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edenfallingI don't know where exactly Sasuke thinks he's taking this story -- he's the one I need to persuade in order to get a threesome out of this scenario -- but I'm willing to play along for now. I'm willing to play along with Faith, too, who keeps pulling minor character moments out of nowhere and acting like she can't understand why I'm surprised. Duo, on the other hand, needs to relearn his place. He is a character; I am the writer. He doesn't get to overrule my plot choices! And yet he keeps trying to derail my plans -- he's not supposed to think of ways to get out of the hell dimension before I'm ready to let Willow find them, you know!
Ah well, it's in-character for him to be clever and sneaky, and even if his plan succeeds, I'm sure I can work it in somehow. Outlines are never set in stone. *evil grin*
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Lemonade
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Part XII: in which three people lose their tempers
"You are a fucking idiot. I don't know what you said to Sasuke, but his reaction makes your idiocy pretty self-evident."
Duo grimaced, but didn't object.
"In fact," Faith continued, raising her head from Duo's lap and glaring at him, "you are such a fucking idiot that I have to get away from you for a while, until you're not so stupid it's contagious. If you're so professional, why the hell don't you know how to back off before you cross lines and break alliances apart?"
"Figure that out and I'll be first in line to hear the answer," Duo said, his mouth twisting ironically.
"Don't hold your breath." Faith stood, stretched the kinks out of her back, and checked her weapons. "For future reference, though, what was Sasuke yelling at me, and what did you say to him? I need to know so I don't make your mistake all over again."
Duo sighed and looked down at his empty hands. "He was annoyed that we had sex instead of securing the area or making plans -- he thinks it's a dangerous waste of time. Then I made a joke about robots and sex. It was nothing, just hot air, but I'd already teased him for sitting out and it looks like he's more sensitive on that topic than I thought." He shrugged. "My bad. And hey, as long as I'm spilling Sasuke's secrets, he's got a hang-up about teamwork and partners and shit -- my guess is that he either got betrayed or left his friends behind at some point -- so watch out for that too."
Faith turned the information around in her mind, testing its fit with her observations of Sasuke. Prickly, uptight, massive tunnel vision, paranoid, misanthropic... yeah, all that and a bag of chips. In retrospect, the wonder wasn't that he'd exploded, but that he'd taken so long before losing his temper. Especially with both her and Duo prodding at him all the time.
Duo was more at fault, since he could at least understand Sasuke, but she wasn't standing around pure as the driven snow either. God, when would she ever learn?
"Fuck it. You stay here and do whatever assassins and ninjas do to secure your secret campsites. I'm going to hunt down a scorpion or something and smash its brains out."
"Tension relief method number two," Duo said, and then slapped himself theatrically on the side of his head when Faith growled. "Right, backing off now, Lady Slayer, yes ma'am, on the double!"
"You couldn't quit joking to save your life, could you?" Faith grumbled.
"You'd be surprised," Duo said, his voice gone abruptly flat. His eyes fixed on some memory, dark and distant. "Then again, it's amazing how absurd war can be, and how easy it is to see the whole world skewed and surreal. Death's a damn funny thing from some points of view."
"Not any good ones."
Death was not cool. Death was not a joke. Death was Kakistos ripping her Watcher to bloody hunks of meat. Death was Alan Finch in the wrong place at the wrong time. Death was hundreds upon hundreds of vampires and demons, who'd had thoughts and personalities and goals until they met her; then they didn't have anything. Death was girls sitting in a classroom with expressions ranging from bored to eager to downright lustful, and those same faces gone tight with fear or slack with nobody there behind the eyes because she couldn't protect them all, couldn't cheat fate enough to carve experience into them without paying for it in blood.
"I'd argue that," Duo said, "but I get what you mean. Go on, find some dinner and grab Sasuke before he convinces himself he's better off alone. I'll sit here and practice not being stupid."
