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edenfallingFor the first time in this story, I am not keeping an absolutely strict linear time flow. In other words, Faith's POV section picks up a few minutes before the end of Sasuke's POV section from chapter 16. Everything after that is linear again.
Thank you to everyone who gave me advice on Chinese and Japanese writing systems, and to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deralte, who pointed out the obvious English workaround to the Japanese phrase I was asking about. (2,100 words)
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Lemonade
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Part XVII: In which we consider the oddities of interdimensional communications
Faith shot Duo a wry look. "I take it you wanted privacy?"
Duo shrugged and stretched his arms up above his head, making his shoulder joints crackle as he worked out a night's worth of kinks. "Eh, that too. Mostly I wanted to give Sasuke an excuse to go blow off steam before I said the wrong thing again and made him explode in our faces. 'Cause I guarantee you I will set him off sooner or later, whether I mean to or not. It's one of my more backhanded talents."
Joints apparently loosened, Duo grinned and draped an arm around Faith's shoulders. Faith blinked. Yeah, they'd had sex, and she was all in favor of flirting, but this felt... friendly? Weird. Guys didn't usually do friendship around her, especially not after sex.
Duo was as crazy as Sasuke, in his own way, Faith decided. But whatever; she could deal with crazy. "It takes practice to be an assassin," she said. "Does it take practice to be annoying, too?"
"Nah, that comes naturally," Duo said, and laughed. He squeezed her once around the shoulders, in a sort of one-armed hug, then ambled away to the water's edge. "On a completely different topic, we should come up with a few projects to keep ourselves busy while we wait for your witch. I know Sasuke will want to make defensive emplacements--"
He stopped, spinning on his heel to face the ridge. "Something's wrong."
Puzzled, Faith turned to follow his gaze. She didn't see anything -- didn't hear anything either -- so what had caught Duo's attention? "Are you sure about--" she started to say, but then a creeping, familiar unease seeped into her bones and she cut herself off with a frustrated hiss. "Demons. Fuck it."
Duo had already pulled his gun and a knife, and was heading into the trees. "Sarguls?"
"No way to tell until we see them," Faith said, following him. Her serrated knife was a comforting weight in her hand.
A distant sound of shrieking teakettles and the clatter of loose stones heralded Sasuke's descent from the ridge. "Duo. Faith," he said, as he flung himself into the clearing around the little house. Then he slid into rapid Japanese, gesturing occasionally as if sketching invisible figures. Faith ground her teeth and waited for Duo to translate. Yeah, it made sense to get the full picture instead of playing twenty questions with Sasuke's fractured English, but goddamn, it was frustrating being out of the loop.
"Not Sarguls," Duo said when Sasuke fell silent. "Insect demons. Blue ones with two legs and wings, and big-ass gold ones the blue ones are riding like horses. Sasuke says they had some clothes and jewelry, so they're probably intelligent. And they're heading this way. Can you tell if they're hostile?"
Faith laughed, short and sharp. "Of course not. That'd make life too easy." She shifted her grip on her knife and dropped her right hand to touch the little throwing axe hanging from her belt. "Even if they are hostile, it's their world. To them, we're the creepy things from another dimension. It's only fair to try the 'we come in peace' routine before shooting."
"Fair enough. I'd rather save my bullets in case the Sarguls turn up again. Speaking of which…" Duo bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, then tucked his gun away. He unclipped his collapsible scythe and extended it instead, resting his thumb over the power switch. "No way of knowing if they've ever seen a gun, and intimidation doesn't work if the other guy doesn't know he's supposed to be scared. But everyone understands about glowing blades."
"Showoff," Faith murmured.
Beside her, Sasuke rolled his eyes. "Quiet," he said. "Listen. They come -- both sides." He pointed left and right.
"Pincer trap," Duo said, annoyance clear as a bell in his voice. "And us without a decent escape route."
