[Fic] "What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed)" -- Naruto
Remix reveal day! I wrote What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed): Madara lied about the eye transplant's effects. Captured and brought back to Konoha, Sasuke must adjust to blindness and his unexpected survival. Remix of Put a little fixing on it, by megyal. NaruSasu, 21,000 words. (And here is an alternate link that will get you a sidebar with links to navigate the collection.)
[ETA: The ever-so-slightly revised final version is now up on ff.net.]
[[ETA 2: As of 12/5/10, I finished the revisions I did not have time to make before the Remix Redux posting deadline, which means the AO3 and ff.net versions are now the exact same text, and the story is now 24,500 words long, plus two sidefics. *headdesk* Look, I never claimed brevity was my forte!]]
...
21,000 words. Twenty-one thousand words. Which I wrote in exactly two weeks, starting the night of May 9 and finishing at 4am on May 23. Actually, it's even worse than that. When I posted the rough draft on May 16, I had about 5,000 words of story plus 1,500 words of outline: scene overviews, some rough-sketch blocking, and occasional dialogue fragments. That means I wrote 16,000 words in one week. And given that on the afternoon of May 22, I had about 15,000 functional words (the ending sections being more a half-assed expansion of my outline than proper scenes), I wrote 6,000 words in one day. So yeah.
In all honesty, the story is so long because I didn't have time to make it shorter. I could likely cut at least a thousand words out of it without affecting the plot or character arcs. (Of course, if I start editing, I may well write a thousand new words to even out the difference in sensory description and Sasuke's obsession with knowing the exact dimensions of his surroundings between the start of the story and the end, but whatever.)
Um. Where was I?
I knew from the start that this was going to be a long story, partly because megyal's story is long (7,300 words), and partly because I wanted to show the gradual progression of Sasuke's emotional arc, which meant that if I wanted to be convincing, I couldn't shorthand the steps. But I was thinking 8,000 to 10,000 words -- maybe 12,000 tops. Instead What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed) is, by over 3,000 words, the longest oneshot I have ever written.***
I sincerely hope I never break that record again.
[ETA: And then I broke it less than a year and a half later with Out of Season, which was written for the 2011 Narnia Fic Exchange and is roughly 27,000 words long. Whoops! But I doubt I'll ever have the patience to write a 30,000 word story as a one-shot, so... *crosses fingers*]
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Okay, on to slightly more relevant points. As I said when I received my assignment, megyal and I share two fandoms: Naruto and Harry Potter. Remix Redux only promises that you will have one fandom in common with your remixee, so that was a pleasant surprise. Most of her stories are shipfic, however, and she has strong OTPs, while I prefer gen and world-building to romance. Her main pairings are Harry/Draco and Kakashi/Iruka, with a bit of Naruto/Sasuke on the side.
I like Harry/Draco, but oddly enough, I have never written them as a pure pairing -- it's either been subtext, or threesomes with Ginny or Luna. Also, I have been pulling away from HP over the past few years, and I wanted to make sure there were some Naruto fics in the Remix archive so it would continue to be a qualifying fandom next year. So I set her H/D stories aside in case I couldn't find any Naruto fic to work with.
I like both Kakashi and Iruka very much, but KakaIru is not a pairing that grabs me. (No Kakashi pairing is, actually.) This is because I view Kakashi as too emotionally damaged to maintain an intimate relationship where he has to actually talk to and live with an equal, and I like Iruka too much to wish him the heartache of trying to resolve Kakashi's issues. I am sure my real life baggage influences this, since my high school boyfriend had serious emotional trauma from a fucked up early adolescence, which he would not deal with nor talk about, except to me -- he expected me to be his absolution and to carry all the weight he pretended wasn't there. I liked him, but that relationship was beyond exhausting. So while I am happy to read KakaIru, I find it hard to believe in enough to write it.
