Not really Nanowrimo
My hands are sore from Rock climbing! Owowow.
In honor of Nanowrimo I'm trying to do a piece of writing a day. So Drabbles for Nov 1-4.
Timeline Switch
One of the early pranks that he and Tobirama had pulled when they were young was climbing up to the giant faces enlarging noses and ears with the ninjutsu, turning the profiles of the founders Naruto and Sasuke (from their distant pensive view) toward each other. It had been a hard one, and he'd had to mostly do it by himself except when he took breaks to yell at his brother for being shit at earth jutsu. When he finished their gazes seemed closer, intimate to the point where Kakashi raised a speculative eyebrow at him when he came in late after the reprimand.
There was very little the really scared him. Really, and he enjoyed Madara's company. His little singular ways like how he stayed on the practice field longer than anyone else, how when he talked in class he talked in that archaic Uchiha way all the police force did, how he must have come sprung from somewhere else, from cold rooms, vicious spaces with no where to take shelter.
The bottles clink when he sits down next to the practice posts, plastic bag rustling. He likes Marble soda just because of the novelty of it: how he can never get the mechanism of it quite right so it bubbles up over his fingers leaving them tacky for the rest of the day. He nudges one over to Madara who sneers over his scroll, but drinks it anyway.
"My dad says they used to break these and use the marbles to play with."
"Break one then."
"I'm not really one for games" he says lying back in the dirt to watch his only friend (the only one he had to work for, anyway) drink cold soda at the end of a day, watching it move down his throat. The sun on the soil turning it orche, too bright, he turns his eyes away.
They walk back when the day starts to dim, sticky-lipped and Madara a little pink from the sun. Before they pass the great 'あん' inscribed on the gate he turns back to look out into the dark forest,"Do you ever wonder--what else--"
"Yes" the boy says it without even looking at him, as if he too has lain awake at night contemplating the same question. Then unexpectedly Madara shivers, "You don't know what's out there" and he knows in a moment Madara will activate the Sharingan and the mystery of it will be over.
"No, but--but I do" Hashirama realizes it suddenly before his mind can even form the words: that they would pass chuunin, he knew instinctively they would pass, and that from there it would be only a year before they moved on, the endless set of hurdles, hours spent mastering scrolls in the library and then on the field until finally, finally it gave a little. Your mind shifting grasping at their failing beautiful art. The world for them was already set in stone no matter what pranks he pulled, and he longed to be out in the night, creating blindly and free of conscience.
Homesick
Home is the old docking ports with the fish merchants screaming their wares, and the great frozen carcasses laid out on woven grass mats, the rare and distinctive stink of the harbor. To him they are smells of childhood and since he is an only child it is he who carefully stores these particular traits. Itachi gives him one of his peculiar side-long looks when they cross the border into Kirigakure, it's the look that Kisame has come to interpret as curiosity, a conversation opener.
"I was born here" he says sniffing their air once. (Smells are very much his specialty; dense greasy scents--dried squid, chewy papery, a treat). He turns to Itachi, "I'm sure you've heard fish can travel miles to find where they were spawned." His partner murmurs an agreement looking out at the bay. The water is a copper green, ugly really.
"Are you sure you don't want to stay longer," Itachi asks much later, stark naked and fiddling with the window of their room. It's made of long horizontal strips of glass, the angle affording it to remain closed or open. "Yes" and Kisame says it very simply. Waiting. They don't touch very often. That had been one of his first thoughts, his great hand on a boy's stomach. Even at sixteen he was still too slim. Once, it had reminded him of fishing in high altitude rivers and ponds, the fish their unused to being preyed upon, hooked they writhed bodily to be free.
As he watches, Itachi opens the glass a chink and sticks a finger through, says "if it's your home..." and trails off. They have a view of an alley, and beyond that the rising hills filled with the the squalid ramshackle homes along the lip of the bay. It looks nothing like Konoha. It is nothing like Konoha. Through the open window comes the sounds of cats or whores yowling, high up, almost like the wail of mourners.
A myth that we come from land
His teachers had told him it was the tension of the tectonic plates shifting and re-aligning that caused the hills that surrounded his country to form, and that in turn these trapped moisture from the sea which created mist.
Their words are so neat, their explanations so boring. He was born in the long series of caverns beneath Mist Country, and he knows with total assurance what his teachers say to be a myth. The white calcified vena cava were notorious for not naturally occurring, having been carved by early settlers. Each time he enters the grottoes he feels all of them, his ancestors, transferred weight their struggle to shore hauling slick, greenish bodies wet and damp like seals to land. Its startling dryness. How they stopped and rested, lungs-hurting, wished to go back and funneled their loneliness into clawing their homes into he cliff face, anywhere away from the tide and deep currents. There were still curious nail marks in the deep places.
When he meets Madara Yagura quotes something he had seen scratched into one of the walls, he says "My people are notoriously strong-willed, we are of the sea and bend only to the moon". He had read it and thought it a treatise, but Madara just smiles in response--he had had been there after all, held the smoking torch, instructed them what to write.
