[Cross-posted from AO3; originally posted there on 05/7/2014.]
(A.N.: I don't think any particular timeline is ever specified for Juugo and Kimimaro's backstories in the manga - so it's not all that important, but I was imagining them both aged about ten at the time of this fic.)
.-.-.-.
Juugo wakes up one morning in a puddle of blood, which is even worse than it might seem: for if he has done something terrible and then slept through the aftermath, it means that whatever it was took place on so large a scale that it left him completely exhausted, and that has never happened. He can't even imagine how terrible a thing it must have been, to tire him out; he can't imagine a person in the world who would be strong enough to last against him long enough to tire him.
He goes to the mouth of his cave and peers out into the daylight, and in the daylight he sees a trail, leading all the way up to his cave, tracked in blood and huge, malformed footprints.
"Oh, dear," he says, as his heart plummets downward. And then, ever more forlorn: "Oh, dear – oh dear..."
It's a very lovely day today, but Juugo wishes it wasn't. The sky is high and clear, with a gentle breeze that's just the way the birds like it, and he can hear them already – telling each other where the best updrafts are, telling each other to come on out and play, telling each other to stay away from the heart of the valley. The heart of the valley? Juugo supposes he will have to go there himself, then. He would really rather not.
He goes to the river first though, which comes burbling down the mountainside and crashing over the stones, weaving its way through the undergrowth, the endless splash of water in motion soothing to Juugo like not many things are soothing to Juugo: a constant, peaceful sound. His reflection is even bloodier than he'd been dreading: face smeared, hair clogged and streaked. That he's spattered all the way up to above his elbows he's known since he woke up – like bloody gloves, as though perhaps he had reached into someone's – as though, perhaps, he had – perhaps –
He cleans himself. He rinses out his clothes as well, and the sun dries out his fresh-washed hair as he does it, so that his reflection, fragmented by the water, returns it to a bright clean orange. He still has blood on his hands, of course, and he knows it, but it's just easier to have blood on his hands when he doesn't have blood actually on his hands – when he doesn't have to feel it crusted in his hair, and stiffening the folds of his T-shirt.
And then he's clean, and rested, and there is nothing for it but to listen to the birds and their warning cries, and take the exact path they advise against.
The trek takes him upward, away from his cave, toward the higher ground of the mountain. The birds cry for him to change his route. He assures them that he'll be safe, and carries on, picking berries as he goes. Whatever he did last night, it left him not just exhausted but ravenous: evidence, piling higher, that last night's crimes were terrible beyond precedent, terrible beyond imagining. His stomach feels sick, liquid with anxiety.
From the high jut of rock he clambers onto, the view of the valley spreads out beneath him, sunk into the nadir between several of the mountain's peaks. The view is lushly green and marked sporadically by settlements of lean-tos, sunshine reflecting brightly on roofs of corrugated aluminium; the slow coils of the river wind through the crop fields. It is silent though, and eerily still, and the longer Juugo watches the lower his heart sinks, until it has reached nearly to his feet, and just about the only thing stopping him from being sick is the terror that he'll lose control again if his concentration slips even for a moment.
The birds are telling him he doesn't want to go there. The birds are right, but he doesn't have a choice: he jumps from the rock, and skids his way down the steep mountainside, barefoot on mossy ground and crashing through the undergrowth, hurtling faster as momentum builds and a flurry of woodpigeons explodes from the brush – he doesn't want to go there, they're crying out, but he knows he doesn't and that doesn't change a thing – and then he goes charging out into the open and skids and staggers to a halt, waist-deep in corn with young green crops smashed all the way behind him. He picks his way out of the field as carefully as he possibly can but the damage has been done, really, and he's just ruined someone's harvest, whoever had spent so much of their own time sowing that field, and tending to it, and watching it grow and anticipating the reaping and the winter of full bellies to follow – he's ruined that, and the peaty soil of the field that's squelching between his toes will have nothing to nourish, nothing at all...
There's a little shack propped up at the edge of the field, made of wooden slats and a flat tin roof. A wind chime hangs from a crooked gutterspout, bits of hollow metal and ringpulls from cans and shards of mirror all strung together and twisting in the breeze, jingling quietly. Usually there are chickens, too, scratching in a wire-caged run down the side, but as Juugo makes his slow, cautious way towards their home he can't see the chickens anywhere—can't hear them, either. He can't hear much of anything, actually, apart from the distant rush of the river and the sound of wind through trees, a gentle endless rustling.