Fortunately, there were three NaruSasu fics. :-)
More specifically, there were (Make things so) Complicated and Put a little fixing on it. My first impulse (otherwise known as the "brilliant, terrible, evil and hysterically entertaining thought") was to take (Make things so) Complicated and redo it as A) a story about Sakura realizing that Naruto is head over heels for Sasuke and rounding up a group of friends to serve as emotional support for Hinata when Hinata inevitably figures out the situation, and/or B) a story wherein Sakura has a crush on Hinata herself and is trying to get Naruto together with Sasuke so Hinata will stop pining after him and notice Sakura. But I couldn't get either of those ideas to coalesce into a useful plot, perhaps because I wanted to write them both but I couldn't get the ideas to resolve in tone between a serious story about female friendship and broken hearts, and a humorous romance that matched the tone of megyal's original story. It's a pity; that would have been an interesting story. :-\
Anyway, I set that idea aside and took another look at Put a little fixing on it, which I find structurally fascinating. It's told as an alternating series of scenes, one present-day, the other flashbacks. The POV also shifts among Iruka, Kakashi, Naruto, and Sasuke. What's even more interesting, to me, is that while the plot resolution happens in the present day thread, that's only the penultimate scene; the emotional resolution happens in the flashback thread, and is the end of the story. Ending in the past is an unusual choice, especially when you're telling the story of a successful relationship rather than a failed one.
Also, the story is constructed as a series of slow reveals. Each flashback scene explains the source of situations and dialogue we've just seen in the present day scenes, so we only gradually understand how and why Sasuke is in Konoha, the logic behind his current job, how he can maneuver despite his blindness, and, most importantly, the exact nature of his relationship with Naruto.
The timeline is a little hazy. The first section informs us that Kakashi has been Hokage for ten years; we later learn that Tsunade never woke from her coma, which means he took over shortly after Pain's invasion. Apparently Sasuke has been teaching at the academy for a year. Before that he spent a year living in Iruka's custody, and an unknown length of time locked up in jail -- I would guess between one and three years, but that's not made clear. So Naruto and Sasuke are probably around 27 years old, and Sasuke was still running around with Team Hawk when he was captured. Some of these details are artifacts of the time when the story was written vs. the publication of various manga chapters, but others -- like what Sasuke was doing between Pain's invasion and his capture -- are never explained.
Anyway. When I read Put a little fixing on it, my first thought was that I enjoyed it; it gave me a lovely warm feeling. If I had not been looking at it as a potential remix, I would probably have stopped there, but Remix is all about picking stories apart. So. My second thought was that I had no idea why Sasuke remained in Konoha after his release from prison -- in canon, he is so focused on revenge, and so far past accepting help, that I thought time locked up in a grim, dark cell (even with Naruto barging in as often as possible) might have embittered him further rather than cooling him down to something approaching civility. My third thought was that I wished Sakura and Sasuke had not been so awkward and bitter around each other, because NaruSasu story or not, I am first and foremost a fan of Team 7, which means I think all four bonds (NaruSasu, NaruSaku, SasuSaku, and NaruSasuSaku, whether platonic or romantic/sexual) are very, very important, and I don't want to see any of them strained. And my fourth thought was that while we saw Sasuke's initial reaction to his blindness and the jutsu that lets him work around it, we didn't see much of how he coped before Iruka taught him the chakra sonar.
What I decided to do was to explore Sasuke's blindness in a little more depth. Initially I thought he might find it weirdly freeing, since he physically couldn't carry out his revenge anymore, and that the attack on his students would force him to explain to Naruto that he didn't think he'd lost anything important, since what he gained was a life rather than just an existence. Those ideas fell to the side very quickly, since Sasuke insisted that being blind was no excuse for abandoning his goals. The emotional arc therefore became Sasuke slowly deciding to give up his revenge and stay in Konoha -- and to stay as Naruto's... something-or-other. *grin*
I did not just unspool megyal's story and write it chronologically. Instead, I blended the two story threads, so the emotional climax was a direct consequence of the action climax. I also kept the pattern of the ending, where the action plot resolves in the penultimate scene but the story doesn't end until Sasuke and Naruto complete their emotional arc. I split Sasuke's decision to stay between the action plot (where he makes that choice) and the emotional plot (where he reaffirms it by telling Naruto). He puts his decision into action first through violence, and then through gentleness. I like that balance, and the way it echoes the structure of megyal's fic.
