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edenfallingHere is chapter 14 of "Lemonade." I think it stinks like a stinking thing, but unfortunately the sensible story flow transition -- having the storm arrive at the start of Sasuke's POV section -- would put the chapter break in a weird place, so I'm left with a sense of filler. *sigh*
And I'm totally fudging stuff about Cleveland, but I will say again for the record: if anyone knows the city and is willing to help me with local details, I will worship at your feet!
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Lemonade
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Part XIV: in which a storm approaches
A few minutes' struggle with the sawtooth grass convinced Faith it wouldn't make much of a mattress -- the edges were too sharp for comfort. Well, they'd slept on bare ground last night, and at least now they had a blanket and a roof, and dirt instead of rocky sand. "Always try to look on the bright side," she told herself. "If nothing else, you can laugh yourself sick over the lack of realism."
Beds were a no-go, Sasuke had taken care of firewood and dinner, and she wanted a while to sort out her head. Therefore, it was laundry time.
As she scrubbed her clothes with sand, Faith ran the last couple days through her head. She'd been eating dinner at Moonshadow -- a local demon bar, which also happened to serve great curly fries and let her get some damn privacy -- when a furtive Grwathsunde demon had dropped some hints about someone messing with portals down in the Flats. She'd called in the location and headed over to check it out, all SOP. Except her cell phone was dead -- the piece of shit battery had crapped out again -- so she'd lifted a phone from a vampire in order to make the call. It would take a while for Robin's geek team to verify her ID and intel, especially since Robin was mad touchy about her these days.
She'd crashed the Sarguls' party at eight, fallen through the portal when it snapped open in front of her, and wound up in the desert at what looked like local noon. Enter Duo and Sasuke, exit Sarguls. Then they'd fought the centipede thing and swapped the broad versions of their life stories. Today they'd fought more Sarguls, found the lake and cabin, and done the personal drama thing -- which was probably a way of letting off steam now that they had a source of water and a more defensible position.
Still. That was a lot of crazy to cram into maybe forty-eight hours.
And she'd slept with Duo without knowing more than the bare sketch outline of his past. Faith wrung out her shirt and grinned, a little rueful. So much for being a good girl. Then again, she might not know the specifics of Duo's war, but her gut said he was on the side of light. She tried to go with her gut these days -- her worst screw-ups had happened when she ignored that split-second judgment and went with what she wanted to be true instead of what she knew was right.
She'd really, really wanted Dick to be a good guy.
She'd really, really wanted to blame anybody other than herself for her fuck-ups.
But anyway, Duo: very dangerous, a little crazy, very sexy. And then there was Sasuke, who was equally dangerous and crazy (if not more so), and also damn attractive, though in more of a 'broken, please fix' way.
Faith smiled. "If God wanted me to keep my hands to myself, he'd do a better job of keeping me away from hot guys, yeah?" Or maybe not -- in her opinion, the Bible made God out to be something of a narcissistic bastard -- but in that case God could go fuck himself. She liked sex, and there was nothing wrong with using the body God gave her.
Love would be better, probably, but the older she got, the more it looked like love wasn't in the cards for her. She'd tried with Robin, tried her hardest, but whatever he was looking for just wasn't her -- and fuck if she was going to sit around and listen to him criticize her day in and day out. He'd been right that she wasn't giving him a chance, but a chance didn't last forever, and when he didn't hold up his end of the bargain and take her like she was instead of trying to cut-and-paste her into somebody else's shape...
"Screw him anyway," Faith muttered, and pulled her damp shirt back over her head. She did her job, he did his, and the sooner one of them got reassigned out of Cleveland the better. Maybe without Robin always hovering behind her shoulder she'd have a chance at finding a man willing to work with her at figuring out this love thing.
And if not, well, there were worse things. Look what love had done to B and the Scoobies -- Faith had slammed up against enough pain in her life, and there was no sense adding more mess to her load.
She glanced up at the purple sky, trying to gauge how long they had until sunset, and frowned. The tiny, arc-light sun was maybe halfway down the western half of the sky, which meant the stars should be nice and clear over toward the eastern horizon. But they weren't. Instead, that patch of sky looked brownish-gray with hints of green and black, and when she squinted, she was pretty sure she saw a flash of lightning.
"Shit." Sandstorm, thunderstorm, wrath of God, whatever. It all came to the same thing in the end, and that was badness.
Faith strode back toward the cabin to warn Duo and Sasuke.
