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edenfallingI'm not thrilled about this chapter, but I think it does what it needs to do in terms of plot and character development, and I can't figure out how to cover the same ground better, so here it stands. If you can think of useful changes, I'm all ears!
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Lemonade
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Part XIII: in which we consider the art of the non-apology apology
Sasuke was weird.
There was really no other word that covered it, Faith concluded, unless she went with 'so fucked-up he's almost well-adjusted, if you check your common sense at the door and grab a double helping of paranoia and mood-swings instead,' but that was way more than one word so she was stuck with 'weird.'
It wasn't like she had any kind of claim to being normal or sane -- and Duo sure as hell didn't either -- but Sasuke was still fucking weird.
She wondered if he'd make any more sense if he spoke better English or she spoke Japanese. Probably not. Life was never helpful like that, not unless it was setting you up for a sucker-punch in an unexpected direction.
Her boots crunched on the black sand and gravel; to her left, Sasuke's steps were nearly silent. That had to be a ninja thing, since there was no real difference in the thickness of their soles. Faith could be quiet when she needed to -- she hadn't always been strong enough to fight monsters head on -- but there was a difference between walking on pavement or grass and walking on little stones that kept shifting under her feet.
"Hey, Sasuke."
He didn't answer, so she poked his shoulder. His hand twitched down toward his knives and he glared at her. "What?"
"How do you walk so quietly?" Faith asked, and then remembered he still didn't know that much English, no matter how crazy fast he'd been learning. "Fuck. Um. Your feet, no sound. My feet, big sound. How do you stop the sound?"
Sasuke snorted. "Practice." His tone implied that she was an idiot for needing to ask.
Sasuke was arrogant, too. Also pig-headed and melodramatic.
They crested the ridge around the lake valley, notable only for its slightly higher density of scrub grass, and headed down toward the scattered groves of trees. Unless she'd lost all her sense of direction -- which, given the utterly cloudless sky, was kind of hard to do, even with her pathetic orienteering skills -- the cabin should be slightly to their left.
Sasuke veered left. Faith raised a mental fist in victory. City girl one, trackless wilderness zero.
Okay, so technically it was city girl one, trackless wilderness one, since she'd had no idea which way to go from the original portal and would probably have died of thirst if Sasuke hadn't picked this direction -- 'competent' was another word for him, annoying as it was to admit that -- but she'd take her wins where she could get them.
She followed Sasuke's path through the trees, in case he or Duo had taken the time to set traps or shit like that. It was nice to be in the shade; she could rest her eyes after squinting against the white-hot sunlight, and even though the air over the sand wasn't like an oven, the trees and the grass were still more inviting.
Duo was sprawled out, chest down, on the grass in front of the cabin. He raised one hand in a lazy greeting. "The prodigal son returns! Quick, find me a fatted calf."
"We're all out of veal, but you can have some demonic lobster-crab hybrid instead," Faith said, sitting down beside him.
"Who killed it?" Duo asked as he sat up.
"Sasuke."
"That's no good; the whole point of the story is that the father throws a party for his son even though the son fucked up and has nothing. It doesn't work if the son brings dinner with him as a result of his fuck-up." Duo laughed at Sasuke's confused look, and then bowed from the waist, folding his torso down over his crossed legs. "Sumimasen, Uchiha-san."
---------------------------------------------
He started with an apology, even though he wasn't sorry for what he'd done. He was sorry for the effects, though, and misleading sincerity was still sincerity.
"Look, I didn't mean to push you that hard," he told Sasuke. "I don't tease people as a put-down, but I suck at judging when I'm going too far and it stops being funny. I can't promise to lay off you completely -- sometimes I honestly can't control my mouth -- but next time I get close to the line, tell me. I promise to back off, even if I have to bite my tongue in half to stay quiet."
Sasuke snorted, and Duo shrugged. "Yeah, so suicide's a bit drastic. Anyway, I didn't mean to pressure you. I think you're damn sexy and it's a shame you won't relax, but if you don't want to join in, that's your prerogative. End of story.
"Are we okay?"
Sasuke dragged out the silence for a long beat before giving Duo a faint bow in return. "I accept your truce. Faith said you wanted to talk to me; was that all you had to say?"
