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Axel gives the impression that he does the most collateral damage of the Organization.  He gives this impression very carefully, and with admirable control.  He’s in fact very aware that his powers are very good for collateral damage, and if he leaves a bunch of half-burned out buildings behind him, those are deliberate. He fights people inside the Castle, after all. He knows how to control his fire when he has to.

 

 

During KH2 Axel, in the pursuit of trying to sound friendly enough to interact with Kairi, actually attempts to practice a friendly voice in front of a mirror.  

 

 

Related to the previous headcanon, part of the reason his friendly voice still sounds vaguely menacing is that he doesn’t have a lot of actual experience with friendly voices.  (Roxas sounded friendly sometimes, but it just sounds weird when Axel tries to impersonate him.  Who else is he going to impersonate? Larxene?)

 

 

All of my hopes edge too close to spoiler territory.  Maybe someday he learns how to be slightly less of a trash fave and a bit of a better person?  

Thank you, I love him too! Please note that this post is full of Riddle in Reverse and Steeplechase spoilers! (I will get back to work on those when my health gets back in gear)

 

 

Hakuba is basically the mom friend who doesn’t know how to take care of himself. He’ll tell you to remember to eat your vegetables and get a good night’s sleep, but then he’ll spend all night working on a case and do all sorts of other reckless things that he would yell at you for.

 

 

When he first starts working with the police department, he has a hard time remembering that he is supposed to be following the law. He’s so used to being able to do things with that are completely illegal that he just completely forgets that there are rules you have to follow when you’re part of the police department, especially when your adult colleagues are watching. He keeps thinking things like “ this would be so much simpler if we could just hack their computers,”  and then remembering that he can’t do that now.

 

 

He’s never going to make friends with Mouri. Mouri smokes too much,  and cigarette smoke, really any kind of smoke, will always be a trigger for his PTSD,  at least to some extent. To be honest, it will be easier for him to spend time around Shinichi once he is able to move out of the Mouris’ house. On bad days, he probably has to ask Conan to either avoid meeting with him physically, or take a shower at the professor’s and change into clothes from there before he does.

 

 

Realistically he’s a little bit too mature to actually get petty revenge on Kaito’s mom for the whole Black Crow incident. In my heart, though, he makes her life as difficult as he possibly can.  He also does this for certain other people he does not like, some of whom have not yet appeared in the fic.

 

(Guess who has to remind herself to do the canon version and not my ridiculous AU version, XD)

 

Hakuba specializes in theft and fraud; he never specifies what kind of cases he previously solved during the Detective’s Koshien and I firmly believe that a lot of what he did overseas involved remote detective work and recovery of stolen objects and money. He has solved murders before, but he isn’t a murder detective in the way that Kudou and Hattori are.  If he joins the police, he’ll actually be joining Nakamori’s division.

 

 

Hakuba is functionally bilingual in Japanese and English, but his Japanese slang has a fair amount of gaps when he first comes to the country, since he mostly practiced Japanese with adult relatives and through television.  What I’m saying is that there are certain unpleasant slang terms that he’s sure, based on tone of voice, must mean something terrible, but he’s never learned the meaning of from any source of tutoring he’s ever had.  Anyone who’s ever been to public high school will realize that this becomes a problem rather quickly. (Fortunately, the internet is useful in this regard) 

 

 

He’s never been precisely good with people, particularly those his own age, so Kaito and the group of classmates that gather around him are his first real experience with friendships not born of constantly attending the same high-society functions or being in the same study groups. He’s quite sure that Kaito’s just attempting to get inside his guard. The problem is that it’s working, and he genuinely likes the thief he came to Japan to arrest.

 

Hakuba is, at this point, not so much trying to arrest KID as he is to keep the heists from spiraling out of control.  He’s conflicted about arresting KID but he cares too much about everyone involved in heists to stop attending completely.  

Here’s both, though I lost the post halfway through so it took forever!

 

Soma Peries
 

 

During the four-year timeskip, Sergei made a mission of giving Soma as many normal experiences as he could jam into their daily lives.  They went to zoos and theme parks and every kind of restaurant in the HRL. 

 

 

Soma is considered a Strong Female Role Model in the HRL, which is actually fitting, except that some bright-spark PR person thought it would be cool to send her to some schools. After that, well…there were a few discussions about how much detail about battlefields was appropriate for children, and then Soma was quietly taken off of that particular rotation.

