EDIT, August 2011: Once upon a time, StormDragon666 was a friendless, awkward fourteen-year-old who sat alone at lunch in eighth grade every day. Throughout the school day, she looked forward to coming home to go online and gawk at how many people loved her story, Airborne. Now, July 2011, Stormdragon666 is a successful high school graduate with friends and an actual life, and has decided to edit Airborne all the way through...and then update it. YAY.
Oh, by the way, I think this chapter will satisfy you people who came into this story because of the "MultiSaku" tag. What could I be talking about? What part of the chapter am I pointing at? Oh. Oh, you'll see when we get there.
Chapter the 9th.
Uh…dreamtime? ...Sakura POV
After watching the scary movie, we all went to sleep with a light on, and passed the next day in much the same fashion as the ones before, but with a delivered pizza and a game of hide-and-seek around the house which I won. Sometime around 9:30 that night, Hidan turned off the TV and decided we should take a nap, so get ready for our new plan of staying up all night watching a movie series called "Star Wars," which I'm really excited about because Genma and Kabuto have talked about it a dozen times over the years, and even though I know a lot of spoilers, I'm eager to see this franchise which captured the world.
Hidan brought down his alarm clock from his room—it was red and had a lot of biblical stickers on it—and plugged it in the wall next to the TV. He would wake me at 11:30, he said, and we'd start off with the movie which is actually fourth in the series, but it's the one you have to watch first. Even via Kabuto and Genma, I never understood why this is so. Hidan says "it just is."
I fell asleep faster than I thought. (Couches. Are. Soooffft.) And for the first time in a couple of weeks, I had a dream. It was a strange one. Usually, I had dreams that take place in reality, but with splashes of insanity and "wtf"-ness throughout. I remember one where Kabuto went about his scientist business in a polka-dotted labcoat and a dead civet on his shoulder. And I recall one where Naruto stood before a sink and washed his hands in liquid penguins. Now, that one, I knew Naruto didn't comment on the penguins not because it was just a silly dream, but because he's a brainless beast and wouldn't realize he should wig out even if solid gold came out of the sink.
This dream, though, appeared to be a flashback, reliving a few minutes of my life. It was strange, but not unfamiliar. The way I experienced the dream it what was strangest. I didn't see through my own eyes. I saw myself, my image, like I'm looking through some kind of camera, like someone made a movie about me and I'm watching. It made me so uncomfortable.
It started out when I was sitting on an examination table, looking at a broken nail on my right hand. I knew this dream was a flashback because of that nail. I remembered it, remembered how weird it made me feel and how I picked at it for hours before Hayate saw it and clipped it off, while humming a song that went like, "aint nothin' but a hooound dooog." I was two years old that day. I must have looked like a six- or seven-year-old child.
At this point, no one had noticed my broken nail so I sat there attending to it. I had a kind of Scrabble game going on in my head. I was generation random letters one at a time and attempting to spell "fascination" as quickly as possible while a timer in another section of my mind counted down. It was pretty fun. Then evil came.
By this I mean Kin. She opened the door (her labcoat was buttoned up that day, which was odd for her) and came in with a bottle of rubbing alcohol. This she dropped on the floor out of nowhere, and I, the dreamer, the eight-year-old I am now, wondered why that happened. In the real memory, she hadn't dropped the bottle, she had set it down on the counter next to me. Now Kin fetched a little stool from the corner and sat on it so she was about level with my knees as I sat on the table. Suddenly a nail file was in her hand, and I, the two-year-old child, was scared and panting, and so was Kin.
"Please. Please..." I murmured to her, and my little hands shook. At this point I knew this had veered away from flashback territory and into a regular dream. But why was I so scared?
"I'm working, kid, don't worry." Kin gasped. She worked madly with the nail file at a metal brace that was suddenly locked around my ankle, and chained to the floor. "I'll get you out." The walls began to glow faintly red, and shone with wetness. We weren't in an examination room anymore.
I started to tell Kin something unintelligible. She nodded and nodded, but then suddenly looked up. "Oh, God, Sakura." She whispered, and stared behind me. "He's looking."