---------------------------------------------
"Faith! Long time no see, chica!" Duo called as he heard her boots crunching the grass and gravel. "It's no-go on the portal stones, unless things go totally FUBAR, in which case any chance is better than no chance. So what's up with you?"
"I'm fine, but we're in trouble," Faith said, leaning against a not-willow and looking grim and businesslike despite the way her damp, burgundy shirt clung to her body. "There's a nasty storm coming in from the southeast -- I saw lightning, and ten gets you one we get hail or something worse. Deserts are supposed to have really fucked up weather, right?"
"Damn straight. I could tell you stories..." Duo muttered, but he didn't bother going into details. That could wait until they got some water, plastered the cracks in the cabin walls, and shut themselves inside, away from the wind and whatever it was carrying.
"Storm's coming," he told Sasuke when the ninja gave him a questioning look. "We need water and some kind of plaster for the cabin. And since I'd like more clean water than your canteen can hold -- not that I'm not grateful for that canteen! -- I hope you have some magical ninja trick for making a watertight hole in the ground. Otherwise we're stuck with my old 'line it with stones' method, and that tends to let mud seep in."
"I know a water purification jutsu," Sasuke said.
"Good enough. So you'll dig a hole and fill it up while Faith and I work on the walls." As soon as the words left his mouth, Duo wished he'd put that differently. They weren't in an army and this wasn't a battle, so he had no real right to give Sasuke orders -- and Sasuke knew it -- but amazingly enough, Sasuke didn't argue. He just shrugged, collected his knives, and headed toward the cabin.
"You should use your jacket to carry the mud," he said, pulling Duo's much-abused jacket down from the tree branch where he'd been drying it. Sasuke tossed the jacket over his shoulder without bothering to aim; the fabric landed neatly in Duo's hands anyway.
Duo sighed. "And I just got this thing clean, too." At Faith's raised eyebrow, he shrugged. "Sasuke's going to dig a mini cistern, in case the storm lasts more than a few hours. Meanwhile, you and I get to mix up some homemade adobe to make sure no sand gets in through the cabin walls, and Sasuke just volunteered my poor jacket for carrying the mud."
Faith frowned. "There's no chimney. If we plug up the walls, we can't have a fire -- I refuse to die from something as stupid as choking on carbon monoxide."
"A very good point," Duo acknowledged -- and he should've realized that himself -- "but it shouldn't be a problem. We have Sasuke around to flash-fry anything we need cooked, and body heat should keep us from freezing even if the storm drops the thermometer. We weren't exactly turning into icicles last night, after all."
"Okay, so Sasuke's our human Zippo and we get to play with mud. Feel my joy," Faith said, uncrossing her arms. "Seriously, don't take this the wrong way, but I am not looking forward to spending more than a couple hours shut up in a windowless room with you two, not when the two obvious distraction methods are off limits. What are we supposed to do -- tell fairy-tales?"
Duo pulled out his best manic grin. "Sure! Don't worry. I know lots of stories."
Faith looked like she'd just revised his insanity level up about a hundred notches, and Duo's grin widened until his cheeks hurt with the effort of restraining mad laughter. Oh yeah, he still had the touch.
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Digging, lining, and filling the water pit took Sasuke all of half an hour, after which he joined Duo and Faith in plastering the cabin walls with mud. The quality was poor compared to the adobe he remembered seeing in Sand Country -- there simply wasn't enough clay in this ground -- but cutting the mixture with water weeds and grass helped just enough to keep it from oozing out of the walls.
Each time he went back to the lake for more water and weeds, Sasuke checked the sky. The storm was approaching fast -- clouds loomed over nearly a quarter of the sky, boiling into thunderheads shot through with lightning. The distant boom and rumble of thunder carried clearly over the desert, and the air had grown tense and electric.
"With a bit of luck, it'll blow over fast," Duo said as they carried a jacketful of mud and grass to the cabin. "And with a bit more luck, I'll have time to wash my damn jacket -- again -- as well as the rest of me. I smell like seaweed and rot, and, no offense, there's no way I'm going to spend God knows how many hours stuck in a tiny cabin with two other stinky people. I did that once, and I have no desire to repeat the experience."
Sasuke eyed the cabin walls. "We're nearly done. Give me the jacket and take your bath." Duo shrugged, and headed down toward the lake while Sasuke daubed mud into the few remaining cracks around the door.
"All good?" Faith asked, as she appeared from around the eastern corner of the cabin, wiping her fingers on a handful of tiny leaves.
