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-- Shuffle Challenge: Petshop of Horrors --

Rules:
1. Pick a character, fandom, pairing, friendship, whatever.
2. Put iTunes or your music program on shuffle and start playing songs.
3. For each song, write something inspired by the song related to the theme you chose earlier. You only have the song length. No pre-planning and no writing after the song is over. No skipping songs either.
4. Do this for ten songs

For the theme: First 5 songs = pet and owner scenes (buying scenes, death scenes, etc.). Last 5 songs = D and Leon (possibly romantic scenes, but not necessarily). All drabbles in this collection are unrelated to each other. Author's notes in [brackets]

- Chihro Yonekura, "Will" -

"I want a Drowzee!" the little girl stated adamantly.

Count D had no idea what she was talking about.

"It's a Pokemon..." the mother explained hesitantly, obviously embarassed. D still had no idea what that was, so the mother continued, "It's an animal from a video game, a kind of trainable pet or something... the one she likes is a yellow and brown anteater thing that eats dreams..."

Upon hearing this description, D immediately brightened.

"I have just the pet for your little girl!"

- Aiden, "The Last Sunrise (Dusk Mix)" -

At dawn, it came out of its cocoon

The man was dead by nightfall, slowly digested from the inside out by his pet's venom.

He should have paid more attention to the rules and not broken the contract.

They would have both been happier that way. Now his cute little pet was a monster.

- move, "Romancing Train" -

"... and you have the snake boy there in that jar?" Count D asked as the young woman finished her story.

"Yes."

"May I see him?"

She pulled the cover off the jar. There was nothing inside but liquid.

The girl gasped in horror. "He got away somehow?!"

[This doesn't really make sense if you don't know the Snake Boy story. It's a short (manga) story by Senno Knife. And the girl tells the story of the snake boy to a stranger on a train, which is why I thought of this for this song.]

- Metallica, "The Day That Never Comes" -

She swore she was going to change her life. But she just kept going on doing the same things day after day.

Until the day she went into the pet shop, and bought the pet that she thought would turn her life around.

Still her life remained the same, except for the fact that now she had a small animal depending on her in addition to everything else she had to deal with.

One day she forgot to feed him... and her life really changed after that.

Silly humans, always forgetting to be careful what they wish for.

- Toby Keith, "You Ain't Much Fun" -

[Oh, if this had only come one song later... Drunk Leon is fun, but this is the 5th song, so it's still "pets & owners" theme]

He was tired of his family. He'd stopped drinking, and finally remembered the reason he'd started in the first place.

He thought maybe a pet would make things better. Not fix things, but maybe make them a little more bearable.

But the "lizard" [song ended here o_O]

- Fear Factory, "W.O.E" -

"I hate bees!!" Leon complained loudly, ruining what would have otherwise been a quiet, peaceful picnic in the park.

"Don't aggravate them," D cautioned.

But it was too late. Leon had already been stung.

[metal song, lot of screaming, picnic/bee idea was random]

- Yoko Ishida, "For Real (ParaPara Max Dance Remix)" -

"Wow, last night must have been some weird acid trip... or maybe I breathed in too much of the count's 'special incense'..." Leon mumbled to himself as he woke up with a killer headache.

Then he discovered the Count laying next to him. Naked.

Oh, God, it was real...

[I had to cheat and write the second half while the next song was playing.]

- Miho Morikawa, "Blue Water" -

Shipwrecked. In the middle of the ocean. With the weird animal guy.

Anyone would panic and act like a little kid at a time like this, right?

"PLEASE DON'T LET ME GET EATEN BY SHARKS!!" Leon begged, all traces of dignity gone as he clung to the count.

[Finishing the last one cut into my time on this one, so I had to keep it short.]

- Bush, "Machinehead (live)" -

The count did not get along with machines.

Leon tried to help, but D was oddly resistant to having anything to do with mechanical devices...

[So, when this song came on I immediately got an image in my mind of D and Leon laying on the petshop floor getting stoned. So I had to block that image and try to write something else, and this is what I came up with. That first image is still lingering in my mind and it's just so sexy and wrong... lol.]

- The Trans-Siberian Orchestra, "The Snow Came Down" -

"Tell me again how you talked me into coming with you to find some rare snow-whatever?!" Leon snapped bad-temperedly, as he and the count cuddled for warmth at the back of a shallow mountain cave while a vicious snowstorm rage outside.

"I didn't," D replied, sounding irritated - but not nearly as much so as Leon was. "I told you where I was going and you insisted on coming along to make sure I wasn't trying to 'skip town'."

Leon sighed. Yelling at each other wasn't going to get them out of this mess.

"I'm freezing," he said in a defeated tone.

"And I, also," the count replied, snuggling closer to his dear detective.

-end-

A/N: for anyone who's wondering, the 5th one was supposed to say something along the lines of: "But the 'rare lizard' he bought from some random guy on the street (who the reader would assume was a customer of D's) was actually a baby alligator... and the probablem with baby alligators is that they grow up to be alligators... and eat your family."

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