Something was there. Something was looking. I turned behind me to see it, and there behind the barred window was Sasori, eyes wide and hands open and tongue sweeping slowly and madly at the bars. As I saw him, I heard an insane chorus of violins and knew he would get through.
Here I woke up. My eyes shuddered open slowly, unwillingly, and they opened another one of my indifferent acceptances of such nightmares as perfectly real. I had dreams like this very often, dreams of the other experiments about to finally get me, touch me. Or dreams where they actually did get to do it, and would rend me open. This one was the first of its kind I'd had since I escaped Chambers. I must have unconsciously hoped once I escaped the other experiments, I would escape dreams about them, too, and that was why I felt so resigned and heavy right now. Chained to those monsters even in my new haven...I would like to have something else to say besides that, but I don't.
January 12th, 11:30 PM, since Hidan's clock is ringing now… ...Sakura POV
Huh. I suppose all I needed was time. Because by the time Hidan's alarm clock went off and woke him up, I was feeling better, and had the energy and will to drive the dream and all its nasty implications out of my mind.
After all, I still was lying on the warm, soft couch! Score one for Sakura! As I was smiling about this, Hidan slapped the alarm clock to stop it from ringing and got up.
"Yuuughhh. Nice nap. Nice." He sat on the floor for a few seconds, just blinking away sleep and suddenly he scared me, making my feathers stick up. "OHTHEMOVIE! Hey, I'm gonna get the movie, you should fix your feathers. They look like hedgehog spikes! Stay here."
As Hidan went upstairs, Kakuzu came down, holding what looked like a checkbook in his hand. He slapped Hidan's back as he passed—it looked more painful than affectionate—and he focused his dark eyes on me. "Hey, can you open your wings for a second?"
I stood up and stretched my legs as I put them on the ground, as I had always done. I told him, "Sure, what for?"
"Just checking some things. Some proportions."
Kakuzu could check whatever he wanted about me. I trusted him, so I spread my wings for him (the right one was a little bit smooshed against the TV screen). As he moved a step closer, it struck me that that trust was really, really strange for me. Look at me. Trusting someone. Man.
He had some measuring tape in his hand, and I guessed he was going to check my wingspan. I let him stretch the yellow tape from one grey wingtip to the other. "Nearly eleven feet." He finished. Then he moved the tape under the sole of my foot, and moved it up to the top of my head. "You're five-five. Barely."
"If you wanted to know if my wingspan was proportional to my height or weight, you could have asked that." I asked, fingering my hair.
He let go of the measuring tape and it retracted into its container with a loud snap! "I thought they must be, if you can fly all right without feeling too burdened or out of control. But hey, maybe they screwed you up. They're fucked in the head, so it wouldn't surprise me any. Just wanted to check."
"They made me proportional, I promise. My height wouldn't even make their list of top fifty mistakes."
He snorted. "You kidding? Your wings are a foot too short. Maybe a little more. Your wingspan should be almost twice your height. It's a little less than that."
Well, look at him and his...mathematical formulas! "I'm impressed that you know proportions like that, since you were nervous about 'not being a vet' when you first saw me and fixed me up."
"Hn. I guess some of us are just smarter than others. There's a reason I have a nice handful of scholarships and he has none." He glared upwards at the ceiling, where Hidan was banging around.
This brought up a new thought for me. "What are you and Hidan going to college to become? Will you be a mathematician?"
An annoyed look crossed his face. The stitches made a massive, synthetic grin on his face, but this expression effectively broke that. "Prior to being a lazy shit and taking a gap semester, he was going into youth ministry. Teaching kids and teens to worship." I told him that that was a little bit unbelievable, and to please answer me seriously. "I am! He wants to teach religion to young people in a way that's not stuffy and long-winded. I've seen him go to a local church and do it, he's pretty good. When he graduates next year, he wants to move to Germany and get a job there."
That's...unexpected. Is Germany ready for Hidan Zashi, I wonder? I told Kakuzu this and he just shrugged. "He's just obsessed with the fact that over there, kids can take a class about religion in school. So he might be a minister and a teacher. His German's definitely good enough to do that, at least." I was about to gasp and wig out over the fact that Hidan apparently speaks good German, when I was interrupted with, "Now, do your wings hurt at all?"