Muttersöhnchen
The soldiers who take him back and forth to Shaw's office call him 'Muttersöhnchen', or 'Mother's boy'. He guesses it must be in references to the stories they must have heard from the other soldiers about the ones that--died. It isn't until later that he realizes they do it as a joke, that they think he's about the furthest thing from a "mother's boy" there is.
His mother had been a teacher before the war. Mostly French and he knows a little English from the Talkies, but Shaw tests him switching from one to the other each day, even mixing in a little Russian. When they work on his magnetism they go to the room, but most of the other time they read and Shaw tests him. He's never beaten, although often cuffed on the back of the head like the strictest of his schoolmasters, or sent back without meals more than once for lack of cooperation, but never beaten.
Shaw only hits him once when he catches him reciting prayers in Hebrew under his breath, the strike is so hard he wakes up dazed and falling out of his chair. Shaw grabs him by the hair and pulls him the rest of the way out of his seat so that he's half-kneeling on the floor, nose bleeding into his lap. "Say it again" he says in French right before the phone rings.
"You know what that was don't you? If I've got the timeline correct, which I'd like to think that I have," Charles gives himself a grin and stabs at the napkin on to which he's plotting out Erik's life, "It was the Americans launching D-day. They were telling him to stop and pack up."
It's a memory Charles has seen but will never fully understand, how in those moments it was never about stopping, or geopolitical tactics, that with Shaw these things had hardly mattered. He hears the light tap of the secretary's heels as she walks over to knock on the door. He shouts at her then turns back to him, "Say it again" he says very clearly this time in German. When Erik mumbles something he says "Louder this time," and when he does, he repeats himself "Louder, so he can hear you" pulling him up by his hair until he's screaming, till it all comes out in tongues, the words made unintelligible by their volume, raw noise, meaningless.
He leaves him on the carpet bloodied and shivering before saying in French, "Now, don't ever bring that in here again," and settling the papers on his desk in order.
Drabble Requests/Writing exercise prompts are OPEN. If there's something you'd like to see leave it in the comments and leave more than one! Preferably a pairing and a scenario/theme/word. I won't be able to do all of them, but I like having options. Best case scenario prompt would be something innovative with wiggle-room and tragic overtones (e.g.Rock Bison in a china shop, Shisui/Itachi&Ravens). Really, just throw something into the fishing net and we'll see what it catches.
Fandoms: Naruto, Katekyo Hitman Reborn!, Gundam Wing, Tiger&Bunny, Harry Potter,X-men:First Class, Inception, Supernatural (maybe).
In honor of Nanowrimo I'm trying to do a piece of writing a day. So Drabbles for Nov 1-4.
Timeline Switch
One of the early pranks that he and Tobirama had pulled when they were young was climbing up to the giant faces enlarging noses and ears with the ninjutsu, turning the profiles of the founders Naruto and Sasuke (from their distant pensive view) toward each other. It had been a hard one, and he'd had to mostly do it by himself except when he took breaks to yell at his brother for being shit at earth jutsu. When he finished their gazes seemed closer, intimate to the point where Kakashi raised a speculative eyebrow at him when he came in late after the reprimand.
There was very little the really scared him. Really, and he enjoyed Madara's company. His little singular ways like how he stayed on the practice field longer than anyone else, how when he talked in class he talked in that archaic Uchiha way all the police force did, how he must have come sprung from somewhere else, from cold rooms, vicious spaces with no where to take shelter.
The bottles clink when he sits down next to the practice posts, plastic bag rustling. He likes Marble soda just because of the novelty of it: how he can never get the mechanism of it quite right so it bubbles up over his fingers leaving them tacky for the rest of the day. He nudges one over to Madara who sneers over his scroll, but drinks it anyway.
"My dad says they used to break these and use the marbles to play with."
"Break one then."
"I'm not really one for games" he says lying back in the dirt to watch his only friend (the only one he had to work for, anyway) drink cold soda at the end of a day, watching it move down his throat. The sun on the soil turning it orche, too bright, he turns his eyes away.
They walk back when the day starts to dim, sticky-lipped and Madara a little pink from the sun. Before they pass the great 'あん' inscribed on the gate he turns back to look out into the dark forest,"Do you ever wonder--what else--"
"Yes" the boy says it without even looking at him, as if he too has lain awake at night contemplating the same question. Then unexpectedly Madara shivers, "You don't know what's out there" and he knows in a moment Madara will activate the Sharingan and the mystery of it will be over.
"No, but--but I do" Hashirama realizes it suddenly before his mind can even form the words: that they would pass chuunin, he knew instinctively they would pass, and that from there it would be only a year before they moved on, the endless set of hurdles, hours spent mastering scrolls in the library and then on the field until finally, finally it gave a little. Your mind shifting grasping at their failing beautiful art. The world for them was already set in stone no matter what pranks he pulled, and he longed to be out in the night, creating blindly and free of conscience.
