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Entry tags:
Monthly Word Count - April
EDIT: OH WAIT I FORGOT THIS BIT. I DID write some Teamwork proper this month! Woohoo 15 417 words.
Anyway.
Completed and posted:
-Tripletsverse - Names Redux (Kyuubi-POV Gen-ish) (1 147 words)
-Teamwork Sidefic: Grandmother Cat's wedding invitation (gen) (1 191 words)
-Restore chapter 8.2 (Sephiroth&Aeris) (3 114 words)
-Genderbent Teamwork AU - Proposals (Naruto POV) (1 929 words)
Incomplete:
-FF7 Daemon AU; Tifa&Breon in Cloud's head in the Lifestream (2 002 words)
-Random sequelthing for this baby meme SakuHina ficlet. (288 words) (everyone seemed to think the ficlet implied Hinata was gonna die, and when I read over I realized why -- my bad XD I intended for her to pull through. This is gonna need a rewrite. Anyway the sequelthing is turning somewhat pre-naruhinasaku on me. Weirdness.)
-FF7 Restoreverse: added a few lines to a Tifa&Sephiroth thing that then decided to tell me HEY I COULD TOTALLY BECOME AN EPIC HORROR/SURVIVAL ACTION SCENE AND ALSO BE PART OF THE FIC PROPER. I'm still chewing on that one. (280 words)
-Teamwork AU porn (4 708 words, mostly complete but needs some tweaking. Oh, by the way... it's really not what I'd call happy!porn. D: )
-Teamwork Proper! :D :D :D (only 754 words, and not a complete scene either boohoo. But still something?)
Teasers:
Tifa&Breon in Cloud's head in the Lifestream
The Cloud on the ground climbed to his feet. His head hung, his shoulders were slumped, but he moved under his own power. Tifa forced a smile.
Perhaps if she pretended that Cloud's daemon was a, a butterfly, or a very small lizard, it would be fine to see him moving around without, like a man with a gaping hole for a chest. (But it wasn't, it wasn't, Skally was Cloud and Cloud was Skally, and Skally was a cuahl and nothing else, elegant and compact and falsely slender, deadly to her enemies and mama-cat to those she allowed in.)
"Five years ago," said Breon in his calm, measured baritone, "two men from SOLDIER came. One of them was Sephiroth. One of them..."
"Can you," Tifa continued in something that came too close to a whisper, "can you tell me again what happened?"
Cloud flickered from view, reappeared a couple feet to the side. A second later a black-clad man and a smoke-gray beast flickered into existence right under the town's gate.
This... Not in word, no, but it was Cloud's answer to her, proof that he could hear her, understand her. Tifa breathed out slowly and she and her daemon stepped off to the side of the road to watch the scene unfold.
If Sephiroth had stretched out his hand, his leather-clad fingertips might have brushed against silvered fur. He didn't. Never even looked. He turned to look back at the road and the huge wolflike beast didn't, and he said something about hometowns and his parents. His mother was dead, and the thought of his father made him laugh in a way that made her horribly uncomfortable. It was full of sharp edges and black irony.
"To tell you the truth, Cloud, I thought he was very cold. I remember, I felt..." He never did acknowledge his daemon, in any of her memories. She'd put it down to military reserve.
Two grunts walked up first, one with a small terrier and the other with a yellow chocobo, and then another Cloud came up the road, swaggering and so alive she would have known he was a fake even with the blurry-edged cuahl flanking him. The ghost-Cloud shuffled his way to them and melted into the memory-Cloud, his hand twitching as it passed by Skally's memory.
The rest of the scene was so crisp, but her markings were blurred.
"This is not Skally," Breon whispered.
The shape was about right. The size, the way she walked. It was like looking at any random animal from the jungle, like someone had plucked a trained one from a zoo and switched it on him behind his back. Not anyone's soul, just a beast.
"No, Cloud," she said, as gently as she could, and knew that later on when she had nightmares about the whole thing this moment would have a special place.
- gasp Hinata got Sakura pregnant :o
He opens and closes his mouth carp-like for at least a whole minute before he can find his words. Of course the first thing he says is, "OH MY GOD HINATA-CHAN DID GET SAKURA-CHAN PREGNANT," which, thankfully enough, the rest of the hospital already knew, seeing as it's only been a topic of gossip for the last, oh, two months. Almost three. Sakura rolls her eyes, taps Hinata's arm so that she hand her that novel Sakura's been reading, and flings it at his head.- restoreverse Tifa&Sephiroth
"Ow," Naruto says, sulkily, and picks up his hat from the floor. Sakura glowers at him over the curve of her belly.
"You're lucky I can't leave that bed," she growls. Hinata hangs her head guiltily, and Sakura sighs and nudges her so she can flick the Hyuuga head of clan a reassuring little smile.
"Man. Have diplomatic whatsits out of the village for a couple months and when you come back your two girl buddies are making a family together."
But Naruto is smiling as he says that, rueful and quiet as he rarely is. He drops the book back on Sakura's mattress, even though he likely knows it'll fly back at his head soonish, and he sits at her side, on the other side from Hinata's usual spot.
"How are you feeling?"