I responded quickly, "No, they're healing perfectly. In fact, you ought to be able to take the stitches out tonight or tomorrow morning." to which he said, "That's weird."
"Why?" He made a flowing motion with his hands that made him look a lot like a professor. "When I sewed up your wings, I noticed they were making some cracking noises when they moved too much. It sounded to me like the bones were out of place, or broken or bruised or…something like that."
"Excellent observation, Sir Not-A-Vet."
He looked away, and I swear his face was a few degrees shy of blushing when he answered, "Not a vet. Doctor. I'm majoring in medical science and aim to be a spinal surgeon...and any med student or local drunk could guess that you should be feeling some pain considering how you got both those injuries."
I'd have to be a local drunk myself to forget being stabbed in the wing by a knife and then by a tree. Or that surreal experience of catching my dripping blood in my hands and smearing it in my shirt so it wouldn't hit unsuspecting people like bird poop. Thinking of this made me unconsciously rub the hem of my white tee, which was most definitely white again thanks to the washing machine in this house. And of course, the fact that the fight with the gang members had wounded my wing somehow, dislocated a part of it, in such a way that they creaked and scraped against each other all the time, possibly due to a ligament that had been worn or torn away. I had planned to set my wing myself, but hadn't done it simply because I forgot. Star Wars and chicken breast and hide-and-seek made me forget, and the pain and the bone-scraping is gone now. My body must have taken care of this on its own. How lucky.
These thoughts passed through my mind in some one and a quarter seconds, and then I told Kakuzu, "Well, considering my body can heal a broken arm in three days, I am frankly not surprised that the problem's gone away. I would have set the wing myself, but honestly hanging out with you two made me forget, and I must have re-grown the ligament between the two scraping bones during that time."
He narrowed his eyes at me, a kind of accusatory squint. "Ligaments don't regrow, Sakura. That's why old people complain about their joints and why we have a word called 'osteoporosis'."
And I narrowed my eyes a little bit, too. "My ligaments regrow, Kakuzu. I've seen scans of them torn and re-grown nine times. It's very possible, and would probably throw Greg House for a loop." And there wasn't anything he could say to that. Oh, snap!
At this point Hidan jumped down the stairs, yes, jumped, taking four at a time and landing on the floor clumsily on his hands and knees with the DVD case in his mouth. "Fharr Wurz! Fharr Wurz!" I guessed he was trying to say "Star Wars," but before I could ask if I was right, he had jumped right over the couch and began programming the DVD player. By programming, I mean jamming and mashing buttons, which is also how he plays video games.
Kakuzu put his hand on my head and moved me aside to better see Hidan. This made me giggle. "Hidan, your paid time off ends tomorrow. You have to go to work at three, so this is your last night of staying up till sunrise."
His cousin barely seemed to hear, and spoke only to me. "Sakura, this series is the king of all movie series. If we don't watch at least three of them before goin' to sleep, I'll commit suicide."
"Really?" Kakuzu cocked his head. "Awesome. I'll go hide 'Return of the Jedi.' Kakuzu went into the kitchen, pretending to thank God for taking away his horrible burden. He stopped a few seconds into what may have been a tirade. Maybe he'd found a Sprite that we'd missed and was chugging it. I sat on the stairway between the living room where Hidan was flailing and the kitchen were Kakuzu was quiet, and stretched my wings backwards and up the stairs, and waggled them a little. Hidan got up and stubbed his toe on the edge of the wall. He hobbled on one foot and erupted in a shower of nasty curses that made me put my lips in a thin line. Sometimes that got tiring. All the same, watching him hop around like that made me smile, and my stomach felt warm and fluttery. It felt good to have a friend to laugh at.
A couple minutes after Hidan's pain died down, he realized the DVD player had somehow come unplugged, and was muttering angrily because he had to move the very heavy TV stand to plug it back into the outlet. I heard Kakuzu coming before he tapped me on the shoulder, and I expected him to have a Sprite in his hand, but he had nothing, and his face was very, very…serious. The wideness of the eyes alone alerted me, because Kakuzu's eyes were never too wide or too narrowed unless he was angry...and he didn't seem angry.
"You lose your checkbook?" I chuckled at him.