"Practice hard," Faith told him, and set off up the ridge, angling toward the far end of the lake. When she'd calmed down she'd look for Sasuke, but not just yet. First, she was going to kill something.
---------------------------------------------
"And that, Mister Maxwell, is why everyone always calls you an idiot," Duo told himself as Faith vanished into the trees. They made guns with safeties; why the hell couldn't mouths and brains come with a circuit-breaker? "Duo no baka. Zote, bobo, estúpido..." He repeated the thought in every other language he knew -- it came to sixteen for insults, though he only spoke five well enough to use in polite conversation. (His French was fluent, too, but polite was the last word on earth he'd use to describe the dialect he'd learned from Trowa.)
When he ran out of words, he laughed.
Life was like playing poker with the universe's best bluffer and a crooked dealer. You never knew what was lurking around the corner. He was a better guesser than most people -- he had to be, or he wouldn't have lived to his tenth birthday, let alone through two wars -- but an itchy sense of 'something's wrong' didn't give a person a hell of a lot to go on. He'd written this itch off as residual stress -- or an echo from being out of his whole dimension, for God's sake -- but life had called his bluff and Sasuke had stomped off to pitch a hissy fit.
"Never underestimate teenage melodrama and offended pride," Duo muttered, thinking back to the hare-brained things he and the other pilots had planned and pulled off during the wars.
Yeah, he'd put his foot in it.
On the other hand, it wasn't like he'd been wrong. Sasuke needed to vent some pressure as much as he and Faith did, and if he wouldn't cheer up or join them, then losing his temper was better than nothing. It broke his damned control; that was the important thing.
And arguments were fixable, especially when there were practical reasons drawing the three of them together. Duo nodded to himself. Yeah, they were all idiots -- pie in the face all round -- but what didn't kill you made you stronger and all that crap.
He made a private bet against the universe that he could pry Sasuke open before they got out of this fucked-up dimension. He'd probably lose -- betting against the house was a sucker's game -- but if he didn't try to keep things interesting, didn't try to lend a hand where it was needed, what was the point of recycling oxygen and trying not to cross moral lines in the sand?
If you were alive, you had to live, or you might as well be dead.
So. What could he do to be useful while Faith and Sasuke were doing anger-management therapy via bashing small creatures with rocks? "I should wash my damn jacket, that's what," Duo told himself, as he spotted the heap of fabric leaning against the tree trunk. The centipede steaks would store equally well (or equally badly, to be more accurate) on some stones in the cabin, and he could stop feeling so damn exposed with half his weapons in plain view.
Five minutes later, Duo waded into the lake, towing his liberated jacket behind him. He'd smelled worse things -- the sweet-sour metallic tang of rotting garbage piled hip deep in the back alleys of L2 came to mind -- but that was like saying negative thirty degrees was warmer than negative forty: technically true, but missing the point, which was that both temperatures were too fucking cold. Or, in this case, that his jacket reeked.
He bent down and scooped a handful of sand from the lake bottom. The two portal stones and his cross swung free of his chest, knocking against each other with faint metallic clicks. The stones gleamed in the harsh white sun.
Duo paused with his hand halfway to the surface.
"You know, if the Sarguls only had three portal stones, and if they're from Faith's world, and if one or two stones will just home in on their missing friends..."
Right. When Faith dragged Sasuke back, he was going to make mister magical ninja take a good hard look at these opals. Faith was pretty sure she'd get rescued, but pretty sure wasn't a hundred percent, and there was no point sitting around playing Rapunzel in her tower if you could break free on your own.
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Sasuke disliked deserts. He'd grown up in a country where trees constantly threatened to reclaim the cultivated lands, and Hidden Sound was even more heavily symbiotic with the forest. Besides, deserts reminded him of Gaara, and he didn't want to follow any of the chains of thought that lunatic led to.
He'd spent a long time teaching himself not to think about certain things.