I am not sure how apparent that echo is -- I think it may get lost in the sheer length of the story -- but it was important to me that it be there.
As part of blending the plots, I had to compress the time frame drastically, so instead of three or more years, my story takes place over... oh, eight months to a year, depending on how long Sasuke was teaching before it was his turn to make the monthly report. This means everyone is ten years younger, which was useful because it gave Naruto a reason to be awkward about his place in Konoha (what does he know about being a jounin-sensei, after all?) at the same time Sasuke was reevaluating his own place.
I also changed some other things. I rearranged the order of a few plot elements -- most notably by having Iruka teach Sasuke false-sight before Sakura examines his eyes. I created a new set of OCs to fill the roles of Naruto's genin team and Sasuke's favorite student. (I had three reasons for that. First, I couldn't resist naming Naruto's team with a silly phonetic pattern gag. Second, I started dreaming up sidefics while I was working on the remix and it felt rude to plot fic about megyal's OCs without asking her permission first. And third, if my story happens ten years before hers, logically Naruto and Sasuke cannot be teaching the same set of people... though that was more a rationalization after the fact. *grin*) I rewrote the second half of the action plot to make Sasuke confront the invaders more directly, and also just because Kirin is fucking awesome. Finally, I kept Sasuke and Sakura friendly -- though there's an undertone of pain to their relationship -- and went so far as to swap Sakura into Naruto's place for the scene in Kakashi's office. (There were plot reasons for that switch, but I also wanted to show Sasuke interacting with her. As I said, I am a Team 7 fan before I am a fan of any two-person subset of those three.)
What I think my story is mostly about, in the end, is how home is defined by people as much as by place, and how the Leaf-nin take advantage of that and slowly, carefully, and painstakingly help Sasuke rebuild his bonds to his friends and his community. Falling into what will most likely become a romantic/sexual relationship with Naruto is the main part of that, but still only one part. Sasuke's friendship with Sakura, the slightly prickly mutual respect he has with Iruka, his amusement at Kakashi, his somewhat distant concern for Naruto's genin, and his care for his students are also important -- which is why I mentioned them all at the climax of the action plot. To mangle a cliché, it takes a village to bring Sasuke home. *wry*
I am not especially good at writing romance or sexual attraction, so I was grateful that megyal's story was very low key in that department. I did, while making my initial outline, think Sasuke and Naruto might kiss after Sasuke's first day at the academy, and have sex after the fight at the bridge, but that turned out to be moving too fast. They never got further than kissing and holding hands.
But mostly What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed) is, as I said, a story about friendship and community. (In fact, I will tell you a secret: in my private thoughts, I call it "the story where Konoha redeems Sasuke with the power of Stockholm syndrome!" -- which is inappropriate, and I know it, but I cannot get the thought out of my head. Hopefully I have now transmitted the idea to you and it will leave me in peace. *grin*)
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I have at least three potential sidefics floating around in my head. One is about Iruka cleaning his house and setting it up for Sasuke to move in. (The room on the ground floor used to belong to his great-aunt -- who is, of course, Aunt Sadako from Lessons and The Way of the Apartment Manager, because I am nothing if not self-referential -- and Iruka has to take all her possessions and move them upstairs to his parents' old room, which he then locks.) The second is about Naruto and Sakura helping Sasuke move into his new apartment, arguing cheerfully all the while. And the third is about Naruto giving his genin the bell test, probably from the kids' point of view.
I will probably never write those, but it is, I think, a measure of how much I was eating, breathing, and sleeping this story by the end that they occurred to me at all. The world megyal created and I adapted became so real to me that it turned into something of a full-on secondary canon.