He knocks at the door but gets no answer. He peers in through the window, but sees no one inside.
He picks up the path that runs into the valley. The birds have given up warning him; they left him on the mountainside, and now he only sees them far above, wheeling in the high blue sky.
Across the trunks of a cluster of trees off to the side of the path there's a spatter of blood, a slash of it, as though it came from a jet as sudden as water from a hosepipe. Juugo looks at it, although he doesn't want to. He keeps going, although he doesn't want to.
Not very long after that he finds the farmer and his wife, who are both dead – both very dead – extremely dead, and open to the elements, and looking at them sprawled out in the ditch the way they are it's all Juugo can do to keep his mind reeled in and stop the underneath of his skin from simmering the way it does before – well, before this, the farmer and his wife, dead in the bright morning sunshine. He rubs his palms against his shorts, against the coarse fabric, and takes a deep breath. He's still in control.
But it doesn't get better after that, and as he keeps going the village starts to smell as awful as it looks, like meat and rot and blood and nightmares. The family of the next shack he reaches must have heard him coming last night, because they made it halfway across their dirt yard before he caught them up. He hates to imagine it, but he can't just turn his face away from what he's done and pretend he never did it, so imagine it he does – in sick horror, in penance – him already bloody and them already terrified, running though they must have known they never had a chance from the moment they heard his bellow echo through the valley.
And it's the same, everywhere he goes – all through the village. The further in he gets the more property destruction there seems to be, until by the time he's at the lowest crook of the river where the footbridge stands he sees that the footbridge has been destroyed – and the crops in the fields alongside it slashed through, torn up, the earth churned over with no respect for the labour of its farmer – who lies dead himself, horribly so, as do his two sons, all good people – all good people, every last body he has found today the body of someone Juugo has known since he was very young, before he left the village for the village's own sake – which has clearly not worked, not at all, since he has destroyed it all the same.
He wades through the river. On the other shore he finds a boy he doesn't recognise at all, whose grip is tight in the front of his own shirt, clinging onto where his heartbeat pounds with grim determination.
"Um," starts Juugo, hesitantly, intending to offer help or apology or anything the boy might want of him, but the boy starts screaming instead, thick wet terrible screams, and in the midst of all that screaming makes it very clear that Juugo is the last person he wants around him while he waits to die from the damage Juugo caused him: so Juugo flees.
Hours pass – they must do, because the strength of the sun and the length of its shadows change, though Juugo himself has begun to feel cut out of time, like this is a single preserved bubble of a moment which will pop any second now, and everything will resume – will pick up where it left off, and this stasis, this silence, this eerily still and lifeless village: it will kick back into life. His own family is dead as well, which he'd been expecting by the time he reached their home but which was no easier to see the proof of. A couple of chickens roam freely through the undergrowth. He supposes he must have freed them after ripping apart their owners. The chickens won't live long, as domesticated as they are: if last night he thought he was saving them by freeing them, he was wrong.
Really, though, Juugo doubts he was thinking much of anything at all.
He goes back to his cave, eventually. He takes a fish with him from his family's ice box, and wraps it carefully in leaves while he kindles a fire – always in the same place, on the flat rocky plateau outside his cave, because all the wildlife of the woods dislikes fire and so it's better always to start it in the same place, to make as little of a disturbance as possible. He has the berries from earlier, too, so he eats those while he waits for the fish to cook, and when he's done he goes as far into the cave as he can, all the way in to where the roof steeply lowers and in the cold dank shadows at the very back of the cave there's nothing but a wedge of space, mossy and unpleasant. He curls up, rests his head in his arms, tries to sleep and doesn't sleep – stays awake for hours yet, staring unseeingly into the dark.
