Konohagakure, 10:36 PM
Night blankets the village of leaves, wrapping snugly around the sleeping forms resting within their homes, and Sakura is dying.
Pin pricks jab into her skin, sinking and sinking, yet the bed sheets stay remarkably spotless. Phantom pains, they are called, but Sakura has no idea where they came from. An invisible killer? No, surely she would realize an intruder in her home, Sakura is a genin after all.
The bed squeals and creaks while Sakura convulses under the sweltering heat of her thick covers – off, off, they need to get off. She tumbles out of her pink bed and smacks into the floorboards, groaning her pain into the air.
It doesn't help at all.
Sakura forces her noodle-like limbs into action, face gone a spotty red as she struggles to lift her nightgown over her head. Air slides over her skin, cool as a spring breeze, but Sakura is going to die from heat – unbearable, terrible heat.
Alas, the girl eventually stands, limping to the bathroom with the barest flutters of undergarments over her pale skin. Usually insecurity and shame come upon glancing herself in the mirror, but Sakura's attention is on the bite marks on her arms – someone is biting her, who is biting her!?
Heat rises from her skin, twirls around inside of her and tingles – it almost feels like chakra when doing a jutsu – and it leaves her body. It – that is her chakra and it is moving without her permission, what the fuck. Wisps of blue energy rise from the bitemarks in her arms and disappear into the air.
Sakura knows she has an abysmal amount of chakra in her coils. She's civilian-born, from a merchant clan, but it shouldn't hurt like this. Her chakra shouldn't leave her like this. Tears drip from her eyes, the chakra is still disappearing, and Sakura reaches desperately for the blue tendrils.
Please, she needs it, come back…
Heat presses down into her body again, and Sakura retches into the toilet bowl.
The world turns a mixture of swimming black dots and vibrant blues, though it does not contest with the beautiful pink, blotchy red, twirling, bloody vomit in the toilet water. She collapses onto the floor.
Everything goes black.
Kusagakure, 10:36 PM
Most days, Karin is angry, bleeding, and crying.
Teeth sink into her skin like the prongs of a shuriken, digging and digging, just to spite her. When their bellies and coils are filled with chakra and blood – vaguely reminiscent of the books Karin reads when she isn't living them – they rise from her body with wasted life essence soaked into their clothes.
Karin is left shivering like a leaf, and the next one to snap the olive branch kneels in front of her pseudo-corpse. In these moments of peace, Karin thinks hard. She thinks about her mother, her dull brown eyes, and the frantic attempts to revive her. She thinks about the even more frantic ninja still biting her to take what is left.
Karin doesn't like thinking.
The next one, an older shinobi, sinks his teeth a few inches below her underwear and Karin jerks. He laughs around his mouthful. She loses more blood because all of them are so messy and her sight goes black.
Karin is grateful. The man continues to take.
Shiore doesn't feel guilty.
He never has anything to feel guilty for. A lot of the mindfucking issues in the world have nothing to do with him. He doesn't feel guilty for any of them because they aren't his fault; he doesn't feel guilty because they aren't anywhere near him, but…
The girl with the bloody hair, and the bloody clothes, and the bloody teeth on her. That girl is right there. Shiore feels more guilty than he has ever felt in his entire life.
The young shinobi, genin – like him – feeding on her yanks his teeth out so hard, blood spurts from the area on her arm.
Shiore has only been here a few times, in the feeding place right next to the girl's small shack-house, but he has seen it happen so often that it is a normality, a necessary evil to procure the happiness of their shinobi. This cruelty is regular, an entirely normal thing to occur, and Shiore always feels slightly guilty, but it has never burrowed into his chest like this.
It has never eaten him alive. It has never turned into a physical pain, albeit a small prickle, though Shiore certainly feels the anguish and pain from his curious seat twenty meters away. Then, the next man comes.
It's his father, a respected chunin and prospective jounin in a few weeks time, and the look in his eyes is so terribly malicious that Shiore feels the tears prickle and a soreness wash over him. The soreness, he isn't really sure where it comes from, but it must be some sort of physical-emotional reaction to this, frankly, cruel ritual.
Shiore believes this, of course, until his father bites down into the girl's thigh and his vision flashes white with pain.
The shock has him falling from his seat and seizuring on the ground.
The blurry sound of panic – his father calling out "Save my son, save my son!" – is barely understood by his pain-riddled mind. Shiore groans out a protest to the flush of heat in his system while the world turns sideways on its axis.
If this is because of his guilt, Shiore refuses to feel guilty ever again.
Otogakure, 10:36
Kimimaro is alone again, with his thoughts, and those thoughts are slowly turning suicidal.
His death is an expectation. Kimimaro knows he is going to die, Kabuto knows he is going to die, Lord Orochimaru knows he is going to die. Everyone in the whole damn base knows that he is going to keel over soon – and despite that, no one knows how to fix it. Of all people, Kimimaro would think Lord Orochimaru, even Kabuto capable of reverse-engineering a disease, and it gave him hope.
But here he is. Still rotting, still coughing, and the clock on the wall still ticks.
So, Kimimaro is suicidal, only because he knows his life is doomed to end. Less suicidal and more fatalistic, maybe?
It doesn't matter too much anyway. Kimimaro served his lord well for the years he spent with this toxicity in his body, and he will die in the name of Orochimaru's will. And if he can't do that…well. Maybe he's just meant to die like the rest of his clan.
Kimimaro nurses a very, very small cup of sake in his hand.
Kabuto says it isn't good for his condition, but he needs something to cope with, and at least he's aware enough to keep it to a minimum. The illness is simply going to worsen regardless. There isn't any reason to cut back, if only for the sake of obeying Orochimaru's extended will through his highest ranking subordinate.
Kimimaro elegantly hops down from his high stool and takes a long moment to look out of the window. Dark blue drapes over the sky, with sparkles of gleaming light shining down onto the world. It's peaceful.
Kimimaro coughs, per usual, over his cup, and suddenly there are globs of blood swimming in the sake. Startled, he drops the glass and it shatters outside.
Stars circle his vision, then rapidly leave his sight as he collides with the floor, but the white, empty ceiling makes him more nauseous. This is his end, it seems. Kimimaro sighs through the blood in his lungs and the chakra draining from his body.
This is fine. This is expected. He knows.
It's the end of him. It's the end of the Kaguya. The end of his service to Orochimaru. It's fine. Kimimaro can die like this.
He closes his eyes.
Then he opens them again, and he feels.
Everything is a hurting, burning, excruciating pain. Heat simmers from the soles of his feet and rises like boiling water to his scalp, so crisp that Kimimaro tries to raise his hand to assure the hair is still on his head. It doesn't work out, and the tendons in his arm twitch sporadically at the attempt.
The heat is so, so much that he doesn't feel the bloody rawness in his throat when he screams.
Death is the furthest thing from his mind.