[Fic] "Lemonade" chapter 15 -- BtVS/Gundam Wing/Naruto
Here is chapter 15 of "Lemonade." I am not switching this story up on my priority list. Sasuke's POV scene just happened to smack me in the face last night, so I finished this chapter. I am not at all sure that the scene is any good, but it wanted to be written, so here it is. *shrug*
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Lemonade
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Part XV: In which people talk a lot, again, with slightly more useful results
The door shut with a halfhearted click, but it felt ominously final.
Faith waited for her eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness. Luckily, Slayers had good night vision. After twenty seconds, she could see Duo and Sasuke as darker shapes against the faint light seeping through the timber ceiling.
"Shit, we forgot to plaster the roof," she muttered.
Duo sat down against the door. "Too late now. As guardian of this perilous gate, it falls upon me to forbid passage until such time as the present danger has passed away and joy returns to this benighted land!" He added something short in Japanese; Sasuke grunted.
"I swear to God, if you keep talking like that, I disclaim all responsibility for my reaction," Faith said, and slid down to sit on the hard-packed dirt. Her right hand landed on the blanket, which she wadded up and stuffed behind her back.
"I see. In that case, this is probably not the best moment to stick out my tongue and say, 'Nyah nyah, can't touch me!' is it?" Duo said, sounding thoughtful. "On the other hand, I doubt you can see if I'm sticking out my tongue, so as long as I don't say anything... well, the sky's the limit. Oh, the opportunities to practice silly faces! Fear my newfound freedom to cross my eyes without social disapproval! Mwahahaha!"
"Your maniacal laughter needs work," Faith said after a moment.
"Yeah, it never sounds right when I'm not actually killing people," Duo agreed. "Me, I think that's a good thing; it fools people into thinking I'm sane."
Sasuke asked something in Japanese, and Faith tuned the guys out, trying to blank her mind and let time slip around her. Outside, the leaves whispered restlessly.
"Hey, Faith?"
"Huh? What?"
"You are awake; that's good." The door rattled as Duo shifted. "Sasuke pointed out that we've told our vengeance stories, but you never shared yours. That ain't fair, and it's not good strategy either -- the Sarguls are from your world, so maybe you crossed them back in the day. We need all the intel we can get."
Faith knocked her head against the wall. "They want Willow. I never had much to do with her." Except that time in LA, of course -- that whole mess with Angelus -- but if the Sarguls were pissed off about that, she was pretty sure they'd have mentioned it by now. They were probably just mad about the baby Slayers, like every other demon in the fucking universe.
"Excuses, excuses. Come on, you're not gonna be a scaredy-cat, are you?" There was a smile in Duo's voice, but it probably didn't reach his eyes.
Faith flipped him the finger, knowing he couldn't see to call her on it. "Fine. You want my life story, you got it." But where to start? How far back to pick up the first threads?
Might as well go all the way. "You know what it's like in a city when you're a kid and no one wants you, right?"
"Yeah. It sucks."
"Damn straight," Faith agreed. "I was falling into the same shit that fucked up my mom, and I knew it, but I didn't know how to get out. Pritchard, my Watcher, tried to help. She was the first person who gave a damn about me, and I thought maybe I could live up to that... but a vamp killed her in front of me. After that, it was just one damn thing after another, never any breathing space.
"I lit out for California to get help from B, the other Slayer, but I killed a guy by accident and B made like I'd done it on purpose and kicked me out. Then I fell in with this guy, Dick Wilkins, but he was major bad news -- he set me up to fight B, and she put me in a coma for a year. Then she killed Dick. Which he deserved, but still..."
Faith closed her eyes, remembering the pain and the disorientation of waking up and learning that she was all alone in the world. Again. Like always. Duo murmured to Sasuke in Japanese, his voice even and non-judgmental. In the distance, thunder rolled and grumbled.
"When I woke up, I made like all my problems were B's fault and tried to kill her, which didn't work. Then I tried to make this other guy, Angel, kill me, but he wouldn't. He told me I'd fucked up, but I didn't have to stay in the dark forever. He was the first person since Pritchard who gave a damn. He believed, even though I'd tortured his friends. Shook the hell out of me."
"It's hard to live up to something like that," Duo agreed.
"Oh, shit yeah. But I had to try. I'm still trying." Faith scrubbed the back of her hand over her face, grateful for the darkness. She wasn't crying -- she didn't do tears -- but she didn't want to know what her expression must look like.