Homesick
Home is the old docking ports with the fish merchants screaming their wares, and the great frozen carcasses laid out on woven grass mats, the rare and distinctive stink of the harbor. To him they are smells of childhood and since he is an only child it is he who carefully stores these particular traits. Itachi gives him one of his peculiar side-long looks when they cross the border into Kirigakure, it's the look that Kisame has come to interpret as curiosity, a conversation opener.
"I was born here" he says sniffing their air once. (Smells are very much his specialty; dense greasy scents--dried squid, chewy papery, a treat). He turns to Itachi, "I'm sure you've heard fish can travel miles to find where they were spawned." His partner murmurs an agreement looking out at the bay. The water is a copper green, ugly really.
"Are you sure you don't want to stay longer," Itachi asks much later, stark naked and fiddling with the window of their room. It's made of long horizontal strips of glass, the angle affording it to remain closed or open. "Yes" and Kisame says it very simply. Waiting. They don't touch very often. That had been one of his first thoughts, his great hand on a boy's stomach. Even at sixteen he was still too slim. Once, it had reminded him of fishing in high altitude rivers and ponds, the fish their unused to being preyed upon, hooked they writhed bodily to be free.
As he watches, Itachi opens the glass a chink and sticks a finger through, says "if it's your home..." and trails off. They have a view of an alley, and beyond that the rising hills filled with the the squalid ramshackle homes along the lip of the bay. It looks nothing like Konoha. It is nothing like Konoha. Through the open window comes the sounds of cats or whores yowling, high up, almost like the wail of mourners.
A myth that we come from land
His teachers had told him it was the tension of the tectonic plates shifting and re-aligning that caused the hills that surrounded his country to form, and that in turn these trapped moisture from the sea which created mist.
Their words are so neat, their explanations so boring. He was born in the long series of caverns beneath Mist Country, and he knows with total assurance what his teachers say to be a myth. The white calcified vena cava were notorious for not naturally occurring, having been carved by early settlers. Each time he enters the grottoes he feels all of them, his ancestors, transferred weight their struggle to shore hauling slick, greenish bodies wet and damp like seals to land. Its startling dryness. How they stopped and rested, lungs-hurting, wished to go back and funneled their loneliness into clawing their homes into he cliff face, anywhere away from the tide and deep currents. There were still curious nail marks in the deep places.
When he meets Madara Yagura quotes something he had seen scratched into one of the walls, he says "My people are notoriously strong-willed, we are of the sea and bend only to the moon". He had read it and thought it a treatise, but Madara just smiles in response--he had had been there after all, held the smoking torch, instructed them what to write.
Muttersöhnchen
The soldiers who take him back and forth to Shaw's office call him 'Muttersöhnchen', or 'Mother's boy'. He guesses it must be in references to the stories they must have heard from the other soldiers about the ones that--died. It isn't until later that he realizes they do it as a joke, that they think he's about the furthest thing from a "mother's boy" there is.
His mother had been a teacher before the war. Mostly French and he knows a little English from the Talkies, but Shaw tests him switching from one to the other each day, even mixing in a little Russian. When they work on his magnetism they go to the room, but most of the other time they read and Shaw tests him. He's never beaten, although often cuffed on the back of the head like the strictest of his schoolmasters, or sent back without meals more than once for lack of cooperation, but never beaten.
Shaw only hits him once when he catches him reciting prayers in Hebrew under his breath, the strike is so hard he wakes up dazed and falling out of his chair. Shaw grabs him by the hair and pulls him the rest of the way out of his seat so that he's half-kneeling on the floor, nose bleeding into his lap. "Say it again" he says in French right before the phone rings.
"You know what that was don't you? If I've got the timeline correct, which I'd like to think that I have," Charles gives himself a grin and stabs at the napkin on to which he's plotting out Erik's life, "It was the Americans launching D-day. They were telling him to stop and pack up."
It's a memory Charles has seen but will never fully understand, how in those moments it was never about stopping, or geopolitical tactics, that with Shaw these things had hardly mattered. He hears the light tap of the secretary's heels as she walks over to knock on the door. He shouts at her then turns back to him, "Say it again" he says very clearly this time in German. When Erik mumbles something he says "Louder this time," and when he does, he repeats himself "Louder, so he can hear you" pulling him up by his hair until he's screaming, till it all comes out in tongues, the words made unintelligible by their volume, raw noise, meaningless.
He leaves him on the carpet bloodied and shivering before saying in French, "Now, don't ever bring that in here again," and settling the papers on his desk in order.
Drabble Requests/Writing exercise prompts are OPEN. If there's something you'd like to see leave it in the comments and leave more than one! Preferably a pairing and a scenario/theme/word. I won't be able to do all of them, but I like having options. Best case scenario prompt would be something innovative with wiggle-room and tragic overtones (e.g.Rock Bison in a china shop, Shisui/Itachi&Ravens). Really, just throw something into the fishing net and we'll see what it catches.
Fandoms: Naruto, Katekyo Hitman Reborn!, Gundam Wing, Tiger&Bunny, Harry Potter,X-men:First Class, Inception, Supernatural (maybe).