At least he no longer has a reason to ever leave his cave again, he supposes. At least he no longer has a reason to ever inflict himself on other people. Travellers rarely come high enough into the mountains to cross his path, not up here where the air thins out and the clouds are sometimes low enough that the woods seem almost misty in the mornings. And locals – well, he's never been beyond the village, but he's heard more like it lie further down the mountainside, lie further across the peaks. Maybe they'll hear about what he's done. He hopes they don't come after him. He doesn't want to kill anyone, much less good and innocent people who want only to protect themselves, but what Juugo wants has always had very little impact on what Juugo does, when killing is involved.
.-.-.
.-.-.
Time passes vaguely in the mountains. The wildflowers in the meadowland brighten in the spring, burst into colour in the summer, wilt throughout the autumn; the seasons are marked by the birds, some of which migrate and some of which remain at Juugo's side year-round. The ones that stay are the ones that pass Juugo's story on to newcomers, which turns him hot with grief and shame every time and so he asks if they wouldn't mind gossiping where he won't overhear it – and they oblige, because he's never done wrong by them. The birds, at least, have no reason to fear him the way they should.
He knows, rightfully, that a winter spent alone in a mountain cave with only his T-shirt and shorts for warmth should be excruciating at best, lethal at worst, but the next winter that comes after he murders his village is not the first winter he has spent alone, and it doesn't trouble him the way he remembers it had troubled his parents, when Juugo had been very young indeed and permitted still to live at home. Outside the winds howl, and sleet drives down hard against the stone, bends the trees back beneath the force of it: and Juugo huddles at the back of his cave, heat simmering inside his skin. A few of the local possums have chosen to spend the winter in his company this year; they sleep curled up beside him, and he smoothes the soft short fur of their backs and watches as the storm shrieks on, and on, and on and on and on.
It's in the wake of this storm that Kimimaro comes. He appears as a silhouette in the mouth of Juugo's cave, sleek and dark against the white sky outside, and doesn't run when Juugo tells him to but instead comes right on in, deep into the cave's gloom.
Juugo's mind explodes into flame, but in the last few moments before it burns he sees the foreign cut of Kimimaro's clothes, the strange, luxurious drapes of heavy cotton, and feels a spike of dangerous curiosity; dangerous, because if he wonders about the outside world he might want to see it, and he knows very well that that must never ever happen –
– and the spike of curiosity is still there as his madness fades, and his breathing ratchets up several stages into panic.
"You have to go," says Juugo, "you have to get out of here, or I'll – you need to go –"
"You won't hurt me," says Kimimaro, who is somehow not even wounded, not even a little, despite the fact he has just faced Juugo down in very close quarters while Juugo lost control.
"I will," says Juugo. "I don't want to, but – that's what happens. You need to leave. You need to leave, you do, you need to, you need –"
"You won't hurt me," Kimimaro says again. His expression is surreally calm, pale-eyed and serene as he looks up into Juugo's face. "You can't. You can try if you don't believe me, but you still won't manage it."
"I don't want to try," Juugo says, horrified. For a moment he hesitates, hardly knowing what to say – or what to do, with a person so strange and so slight – and so close to him – to him, who hasn't been this close to a person without ripping them apart since before he was old enough to walk. And then it starts again, the prickling in his limbs, the first warping of his flesh, the certainty that his skin will catch fire any second now and burn his mind right out of him – "You need to go," he says again – wants to push Kimimaro to hurry him away, but despairs of hurting him – though if he doesn't push him now he's only going to hurt him worse when he transforms! – oh, no, oh no no no – "Get out!" he howls.
But Kimimaro is still there when Juugo comes back into himself again. The strange draping of his shirt has fallen back, so that he stands bare to the waist and quite alien-pale in the gloom. From his ribcage, right through the flesh, protrudes another ribcage – in which Juugo finds he is trapped, between long clean bones that meet like pincers.
"You see," Kimimaro says, "that you can't hurt me."
There isn't any tension in his voice. He doesn't seem to mind at all what has happened to his body. The last parts of Juugo left to shift back shift back, and all his parts draw into themselves so that he stands in his cave fully human once again, staring down at his unbelievable visitor with his heart pounding in wonder as much as panic. "You," he says, "you –"
Kimimaro makes a sharp gesture with his hands, one-two, and Juugo flinches – but all Kimimaro has done is snap off his own ribs, which shatter to the ground one after the other with a brittle hollow sound like branches broken down for tinder. The skin of his chest shifts, and then the jagged stumps of bone that still jut out are subsumed by flesh: and his torso is flat and unscarred as it ever was.
