[drabbles] 10 minutes, joint with nthcoincident
More 10 minute drabbles with nthcoincident. I made a few minor edits and there are a bunch of fragments so consider yourself warned.
Before we get there I would just like to stop and give a brief explainer as to WHY YOU SHOULD READ nthcoincident if you haven't already. Two words I'll use to describe her fics are:
Her writing style is innovative and "curlique-esque", somewhat reminiscent of Toni Morrison in that it precipitates and hearkens back to the beginning, middle, and end of many different scenes. There is also the use of language, excellent word choice and with that an excellent use of description and detail. In particular mannerisms of certain characters as they interact (Madara untangling Mito's hair in A Loved Girl is probably my favorite, but check out Children of the Sun too), and more than that there is a definite and distinct life to the world she gives pre-Konoha. Traditions, cultural aspects, myths are told like they not only exist, but have existed for some time and carry the weight of oral stories. You also get a sense of this in her descriptions and scenes; types of brushes, inks, banners, swords are all imbued with a certain specificity and importance. Even more than that there is a sense of macroscopic wonder at each of these microscopic objects down to Mito doing writing exercises with a single-haired brush on the inside of a cowrie shell.
In comments I recently said "...to create a scene you need recognition of feelings, smells, places and from that and from the way you use them (style) you can distill some sort of substance. Unfortunately most people think it's the other way around, that starting from the theme of love or political unrest etc you build the plot like a castle from the ground up rather than say a tree with both obvious branches above and less obvious and greater depth below, but that it is all connected" and Nth is very much this type of organic writer, layers and layers of description and detail but all to drive in a point. If we look at her characterization of Mito, which imo is one of the fullest and most convincing characterizations of a character with such small screen time, there is the tragic back history but more than that her Mito foolishly writes the word 'Knowledge' into the cowrie shell. With it being written comes the complicated gamut of emotion connected with longing for it, the continuous marveling at it, and being obsessed by it almost to the point of madness when you do. In truth they remind me mostly of fables or legends, this brother in revenge did this to this brother, Odedipus, the 12 labors of Hercules when it was one of his first that already did him in; elements of horrible tragedy and the sublime magnificence, but they are also amazingly humanistic and personal. This is not a writer you see see everyday and if you haven't you're missing out. Also she is good at writing crazy hermits
The one where Madara is a lady
Hashirama makes a soft noise when they undress and Madara is finally bare in front of him. He'd seen Madara, hair in the water re-braiding it to be out of the way, the shoulder of a uniform down. It was a very peculiar picture, body crouched in the mist that hung at the shore of the great lake, something spectral and ghost-like. Lips colorless and hands white as they wrung the rope of hair out.
It's something else entirely when that figure comes to his tent in the middle of the night.It's cold out, right before fall. The villagers calling on his expertise to sap trees before they dry up and he and the Uchiha have spent all day helping them boil huge vats of pitch. Madara comes in and undresses in front of him, the heavy breastplate with the ties worn on the left side. Oh he thinks, oh when he sees her, her white form underneath it all. Madara doesn't smile, but she does watch him. Does make a sharp noise in her throat when he goes to his knees and puts his mouth on her. He's stoked fires all day, burning, being burned.
The one where Mito wins
"I'm sure you'll like her" is what he says with an easy smile. He's been smiling the whole morning; it makes your teeth hurt. You with your closed mouth little skepticism, your small mean words. He's been to whirlpool twice in the last two weeks, you offer to go with him. It's not like you haven't been before. That you hadn't been there at the beginning when they met, hadn't sat and complimented their small haphazard homes, the zen gardens built in the same manner, but the layout completely different. It's all round and round curling, the way she draws him in ("No, I'll be fine might interfere with our plans you know" he winks). How she marks him with her little archaic turns of phrase that you catch him practicing.
At the wedding you stand at his right. She's brought forward on a dais dressed in white and gold. The veil down, Hashirama sees her now with the blank cloth symbolizing purity, starting over, union, virginal, aching, tender, anew. But you, you standing at the side see the flash of her jewelry, her red hair as fine as yours, coiffed and up, on her face the sly hint of her mouth, painted, sly-edged, triumphant.
The one about Madara, that is not actually about Madara
He doesn't come from any of the big clans. He's not handsome, he's not br--. In the morning his father who is too drunk to go on patrol sometimes slurs at him, and his mother packs him rice and salty pickles made from green plums she gathered in early spring before they were ripe and the birds would get at them. Her toes in her plastic sandals curled precariously on the ladder's aluminum rungs as she bent and leaned to get even the ones at the top of the tree.