The black rocks swallowed shadows, throwing off his sense of perspective unless he activated Sharingan. The point of this exercise was to find prey and kill it, not to exhaust himself -- he couldn't afford to lose his edge among uncertain allies -- so Sasuke pushed down his instinctive reliance on his bloodline limit. He refused to search out animals by feeling for chakra, either; he stretched his ears instead, listening for the scrabble of tiny claws or pincers, and occasionally turning over the more loosely grounded stones.
In the half hour since he'd left the valley, he'd found nothing but a nest of skittering insects that seemed like the miniature cousins of yesterday's centipede demon. He'd smashed them, methodically, one by one by one, until their tiny corpses stopped twitching and blood puddled in the depression where they'd hidden from the sun.
It didn't calm him at all.
Sasuke took three nearly soundless steps toward a large pile of rocks, and then stilled -- he listened for the bare edge of audibility -- he dug his toes into the sand, feeling for the faintest vibrations -- he watched for the smallest twitch of motion. One heartbeat, two, five, ten...
To his left, an indefinable quiver snagged his senses.
The stone flew back and a borrowed knife stabbed down, pinning the creature underneath to the earth. Sasuke crouched to examine his kill -- it resembled a crab, perhaps three hand-widths across the center of its shell, but its body tapered into a segmented tail at the rear, rather like a lobster or scorpion. The shell was dull purple, with rust-colored patches scattered across its back and brighter red streaks at the tips of its legs. The crab-thing's claws flexed, feebly; Sasuke snapped them off with the hilt of another knife. The creature twitched for another minute, and then subsided into death.
Behind him, footsteps crunched over the loose sand and gravel. "What is that?" Faith asked.
"You see, you say to me," Sasuke said without turning. He pulled the knife out; its edge grated against the crab-thing's cracked shell, and it was spotted red with blood. He scooped a handful of sand from beside his foot and began to scour the blade.
Faith crouched on the other side of the tiny hollow and poked at the crab-thing. "I've never ---- like this. Not ---- this, not ---- that. Demons." She made a disgusted noise, and then said, "Food?" Her tone implied that she didn't want to eat the creature.
"Maybe," Sasuke said, examining the knife for spots he'd need to sharpen again; it held an edge well for such poor-quality steel, but you couldn't drive a blade through something solid and not expect some nicks or dulling.
"Hey," Faith said, and snapped her fingers in his face. Sasuke looked up, trying to convey exactly how little he wanted to deal with her right now. She ignored his glare.
"I was an idiot," she said. "Duo was too. We didn't... we..." She trailed off, looking frustrated, and then muttered something too fast to be comprehensible. "Sasuke. Watch." She gestured with her hands, opening and closing them like mouths. "We talk, yeah? We say bad things, yeah? Sorry. We were idiots. We are sorry. See?" She smacked herself lightly on the side of her head. "Bad Faith, no fun for me."
Sasuke watched, silently.
Faith studied his face -- he held himself impassive -- and then shrugged. "Come back. We can't talk ----. Duo can translate."
Sasuke shook his head. He didn't need those two. Besides, they'd chosen a path and he'd chosen his; there was no point in trying to change things. Once they stopped feeling guilty for no reason, he could rejoin them and wait for Faith's friend to find her, but until then, it was better to stay away. That was best for everyone. He picked up the crab-thing and stood.
Faith caught his left arm at the elbow; her grip was light, but somehow Sasuke couldn't move. "Come back, Sasuke," she said again. "Please. I want to talk." Then she laughed, and let go of his arm to tap the back of her hand against his shoulder. "----, you have no water, and if Willow ---- portal, don't you want to be ---- to me? It will ---- time."
There was no pressure in her voice, no need. She wanted him to go with her, that was clear, but if he didn't, she wouldn't plead or fight. Circumstances had forced them together, but beyond that, beneath the surface, Faith didn't care about him one way or the other. Duo didn't either. They didn't know him enough to care.
"Okay," Sasuke said.
He spent the walk back to the lake wondering why he'd changed his mind.