 

 

Soma actually quite looked forward to meeting the son that Sergei held in such high esteem. Anyone he loved that much had to be a great man. She was disappointed when he seemed to hate her on sight.  (Let’s not get into how she felt about later events)

 

 

Soma’s still inside Marie somewhere. (Part II of this is under Marie ^^)

 

 

Marie has some practical and muscle memory leftover from Soma, but it’s not hers, and if she thinks too hard about what she’s doing, she suddenly stumbles mid-action.  It’s disorienting, to say the least, and the adjustment period is a mess.

 

 

Marie has also not had food since a very young age.  Space food is delicious to her now.  Yes, even that one flavor of dehydrated soup that Setsuna F. “People are starving in refugee camps right as we speak eat the d*** rations” Seiei won’t touch.

 

 

Marie told Allelujah to go on that escape pod. She wanted him to be free, even if she couldn’t be.  When they’re both adults, and she finds out the whole story of what happens, she blames herself a bit.

 

 

Not so much unrealistic as noncanon: Soma and Marie work out a timeshare on the body.  It takes a few years and they need a set of rules for it to work, but it does eventually settle into a routine.

 

After the second or third time she had to actively use karate on a case, Ran started shifting her training focus to incorporate not only things that would be effective and legal in regulation matches but also things that would work on a real assailant.  

 

Especially if you take the movies as canon, Ran is probably an Internet Cryptid™ in the sense that there’s stories about a brown-haired teenage girl doing impossible things that show up on various message boards once in a while. Maybe someone even got a really blurry photo of her kicking out that car window.  Ran’s definitely the type who doesn’t spend a lot of time on the internet, so she has no idea.  Sonoko knows and thinks it’s the best thing ever.

 

Ran puts up with Shinichi’s increasingly unacceptable behavior as a romantic interest/boyfriend in part because of her own family situation. She knows she doesn’t want to end up like her own parents, who refuse to tolerate one another’s bad points whatsoever, so she’s swung too far the other direction and started putting up with things from Shinichi that she knows aren’t fair to her.

 

At this point, it’s not that Ran doesn’t suspect, or for that matter, that she isn’t pretty darn sure.  She’s just tired of Conan diverting her.

 

(She’s not an idiot)

 

The Meisters vary a lot.  Setsuna’s town probably had a few elders with old, near-broken instruments–and one or two nearly-broken radios that occasionally picked up a staticky music station or two.  Neil and Lyle lived in an Irish city–they probably have childhood memories of going to family pubs with live musicians.  Tieria’s first experience was probably another member of Celestial Being leaving their music playing in a common area.  The first experience Allelujah remembers is probably soft classical music being piped through the sleeping quarters in an attempt to stimulate the young Super-Soldiers’ brain function.  Saji’s first experience was probably children’s songs tapes.

 

The Trinities probably found a radio station entirely by accident while looking for information, and then liked it.  Marina’s mother sang to her–she was probably where Marina got her love of singing from.  I don’t want to go through the whole cast, but the idea intrigues me.

 

Sending an ask is fine!! I still have a lot of feelings about GSD, as it was my Very First Gundam, so even though I’m not actively in the fandom, nor was I ever really other than, like, two really subpar fanfics, I like the opportunity to talk about it.  My love for Gundam Seed Destiny is the love of nostalgia–it wasn’t actually that good, but it meant a heck of a lot to me at the time.  Besides getting me into Gundam, it presented a fundamentally different narrative about war than anything else I’d been exposed to up to that point, and it was in some ways formative for me in that sense.  Narratively and as a piece of writing, though…it was not great.  

 

Shinn’s arc was a trainwreck and it didn’t have to be.  He wasn’t some sort of irredeemable villain from the get-go, he was a hurting kid with PTSD and an impulsive streak.  Athrun was trying to get him to make better choices, but Athrun was affiliated with Orb, Shinn had trauma, and Durandal was playing everyone.  Shinn was manipulated by Durandal, but also took reprehensible actions on his own.  So it’s more complicated than him just being a victim of Durandal, but it’s also false to say he wasn’t one.  I know from an Anime Insider interview from when the show was released that someone on the production staff (head writer or director, I think?  It’s been years and my hard copy’s not here)  basically said that Shinn was a portrait of the problems with modern Japanese youth, that he was “entitled” and craved “acceptance” and “approval.” I remember being annoyed by that when I read it and it still annoys me.  If they were trying to portray Shinn as entitled, I’m not sure they did a good job.  Traumatized war orphans who live on their combat ship just don’t read as entitled to me.  His tendency to seek approval constantly and especially from the wrong people is among his tragic flaws, but it’s also among Athrun’s, and yet things turn out very differently for those two characters.