"Anyway, I went to prison for a couple years until the Council decided to kill me. Some friends sprung me and I helped B out with the mother of all apocalypses. But, you know, I'd had time to think, and I figured out that all the people I spent all that time hating -- they were symptoms, not the cause. The cause is the system."
She unclenched her fists and laid her hands flat on the ground to steady herself. "I can't do much about Boston, not yet. But Angel died in the middle of LA, fighting a demon army and a fucking dragon, and everyone decided it was a gas explosion and some Hollywood stunt gone wrong. Once we finish ripping up the last of the old Council and making sure the new Slayers get backup and paychecks, I'm going to set that record straight. Then I'm going to make sure nobody can keep ignoring what's in front of their faces. My world's at war -- it always has been -- and it's way past time for people to get off their fat asses and fight."
Faith bared her teeth in the smile she saved for killing blows. "That's my vengeance."
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Duo finished translating with only half his mind on finding the right words. The rest was busy comparing Faith's story to his own past and wondering how anyone managed to believe in a loving, omnipotent God when the world kept making people like them.
Faith was right; the system was fucked.
Thing was, he had no idea what to put in its place. Human nature being human nature, how the hell could you make a world that allowed for free will but kept assholes from finding loopholes and turning 'fair' into a mockery? How could you stop disease and earthquakes and storms and pressure leaks?
But if you didn't try, what the hell was the point? And how else did he justify himself, these days? He was... pruning the system. Duo grinned in the dark. Yeah. God's own gardener, pulling out tares from amongst the good grain, or something like that.
"You're wicked quiet over there," Faith said, accompanied by the sound of shifting fabric. She probably had the blanket, then. "Gonna render judgment?"
Duo shrugged luxuriously and stretched out flat on his back. "Nah, babe. 'Let he who is without sin' and all that."
Outside, wind moaned through the branches of the not-willows and sand rattled on the roof. A few grains sifted through the unmortared gaps and dusted his nose and mouth. Duo grimaced and brushed them away.
"That's not how it goes, you know," Faith said. "It's actually, 'So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."' But that's too convoluted, yeah? So everyone misquotes it." She laughed, short and harsh. "My mom loved that verse."
"Gets you out of jail free," Duo agreed. "But only if you ignore the rest of the story. How's that go, all the accusers realize they're a bunch of assholes and run off, and then Jesus says, 'I don't condemn you either; go and sin no more'?"
Faith laughed again, softer. "Pretty much. Set the bar high, didn't he? I used to think the woman didn't even try to stay clean once she got home, but now... I dunno, you'd have to be a real shitty person not to at least try to live up to faith like that."
Duo closed his eyes against the memory of Father Maxwell and Sister Helen. "Yeah. Practically inhuman."
The sky cracked open.
Well, not literally; it just sounded like that, what with the house-shaking clap of thunder and the sudden hammer of rain on the roof. And how weird was it that he felt a need to qualify that? He'd wondered, sometimes, in his more whimsical and/or sleep-deprived moments, what a crack in the sky might look like, but he'd never been in a situation where there was any danger of that metaphor coming true.
"Fuck," Faith muttered, barely audible over the rushing rattle of rain and wind. "I hate this."
Duo grinned and rolled sideways to kick Sasuke's shin. "Don't tell me you're scared of thunder. Hey, Sasuke, did you realize--"
"Don't touch me," Sasuke snapped in Japanese, at the same moment Faith snarled, "I'm not scared, you shithead." The languages crossed in Duo's mind and it took him several seconds to work out a coherent response.
"Touching isn't flirting," he murmured in Japanese, aiming for his best estimate of Sasuke's head. Then he switched back to English. "So what is your problem?"
"My problem is that there's a leak dripping on my head," Faith grumbled. "We are such idiots."
"Tension," Sasuke said, abruptly. "It's the lightning -- she feels the potential waiting to strike, and she wants to run or fight."
Duo blinked. "...And now you're an expert psychologist? When did that happen, Sasuke-kun?"
Sasuke hissed between his teeth, but either he didn't want to risk an awkward strike in the dark, or he was learning when not to take Duo too seriously. "It's not hard," he said. "It's what you want, too. So do I. It's what we're trained to do. But we're allies, and you can't fight a storm, and Faith isn't professional."
A crash of thunder punctuated his words.
