Um, yeah, I have lots and lots of really short stories that I've written and decided I couldn't finish/didn't like them. So I figure that instead of cluttering up the forum, I'd just post them in this thread. ^^

A Struggle in the Subconscious

Sorry about the language. xp I don't have the energy to look through it and censor. Let's just say that this is PG-13, yes? It probably is for the topic, anyways. I like this little story. I can't remember what prompted it anymore, though. Um, yeah. Enjoy?

And forgive the title. I'm bad at coming up with them.

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So there I was. Trapped in my own subconscious or some such shit with an insane devil attempting to possess me, and I wasn't entirely sure why. I first had some knowledge of it, say, a couple months ago, after a car accident that should have killed me but left me with a slight concussion and lots of bruises and scrapes. The last thing I remember from that night is a voice, telling me that it was fine that I go to sleep; I was tired anyways. I could drive home. Or maybe, I first realized it when I was much younger, early high school or middle school aged. Listening to the music coming from my CD player, I heard a strange, harsh, guttural voice, talking to me. Oh, I figured it out consciously when sometime later I heard a lawnmower going at the same time as my CD player, and when I stood in a certain position right next to my bed, I could hear something that sounded kind of like that voice. But it wasn't, and I knew it, even though I could never tell anyone. There were other signs, though, in the months after the wreck. I began to talk to myself even more, and I was pretty sure that I wasn't actually the person on the other end. That was kind of freaky, to say the least. It wasn't that the other voice, person, thing wasn't trying to persuade me to do something the way the Bible says that devils or demons do. It just wasn't me inside my head, answering my thoughts, instead of me. And the dreams. I walked down a long, dusty road, waiting for someone, and the further I walked, the more scared I became, until I was physically shaking from the fear while my feet dragged me forwards. Considering the fact that I've never had nightmares in my life, that's pretty significant. Then, I began to wonder exactly why I've never had nightmares. Could it be that this devil feeds upon them, the nightmares, the illnesses, the bad stuff, but also the good things, the grand passions and the loves, leaving me an empty shell? At least I still had my dreams. Interesting thoughts, but now is not the time for them.

The devil did not look like the Judeo-Christian imagery of a red-skinned, pitchfork-wielding, horned and tailed man. Instead he/she/it was normal. So normal that you could pass him/her/it by in any street and never take any notice of its presence. Was that its secret? That it could infiltrate your mind without your ever noticing? A scary idea indeed. We stood at an impasse, perhaps, like one of those old Western standoffs where you're just waiting for the hero to grab his gun and shoot the bad guy. But this time, things don't go quite right, and the hero falters and the bad guy shoots and kills him. That's what this was like. I couldn't consciously sense what was happening, but one minute I was my, in full possession of my mind and body, and the next I was nothing more than a trapped spirit in the forest of my subconscious, with the devil free to parade around in my body. My body. I had never, and I will never feel as dirty as I did when the devil was possessing me.

The devil had known what it was doing. There is no question about that. While the consciousness of a person can be likened to a vast, sunny meadow, the subconscious, while equally vast, is more like a dark forest filled with twisted trees and menacing shadows. The interior of a human mind is not a happy place. In there are stored all memories, good or bad, all the little habits, instincts, reflexes, whatever, that enable us to live our lives as human beings without going insane. My task was, in essence, to navigate my way through these forests without damaging anything that would keep me from living my life when or if I managed to wrest control from the devil. It would not be pleasant to forget how to walk or talk. It would be lethal if I could not work my heart or my stomach, or if I couldn't feel, taste, smell, see, or hear anything ever again. That was my struggle. Even then, in the first minutes of my possession, although time is all but meaningless in that realm, I could feel the magnitude of my task settling upon me. And then I began my journey, my journey through my mind.

Need I mention everything that I went through? The horrid little nightmares that swarmed me. The fogs of depression or anger scattered about. The horrid loneliness of a person trapped within her own mind. It's funny. How was I able to think during that time? Is there some further level of consciousness? Was I able to tap my own consciousness to keep myself aware and alert? I don't think I'll ever know. But that's meaningless. As I went I sabotaged, slightly, the devil lost the entire year's worth of my current math class. I didn't care about failing that. Occasionally, I came across iridescent bubbles of memories. I'd look at them, remembering the events that provoked them, but detached, they didn't relate to me at that stage. And sometimes, I'd pop one. And then, although I'd lose it myself, (the mind has gentler ways of retrieving its memories) the devil would suddenly be immersed in a full scene from my past, unable to concentrate on anything in the present.

