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edenfallingA little Narutostuck interlude while the teams are en route to the eastern Elemental Countries, to participate in a chuunin exam. Terezi, Dave, and Karkat have been a team for about a sweep at this point (as have the other kid-and-troll teams). The revolution ended when they were, oh, let's say fourteen, so they're roughly sixteen now. Previous installments include The Spider and the Flies (complete) and Damaged Goods (fragment).
(No, I don't know why the trolls still count time in sweeps. I'm inclined to say it has something to do with an oceanic climate cycle, because seatrolls, but it might relate instead to the revolution of the Naruto universe's equivalent of Mars. Maybe that extra-terrestrial year happens to match nicely with troll reproductive cycles, for whatever reason. It is a mystery!)
Anyway, story.
While traveling east to the chuunin exam, Terezi reflects on history and maps and indulges in a bit of pointless stargazing. Her teammates help, in their own idiosyncratic ways. Contains passing mention of Terezi's fraught history with Vriska. (1,075 words)
[ETA: The slightly revised final version is now up on AO3.]
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Narutostuck: Set with Stars
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The desert between the lands of Wind and Space is an empty, trackless no-one's country. It wasn't always that way. In the distant past, or so Terezi read when she still had eyes, there were clans of nomadic humans and trolls who wandered from oasis to cave and back, drifting through time and space at the call of the wind with only the sun and stars as their map.
The Condesce ended that era at the points of a very literal trident. Borders were drawn, a buffer zone established, and all official records of a different way of life either destroyed or classified beyond rational belief. There are no maps left of this land, except the ones Terezi traced herself before the coup, when the old Uchuukage set the record hall on fire before he fled to join his mistress beyond the rebellion's reach.
Terezi remembers nights creeping through the damp, lightless sewers of Kouin, carefully dislodging grates and hauling her way into the restricted sections of the record hall. Some of the commanders had argued against sending a wiggler into such danger, but no grown troll was small enough to slip through the confined spaces, and hardly any humans could navigate well enough in pitch black, let alone keep from getting dangerously chilled by the frigid water.
Terezi copied and stole information for half a sweep before she got caught.
No. Before she got careless. Before she got soft. Before she forgot who Vriska was -- who Vriska had always been -- and let too many hints slip out.
Before her sworn sister sold her out and smiled in the frozen, lifeless dark of the torture cells while Mindfang lowered the glowing poker to Terezi's eyes.
Terezi flops onto her back, squirms until her bedroll is almost tolerably arranged amidst the tiny sharp stones of the desert, and stares blankly upward toward the night sky. She can't quite remember how the constellations are arranged -- she'd never watched them much back when she still could, more interested in watching people, how they moved and talked and lied. Her Ancestor has a dragon for a lusus. Redglare must know how to navigate by the stars. Summoner-sensei probably knows as well -- she knows he's done aerial night missions. But asking them feels... not weak, no, but awkward. Pointless, maybe. Definitely silly.
She stifles a shiver, then wonders why she feels so cold. The desert night is chilly, but no worse than many things she's endured in the past.
"Can't sleep?"
Dave's voice is a low rasp beside her. His hand brushes against her side, human skin like a blast of fever warmth on the cool chitin of her hide.
"I am staying up to indulge in some quality stargazing!" Terezi says, falsely bright. "It's so hard in Kouin. The city lights get in the way."
Dave is silent for a moment. Then he says, "Awesome. Point out some constellations for me?"
Terezi closes her eyelids over the pits where her eyes used to be. Her lashes flutter against the silk of her blindfold.
"Okay," she says, and points randomly forward toward a spot on the horizon. "That is the sign of the Oceanic Dragon, which will one day eat the world, but until then serves as the guardian of the Empress of the Heavens. Do you see how it coils around the other stars, holding them trapped in its claws for the Empress's judgment?"
"Shit yeah, it's a thing of beauty," Dave agrees, edging closer to press his shoulder against hers. "Does it ever, you know, nibble on the evil criminal stars just a bit before the Empress pulls the chain and says, 'Bad dragon, no biscuit,' calls it back home and smacks its snout with--"
"A dragon could eat all three of us in a single bite," Karkat interrupts from Terezi's other side. "A nibble would just take off your stupid head and let the rest of us get some well-earned sleep."