 

Personally, I find Shinn most interesting as a counterpoint to both Athrun and Kira, in the sense of this is how their arcs could have gone wrong.  I am not certain this is what the show was trying to convey, but I’m a former English major and texts are sometimes more fun when you read for what’s actually in them rather than authorial intent.  Kira’s arc in GS is plagued by the threat of the Earth Forces wanting to turn him into a glorified tool.  Shinn’s arc, in an indirect way, is that made real in the form of Durandal’s manipulations (and Rey’s, though Rey is also simultaneously complicit and a victim).  The difference between them is the allies Kira had with him (vs. Shinn’s allies, who aren’t all truly his allies, aren’t close to begin with and are picked off one by one through the show, until only Luna and Meyrin survive the series, and only Luna stays with Shinn).    Athrun, meanwhile, makes poor decisions about who to follow, but also is ultimately able to realize when his side has morally gone beyond the pale, and to use the connections he had from childhood (Kira and Lacus) with the other side to reorient himself to a side that matches his moral convictions (vs. Shinn, whose only remaining childhood connection, the cell phone recording of his younger sister, is a tool that Durandal uses to manipulate him toward further morally questionable decisions).  Shinn is a testament to the chaotic nature of war, a reminder that our faves, while good people, also got lucky.  If they’d ended up in the wrong places at the wrong times, they could have ended up like him, or at least in similar situations.

 

REEEEEEY.  My feelings about him are so complicated and at the same time boil down to screw Ulen Hibiki.  A lot of my GS and GSD feelings boil down to that honestly.  Rey deserved better.  Rey also did some very, very screwed-up things and the fact that he was actively aiding Durandal in turning Shinn into a human UXB shouldn’t be overlooked, but he was also one of the only people who was really kind to Shinn. The fact that he helped Shinn rescue Stellar makes me think that under all the manipulation and pain and screwed up things that never should have happened to either of them, Shinn and Rey’s friendship was real, to some extent.  In an environment with no Durandal, it could have been good for them both.

 

It’s been like 10 years since I watched this show why on earth do I still have this many emotions about it???

 

(Disclaimer to anyone who comes across this in the tag: I am not an active participant in the GS or GSD fandoms, and know nothing about the current discourse trends. I’m not really interested in fighting anyone on this, it is just my opinion.  Lemme be wrong on the internet in peace if that is what you feel I am.)

Steeplechase is in its final arc.  This story is about Kaito bringing Hakuba home.  Granted, it’s also about a lot of other things, and I do plan to resolve as many of the emotional arcs, side plots, etc. as I can, but that was always the main point of this story.  Granted, getting Hakuba home means more than getting him there physically; it involves convincing him that this is home.   The story has quite a few chapters left in it still–there’s a lot of conversations left to be had in the wake of Hakuba’s return, and I’m not planning to rush through them.  Also I made promises to miladyRanger about the epilogue, and those date back to 2014 or possibly early 2015.   So, given my current posting speed, making firm predictions on whether the story will end this year might be pushing it.  But it won’t still be going this time next year.

 

I’m not going to write another chaptered fic for this verse, or at least, I don’t have plans to do so at the moment.  When I finish Steeplechase, I’d like to take a bit of a break and catch up on ficcing for some of the other fandoms I’ve been neglecting in favor of this fic, and possibly even poke at some original projects again.  But when I come back, I have pretty fleshed-out plans for oneshots set in this ‘verse, and I’d very much like to write them.  While putting together background for this fic, miladyRanger and I wrote some backstory that didn’t really have a place in the fic–adding it would’ve been intrusive and unnecessary, so I left it out.  Also, it would just be fun to write some lower-pressure scenarios with these versions of the characters, as opposed to what I’ve been doing with Steeplechase.  There’s a lot I like about the character relationships I’ve set up in this verse and a lot I’d like to be able to explore with them.  So yeah, I’ll probably write in this verse after this, but it might not be on this scale.

 

…Frankly, if I write on this scale again, next time I might want it to be original fiction.  I really enjoyed this, and I’m so glad everyone else has too, but I can’t emphasize how much the length was not planned.

Ehhhhh.  Don’t really have crossover ships for this, either.

 

the characters who would be BFFs
 

Tsuyu is going to be Seto’s new favorite person.  Not only does she always say what she thinks (no confusing contrasting thoughts) but she’s a frog.  

 

Midoriya get along super-well with Ayano, since they’re both earnest, determined, self-sacrificing, hero-idolizing nerds.  Uraraka and Momo, the relentlessly cheerful girls who got into their current lines of work with their family’s finances in mind, would also bond.  Jirou and Kido would also get along really well, I think, although it’s Hagakure and Kido who end up bonding over powers.  Kaminari and Takane bond over both their similar powers and their awful grades.