Faith pictured the situation. Cabin to the west, lake to the east, demons to the north and south. Not bad planning, really -- pin them down enough to make escape difficult, but not enough to make it impossible, 'cause trapping people into last stands was just asking for trouble.
Still, traps schmaps. Faith loved springing ambushes and careful tactical setups. There was a beautiful, unholy rush in letting vamps get her right where she wanted to be, and then turning the tables on them. "Who said anything about escaping?" she asked Duo. "But hey, if you want to play it safe, send Sasuke up a tree or something."
"They've already seen him," Duo pointed out. "They'll know he's around."
Faith's grin widened. "First, so what? That'll just make them cautious. Second, are you sure they can tell one human from another? A lot of demons really can't, just like we can't tell them apart. You have to spend actual time around a new species before they stop looking like monsters and start looking like people. And third, like fuck am I hiding up a tree, and we need you down here to negotiate. You know the most languages."
Duo stared at her for a long moment, while soft teakettle whistles drew closer from both sides of the grove. "Okay. Fair points. Sasuke," -- he lapsed into Japanese for a sentence -- "and as for you, chica--"
"--you have my back," Faith finished for him, as Sasuke vanished up a nearby tree. Something gold flashed in her peripheral vision. "Quit stalling, space boy. It's show time." She slid behind him and set her back to his.
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Duo blinked. Where, exactly, had he lost control of that exchange? And which of them was a professional soldier?
But no, be fair: Faith knew about demons through personal experience. He didn't. And in battle, posturing got your killed. Time to shut up and listen to the expert.
They were well and truly pinned now. Gold and blue -- vivid, hyper-saturated colors he wasn't used to seeing outside of beetles, poisonous lizards, and Trowa's circus friends -- flashed and shifted as the insectile demons moved slowly forward on both sides of the clearing. "Confident bastards," Duo muttered over his shoulder.
"Mmm," Faith agreed, her shoulder blade brushing the middle of his back as she shifted her weight. "I could've hit at least three by now. Of course, there's no telling what they might be able to throw back."
Duo bared his teeth, reaching for a grin. "I hate unknowns." He hated waiting, too. Fights were an unholy joy, but the creeping tension before the wire snapped and violence unspooled was like watching a misaligned airlock seeping life away into the black of space. He itched to flick his scythe blade on and just move.
He stayed still. Jumping the gun got you killed just as bad as misplaced pride.
"Move, you fuckers," Faith growled. "Move. Come on. We can see you, you can see us, we all know we can see each other. What the fuck are you waiting for -- engraved invitations? Christmas?"
Another teakettle whistle -- this one lower pitched, more of a warble, really -- followed by some oddly tuneful clicks and a trill -- and finally the demons came forward into the open. Duo counted fast: from nine o'clock to three o'clock, seven demons, four on the gold horse-equivalents, three on foot, all armed with archaic weapons. "Seven my side, four mounted," he said without turning his head. "You?"
"Three riding, three walking," Faith said. "Riders have spears, walkers have... slings? Haven't seen one of those since I was training with Pritchard. They're a bitch and a half to learn, but they throw a stone like nobody's business."
"Same my side," Duo said. "So? Come on, demon-girl, tell this space-boy what to do."
Faith laughed. "Step forward, open your hands, and start talking. And keep your foot out of your mouth or I will skin you alive once we get out of this mess. Got it?"
"Mission acknowledged," Duo said wryly. He debated for a moment, but nothing felt like it would collapse into carnage in the next few seconds. Empty hands it was. He collapsed his scythe staff back into its rod form, clipped it to his belt, and stepped forward.
One of the mounted demons nudged its golden... grasshopper? Beetle? Scarab? Easier to pick a name if he had a better grasp of insects, of course, but that wasn't relevant knowledge in space. Scarab sounded coolest. So. One blue mantis on one golden scarab, waiting for him to make the first move.
"We come in peace. Take us to your leaders," Duo said, fighting down a manic grin.
Behind him, Faith groaned.