"Don't be a killjoy, Vantas," Dave says.
"I'll kill anything I damn well want to," Karkat snaps -- quietly, though, inasmuch as he can ever manage quiet. "Besides, the Oceanic Dragon is off in that direction, numbglobes." He reaches up and wraps his fingers -- nearly human-warm, incongruous with the smooth normality of his chitin -- around Terezi's wrist and shifts her hand until her finger points back over her head toward the opposite horizon. "See? There. Twelve stars, that line going back to that triangle, as the body and tail. Those four -- it's a trapezoid, sort of -- as the claws. And then those other four -- no, Strider, those four, the ones shaped like a triangle with a dot off-center in the middle, you dumb cluckbeast -- as the head. The dot is the eye."
"It's kind of red," Dave says. "Weird. I thought stars were just plain old white."
"If we ever get wilderness missions, you are officially forbidden from navigating," Karkat says without heat.
Dave makes an odd grumbling noise, deprived of the explosion he was clearly aiming for. Terezi nudges her shoulder against him in consolation. He nudges back, and his hand drifts over to rest gently on her thigh.
"Thank you, Karkat," Terezi says. "It's been a long time since I went stargazing! It seems I've forgotten many things."
"Yeah, come on Vantas-sensei, school us in the ways of twinkly bird shit in the sky," Dave adds.
Karkat makes a grumbling noise nearly identical to Dave's. (Terezi is absolutely certain both of them would deny any similarity at great and verbally adroit length. This is an improvement! Last sweep, they would have denied it to the point of death.)
After a moment, though, Karkat shifts his grip on Terezi's wrist, moves her arm to point nearly straight overhead. "Up there is the Sword of Justice," he says, "those six stars like a cross. It's pointing toward the Betrayer" -- he shifts Terezi's arm downward a fraction -- "which is basically those four really bright stars that look like a box. There's a bunch of others that make his arms and legs, but fuck if I can remember useless crap like that."
"Ooh, great navigator of the wilderness, ooh."
"Shut up, douchnozzle. Off to the left is the Empress of Heaven herself, with her hand stretched toward--"
Terezi lies in the trackless waste, sandwiched between the living warmth of her teammates, and listens to Karkat paint an anchor in the sky.
---------------------------------------------
Inspired by the 7/8/13![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
15_minute_ficlets word #178: burnt
---------------------------------------------
This was actually a 45-minute fic, but shoosh, I won't tell if you don't. ;-)
(No, I don't know why the trolls still count time in sweeps. I'm inclined to say it has something to do with an oceanic climate cycle, because seatrolls, but it might relate instead to the revolution of the Naruto universe's equivalent of Mars. Maybe that extra-terrestrial year happens to match nicely with troll reproductive cycles, for whatever reason. It is a mystery!)
Anyway, story.
While traveling east to the chuunin exam, Terezi reflects on history and maps and indulges in a bit of pointless stargazing. Her teammates help, in their own idiosyncratic ways. Contains passing mention of Terezi's fraught history with Vriska. (1,075 words)
[ETA: The slightly revised final version is now up on AO3.]
---------------------------------------------
Narutostuck: Set with Stars
---------------------------------------------
The desert between the lands of Wind and Space is an empty, trackless no-one's country. It wasn't always that way. In the distant past, or so Terezi read when she still had eyes, there were clans of nomadic humans and trolls who wandered from oasis to cave and back, drifting through time and space at the call of the wind with only the sun and stars as their map.
The Condesce ended that era at the points of a very literal trident. Borders were drawn, a buffer zone established, and all official records of a different way of life either destroyed or classified beyond rational belief. There are no maps left of this land, except the ones Terezi traced herself before the coup, when the old Uchuukage set the record hall on fire before he fled to join his mistress beyond the rebellion's reach.
Terezi remembers nights creeping through the damp, lightless sewers of Kouin, carefully dislodging grates and hauling her way into the restricted sections of the record hall. Some of the commanders had argued against sending a wiggler into such danger, but no grown troll was small enough to slip through the confined spaces, and hardly any humans could navigate well enough in pitch black, let alone keep from getting dangerously chilled by the frigid water.
Terezi copied and stole information for half a sweep before she got caught.
