Chapter 2: The Fangs

The King in Red

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Morino Ibiki had seen every way that blood could spill. He had personally bled it out of hundreds of prisoners, one after another, the faces, skins, and bodiless hands groping at him from the darkness of his memories. He led his department in pills taken and heart attacks survived. Every medicinal pebble he swallowed strengthened his loathing for those that drove him to the bitter, shrieking edge, that tasted like the bile on the back of his tongue after he woke up from another four flat, dreamless, pill-induced hours of sleep.

There was no rest for Morini Ibiki. Only suffering; and the fact that he never bled didn't lessen its ravages. He knew better than anyone else that more than blood could break a man. He could have been called a martyr if he didn't exist solely to inflict his suffering on others as well.

But he had never seen the Ninetails, and what it had wrought in the small, blond-headed child.

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He has stained-glass eyes of boiled wine

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The containment cell was lit a soft red, like candlelight without a clear source. It turned the white walls to velvet and made it prickle the skin, as if every cushion was filled with straw. Ibiki opened the door, carefully glanced around the door, and saw the child in a back corner. He was seething.

That was really the only word for it. The child was hyperventilating, sobbing, as any child would when taken by strangers and locked into a cell. Balled up into a fetal position and tucked into a corner, he made soundless, choking sounds of grief and misery.

Around him pulsed a sickening mien of red-black ocean, heaving with swells of nameless, dark shades of color and misshapen faces. The mouths opened and stretched, deformed to maddening levels, until the jaws expanded past the face and consumed it all whole in self-cannibalism. Worst of all, the faces crowded around the child, and smoothed his blonde, spiky hair, and stroked soothingly down his back with the sides of their fangs.

Morino Ibiki looked at all of this, and could only think that it was sin. He interrupted the . . . interaction by entering the cell and closing the door loudly behind him. It was a strict breach of protocol, but it didn't really matter at this point. If the Ninetails was this close to release, protocol was nothing more than a faster way to railroad his ass to hell. He needed to connect with the child before the thing within him could corrupt him.

"I'm Morino Ibiki." the interrogator murmured, sitting down cross-legged in front of the child. The container did nothing but shriek and shrink away, the cloud of faces lashing out bonelessly and carving a red trench all the way up Morino's right arm, piercing to the bone most of the way.

Ibiki didn't blink. He let the blood flow out of his arm unhindered and watched the child flail at him with that bloody aura. It scarred him up a few more times, lacerating him to the bone at several points.

He noted with interest that the red cloud would coagulate just before contact into eerie, translucent fangs, which would then tear the hell out of whatever they struck. They were freakishly sharp, and caused pain unlike anything Ibiki had known since his capture and torture at the hands of Iwagakure. But pain was a non-issue for Ibiki. He had slept eight hours in the last two weeks. He had eaten six times. Suffering was his bread and water, and he lived like an ascetic. The Chuunin simply let the child exhaust his pain and fear against his own flesh, and waited.

After several minutes the child quieted down, and turned his head slightly to stare at Ibiki through one eye. It was bloodshot beyond anything Ibiki had ever seen, even beyond when he had carved out the inside of one man's eyelids then slipped two drops of lemon juice under them. Bizarre, engorged blood vessels covered the whites until there was more of the crimson hue than the original color. Curiously, the iris and pupil were completely unaffected.

"What's your name?" Ibiki prompted gently, projecting sympathy and tranquility towards the child. He was a master of lying.

Several sniffs. A quiet, staggering sigh, as the seething red was drawn within his body again, leaving scarred sigils on the walls.

" . . . Uzumaki Naruto." the child replied, hesitantly.

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The living celll, the Box of Sin

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He was a violently intriguing case, Ibiki decided. Whatever had been done to child in the Sandaime's neglect had undeniable results.

After four weeks of research and interaction, he was no closer to discovering what it was that created that wall of faces that more or less constantly cloaked Naruto. Most of the time, it was only an eerie but subtle effect; grass would twist together in strange circles, the shadows of tree bark would shift to cause patterns, leaves would flicker and become rigid long enough for the subliminal image of a mouth to be perceived. It was extremely disconcerting and even Ibiki himself found it impossible to stay around Naruto for longer than six hours without becoming disturbed.

The container's basic physiology had been revealed, however, and Ibiki mused as he watched Naruto through a stained-glass window of red, into a room with a dirt floor and scattered with foliage and low bushes.

Most noticeably, the child didn't have fingers anymore. They had been hardened and lengthened into almost fang-like appendages. With only a single joint remaining, that connected the appendages and the knuckle, he was no longer capable of holding objects normally, and had to squeeze them in his palm to hold anything.

