[Fic] "Hold These Truths" -- Naruto

I'm still not entirely sure this hangs together -- seriously, if you have suggestions or concrit, please tell me -- but I finally managed some sort of ending and I'm tired of staring at the screen until the words blur into meaningless syllables, so. Have a fic!

Summary: Sakura and Sasuke thwart an assassination attempt on Naruto during a political rally. SasuSaku, implied NaruSasuSaku. (2,800 words)

Note: This story is a response to the Cotton Candy Bingo prompt believe, and to a suggestion from askerian that I write a Summer Camp & Politics story in which Sakura and Sasuke thwart an assassination attempt on Naruto. In retrospect, there is a slight conceptual mismatch between assassination and fluff, and also between discussion of political corruption and fluff, but what the heck, there's flirting and love and trust and a mostly happy ending, so I will call it fluffy if I want to. *resolve face*

[ETA: the slightly revised final version is now up on AO3!]

( Hold These Truths )

In terms of series continuity, this happens after Zero-Sum Fallacy, in which the trio are about twenty-eight and before After Frost in which they're about thirty-four. This time I actually sat down and did a little structural thinking about the political setup in this weird AU version of Fire Country, and my conclusions are as follows:

( cut for lengthy world-building babble )

And I think that's everything I dealt with in this fic. If you want to know anything else, please feel free to ask!

[Fic] "Visiting Narnia" -- Chronicles of Narnia, fragment

I mentioned last summer that the story I ended up writing for FiKate in the 2014 Narnia Fic Exchange was not the story I first tried to write. I'd forgotten how close that failed attempt came to reaching the minimum word count, though, and I think it's fairly cute in its own right, so I'm posting it for the sake of completism.

Summary: Aravis, Cor, and Corin visit Narnia for the Summer Festival. Fragment. (900 words)

( Visiting Narnia )

And that is where I stalled out and could not manage another hundred words for love nor money. I think the main problem is that I had no plot. I mean, the general thrust was Aravis and Cor having polite culture shock about various things in Narnia, but there wasn't a strong narrative arc, and a more general "hey, let's explore Narnia for a while" milieu story would have required at least another two thousand words to feel properly weighted and balanced, and if I couldn't manage another hundred, twenty times that was clearly out of the question.

The other takeaway lesson, of course, is that the narrative voice Lewis uses for the Chronicles does NOT come naturally to me, and I should probably not try to force it unless I have a very good reason. *wry*

(I am not entirely sure that this fragment meshes with These bringing with them unknown gods and rites. It fits all right with Any Sentry from His Post, which is set one week after the Battle of Anvard, but I'd expect Aravis to at least make passing mention of a trip to Narnia when thinking about the trouble of settling in to a new country and culture. Still, if the first full moon fell, let's say, the night before this fragment opens, and the trip to Narnia only lasts two or three weeks, she could perfectly well be back in Anvard for the next full moon.)