No. Before she got careless. Before she got soft. Before she forgot who Vriska was -- who Vriska had always been -- and let too many hints slip out.
Before her sworn sister sold her out and smiled in the frozen, lifeless dark of the torture cells while Mindfang lowered the glowing poker to Terezi's eyes.
Terezi flops onto her back, squirms until her bedroll is almost tolerably arranged amidst the tiny sharp stones of the desert, and stares blankly upward toward the night sky. She can't quite remember how the constellations are arranged -- she'd never watched them much back when she still could, more interested in watching people, how they moved and talked and lied. Her Ancestor has a dragon for a lusus. Redglare must know how to navigate by the stars. Summoner-sensei probably knows as well -- she knows he's done aerial night missions. But asking them feels... not weak, no, but awkward. Pointless, maybe. Definitely silly.
She stifles a shiver, then wonders why she feels so cold. The desert night is chilly, but no worse than many things she's endured in the past.
"Can't sleep?"
Dave's voice is a low rasp beside her. His hand brushes against her side, human skin like a blast of fever warmth on the cool chitin of her hide.
"I am staying up to indulge in some quality stargazing!" Terezi says, falsely bright. "It's so hard in Kouin. The city lights get in the way."
Dave is silent for a moment. Then he says, "Awesome. Point out some constellations for me?"
Terezi closes her eyelids over the pits where her eyes used to be. Her lashes flutter against the silk of her blindfold.
"Okay," she says, and points randomly forward toward a spot on the horizon. "That is the sign of the Oceanic Dragon, which will one day eat the world, but until then serves as the guardian of the Empress of the Heavens. Do you see how it coils around the other stars, holding them trapped in its claws for the Empress's judgment?"
"Shit yeah, it's a thing of beauty," Dave agrees, edging closer to press his shoulder against hers. "Does it ever, you know, nibble on the evil criminal stars just a bit before the Empress pulls the chain and says, 'Bad dragon, no biscuit,' calls it back home and smacks its snout with--"
"A dragon could eat all three of us in a single bite," Karkat interrupts from Terezi's other side. "A nibble would just take off your stupid head and let the rest of us get some well-earned sleep."
"Don't be a killjoy, Vantas," Dave says.
"I'll kill anything I damn well want to," Karkat snaps -- quietly, though, inasmuch as he can ever manage quiet. "Besides, the Oceanic Dragon is off in that direction, numbglobes." He reaches up and wraps his fingers -- nearly human-warm, incongruous with the smooth normality of his chitin -- around Terezi's wrist and shifts her hand until her finger points back over her head toward the opposite horizon. "See? There. Twelve stars, that line going back to that triangle, as the body and tail. Those four -- it's a trapezoid, sort of -- as the claws. And then those other four -- no, Strider, those four, the ones shaped like a triangle with a dot off-center in the middle, you dumb cluckbeast -- as the head. The dot is the eye."
"It's kind of red," Dave says. "Weird. I thought stars were just plain old white."
"If we ever get wilderness missions, you are officially forbidden from navigating," Karkat says without heat.
Dave makes an odd grumbling noise, deprived of the explosion he was clearly aiming for. Terezi nudges her shoulder against him in consolation. He nudges back, and his hand drifts over to rest gently on her thigh.
"Thank you, Karkat," Terezi says. "It's been a long time since I went stargazing! It seems I've forgotten many things."
"Yeah, come on Vantas-sensei, school us in the ways of twinkly bird shit in the sky," Dave adds.
Karkat makes a grumbling noise nearly identical to Dave's. (Terezi is absolutely certain both of them would deny any similarity at great and verbally adroit length. This is an improvement! Last sweep, they would have denied it to the point of death.)
After a moment, though, Karkat shifts his grip on Terezi's wrist, moves her arm to point nearly straight overhead. "Up there is the Sword of Justice," he says, "those six stars like a cross. It's pointing toward the Betrayer" -- he shifts Terezi's arm downward a fraction -- "which is basically those four really bright stars that look like a box. There's a bunch of others that make his arms and legs, but fuck if I can remember useless crap like that."
"Ooh, great navigator of the wilderness, ooh."