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***The second-longest oneshot I've written, incidentally, is Paint the Town, which is a 17,500 word Harry Potter fic. The third-longest is, I think, Finding Marea: Truth and Change in the Circle of Kemar, which is 16,500 words and is original fiction, not fanfic.
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[ETA: The ever-so-slightly revised final version is now up on ff.net.]
[[ETA 2: As of 12/5/10, I finished the revisions I did not have time to make before the Remix Redux posting deadline, which means the AO3 and ff.net versions are now the exact same text, and the story is now 24,500 words long, plus two sidefics. *headdesk* Look, I never claimed brevity was my forte!]]
...
21,000 words. Twenty-one thousand words. Which I wrote in exactly two weeks, starting the night of May 9 and finishing at 4am on May 23. Actually, it's even worse than that. When I posted the rough draft on May 16, I had about 5,000 words of story plus 1,500 words of outline: scene overviews, some rough-sketch blocking, and occasional dialogue fragments. That means I wrote 16,000 words in one week. And given that on the afternoon of May 22, I had about 15,000 functional words (the ending sections being more a half-assed expansion of my outline than proper scenes), I wrote 6,000 words in one day. So yeah.
In all honesty, the story is so long because I didn't have time to make it shorter. I could likely cut at least a thousand words out of it without affecting the plot or character arcs. (Of course, if I start editing, I may well write a thousand new words to even out the difference in sensory description and Sasuke's obsession with knowing the exact dimensions of his surroundings between the start of the story and the end, but whatever.)
Um. Where was I?
I knew from the start that this was going to be a long story, partly because megyal's story is long (7,300 words), and partly because I wanted to show the gradual progression of Sasuke's emotional arc, which meant that if I wanted to be convincing, I couldn't shorthand the steps. But I was thinking 8,000 to 10,000 words -- maybe 12,000 tops. Instead What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed) is, by over 3,000 words, the longest oneshot I have ever written.***
I sincerely hope I never break that record again.
[ETA: And then I broke it less than a year and a half later with Out of Season, which was written for the 2011 Narnia Fic Exchange and is roughly 27,000 words long. Whoops! But I doubt I'll ever have the patience to write a 30,000 word story as a one-shot, so... *crosses fingers*]
---------------
Okay, on to slightly more relevant points. As I said when I received my assignment, megyal and I share two fandoms: Naruto and Harry Potter. Remix Redux only promises that you will have one fandom in common with your remixee, so that was a pleasant surprise. Most of her stories are shipfic, however, and she has strong OTPs, while I prefer gen and world-building to romance. Her main pairings are Harry/Draco and Kakashi/Iruka, with a bit of Naruto/Sasuke on the side.
I like Harry/Draco, but oddly enough, I have never written them as a pure pairing -- it's either been subtext, or threesomes with Ginny or Luna. Also, I have been pulling away from HP over the past few years, and I wanted to make sure there were some Naruto fics in the Remix archive so it would continue to be a qualifying fandom next year. So I set her H/D stories aside in case I couldn't find any Naruto fic to work with.
I like both Kakashi and Iruka very much, but KakaIru is not a pairing that grabs me. (No Kakashi pairing is, actually.) This is because I view Kakashi as too emotionally damaged to maintain an intimate relationship where he has to actually talk to and live with an equal, and I like Iruka too much to wish him the heartache of trying to resolve Kakashi's issues. I am sure my real life baggage influences this, since my high school boyfriend had serious emotional trauma from a fucked up early adolescence, which he would not deal with nor talk about, except to me -- he expected me to be his absolution and to carry all the weight he pretended wasn't there. I liked him, but that relationship was beyond exhausting. So while I am happy to read KakaIru, I find it hard to believe in enough to write it.
