damnfooltalk | February Wordcount Tracking (Reply)

Total February Wordcount: 2297 words (x_x)V

Posted: Chapters 1 & 2 of Surprise Royalty, which is the first chunk of a series of Homestuck fantroll RP's that my spouse and I decided to throw on the archive. As for independent projects, nix.

IN PROGRESS:

There’s a place I’ve seen where the soul burns clean: 399 words. This chapter is fighting me hard and tax season means I have even less time than usual to wrestle with it. Not loving this combination!

Self-indulgence Sandbox fics: 1898 words

Sneak Peeks:

>There's a place I've seen where the soul burns clean <

Izuna vented some more annoyance (he had plenty! He could do this all night!) by yanking a chunk of his big brother’s hair like they were brats scuffling in the training yard again. It was entirely reasonable for him to sneak in a few more petty jabs in the wake of realizing that he was going to have to spell it out – and do it now, before he was put to bed like an unruly child. His annoyance was justified – he could excuse himself for not having realized the obvious immediately; Haruka had really only stabilized him for travel, and even as quickly as he healed he’d be down for a while without her coming back to finish the job. Of course he wasn’t at his best right now. But Madara?

Frankly, it was alarming to see how badly his death would endanger his big brother, but at this point the evidence was clear: the prospect of losing Izuna turned the most dangerous person he knew into a giant idiot.

That was unkind and overly dramatic, perhaps, but in the silence of his own head Izuna would give himself a pass.

"Anyway, you’re worried about the wrong thing.” That got him a sharp look, but nothing that made Izuna think Madara had suddenly made the connections that had occurred to him in between his bouts of unconsciousness this evening. He sighed, shrugged off the supporting arm, and plopped himself back down. “Nii-san, you have to have realized this was a setup."

> Self Indulgence Sandbox <

It wasn’t until [Hashirama] stood on the bank in full view that he realized that he hadn’t really made sure that the other boy was alone, even though he was pretty sure by now that he’d snuck off from somewhere to cry in private. The Tobirama voice (that Tobirama would claim was what other people called their common sense and just sounded like him because Hashirama didn’t have any) was telling him that he was an idiot again, but oh well.

The other boy was staring at him, looking him up and down with a look on his face that Hashirama couldn’t make any sense of. After a minute, Hashirama waved. “Anyway, my name’s Hashirama,” he said, “what’s yours?”

Hashirama thought he might not answer, but then he shifted his weight just a little, standing centered like nothing would move him instead of keeping his feet light and ready to spring in any direction. “Madara.”

Now that he was closer, he could see that the skin around Madara’s eyes was a little red, and he had a streak of dirt on one side of his cheek like he’d been wiping his face. The boy’s shoulders went rigid, and Hashirama knew he’d been caught looking.

He wasn’t going to be a jerk about it, but Madara didn’t have any way to know that. Rather than say anything, he kicked his sandals off and dug his feet into the loose mix of rocks and sand on this side of the bank, watching his toes wiggle through to the surface. “So what were you throwing rocks for?” he asked.

Madara was still giving him a suspicious glare when he looked back up, reminding Hashirama of nothing so much as the giant grumpy old cat that liked to sleep in their garden back home. He would bite hard if you annoyed him, but once Hashirama had gotten the trick down of sitting peacefully until the cat decided you weren’t going to cause problems he’d found out that the cat’s belly fur was the softest thing in the world, and that when he petted it the cat rumbled so loud that you could feel it through the ground.

[Hashirama had gotten a lot of practice with his control using doton trying to figure out how to rumble back at the cat without scaring him, and he’d gotten so much better with it that Chichi-ue had spared him a few words of rare praise for finally getting serious about his training. That had nearly made Hashirama admit the real reason for his improved control just so he could see Butsuma’s face before he took all of it back (because getting recognition for the wrong reasons was almost as bad as the usual not-living-up-to-your-potential speech, when Hashirama heard all the time from everyone but his father about how strong he was and how proud he’d make the clan.) But that was stupid and Hashirama wasn’t actually dumb enough to get himself in trouble on purpose just because his dad didn’t have any room in his head for anything but the war and the pride of the Senju.]

He kept all of the tangled up feelings around that off his face, though, and did his best to put calm in his chakra like Tobirama said he did when he was trying to make friends with the cat. It worked, he thought, or at least when he accidentally slow-blinked at Madara, the boy blinked back at him. It might have just been reflex; he drew back all flustered a second later, but when Hashirama didn’t say anything about that either his shoulders went back down and actually answered the question. “My big brother died.”