[DVD commentary] Arabian Ninjas
This DVD commentary was requested by lita_of_jupiter. The fic-fragments are here and here.
The idea for this came when I was reading a book of first names (I was looking for names for characters in an original fic) and I discovered that the name ‘Hilal’ and its meaning (‘light of the moon’). I already knew Nedjma/Nejma was a girl’s name that meant ‘star’, but in a stroke of inspiration, I went to see if there wasn’t a boy’s name - and found out that indeed, there was such a name as ‘Nejm’. I decided it was uber cool and I was going to write Arabian AU with Hinata and Neji called Hilal and Nejm, and I did.
With the weeks and months, I had ideas for thise verse which hopefully I’ll write one day, and spent a great many hours looking for equivalents of the name of just about every character in Naruto, up to and including people like Deidara who I haven’t even needed to mention in non-AU fics. I also borrowed a number of books from the library to know a little more about the social verisimilitude of the imaginary world and scanned and obsessed over 50 and some pages when I should have been worrying about my finals.
By the way, this tidbit hasn’t yet been mentioned, but one of the first things I looked for/stumbled across during my quest for names was this: there was a clan who was responsible for protecting and guarding the Mecca, and their name was Hudhayl. *_* I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. See why I decided it was uber cool and I needed to write it? (According to other sources, the Hashichins were guardians of the Mecca. It doesn’t matter, I have plans for the Hashichins.)
i.
Moonlight kisses Hilal's profile.
I’m not sure how I decided on present tense. I think I already knew it was going to be description heavy, and I wanted to grasp the immediacy of the description? Small instants, snatches. Also, I bloody well hate first sentences.
Hilal means ‘moonlight’, and ‘moonlight’ is also the first word; she’s twice present in the sentence (to Nejm, but we don’t know yet whose PoV it is - just not Hilal’s). I hate first sentence, but I think I might be pleased with this once, because it’s both about sensuality and light. The word ‘profile’ also indicates that she’s not looking at whoever is watching.
Nejm watches her from afar, watches her watching the window of the room where their guest is now resting. His hand brushes against the scabbard of his curved sword as he straightens, leaving his spot against one of the massive stone pillars.
I give his name as the first word of the sentence because I thought the AU and name-changing were complicated enough without playing hide-and-seek with narrators and names.
Watching the person you like not look at you is a motive in what I write, and here I double it with ‘watches her watching’ - not only isn’t she paying attention to him (translate: she doesn’t love him), but she wants someone else. Someone she isn’t sure she can get.
!But! Nejm is moving! He’s going to act! He’s less passive than my usual Neji, OR IS HE?
The second sentence in the paragraph is there to provide the beginning of surroundings, and to give Nejm his sword. He’s a warrior, and more than that, he’s a guard, almost a servant. The reader knows they’re in their house (I said “their guest”), and the two most immediate reasons why someone would be armed in such a context would be if 1)they were under attack or fearing one, or 2)they have to. Masters in their houses rarely walk around with a sword unless they are welcoming an important guest and want to make an impression. It’s clear very soon that no-one is going to attack, so the reason why Nejm is armed is because he’s a guard.
She turns toward him when he reaches the fountain, and smiles briefly, faintly. She's distracted, but even if she weren't she wouldn't speak, she's never sure of how to speak to him.
I have a clear if rather stereotypical picture of the courtyard. It’s a very common type of courtyard in Arabic countries. The fountain, though, is an indicator of wealth.
I combine both the fact that Nejm knows her and the fact that I wasn’t sure of exactly how they were related and how she’d call him.
Her eyes are wide, liquid. Staring at them is like staring at the smooth surface of the fountain, the perfect reflection of the moon over its dark waters, immobile like a moment in time. He's about to shatter this serenity, he wonders how best the wind breezes over the water to make it shiver and ripple, troubling its limpidity.
The traveller was blond-haired and bright-eyed, he spoke loudly and passionately; when he grinned his eyes crinkled up. During dinner, he grinned at his host’s daughter once. Down the table, out of the corner of his eyes, Nejm had seen Hilal's breath fluttering and the waters of her eyes stirring. The traveller had already moved on to entertaining Hilal's younger sister, with tales of the desert he had crossed and the leafy valley he had left.
Hinata is the only girl with half a brain in the entire canon. I mean sure Sasuke is pretty - but what’s pretty good for? There’s Naruto right next to him. Right next to. It’s a matter of prettiness vs charisma, here, people. I know which I find more attractive. (Also, what’s unattractive about a boy acting like you’re not an annoyance? I must have missed the memo.)
