[Fic] "Narutostuck: The Mother of Necessity" -- Homestuck/Naruto
Here, have some Narutostuck backstory. (Nothing awful happens on-page, but some of the background implications are fairly skeevy... so fair warning for that, I guess?)
Trolls can't breed for bloodline limits, but humans can. The old regime is not kind in its methods. Roxy does what she can to spare Dirk the consequences. (975 words)
[ETA: The slightly-revised final version is now up on AO3.]
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Narutostuck: The Mother of Necessity
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You find Dirk holed up in the back room of a weapon-smith's workshop, futzing around with one of his goddamn puppets. You have no idea why he bothers with those things. He never makes them with any weapons or poisons to help in a fight. He doesn't even take advantage of the stupefied shock they induce in his opponents -- that vital minute while they try to wrap their heads around a guy using pornographic bits of cloth to mock them for no apparent reason -- to sneak in and eviscerate them or anything.
The guy has an inscrutable sense of humor, is what you're saying.
Also a smoking hot body, an unbreakable code of honor, a bleeding heart he doesn't hide half as well as he thinks he does, and a better than average ability to use Kouin's special repertoire of time-warping jutsu.
That last one is going to get him killed.
Which is why you're here.
You slap a quick genjutsu around the room, removing it from every level of perception you can think of and blurring the removal so nobody notices the misaligned surroundings. Dirk doesn't even blink, the bastard. So you nudge the puppet away with your toes -- tastefully painted in virulent pink just that vital legal fraction different from the Lady of Space's blood -- and drop into his lap all boneless seduction.
He raises one hand to scrub at the bandana keeping sweat and hair out of his eyes -- hey, there's a furnace in the next room, smithing is a hot business! -- and sighs.
"What is it this time, Roxy?"
"I'm fertile today," you tell him. "Been using the inducement jutsu and everything, so I'll probably catch with twins or more if you knock me up."
Dirk sighs again.
"I know," you say before he can let you down gently like he did the first time. (And the second time, and the third, and on another hundred before you caught on that it wasn't a joke to him; that he really would've tried to turn himself inside-out to make you happy, that he'd been nosing around mind-fuck genjutsu techniques way above his classification level.) "You can jerk off into a cup an' I'll take it from there. But you gotta do this with someone sooner or later. You're on the breeding list. You can't duck out forever. At least with me you know it means something, that you're more than livestock in the zoo, that I actually want the kids."
"Roxy, you don't need to--" he starts.
"I don't," you agree. "But I wanna. For you and for me, and I promise you -- I swear on my blood and my breath -- that we won't let the rugrats grow up the way we did. We are gonna overthrow that bitch and her minions if it's the last thing we do. But we're not ready yet, not anywhere near, and if you wanna live to see that day... this is what we've gotta do."
"Are you drunk?" he asks.
You flinch at the words. You've both danced around that issue so well and so long that to hear him say it, blunt and undeniable, is a cold slap in your face.
But yeah, it's a fair question.
"Not for two weeks now," you tell him. "I wouldn't fuck around with this. You know me better than that."
Dirk tugs you close, wraps an arm around your shoulders in an apologetic hug. "I had to ask," he says.
"Yeah, whatever, you're still an asshole," you say. "Come on, this is no place for romance. I got a room at Egbert's safehouse for the afternoon and night. You can beat off to my porn collection until dinner, and then we can go ogle Egbert and his baby half-bro for the night's inspiration."
"A woman after my own heart," Dirk says. Time stutters and blinks, and with no apparent transition he's on his feet with you slung over his shoulder, face perfectly positioned to stare at his ass. It flexes while he moves, darting from roof to roof from one end of Kouin toward the other. You womanfully restrain yourself from pinching him to test his muscle definition.
"You're sure you couldn't just wipe me off the list for a year or two?" he asks as he touches down on Egbert's roof.
You flip yourself forward, flinging your legs neatly through the air to land in a crouch behind him. You sigh. "Nah. I already did that last year. You can fall through the cracks once an' it's just administrative whoops. Try it again and somebody's gonna notice. No way in fuck am I gonna bring that kind of grief down on your ass."
"It's far too awesome an ass to suffer such a fate," Dirk agrees, tugging his bandana down to shade his eyes from the stabbing midday sun.
You slap that delicious ass casually as you both head toward the rooftop trapdoor. "Third best human ass in town, no question."
"First being Jake Harley and second being Egbert?" Dirk asks, time-stepping ahead of you to raise the door in a parody of samurai manners.