---------------------------------------------
End of Chapter XII
Back to part XI
Continue to part XIII
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
---------------------------------------------
If anyone reading this knows Spanish and is willing to help me with occasional translations, please leave a comment! You see, I've hit the limit of my ability to fake knowledge of a language I don't speak. I'd be very grateful for any help!
Ah well, it's in-character for him to be clever and sneaky, and even if his plan succeeds, I'm sure I can work it in somehow. Outlines are never set in stone. *evil grin*
---------------------------------------------
Lemonade
---------------------------------------------
Part XII: in which three people lose their tempers
"You are a fucking idiot. I don't know what you said to Sasuke, but his reaction makes your idiocy pretty self-evident."
Duo grimaced, but didn't object.
"In fact," Faith continued, raising her head from Duo's lap and glaring at him, "you are such a fucking idiot that I have to get away from you for a while, until you're not so stupid it's contagious. If you're so professional, why the hell don't you know how to back off before you cross lines and break alliances apart?"
"Figure that out and I'll be first in line to hear the answer," Duo said, his mouth twisting ironically.
"Don't hold your breath." Faith stood, stretched the kinks out of her back, and checked her weapons. "For future reference, though, what was Sasuke yelling at me, and what did you say to him? I need to know so I don't make your mistake all over again."
Duo sighed and looked down at his empty hands. "He was annoyed that we had sex instead of securing the area or making plans -- he thinks it's a dangerous waste of time. Then I made a joke about robots and sex. It was nothing, just hot air, but I'd already teased him for sitting out and it looks like he's more sensitive on that topic than I thought." He shrugged. "My bad. And hey, as long as I'm spilling Sasuke's secrets, he's got a hang-up about teamwork and partners and shit -- my guess is that he either got betrayed or left his friends behind at some point -- so watch out for that too."
Faith turned the information around in her mind, testing its fit with her observations of Sasuke. Prickly, uptight, massive tunnel vision, paranoid, misanthropic... yeah, all that and a bag of chips. In retrospect, the wonder wasn't that he'd exploded, but that he'd taken so long before losing his temper. Especially with both her and Duo prodding at him all the time.
Duo was more at fault, since he could at least understand Sasuke, but she wasn't standing around pure as the driven snow either. God, when would she ever learn?
"Fuck it. You stay here and do whatever assassins and ninjas do to secure your secret campsites. I'm going to hunt down a scorpion or something and smash its brains out."
"Tension relief method number two," Duo said, and then slapped himself theatrically on the side of his head when Faith growled. "Right, backing off now, Lady Slayer, yes ma'am, on the double!"
"You couldn't quit joking to save your life, could you?" Faith grumbled.
"You'd be surprised," Duo said, his voice gone abruptly flat. His eyes fixed on some memory, dark and distant. "Then again, it's amazing how absurd war can be, and how easy it is to see the whole world skewed and surreal. Death's a damn funny thing from some points of view."
"Not any good ones."
Death was not cool. Death was not a joke. Death was Kakistos ripping her Watcher to bloody hunks of meat. Death was Alan Finch in the wrong place at the wrong time. Death was hundreds upon hundreds of vampires and demons, who'd had thoughts and personalities and goals until they met her; then they didn't have anything. Death was girls sitting in a classroom with expressions ranging from bored to eager to downright lustful, and those same faces gone tight with fear or slack with nobody there behind the eyes because she couldn't protect them all, couldn't cheat fate enough to carve experience into them without paying for it in blood.
"I'd argue that," Duo said, "but I get what you mean. Go on, find some dinner and grab Sasuke before he convinces himself he's better off alone. I'll sit here and practice not being stupid."
"Practice hard," Faith told him, and set off up the ridge, angling toward the far end of the lake. When she'd calmed down she'd look for Sasuke, but not just yet. First, she was going to kill something.