"When she left, yeah, that was pretty much it. But I had an idea since then -- hang on a sec while I catch Faith up and then I'll toss it in the air for you to poke holes through."
Duo turned to Faith, who was drumming her fingers on the ground. "I apologized, he accepted, and now I'm gonna run an idea past him. You remember the Sarguls said that one or two portal stones will only home in on other portal stones? They still have one, and it's probably still in your world, so if Sasuke can tune his magic to the stones' frequency, maybe we can get out of this dump without waiting for your pet witch to save us."
Faith looked skeptical. "What I hear, dimensional portals are damn glitchy. Even if Sasuke can open one, I wouldn't trust it to work right. We could come out the other side turned inside out or joined like Siamese twins, if we come out alive at all. And there are more than four of the stones out there, right? The first assassin they summoned stole one, and there's no telling what world she's in by now -- we could end up even more fucked than we are now."
"Valid points," Duo conceded. "But we should at least try. I'm not morally opposed to getting rescued instead of doing the rescuing, but I'd feel really stupid if your witch showed up, took one look at the stones, and asked us why we didn't get out days ago."
"Yeah, I get it." Faith sighed and pushed herself to her feet. "Go on, talk mojo. I'm going to pull some grass and see if it'll work for mattresses, and then maybe build a campfire down on the beach. Tell Sasuke to come cook lunch when you're done. And for God's sake, if he can't work the portal now, don't give him shit over it. There's still Willow, and even if she doesn't come through, we'll probably run into the Sarguls again -- fanatics never give up -- and Sasuke can pick their brains until he learns the right spell. And you can tell him I said so." She flipped a careless salute in Sasuke's direction -- probably pointless without any cultural context, but whatever -- and strode off into the trees.
Duo admired her legs for a moment. Then he turned back to Sasuke, who looked like he'd bitten into an apple and found that he'd eaten half a maggot along with the fruit. "Lighten up, man -- just 'cause I'm not teasing you doesn't mean I have to give up all my fun. Faith's hot and I like to look at pretty things. Suck it up and deal."
"Whatever," Sasuke said, bending down to pull the legs off his dead crabstrosity. Or should that be lobstrosity? That sounded vaguely familiar, maybe something out of an old horror book -- one of the brick-thick paperbacks he used to distract himself during shuttle flights so he wouldn't reach for phantom controls when the pilots wasted fuel or kissed the docking rings -- but who cared what name he gave the mini-demon-thing so long as it was edible? And he was spinning off trajectory again.
"Listen, here's my idea," Duo said, and ran through the whole business in Japanese. At the end of the spiel, he pulled the necklace with the opals over his head and held it out to Sasuke. "So, no pressure, but what do you think? Can you make it work?"
---------------------------------------------
Sasuke set the crab-thing aside and took the necklace from Duo, careful not to touch either the opals or Duo's skin. He held the chain taut between his fingers, letting the stones swing and glint in the leaf-filtered light. There was obviously something peculiar about them -- they itched at the edge of his awareness a bit like a primed explosive note -- but he couldn't make sense of the energy woven into them. He slipped into Sharingan for a better look.
"It's like a summons turned inside out and then translated into a foreign language, backwards, by an illiterate monkey," he said after a minute.
Duo's lip twitched. "And that means...?"
"It means I have no idea what might happen if I tried to activate the jutsu stored in here. I can copy techniques, but I'm not an analyst." Orochimaru didn't want his puppet learning any skills that might let him twist their bond to his own use.
"So you can't control where we'd end up?" Duo asked.
Sasuke shrugged. "I can't even guarantee we'd go anywhere -- I might bring the Sargul wizard here instead. Or I might blow a hole in this universe and kill us all. Summons are tricky to start with, and the more power you feed into them, the more careful you have to be with your aim. There's a lot of power in these stones. I won't activate them blind." He tossed the necklace back to Duo.
"Well, shit. There goes that plan." Duo flopped onto his back and folded his arms behind his head. "I guess we're stuck here on indefinite vacation. On the one hand, I hate not being able to do anything useful, but on the other, at least it's a chance to work on my tan. And the company's not half bad." He aimed a leer in Sasuke's general direction.
