Miscellaneous Anime/Manga One-Shots!

strangers (Mawaru Penguindrum)

Yuri Tokikago is ugly, and no one fails to impress this upon her more than her father. Blonde hair far too frizzy, beyond the help of any hairbrush or comb, fingers too stubby and clumsy, always trailing cookie crumbs across her plain dresses, cheekbones low and chin too pointy and nose squashed and-

Imperfections. All of it.

So he chisels.

"Come along, Yuri," her father coaxes, beckoning her over to the silver table, a belt of perfect instruments strapped to his waist. Tools were always immaculate, with their jagged edges that cut gently sloping contours of crimson before she could cry out in pain.

She obliges (she always does), and stares dreamily as the blurred ceiling as he, with his slender artist's fingers, hacks, carves, and trims, leaving her blotchy skin smeared with blood and tears. He eventually stops, disgruntled, and drapes a white shirt over her trembling body, crossing the studio to finger his sculptures; the lovingly carved faces of creamy marble staring blankly back at her.

Pert noses. High foreheads. Full lips.

The kind of beautiful she will never be.

Yuri is a sinner.

They taunt her for the bandages on her face and encircling her wrists, like harpies that gleefully pounce on her, tearing her carefully structured walls with their words. Words like chains and whips and scythes, words that hurt more than her father's knives and a desperate yearning for beauty ever could be.

She cradles the purpling bruise on her jaw, holds in her tears because she's even uglier when she cries.

Yuri is a traitor, to her feelings, to her father, to everything she has ever stood for.

Because there is a girl who threatens to tear it all apart. She's the beautiful one, with her magenta tresses and low-sweeping bangs, with those pursed lips and wide amber eyes and a smile that stretches across the expanse of her girlish face.

Momoka Oginome.

"Say, Yuri," the use of her first name prompts a cringe, "do you believe in fate?"

She's breathless, a little flustered, toying with the edge of her plaid jumper and knocking her heels against the legs of the park bench. Never still, always in fluttery motion- like a bird, ready to take flight at the slightest disturbance.

A stone dropped into a pond, sending gentle ripples to Yuri's tiny corner of the universe.

There's a boy, too- Keiju Tabuki. He's quiet, shy, and blushes when Momoka takes his hand. Yuri notices his bandaged hands, the way he curls them into his palm, winces when she squeezes them.

He's just as broken as she is.

Yuri is a ghost.

Tabuki looks stunned, and the Oginomes weep as they cradle their newborn baby, a tiny thing with a sweeping nose and mousy strands of chocolate-brown hair, diary clasped in her stubby fingers. She's a little pink-faced, a little more scrunched-up, but this is Momoka.

It's fate, she knows it. Momoka dead, a body encased in rubble and pale, misshapen fingers peeking underneath a toppled subway sign, and Ringo risen, a mere shadow of her former glory.

So Yuri vows.

Yuri is a star.

As it turns out, she's not as ugly as she's led to believe. She's a petite girl in a noisy city of soaring skyscrapers and cigarette-littered pavements without a single lick of makeup on her face when she discovers the advertisement in the corner of the Sunday newspaper. Gazing around at her decrepit rented apartment, she pores through the fine print; Actresses Wanted.