He didn't laugh with me. "Come with me," He said, in a tight voice. My brows came together slightly at hearing him. I had never heard him sound scared before. Except when I hit him with electricity. He took my hand and led me into the kitchen and all the way to the end of the room. I blinked in realization that I'd never come to this end of the big room before, because there was nothing here but unused cabinets, so had no reason to be in that part of the room. But next to those cabinets, there was a wall broken only by a window with slightly tattered blinds over it.
"Look out there." he said, still with that tense tone.
"Why?" I asked as I moved towards the curtain. "If there's a burglar or something out there, I can take him down for yo—"
'Oh...oh...'
How stupid of me. I'm living like I can spend the rest of my life playing games and watching movies with Kakuzu and Hidan. But they have lives and I have lives, they are innocent and I'm being hunted and I should have left earlier for their own safety. I'd been so neck-deep in them, their sweet human life and their food and their Star Wars and their friendship that I had just blocked out everything else. And everything else came back to me in one huge, body-numbing strike, like my own electricity. I only kept standing because I was too numb for my legs to give out.
I was numb even as I reached for the turner on the blinds. I was remembering my own suffering and my silent tears and my silent self. I had been speaking for three days, but spent the previous eight years in perfect silence against monsters and madmen and tools of science. Much as I wished, those eight years would not just be shed and fall away into an abyss. I knew this as I curled my fingers along the turner and the blinds moved up to let me see outside into the night. In the backyard...demons were out there.
Kakashi, Zetsu, Deidara and Neji were all standing together out there.
"They're the other ones, aren't they?" Kakuzu asked, but I felt I didn't have to answer him.
"This is half of them," I eventually replied, and then couldn't say anything else.
Kakuzu watched them, wearily and breathing deep. "But you said you flew all night to get away from the laboratory. How could they get here so fast if none of them can fly or anything? How did they track you here from so far away? "
To keep my mind running, I ran through possibilities as quickly as I could and stacked them up like a wall before me. I hid behind them. "It means I didn't cover nearly as much distance as I thought. I might not have flown in a straight line. Maybe I even flew in circles. And the only way they could have tracked me," I paused because Deidara was looking right into the window and smiling, with smoky, animal-needy eyes and I shivered at them. "...the only way had to have been by scent. Deidara's sense of smell is incredible. Maybe, maybe the scientists saw the news story about the man who crashed a-and saw me. And knew I was near."
Neji and Kakashi's claws were so sharp and impeccable they literally gleamed when the cloud cover faded and moonlight hit them. Deidara's eyes continued to smolder and Zetsu widened his plant appendage so that it looked like a gaping mouth instead of a weakly parted jaw. A little Logic Fairy inside me said that that should have torn his shirt right open, but of course, Zetsu's shirts were always outfitted with freaking huge neck holes so it didn't matter. He just looked ridiculously burdened, like usual.
Also, all of them were wearing shock collars. Each one had a small, transparent panel which I guessed was shielding some tracking device from the outdoor elements. Of course. They even had to bring that element of my past back to me with them. Somewhere inside me was a seed of anger at that. But it was smothered by the choking, cold fear that was eating me alive inch by inch. Perhaps there was another collar waiting for me. Waiting to control me and swallow me.
"Sakura, come on! If I leave it at the main menu for too long, it'll just start!" I heard Hidan walking stiffly into the kitchen, and he must have seen us staring out the window. "Oh, God, is it the goddamn raccoons again?" Kakuzu moved out of the way, gladly, I guessed. Hidan took his place and moved the curtain further away. "Fuck." He said, and that was all. We could hear him inhale with a hiss when Deidara lifted one of his hands and bared its teeth. I watched it, and I watched him. I knew better than to look away from the eyes of a predator, save Itachi.
"I have a friend whose dad is a hunter." Hidan murmured. "He took us on hunting trips, and he gave me a shotgun once. It's up in my room under the bed. I can go get it.
I shook my head as slowly as I could. I couldn't afford any quick movements that might make them, all four of them, attack me and my defenseless friends. They would die. "They'd swipe it out of your hands before you could aim it, and then rip your throat out."
"Then what do we do?" Kakuzu's voice was quiet but even. I was grateful for his strength, or the convincing front of it.