"Back off," Sasuke said, breaking another leg off the crab-thing.
Duo blinked. "Oh, come on -- that's so mild it's barely innuendo. But okay. I keep my word -- no sex for you!" He waved a hand and grinned; this smile didn't have any hidden meanings, just rueful amusement.
"I honestly do like your company, and I bet Faith does too," Duo continued. "You're a prickly little jerk and you're as fucked in the head as any of my friends back home, but I've always had a soft spot for people who go after what they want instead of knuckling under to fate. I think you could be more sensible about it -- having a goal doesn't mean you can't have a life, too -- but the world would be a hell of a lot more boring if nobody ever told reality to fuck off and made things change."
Sasuke let the crab-thing slip through his hands in surprise.
Duo... thought he was doing the right thing? Not that Duo knew anything important about his past, but still... he thought seeking vengeance was reasonable? He approved of working toward a goal, no matter how impossible it seemed?
"Do you care how people make things change?" he asked before he could force his mouth shut.
Duo's eyes narrowed. "That depends. There are lines you don't cross without one hell of a good reason -- torture, murdering kids, stuff like that -- and there are some goals that I'd kill people for turning into reality. But anything else... I'm in no position to throw stones. I like to think I picked the least bad option and kept other people clean by taking shit on myself, but still. There are a lot of people in my world missing their families, or their arms and legs, or their lives, because of me. So if you have a good cause, and you don't cross the line -- yeah, it's up to you how you reach your goal."
Yes. Yes. He had the best cause in the world, and it was his responsibility to see it through to the end. It had nothing to do with Naruto or Sakura or Kakashi, nothing to do with anyone who wasn't already trapped in Itachi's nightmare; if they had tried to help, all they could have done was catch Itachi's attention and die. Sasuke knew that down to his bones.
So he could betray them and leave them and glut himself sick on Orochimaru's tainted knowledge and the twisted power of the curse seal, and that was all right because he was already broken, no matter how hard he pretended he wasn't. And no matter how hard he pretended not to notice, he knew Sakura and Naruto were clean. They were whole. So he had to protect them, and if his choices destroyed him, that was all right too. He was willing to pay any price.
"Hey. Hey, Sasuke, you alive? Mission control to Sasuke!" Duo's hand waved in front of his face, and Sasuke wondered why he hadn't reached for a kunai -- this world drained chakra, but it shouldn't affect his reflexes.
"There you are," Duo said, sitting back on his heels. "Mind telling me what that little blank-out was about?"
"Yes."
"Yes, you'll tell me, or yes, you mind?"
"I mind."
Duo shrugged. "Okay, your call." He crossed his legs under himself and turned half away, so he wasn't facing Sasuke directly. After a moment, Sasuke picked up the crab-thing again.
They sat together for nearly half an hour. Sasuke chipped the shell off the crab-thing's back, leaving its belly-plate as a makeshift cooking dish; then he returned to sharpening his stolen knives. Duo drew a knife from a boot-sheath and spent a few minutes in desultory target practice, before scooping a handful of stones from the ground and attempting to juggle. At first the silence felt uncomfortable, as if Duo wanted to be talking, but after a while the occasional click of rocks as Duo lost his pattern and caught the falling stones, and the scrape of stone on low-grade steel, seemed like the soothing background noise of a team at rest between missions.
When Faith walked up from the lake, Sasuke didn't even consciously notice her approach until Duo called out her name. He hadn't been tracking her; he knew her footsteps by now, and at some point he'd stopped marking them as a potential threat.
In the back of his mind, Faith and Duo weren't strangers anymore.
---------------------------------------------
End of Chapter XIII
Back to part XII
Continue to part XIV
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
---------------------------------------------
This may be the last chapter of "Lemonade" for several months, because I really need to finish "Secrets" and get some serious work done on "Guardian." On the other hand, "Lemonade" is relatively easy to write, since so much of it is just putting two or three people together and essentially taking dictation as they talk -- it's less plot-driven than a lot of my stories -- and I am easily frustrated by plot complications, so...
