4. Little Death
Evening dark enveloped the remains of the caved-in shaft. Starlight lay on the dark mass of the quiet hill when the pebbles began to shake.
A great, dark shape burst from the ground, and proceeded to pull its long body out of the earth's constraints. Once it got its tail out of the hole, the large serpent coiled and spat out a wet bundle. It hissed at the content of its stomach, as he somewhat shakily rose to his feet. Heated red gaze met the snake's cold one.
The great snake's tongue whipped the air one last time before it disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Sasuke cursed under his breath, and collapsed onto his knees.
The wound on his right leg still bled profusely. No wonder the snake was reluctant to spit him out.
When the cave's ceiling started crumbling to pieces and he earned the gash, Sasuke used too much chakra in the quick summoning. The snake was too powerful. He barely managed to convince it, using electricity and wasting more of his chakra, to let him out. The serpent somehow put into its head that eating the summoner would be acceptable retribution for being summoned into an exploding cave.
It was humiliating.
Eight months of training and he still wasn't capable of controlling Orochimaru's minor summons, let alone Manda. Sasuke pulled out a bundle of bandages and worked on the wound. He had failed to learn any medical ninjutsu, also. This mission was proving to be an eye-opener. Sasuke mercilessly tightened the binding.
The target.
He should have known lightning style wouldn't work on him.
Sasuke's lightning hit his inhuman side, and the metal functioned as a conductor. The lightning ran straight through Sabiiro and down into the ground. Kabuto could have mentioned the fact earlier, but he probably concluded that Sasuke would be able to guess that for himself.
Some of the hatred Sasuke cultivated for his brother slipped from his control and redirected to the machine man. He made him feel stupid.
But Sabiiro's advantage wouldn't last long. And he couldn't say that he didn't profit from the failure. He now knew what to fix once he returned to Orochimaru's dojo.
Sasuke straightened up, tucking the hatred back where it rightfully belonged.
Still, the 'kill' option began to attract him.
The young Uchiha rose his gaze to the scattered stars. Sabiiro had a nice head-start, but he probably didn't count on one thing.
Sasuke could see in the dark.
The metal leg dragged across the leaves, grubbing the humid soil. Souta could swear it grew heavier with every passing minute.
He had been running for the whole night, and it looked like he would reach his destination before daybreak. His footsteps became flabby, resolution leaking out of his frame with every gained inch. Souta was hungry and exhausted – but more than that, he was steadily becoming terrified.
Step. Step. Step. Memory. Memory. Memory.
His left arm feebly flailed in the dark and caught a thick branch. Bald head leaned on the forearm, and heavy breaths misted the night air.
'I can't do this... I don't want to do this.' Souta slid to the ground and hid his face in the crook of his human arm. In some insane way, it was easier to run with someone at his heels than now when the open road stretched before him.
He wasn't able. He couldn't walk up to Kuroguma after ten years or so and lie his eyes on Koemi. Koemi's father was dead, and Souta-of-today was a dead man's shadow. Without looking, he could feel the cold metal barrel touching his left leg, and he moved the artificial arm away with disgust.
This thing they made of him... This thing he made of himself... Ugh.
A cloud passed over the pale moon, and the darkness grew thicker. The darkness overtook Souta's mind.
He remembered when Four-Eyes took his right arm away. He remembered waking up to the fire in his body, as something new, as a mutant of some kind. When his hazy eyes looked around, his head still too fuzzy to panic over the unknown and unfamiliar, he saw something white shelved on a cupboard near his bed.
The old rage, the rage which he felt back then, heated Souta's veins again.
It was his arm.
His severed right arm.
And an unfeeling slab of metal in its place.
Even through the haze of the fire, Souta could see the thin pink scar running from his right thumb to the wrist. The scar was as old as him. And watching it, Souta could feel most acutely that that arm belonged to him, and that somebody took it away, no questions asked.
New blood pumped harder through his tender, healing vessels, and Souta felt murderous.
On the obscure metal cupboard, almost within an arm's reach if you wanted to be funny as hell, Souta's right hand was rotting away. A part of him was dead.
His little death.
It was when those words passed through his mind that Souta's rage withdrew. A dumb, numb realization cooled his thoughts.
His right arm was dead, but he was not. That sickly white thing lying on a metal cupboard could have been him. The survival instinct jolted his nerves, and a mad fear of dying seized him.
It was that same cowardly need to stay alive which turned him into a faithful lapdog of his savior/tormentor. The bespectacled, silver-haired man soon revealed himself.
In the following ten years he had killed for that man and that man's master more times than he could count. When Souta awoke, Four-Eyes told him he had found Souta mostly dead next to a number of charred corpses, his skin almost entirely burned from the right side of his body. Four-Eyes took him in and repaired him, adding a few extra parts. Souta should thank Four-Eyes for his life, and Four-Eyes was sorry to tell him that, taking his current condition into consideration, Souta's return to his home village would do more damage than good. Souta agreed.