He stays extra time in the library before he goes home. The light waning in from the windows, the air dry and smelling of dust a little of mothballs and methanol. They talk about Madara in class of course, but it's all very curious. There's the story about the shodaime and him meeting on the battlefield, the signing of the treaty, the clearing of the forest (where Hashirama is to said have leaned on him when he was finished, leaned and said "Look what we have made".), then the cheerful building of the villages with an illustration everyone working industrially under the familiar cliff face. It's a little troubling, and the whole library doesn't have much on him, skipping from the founding to the first and second shinobi war, then the introduction of the Uchiha police force--a photograph, a sea of black heads, someone shaking hands with Tobirama.
He does find one paragraph written by one of the rogue Konoha historians, it goes like this: Uchiha Madara should be credited not only with the foundation of the leaf village, but with the system of economic militarization through which the shinobi world exists today--one cannot credit a wolf without teeth, no matter how much the rest of the body insists on forgetting their existence.
--their existence and this last phrase flits through his head over and over, so when someone in the back of the class whispers loudly "You know what I heard--I heard he was gay for Hashirama, that's why he was so angry when the First got married and left when the First's baby was born". He waits till recess then puts his fist through the boy's teeth. He's breathing hard and the teachers have to pull him off. They make him sit in the corner of the chemistry classroom until the end of the day, until one of them comes in and rubs down his knuckles with alcohol. It stings and he wants to cry, but he doesn't and when she finishes she ruffles his hair and says, "Now, now you know we shouldn't fight Danzo-san."
The one about shinobi clients
"Could I see a demonstration first?"
It's what they usually ask and it makes Madara go white with anger but Hashirama smiles drinks his tea and makes them wonderful impossible things, miniature houses with tiny wooden lattice screens waiting to be papered by tiny people, bonsai snapping their restraining wires curling up through walls taking over the garden in a riot. The great branches husbanded, interlocking.
It only sours later when he pretends to sip at the plum and rice wine offered to him in little cups made of bone ash porcelain, until they are tipsy with it, sloppy. They say things like "I suppose we should have expected some sort of union after all these years" or "Years ago--starving flea-ridden things--begging for someone to kill. I could have had my pick of any of you." He leaves them then, the servants in shadow in the wings, their great ruinous castles already coming down around them.
And Madara is usually waiting outside by then, talking to the horses. They stamp and snort when he gets close nostrils wide, black, and Madara is in among their great heavy bodies almost indistinguishable a little wild around the eyes.
Before we get there I would just like to stop and give a brief explainer as to WHY YOU SHOULD READ nthcoincident if you haven't already. Two words I'll use to describe her fics are:
Her writing style is innovative and "curlique-esque", somewhat reminiscent of Toni Morrison in that it precipitates and hearkens back to the beginning, middle, and end of many different scenes. There is also the use of language, excellent word choice and with that an excellent use of description and detail. In particular mannerisms of certain characters as they interact (Madara untangling Mito's hair in A Loved Girl is probably my favorite, but check out Children of the Sun too), and more than that there is a definite and distinct life to the world she gives pre-Konoha. Traditions, cultural aspects, myths are told like they not only exist, but have existed for some time and carry the weight of oral stories. You also get a sense of this in her descriptions and scenes; types of brushes, inks, banners, swords are all imbued with a certain specificity and importance. Even more than that there is a sense of macroscopic wonder at each of these microscopic objects down to Mito doing writing exercises with a single-haired brush on the inside of a cowrie shell.
In comments I recently said "...to create a scene you need recognition of feelings, smells, places and from that and from the way you use them (style) you can distill some sort of substance. Unfortunately most people think it's the other way around, that starting from the theme of love or political unrest etc you build the plot like a castle from the ground up rather than say a tree with both obvious branches above and less obvious and greater depth below, but that it is all connected" and Nth is very much this type of organic writer, layers and layers of description and detail but all to drive in a point. If we look at her characterization of Mito, which imo is one of the fullest and most convincing characterizations of a character with such small screen time, there is the tragic back history but more than that her Mito foolishly writes the word 'Knowledge' into the cowrie shell. With it being written comes the complicated gamut of emotion connected with longing for it, the continuous marveling at it, and being obsessed by it almost to the point of madness when you do. In truth they remind me mostly of fables or legends, this brother in revenge did this to this brother, Odedipus, the 12 labors of Hercules when it was one of his first that already did him in; elements of horrible tragedy and the sublime magnificence, but they are also amazingly humanistic and personal. This is not a writer you see see everyday and if you haven't you're missing out. Also she is good at writing crazy hermits
The one where Madara is a lady
Hashirama makes a soft noise when they undress and Madara is finally bare in front of him. He'd seen Madara, hair in the water re-braiding it to be out of the way, the shoulder of a uniform down. It was a very peculiar picture, body crouched in the mist that hung at the shore of the great lake, something spectral and ghost-like. Lips colorless and hands white as they wrung the rope of hair out.