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Sasuke's head ached from keeping Sharingan active in the draining field of this world, but he refused to give up his sight. It was too useful an advantage. He'd been throwing away too many advantages lately, reacting before he considered the implications. It was past time to stop letting Duo push him without striking back, allies or not.
Duo hummed, propping himself on his elbows. "I dunno. Her formal training's a bit sketchy, but she's been fighting for six years now, against demons and the kami only know what else, and she's still here and mostly sane, so..." He shrugged. "That's pretty damn professional, from one point of view."
A point of view that only made sense if he exchanged rationality for an extra helping of hormones. "She's planning to fight her entire world," Sasuke said, over a shrieking gust of wind. "That's not professional. That's insanity."
Duo pushed himself upright and leaned against the doorframe. "I have to disagree again. I think she's stone cold sane, at least on that subject. You heard what she said -- she wants to change the system, so no one else ever falls into the same trap she did. That's what I'm trying to do, too, in a way. See, I figured out, eventually, that vengeance isn't going to fix anything. Yeah, it makes me feel better for a little bit, and it cleans out some bastards who need killing, but if you don't change the system, new scum will just pop up in their places."
He kicked Sasuke's ankle, gently. "One guy went bad and killed your clan. You're going to kill him. Great. He deserves to die slow. But what are you doing to stop anyone else from going nuts and slaughtering some other family? If it happened once, it can happen again... and this time, people know it can be done. Some whack jobs take that sort of thing as a challenge."
Sasuke lost Sharingan in a blaze of rage.
He gripped the earth, digging his hands into the hard-packed ground, anchoring himself. He was not like Itachi. He would not kill Duo just for saying things he didn't want to hear. He would not lash out like a child at the suggestion that he wasn't thinking clearly, wasn't already doing more than anyone could expect of him.
"---- quiet," Faith said into a momentary lull in the wind. "Is ---- wrong?"
"Well, Sasuke-kun? Is anything wrong?" Duo asked. "C'mon, man, don't tell me I blundered into another tripwire."
And that was absolutely the final weight on the scale. He had not come so far, sacrificed so much, to be pitied like a delicate civilian who'd break under the slightest pressure. "I am okay," Sasuke said, in English. "I not want talk. Quiet good. Try sleep."
He knew Duo and Faith would have exchanged a condescending look if they'd been able to see. He didn't care. He wanted nothing to do with them. He didn't know why he kept forgetting that.
No. Be honest. He wanted to want nothing to do with them, but he'd never been anywhere near as good at standing alone as he'd tried to be. He'd always always craved friends, no matter how hard he tried to root that weakness out. He couldn't afford friends, not while Itachi was alive. They'd only hold him back, or wind up as pawns, used against him.
But.
Itachi wouldn't live forever. And what would happen then? Sasuke pressed the heels of his dirt-stained hands against his aching eyes, wondering why he'd never visualized the aftermath of victory. Was it because he thought he'd die killing his brother? Was it because he still, somewhere in his heart, didn't believe he could win?
No. He could win. He would win. Alone.
And then... maybe then he could try what Duo and Faith were doing. Maybe then he could try to make sure no one else followed Itachi's path. And that wasn't a mission he could win alone.
That was a perfect mission for Naruto and Sakura.
If he could go home. If Konoha took him back. If his teammates still wanted him. If.
It was nothing more than a dream. But what was it that Duo had said, after he apologized? The world would be a useless place if nobody ever told probability to mind its own business and forced their crazy dreams into reality. Naruto did that every day. If a dead-last idiot could manage the trick, surely Sasuke could, too.
"Here, Sasuke." Faith's voice, next to his ear, startled him into a reflexive strike; he caught the blow before he touched her. "Take the blanket." The brush of rough fabric against his shoulder gave context to the final word, and Sasuke gathered the blanket into his arms, oddly unsure how to react to her gesture.
"Thank you," he said, eventually.
Duo chuckled in his other ear. "You're learning. Good. It's about time."
Sasuke refused to dignify him with a response. There was no reason to give away even more advantages.
In the darkness, the wind shrieked and howled, accompanied by thunder, the hiss and rattle of sand, and the muttered lilt of Faith and Duo's conversation. Sasuke fell asleep to the song of the storm.
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End of Part XV
Back to part XIV
Continue to part XVI
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
---------------------------------------------
And now I am off to the library to return a book that I have decided not to finish reading. Then I should get some chores done, since it's my day off, but I suspect I'll probably watch the remaining half of The Sea Devils instead. (I should never have given in and started watching Doctor Who. It is still attempting to eat my brain... and even if I thwart that evil plan, it is slowly and surely succeeding in eating my budget. Woe!)