"What are you?" Juugo blurts.
"Only the same as you," says Kimimaro, but he's started smiling, and all of a sudden he looks far younger than Juugo had thought he must be – to carry himself so straight-backed and confident. He pulls the draped sleeves of his shirt back up across his shoulders.
"But," says Juugo, picking through his words with desperate care, holding himself desperately still, "but – I can't – do that. What you. Did, what you did, I can't –"
"You can do something like it, though," Kimimaro says. "Can't you? I've already seen you do it."
Juugo stares at him for another moment before he realises what Kimimaro must mean, and then he flinches back in horror. "That's not – no, no, you don't underst—I don't do that, it just – it's terrible," he says, urgently, because Kimimaro has to understand, "it's terrible, terrible –"
"Hush," Kimimaro tells him, gently, and takes his wrists – takes Juugo's wrists, Juugo who has not been touched in years, Juugo who has touched others only to destroy them –
– and when the roaring fire in Juugo's mind eases out enough for him to think, he finds that his back is against the cold cave wall and his head is crooked awkwardly where the roof begins to slope inward, pinned in place by a jagged rope of vertebrae and two viciously sharpened scapulae, ruptured out from the nape of Kimimaro's bowed neck and from Kimimaro's own collarbones.
Juugo stares down at the back of Kimimaro's neck, where his sleek pale hair parts around the explosion of bone. "I'm – okay," he says, which he is pretty sure he has never said before. He takes a great deep breath. "I'm – um. Okay."
Kimimaro releases Juugo's wrists. His scapulae sink back inside him and he wrenches out the remnants of his spine. "I'm glad to have found you," he says, when he's done, and looks up half-smiling into Juugo's face. "They tell so many rumours of you in these mountains, I almost believed I was hunting a youkai."
Ah, thinks Juugo. "If you wouldn't mind, then," he begins, "um – could we – could it be outside? By the river?"
The half-smile grows confused.
"That's how I – imagined it," Juugo hurries to explain, "when I've – because, I mean, no one's really strong enough to – to kill me, so I thought I'd just, um – by the river. Die there. Because I like it best. But if you're, well, you can kill me, I should expect – so if it's okay with you, then – um. The river. If you don't mind."
Kimimaro's expression softens into something Juugo's not sure he's ever seen before. "I have no wish to kill you."
"But," says Juugo – and finds that he's suddenly so far outside his realm of understanding that he has no idea what he should be saying next: so he says nothing, and only stares, bewildered.
"My master hates for me to leave his side," says Kimimaro. His tone is kind. "He would never have sent me on a mission as involved as locating you – not if all he wished was that I would kill you."
Juugo's bewildered stare grows ever more bewildered.
"I have an offer of sanctuary for you, in fact."
"But," Juugo says again, and then he reverts to bewildered staring.
"Or rather," says Kimimaro, suddenly solemn, "my master does. But I act as his vessel, and he speaks through me, and he assigned me personally to find you – so I have the authority to act on his behalf. If you were wondering." He rummages inside his shirt for a moment and pulls out a little woven sack, from which he removes two plastic-wrapped objects before stashing it back away again, tucked above his sash. "Would you like to discuss it over dinner?" he asks, politely.
Juugo stares a moment longer. Then it hits home, all of a sudden, that he has a guest – his first ever guest! a guest he is very unlikely to disembowel or otherwise maim! a guest so strange and sleek and foreign, from the delicate lilac of his clothes to the graceful manner of his speech! – and Juugo hurries, for the first time in his life, to be the welcoming host.
.-.-.
.-.-.
Though the worst of the storm has passed it remains bitterly cold outside, the sky bleached and bleak, the bare gnarled branches of the trees like brittle calligraphy against it. Juugo doesn't feel the cold, but he worries for a moment that Kimimaro will, until Kimimaro happens to mention just how many weeks he has spent in the mountains on Juugo's trail and Juugo accepts that anyone who has spent this vicious winter hiking deserted mountain paths is probably okay with sitting outside for a little while. He kindles up a fire, rubbing tinderwood briskly against tinderwood, and sits back on his heels while Kimimaro unwraps the objects from his sack, hard and brownish.