The container had also lost the ability to perceive the color red, an extremely interesting development. It was as if he now saw through red 'lenses'. This had completely negated his aversion to blood; the last time an ANBU guard had insulted Naruto, he had turned and backhanded the offender in the stomach. The puny blow tore a two-foot hole through the ANBU's abdomen and resulted in his death six minutes later.

There were so many unnatural developments within Naruto that Ibiki found himself with little time to do anything else, and eventually the Sandaime came to realize this. Thus Ibiki was discharged from T & I, and reassigned into ANBU. His mission was to study, interact with, and raise the jinchuuriki of Konogakure.

It did not take a Jounin to see the woodenness in Sarutobi's eyes as he issued this order to Ibiki personally. It would not take a Jounin to see it another six weeks later, as the reports kept flowing in and Sarutobi's self-disgust faded utterly.

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Caught within and without, the King in Red

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Naruto's third kill came roughly a month later, under Ibiki's direction.

Ibiki took him into a stone room, with only a rough-hewn chair between the door and walls. Strapped to the chair with lengths of leather was a man, thirty-something years of age with black hair. A stained Iwakagure head protector hung loosely on his left arm. He focused on Ibiki with a mixture of fear and screaming defiance, although the screams came out supremely muffled by the gag in his mouth. He did not noticed Naruto at all, besides the scarred ANBU.

"I want him to talk." Ibiki said quietly to the child. "Can you make him talk?"

Naruto nodded solemnly and walked forward, with the awkward, rolling steps he had adopted sometime in the last week. Ibiki had questioned the sudden clumsiness and received no answer, but had later realized it was because Naruto's leg bones were reshaping themselves.

The Jounin almost snickered through his gag until it twisted oddly and he gasped in pain. Crimson liquid began seeping out of his bottom lip as the wadded cloth in his mouth, now oddly prickly-looking, began to dice the flesh there.

Ibiki watched as Naruto settled gently on the Jounin's lap, and the wall of faces began to manifest around him; there was much less face than mouth, now, and seemed to be a continual mosaic of fanged maws and bitten, broken lips.

"Hello." Naruto crooned, and set his hands on the man's face.

Then all the Red in the world was vanished, drawn up into a single violent crimson rush into the man's eyes and ears and nose and thunderclapped inside of his head.

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Dangled from his threads

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OhgodohgoditsinmeitsinmeanditsnevercomingoutanditseatingmeandchewingmeandohgodicanseetheteethinthemarrowofmySKULLanditseating

mealivethefangsarethefangsarewithinandstringsarepullingi'mfallingapartandthere'saTHINGinmyheadanditsneverlettinggo

becauseIwanttoDIEanditwontletmebecauseitsgotitsstringsinmeanditsteethandhesgnashingmeupinsidehismawandwewillall

weepwhenhecomesoutsideanddancesyouallonstringsofteeththeREDpuppeteerhasnohandsandnofingersbuthesstillcomingforYOUandEAT

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A hungry puppet that will never rot

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Naruto pulled away from the corpse as the head simply melted into a red cloud of flashing teeth and oblong, obscene lines, spilling off-color blood onto the cold stone floor, and said, "He knew a lot."

Ibiki nodded, and carefully didn't let the shudders creeping up his spine show. The child looked up at him, mouth curiously unstained, and watched the chills right through his chest. The shakes grew worse.

Ibiki led the container back to his room of grass and roots and shrubs, went back to his own quarters, and downed half a dozen pills and a glass of water. He would shortly thereafter have a stroke and lose the use of his right hand and arm, along with most of the mobility of the matching leg.

Despite the ethereal marks of fangs on both leg and arm, he would refuse to quit his mission. Ibiki would be the only person to see, hear from, speak to, or touch Naruto for almost six months, who would remain in his room of fake wilderness for the majority of that time.

Despite the lack of sunlight, Naruto's skin never paled. It actually lost the hint of healthy pink it had once held, and darkened slightly. The result was a boy that looked like he was monochrome-painted, tan with white and black intermixed. Faint patterns flickered beneath his skin, and it wasn't until Ibiki sat and watched Naruto stalk through the ferns of his little room that he realized the patterns were shadows. Far more disturbing to realize was the fact that nothing was casting these shadows. They morphed and poured across his skin like living ink, and Ibiki didn't even try to figure out what shapes they made. He went to bed as soon as he saw the first hints of a figure beginning to emerge and had some more dreamless sleep.

A week later, six and a half months into Naruto's imprisonment, Ibiki stopped needing his pills.

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The living wax of the Beast's candle

The tallow which he burns

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