This is just a random look at how things *could* have turned out, if various things happened differently... Currently, the main difference is that the Bet never happened. Hokuto is still dead, but it wasn't Sei-chan's fault, and Sei-chan isn't a psychotic bastard. Of course, his psychotic bastardness in canon is also a debatable point. The title was borrowed from an excellent AU FF7 fanfic, actually, I think it was almost the /first/ fanfic I ever read, and I've lost the URL. Drat.

        Apologies if the characters are OOC. I'm not a very good writer, and anyway, I don't really know /how/ Subaru would be like... I mean, his twin /is/ dead, even without the added emotional angst of his loved one having killed her. I'm making him act like how he seems in X, just, well, giving him a spine. WithASpine!Subaru appears to be a very popular recent innovation. Or something.

        This is about a year before X, and is going to hit the X storyline, with my own little changes, of course...

        The pairing of this 'fic is, for now, Seishirou/Subaru, and maybe more will be added once the X storyline is fit in. But no lemon. I can't write lemons for the life of me. Although, truth be told, I have a completed little lime scene on my HD, which is going into Twisted canon. A long, long way from now.

        This fanfic is basically a way for me to play with Subaru/Seishirou character interactions. But at least it's fun.

1/Twisted: Meetings

ALRIGHT! Like I seem to do for /any/ story which spans longer than one chapter, I'm beginning to rewrite Twisted. *sweatdrops and ducks* Chapter 4 will now be pre-empt 2/Twisted: Ice-cream, and 3/Twisted: Drive is going to be entirely left out, because it sucks and Seishirou's thoughts can always be put in some other chapter with a little more action than a CAR RIDE.

Nothing much has changed, except for the ending--I editted it quite a bit, and I haven't got a clue whether it's at all better than the first version, but it's all in the spirit of trying to make things go a little slower.

2/Twisted: Smoke

...*small voice* Ah... sorry? *sweatdrops* I wrote the first scene a long, long time ago. A very, very long time ago. Like, almost directly after finishing the first chapter rewrite. Yes, that long, which is why the style might seem odd, and I'm not too happy with it.

Anyway. I wrote the first scene, and then left it to rot on my hard drive for five months. And then sometime in the beginning of May, I started writing it again, and finished it over the course of a month or so. X.x And yes, only /now/ I'm putting it up, after a little minor revisions.

Thanks go to Flamebyrd, for literally being with this 'fic every step of the way, and to all the other people who read through this before I put it up. ^^;x The idea for Sei-chan to send his Shikigami came from Leareth, although the freaky psychedelic Subaru's-Shikigami thing was my tortured imagination.

I made the magic up. /All/ of it. The only part I /didn't/ make up was the chant, which was from the OAV. X.x The gaki came from a long list of spirit-things-that-Subaru-can-fight, which was written up by me and Aine... ah... last year. Ehe.

The /original/ ending of this chapter was /going/ to be Sei-chan cooking dinner for Subaru in Subaru's own apartment, because I had a wonderful mental image of Aproned!Sei-chan smiling up with that delightful innocent smirk as Subaru walks in through the door with both eyebrows raised.

"Seishirou-san... locks are there for a reason."

It was scrapped for being wierd, implausible, and since the point of the rewrite was to get things to go slower... yes. So instead, we get Sei-chan offering Subaru a cigarette, which is also a rather nice mental image, although I don't know whether or not it works. And remember, smoking is a bad habit.

The Shikigami fascinate me, and I wanted to give them a bigger role. And Aine-chan encouraged that. So go and blame /her/, not me. I'm /also/ making up everything that involve the Shikigami, because so little about it is said in the manga. X.x And just so you know, Shikigami = the three-headed crow of Subaru's, or Sei-chan's eagle. And shikigami without a capital letter = those little bird-things that Subaru and Sei-chan make out of ofuda.

This was a very long author's note. But anyway. This chapter took six months to do when I had a full idea of what was going to happen, I don't even know what will take place next chapter, so, uh... ^^;;;x

3/Twisted: Flight

It didn't take 6 months to do, after all. But close enough, I'm not happy with it, and with love to Liz for the subtitle suggestion. There is now a cat named Schroedinger living in my head. That will be all. So.

Back?

Subaru, Seishirou, X and whatever references I make to the Sakura tree and stuff all belong to the group of four very evil mangaka known as CLAMP.