Hilal has been pinged so hard.
I liked describing Naruto. Actually, I like describing characters through ‘snatches’, like this “when he grinned his eyes crinkled up”. I often try to pinpoint these. It’s very rewarding when I can put just the right words on them. I like this one, I don’t think it’s contrived the way it sometime feels - which is the downside of these snatches.
Through the first three sentences, I begin with Nejm noting what has attracted Hilal’s attention, then I have Nejm calculate risks and losses (“he grinned at his host’s daughter once”, that’s hard fact), then leave Nejm’s subjectivity to have a sort of tracking shot from the outside.
I’m not being very creative with my imagery, but... I like the imagery.
Hilal faces the closed window. Her eyelashes cast fan-like shadows on her cheeks. She has slipped a branch of jasmine behind her left ear.
Slipping jasmine behind one’s ear means that you’re single and looking (if you slip it behind your right ear) or that you’re taken (if behind the left); at least such is the tradition in Tunisia. Hilal’s message is: “I’m yours”.
"If you want to join him, I'll cover for you."
I don’t like the second part of the sentence. It feels like slang.
Her eyes are wide, disbelieving and almost horrified.
Nejm could go to her father with the knowledge that Saïda Hilal is giving herself to the stranger. The stranger shared their salt and bread, but here she is, under his window, longing for his touch.
In Arabic cultures, when you share salt and bread with your host you accept their hospitality and that mean you don’t do things like dishonoring their daughter or murdering them in their sleep. This tidbit brought to you by Arabian Nights and their various adaptations as children’s books.
I’m thinking English would probably get rid of the “¨” on “Saïda”, but I didn’t because it felt weird to me.
But he will not and they both know it.
He rests his hand on the guard of his sword, protectively.
The gesture is a promise and a reminder that he’ll use his sword to protect her. With these two sentences, I try to show that Neji and Hinata’s places haven’t changed a lot between canon and this world.
Hilal doesn’t know that his protecting her doesn’t have as much to do with him doing his duty as it does with him loving her.
"Nejm…" her lovely lips finally mutter, so gratefully that Nejm thinks he could break.
He bows his head.
"Go, Saïda Hilal."
Nejm = T_T
She takes off then, with small, hurried steps as Nejm gives his first look around of his new guarding duty. His hand tightens over the guard of his sword when she reaches the shadows and dissolves. A whiff of warm air dilutes the moon's perfect reflection in the fountain.
Bringing back the ‘wind over water’ imagery. Symbolically here, Hilal = water, but the wind is Naruto and not Nejm, no matter how much he wants it to be him. That, right there, is also an implication of pr0n.
ii.
Morning comes like an apology, and Nejm intercepts the slave with the tray going to Hilal's room; "I will carry Saïda Hilal's breakfast myself," he announces. The boy takes a look at Nejm's sword and his hold on the copper tray loosens; the metal tilts, making the dim light reflections flicker on its engraved surface as Nejm takes it into his hands.
Obviously an apology to Hilal, but also to Nejm, because morning means the previous night wasn’t a nightmare.
I like the beginning of the sentence, but I think the paragraph is too big to make an adequate first paragraph. I should have done a paragraph break somewhere, but the issue was that I wasn’t sure where to put said paragraph break.
The slave was a servant in the first draft, but as I did more world-building and plot-thinking and general research, he was downgraded to slave.
The bit of description is part my going “ambience!” part because metal-tray-tilting-and-reflecting-the-light is a descriptio I’ve always wanted to use. If you want to know, it’s a round tray.
He must have recognised him, Nejm acknowledges, but it's the last of his concerns. Must have imagined himself in Nejm's place, too; Nejm remembers being his age.
Nejm had the same role as the slave boy at one point. (Hudhayl implied backstory!)
He doesn't know when Hilal left the stranger's bedroom, when she glided back into her own like the shadow of a dream; he'd left the fountain at the hour he always goes to bed, knowing that no-one would try to interrupt the stranger's sleep anymore.
He'd slipped past a corner and waited for a few minutes more until he knew no girl had been watching from afar, waiting for him to leave the place, so they could go up and knock nervously on the stranger's door; but he only waited because he had to protect Saïda Hilal even if she gave no thought to her protection, and not because he thought any girl would come.