He skewers them on bones from his forearm, too abrupt for Juugo to stop him – holds the pieces of food to his wrist and bone bursts out, spears them through, one after the other, catches them in his lap as they fall. Propped above the flames, they work just as well as any other skewers – but still...
"I could have, um. Given you a stick for that," says Juugo.
Kimimaro glances up. "It's just habit," he says, but then he smiles at Juugo across the fire and Juugo, who has not been smiled at for as long as he can remember, hastily averts his eyes. "I'll remember for next time, though."
Next time! – he anticipates a next time! It's dangerous for Juugo to think of next time because Juugo is dangerous – but if he's not dangerous to Kimimaro, then perhaps it isn't dangerous for him to think of next time, so long as that next time is with Kimimaro...? The light of the flames casts flickering shadow up across him, as pale and delicately strange in the bleak daylight as he seemed inside the cave. Juugo is terrified of being around anyone at all, but people like Kimimaro more than most: people like Kimimaro, whose bodies are so slight and whose bones are visible so cleanly beneath the skin, terrifyingly fragile.
Not Kimimaro, though. Juugo thinks of this, and feels as though he stands above a very high precipice, so high that the clouds mist beneath him and obscure the distance to the ground, so high that only the vultures wheel and shriek above him. He can't hurt Kimimaro – he can be near to Kimimaro – Kimimaro is safe from him. The idea is absurd, but it is true, and it is dizzying to believe.
The food, once cooked, turns out to have no taste Juugo knows at all.
"It's just my mission rations," Kimimaro says, almost apologetically, and Juugo hurriedly nods, pretending this means something to him. It tastes old and dry, as though it's been kept plastic-wrapped for a very long time, but if Kimimaro has carried it with him all the way across the mountains then he supposes it must have had to be, to last that far. Not everyone lives from the woods, after all. He holds the radial bone it's skewered on very carefully and eats – listens too, quietly, as Kimimaro begins to talk.
He talks about paradise, or something that sounds an awful lot like it. A place where Juugo could be safe from the world and the world could be safe from Juugo, and where Kimimaro would be at his side, always, for the rest of time, to hold him back –
"I may not always look this way," Kimimaro interjects, "and the person who looks this way may not always be me –" he gestures to his face, the painted markings, the bright pale eyes fixed on Juugo's, "but I'll be there. One way or another. In some form of consciousness, in someone's body, somewhere."
"Right," says Juugo, frowning in concentration.
"But that's all between my master and me, so you shouldn't let it concern you if you don't understand."
"Right," Juugo says again, relieved.
Kimimaro keeps talking, gazing into the fire as the day gets dimmer, but Juugo had heard all he needed to hear when Kimimaro promised that he, Juugo, would be stopped from ever hurting anyone again. That's all he wants. That's all he's ever wanted. That it might come in a way that doesn't involve his death, and that it might come in a way that involves a person who can be near to him, involves a boy his own age, involves Kimimaro – well, those are only bonuses, but what bonuses they are!
.-.-.
.-.-.
Juugo sleeps easily that night. Kimimaro is across the cave from him, curled up inside a savagely jagged cage of his own bones that he erected around himself at Juugo's request, once it became apparent that Kimimaro was going to ignore Juugo's initial request that they sleep as far apart as possible – preferably Kimimaro in the cave, for the sake of Kimimaro's comfort, and Juugo several miles up the mountainside, for the sake of Kimimaro's safety – and the dense security of that bone-cage is enough to satisfy Juugo, and so he sleeps untroubled.
One of the possums moves closer to him in the night, and he wakes up with its warm hide pressed against his cheek, solid and reassuring. He sits up, and scratches gently between its ears, listening to the distant calls of the mountain owls, the sound of Kimimaro's breathing shallow but steady. In the faint traces of moonlight that make it inside the cave, the white of his hair is eerie, glowing nearly silver. His bones shine too, but Juugo has seen a lot of bones, most of them just as snapped and jutting as Kimimaro's cage, and it's much easier to see them when they're snapped and jutting from the body of a person who feels no pain, and did it to himself, and doesn't mind at all.