Souta kept on agreeing for ten years, until yesterday when he realized where the forest path led.
Koemi was better off without him. She was so small when he left that she probably retained only a handful of fuzzy memories. What right did he have to come and see her?
He had once pressed the barrel against a man's stomach, and blasted off his bowels.
The tracker whose death he caused only a few hours ago was so young.
...
Souta peeked at the sky overhead. The dark blue was lighting up. Not much time was left before daybreak.
In the end, Souta was a selfish man. And a coward. He didn't know which was more cowardly – continuing or retreating, so he would let selfishness prevail. After all, he had already come a long way.
He would take one good look of her, and draw back to the shadows.
Maybe he would kill himself. Maybe he would leave it to Snake-Eyes' next tracker. It suited him either way.
With every familiar rock or tree, Souta pushed the quivering part of him deeper into his inner gray patches. He tried to make himself as indifferent as the cool metal of his body. No pain, no thoughts, just steps.
It didn't work.
He couldn't stop marveling at how many things he had forgotten. Even in the weakening darkness, mislaid memories kept springing up.
The tree onto which the neighbour's dog chased him once. The sneaky root that gave him his most badass scar.
... And the chestnut branch, as thick as both his arms, where once upon a time he planned to put a swing for his infant daughter, which he never got to make.
He was close. No matter how slow he had walked for the last few miles, the house in which he grew up lay just around the bend.
'... Well... Get done with it.'
The last few meters felt like gliding through a watery dreamscape. In a blink of an eye, the past incarnated before his eyes.
Almost as if he never left.
Almost as if nothing had changed but him.
The starlight was fading, and the little wooden house stood perfectly still in the early hours of the morning. It was hard to tell whether it was inhabited or not, but Souta felt that life already dealt him enough nasty surprises. Somebody must have slept inside. It might be her. A few hours of sleep and Souta would know.
Not taking his eyes from the closed shutters of a low window, Souta made his way toward a solid black shape, towering not far away from the main house. In the distant past it used to be some sort of a stable/toolshed, but in Souta's time it was already a crumbling ruin no one got near to except his father. Even in the dark, Souta could tell it came nearer the final collapse. Perfect.
The unlocked door almost fell from the hinges at the pull, and Souta carefully stepped into the realm of decay. A humid smell of rotting wood, sodden with rainwater, attacked his nostrils, and little feet scuttled in the right corner. 'Nice and comfy, no doubt. Just like the cell back home.'
Remnants of rusty tools crumbled beneath his feet, but Souta could hardly fear tetanus. He proceeded to make himself space on the grimy floor, waving away cobweb.
'And you used to say you'll tear the old place down... Look how useful it turned out to be.'
It was impossible to see anything through the dirty window-panes, but the glass was broken, providing him with a nice, drafty peephole. He could keep watch over the house, and when the morning came, he would find out whether Koemi was in there. There was no future beyond that point.
Souta lay to catch up on sleep. The drama was drawing to a close.
His dreams were as broken as the glass scattered around his head, full of trees and faces and torch-lit hallways leading to nothing. The fabric of the figments was such a miscellany of clashing things that at first the sound of cock-crow didn't strike him as anything odd. It was when the cock-a-doodle-doo persevered and got louder that Souta finally awoke.
Opening his eyes to a bird's call. Well, that was a first in a decade. The illusion that he was still in his deep underground cell lasted for a second. The messy tooolhouse didn't offer much better prospects, but Souta's head snapped up when he remembered what was outside.
He got to his knees and dragged himself to the hole in the window.
The air was misty blue, still in the absence of the sun. The house remained calm and soundless as several hours ago, but Souta could now tell he had been wrong. It did change. Even the house was ten winters older.
His hunger awoke with him, and his stomach howled. Souta reached for his weapon pouch to bring out the standard military snack-bars Snake-Eyes equipped his men with.
He was just tearing the wrapper when something happened. A fraction of noise, coming from afar. Souta blinked, unsure if it was his imagination. It repeated.
If he hadn't spend ten years listening around for enemies, maybe he wouldn't have picked it up.
There. Almost as if coming from the house across the yard.
Before Souta could prepare himself, before he could tell himself that he couldn't do it, the shutters of the opposite house opened with a creak, and a vision appeared.
Souta stared at his dead wife leaning over the low window. The blackhaired girl, tresses still disheveled from bed, squinted up at the ruddy sky and yawned at the morning. She was gone in a second.
Souta kept kneeling and peeking, dumbfounded.
He got his glance of Koemi.
And now he needed much more.
A/N - Now, I did my homework and asked a couple of science-oriented friends what would happen if a cyborg got hit by a lightning. Sparked no funny glances, nope, none at all. So I am aware that in a close encounter of that kind Souta wouldn't fare well. But then again, real life ninja don't exactly walk 30-meters-long free falls off, do they?