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The blue demon cocked its head at strange angles, turning from side to side to study Duo and Faith from one faceted eye and then the other. Finally it faced them head-on again, the two smaller, black eyespots in the center of its forehead probably helping it balance its split field of vision with some type of binocular focus. It whistled and clicked incomprehensibly, waving one spike-jointed arm in Duo's direction.
Sasuke tensed, ready to leap down from his hidden vantage point, but apparently that wasn't an attack signal or a method of shaping ninjutsu.
Duo shrugged, gesturing toward the demon, then toward himself, then outward while frowning and shaking his head. He said something in English about not understanding. "Do you speak Japanese?" he asked. The demon remained still. Duo said something in, presumably, another language, then a harsher one, then a melodious one, pausing each time for a response that never came.
He tried a sixth language, rather sing-song, and suddenly the blue insect demon moved. It flung one arm backward, beckoning a second demon forward. The new demon held up both its arms -- 'no weapons' was a universal gesture, it seemed -- then bent to dig its chitin-armored fingers into the sandy ground at its feet.
No. To write. The demons couldn't speak human languages, but they could recognize them.
Sasuke waited as Duo walked cautiously forward and bent to read the demon's words. He frowned -- Sasuke tensed -- but then Duo laughed and the hidden tension in his stance eased. "Hey, Sasuke, get down here," he called. "I can't actually speak the Middle Kingdom's language worth a damn and I'm bad with kanji anyway, so trying to read them Middle Kingdom style is only going to get me a bunch of gibberish. Come see if you can make any sense of this."
The unfamiliar sing-song language used kanji? Strange. Writing was a gift from the Sage of Six Paths -- how had it spread to this world, or to Duo's 'Middle Kingdom'? Or perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps the Sage had traveled through many dimensions before stopping to seal the Juubi and bring civilization to the world.
But that was irrelevant. The only important questions were whether the demons' writing was comprehensible, and whether their intentions were hostile.
Sasuke dropped from the tree, startling several demons into raising their slings and spears and whistling shrilly. Duo said something quickly while Sasuke held up his empty hands and smiled, thin and sharp, to show he was unarmed -- as if that mattered. The blue demons subsided.
"Nothing but trouble," Faith muttered, poking Sasuke in the shoulder. "Go on, play nice."
"Play nice is for ally, not for demon," he told her, and tried very hard not to wonder why he liked hearing her laugh.
The demons' kanji were strange. Firstly, they were written side to side, not top to bottom. "Yeah, that threw me too," Duo said, leaning on his staff at Sasuke's right side. "Don't worry if you can't get a perfect translation. The gist is all we need for now."
Sasuke ignored him, tracing his finger through the air over the words. They made no sense read for sound, and some he couldn't get to make sense in any reading, but if he ignored all sense of grammar and strung rough concepts together...
He sat back on his heels, frowning. "They're not hostile, I think. But they want to know if we're the shifting-world strangers the net-mouth-people are looking for, and if so, they'd like us to come with them so we can meet the net-mouth-people on neutral ground and stop leaving corpses all over the trade routes."
Sasuke looked up at Duo, turning to include Faith in his next words. "They know Sarguls," he said in English. "They say they make truce, make meeting. Save time, save sleep, no wait for Sarguls attack all time. But. They know Sarguls. We trust them -- yes or no?"
---------------------------------------------
End of Part XVII
Back to part XVI
Continue to part XVIII
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 seem like a completely random plot tangent, but I promise there is a method to my madness, though it may not currently be apparent. (I will give you a hint: it involves bathtubs. And possibly chocolate. *grin*)
...I will try to describe the blue insect demons and their mounts in more detail when I revise this for ff.net, but right at the moment, I would rather get something posted than wait until I have the mental energy to make it perfect.