He goes to the river, and by the time the sound of Kimimaro withdrawing his bones back inside him starts scraping through the still mountain air, Juugo has washed, and he's sitting outside his cave making the two of them a breakfast out of river weeds.
"You slept well?" says Kimimaro, emerging into the morning. His head is to the side, and he's reknotting the tie of his hair.
"Very well," says Juugo, nodding, "um – very well. Thank you."
The morning doesn't dawn until hours after they wake up, but it's bright when it does: bright and clear, and icy-cold enough that the frost on the ground doesn't melt beneath it. Juugo wishes a solemn farewell to the birds, and asks that they pass on his farewell to all those who've migrated away for the season when they return; he wishes an equally solemn farewell to the possums, though this farewell he whispers, so as not to disturb them; he leads Kimimaro to the river, frozen grass crunching between his toes, and wishes farewell to the few hardy fish still enduring this frigid weather. Kimimaro stands respectfully back as he does all this, and Juugo is grateful. People in the village used to pry when he and his family would mention communicating with the local animals, and it made him – uncomfortable. Not that there's ever been much that doesn't make him uncomfortable, but still – still, he appreciates that Kimimaro is silent.
"That's everything," Juugo says eventually. "That's – I don't have anything else to do. That's it."
"You're certain?"
Juugo nods.
"Well," says Kimimaro, "well, then. Let's go this way," he adds, and starts walking, in the direction of a rough path Juugo knows won't lead past his village, and the relief Juugo feels on seeing this is so much that the next thing he knows he's pinned face-down in the frosty dirt and something is digging into his back, hard and blunted, and he can feel the fire crawling back inside him as his limbs twist back into their rightful human shape.
"I'm okay," he manages, half-winded.
"Are you sure?" says Kimimaro, and just the gentle sound of his concern is enough to black Juugo out for another moment, until he comes back to himself with several more of those same rigid points digging into his back.
"Yes," he says. He's still breathing hard, but the fire has definitely retreated. "I – yes, I am now. Sorry."
After a moment Kimimaro stands. Juugo clambers to his feet and sees the long spurs of bone curving out from Kimimaro's knees and elbows for barely a second before Kimimaro moves, too fast to follow, and slams his palm against them to break the loose ends away.
Awkwardly, Juugo dips his head. "I apologise."
"You have nothing to apologise for," says Kimimaro. He's almost smiling. He's not at all disgusted. "Shall we try that again? Let's go – this way," and he gestures in the same direction he had gestured in the instant before Juugo lost it.
Gratitude bursts open inside Juugo's heart in a way that feels like summer, warm and blossoming. He follows Kimimaro into the bare trees and tries to hold back his smile as he listens to the birds, who are crying out in merriment, hooting their blessings for his journey.
.-.-.
.-.-.
Kimimaro doesn't talk much while they travel, which Juugo is glad for; as much as he values Kimimaro's company, he's still very unused to having company at all. When he does, it's mostly of his master, and of how glad his master will be to receive Juugo, and of how much Juugo will gain from serving his master, and of how clever and kind and powerful his master is: and eventually Juugo can suppress his years-suppressed curiosity no longer, and he asks.
Kimimaro glances up from jabbing part of his shinbone into that night's campfire. "Lord Orochimaru – my Lord Orochimaru." And then, when that elicits no more response from Juugo than a semi-bewildered shrug: "You haven't heard of Lord Orochimaru?"
"Um," says Juugo. "Sorry."
"One of the three Legendary Sannin," says Kimimaro, "and the greatest one alive today." He jabs once more at the fire, and then he tosses his tibia away behind him and sits forward, hands curled on his knees, staring intently at Juugo through the gusting smoke. The night is very dark and the shadows of the firelight skip across him weirdly, hollowing his collarbones, drawing out the sharpness of his jaw. "What I can do," he says, "my bones – people wanted me dead. My whole clan was exterminated, and I went into the mountains – into hiding – and I believed I would die, you understand, if no one killed me first – that I would die alone up there..."
Juugo can think of nothing to say, but he's not sure he'd be able to say it even if he could, so paralysed by horror does he feel. That Kimimaro should have lived the way Juugo has! – that Kimimaro should have known the misery of loneliness – of complete and utter isolation, and life under the death warrant! It is almost too much to bear, and he rubs his hands anxiously against his knees as he listens, gazing at him through the fire.