"Shut up, douchnozzle. Off to the left is the Empress of Heaven herself, with her hand stretched toward--"
Terezi lies in the trackless waste, sandwiched between the living warmth of her teammates, and listens to Karkat paint an anchor in the sky.
---------------------------------------------
Inspired by the 7/8/13
15_minute_ficlets word #178: burnt---------------------------------------------
This was actually a 45-minute fic, but shoosh, I won't tell if you don't. ;-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-12 05:02 pm (UTC)Karkat was totally comforting Terezi in his awkward, grumbly, I-do-not-have-a-soft-fuzzy-center-underneath-all-the-angry-shoutiness-how-dare-you-insinuate-that sort of way, wasn't he. I mean, consciously and deliberately, not as a side-effect of "oh-my-god-you're-doing-it-wrong-you-moron" that he may or may not have been subconsciously aware of. (This time, that was just an excuse.)
And Dave knew the constellations already (he grew up in Time, after all. Raised by Bro. Why would he not know how to navigate by the stars?) but was humoring/annoying his teammates by pretending ignorance because diamonds. And possibly clubs.
The constellations described by Karkat and Terezi are very evocative of the implied folklore and ...mythscape? mythological worldview? mythos? of troll-human society, at least under the Condesce. That's very cool; so many people, when coming up with fictional constellations, just come up with a few random names and objects and stick them in the sky without thinking about the the stories, cultural values, and worldviews they signify, or how the stories of each constellation interacts with the others. (This is especially annoying in settings that have functional astrology, when you'd expect this sort of symbolism to be particularly important.)
Vriska...ouch. That's somehow even worse than what she did in canon, when she was acting in the heat of the moment. This Vriska, even if she was heavily indoctrinated (possibly brainwashed?) made a calculated decision in cold blood to betray Terezi.
Does this Terezi have synesthesia to substitute for vision? If not, is she going to develop it? Also, how does being blind and without a synesthetic sight-substitute impact her ability to function as a ninja?
What is Karkat's life like under the new regime, considering he has the same blood color as the Lord of Time? (And now I can't stop picturing Signless as the Doctor. Better than Caliborn, I guess...)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-13 06:48 am (UTC)1. Yes, Karkat is intentionally comforting Terezi. (As was Dave -- though his response was to play along with her error, while Karkat corrected her instead. This probably says deep and important things about their respective relationships.)
2. Dave does not actually know much about constellations, and particularly not the stories behind them. What he knows is a few of the most obvious asterisms, and which to expect where in the sky based on the season and time of night. Bro taught him how to find north because that is a basic life skill (especially for a ninja in the rebellion), but the other stuff he learned from different people for unrelated reasons, and anything else would be a spoiler for HIS tragic angsty backstory. (Everyone on this team has a tragic angsty backstory. Yes, that includes the Summoner.)
3. Hey, if you're going to create constellations at you, you ought to do it right. Besides, myths and cultural stuff is like catnip for me. :-)
4. I will tell you now and for free that Vriska's smile was mostly a front to convince Mindfang that she was okay with the torture (and also a futile attempt to convince herself that she was okay with it). She did consciously decide to betray Terezi... but remember, also, that this is Vriska. She doesn't think about logical consequences, and I am fairly sure that she (stupidly and against all evidence) thought that she could persuade Terezi to switch sides -- using Terezi's capture as evidence that the rebellion was obviously doomed! -- and then they'd be partners again. Which... um... yeah, understanding people is not her forte.
5. Terezi is using the blindsight jutsu I developed for Sasuke in "What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed)." Think of it like Daredevil's radar/sonar thing -- chakra echolation processed through the visual centers of her brain to produce a faux-image of the surfaces and edges surrounding her. She has no color sense at all, though, and she misses that a LOT.
6. Karkat gets no official special treatment whatsoever, by dint of shouting down every attempt to give him any. The Sufferer tacitly agrees with this, since he's never offered any special perks beyond calling Karkat in for extremely awkward tea and conversation every couple months. They like meritocracy and democracy, thank you very much. (It's Lord of Space, actually -- the country is Uchuu no Kuni, and the ninja village is Kouingakure no Sato. Unless someone gives me a better translation of "Hidden Time" to use in this context. Internet translation is not very accurate, even if you double check by going from English to Japanese and then back again.)