Ah, whatever. They'll all get finished in the end. I just make no guarantees how long it'll take me to get there. :-)
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Lemonade
---------------------------------------------
Part XIII: in which we consider the art of the non-apology apology
Sasuke was weird.
There was really no other word that covered it, Faith concluded, unless she went with 'so fucked-up he's almost well-adjusted, if you check your common sense at the door and grab a double helping of paranoia and mood-swings instead,' but that was way more than one word so she was stuck with 'weird.'
It wasn't like she had any kind of claim to being normal or sane -- and Duo sure as hell didn't either -- but Sasuke was still fucking weird.
She wondered if he'd make any more sense if he spoke better English or she spoke Japanese. Probably not. Life was never helpful like that, not unless it was setting you up for a sucker-punch in an unexpected direction.
Her boots crunched on the black sand and gravel; to her left, Sasuke's steps were nearly silent. That had to be a ninja thing, since there was no real difference in the thickness of their soles. Faith could be quiet when she needed to -- she hadn't always been strong enough to fight monsters head on -- but there was a difference between walking on pavement or grass and walking on little stones that kept shifting under her feet.
"Hey, Sasuke."
He didn't answer, so she poked his shoulder. His hand twitched down toward his knives and he glared at her. "What?"
"How do you walk so quietly?" Faith asked, and then remembered he still didn't know that much English, no matter how crazy fast he'd been learning. "Fuck. Um. Your feet, no sound. My feet, big sound. How do you stop the sound?"
Sasuke snorted. "Practice." His tone implied that she was an idiot for needing to ask.
Sasuke was arrogant, too. Also pig-headed and melodramatic.
They crested the ridge around the lake valley, notable only for its slightly higher density of scrub grass, and headed down toward the scattered groves of trees. Unless she'd lost all her sense of direction -- which, given the utterly cloudless sky, was kind of hard to do, even with her pathetic orienteering skills -- the cabin should be slightly to their left.
Sasuke veered left. Faith raised a mental fist in victory. City girl one, trackless wilderness zero.
Okay, so technically it was city girl one, trackless wilderness one, since she'd had no idea which way to go from the original portal and would probably have died of thirst if Sasuke hadn't picked this direction -- 'competent' was another word for him, annoying as it was to admit that -- but she'd take her wins where she could get them.
She followed Sasuke's path through the trees, in case he or Duo had taken the time to set traps or shit like that. It was nice to be in the shade; she could rest her eyes after squinting against the white-hot sunlight, and even though the air over the sand wasn't like an oven, the trees and the grass were still more inviting.
Duo was sprawled out, chest down, on the grass in front of the cabin. He raised one hand in a lazy greeting. "The prodigal son returns! Quick, find me a fatted calf."
"We're all out of veal, but you can have some demonic lobster-crab hybrid instead," Faith said, sitting down beside him.
"Who killed it?" Duo asked as he sat up.
"Sasuke."
"That's no good; the whole point of the story is that the father throws a party for his son even though the son fucked up and has nothing. It doesn't work if the son brings dinner with him as a result of his fuck-up." Duo laughed at Sasuke's confused look, and then bowed from the waist, folding his torso down over his crossed legs. "Sumimasen, Uchiha-san."
---------------------------------------------
He started with an apology, even though he wasn't sorry for what he'd done. He was sorry for the effects, though, and misleading sincerity was still sincerity.
"Look, I didn't mean to push you that hard," he told Sasuke. "I don't tease people as a put-down, but I suck at judging when I'm going too far and it stops being funny. I can't promise to lay off you completely -- sometimes I honestly can't control my mouth -- but next time I get close to the line, tell me. I promise to back off, even if I have to bite my tongue in half to stay quiet."
Sasuke snorted, and Duo shrugged. "Yeah, so suicide's a bit drastic. Anyway, I didn't mean to pressure you. I think you're damn sexy and it's a shame you won't relax, but if you don't want to join in, that's your prerogative. End of story.
"Are we okay?"
Sasuke dragged out the silence for a long beat before giving Duo a faint bow in return. "I accept your truce. Faith said you wanted to talk to me; was that all you had to say?"
"When she left, yeah, that was pretty much it. But I had an idea since then -- hang on a sec while I catch Faith up and then I'll toss it in the air for you to poke holes through."