"Here is good," he told her, pointing at the southwestern wall of the building. "This... ah..." -- what was the English word for wall? He had no idea; it hadn't seemed relevant while they were in the open desert, and he had chosen to sharpen knives in silence rather than continue language lessons this afternoon. Stupid. But he could work around his ignorance. "This wood, no holes."
"This side?" Faith suggested. "This wall? This part?"
Without Duo, Sasuke had no way to tell which word was closest to his intended meaning. He waved his hand in a circle, to show that any word would probably work. "Here is good. There is good?" He pointed at the corner she'd just walked around.
"The other sides are good," Faith said, dropping the mud-streaked leaves to the ground. "But you can ---- if you want."
He should inspect the other walls -- Faith was not a professional, and her idea of a good job might not be thorough enough -- but... Sasuke hesitated. Even though she didn't have his training, Faith wasn't stupid, and, aside from her need for sex, she hadn't been careless. He'd trusted her with his life during three fights now, and that trust had, so far, been well-placed. To display suspicion now might damage that trust, which was bad strategy. And in the end, faulting caulking would do nothing worse than let a bit of sand into the cabin, whereas a display of trust would make Faith much more likely to offer him respect in turn.
Just because he hadn't worked in a team for nearly three years didn't mean he'd forgotten how it was done. And even in a worst-case scenario, it was best to establish trust. That way he might get a few seconds of lead time if he needed to work against the others.
"No. You say the side is good. Okay. The side is good. Now water. I want not dirty."
Faith smiled. "You want a bath. Good. You stink," she said, and snatched Duo's jacket from his hands. Then she winked at him and sauntered down toward the lake, her hair swaying with the movement of her hips.
Sasuke counted to ten, and hoped the storm passed quickly. If he had to spend more than an hour or two trapped in a small cabin with Faith and Duo, he wouldn't be held responsible for his actions.
"Are you coming?" Faith asked, looking back with a falsely mild expression.
"Yes," Sasuke said, and then spent the rest of the walk to the water trying to figure out why she laughed.
---------------------------------------------
End of Chapter XIV
Back to part XIII
Continue to part XV
See the original crack pairings meme and the scene that attacked me and became the first section of part I
Read the final version on ff.net
---------------------------------------------
On a completely different subject, Happy Birthday,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
warholzprodigy! *throws virtual confetti* I hope your midterm wasn't a killer, and that you got lots of compliments on your tiara. :-)
And I'm totally fudging stuff about Cleveland, but I will say again for the record: if anyone knows the city and is willing to help me with local details, I will worship at your feet!
---------------------------------------------
Lemonade
---------------------------------------------
Part XIV: in which a storm approaches
A few minutes' struggle with the sawtooth grass convinced Faith it wouldn't make much of a mattress -- the edges were too sharp for comfort. Well, they'd slept on bare ground last night, and at least now they had a blanket and a roof, and dirt instead of rocky sand. "Always try to look on the bright side," she told herself. "If nothing else, you can laugh yourself sick over the lack of realism."
Beds were a no-go, Sasuke had taken care of firewood and dinner, and she wanted a while to sort out her head. Therefore, it was laundry time.
As she scrubbed her clothes with sand, Faith ran the last couple days through her head. She'd been eating dinner at Moonshadow -- a local demon bar, which also happened to serve great curly fries and let her get some damn privacy -- when a furtive Grwathsunde demon had dropped some hints about someone messing with portals down in the Flats. She'd called in the location and headed over to check it out, all SOP. Except her cell phone was dead -- the piece of shit battery had crapped out again -- so she'd lifted a phone from a vampire in order to make the call. It would take a while for Robin's geek team to verify her ID and intel, especially since Robin was mad touchy about her these days.
She'd crashed the Sarguls' party at eight, fallen through the portal when it snapped open in front of her, and wound up in the desert at what looked like local noon. Enter Duo and Sasuke, exit Sarguls. Then they'd fought the centipede thing and swapped the broad versions of their life stories. Today they'd fought more Sarguls, found the lake and cabin, and done the personal drama thing -- which was probably a way of letting off steam now that they had a source of water and a more defensible position.
Still. That was a lot of crazy to cram into maybe forty-eight hours.
And she'd slept with Duo without knowing more than the bare sketch outline of his past. Faith wrung out her shirt and grinned, a little rueful. So much for being a good girl. Then again, she might not know the specifics of Duo's war, but her gut said he was on the side of light. She tried to go with her gut these days -- her worst screw-ups had happened when she ignored that split-second judgment and went with what she wanted to be true instead of what she knew was right.