He has seen several of his cousins eyeing the stranger appreciatively, out of the corner of their eyes as they ate and talked, with musical laughs that blended in with the song of the cithara, but they would be bound by the rules of hospitality. Only Hilal would dare defy them.
My attempt to fix the ‘Naruto is charismatic, how come no girl notices it?’ issue. The way I described him, I thought it’d have made little sense if Hilal was the only one interested.
Only for Hilal would Nejm wait downstairs, and watch around so as not to slip and look accidentally up, and blind himself by looking at the stranger's closed window, but only Hilal would patter up the stairs to drink in the forbidden.
There are so many metaphors referring to light it’s scary.
Nejm knocks at Hilal's door and lets himself in. It isn't as unusual as the boy's reaction implies, that Nejm is the one serving her, without a word before going off to his other duties. The boy isn't the servant who usually goes at these type of affairs; the one who is, Nejm thinks, must have been sent to take care of the traveller.
The tray sets with a soft clink on the wooden table; only a fraction of the blue arabesque emerges from under the tray, so thin and dark as to merge with its shadow against the red paint. One of the figs rolls slightly; Nejm puts it back in its former place, and only then does he look up at her.
I didn’t want to describe how Nejm would go through corridors and knock or not at her door and possibly wait for an answer or not. I’m bad at transitions and the idea of writing it was boring me.
Blue and red don’t have any meaning here, sorry. But I suppose you can say that I subconsciously picked primary colors that are almost chromatical opposites, and that by having them blend I must obviously mean something, probably of the metaphorically pr0ny variety and referring to Hilal and Naruto’s wild night of passion.
I hope the description reads as quiet and almost immobile and Nejm focusing on minor details before gathering his courage to:
She's looking out of the window.
finally look at her.
Again, she’s not looking at him or acknowledging that he is here.
The traveller is leaving. The echoes of the farewells reach the room, formal for Hilal's father. A gust of wind strokes through Hilal's hair at the same time as the stranger's playful tones brush past her.
More on the wind = Naruto imagery. More referrences to their being physical. (“strokes”, “brush”) Contrasting ‘Hiashi’ and ‘Naruto’ was fun, though I needed to twist the sentence around a number of times before I found a result that wasn’t too heavy-handed.
She stands, and absently she oscillates to the table, and grasps the silver fuming teapot.
I am extremely disappointed with the verb “oscillates”. I know exactly what image I wanted to conjure, I knew it since before I started writing this, and I failed. Think a ship, though of course I couldn’t describe her as such, because Nejm doesn’t have any experience of ships.
(I love these teapots. My grandmother had one when I was a kid, and I’ve always been *_* in front of those. Though try grasping one when it contains hot tea/coffee and feel your hand be scalded. I don’t know how most people do it, I always have to wrap cloth around the handle.)
Nejm's hands unclench.
I like saying something has happened by having it end. Given the moment at which he unclenches his hands - after she’s walked away from her watching spot - I tried to imply that he had them clenched since he looked at her and saw her there.
He doesn't leave until she has drunk the glass of coffee, and until she's looked down on the tray again, and until he has seen her gaze close on the concoction of herbs Nejm has put there himself.
Use of the “x3” construction: ‘until..., and until..., and until...’, to make it sound somehow like a sentence in a tale.
I tried to make it as clear as I could without outright spelling it out that the concoction is an abortive potion of some kind. I didn’t spell it out because I don’t think it fitted the ambience if I did - very little is actually stated through the fic, about anything.
A moment hangs on which a life could turn, during which they are looking at each other's reflection on the tray, or in which she could be looking at the murky broth and he could be looking at how the bowl the broth is contained in rests on the tray and is empty of her hands around it.
I never was convinced by the “could turn”, and looking back I wish I had written “would turn”.
Nejm, btw, is trying to deny that Hilal and Naruto had wild sex last night.
Then Hilal's hands raise and cup around the bowl, and raise it to her lips, tipping it at the same angle as her head, and she drinks.
The bowl sets with a sharp clink on the copper tray. She eats two figs.
I don’t think I could imply that Nejm is numb better than by foregoing describing his feelings entirely.
The food mentioned in this verse was a subject of very serious academic research. Same with every piece of furniture, btw. T_T
Nejm forces himself to wait until she's finished, and he gathers the tray again and bows before leaving the room. His step is even and confident, and it still is when he carries the tray back into the kitchen, and when he walks down the corridor and away, out in the stable, until Nejm is kneeling, bent over a bucket as he retches.