Duo turned to Faith, who was drumming her fingers on the ground. "I apologized, he accepted, and now I'm gonna run an idea past him. You remember the Sarguls said that one or two portal stones will only home in on other portal stones? They still have one, and it's probably still in your world, so if Sasuke can tune his magic to the stones' frequency, maybe we can get out of this dump without waiting for your pet witch to save us."
Faith looked skeptical. "What I hear, dimensional portals are damn glitchy. Even if Sasuke can open one, I wouldn't trust it to work right. We could come out the other side turned inside out or joined like Siamese twins, if we come out alive at all. And there are more than four of the stones out there, right? The first assassin they summoned stole one, and there's no telling what world she's in by now -- we could end up even more fucked than we are now."
"Valid points," Duo conceded. "But we should at least try. I'm not morally opposed to getting rescued instead of doing the rescuing, but I'd feel really stupid if your witch showed up, took one look at the stones, and asked us why we didn't get out days ago."
"Yeah, I get it." Faith sighed and pushed herself to her feet. "Go on, talk mojo. I'm going to pull some grass and see if it'll work for mattresses, and then maybe build a campfire down on the beach. Tell Sasuke to come cook lunch when you're done. And for God's sake, if he can't work the portal now, don't give him shit over it. There's still Willow, and even if she doesn't come through, we'll probably run into the Sarguls again -- fanatics never give up -- and Sasuke can pick their brains until he learns the right spell. And you can tell him I said so." She flipped a careless salute in Sasuke's direction -- probably pointless without any cultural context, but whatever -- and strode off into the trees.
Duo admired her legs for a moment. Then he turned back to Sasuke, who looked like he'd bitten into an apple and found that he'd eaten half a maggot along with the fruit. "Lighten up, man -- just 'cause I'm not teasing you doesn't mean I have to give up all my fun. Faith's hot and I like to look at pretty things. Suck it up and deal."
"Whatever," Sasuke said, bending down to pull the legs off his dead crabstrosity. Or should that be lobstrosity? That sounded vaguely familiar, maybe something out of an old horror book -- one of the brick-thick paperbacks he used to distract himself during shuttle flights so he wouldn't reach for phantom controls when the pilots wasted fuel or kissed the docking rings -- but who cared what name he gave the mini-demon-thing so long as it was edible? And he was spinning off trajectory again.
"Listen, here's my idea," Duo said, and ran through the whole business in Japanese. At the end of the spiel, he pulled the necklace with the opals over his head and held it out to Sasuke. "So, no pressure, but what do you think? Can you make it work?"
---------------------------------------------
Sasuke set the crab-thing aside and took the necklace from Duo, careful not to touch either the opals or Duo's skin. He held the chain taut between his fingers, letting the stones swing and glint in the leaf-filtered light. There was obviously something peculiar about them -- they itched at the edge of his awareness a bit like a primed explosive note -- but he couldn't make sense of the energy woven into them. He slipped into Sharingan for a better look.
"It's like a summons turned inside out and then translated into a foreign language, backwards, by an illiterate monkey," he said after a minute.
Duo's lip twitched. "And that means...?"
"It means I have no idea what might happen if I tried to activate the jutsu stored in here. I can copy techniques, but I'm not an analyst." Orochimaru didn't want his puppet learning any skills that might let him twist their bond to his own use.
"So you can't control where we'd end up?" Duo asked.
Sasuke shrugged. "I can't even guarantee we'd go anywhere -- I might bring the Sargul wizard here instead. Or I might blow a hole in this universe and kill us all. Summons are tricky to start with, and the more power you feed into them, the more careful you have to be with your aim. There's a lot of power in these stones. I won't activate them blind." He tossed the necklace back to Duo.
"Well, shit. There goes that plan." Duo flopped onto his back and folded his arms behind his head. "I guess we're stuck here on indefinite vacation. On the one hand, I hate not being able to do anything useful, but on the other, at least it's a chance to work on my tan. And the company's not half bad." He aimed a leer in Sasuke's general direction.
"Back off," Sasuke said, breaking another leg off the crab-thing.