"Other way around," you correct. Dirk's snort of disagreement follows you as you leap down into the safehouse, and you gratefully fall into a technical argument over the relative virtues of the two men's posteriors rather than talk about the reason you're both here.
This isn't the way you wanted Dirk -- isn't the way you wanted to be a mom, either -- but you're a soldier of Hidden Time and an agent of the rebellion. You refuse to let soft civilian dreams get in the way of saving your best friend's life. You refuse to imagine a future where your children will resent you for the circumstances of their birth.
This is what you've been given.
You will make it work.
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Inspired by the 7/15/13
15_minute_ficlets word #179: strength
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For the record, Roxy and Dirk are cousins in this AU. Jane, Dadbert, and Jake are all half-siblings -- Dadbert is the child of Jane's father and Jake's mother (who were probably Alpha!John and Alpha!Jade but are definitely dead so it's not really relevant), so they are each related to him but not directly related to each other. Jane is Miss Not-Mentioned-In-This-Fic because her Lifey Thing caught the regime's attention when she was very young and she was conscripted into Kouin's version of Root. Whoops.
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In other news, I have three chapters of Secrets up on AO3 now. I also posted Restoration and Paint the Town over there. I've been manually posting chapters rather than importing from ff.net, partly because I want to look them over and make a few minor edits (mostly removing italics and a bit of adjusted punctuation), and partly because the line-breaks I use on ff.net are a response to the way that site strips code out of uploads and I'd rather not use them on other sites if I don't have to. (There are also a couple points in later chapters where Sir Vladislav crosses out some text. Since ff.net does not allow strikethrough text effects, I had to alter those lines when I posted there.)
Tangentially, I am fascinated to discover that AO3 hosts four other stories that include Harry/Luna/Draco. I am not the only person who has written that threesome! (I have never been certain, but I may have been the first person to do so back in 2005. Which is a weird thought.) I must go check these other stories out and see if they're any good...
ETA: I have read three of the four; the last is a WIP and the summary does not sound like my thing. I quite liked The Moon Is a Strange Mistress and thought Matrjoschka was interesting (though I'm annoyed at the misspellings in the quote line from "Erlkönig" -- you can google that in thirty seconds, it is not hard to fix). Contagious Madness, on the other hand, was written for a porn fest and it shows; there is no real setup and no real conclusion, just sex for the sake of sex. Which is fine, but not what I personally want out of rare pairing fic.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
Trolls can't breed for bloodline limits, but humans can. The old regime is not kind in its methods. Roxy does what she can to spare Dirk the consequences. (975 words)
[ETA: The slightly-revised final version is now up on AO3.]
---------------------------------------------
Narutostuck: The Mother of Necessity
---------------------------------------------
You find Dirk holed up in the back room of a weapon-smith's workshop, futzing around with one of his goddamn puppets. You have no idea why he bothers with those things. He never makes them with any weapons or poisons to help in a fight. He doesn't even take advantage of the stupefied shock they induce in his opponents -- that vital minute while they try to wrap their heads around a guy using pornographic bits of cloth to mock them for no apparent reason -- to sneak in and eviscerate them or anything.
The guy has an inscrutable sense of humor, is what you're saying.
Also a smoking hot body, an unbreakable code of honor, a bleeding heart he doesn't hide half as well as he thinks he does, and a better than average ability to use Kouin's special repertoire of time-warping jutsu.
That last one is going to get him killed.
Which is why you're here.
You slap a quick genjutsu around the room, removing it from every level of perception you can think of and blurring the removal so nobody notices the misaligned surroundings. Dirk doesn't even blink, the bastard. So you nudge the puppet away with your toes -- tastefully painted in virulent pink just that vital legal fraction different from the Lady of Space's blood -- and drop into his lap all boneless seduction.
He raises one hand to scrub at the bandana keeping sweat and hair out of his eyes -- hey, there's a furnace in the next room, smithing is a hot business! -- and sighs.
"What is it this time, Roxy?"
"I'm fertile today," you tell him. "Been using the inducement jutsu and everything, so I'll probably catch with twins or more if you knock me up."
Dirk sighs again.
"I know," you say before he can let you down gently like he did the first time. (And the second time, and the third, and on another hundred before you caught on that it wasn't a joke to him; that he really would've tried to turn himself inside-out to make you happy, that he'd been nosing around mind-fuck genjutsu techniques way above his classification level.) "You can jerk off into a cup an' I'll take it from there. But you gotta do this with someone sooner or later. You're on the breeding list. You can't duck out forever. At least with me you know it means something, that you're more than livestock in the zoo, that I actually want the kids."