Perhaps that it is odd that I should have been so callous towards my life. The devil actually wasn't doing anything bad. It attended school, the same as me; it had pretty much the same relationships with friends and family that I had had. It didn't do anything horrifying to my body. It didn't even smoke once my body was legally able to. It was much the same as it would have been had I been the sole occupant of it. But that wasn't the point, was it? The point was that it wasn't mine. I had had control for over seventeen years and I wasn't about to give up control to that kind of creature.

Like I said, time is meaningless in that realm. I would sometimes feel like I had been struggling for years when in the devil's life, it was merely the course of a day. Or I'd fall asleep and find that a week had passed. Time was severely screwed up. But it did pass, and I got harder. My self was some pseudo-corporal extension of my will, and that showed every scar that I got upon that journey, every line, all of that. I still look in the mirror sometimes and trace the scar where a strong nightmare nearly got my heart. And I made it, eventually. To the surface of my mind, which is where a person typically dwells. At the time, it was all happy butterflies, sunshine and flowers. It wasn't anything that I was used to at all. The devil was waiting for me. Again. Again it was the western draw. This time, the hero got the jump on the bad guy, and I was back, blinking, in my own body, in the middle of class. I ran a mental checklist against how I remembered things being. Eventually I decided that everything was in working order except what I deliberately sabotaged, and that I had decided at the time, I could do without. I had control again, but why wasn't I happy?

That was a difficult question with an extremely simple answer. The devil was still there, lurking within me. Waiting for a chance to strike. And I knew that it would, sooner or later. I'd have to prepare for it myself. It knew the pathways of my mind and could far easier extricate itself from its exile than I had been able to. Just so long as it was as undamaging as it had been before I had been aware of it, it would be fine, right.

My thoughts were seething in my mind, and I could picture the meadow of consciousness as dimming in anger when I heard a large explosion. There was fire all around me, not consuming my skin or my cloths, but a halo, with my peers staring at me in surprise; my teacher not the least startled among them. Slowly, I gathered my will together, and the flames sucked back into me. So. A visible manifestation of anger. This could be both good and bad. But in the classroom, people were beginning to talk to each other. That could be bad. Anything that cast suspicion on me was bad. Hesitantly, I reached out with that portion of my will that had remained whole and gathered up the little butterflies of short-term memory that I found fluttering around my classmate's minds and deposited them into my own, relying on the culling mechanism to rid them from me while I slept. But what to do to explain the sudden loss of that class? Make them all sleep. An extremely simple thing to do, because of the necessities of sleep. While they slept, I hastily manufactured some butterflies from my own memories of that class and passed them to my classmates; hoping that they would synthesize them into their own selves. At any rate, it wasn't a hard thing for them to lose. The bell rang, and they all woke, satisfied that nothing really odd had happened. I had no intentions of disabusing them of that notion.

That was when I really realized what I had been doing. Exerting that will that I had been honing for as long as half a year, I could do all sorts of things that I would never have dreamt possible before my exile. Something that anybody else would find to be equally impossible. Do I tell anybody? What do I tell them if I do?

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I kinda intended to write some more, but everything else was stupid, so I stopped after that one. I don't mind that so much, though. This is one of my favored pieces of writing.

A Marauder Story

This is based in the Harry Potter universe, but very AU if you can't tell. Just kind of a what if piece.

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I put my quill to parchment to record the events of the Marauders, leading up to the dissolution of the group.