She'd really, really wanted Dick to be a good guy.
She'd really, really wanted to blame anybody other than herself for her fuck-ups.
But anyway, Duo: very dangerous, a little crazy, very sexy. And then there was Sasuke, who was equally dangerous and crazy (if not more so), and also damn attractive, though in more of a 'broken, please fix' way.
Faith smiled. "If God wanted me to keep my hands to myself, he'd do a better job of keeping me away from hot guys, yeah?" Or maybe not -- in her opinion, the Bible made God out to be something of a narcissistic bastard -- but in that case God could go fuck himself. She liked sex, and there was nothing wrong with using the body God gave her.
Love would be better, probably, but the older she got, the more it looked like love wasn't in the cards for her. She'd tried with Robin, tried her hardest, but whatever he was looking for just wasn't her -- and fuck if she was going to sit around and listen to him criticize her day in and day out. He'd been right that she wasn't giving him a chance, but a chance didn't last forever, and when he didn't hold up his end of the bargain and take her like she was instead of trying to cut-and-paste her into somebody else's shape...
"Screw him anyway," Faith muttered, and pulled her damp shirt back over her head. She did her job, he did his, and the sooner one of them got reassigned out of Cleveland the better. Maybe without Robin always hovering behind her shoulder she'd have a chance at finding a man willing to work with her at figuring out this love thing.
And if not, well, there were worse things. Look what love had done to B and the Scoobies -- Faith had slammed up against enough pain in her life, and there was no sense adding more mess to her load.
She glanced up at the purple sky, trying to gauge how long they had until sunset, and frowned. The tiny, arc-light sun was maybe halfway down the western half of the sky, which meant the stars should be nice and clear over toward the eastern horizon. But they weren't. Instead, that patch of sky looked brownish-gray with hints of green and black, and when she squinted, she was pretty sure she saw a flash of lightning.
"Shit." Sandstorm, thunderstorm, wrath of God, whatever. It all came to the same thing in the end, and that was badness.
Faith strode back toward the cabin to warn Duo and Sasuke.
---------------------------------------------
"Faith! Long time no see, chica!" Duo called as he heard her boots crunching the grass and gravel. "It's no-go on the portal stones, unless things go totally FUBAR, in which case any chance is better than no chance. So what's up with you?"
"I'm fine, but we're in trouble," Faith said, leaning against a not-willow and looking grim and businesslike despite the way her damp, burgundy shirt clung to her body. "There's a nasty storm coming in from the southeast -- I saw lightning, and ten gets you one we get hail or something worse. Deserts are supposed to have really fucked up weather, right?"
"Damn straight. I could tell you stories..." Duo muttered, but he didn't bother going into details. That could wait until they got some water, plastered the cracks in the cabin walls, and shut themselves inside, away from the wind and whatever it was carrying.
"Storm's coming," he told Sasuke when the ninja gave him a questioning look. "We need water and some kind of plaster for the cabin. And since I'd like more clean water than your canteen can hold -- not that I'm not grateful for that canteen! -- I hope you have some magical ninja trick for making a watertight hole in the ground. Otherwise we're stuck with my old 'line it with stones' method, and that tends to let mud seep in."
"I know a water purification jutsu," Sasuke said.
"Good enough. So you'll dig a hole and fill it up while Faith and I work on the walls." As soon as the words left his mouth, Duo wished he'd put that differently. They weren't in an army and this wasn't a battle, so he had no real right to give Sasuke orders -- and Sasuke knew it -- but amazingly enough, Sasuke didn't argue. He just shrugged, collected his knives, and headed toward the cabin.
"You should use your jacket to carry the mud," he said, pulling Duo's much-abused jacket down from the tree branch where he'd been drying it. Sasuke tossed the jacket over his shoulder without bothering to aim; the fabric landed neatly in Duo's hands anyway.
Duo sighed. "And I just got this thing clean, too." At Faith's raised eyebrow, he shrugged. "Sasuke's going to dig a mini cistern, in case the storm lasts more than a few hours. Meanwhile, you and I get to mix up some homemade adobe to make sure no sand gets in through the cabin walls, and Sasuke just volunteered my poor jacket for carrying the mud."
Faith frowned. "There's no chimney. If we plug up the walls, we can't have a fire -- I refuse to die from something as stupid as choking on carbon monoxide."
"A very good point," Duo acknowledged -- and he should've realized that himself -- "but it shouldn't be a problem. We have Sasuke around to flash-fry anything we need cooked, and body heat should keep us from freezing even if the storm drops the thermometer. We weren't exactly turning into icicles last night, after all."