"But," says Kimimaro. He looks up again at Juugo, and he's smiling, eyes bright with rapture. "But. My Lord Orochimaru found me – saved me, and I'm his, now. I pledged my life to him. I belong to him. And I am honoured every day I serve him."
"Right," says Juugo, desperately keen to seem as though he understands. "Right, so he – he's, um –"
"A genius," says Kimimaro. "No one as clever as him has ever lived. The greatest ninja of his age – of any age –"
"He's a ninja?" blurts Juugo, before he even realises that he's interrupting. "I mean – Kimimaro –!"
Fast, so very fast, Kimimaro clenches his fists – and bone explodes out from the knuckles, straight across the fire, pinning Juugo where he sits before the madness has burned even halfway through his body.
It burns back, receding as quickly as it came.
"Okay?" says Kimimaro.
Juugo rubs his arms, aching from the vice-like pressure of the bones. "Okay," he says, breathing deeply. "Um – thank you..."
"It's nothing," says Kimimaro. Through the fire something changes in the quality of his frown, something small, and Juugo tries to steady himself in preparation for whatever's coming. "It – surprises you that my master is a ninja?"
"I've met ninja," Juugo starts, hesitantly, "once or twice – when they'd come looking for work, sometimes – if it was harvest season, or to, um, to – clear snow, or... But not in person. And not, um. Any genius ones."
"That's not true," says Kimimaro. Juugo stares at him in confusion for a moment, and then Kimimaro very nearly smiles – flattens his hands to the dirt, bows down low above his knees. "Kimimaro of the Kaguya clan, formerly of Water Country, presently of Sound Country. Lord Orochimaru's favoured prodigy. Please treat me kindly."
"Oh," says Juugo. He looks at the long sweep of Kimimaro's hair, fallen forward across his shoulder, reflecting orange in the firelight. He has heard of Water Country in the stories of migratory birds, who have always seemed rather taken by its endless oceans and by the mountain forests they say last year-long, far darker at their hearts than the forests of Juugo's country; he has heard of hidden villages too, though he's not sure just what they entail, and he wishes more than ever that he had paid attention to the legends of the ninja that were whispered through his village when he was very young, myths to keep the children up at night, nightmares to keep them inside village boundaries. Of course, Juugo himself became the nightmare before long: which perhaps, more than anything, should have told him there was more to the stories of the ninja than there seemed.
"I'm – just Juugo," he says. "I live in the mountains. That's all."
Kimimaro straightens up. His silky hair has fallen in his eyes, and he brushes it back. "You have no clan name?"
"No," says Juugo, after a moment, and Kimimaro accepts this without question.
For a little while, it is quiet again. Kimimaro pulls another length of bone from his shin, dragging it out hand over hand from beneath his patella and snapping it free, and starts to stoke the fire higher, nudging ashy kindling into places where the dying flames burn brightest. The flames crackle, spitting softly; they leave violet aftertraces on the dark, inside Juugo's eyes. He watches them, and, when he thinks Kimimaro isn't looking, he watches Kimimaro too. Small and sleek and strange: perhaps this is how ninja are, the whole lot of them, formal and precise, fast and efficient in their movements. Perhaps the painted markings on his face are ninja markings, and Juugo wonders what they mean. He would ask, if he weren't so sure it would be considered rude. Maybe in the future. They have forever together, after all: so Kimimaro says, and Juugo believes him with an open heart.
"It doesn't matter, anyway," Kimimaro says, at length. His voice is soft, hardly louder than the crackle of the kindling, but when he glances up Juugo sees that once again his gaze is passionately bright. "Your clan, or where you come from – it doesn't matter to my master where anyone comes from, because he receives you just the same." Deliberating, he hesitates: and then his voice drops again, into a pitch so fervently sincere that Juugo feels his spine nearly shiver. "You can be born for him," says Kimimaro. "Everyone starts again in Hidden Sound. No one has a past – you leave it at the village gates. Your life starts over once you get there. Do you understand?"
Juugo nods, near-hypnotised by the quiet intensity with which Kimimaro speaks his gospel. His gaze through the smoke is intent, his face still ghoulish in the flickering shadows of the firelight.