A superposition of images runs behind his eyelids, of Hilal everywhere and in every position, and the stranger's brown hands, blond hair, and no doubt grin, and in that moment Nejm teeters on the edge of a hatred he thought since long forgotten.
Nejm has a very vivid imagination, so first I started by trying to describe with more details, recoiled in horror, and went for the common denominator between all the scenes he imagines, giving you the core but not the shape of the smut.
Backstory hint: “a hatred he thought since long forgotten”
Every sequence ends on Hilal drinking the concoction, a concoction of herbs of which men are not supposed to know the use, and often only pretend not to, and that Nejm has obtained himself, retrieved from amongst the salves and potions this very morning, in provision for his visit to her.
It is fitting, he thinks, for him to be sick, as it parallels that she will not.
I’m using Neji’s canonical love for symbols to cover my own heavy-handed metaphorism.
He has sworn to cover for her, and he doesn't feel a twinge of guilt or regret at facilitating her meeting with the man or at betraying her father.
He covers for the things that she doesn't think about, he makes security happen in the form of a bowl on her breakfast tray instead of restless nights and awkward hedging, trying to get an excuse to enter the medical storeroom and find that same remedy. Nejm has saved her weeks of uncertainty; or he may have simply saved her.
Again with the making clearer what’s the potion is supposed to do.
I like the phrase ‘he makes security happen in the form of...’ because it makes security into something palpable; it’s not just a feeling.
Yet it matters very little, only in the sense only he would do this for her, and less than Hilal's moon-pale skin under another man's hands.
I often make references to the fact that ‘only he’ would do such things for her, and ‘only her’. It’s a feeling I get from the manga, that theirs is a very special relationship, or more accurately that his relationship to her is very heavily based on a ‘only him - only her’ reality. I developped it in Celebrationverse, but you can assume Nejm feels the same about Hilal.
Will I ever stop playing with the Neji-pining-for-Hinata? Seems unlikely.
When he's done, he rests his forehead - burning and sticky as if he had been working out - against the cold hilt of his sword.
The images won't leave his mind.
Nejm has a pretty angst-filled imagination. The ending isn’t striking, but it’s a subdued echo, which fits with the general atmospheric tone of the piece.
The idea for this came when I was reading a book of first names (I was looking for names for characters in an original fic) and I discovered that the name ‘Hilal’ and its meaning (‘light of the moon’). I already knew Nedjma/Nejma was a girl’s name that meant ‘star’, but in a stroke of inspiration, I went to see if there wasn’t a boy’s name - and found out that indeed, there was such a name as ‘Nejm’. I decided it was uber cool and I was going to write Arabian AU with Hinata and Neji called Hilal and Nejm, and I did.
With the weeks and months, I had ideas for thise verse which hopefully I’ll write one day, and spent a great many hours looking for equivalents of the name of just about every character in Naruto, up to and including people like Deidara who I haven’t even needed to mention in non-AU fics. I also borrowed a number of books from the library to know a little more about the social verisimilitude of the imaginary world and scanned and obsessed over 50 and some pages when I should have been worrying about my finals.
By the way, this tidbit hasn’t yet been mentioned, but one of the first things I looked for/stumbled across during my quest for names was this: there was a clan who was responsible for protecting and guarding the Mecca, and their name was Hudhayl. *_* I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. See why I decided it was uber cool and I needed to write it? (According to other sources, the Hashichins were guardians of the Mecca. It doesn’t matter, I have plans for the Hashichins.)
i.
Moonlight kisses Hilal's profile.
I’m not sure how I decided on present tense. I think I already knew it was going to be description heavy, and I wanted to grasp the immediacy of the description? Small instants, snatches. Also, I bloody well hate first sentences.
Hilal means ‘moonlight’, and ‘moonlight’ is also the first word; she’s twice present in the sentence (to Nejm, but we don’t know yet whose PoV it is - just not Hilal’s). I hate first sentence, but I think I might be pleased with this once, because it’s both about sensuality and light. The word ‘profile’ also indicates that she’s not looking at whoever is watching.
Nejm watches her from afar, watches her watching the window of the room where their guest is now resting. His hand brushes against the scabbard of his curved sword as he straightens, leaving his spot against one of the massive stone pillars.
I give his name as the first word of the sentence because I thought the AU and name-changing were complicated enough without playing hide-and-seek with narrators and names.