Fortunately, there were three NaruSasu fics. :-)
More specifically, there were (Make things so) Complicated and Put a little fixing on it. My first impulse (otherwise known as the "brilliant, terrible, evil and hysterically entertaining thought") was to take (Make things so) Complicated and redo it as A) a story about Sakura realizing that Naruto is head over heels for Sasuke and rounding up a group of friends to serve as emotional support for Hinata when Hinata inevitably figures out the situation, and/or B) a story wherein Sakura has a crush on Hinata herself and is trying to get Naruto together with Sasuke so Hinata will stop pining after him and notice Sakura. But I couldn't get either of those ideas to coalesce into a useful plot, perhaps because I wanted to write them both but I couldn't get the ideas to resolve in tone between a serious story about female friendship and broken hearts, and a humorous romance that matched the tone of megyal's original story. It's a pity; that would have been an interesting story. :-\
Anyway, I set that idea aside and took another look at Put a little fixing on it, which I find structurally fascinating. It's told as an alternating series of scenes, one present-day, the other flashbacks. The POV also shifts among Iruka, Kakashi, Naruto, and Sasuke. What's even more interesting, to me, is that while the plot resolution happens in the present day thread, that's only the penultimate scene; the emotional resolution happens in the flashback thread, and is the end of the story. Ending in the past is an unusual choice, especially when you're telling the story of a successful relationship rather than a failed one.
Also, the story is constructed as a series of slow reveals. Each flashback scene explains the source of situations and dialogue we've just seen in the present day scenes, so we only gradually understand how and why Sasuke is in Konoha, the logic behind his current job, how he can maneuver despite his blindness, and, most importantly, the exact nature of his relationship with Naruto.
The timeline is a little hazy. The first section informs us that Kakashi has been Hokage for ten years; we later learn that Tsunade never woke from her coma, which means he took over shortly after Pain's invasion. Apparently Sasuke has been teaching at the academy for a year. Before that he spent a year living in Iruka's custody, and an unknown length of time locked up in jail -- I would guess between one and three years, but that's not made clear. So Naruto and Sasuke are probably around 27 years old, and Sasuke was still running around with Team Hawk when he was captured. Some of these details are artifacts of the time when the story was written vs. the publication of various manga chapters, but others -- like what Sasuke was doing between Pain's invasion and his capture -- are never explained.
Anyway. When I read Put a little fixing on it, my first thought was that I enjoyed it; it gave me a lovely warm feeling. If I had not been looking at it as a potential remix, I would probably have stopped there, but Remix is all about picking stories apart. So. My second thought was that I had no idea why Sasuke remained in Konoha after his release from prison -- in canon, he is so focused on revenge, and so far past accepting help, that I thought time locked up in a grim, dark cell (even with Naruto barging in as often as possible) might have embittered him further rather than cooling him down to something approaching civility. My third thought was that I wished Sakura and Sasuke had not been so awkward and bitter around each other, because NaruSasu story or not, I am first and foremost a fan of Team 7, which means I think all four bonds (NaruSasu, NaruSaku, SasuSaku, and NaruSasuSaku, whether platonic or romantic/sexual) are very, very important, and I don't want to see any of them strained. And my fourth thought was that while we saw Sasuke's initial reaction to his blindness and the jutsu that lets him work around it, we didn't see much of how he coped before Iruka taught him the chakra sonar.
What I decided to do was to explore Sasuke's blindness in a little more depth. Initially I thought he might find it weirdly freeing, since he physically couldn't carry out his revenge anymore, and that the attack on his students would force him to explain to Naruto that he didn't think he'd lost anything important, since what he gained was a life rather than just an existence. Those ideas fell to the side very quickly, since Sasuke insisted that being blind was no excuse for abandoning his goals. The emotional arc therefore became Sasuke slowly deciding to give up his revenge and stay in Konoha -- and to stay as Naruto's... something-or-other. *grin*
I did not just unspool megyal's story and write it chronologically. Instead, I blended the two story threads, so the emotional climax was a direct consequence of the action climax. I also kept the pattern of the ending, where the action plot resolves in the penultimate scene but the story doesn't end until Sasuke and Naruto complete their emotional arc. I split Sasuke's decision to stay between the action plot (where he makes that choice) and the emotional plot (where he reaffirms it by telling Naruto). He puts his decision into action first through violence, and then through gentleness. I like that balance, and the way it echoes the structure of megyal's fic.