 

Mary would glom onto Shinshou and attempt to pass on Seto’s “you’re not a monster” lesson; he’d probably be surprised enough that it would at least partly work.

 

All Might would teacher-adopt the whole Dan, honestly.

 

the characters who would be enemies
 

Honestly, both series end up along the same basic moral lines. The Dan would have the same basic objections to the Villain Alliance and Hero Killer Stain that the UA Kids do.  While the UA kids wouldn’t have a personal grudge against the Snake of Clearing Eyes, they generally object to murder, so they’d also be enemies with him.  Same for the adult heroes.

 

I’m pretty sure that, given a chance, the Dan would totally attend UA.  So the Dan would be up for allying with the BnHA cast.  As for the UA kids and teachers, they might think that the way the Dan sneaks around and does “missions” is too much like vigilantes at first, but I think once the Dan explains that there aren’t Pro Heroes or Hero Laws in their reality, they’d be pretty okay with allying with the Dan, too. 

 

The Villain Alliance and the Snake of Clearing Eyes would try to manipulate one another, and probably both would end up getting at least some of what they wanted out of the other.

 

Ayano Does Not Like Bakugou.  He makes Seto think of the kids who used to bully him and Seto won’t speak up for himself of course…so Ayano keeps him well away from Seto by force of personality and following him around when necessary.  Bakugou doesn’t like this.

 

Kano’s rulebreaking tendencies offend Iida’s sensibilities.

 

Actually, I think I’m gonna go with Momo and Uraraka.  Both of them go into really tough industries with the goal of supporting their families, both of them are super upbeat and cheerful, and both of them are actually really good at strategy.  In a meta-narrative sense, they both end up being the fanservice girls for their respective series.

 

Ayano and All-Might?  Ayano would love All-Might, because here’s one of her childhood heroes brought to life.  But if she met him as Toshinori she’d immediately go into mother-hen mode and start trying to take care of him before she even realized what she was doing.  As for All-Might, again, he’d adopt the whole Dan, and he’d find Ayano’s admiration flattering and a little overwhelming, because it becomes clear quickly that she’s as much a hero to the rest of her friends as he is to her, and it’s…a lot, to have the admiration of a person like that.

Nope!  Not published anyway.  I started a snipped of one, might still be on the computer…

 

Ah, it was a false start for Uploaded On…; I’ll put it here since I’m not sure if I’ll do anything else with it or not.

 

 

When it’s all said and done, they bring Haruka home from the hospital to the red brick house, now nicely modified by Seto to be as wheelchair-friendly as a two-story building with no elevator can be.  He still can’t go upstairs, but they’ve moved everything but the bedrooms and the second bathroom downstairs, and they don’t have the budget for an elevator yet.  They’re saving up for one, though, because while the doctors are more optimistic now about treatments for his heart condition, they’re also hesitant about putting his body through the stress of the rehab he’d need to get back muscle tone in his legs after his “coma.”  Haruka, himself, isn’t sure how to feel about the possibility of using a wheelchair long-term or even permanently, but he’s pretty okay with the idea of not dying during physical therapy, so he’s focusing on that for now.

 

He’s not entirely sure who the red brick house actually belongs to, now–possibly, it’s Ayano’s. Everyone lives there a little bit, though. Ayano and Takane are the only permanent residents.  Shintarou is doing his best to move, but Haruka can see how hard just being outside is for him sometimes.  And Ayano’s siblings seem to love and hate the house by turns; after a few months, they settle into a pattern of visiting rather than staying over.  Mary, most of all, acts like a guest–Haruka thinks that seeing the siblings fall into old patterns with Ayano makes her feel just a bit outside.  The red brick house is also where Hibiya and Hiyori stay, on the rare occasions they come up.  

 

It’s a good home, and Haruka loves it, but sometimes, in the middle of the day, when he’s got nothing to do, the others are all out, and he knows that scrolling the web isn’t going to satisfy him the way it does Shintarou–it feels lonely.

 

And then, for his first birthday after coming back, Momo and Seto pool their funds to buy him a Wacom tablet, and Shintarou absently reminds him that he used to have a pixiv account.

 

He doesn’t remember the pixiv account, but Takane kind of does, and Shintarou’s good at this sort of thing, so the three of them track it down and manage to get into it, and within a week Haruka’s account is as resurrected as he is.

 

(Kano’s sense of humor is rubbing off a little, maybe.)

 

He rereads some of the manga that he bookmarked fanart for, because his memories of most of them are blurry.  He approves of his younger self’s taste, mostly, though he’s a little embarrassed by some of it.

 

And then, while checking out some of the newer art, he finds a speedpaint, and thinks, I want to do that.  

 

In retrospect, that is exactly when it starts.