---------------------------------------------
"And that, Mister Maxwell, is why everyone always calls you an idiot," Duo told himself as Faith vanished into the trees. They made guns with safeties; why the hell couldn't mouths and brains come with a circuit-breaker? "Duo no baka. Zote, bobo, estúpido..." He repeated the thought in every other language he knew -- it came to sixteen for insults, though he only spoke five well enough to use in polite conversation. (His French was fluent, too, but polite was the last word on earth he'd use to describe the dialect he'd learned from Trowa.)
When he ran out of words, he laughed.
Life was like playing poker with the universe's best bluffer and a crooked dealer. You never knew what was lurking around the corner. He was a better guesser than most people -- he had to be, or he wouldn't have lived to his tenth birthday, let alone through two wars -- but an itchy sense of 'something's wrong' didn't give a person a hell of a lot to go on. He'd written this itch off as residual stress -- or an echo from being out of his whole dimension, for God's sake -- but life had called his bluff and Sasuke had stomped off to pitch a hissy fit.
"Never underestimate teenage melodrama and offended pride," Duo muttered, thinking back to the hare-brained things he and the other pilots had planned and pulled off during the wars.
Yeah, he'd put his foot in it.
On the other hand, it wasn't like he'd been wrong. Sasuke needed to vent some pressure as much as he and Faith did, and if he wouldn't cheer up or join them, then losing his temper was better than nothing. It broke his damned control; that was the important thing.
And arguments were fixable, especially when there were practical reasons drawing the three of them together. Duo nodded to himself. Yeah, they were all idiots -- pie in the face all round -- but what didn't kill you made you stronger and all that crap.
He made a private bet against the universe that he could pry Sasuke open before they got out of this fucked-up dimension. He'd probably lose -- betting against the house was a sucker's game -- but if he didn't try to keep things interesting, didn't try to lend a hand where it was needed, what was the point of recycling oxygen and trying not to cross moral lines in the sand?
If you were alive, you had to live, or you might as well be dead.
So. What could he do to be useful while Faith and Sasuke were doing anger-management therapy via bashing small creatures with rocks? "I should wash my damn jacket, that's what," Duo told himself, as he spotted the heap of fabric leaning against the tree trunk. The centipede steaks would store equally well (or equally badly, to be more accurate) on some stones in the cabin, and he could stop feeling so damn exposed with half his weapons in plain view.
Five minutes later, Duo waded into the lake, towing his liberated jacket behind him. He'd smelled worse things -- the sweet-sour metallic tang of rotting garbage piled hip deep in the back alleys of L2 came to mind -- but that was like saying negative thirty degrees was warmer than negative forty: technically true, but missing the point, which was that both temperatures were too fucking cold. Or, in this case, that his jacket reeked.
He bent down and scooped a handful of sand from the lake bottom. The two portal stones and his cross swung free of his chest, knocking against each other with faint metallic clicks. The stones gleamed in the harsh white sun.
Duo paused with his hand halfway to the surface.
"You know, if the Sarguls only had three portal stones, and if they're from Faith's world, and if one or two stones will just home in on their missing friends..."
Right. When Faith dragged Sasuke back, he was going to make mister magical ninja take a good hard look at these opals. Faith was pretty sure she'd get rescued, but pretty sure wasn't a hundred percent, and there was no point sitting around playing Rapunzel in her tower if you could break free on your own.
---------------------------------------------
Sasuke disliked deserts. He'd grown up in a country where trees constantly threatened to reclaim the cultivated lands, and Hidden Sound was even more heavily symbiotic with the forest. Besides, deserts reminded him of Gaara, and he didn't want to follow any of the chains of thought that lunatic led to.
He'd spent a long time teaching himself not to think about certain things.
The black rocks swallowed shadows, throwing off his sense of perspective unless he activated Sharingan. The point of this exercise was to find prey and kill it, not to exhaust himself -- he couldn't afford to lose his edge among uncertain allies -- so Sasuke pushed down his instinctive reliance on his bloodline limit. He refused to search out animals by feeling for chakra, either; he stretched his ears instead, listening for the scrabble of tiny claws or pincers, and occasionally turning over the more loosely grounded stones.