It's something else entirely when that figure comes to his tent in the middle of the night.It's cold out, right before fall. The villagers calling on his expertise to sap trees before they dry up and he and the Uchiha have spent all day helping them boil huge vats of pitch. Madara comes in and undresses in front of him, the heavy breastplate with the ties worn on the left side. Oh he thinks, oh when he sees her, her white form underneath it all. Madara doesn't smile, but she does watch him. Does make a sharp noise in her throat when he goes to his knees and puts his mouth on her. He's stoked fires all day, burning, being burned.
The one where Mito wins
"I'm sure you'll like her" is what he says with an easy smile. He's been smiling the whole morning; it makes your teeth hurt. You with your closed mouth little skepticism, your small mean words. He's been to whirlpool twice in the last two weeks, you offer to go with him. It's not like you haven't been before. That you hadn't been there at the beginning when they met, hadn't sat and complimented their small haphazard homes, the zen gardens built in the same manner, but the layout completely different. It's all round and round curling, the way she draws him in ("No, I'll be fine might interfere with our plans you know" he winks). How she marks him with her little archaic turns of phrase that you catch him practicing.
At the wedding you stand at his right. She's brought forward on a dais dressed in white and gold. The veil down, Hashirama sees her now with the blank cloth symbolizing purity, starting over, union, virginal, aching, tender, anew. But you, you standing at the side see the flash of her jewelry, her red hair as fine as yours, coiffed and up, on her face the sly hint of her mouth, painted, sly-edged, triumphant.
The one about Madara, that is not actually about Madara
He doesn't come from any of the big clans. He's not handsome, he's not br--. In the morning his father who is too drunk to go on patrol sometimes slurs at him, and his mother packs him rice and salty pickles made from green plums she gathered in early spring before they were ripe and the birds would get at them. Her toes in her plastic sandals curled precariously on the ladder's aluminum rungs as she bent and leaned to get even the ones at the top of the tree.
He stays extra time in the library before he goes home. The light waning in from the windows, the air dry and smelling of dust a little of mothballs and methanol. They talk about Madara in class of course, but it's all very curious. There's the story about the shodaime and him meeting on the battlefield, the signing of the treaty, the clearing of the forest (where Hashirama is to said have leaned on him when he was finished, leaned and said "Look what we have made".), then the cheerful building of the villages with an illustration everyone working industrially under the familiar cliff face. It's a little troubling, and the whole library doesn't have much on him, skipping from the founding to the first and second shinobi war, then the introduction of the Uchiha police force--a photograph, a sea of black heads, someone shaking hands with Tobirama.
He does find one paragraph written by one of the rogue Konoha historians, it goes like this: Uchiha Madara should be credited not only with the foundation of the leaf village, but with the system of economic militarization through which the shinobi world exists today--one cannot credit a wolf without teeth, no matter how much the rest of the body insists on forgetting their existence.
--their existence and this last phrase flits through his head over and over, so when someone in the back of the class whispers loudly "You know what I heard--I heard he was gay for Hashirama, that's why he was so angry when the First got married and left when the First's baby was born". He waits till recess then puts his fist through the boy's teeth. He's breathing hard and the teachers have to pull him off. They make him sit in the corner of the chemistry classroom until the end of the day, until one of them comes in and rubs down his knuckles with alcohol. It stings and he wants to cry, but he doesn't and when she finishes she ruffles his hair and says, "Now, now you know we shouldn't fight Danzo-san."
The one about shinobi clients
"Could I see a demonstration first?"
It's what they usually ask and it makes Madara go white with anger but Hashirama smiles drinks his tea and makes them wonderful impossible things, miniature houses with tiny wooden lattice screens waiting to be papered by tiny people, bonsai snapping their restraining wires curling up through walls taking over the garden in a riot. The great branches husbanded, interlocking.
It only sours later when he pretends to sip at the plum and rice wine offered to him in little cups made of bone ash porcelain, until they are tipsy with it, sloppy. They say things like "I suppose we should have expected some sort of union after all these years" or "Years ago--starving flea-ridden things--begging for someone to kill. I could have had my pick of any of you." He leaves them then, the servants in shadow in the wings, their great ruinous castles already coming down around them.
And Madara is usually waiting outside by then, talking to the horses. They stamp and snort when he gets close nostrils wide, black, and Madara is in among their great heavy bodies almost indistinguishable a little wild around the eyes.