Thank you to everyone who gave me advice on Chinese and Japanese writing systems, and to
deralte, who pointed out the obvious English workaround to the Japanese phrase I was asking about. (2,100 words)---------------------------------------------
Lemonade
---------------------------------------------
Part XVII: In which we consider the oddities of interdimensional communications
Faith shot Duo a wry look. "I take it you wanted privacy?"
Duo shrugged and stretched his arms up above his head, making his shoulder joints crackle as he worked out a night's worth of kinks. "Eh, that too. Mostly I wanted to give Sasuke an excuse to go blow off steam before I said the wrong thing again and made him explode in our faces. 'Cause I guarantee you I will set him off sooner or later, whether I mean to or not. It's one of my more backhanded talents."
Joints apparently loosened, Duo grinned and draped an arm around Faith's shoulders. Faith blinked. Yeah, they'd had sex, and she was all in favor of flirting, but this felt... friendly? Weird. Guys didn't usually do friendship around her, especially not after sex.
Duo was as crazy as Sasuke, in his own way, Faith decided. But whatever; she could deal with crazy. "It takes practice to be an assassin," she said. "Does it take practice to be annoying, too?"
"Nah, that comes naturally," Duo said, and laughed. He squeezed her once around the shoulders, in a sort of one-armed hug, then ambled away to the water's edge. "On a completely different topic, we should come up with a few projects to keep ourselves busy while we wait for your witch. I know Sasuke will want to make defensive emplacements--"
He stopped, spinning on his heel to face the ridge. "Something's wrong."
Puzzled, Faith turned to follow his gaze. She didn't see anything -- didn't hear anything either -- so what had caught Duo's attention? "Are you sure about--" she started to say, but then a creeping, familiar unease seeped into her bones and she cut herself off with a frustrated hiss. "Demons. Fuck it."
Duo had already pulled his gun and a knife, and was heading into the trees. "Sarguls?"
"No way to tell until we see them," Faith said, following him. Her serrated knife was a comforting weight in her hand.
A distant sound of shrieking teakettles and the clatter of loose stones heralded Sasuke's descent from the ridge. "Duo. Faith," he said, as he flung himself into the clearing around the little house. Then he slid into rapid Japanese, gesturing occasionally as if sketching invisible figures. Faith ground her teeth and waited for Duo to translate. Yeah, it made sense to get the full picture instead of playing twenty questions with Sasuke's fractured English, but goddamn, it was frustrating being out of the loop.
"Not Sarguls," Duo said when Sasuke fell silent. "Insect demons. Blue ones with two legs and wings, and big-ass gold ones the blue ones are riding like horses. Sasuke says they had some clothes and jewelry, so they're probably intelligent. And they're heading this way. Can you tell if they're hostile?"
Faith laughed, short and sharp. "Of course not. That'd make life too easy." She shifted her grip on her knife and dropped her right hand to touch the little throwing axe hanging from her belt. "Even if they are hostile, it's their world. To them, we're the creepy things from another dimension. It's only fair to try the 'we come in peace' routine before shooting."
"Fair enough. I'd rather save my bullets in case the Sarguls turn up again. Speaking of which…" Duo bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, then tucked his gun away. He unclipped his collapsible scythe and extended it instead, resting his thumb over the power switch. "No way of knowing if they've ever seen a gun, and intimidation doesn't work if the other guy doesn't know he's supposed to be scared. But everyone understands about glowing blades."
"Showoff," Faith murmured.
Beside her, Sasuke rolled his eyes. "Quiet," he said. "Listen. They come -- both sides." He pointed left and right.
"Pincer trap," Duo said, annoyance clear as a bell in his voice. "And us without a decent escape route."
Faith pictured the situation. Cabin to the west, lake to the east, demons to the north and south. Not bad planning, really -- pin them down enough to make escape difficult, but not enough to make it impossible, 'cause trapping people into last stands was just asking for trouble.
Still, traps schmaps. Faith loved springing ambushes and careful tactical setups. There was a beautiful, unholy rush in letting vamps get her right where she wanted to be, and then turning the tables on them. "Who said anything about escaping?" she asked Duo. "But hey, if you want to play it safe, send Sasuke up a tree or something."