"I guess…I'll go lead them away. I'm faster than they are."
One of the cousins made some kind of disapproving hiss, and then Hidan said indignantly, "Oh, don't even try playing hero. I have to at least try and get the shotgun."
"Either I play hero and make them move away from here, or we can all be murdered." I shot back at him, being careful not to narrow my eyes. "I won't let them murder you. You're the first good people I've ever met. I like you." That shut their mouths, as though they thought it strange that I ate their food and learned their lives and interests and had grown to like them thus.
"I'm getting the shotgun no matter what you say." Hidan said, slowly backing away. As he made turtle-speed steps away from the window. Kakashi suddenly made a face, and the black scarf over the bottom of his face sank down over a half-inch of skin. He was frowning. Suddenly he lifted his right hand and made a weird motion with it—
CRSSSH!
The glass of the window suddenly exploded. Eight years of training kept me quiet against the shock and the spray of debris, but the cousins cried out. Dozens of shards spread all over the kitchen's tile floor, and Kakuzu fell against the counter and three of them were pierced into his shoulder, and two in his thighs. "Kakuzu!" I whispered as he fell down. I grasped his arm so he wouldn't fall on the floor, and heaved him towards the counter behind him so he could support himself there. This was the first time I'd really tried to move him and he was heavy. "All you all right? Don't move. I'll take these out!"
"I...I stepped on an iron nail once. This is nothing…Check Hidan, too…"
I responded by picking the shards out of him. His response was pretend it didn't hurt. Ballsy guy.
With an unsatisfied sigh at his being over-manly, I looked over at Hidan, who was sitting on the floor. He was picking a shard out of his leg on his own. "Gaaah! Fuck! Fuck! That hurts!" I bent down and ripped the last two shards from his knee, and helped him stand. Unfortunately, all of us were barefoot at this time, and struggled to not step in any of the pieces.
Outside I heard Kakashi growling…no…laughing? I rushed to the window, reminding myself not to touch any of the last glass pieces remaining in the pane. With my excellent raptor's vision I could easily see the upward curve of Kakashi's scarf, the shaking of his broad shoulders. He was definitely laughing. It was a very deep, masculine and almost happy sound that made me suddenly wish I was deaf. (But then I didn't, because, geez what an impairment it would be! Kakashi could dance right up to me if he wanted!)
He was laughing because he'd hurt them. He'd thrown a pebble or something and tried to pierce the glass into their faces. (Yes, a pebble, I could feel it under my toe.) And he'd surely hurt them more if given a chance. He'd kill them unless I could get their attention and lure them away. These two people were my friends; my first friends. I was not going to let them be killed because I was afraid. I couldn't let them get killed because I was afraid. I wouldn't.
Behind all this courage, a puff of logic rose up and spread like smoke: when loved ones are in danger, the human mind, perhaps the animal mind as well, says "Fuck danger!" and does whatever is needed. Now I understand that.
"Hidan, move slow and go get your shotgun." My eyes focused on Zetsu, who wore his favorite expression, a combination of hungry and desperately excited. I was surprised at myself. I thought I'd be scared out of my wits if they ever came here. Instead, I felt kind of, maybe somewhat…angry. "Help Kakuzu up the stairs. Stay in the house, hide in a closet or bathroom. Do not come out for anything. Anything!"
"Hide in the fucking bathroom? Who got raped and made you queen?"
That almost made me laugh, but I resisted the temptation. Somethinf told me it'd ruin the serious and challenging image I'm trying to build up for the other experiments. I kept a straight face and told them both, "Just do what I say, please. I need you two to be safe." They stared at me with wide eyes, eyes with strange, black sclera and inhuman violent irises. They both had beautiful eyes. I smiled at them both. "Please do as I say. I'll take care of this."
I rushed towards the front door. Hidan had told me the only way to the backyard was through the basement. That would mean the door leading out there would have a set of stairs leading back up to level ground. I couldn't take that route and risk being ambushed from above. No, I'd go out the front door, fly over the top of the house and rush down at them in the backyard instead. They deserved a taste of what it felt like to be ambushed.
I opened the door and…and it was one of the worst situations it could have ever been. Because there was someone standing there, with their hand held slightly in front of his face. Um...