"Roxy, you don't need to--" he starts.
"I don't," you agree. "But I wanna. For you and for me, and I promise you -- I swear on my blood and my breath -- that we won't let the rugrats grow up the way we did. We are gonna overthrow that bitch and her minions if it's the last thing we do. But we're not ready yet, not anywhere near, and if you wanna live to see that day... this is what we've gotta do."
"Are you drunk?" he asks.
You flinch at the words. You've both danced around that issue so well and so long that to hear him say it, blunt and undeniable, is a cold slap in your face.
But yeah, it's a fair question.
"Not for two weeks now," you tell him. "I wouldn't fuck around with this. You know me better than that."
Dirk tugs you close, wraps an arm around your shoulders in an apologetic hug. "I had to ask," he says.
"Yeah, whatever, you're still an asshole," you say. "Come on, this is no place for romance. I got a room at Egbert's safehouse for the afternoon and night. You can beat off to my porn collection until dinner, and then we can go ogle Egbert and his baby half-bro for the night's inspiration."
"A woman after my own heart," Dirk says. Time stutters and blinks, and with no apparent transition he's on his feet with you slung over his shoulder, face perfectly positioned to stare at his ass. It flexes while he moves, darting from roof to roof from one end of Kouin toward the other. You womanfully restrain yourself from pinching him to test his muscle definition.
"You're sure you couldn't just wipe me off the list for a year or two?" he asks as he touches down on Egbert's roof.
You flip yourself forward, flinging your legs neatly through the air to land in a crouch behind him. You sigh. "Nah. I already did that last year. You can fall through the cracks once an' it's just administrative whoops. Try it again and somebody's gonna notice. No way in fuck am I gonna bring that kind of grief down on your ass."
"It's far too awesome an ass to suffer such a fate," Dirk agrees, tugging his bandana down to shade his eyes from the stabbing midday sun.
You slap that delicious ass casually as you both head toward the rooftop trapdoor. "Third best human ass in town, no question."
"First being Jake Harley and second being Egbert?" Dirk asks, time-stepping ahead of you to raise the door in a parody of samurai manners.
"Other way around," you correct. Dirk's snort of disagreement follows you as you leap down into the safehouse, and you gratefully fall into a technical argument over the relative virtues of the two men's posteriors rather than talk about the reason you're both here.
This isn't the way you wanted Dirk -- isn't the way you wanted to be a mom, either -- but you're a soldier of Hidden Time and an agent of the rebellion. You refuse to let soft civilian dreams get in the way of saving your best friend's life. You refuse to imagine a future where your children will resent you for the circumstances of their birth.
This is what you've been given.
You will make it work.
---------------------------------------------
Inspired by the 7/15/13
15_minute_ficlets word #179: strength
---------------------------------------------
For the record, Roxy and Dirk are cousins in this AU. Jane, Dadbert, and Jake are all half-siblings -- Dadbert is the child of Jane's father and Jake's mother (who were probably Alpha!John and Alpha!Jade but are definitely dead so it's not really relevant), so they are each related to him but not directly related to each other. Jane is Miss Not-Mentioned-In-This-Fic because her Lifey Thing caught the regime's attention when she was very young and she was conscripted into Kouin's version of Root. Whoops.
---------------
In other news, I have three chapters of Secrets up on AO3 now. I also posted Restoration and Paint the Town over there. I've been manually posting chapters rather than importing from ff.net, partly because I want to look them over and make a few minor edits (mostly removing italics and a bit of adjusted punctuation), and partly because the line-breaks I use on ff.net are a response to the way that site strips code out of uploads and I'd rather not use them on other sites if I don't have to. (There are also a couple points in later chapters where Sir Vladislav crosses out some text. Since ff.net does not allow strikethrough text effects, I had to alter those lines when I posted there.)
Tangentially, I am fascinated to discover that AO3 hosts four other stories that include Harry/Luna/Draco. I am not the only person who has written that threesome! (I have never been certain, but I may have been the first person to do so back in 2005. Which is a weird thought.) I must go check these other stories out and see if they're any good...
ETA: I have read three of the four; the last is a WIP and the summary does not sound like my thing. I quite liked The Moon Is a Strange Mistress and thought Matrjoschka was interesting (though I'm annoyed at the misspellings in the quote line from "Erlkönig" -- you can google that in thirty seconds, it is not hard to fix). Contagious Madness, on the other hand, was written for a porn fest and it shows; there is no real setup and no real conclusion, just sex for the sake of sex. Which is fine, but not what I personally want out of rare pairing fic.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)