"They've already seen him," Duo pointed out. "They'll know he's around."
Faith's grin widened. "First, so what? That'll just make them cautious. Second, are you sure they can tell one human from another? A lot of demons really can't, just like we can't tell them apart. You have to spend actual time around a new species before they stop looking like monsters and start looking like people. And third, like fuck am I hiding up a tree, and we need you down here to negotiate. You know the most languages."
Duo stared at her for a long moment, while soft teakettle whistles drew closer from both sides of the grove. "Okay. Fair points. Sasuke," -- he lapsed into Japanese for a sentence -- "and as for you, chica--"
"--you have my back," Faith finished for him, as Sasuke vanished up a nearby tree. Something gold flashed in her peripheral vision. "Quit stalling, space boy. It's show time." She slid behind him and set her back to his.
---------------------------------------------
Duo blinked. Where, exactly, had he lost control of that exchange? And which of them was a professional soldier?
But no, be fair: Faith knew about demons through personal experience. He didn't. And in battle, posturing got your killed. Time to shut up and listen to the expert.
They were well and truly pinned now. Gold and blue -- vivid, hyper-saturated colors he wasn't used to seeing outside of beetles, poisonous lizards, and Trowa's circus friends -- flashed and shifted as the insectile demons moved slowly forward on both sides of the clearing. "Confident bastards," Duo muttered over his shoulder.
"Mmm," Faith agreed, her shoulder blade brushing the middle of his back as she shifted her weight. "I could've hit at least three by now. Of course, there's no telling what they might be able to throw back."
Duo bared his teeth, reaching for a grin. "I hate unknowns." He hated waiting, too. Fights were an unholy joy, but the creeping tension before the wire snapped and violence unspooled was like watching a misaligned airlock seeping life away into the black of space. He itched to flick his scythe blade on and just move.
He stayed still. Jumping the gun got you killed just as bad as misplaced pride.
"Move, you fuckers," Faith growled. "Move. Come on. We can see you, you can see us, we all know we can see each other. What the fuck are you waiting for -- engraved invitations? Christmas?"
Another teakettle whistle -- this one lower pitched, more of a warble, really -- followed by some oddly tuneful clicks and a trill -- and finally the demons came forward into the open. Duo counted fast: from nine o'clock to three o'clock, seven demons, four on the gold horse-equivalents, three on foot, all armed with archaic weapons. "Seven my side, four mounted," he said without turning his head. "You?"
"Three riding, three walking," Faith said. "Riders have spears, walkers have... slings? Haven't seen one of those since I was training with Pritchard. They're a bitch and a half to learn, but they throw a stone like nobody's business."
"Same my side," Duo said. "So? Come on, demon-girl, tell this space-boy what to do."
Faith laughed. "Step forward, open your hands, and start talking. And keep your foot out of your mouth or I will skin you alive once we get out of this mess. Got it?"
"Mission acknowledged," Duo said wryly. He debated for a moment, but nothing felt like it would collapse into carnage in the next few seconds. Empty hands it was. He collapsed his scythe staff back into its rod form, clipped it to his belt, and stepped forward.
One of the mounted demons nudged its golden... grasshopper? Beetle? Scarab? Easier to pick a name if he had a better grasp of insects, of course, but that wasn't relevant knowledge in space. Scarab sounded coolest. So. One blue mantis on one golden scarab, waiting for him to make the first move.
"We come in peace. Take us to your leaders," Duo said, fighting down a manic grin.
Behind him, Faith groaned.
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The blue demon cocked its head at strange angles, turning from side to side to study Duo and Faith from one faceted eye and then the other. Finally it faced them head-on again, the two smaller, black eyespots in the center of its forehead probably helping it balance its split field of vision with some type of binocular focus. It whistled and clicked incomprehensibly, waving one spike-jointed arm in Duo's direction.