"What you've done doesn't matter," he says, "or who you are, or where you're from – or any of that. All that you are in Sound is what you are in Sound."
"I... think I see," Juugo says, hesitantly, because Kimimaro clearly cares very much about this topic and he doesn't want at all to disappoint. "I think I do."
"I live for him," says Kimimaro. He jabs the long piece of his tibia into the fire. It's beginning to char, blackening along the jagged fracture where he snapped it away. "You can too, if you want," he offers, after a moment. "Maybe you will. You'll have to have training, at least, but my master's already said I'm to take care of that."
"Ninja training?" says Juugo, and Kimimaro nods. "Oh, no – no, no – I just don't want to hurt anyone. I don't mind not being a ninja, or anything like that. I'd rather just stay out of the way. That's all I want, so you don't – um. Have to waste time teaching me. I'm okay like this. But thank you for the offer," he adds hastily, and ducks his head.
Kimimaro says nothing. In the distance a mountain owl cries out, lonesome, looking for its mate. Juugo keeps his head ducked and makes his hands into fists on his knees, stares at them intently, hopes with all his heart that Kimimaro won't reject him because of this – won't cast him off, won't leave him here, won't jump up into the trees or flicker out of sight, the way the stories say that ninja can, like wraiths, like spirits of the forest –
"You know," says Kimimaro, "there are ninja out there who would do anything to study alongside the last of the Kaguya."
Juugo dares to look up. Kimimaro is smiling, almost rueful. "I don't know about – that," he says. "The Kaguya. That's – your clan?"
"My very famous clan," Kimimaro agrees. "But they're dead now, and they were cruel beyond measure while they lived – so!" He tosses the charred bone aside; then the ruefulness drops from his smile, and he very nearly grins. He puts his hands together – moves them quickly, one shape and then another, far too fast to follow – and he opens his mouth: and a stream of fresh water bursts out, clear as the mountain streams, to douse the fire with a single splash. The firelight is gone so suddenly that the night seems all the darker from the shock.
"What..." says Juugo, on one soft astonished exhale.
"Ninjutsu," says Kimimaro. Juugo can't make out his expression but in the very faintest strains of moonlight he can see his silhouette, can see him wiping his sleeve across his mouth. His voice sounds pleased. "Very basic, though. I can teach you it, once we get to Sound – since you have no choice about the training. If you're to be living in a ninja village, you'll need to learn at least the basics."
"Then I don't want to learn from anyone else," Juugo says at once. "I won't. I can't. Only you."
"That's alright," Kimimaro says, easily. "I understand."
"Okay," says Juugo. He hesitates. He can hear the sound of shuffling, of Kimimaro lying down to sleep. "Um..."
The black lump of Kimimaro's silhouette sits back up. "I'm sorry," he says, and before Juugo can assure him that no apology is needed there's the wet sound of flesh splitting, and the weird scrape of bone extending. Then:
"Come and check, if you like. You're safe with me."
Juugo doesn't move.
"Juugo," says Kimimaro. "I'm safe with you, too. Trust me."
After a moment, Juugo shuffles his way around where he can feel the dying heat of the fire, the few sparks leaping from the ash, and shuffles on towards where he last saw Kimimaro – but then in the darkness his outstretched hands contact bone, still warm from Kimimaro's insides, and viciously spined in a way that Juugo doesn't think human bone ever usually is. He feels his way carefully along it, up to where it sockets into a broader bone still, and across that, and down the next, and he maps the expanse of Kimimaro's bone-cage with his hands until its architecture makes sense to him.
"Okay?" says Kimimaro, from somewhere in the middle of it all.
"Okay," says Juugo. He feels heavy with relief. He moves back to his own side of the campfire, and arranges himself to sleep, curled up and tucked into himself. "Thank you," he adds, and means it with a gratitude so huge he's not sure anyone could ever truly understand its weight.
"Sleep well," says Kimimaro. His voice is gentle. One of his bones splinters as he rolls over, and an instant later Juugo hears the drawn-out scraping of a replacement shoving up from beneath his skin.
It is far less pleasant a sound than the steady burble of the river beside his cave had been, but it is just as soothing, and it calms Juugo's heart just as much to hear it.