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Lemonade
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Part XV: In which people talk a lot, again, with slightly more useful results
The door shut with a halfhearted click, but it felt ominously final.
Faith waited for her eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness. Luckily, Slayers had good night vision. After twenty seconds, she could see Duo and Sasuke as darker shapes against the faint light seeping through the timber ceiling.
"Shit, we forgot to plaster the roof," she muttered.
Duo sat down against the door. "Too late now. As guardian of this perilous gate, it falls upon me to forbid passage until such time as the present danger has passed away and joy returns to this benighted land!" He added something short in Japanese; Sasuke grunted.
"I swear to God, if you keep talking like that, I disclaim all responsibility for my reaction," Faith said, and slid down to sit on the hard-packed dirt. Her right hand landed on the blanket, which she wadded up and stuffed behind her back.
"I see. In that case, this is probably not the best moment to stick out my tongue and say, 'Nyah nyah, can't touch me!' is it?" Duo said, sounding thoughtful. "On the other hand, I doubt you can see if I'm sticking out my tongue, so as long as I don't say anything... well, the sky's the limit. Oh, the opportunities to practice silly faces! Fear my newfound freedom to cross my eyes without social disapproval! Mwahahaha!"
"Your maniacal laughter needs work," Faith said after a moment.
"Yeah, it never sounds right when I'm not actually killing people," Duo agreed. "Me, I think that's a good thing; it fools people into thinking I'm sane."
Sasuke asked something in Japanese, and Faith tuned the guys out, trying to blank her mind and let time slip around her. Outside, the leaves whispered restlessly.
"Hey, Faith?"
"Huh? What?"
"You are awake; that's good." The door rattled as Duo shifted. "Sasuke pointed out that we've told our vengeance stories, but you never shared yours. That ain't fair, and it's not good strategy either -- the Sarguls are from your world, so maybe you crossed them back in the day. We need all the intel we can get."
Faith knocked her head against the wall. "They want Willow. I never had much to do with her." Except that time in LA, of course -- that whole mess with Angelus -- but if the Sarguls were pissed off about that, she was pretty sure they'd have mentioned it by now. They were probably just mad about the baby Slayers, like every other demon in the fucking universe.
"Excuses, excuses. Come on, you're not gonna be a scaredy-cat, are you?" There was a smile in Duo's voice, but it probably didn't reach his eyes.
Faith flipped him the finger, knowing he couldn't see to call her on it. "Fine. You want my life story, you got it." But where to start? How far back to pick up the first threads?
Might as well go all the way. "You know what it's like in a city when you're a kid and no one wants you, right?"
"Yeah. It sucks."
"Damn straight," Faith agreed. "I was falling into the same shit that fucked up my mom, and I knew it, but I didn't know how to get out. Pritchard, my Watcher, tried to help. She was the first person who gave a damn about me, and I thought maybe I could live up to that... but a vamp killed her in front of me. After that, it was just one damn thing after another, never any breathing space.
"I lit out for California to get help from B, the other Slayer, but I killed a guy by accident and B made like I'd done it on purpose and kicked me out. Then I fell in with this guy, Dick Wilkins, but he was major bad news -- he set me up to fight B, and she put me in a coma for a year. Then she killed Dick. Which he deserved, but still..."
Faith closed her eyes, remembering the pain and the disorientation of waking up and learning that she was all alone in the world. Again. Like always. Duo murmured to Sasuke in Japanese, his voice even and non-judgmental. In the distance, thunder rolled and grumbled.
"When I woke up, I made like all my problems were B's fault and tried to kill her, which didn't work. Then I tried to make this other guy, Angel, kill me, but he wouldn't. He told me I'd fucked up, but I didn't have to stay in the dark forever. He was the first person since Pritchard who gave a damn. He believed, even though I'd tortured his friends. Shook the hell out of me."
"It's hard to live up to something like that," Duo agreed.
"Oh, shit yeah. But I had to try. I'm still trying." Faith scrubbed the back of her hand over her face, grateful for the darkness. She wasn't crying -- she didn't do tears -- but she didn't want to know what her expression must look like.
"Anyway, I went to prison for a couple years until the Council decided to kill me. Some friends sprung me and I helped B out with the mother of all apocalypses. But, you know, I'd had time to think, and I figured out that all the people I spent all that time hating -- they were symptoms, not the cause. The cause is the system."