"Okay, so Sasuke's our human Zippo and we get to play with mud. Feel my joy," Faith said, uncrossing her arms. "Seriously, don't take this the wrong way, but I am not looking forward to spending more than a couple hours shut up in a windowless room with you two, not when the two obvious distraction methods are off limits. What are we supposed to do -- tell fairy-tales?"
Duo pulled out his best manic grin. "Sure! Don't worry. I know lots of stories."
Faith looked like she'd just revised his insanity level up about a hundred notches, and Duo's grin widened until his cheeks hurt with the effort of restraining mad laughter. Oh yeah, he still had the touch.
---------------------------------------------
Digging, lining, and filling the water pit took Sasuke all of half an hour, after which he joined Duo and Faith in plastering the cabin walls with mud. The quality was poor compared to the adobe he remembered seeing in Sand Country -- there simply wasn't enough clay in this ground -- but cutting the mixture with water weeds and grass helped just enough to keep it from oozing out of the walls.
Each time he went back to the lake for more water and weeds, Sasuke checked the sky. The storm was approaching fast -- clouds loomed over nearly a quarter of the sky, boiling into thunderheads shot through with lightning. The distant boom and rumble of thunder carried clearly over the desert, and the air had grown tense and electric.
"With a bit of luck, it'll blow over fast," Duo said as they carried a jacketful of mud and grass to the cabin. "And with a bit more luck, I'll have time to wash my damn jacket -- again -- as well as the rest of me. I smell like seaweed and rot, and, no offense, there's no way I'm going to spend God knows how many hours stuck in a tiny cabin with two other stinky people. I did that once, and I have no desire to repeat the experience."
Sasuke eyed the cabin walls. "We're nearly done. Give me the jacket and take your bath." Duo shrugged, and headed down toward the lake while Sasuke daubed mud into the few remaining cracks around the door.
"All good?" Faith asked, as she appeared from around the eastern corner of the cabin, wiping her fingers on a handful of tiny leaves.
"Here is good," he told her, pointing at the southwestern wall of the building. "This... ah..." -- what was the English word for wall? He had no idea; it hadn't seemed relevant while they were in the open desert, and he had chosen to sharpen knives in silence rather than continue language lessons this afternoon. Stupid. But he could work around his ignorance. "This wood, no holes."
"This side?" Faith suggested. "This wall? This part?"
Without Duo, Sasuke had no way to tell which word was closest to his intended meaning. He waved his hand in a circle, to show that any word would probably work. "Here is good. There is good?" He pointed at the corner she'd just walked around.
"The other sides are good," Faith said, dropping the mud-streaked leaves to the ground. "But you can ---- if you want."
He should inspect the other walls -- Faith was not a professional, and her idea of a good job might not be thorough enough -- but... Sasuke hesitated. Even though she didn't have his training, Faith wasn't stupid, and, aside from her need for sex, she hadn't been careless. He'd trusted her with his life during three fights now, and that trust had, so far, been well-placed. To display suspicion now might damage that trust, which was bad strategy. And in the end, faulting caulking would do nothing worse than let a bit of sand into the cabin, whereas a display of trust would make Faith much more likely to offer him respect in turn.
Just because he hadn't worked in a team for nearly three years didn't mean he'd forgotten how it was done. And even in a worst-case scenario, it was best to establish trust. That way he might get a few seconds of lead time if he needed to work against the others.
"No. You say the side is good. Okay. The side is good. Now water. I want not dirty."
Faith smiled. "You want a bath. Good. You stink," she said, and snatched Duo's jacket from his hands. Then she winked at him and sauntered down toward the lake, her hair swaying with the movement of her hips.
Sasuke counted to ten, and hoped the storm passed quickly. If he had to spend more than an hour or two trapped in a small cabin with Faith and Duo, he wouldn't be held responsible for his actions.
"Are you coming?" Faith asked, looking back with a falsely mild expression.
"Yes," Sasuke said, and then spent the rest of the walk to the water trying to figure out why she laughed.
---------------------------------------------
End of Chapter XIV
Back to part XIII
Continue to part XV
See the original crack pairings meme and the scene that attacked me and became the first section of part I
Read the final version on ff.net
---------------------------------------------
On a completely different subject, Happy Birthday,
warholzprodigy! *throws virtual confetti* I hope your midterm wasn't a killer, and that you got lots of compliments on your tiara. :-)