I am not sure how apparent that echo is -- I think it may get lost in the sheer length of the story -- but it was important to me that it be there.
As part of blending the plots, I had to compress the time frame drastically, so instead of three or more years, my story takes place over... oh, eight months to a year, depending on how long Sasuke was teaching before it was his turn to make the monthly report. This means everyone is ten years younger, which was useful because it gave Naruto a reason to be awkward about his place in Konoha (what does he know about being a jounin-sensei, after all?) at the same time Sasuke was reevaluating his own place.
I also changed some other things. I rearranged the order of a few plot elements -- most notably by having Iruka teach Sasuke false-sight before Sakura examines his eyes. I created a new set of OCs to fill the roles of Naruto's genin team and Sasuke's favorite student. (I had three reasons for that. First, I couldn't resist naming Naruto's team with a silly phonetic pattern gag. Second, I started dreaming up sidefics while I was working on the remix and it felt rude to plot fic about megyal's OCs without asking her permission first. And third, if my story happens ten years before hers, logically Naruto and Sasuke cannot be teaching the same set of people... though that was more a rationalization after the fact. *grin*) I rewrote the second half of the action plot to make Sasuke confront the invaders more directly, and also just because Kirin is fucking awesome. Finally, I kept Sasuke and Sakura friendly -- though there's an undertone of pain to their relationship -- and went so far as to swap Sakura into Naruto's place for the scene in Kakashi's office. (There were plot reasons for that switch, but I also wanted to show Sasuke interacting with her. As I said, I am a Team 7 fan before I am a fan of any two-person subset of those three.)
What I think my story is mostly about, in the end, is how home is defined by people as much as by place, and how the Leaf-nin take advantage of that and slowly, carefully, and painstakingly help Sasuke rebuild his bonds to his friends and his community. Falling into what will most likely become a romantic/sexual relationship with Naruto is the main part of that, but still only one part. Sasuke's friendship with Sakura, the slightly prickly mutual respect he has with Iruka, his amusement at Kakashi, his somewhat distant concern for Naruto's genin, and his care for his students are also important -- which is why I mentioned them all at the climax of the action plot. To mangle a cliché, it takes a village to bring Sasuke home. *wry*
I am not especially good at writing romance or sexual attraction, so I was grateful that megyal's story was very low key in that department. I did, while making my initial outline, think Sasuke and Naruto might kiss after Sasuke's first day at the academy, and have sex after the fight at the bridge, but that turned out to be moving too fast. They never got further than kissing and holding hands.
But mostly What Isn't Broken (Can Still Be Fixed) is, as I said, a story about friendship and community. (In fact, I will tell you a secret: in my private thoughts, I call it "the story where Konoha redeems Sasuke with the power of Stockholm syndrome!" -- which is inappropriate, and I know it, but I cannot get the thought out of my head. Hopefully I have now transmitted the idea to you and it will leave me in peace. *grin*)
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I have at least three potential sidefics floating around in my head. One is about Iruka cleaning his house and setting it up for Sasuke to move in. (The room on the ground floor used to belong to his great-aunt -- who is, of course, Aunt Sadako from Lessons and The Way of the Apartment Manager, because I am nothing if not self-referential -- and Iruka has to take all her possessions and move them upstairs to his parents' old room, which he then locks.) The second is about Naruto and Sakura helping Sasuke move into his new apartment, arguing cheerfully all the while. And the third is about Naruto giving his genin the bell test, probably from the kids' point of view.
I will probably never write those, but it is, I think, a measure of how much I was eating, breathing, and sleeping this story by the end that they occurred to me at all. The world megyal created and I adapted became so real to me that it turned into something of a full-on secondary canon.
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***The second-longest oneshot I've written, incidentally, is Paint the Town, which is a 17,500 word Harry Potter fic. The third-longest is, I think, Finding Marea: Truth and Change in the Circle of Kemar, which is 16,500 words and is original fiction, not fanfic.
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