Watching the person you like not look at you is a motive in what I write, and here I double it with ‘watches her watching’ - not only isn’t she paying attention to him (translate: she doesn’t love him), but she wants someone else. Someone she isn’t sure she can get.
!But! Nejm is moving! He’s going to act! He’s less passive than my usual Neji, OR IS HE?
The second sentence in the paragraph is there to provide the beginning of surroundings, and to give Nejm his sword. He’s a warrior, and more than that, he’s a guard, almost a servant. The reader knows they’re in their house (I said “their guest”), and the two most immediate reasons why someone would be armed in such a context would be if 1)they were under attack or fearing one, or 2)they have to. Masters in their houses rarely walk around with a sword unless they are welcoming an important guest and want to make an impression. It’s clear very soon that no-one is going to attack, so the reason why Nejm is armed is because he’s a guard.
She turns toward him when he reaches the fountain, and smiles briefly, faintly. She's distracted, but even if she weren't she wouldn't speak, she's never sure of how to speak to him.
I have a clear if rather stereotypical picture of the courtyard. It’s a very common type of courtyard in Arabic countries. The fountain, though, is an indicator of wealth.
I combine both the fact that Nejm knows her and the fact that I wasn’t sure of exactly how they were related and how she’d call him.
Her eyes are wide, liquid. Staring at them is like staring at the smooth surface of the fountain, the perfect reflection of the moon over its dark waters, immobile like a moment in time. He's about to shatter this serenity, he wonders how best the wind breezes over the water to make it shiver and ripple, troubling its limpidity.
The traveller was blond-haired and bright-eyed, he spoke loudly and passionately; when he grinned his eyes crinkled up. During dinner, he grinned at his host’s daughter once. Down the table, out of the corner of his eyes, Nejm had seen Hilal's breath fluttering and the waters of her eyes stirring. The traveller had already moved on to entertaining Hilal's younger sister, with tales of the desert he had crossed and the leafy valley he had left.
Hinata is the only girl with half a brain in the entire canon. I mean sure Sasuke is pretty - but what’s pretty good for? There’s Naruto right next to him. Right next to. It’s a matter of prettiness vs charisma, here, people. I know which I find more attractive. (Also, what’s unattractive about a boy acting like you’re not an annoyance? I must have missed the memo.)
Hilal has been pinged so hard.
I liked describing Naruto. Actually, I like describing characters through ‘snatches’, like this “when he grinned his eyes crinkled up”. I often try to pinpoint these. It’s very rewarding when I can put just the right words on them. I like this one, I don’t think it’s contrived the way it sometime feels - which is the downside of these snatches.
Through the first three sentences, I begin with Nejm noting what has attracted Hilal’s attention, then I have Nejm calculate risks and losses (“he grinned at his host’s daughter once”, that’s hard fact), then leave Nejm’s subjectivity to have a sort of tracking shot from the outside.
I’m not being very creative with my imagery, but... I like the imagery.
Hilal faces the closed window. Her eyelashes cast fan-like shadows on her cheeks. She has slipped a branch of jasmine behind her left ear.
Slipping jasmine behind one’s ear means that you’re single and looking (if you slip it behind your right ear) or that you’re taken (if behind the left); at least such is the tradition in Tunisia. Hilal’s message is: “I’m yours”.
"If you want to join him, I'll cover for you."
I don’t like the second part of the sentence. It feels like slang.
Her eyes are wide, disbelieving and almost horrified.
Nejm could go to her father with the knowledge that Saïda Hilal is giving herself to the stranger. The stranger shared their salt and bread, but here she is, under his window, longing for his touch.
In Arabic cultures, when you share salt and bread with your host you accept their hospitality and that mean you don’t do things like dishonoring their daughter or murdering them in their sleep. This tidbit brought to you by Arabian Nights and their various adaptations as children’s books.
I’m thinking English would probably get rid of the “¨” on “Saïda”, but I didn’t because it felt weird to me.
But he will not and they both know it.
He rests his hand on the guard of his sword, protectively.
The gesture is a promise and a reminder that he’ll use his sword to protect her. With these two sentences, I try to show that Neji and Hinata’s places haven’t changed a lot between canon and this world.
Hilal doesn’t know that his protecting her doesn’t have as much to do with him doing his duty as it does with him loving her.
"Nejm…" her lovely lips finally mutter, so gratefully that Nejm thinks he could break.
He bows his head.
