Author's Notes:
Dark Deeds~ Prologue. New story. Co-writing. There's nothing much to say.
Kisha~ As she said, not much to say. So, thus begins a new tragedy. Enjoy ~~
She had been four when her mother was murdered right before her.
The two of them had been on a trip to Sunagakure, to escape the cold "hospital" her mother labored in day after day as a result of her exceptional healing skills. The woman had been sick of the screams of the dying experimental patients made to undergo heartless mutations, all because of the Kage of the Sound- Orochimaru. She had finally worked up the means to leave, and so, in the middle of a storm-shrouded night, assisted with great amounts of luck, they escaped the compound they had been forced to stay in.
The man hadn't known of their plans of departure, but the two were sure they were being sought out as soon as they reached the desert. The woman had the dying will to protect her daughter from the sick man- by any means possible. She had known his snake eyes had been vying for her cells the moment the girl was born, and it would be over her lifeless body he would get them. And so she told her little girl that Orochimaru-sama had finally let her have a vacation, and they were going somewhere so quiet that their ears would ring, so warm that they would die to find the shadows, so empty they would feel like the only two people left on the face of the planet. They would go to the desert, where the people lived in giant sand castles and every day the sun was shining.
She couldn't restrain the sad smile when her little girl looked so excited, so unaware of the dangers that would persist after they left. Because the last thing that woman was going to allow was for the reptilian man to take her baby girl.
It was with that attitude that she left, trekked across forests and the vast, baking desert, and made it to the giant city of Sand.
She knew not to trust anyone. Any one of the ninja patrolling the battlements of the village, any of the vendors on the sidewalk selling cold delicacies, any man or woman or child or elder passing through the streets could be an underling of Orochimaru, a pawn controlled by his hypnotic golden eyes. Her caution was at its highest.
Unfortunately for her, she didn't last one night in the sun-baked city, even with her high guard.
The two females were the definition of victim; a small girl with bouncy copper curls, startling black-red eyes, and a ratty but beautiful glass doll and a tall, stunningly gorgeous, willowy woman who had the determination but lacked the physical strength of a warrior. That much was true.
What was not normal was the aggressor.
They had been passing between two closely built houses, trying to find a low-key place to stay that included a hot meal and a warm bed, when they nearly stumbled upon a small, curled up, crying boy. He looked up sharply when the two tripped over something in an effort to avoid crashing into him, and stood up abruptly, holding worlds of sadness, hatred, and raw anger in his light aqua green eyes. His hair was the color of lifeblood, and ringing those glassy eyes were dark circles so black it looked like eyeliner. The ridges of his brows were bare; no eyebrows adorned them. Under the cover of his ratty hair was a red kanji tattoo.
The two children, around the same age, stared at each other for a few moments, but the girl was smothered under the intensity of the young boy's gaze and glanced away. There, resting on one of the boxes that littered the alley was a well-loved, tattered teddy bear. She gingerly picked it up, cradling it next to her doll, and met the eyes of the boy again.
Though the fury still lingered, it had been pushed behind the overwhelming sense of urgency at seeing his bear in the arms of another. But before he could take a child's selfish action, she walked over to him and gently handed him the bear, smiling sheepishly and revealing dimples in the childish roundness of her face.
He eyed her, distrusting, and took the bear greedily from her hand, inspecting it as if her hands, cleaner than his, had left a distinctive stain on the fabric fur. When she reached out to pat the bear, signaling all was well, he slapped her hand away and growled.
Startled, the girl raced behind the leg of her mother, who the boy seemed to not have noticed. Upon realizing the woman was there, his rage returned with a vengeance, and he dropped the bear, eyes livid, clenching and unclenching his tiny fists. Even the woman cowered a bit as his fury seemed to clog the air.
"You, you stupid girl!" he said, his voice taking on a terrifyingly demonic edge, "It's not fair! It's not FAIR!"
His screech nearly deafened the two, and the young girl began to cry silently as she clamped her hands over her ears at the noise.
"LISTEN TO ME!" he screamed, pushing the woman away with inhuman strength and wrenching the girl's hands from her ears. Her tears continued to fall, moistening the sand that began to accumulate in the air.
"WHY IS IT THAT YOU HAVE THE CHANCE TO HIDE BEHIND YOUR MOTHER WHEN SOMETHING IS SCARY? WHY IS IT THAT YOU GET PROTECTION FROM ALL THE SCARY THINGS THAT HAPPEN? WHY IS IT THAT YOU EVEN GET TO HAVE A MOTHER AT ALL?" he screamed, shaking her by her shoulders with a crazed, heart-wrenching look in his eyes. Sand was now whipping around the two children, stinging the girl's eyes and buffeting her skin, but the boy seemed unfazed.