Duo blinked. "Oh, come on -- that's so mild it's barely innuendo. But okay. I keep my word -- no sex for you!" He waved a hand and grinned; this smile didn't have any hidden meanings, just rueful amusement.
"I honestly do like your company, and I bet Faith does too," Duo continued. "You're a prickly little jerk and you're as fucked in the head as any of my friends back home, but I've always had a soft spot for people who go after what they want instead of knuckling under to fate. I think you could be more sensible about it -- having a goal doesn't mean you can't have a life, too -- but the world would be a hell of a lot more boring if nobody ever told reality to fuck off and made things change."
Sasuke let the crab-thing slip through his hands in surprise.
Duo... thought he was doing the right thing? Not that Duo knew anything important about his past, but still... he thought seeking vengeance was reasonable? He approved of working toward a goal, no matter how impossible it seemed?
"Do you care how people make things change?" he asked before he could force his mouth shut.
Duo's eyes narrowed. "That depends. There are lines you don't cross without one hell of a good reason -- torture, murdering kids, stuff like that -- and there are some goals that I'd kill people for turning into reality. But anything else... I'm in no position to throw stones. I like to think I picked the least bad option and kept other people clean by taking shit on myself, but still. There are a lot of people in my world missing their families, or their arms and legs, or their lives, because of me. So if you have a good cause, and you don't cross the line -- yeah, it's up to you how you reach your goal."
Yes. Yes. He had the best cause in the world, and it was his responsibility to see it through to the end. It had nothing to do with Naruto or Sakura or Kakashi, nothing to do with anyone who wasn't already trapped in Itachi's nightmare; if they had tried to help, all they could have done was catch Itachi's attention and die. Sasuke knew that down to his bones.
So he could betray them and leave them and glut himself sick on Orochimaru's tainted knowledge and the twisted power of the curse seal, and that was all right because he was already broken, no matter how hard he pretended he wasn't. And no matter how hard he pretended not to notice, he knew Sakura and Naruto were clean. They were whole. So he had to protect them, and if his choices destroyed him, that was all right too. He was willing to pay any price.
"Hey. Hey, Sasuke, you alive? Mission control to Sasuke!" Duo's hand waved in front of his face, and Sasuke wondered why he hadn't reached for a kunai -- this world drained chakra, but it shouldn't affect his reflexes.
"There you are," Duo said, sitting back on his heels. "Mind telling me what that little blank-out was about?"
"Yes."
"Yes, you'll tell me, or yes, you mind?"
"I mind."
Duo shrugged. "Okay, your call." He crossed his legs under himself and turned half away, so he wasn't facing Sasuke directly. After a moment, Sasuke picked up the crab-thing again.
They sat together for nearly half an hour. Sasuke chipped the shell off the crab-thing's back, leaving its belly-plate as a makeshift cooking dish; then he returned to sharpening his stolen knives. Duo drew a knife from a boot-sheath and spent a few minutes in desultory target practice, before scooping a handful of stones from the ground and attempting to juggle. At first the silence felt uncomfortable, as if Duo wanted to be talking, but after a while the occasional click of rocks as Duo lost his pattern and caught the falling stones, and the scrape of stone on low-grade steel, seemed like the soothing background noise of a team at rest between missions.
When Faith walked up from the lake, Sasuke didn't even consciously notice her approach until Duo called out her name. He hadn't been tracking her; he knew her footsteps by now, and at some point he'd stopped marking them as a potential threat.
In the back of his mind, Faith and Duo weren't strangers anymore.
---------------------------------------------
End of Chapter XIII
Back to part XII
Continue to part XIV
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
---------------------------------------------
This may be the last chapter of "Lemonade" for several months, because I really need to finish "Secrets" and get some serious work done on "Guardian." On the other hand, "Lemonade" is relatively easy to write, since so much of it is just putting two or three people together and essentially taking dictation as they talk -- it's less plot-driven than a lot of my stories -- and I am easily frustrated by plot complications, so...
Ah, whatever. They'll all get finished in the end. I just make no guarantees how long it'll take me to get there. :-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 02:19 am (UTC)break on lemonade = poo, but i'll wait! lol
*sets up camping gear*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 02:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-05 09:04 pm (UTC)