Sakura could mention how precariously attached the placenta is and how she's on bed rest for the remainder of her term if she doesn't want to miscarry, but that would likely fly straight out of his head and do nothing but worry him. "Fine," she says. She doesn't mention the boredom, he'd take it upon himself to fix that and she's sure a Hokage has more pressing things to do with his day than to organize distractions -- they would no doubt get the nurses to hang him by his toes anyway.
He looks up at Hinata, and it's the same quiet, worried look. "Hinata-chan?"
For a second she hesitates, thrown off-balance by his attention, and Sakura feels a little nostalgic, bittersweet twinge. Ever since Hinata inherited the clan's leadership from her father, she's been growing away from her childhood, crippling shyness slowly mutated into quiet reserve. Sakura likes that. No one who really knows her can say that Hinata is weak-willed -- she's observant, diplomatic, polite, soft-voiced, but her resolve is clear. It seems only Naruto still has the power to fluster her.
"Ah... We've been working to root out the faction that prompted the attack and come to a better understanding. It's going well, though I might need the assistance of your negotiation specialists--"
"No, I didn't mean the politics, Hinata-chan. We can do that stuff later -- you're already penciled in, right, Friday or something? I meant you, you."
"Well," she said briskly, still trying to drill through the darkness underneath the Plate with her eyes. "This isn't the first time that happened. He'll be okay."- Teamwork AU porn.
Now if only she could find in the shadows a building taller than the rest, perhaps she could swing from the edge and onto it... she wasn't as resilient as a SOLDIER, but she'd gotten strong enough to deal with pretty steep falls. She tried yelling Cloud's name into the hole, but rather that resonating it felt like the darkness and the dust and rubble swallowed her voice, so that her loudest call seemed to die before it had travelled halfway down there. She heard no response.
"Can you hear him?" she asked through clenched teeth.
Sephiroth took a couple of steps closer to the edge and tilted his head, listening. "... No."
"Alright then." She shuffled forward to sit at the edge, legs dangling. "We've got to go."
"Wait," Sephiroth replied. She stiffened all over again, turned into a low crouch to face him.
"You're not staying up here alone, and I am going down to find Cloud." She calculated angles. If she pivoted on her toes and swept his knees out, she might dump him straight into the hole. More likely, he would land at the edge, on his back, but she could grab onto him and yank him overboard with her weight.
He arched an eyebrow like he could see what she was thinking and wasn't feeling especially threatened. "I was merely going to suggest that we call someone to inform them of our whereabouts first. It's doubtful the PHS network will pick up much under there."
Tifa reddened. "... Right."
"I'm sure you're not going to care, it's very weak of me," Haru tells Sasuke, almost casual. "I'm in love with you. It's not hero-worship. It's not a phase. I am not confused."- Teamwork chpt.10
Silence. Sasuke's expression doesn't change at all. Haru knows better than to think he didn't hear, or misunderstood. He probably suspected it a while ago. But it's alright (it's not, it hurts.) This isn't the reason Haru brought them both here.
"You don't mind fucking guys, but not me," he observes in the silence. "I'm not a worthy rival." His eyes hood briefly, cynical. "I'm a rival anyway. For her."
Sasuke's eyes narrow, his jaw tenses. He's heard Naruto's proclamations of love for Haru and date requests for years, they both know it. "Got a point?" he bites out.
As it happens, Haru does, so he keeps going, unhurried, laying it all open. "Now Naruto, she could be a rival -- she already is, in many ways -- but it always ends with your cock in her... So that's not really a loss, is it."
He's been taking step after step closer, and Sasuke would rather die than give any ground, so when Haru stops they're well in arm's reach of each other. He leans in, presses his lips to Sasuke's mouth. There's no response.
Hands cupping Sasuke's face, he lays it all open, his words like a scalpel, quiet words cutting precise and deep.
"She'd be a very bad Uchiha, but an excellent mother. You want that. She's strong. You want that. You hate that she likes me too. That she likes me best."
Behind him Naruto flinches, opens her mouth to protest, but Haru doesn't break eye contact with Sasuke -- can't afford to do it right now -- and she doesn't say anything in the end.
Earlier he told her, 'The problem is between him and me. You can't fix it for us, Naruto. But you can help me fix it. ... I'll need you to trust me.' And she does, and it makes him feel grateful, humbled, but he hates that it hurts her too.
They were three weeks into their month and up to six hours of training a day when Kakashi told them, "You're aware that you're likely going to go up against each other at some point."
Naruto dissipated the bunshin perched on Sakura's back as added weight for her pushups to let her sit up. Sasuke dissipated his own with a well-placed kick.
"Sixteen participants," Kakashi said. "The odds of two of you meeting in the first round are slightly under thirty percent. Assuming you all meet strangers, and you all win, the odds rise to forty-three percent in your second match. If you get as far as your third match you will have to fight a teammate." He gave them a long, sober look. "I think you'll all agree with me that not taking those matches seriously would be somewhat insulting."
Naruto opened his mouth to protest, that he always took his matches against Sasuke seriously...
Oh. Right. Sakura-chan was in the tournament too, this time around. He turned to look at her, startled, even though he had known that for a while. He'd just never...