It all started when we were in our sixth year, playing the final quidditch game against Slytherin. James Potter, seeker and captain of the team, soared upwards when he saw the snitch. He was around twenty, maybe thirty, feet away from the ground when his broom gave a sudden jerk. He fell off it and while he had managed to grab hold of his broom with one hand that was not enough to get him back up on top. Remus Lupin (chaser) and I (beater) were the only ones who noticed James' struggles; a goal was being made by Slytherin, which distracted everyone. Remus and I rushed to help, but it was too late. A bludger had perhaps been attracted to the helpless player, or perhaps it was charmed, we never learned. At any rate, it slammed into James' face, knocking him unconscious before anyone could do anything about him. The impact was finally noticed, but it was too late, James Potter was dead as soon as he hit the ground. Remus and I naturally rushed over to him first, the rest of the crowd, as they noticed, gradually stopped their raucous cries until the entire stadium was silent. Lily Evans, his girlfriend let out a piercing scream, I still sometimes hear it, even now after seven years. The nurse at the time tried to help him but there was nothing that she could do to help James. Professor Dumbledore was out on Ministry business at the time, which is unfortunate, for he is the only one who could have stopped this.

The funeral was held the next week. It was a terrible affair; James Potter was the first person to have died playing quidditch at Hogwarts. Dumbledore himself spoke the eulogy. When the end of term feast came Dumbledore had the Great Hall draped in black out of respect for James. That summer was quiet for me, Remus, Lily, and Peter Pettigrew, the fourth member of our former quartet. We were ready when the new term arrived, it was, perhaps, a time for a new start, or maybe just new grieves.

The first quarter passed without incident save for rumors that Lily had taken to Severus Snape and Lucius Malfoy, and became more involved with dark magic. After Hallowe'en was when tragedy struck again. Remus was a werewolf, and on full moons James, Peter and I became Animagi to control him. But one day the werewolf overcame it's grief for James and it proved too hard for a dog and a rat to handle alone. Moony escaped and he bit a first year girl who was out collecting herbs in the Forbidden Forest. The next day they were found together by the nurse and by noon his secret was out. Remus was expelled along with the girl. They left together as soon as the girl had recovered enough to travel. After that it was just Peter and I.

I had never gotten along with Peter particularly, it had been James who had held us all together, both before and after his death. I had been using much of my pocket money to hire a detective to find something, anything, on the matter of James' death. The detective at least found a clue, hidden among the students, and he followed it discreetly. While that was happening I had become more distant. My studies had fallen behind, I seemed a shadow of my former self. One night, when I couldn't sleep I went downstairs to the common room in the dead of night to find Peter, sitting next to the fireplace and talking to a head, a stranger to me. I stayed in the stairwell and listened to the conversation. Peter's whining voice, and the sibilant sound of the stranger's resounding in my head until through the midst of my stupor, I heard the stranger query, "Potter is dead, then?" Wormtail, I can no longer call him Peter, seemed to shake with excitement. "Yes, my lord, I hexed his broom and the bludger myself." I couldn't restrain myself then and I hurled myself at Wormtail. The head flickered out as soon as it saw me.

"You killed James, Wormtail." He neither affirmed nor denied the fact. "You traitor," I snarled, "you said so out of your own mouth."

"B-but, you have no idea how powerful He is." Wormtail stammered like the craven fool he is.

"Make no mistake, Wormtail. I will have my vengeance on you, and your master, no matter how powerful he may be," I said, with my wand pointed at his throat. Wormtail begged and pled for mercy, but I paid him no mind. Finally, I tired of his wailings. "Expelliarmus," I muttered. The flash of light that left my wand neatly decapitated Wormtail. Before that, we had been relatively quiet, and noise does not travel easily within Gryffindor tower. Peter's last scream, however, echoed from the ceiling and through the rooms, until his mouth was forcibly separated from his windpipe. And that was that, for me. Students came rushing down to the common room. The saw me, standing over the bloodied corpse of my friend, blood splashed across me and the entire wand, and my wand still drawn. They drew the obvious, and correct, conclusion. I was a murderer.

Then came the hearing that was not a hearing. They had no evidence for me, and I was sentenced to a medium security cell in Azkaban, for they had no reason to believe that I was too much of a danger.

It has been five years now since my incarceration. Slowly, I have lost what little sanity remains to me. Now my final act shall be to kill myself. James, I'm sorry I wasn't able to avenge myself on he who ordered your killing.
The Daily Prophet

Adolphus Langley

On this day, convicted murderer Sirius Black committed suicide. The Daily Prophet found his final letter, and dutifully reprinted it. Our enterprising reporters have discovered some information on persons mentioned therein. Remus Lupin has been sighted occasionally, most recently in the still forested areas of Scotland. Lily Evans is a prominent witch in the ministry. She is married to one Severus Snape, the Defense Against Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Peter Pettigrew was buried in his family burial plot after his brutal murder, and compensations were made to his family.