"Go, Saïda Hilal."
Nejm = T_T
She takes off then, with small, hurried steps as Nejm gives his first look around of his new guarding duty. His hand tightens over the guard of his sword when she reaches the shadows and dissolves. A whiff of warm air dilutes the moon's perfect reflection in the fountain.
Bringing back the ‘wind over water’ imagery. Symbolically here, Hilal = water, but the wind is Naruto and not Nejm, no matter how much he wants it to be him. That, right there, is also an implication of pr0n.
ii.
Morning comes like an apology, and Nejm intercepts the slave with the tray going to Hilal's room; "I will carry Saïda Hilal's breakfast myself," he announces. The boy takes a look at Nejm's sword and his hold on the copper tray loosens; the metal tilts, making the dim light reflections flicker on its engraved surface as Nejm takes it into his hands.
Obviously an apology to Hilal, but also to Nejm, because morning means the previous night wasn’t a nightmare.
I like the beginning of the sentence, but I think the paragraph is too big to make an adequate first paragraph. I should have done a paragraph break somewhere, but the issue was that I wasn’t sure where to put said paragraph break.
The slave was a servant in the first draft, but as I did more world-building and plot-thinking and general research, he was downgraded to slave.
The bit of description is part my going “ambience!” part because metal-tray-tilting-and-reflecting-the-light is a descriptio I’ve always wanted to use. If you want to know, it’s a round tray.
He must have recognised him, Nejm acknowledges, but it's the last of his concerns. Must have imagined himself in Nejm's place, too; Nejm remembers being his age.
Nejm had the same role as the slave boy at one point. (Hudhayl implied backstory!)
He doesn't know when Hilal left the stranger's bedroom, when she glided back into her own like the shadow of a dream; he'd left the fountain at the hour he always goes to bed, knowing that no-one would try to interrupt the stranger's sleep anymore.
He'd slipped past a corner and waited for a few minutes more until he knew no girl had been watching from afar, waiting for him to leave the place, so they could go up and knock nervously on the stranger's door; but he only waited because he had to protect Saïda Hilal even if she gave no thought to her protection, and not because he thought any girl would come.
He has seen several of his cousins eyeing the stranger appreciatively, out of the corner of their eyes as they ate and talked, with musical laughs that blended in with the song of the cithara, but they would be bound by the rules of hospitality. Only Hilal would dare defy them.
My attempt to fix the ‘Naruto is charismatic, how come no girl notices it?’ issue. The way I described him, I thought it’d have made little sense if Hilal was the only one interested.
Only for Hilal would Nejm wait downstairs, and watch around so as not to slip and look accidentally up, and blind himself by looking at the stranger's closed window, but only Hilal would patter up the stairs to drink in the forbidden.
There are so many metaphors referring to light it’s scary.
Nejm knocks at Hilal's door and lets himself in. It isn't as unusual as the boy's reaction implies, that Nejm is the one serving her, without a word before going off to his other duties. The boy isn't the servant who usually goes at these type of affairs; the one who is, Nejm thinks, must have been sent to take care of the traveller.
The tray sets with a soft clink on the wooden table; only a fraction of the blue arabesque emerges from under the tray, so thin and dark as to merge with its shadow against the red paint. One of the figs rolls slightly; Nejm puts it back in its former place, and only then does he look up at her.
I didn’t want to describe how Nejm would go through corridors and knock or not at her door and possibly wait for an answer or not. I’m bad at transitions and the idea of writing it was boring me.
Blue and red don’t have any meaning here, sorry. But I suppose you can say that I subconsciously picked primary colors that are almost chromatical opposites, and that by having them blend I must obviously mean something, probably of the metaphorically pr0ny variety and referring to Hilal and Naruto’s wild night of passion.
I hope the description reads as quiet and almost immobile and Nejm focusing on minor details before gathering his courage to:
She's looking out of the window.
finally look at her.
Again, she’s not looking at him or acknowledging that he is here.
The traveller is leaving. The echoes of the farewells reach the room, formal for Hilal's father. A gust of wind strokes through Hilal's hair at the same time as the stranger's playful tones brush past her.
More on the wind = Naruto imagery. More referrences to their being physical. (“strokes”, “brush”) Contrasting ‘Hiashi’ and ‘Naruto’ was fun, though I needed to twist the sentence around a number of times before I found a result that wasn’t too heavy-handed.
She stands, and absently she oscillates to the table, and grasps the silver fuming teapot.