In the half hour since he'd left the valley, he'd found nothing but a nest of skittering insects that seemed like the miniature cousins of yesterday's centipede demon. He'd smashed them, methodically, one by one by one, until their tiny corpses stopped twitching and blood puddled in the depression where they'd hidden from the sun.
It didn't calm him at all.
Sasuke took three nearly soundless steps toward a large pile of rocks, and then stilled -- he listened for the bare edge of audibility -- he dug his toes into the sand, feeling for the faintest vibrations -- he watched for the smallest twitch of motion. One heartbeat, two, five, ten...
To his left, an indefinable quiver snagged his senses.
The stone flew back and a borrowed knife stabbed down, pinning the creature underneath to the earth. Sasuke crouched to examine his kill -- it resembled a crab, perhaps three hand-widths across the center of its shell, but its body tapered into a segmented tail at the rear, rather like a lobster or scorpion. The shell was dull purple, with rust-colored patches scattered across its back and brighter red streaks at the tips of its legs. The crab-thing's claws flexed, feebly; Sasuke snapped them off with the hilt of another knife. The creature twitched for another minute, and then subsided into death.
Behind him, footsteps crunched over the loose sand and gravel. "What is that?" Faith asked.
"You see, you say to me," Sasuke said without turning. He pulled the knife out; its edge grated against the crab-thing's cracked shell, and it was spotted red with blood. He scooped a handful of sand from beside his foot and began to scour the blade.
Faith crouched on the other side of the tiny hollow and poked at the crab-thing. "I've never ---- like this. Not ---- this, not ---- that. Demons." She made a disgusted noise, and then said, "Food?" Her tone implied that she didn't want to eat the creature.
"Maybe," Sasuke said, examining the knife for spots he'd need to sharpen again; it held an edge well for such poor-quality steel, but you couldn't drive a blade through something solid and not expect some nicks or dulling.
"Hey," Faith said, and snapped her fingers in his face. Sasuke looked up, trying to convey exactly how little he wanted to deal with her right now. She ignored his glare.
"I was an idiot," she said. "Duo was too. We didn't... we..." She trailed off, looking frustrated, and then muttered something too fast to be comprehensible. "Sasuke. Watch." She gestured with her hands, opening and closing them like mouths. "We talk, yeah? We say bad things, yeah? Sorry. We were idiots. We are sorry. See?" She smacked herself lightly on the side of her head. "Bad Faith, no fun for me."
Sasuke watched, silently.
Faith studied his face -- he held himself impassive -- and then shrugged. "Come back. We can't talk ----. Duo can translate."
Sasuke shook his head. He didn't need those two. Besides, they'd chosen a path and he'd chosen his; there was no point in trying to change things. Once they stopped feeling guilty for no reason, he could rejoin them and wait for Faith's friend to find her, but until then, it was better to stay away. That was best for everyone. He picked up the crab-thing and stood.
Faith caught his left arm at the elbow; her grip was light, but somehow Sasuke couldn't move. "Come back, Sasuke," she said again. "Please. I want to talk." Then she laughed, and let go of his arm to tap the back of her hand against his shoulder. "----, you have no water, and if Willow ---- portal, don't you want to be ---- to me? It will ---- time."
There was no pressure in her voice, no need. She wanted him to go with her, that was clear, but if he didn't, she wouldn't plead or fight. Circumstances had forced them together, but beyond that, beneath the surface, Faith didn't care about him one way or the other. Duo didn't either. They didn't know him enough to care.
"Okay," Sasuke said.
He spent the walk back to the lake wondering why he'd changed his mind.
---------------------------------------------
End of Chapter XII
Back to part XI
Continue to part XIII
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
---------------------------------------------
If anyone reading this knows Spanish and is willing to help me with occasional translations, please leave a comment! You see, I've hit the limit of my ability to fake knowledge of a language I don't speak. I'd be very grateful for any help!