This person had been one second away from knocking on the door. It was a boy about the cousins' age. His hair was tied up in a tight ponytail at the top of his head and all made of strands that stuck out, and he wore a green and yellow shirt with a deer on it. Two plain, black eyes stared fearfully into mine, and the silvery earrings he wore made a clinking sound that made our silence even more awkward.
"Uh, hey. Is Hidan here?" His face mildly shocked now but his voice wasn't nearly so. It was like I wasn't a bird girl, a person with really big and noticeable wings, but some neighbor he didn't expect to be here tonight. Maybe…he's drunk and can't be surprised right now? He doesn't look or smell drunk. "So is it his time now?"
"Huh?" I screwed up one eye, and made a face at the boy. He raised a thin brow at me—yes, raised a brow as though he were annoyed. "Ain't it supposed to be that when a guy dies, an angel comes to take him to Heaven? My mom used to tell me that? Or did one of the guys hire you for...some...stuff?" My eyes became normal-size again as I realized he was mistaking me for an angel and then a prostitute, Yeah, I'm an angel who dyed her hair pink and left her white, flowing gown at the cleaner's! All God had left was this cheap athletic getup!"I'm not an angel or a whore. And you really need to go home now."
Maybe-Drunk asked, "Why?"
"Because…because there are some thieves in the backyard."
"Uh-huh. Is Hidan in there?"
I heard the cousins coming out of the kitchen. Hidan was whispering. "Shikamaru, you picked the worst time on fucking earth to come here. Don't you got a girlfriend or a life or something!" And he was so, so right. God only knows what the experiments are doing right now. Creeping around the sides of the house to ambush us right here at the front door? Being dumbasses and just standing there? Please, please be dumbasses and just stay where you are.
The new boy, Shikamaru, replied with a rather casual, "I wasn't going to ask that, idiot. My dad wants to take us to the hunting reserve next Friday, and your phone was dead so I thought I'd just walk over and ask in person. You gonna come?"
"If I still have my fucking head by then!" Hidan screamed. "For you freaking information, there are four freaks of nature in my backyard and my friend has to deal with them so can you just get OUT OF THE WAY?" Shikamaru stepped aside, leaving me enough room to leap out the doorway. I took a step forward to get his attention on me.
"Shikamaru, I need you to do something for me. Take these two to your house and have them stay the night there. This is hugely important. If you don't do it, your intestines will paint the sidewalk." He was nodding a little, then his eyes caught Kakuzu, pierced in half a dozen places and I heard him say, "Whoa." Is this guy high or something?
"Shikamaru, I'll pay you back for this, but she's right. Let's go." Wasting time wasting time wasting tiiime...
"Okay, man. But you're both on the living room couches." Wasting time!
"Hey, I still gotta get my shotgun!"
I slapped my hands over my face. "Fucking God!" I hissed. Within a few seconds, I'd whipped up the stairs, reached under his bed, felt for the cold, hard surface of a gun and brought the thing back down the Hidan.
"You're pretty fast." Shikamaru remarked. "So, you, like...run track?" What I think he meant is probably not what he actually meant, so I ignored him.
"Please, for the love of all that is holy, Hidan, don't shoot unless they provoke you first! But that shouldn't happen because I'm going to lure them away. I'll take them to the woods and lose them there. I'll fly away from them. If I don't come back, just don't worry about it."
"Are you absolutely sure Deidara can't fly?" Kakuzu, tossing his medical knowledge out the window, apparently, scratched at a puncture wound from a shard he'd pulled out.
"Stop picking at that!" I slapped his hand. "I'm sure Deidara doesn't know how to fly. He couldn't have been taught in the time I was away from him. And I don't think he's ever even spread his wings without the scientists holding them up for him. He's an earthbound as all the others." Friggin' finally, they could be on their way. "Shikamaru, you live in walking distance. Exactly how far?" His reply was a muted "five blocks", to which I said, "Okay, that's a good, wide space. Far away. You, get the heck out and start moving." I pulled on Kakuzu's sleeve and he and his cousin lumbered outside onto the porch. "Now get out of here. Stay at Shikamaru's, lock the doors and shut the shades. I'll find you again."
