morning, Akane," and Akane whispers "Good morning, Phi," and they hold hands as Diana ushers them downstairs for breakfast.
Akane waves at her brother Aoi in the dining room, and he gives her a little smile and waggles his fingers just above the tabletop, so no adult sees. She wants to say "Good morning, Aoi," but she doesn't want them to get in trouble again.
This morning, Aoi's arm hurts. It's covered in bruises and needlemarks from yesterday's tests, when he was restrained in a chair and injected with something that made his head heavy and tingly. He watched a bunch of videos with puzzles and had to write the solutions on the screen with his finger. He solves puzzles faster and faster every test, which means he's getting good at finding the answers in the morphic fieldset and Akane is getting good at sending the answers through the fields.
Aoi thinks this place and these tests are bullshit, but he's happy whenever Akane is safe from the adults "negative reinforcement." Aoi never thought he'd say he missed real school. At least he gets to wave at Akane at breakfast before he goes back to stirring runny oatmeal and sipping a thick, bland nutrient shake.
He sees Clover bouncing on her feet in the breakfast line and doesn't know how she has so much energy in the morning. "Somebody tucked Clover's shirt in and straightened her tie this morning," he murmurs to Light, sitting beside him on the bench. Light nods and his shoulders relax now that Clover's safe from a scolding.
Light helped Aoi get dressed in a bathroom stall this morning because his arm hurt so much he couldn't move it. Light buttoned Aoi's shirt to his throat, smirked, and pecked him on the lips. Aoi'd reared his head back and smacked it on the stall wall, and Light'd chuckled smugly before helping him pull his vest over his head and knotting his tie. "Fuck you," Aoi'd said, before returning his kiss.
Aoi thinks he and Light wouldn't be friends if they met in the outside world, but being sixteen and older than most of the kids here is enough to bond them. He still rolls his eyes and groans to drown out Light rambling about physics and Light still pinches Aoi's inner elbow when he swears in front of the kids, but at least they can make each other laugh and steal kisses like they're normal kids in a normal school.
People think because Light can't see, Light is stupid. He's put up with it since the accident, and he doesn't let anyone get away with it. He raises his hand the most and answers the most questions in class, talking about theories of consciousness and thought experiments and philosophical meditations that they study. He talks about how these theories relate to the experiments with the morphic fieldset, and he thinks he can hear the teachers' eyes widening and mouths falling open when he does.
But today they're talking about quantum mental states again, and Light is bored and worried about Clover, so he traces his finger in circles on the tabletop.
Light thinks about how some nights he sneaks out of the boys' room and sits in a big picture window in the hall and presses his cheek to the cold glass. It clears his head and he thinks about how someday he'll be back home in his real bed, playing his harp, reading interesting books, and going clover-hunting with his sister. He doesn't have to fight for respect in class, he doesn't have to take tests, he doesn't have to pretend he's brave and calm. He can just be.
When Clover sneaks out to find him, he pulls her into his lap and tells her about all the things they'll do when they go home. He never lets on that he's not sure if they'll go home.
Light's distracted when something hits the back of his head, and he fishes the offending object out of his collar. A triangular, light paper football. Without turning his head, he throws it over his shoulder the way it came, and hears Junpei's grunt of surprise as it bounces off his face.
Junpei hides the paper football under his book and shakes his head at Sigma when the other boy gestures to flick it his way. Later. Junpei doodles in his notebook until it's time to go outside. They go outside for just a half-hour before and after lunch, and even though it's just a sandy, rocky fenced-off square, Junpei loves it. Diana and Carlos watch them and they don't care if they roughhouse and sometimes lead them in dodgeball.
Today they're left to their own devices, shivering in black coats and gloves, and standing close together. When he spots his sister Phi, talking to Akane by the fence, he sneaks up behind her and picks her up, spinning her around until they almost fall. She yells and hits him but it's worth it.
He laughs at her scowl, and they tussle again until Carlos pulls them apart and makes them apologize to each other. "We weren't really fighting," Junpei grumbles, but Carlos is unconvinced.
Junpei can't have any fun here.
Phi steals Sigma's pudding cup as she walks by the boys' table at lunch. When she sits at the girls' table, she sees him glaring at her, and she peels the top off the cup and licks the pudding off it in front of him.
Beside her, Akane giggles and Phi smiles because she made her laugh.
Sigma would like many things back -- his bed, his Dad, his cat, his old life -- but right now his pudding cup is at the top of the list. It was his thirteenth birthday last week, and nobody acknowledged it because "nobody is an individual here." He can't even have some pudding?
"Your sister sucks," he tells Junpei, and Junpei shrugs.
"You should've been watching your food around her. One time she stuffed a whole eel fillet in her mouth before our mom noticed."
Why is getting kids to bathe such a chore? Carlos is about to hose them all down if they don't stop dragging their feet and arguing with him. "Come on, you stink." He nudges a sullen-looking Junpei toward the shower. "And if I find out you just wet your hair instead of washing it, you're doing it again."
It's the close of another very long day. Diana had to tell him it was a Tuesday in December. Just like he always does, he stands by the door and watches them emerge from the stalls in their pajamas, fight over sink space to brush their teeth, fight over who is in whose way in the mirror, fight over who's using whose comb instead of their own. Were girls easier than this? Maria was.
Then it's another fight to get them all to lie down and be quiet long enough to sleep.
"Why do we have to go to bed with the little kids?" Aoi says, and before Carlos can answer Sigma retorts that he's not little and Aoi shoots back that if he's angry he must need a nap and then Junpei just has to join in and -- Carlos really needs a drink.
He wishes he were saying goodnight to Maria instead of a bunch of teenage boys who try his patience every second of the day. He knows their names, their birthdays, who likes who, and that most of them are easily impressed by his tales from his brief career as a firefighter. He wishes he was still a firefighter instead of a prisoner here, working a morally dubious job, even if it is to pay for Maria's treatment.
He wishes he could promise the boys -- all of the kids -- that this is not the way it's always going to be. That the world is so much bigger than this school and the tall fence and desert surrounding it. But for now this is his universe, and theirs, and he can make no promises.
It is 9pm, time for bed, and tonight Carlos dreams that he's walking on a beach with Maria, and Diana and all the kids are standing in the distance, wearing bright clothes and talking and smiling. They are waving to him. They are calling.