Sasuke tensed, ready to leap down from his hidden vantage point, but apparently that wasn't an attack signal or a method of shaping ninjutsu.
Duo shrugged, gesturing toward the demon, then toward himself, then outward while frowning and shaking his head. He said something in English about not understanding. "Do you speak Japanese?" he asked. The demon remained still. Duo said something in, presumably, another language, then a harsher one, then a melodious one, pausing each time for a response that never came.
He tried a sixth language, rather sing-song, and suddenly the blue insect demon moved. It flung one arm backward, beckoning a second demon forward. The new demon held up both its arms -- 'no weapons' was a universal gesture, it seemed -- then bent to dig its chitin-armored fingers into the sandy ground at its feet.
No. To write. The demons couldn't speak human languages, but they could recognize them.
Sasuke waited as Duo walked cautiously forward and bent to read the demon's words. He frowned -- Sasuke tensed -- but then Duo laughed and the hidden tension in his stance eased. "Hey, Sasuke, get down here," he called. "I can't actually speak the Middle Kingdom's language worth a damn and I'm bad with kanji anyway, so trying to read them Middle Kingdom style is only going to get me a bunch of gibberish. Come see if you can make any sense of this."
The unfamiliar sing-song language used kanji? Strange. Writing was a gift from the Sage of Six Paths -- how had it spread to this world, or to Duo's 'Middle Kingdom'? Or perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps the Sage had traveled through many dimensions before stopping to seal the Juubi and bring civilization to the world.
But that was irrelevant. The only important questions were whether the demons' writing was comprehensible, and whether their intentions were hostile.
Sasuke dropped from the tree, startling several demons into raising their slings and spears and whistling shrilly. Duo said something quickly while Sasuke held up his empty hands and smiled, thin and sharp, to show he was unarmed -- as if that mattered. The blue demons subsided.
"Nothing but trouble," Faith muttered, poking Sasuke in the shoulder. "Go on, play nice."
"Play nice is for ally, not for demon," he told her, and tried very hard not to wonder why he liked hearing her laugh.
The demons' kanji were strange. Firstly, they were written side to side, not top to bottom. "Yeah, that threw me too," Duo said, leaning on his staff at Sasuke's right side. "Don't worry if you can't get a perfect translation. The gist is all we need for now."
Sasuke ignored him, tracing his finger through the air over the words. They made no sense read for sound, and some he couldn't get to make sense in any reading, but if he ignored all sense of grammar and strung rough concepts together...
He sat back on his heels, frowning. "They're not hostile, I think. But they want to know if we're the shifting-world strangers the net-mouth-people are looking for, and if so, they'd like us to come with them so we can meet the net-mouth-people on neutral ground and stop leaving corpses all over the trade routes."
Sasuke looked up at Duo, turning to include Faith in his next words. "They know Sarguls," he said in English. "They say they make truce, make meeting. Save time, save sleep, no wait for Sarguls attack all time. But. They know Sarguls. We trust them -- yes or no?"
---------------------------------------------
End of Part XVII
Back to part XVI
Continue to part XVIII
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 seem like a completely random plot tangent, but I promise there is a method to my madness, though it may not currently be apparent. (I will give you a hint: it involves bathtubs. And possibly chocolate. *grin*)
...I will try to describe the blue insect demons and their mounts in more detail when I revise this for ff.net, but right at the moment, I would rather get something posted than wait until I have the mental energy to make it perfect.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-30 03:50 pm (UTC)I'm glad they did decide to play nice to start with, I tend to think of both Faith and Sasuke- especially Faith- as "look before you leap" types, and it's nice to see this continued streak of maturity in her. Also, as fun as it was having them marooned together otherwise alone in the middle of a wasteland, it's great to see things shaping up into something more involved than that.
Kudos to you, if you still have room to put them somewhere. ; )
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-01 12:37 am (UTC)