We heard echoing sounds then. They sounded like the howls of a great and furious wolf, and they echoed throughout the neighborhood. I saw birds from a nearby tree taking flight in fear. 'I know how you feel.' I felt their fear and a kind of recognition. I wasn't a wild, bloodthirsty animal like the other experiments, but I can't deny I am also an animal. I was animal enough to understand this sound.
They were calling me. They were calling me to them. And I was going to go to them.
I was going to go and lead them away from my friends, and maybe I'd get a good lightning strike in there, too. With these noises in my ears, I wished the three young men good luck, spread my wings—the feeling was a pleasant almost-distraction—and got my running start. I jumped up a few feet in the air and glided up, pretending I wasn't actually doing this in a well-lit residential area and someone might have a camera or just a loud voice or hey, maybe there's a traffic jam nearby full of people who can see me collectively and maybe somebody will actually think I'm an angel and do something ridiculous in the name of God or a riot could start due to people thinking I was any number of things from the next Roswell to a seagull and oh geez I so dislike my brain sometimes.
Shikamaru watched me a moment longer—now there we go, he actually looked shocked beyond belief now!—and then went to Kakuzu's side, helping him walk across the street. I hovered in that spot in the air for a moment, then flapped once, propelling myself upwards. The wind was in my face, and the cool, almost cold temperature of it gave me confidence. The air, the cool and free air, was my territory. From here, I'd get rid of these intruders invading the ground below it.
I flew up the side of the house and over it. They were still in the same spot—four of the worst creations of science, staring up at me. I must have been silhouetted against the moon. I saw my shadow on the ground, huge and dark, hovering near them, big enough to cover three of them. At that time the idea of luring them off seemed less appealing than beating, than hurting. Maybe I could lure them away and hurt them at the same time? Yeah, I can do that!
I'm fast, I'm clever, I'm mean, I can shoot electricity. What the hell can't I do? These men, no, these animals, these wild animals, are going down! They and all they represented had been my sole nightmares to a lifetime. I was done with their torture and their predatory grins and fangs and horrific hunts. Half of my suffering at Chambers had been their fault. They would pay for making me so afraid.
"You want a fight, you bastards?" I clapped my hands together, and when they hit, blue sparks flew around my hands. I hadn't expected that, but couldn't bring myself to feel surprised or even to wonder at how I was generating and controlling this energy. For now, all I needed was to cause pain with it. I pulled my hands apart, and both fists had dancing blue sparks around them.
"Come and get it!"
Without warning to those beasts, I pulled my wings to my body and dropped down, aiming a strike at Zetsu.
I was startled when Zetsu suddenly just wasn't there anymore, and it took me a precious second to realize he'd used his ability. He'd become part of the ground, sunk down into it so quickly I hadn't seen him go. Since when could he do that so quickly? My fist hit the ground pointlessly and I flapped again to go up and be airborne again. I felt the breeze on my bare foot as Zetsu's hand came up from the ground, nearly grabbed me and pulled me down. Fucker was speedy now, but he couldn't even think of a new trick!
Fear grabbed me like Zetsu's hand would have, as I remembered all the times I had run away from him just to stay alive. Well, Zetsu couldn't become part of the sky. I was safe from him as long as I could keep flying. And I had plenty of strength left in me. More than enough. At this point, Neji and Deidara came at me together, one from left and one from right, preparing to jump and attack. I flapped once and scaled twenty feet higher. Neji scowled at me and began falling back to the ground, and Deidara was falling back down too, but he grinned and showed the palms of his hands to me.
Fuck! His tongues! The tongues of his hands that can whip! I twisted in midair and one tongue lashed three feathers off my right wing. It grabbed a feather on it's way back into the mouth and held it between it's teeth like a handsome dancer would a rose.
There was few better ways for him to say, "I want to eat you."
I glared, and as Deidara descended down those last few feet to the ground, I saw the wind whip his hair away from his left eye, and I saw a black device covering it. That must be what they put on his eye after I struck it. Or maybe I'd hurt him so badly that he didn't have a right eye anymore, and that device functioned as an artificial eye? Should I assume he has full vision now or half? Well, my shooting him was accidental, but I sure as hell don't regret it now! With pride and fury roaring in me now, I pointed my palm at Deidara, and sure as the sun does rise, a streak of blue lightning appeared like smoke before my palm and blasted towards Deidara.