The impact of being pushed into a wall shook the woman's bones, and left an indentation in both her skull and the sand structure beside her. With doubled vision and a concussion, she stumbled over to her child, hell-bent on getting her away from the little boy with the murderous expression.
"-WHY IS IT THAT YOU EVEN GET TO HAVE A MOTHER AT ALL?" she heard the boy scream as he shook her daughter's limp body.
Her heart stopped.
The sand that had been whirling around the two had ricocheted grains off her skin, and within a moment the boy had turned to her so quickly it looked as if his head should have snapped right off his neck. His eyes were a sea of deranged homicide, and his mouth curled into a sinister grin as he released the girl. She landed on the floor with a thud that sounded like a crashing boulder, so quiet was the alleyway.
"Please," she managed to sputter out, a half croak. "Please, spare my daughter."
"Spare her?" He barked out a sharp bout of laughter, his voice no longer the voice of the boy, but of something dangerously terrible. "I wasn't going to kill her in the first place." It was the boy's voice again.
She released the breath that had been trapped in her lungs.
He lowered his head, and a menacing shadow spread over his face.
"I'm going to kill you."
The girl's eyes widened, and she called out and yanked on the boy's hand, but it was beyond her control, for the boy backhanded the small girl, sending her into the alley wall, almost knocking her out. Concentrated sand shrapnel cut into her mother's body, shredding her skin and limbs like razors in mere seconds. Her eviscerated torso slumped to the floor, her arms and legs strewn about the alley. Her head rolled into a dank, moldy corner.
The boy's hyena laugh barely penetrated her eardrums. The world was a quiet place, until she heard the most ear-piercing shriek echo through the narrow walls of the alley. Only when she felt her throat become raw did she realize it had been her.
The copper haired girl's pupils dialated when she felt something warm cross her face. She felt the veins in her eyes pop and become bloodshot.
She looked down, her hands and clothes painted with the blood of her own mother. Her eyes felt as if they were going to swell with tears, but it was like turning a faucet when the water was off. Only the stinging burn was felt. She stared with utter horror at her hands, unable to tear her eyes away from the horrid color, but she knew that anywhere else she looked would only be worse.
With shaky hands, she crawled to her now passed mother. The little girl didn't contemplate the fact that if she moved or angered the red headed boy any more, she might die as well.
"Mommy?" she whispered. Her tiny hands took hold of her mother's shoulder as she whimpered, "Mommy? Mommy, wake up!" The girl continued to shake the elder woman in a desperate attempt to rouse her, but to no avail. She curled onto her side next to her mother and began to cry softly, wishing that it all wasn't reality.
The boy kicked her sharply in the side, but she felt nothing. Slowly, she turned her bloodied face up to meet his cold eyes, flickering with a glee not deeply penetrating- it was like the emotion flickered over a glass surface, unable to really be felt.
"Now you'll know how it feels," he said as he looked down upon her slumped face.
Staring up at him, she was able to read the kanji ingrained in ink on his flesh. Ever so ironically, it read "Love".
And in a flash of sad clarity, she said in a voice that sounded a hundred years older than she was, "Yes, I believe I will know how feels. But you'll never be able to truly experience love if you want to inflict the same feelings you have on every person you meet." Her voice returned to its normal pitch, and tears finally accompanied the stinging in her eyes. They spilled over her cheeks, silent and slow-moving as a river. "And I hope you never will."
He looked at her with a mixture of anger, loneliness, and despair. She gazed back at him, her red-black eyes holding no pity, but only an overwhelming sadness. He looked as if he might say something, but then he broke off in a run, dashing through the carnage and disappearing around the corner.
Her tears gushed down her face, dripping down her neck in an uncomfortable stream. She wiped at the salty sadness, but it left a streak of her mother's blood on her pale chest. She couldn't stop herself from taking a quick glance around the area, and retched when her mother's limbless torso spouted a shoot of blood from the various stumps of raw flesh.
She sat there, crying and wailing up at the night sky, until she finally heard footsteps to one side of the alley. She turned, hoping to find a ninja or a concerned civilian, but she instead found herself facing the root of the cause of the entire thing.
Orochimaru removed the straw traveling hat from his silky black head and smiled maliciously-and yet somehow coaxingly- at her.
"Tsk tsk, Xenaphiliana, what a mess you've made." He scooped up her mother's head from the corner, cocking his head as he stared into the lifeless eyes of the woman.
"What a pity. And she was one of my best healers, too."
He dropped her head to the floor, and the thud echoed throughout the alley.
"Come, Xenaphiliana," he cooed, lifting the girl up by her hand. "It's time to go home."