I am extremely disappointed with the verb “oscillates”. I know exactly what image I wanted to conjure, I knew it since before I started writing this, and I failed. Think a ship, though of course I couldn’t describe her as such, because Nejm doesn’t have any experience of ships.
(I love these teapots. My grandmother had one when I was a kid, and I’ve always been *_* in front of those. Though try grasping one when it contains hot tea/coffee and feel your hand be scalded. I don’t know how most people do it, I always have to wrap cloth around the handle.)
Nejm's hands unclench.
I like saying something has happened by having it end. Given the moment at which he unclenches his hands - after she’s walked away from her watching spot - I tried to imply that he had them clenched since he looked at her and saw her there.
He doesn't leave until she has drunk the glass of coffee, and until she's looked down on the tray again, and until he has seen her gaze close on the concoction of herbs Nejm has put there himself.
Use of the “x3” construction: ‘until..., and until..., and until...’, to make it sound somehow like a sentence in a tale.
I tried to make it as clear as I could without outright spelling it out that the concoction is an abortive potion of some kind. I didn’t spell it out because I don’t think it fitted the ambience if I did - very little is actually stated through the fic, about anything.
A moment hangs on which a life could turn, during which they are looking at each other's reflection on the tray, or in which she could be looking at the murky broth and he could be looking at how the bowl the broth is contained in rests on the tray and is empty of her hands around it.
I never was convinced by the “could turn”, and looking back I wish I had written “would turn”.
Nejm, btw, is trying to deny that Hilal and Naruto had wild sex last night.
Then Hilal's hands raise and cup around the bowl, and raise it to her lips, tipping it at the same angle as her head, and she drinks.
The bowl sets with a sharp clink on the copper tray. She eats two figs.
I don’t think I could imply that Nejm is numb better than by foregoing describing his feelings entirely.
The food mentioned in this verse was a subject of very serious academic research. Same with every piece of furniture, btw. T_T
Nejm forces himself to wait until she's finished, and he gathers the tray again and bows before leaving the room. His step is even and confident, and it still is when he carries the tray back into the kitchen, and when he walks down the corridor and away, out in the stable, until Nejm is kneeling, bent over a bucket as he retches.
A superposition of images runs behind his eyelids, of Hilal everywhere and in every position, and the stranger's brown hands, blond hair, and no doubt grin, and in that moment Nejm teeters on the edge of a hatred he thought since long forgotten.
Nejm has a very vivid imagination, so first I started by trying to describe with more details, recoiled in horror, and went for the common denominator between all the scenes he imagines, giving you the core but not the shape of the smut.
Backstory hint: “a hatred he thought since long forgotten”
Every sequence ends on Hilal drinking the concoction, a concoction of herbs of which men are not supposed to know the use, and often only pretend not to, and that Nejm has obtained himself, retrieved from amongst the salves and potions this very morning, in provision for his visit to her.
It is fitting, he thinks, for him to be sick, as it parallels that she will not.
I’m using Neji’s canonical love for symbols to cover my own heavy-handed metaphorism.
He has sworn to cover for her, and he doesn't feel a twinge of guilt or regret at facilitating her meeting with the man or at betraying her father.
He covers for the things that she doesn't think about, he makes security happen in the form of a bowl on her breakfast tray instead of restless nights and awkward hedging, trying to get an excuse to enter the medical storeroom and find that same remedy. Nejm has saved her weeks of uncertainty; or he may have simply saved her.
Again with the making clearer what’s the potion is supposed to do.
I like the phrase ‘he makes security happen in the form of...’ because it makes security into something palpable; it’s not just a feeling.
Yet it matters very little, only in the sense only he would do this for her, and less than Hilal's moon-pale skin under another man's hands.
I often make references to the fact that ‘only he’ would do such things for her, and ‘only her’. It’s a feeling I get from the manga, that theirs is a very special relationship, or more accurately that his relationship to her is very heavily based on a ‘only him - only her’ reality. I developped it in Celebrationverse, but you can assume Nejm feels the same about Hilal.
Will I ever stop playing with the Neji-pining-for-Hinata? Seems unlikely.
When he's done, he rests his forehead - burning and sticky as if he had been working out - against the cold hilt of his sword.
The images won't leave his mind.
Nejm has a pretty angst-filled imagination. The ending isn’t striking, but it’s a subdued echo, which fits with the general atmospheric tone of the piece.