His eyes slid down to her belly. A new, looser top hid the soft roundness he knew was underneath. She was staring straight at Kakashi with her chin set up, looking kind of mulish.
Insulting. Yeah. He could see that. He just... argh. It made him feel a little queasy.
"Alright," Sasuke said soberly. Naruto opened his mouth to protest -- did he have to agree so fast?! -- but then closed it.
There wasn't really a choice, was it? "Alright," he echoed.
Kakashi-sensei gave him a long, intense look, and then made a little "hmm" noise of acknowledgement, too cryptic to tell whether he believed Naruto. "Of course serious for a tournament is not serious for a life-or-death battle, so there are a few areas those of you bothered by such things can consider off-limit." A short pause. "Though if I were you I wouldn't count on your opponents having the same restraint if they get a free shot at your groin."
Naruto's legs snapped closed. Sasuke snorted at him, full of disdain at his squeamishness. Naruto glowered, almost wanted to accuse Sasuke of being a traitorous bastard and this being right up his alley. He didn't in the end, because fact of the matter was, Sasuke might have put an arm through his ribcage that one time but at least he had never kneed him in the crotch.
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Actually, he really wouldn't...I mean, sure, they would TRY to make his day as busy as every other Hokage, but come on...Kage Bushin No Jutsu, and suddenly he can take meetings all day, take out his paperwork all day, assign his missions and STILL have enough to annoy the hell out of his teammates. The man can be in as many places at once as he wants to be. Hell, he probably even makes the excuse that this makes assassination attempts neigh impossible because you could never be sure if it was him or a clone, and in an emergency multiple version of himself running around makes him easier to contact.
That won't save him from the wrath of the nurses, however....
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Because there are limits, you know?
Oh, love this line.
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Looking forward the most to Teamwork proper, of course, but also to the Teamwork AU not so happy porn! Eee!
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I'll say it flat out, my favorite was the Seph/Tifa snippet. The interaction between the two is so compelling. I think that's because we've got a fairly standard level of interaction set between him and the others but Tifa has the ability to be an unknown quantity. Anger is expected, hate even-- sure. But you don't get to be a martial arts master without learning to see underneath the surface. What Tifa will decide about what she finds out, I do wonder because it could open all kinds of doors. The others- Zack, Cloud and Aeris don't really have that kind of opportunity because their relationship with him already has a certain rhythms and expectations.
I love your Tifa. She's not even thinking twice about going down into a deep dark hole likely filled with monsters. Cloud's there and needs someone to watch his back, and it's as simple as that. Never mind she's also dragging Sephiroth with her. The man that destroyed her village and killed her best friend while trying to set the world on fire-- that's who she's taking with her down this dark hole. Because she'd trying to help protect the world from him, even if she won't kill him because she trusts Cloud, who trusts Zack and Aeris. That’s a hell of a lot of trust and guts.
The AU!porn ficlet was the other snippet that really caught my eye. The tension and screwed up-ness of it was palatable. You brought across the emptions really, really well in that. Poor Haru for being in that awkward love circle, but awesome Haru for willing to take what he can get and push for a little more. I feel like he is more subdued in this than he was as a woman. Those gender and lack of ‘manly’ power issues must have really crushed his self-esteem-- but not his determination. *cheers him on*
I uh, really liked it. *coughs embarrassedly* I hope you don’t mind the rampant speculation...um. Do you?.
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I think that's because we've got a fairly standard level of interaction set between him and the others but Tifa has the ability to be an unknown quantity. Anger is expected, hate even-- sure. But you don't get to be a martial arts master without learning to see underneath the surface. What Tifa will decide about what she finds out, I do wonder because it could open all kinds of doors. The others- Zack, Cloud and Aeris don't really have that kind of opportunity because their relationship with him already has a certain rhythms and expectations.
Oho, I never thought about it quite like that. That's a very good point. Though there's still the "you killed my father!!" thing, which uh well. XD She'll be dealing with that one for a while longer. I see Tifa as being extremely accepting and forgiving until you cross a line, and after that extremely not. Now the trick would be to get her back over that line. It's going to be hard. She's a mountain girl, they're stubborn as rocks. XD
I love your Tifa. She's not even thinking twice about going down into a deep dark hole likely filled with monsters.
Aww, thanks. XD I don't think Tifa's issues in the game were ever about physical danger -- she was the one who went and trained with a martial artist as a kid just because she wanted to, even though I can't imagine that it was a popular enough pastime in Nibelheim to go unremarked, and it's got to be a demanding sport where you likely hurt yourself a lot just practicing, all to learn how to hurt people better. It's mostly emotionally that she's more unsure and needs reassurance at times, and when it's a choice between standing there doing nothing and losing Cloud, well.
I'm really glad youre enjoying Haru! and yes, he's less outwardly emotional, simply because it's not encouraged in boys, especially in boys with pink hair, enough smarts and empathy to be somewhat sensitive, and no special kickass attributes. It doesn't mean his feelings are different or less powerful but it does mean he clamps down on them a lot more than girlSakura does.
*loves on you some more* yay commeeeeent~