She unclenched her fists and laid her hands flat on the ground to steady herself. "I can't do much about Boston, not yet. But Angel died in the middle of LA, fighting a demon army and a fucking dragon, and everyone decided it was a gas explosion and some Hollywood stunt gone wrong. Once we finish ripping up the last of the old Council and making sure the new Slayers get backup and paychecks, I'm going to set that record straight. Then I'm going to make sure nobody can keep ignoring what's in front of their faces. My world's at war -- it always has been -- and it's way past time for people to get off their fat asses and fight."
Faith bared her teeth in the smile she saved for killing blows. "That's my vengeance."
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Duo finished translating with only half his mind on finding the right words. The rest was busy comparing Faith's story to his own past and wondering how anyone managed to believe in a loving, omnipotent God when the world kept making people like them.
Faith was right; the system was fucked.
Thing was, he had no idea what to put in its place. Human nature being human nature, how the hell could you make a world that allowed for free will but kept assholes from finding loopholes and turning 'fair' into a mockery? How could you stop disease and earthquakes and storms and pressure leaks?
But if you didn't try, what the hell was the point? And how else did he justify himself, these days? He was... pruning the system. Duo grinned in the dark. Yeah. God's own gardener, pulling out tares from amongst the good grain, or something like that.
"You're wicked quiet over there," Faith said, accompanied by the sound of shifting fabric. She probably had the blanket, then. "Gonna render judgment?"
Duo shrugged luxuriously and stretched out flat on his back. "Nah, babe. 'Let he who is without sin' and all that."
Outside, wind moaned through the branches of the not-willows and sand rattled on the roof. A few grains sifted through the unmortared gaps and dusted his nose and mouth. Duo grimaced and brushed them away.
"That's not how it goes, you know," Faith said. "It's actually, 'So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."' But that's too convoluted, yeah? So everyone misquotes it." She laughed, short and harsh. "My mom loved that verse."
"Gets you out of jail free," Duo agreed. "But only if you ignore the rest of the story. How's that go, all the accusers realize they're a bunch of assholes and run off, and then Jesus says, 'I don't condemn you either; go and sin no more'?"
Faith laughed again, softer. "Pretty much. Set the bar high, didn't he? I used to think the woman didn't even try to stay clean once she got home, but now... I dunno, you'd have to be a real shitty person not to at least try to live up to faith like that."
Duo closed his eyes against the memory of Father Maxwell and Sister Helen. "Yeah. Practically inhuman."
The sky cracked open.
Well, not literally; it just sounded like that, what with the house-shaking clap of thunder and the sudden hammer of rain on the roof. And how weird was it that he felt a need to qualify that? He'd wondered, sometimes, in his more whimsical and/or sleep-deprived moments, what a crack in the sky might look like, but he'd never been in a situation where there was any danger of that metaphor coming true.
"Fuck," Faith muttered, barely audible over the rushing rattle of rain and wind. "I hate this."
Duo grinned and rolled sideways to kick Sasuke's shin. "Don't tell me you're scared of thunder. Hey, Sasuke, did you realize--"
"Don't touch me," Sasuke snapped in Japanese, at the same moment Faith snarled, "I'm not scared, you shithead." The languages crossed in Duo's mind and it took him several seconds to work out a coherent response.
"Touching isn't flirting," he murmured in Japanese, aiming for his best estimate of Sasuke's head. Then he switched back to English. "So what is your problem?"
"My problem is that there's a leak dripping on my head," Faith grumbled. "We are such idiots."
"Tension," Sasuke said, abruptly. "It's the lightning -- she feels the potential waiting to strike, and she wants to run or fight."
Duo blinked. "...And now you're an expert psychologist? When did that happen, Sasuke-kun?"
Sasuke hissed between his teeth, but either he didn't want to risk an awkward strike in the dark, or he was learning when not to take Duo too seriously. "It's not hard," he said. "It's what you want, too. So do I. It's what we're trained to do. But we're allies, and you can't fight a storm, and Faith isn't professional."
A crash of thunder punctuated his words.
---------------------------------------------
Sasuke's head ached from keeping Sharingan active in the draining field of this world, but he refused to give up his sight. It was too useful an advantage. He'd been throwing away too many advantages lately, reacting before he considered the implications. It was past time to stop letting Duo push him without striking back, allies or not.