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Yays! Happy three in the morning piece. ^^ Is very cheerful, yes? Only piece of fanfiction I wrote that I ever liked. >.<

Just for fun. ^^

Joe lived in a small, backwater village in the middle of nowhere. He was an excellent mechanic and had no small talent with weapons and fighting, however he had one fault. He was as lazy as all get out. He would do nothing if an easier, more fun option presented itself.

One day, while he was out in the forest fishing, he heard odd noises and smelled acrid smoke coming from the direction of his village. Dropping his pole, he ran as quickly as he could towards his home. On the way, he was challenged multiple times by the invaders, seemingly human, yet in many ways grotesque. Easily he killed all those whom he met with only his bare hands.

Joe arrived in the village only to find the invaders beginning to retreat, the villagers in a panic. He ran some more to his house, at the same time, killing even more evil creatures. At his arrival, he found the situation in as much disarray as it was outside. There… he found his mother and father. Dead on the ground, nary a breath of life stirring their lifeless corpses. Joe howled vengeance at the sky, vowing to track down and kill those who had murdered his parents. Then, he took his sword and left the village, swearing that he would not return until he had avenged the deaths of everybody.

Joe traveled through the world, meeting many strange, diverse creatures. Admittedly, the relationship was always a short one on the part of the creatures.

Through a variety of quests he assembled quite a posse, including a bubbly, air-headed white mage, a stern, morose gunman, an outgoing and friendly mercenary, and a cold, silent black mage. Together they cut a swathe through the nearby forests during their travels, and pieced together the ancient puzzle as to why the enemy gave tuppence for Joe.

Eventually, the group reached the capital city of the nearest large empire. Of course, that happened to be while it was in the midst of a vast siege by its rival, the neighboring empire. Staring at the opposing forces, Joe suddenly realized, these were the ones who had destroyed his village, upon whom he had sworn eternal enmity. He and his group went on a destructive rampage throughout their camps, allowing the siege to be broken, and the city to mount forces against the bad guys.

After their victory, they were paraded as heroes in the city. And there was much imbibing of spirits. Drunk as a skunk, Joe professed his love to the white mage, who eagerly agreed.

The following day, Joe and his party, as well as a large force from the city set out against the evil ones. During the long days that followed there were many fatalities, until, when they finally reached the capital of the evil empire, only the core party remained.

They walked up the steps, unmindful of those who were set against them, for those were as leaves before a leaf blower. Almost unchallenged, they had made it through the palace and into the throne room of the evil emperor! It was decorated in typical supervillain: black, black, and more black, maybe a little blood red to liven things up, too. The four ministers of the emperor were set against Joe’s group in single combat, but his friends had not the might of Joe and were summarily executed. Last to fall was the white mage. Again, Joe let out a howl that shook the very heavens. The four ministers then set themselves against Joe, but he in his fury summarily executed them. At the end, it was to be a showdown. Joe versus the evil emperor of all things bad.

Triumphant trumpets sounded, and the emperor walked stately in. Paying Joe no heed, he seated himself on the throne, then finally deigned to look at Joe; who stared, it was his very image, as though looking in a mirror, save for differences in clothing, and slight differences in hair styling.

The emperor spoke first, uncaring, “Yes, I look like you, as unfortunate as that may be. For me, that is. You stupid fool, thinking that you’re some grand hero come again. What gives you the right to think that? You and your ilk sicken me with all your supposed morality, and…” He continued to rant on and on about how the heroes were nothing more than bloody idiots who should be put down to save the world some trouble, and about how annoyed he was with all of them, who kept on putting him in the role of evil guy. And on and on and on he went. Joe could not stand up to the verbal assault and began to visibly wilt. Finally, he was nothing more than a thin, gawky man wearing clothes five sizes too large, holding his very large sword with a bemused expression on his face. Joe reached into a hitherto unknown pocket and pulled out a pair of large, black-framed glasses and a black device.

“Okay. ‘Sall good. Bring me back,” he said into the device, and abruptly vanished without a trace.