Duo hummed, propping himself on his elbows. "I dunno. Her formal training's a bit sketchy, but she's been fighting for six years now, against demons and the kami only know what else, and she's still here and mostly sane, so..." He shrugged. "That's pretty damn professional, from one point of view."
A point of view that only made sense if he exchanged rationality for an extra helping of hormones. "She's planning to fight her entire world," Sasuke said, over a shrieking gust of wind. "That's not professional. That's insanity."
Duo pushed himself upright and leaned against the doorframe. "I have to disagree again. I think she's stone cold sane, at least on that subject. You heard what she said -- she wants to change the system, so no one else ever falls into the same trap she did. That's what I'm trying to do, too, in a way. See, I figured out, eventually, that vengeance isn't going to fix anything. Yeah, it makes me feel better for a little bit, and it cleans out some bastards who need killing, but if you don't change the system, new scum will just pop up in their places."
He kicked Sasuke's ankle, gently. "One guy went bad and killed your clan. You're going to kill him. Great. He deserves to die slow. But what are you doing to stop anyone else from going nuts and slaughtering some other family? If it happened once, it can happen again... and this time, people know it can be done. Some whack jobs take that sort of thing as a challenge."
Sasuke lost Sharingan in a blaze of rage.
He gripped the earth, digging his hands into the hard-packed ground, anchoring himself. He was not like Itachi. He would not kill Duo just for saying things he didn't want to hear. He would not lash out like a child at the suggestion that he wasn't thinking clearly, wasn't already doing more than anyone could expect of him.
"---- quiet," Faith said into a momentary lull in the wind. "Is ---- wrong?"
"Well, Sasuke-kun? Is anything wrong?" Duo asked. "C'mon, man, don't tell me I blundered into another tripwire."
And that was absolutely the final weight on the scale. He had not come so far, sacrificed so much, to be pitied like a delicate civilian who'd break under the slightest pressure. "I am okay," Sasuke said, in English. "I not want talk. Quiet good. Try sleep."
He knew Duo and Faith would have exchanged a condescending look if they'd been able to see. He didn't care. He wanted nothing to do with them. He didn't know why he kept forgetting that.
No. Be honest. He wanted to want nothing to do with them, but he'd never been anywhere near as good at standing alone as he'd tried to be. He'd always always craved friends, no matter how hard he tried to root that weakness out. He couldn't afford friends, not while Itachi was alive. They'd only hold him back, or wind up as pawns, used against him.
But.
Itachi wouldn't live forever. And what would happen then? Sasuke pressed the heels of his dirt-stained hands against his aching eyes, wondering why he'd never visualized the aftermath of victory. Was it because he thought he'd die killing his brother? Was it because he still, somewhere in his heart, didn't believe he could win?
No. He could win. He would win. Alone.
And then... maybe then he could try what Duo and Faith were doing. Maybe then he could try to make sure no one else followed Itachi's path. And that wasn't a mission he could win alone.
That was a perfect mission for Naruto and Sakura.
If he could go home. If Konoha took him back. If his teammates still wanted him. If.
It was nothing more than a dream. But what was it that Duo had said, after he apologized? The world would be a useless place if nobody ever told probability to mind its own business and forced their crazy dreams into reality. Naruto did that every day. If a dead-last idiot could manage the trick, surely Sasuke could, too.
"Here, Sasuke." Faith's voice, next to his ear, startled him into a reflexive strike; he caught the blow before he touched her. "Take the blanket." The brush of rough fabric against his shoulder gave context to the final word, and Sasuke gathered the blanket into his arms, oddly unsure how to react to her gesture.
"Thank you," he said, eventually.
Duo chuckled in his other ear. "You're learning. Good. It's about time."
Sasuke refused to dignify him with a response. There was no reason to give away even more advantages.
In the darkness, the wind shrieked and howled, accompanied by thunder, the hiss and rattle of sand, and the muttered lilt of Faith and Duo's conversation. Sasuke fell asleep to the song of the storm.
---------------------------------------------
End of Part XV
Back to part XIV
Continue to part XVI
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
---------------------------------------------
And now I am off to the library to return a book that I have decided not to finish reading. Then I should get some chores done, since it's my day off, but I suspect I'll probably watch the remaining half of The Sea Devils instead. (I should never have given in and started watching Doctor Who. It is still attempting to eat my brain... and even if I thwart that evil plan, it is slowly and surely succeeding in eating my budget. Woe!)