He looked up and saw the bolt coming at him. With something like a yelp, a sound that made me feel oh-so-good, Deidara tore out of the way at the last possible moment, and the lightning struck the ground inches from his foot, creating a tiny, jagged and smoking crater. (Dude.)
"Come on! You came to fight me, didn't you? Come get me!" I did two loops in the air and flew off towards the woods just some miles from Hidan and Kakuzu's house. Beyond Hidan and Kakuzu's home, there was another few blocks of housing area, (if the lord is kind, no one in the area will look up) and beyond that there was nothing but trees. Beyond these woods were a few highways, I could see them from up here, and beyond that was another expanse of woods, this one completely unbroken by roads, houses, or anything else. I would lead them there, many miles out, get in a few good electric shots, lay a false trail that would lead them farther off, and come back for Hidan and Kakuzu…oh, and maybe Shikamaru, too. After that, we'd…we'd…
Well, I'll have plan soon. I always do. But I'll think about that after I've taken care of these guys!'Speaking of these guys,' I thought, scanning the trees below me. 'Where's Kakashi? He hasn't attacked me yet.' I scanned the trees, and vaguely heard light crashes in the branches as Neji and Deidara followed me—Zetsu was probably underground. Where would Kakashi be? The only ability he'd ever shown me was his wild claw attacks, so he might have something else, something I'd never seen in store for me. I'd better be careful.
He wasn't anywhere! I didn't hear him or smell him or sense him in any other way and animal can sense. I crossed the highways, passing over cars, almost too high above them to be seen by anyone looking up, and then I lowered myself several hundred feet, looking and listening again for Kakashi. Yeah, I wanted to be cautious about him, but it was getting frustrating at this point. It's been far too long and I'm worrying about the plans he might have for me.
I had the other three experiments right in the palm of my hands, why not Kakashi? Maybe because he's the oldest, he think he's the smartest—he is NOT, mind you!—and thinks he's big and bad enough to play games with me. I guess he can't wait to have an eye to match Deidara's.
With both my palms facing the forest below, and shot electricity down into the trees, leaving two black holes where they'd burnt and pierced branches and leaves. But no silver-haired wolverine mutant men. This was ranging out of "worrisome" and more into "irritating." I shot more and more electric bolts into the trees, and then straight through to the ground. hoping to drive him above the treetops where I could see him. Nothing. Nothing, nothing. A group of fearful birds taking flight at my shock, and more nothing. My range became wider and wider, and the lightning strikes became bigger and bigger as I grew angrier. At last one bolt struck a tree and set it and part of its neighbor aflame.
The heat from it buoyed me up in the air, and made it effortless to hover, to gape. I'd caused a fire. That would spread to at least four more trees, before the space between them and the other neighboring trees became too great to cross and spread more. Were there animals in those trees? Sleeping squirrels and birds? They would know how to flee fire, wouldn't they? Yes, yes they would! Besides, I'm doing this to help them! No squirrel or fox or robin would want a monster rampaging their forest! I was doing Mother Nature a favor. If I killed Kakashi, it would be for the good of everyone and everything!
So when I saw a tiny, tiny silver gleam that was surely the glint of moonlight off a claw, I shot out an open hand and fired a gigantic lightning bolt twice as thick as the usual ones. My hands felt hot as the bolt struck a tiny space between two trees, very near the gleam, and promptly electrocuted and burnt up everything within a radius as wide around as a house. (I'm sorry, Nature!).
The gleam was gone. Everything within the strike range was burnt black. The leaves of trees seemed to disappear, and the nearby trunks and branches were burnt. Nearly all the grass had been burnt away, leaving only black dirt. I looked around, eyes raptor-sharp, for any more experiments that might have been hiding in the shadows of nearby trees. My hands were open and ready to shoot more electricity if needed, or deliver bone-crunching punches. I flew lower, circling, marveling in the fact that I'd maybe, maybe hit Kakashi.
It would take more than one strike to kill him, but the fact that I had struck him, or hadn't but tried to, brought such an ecstasy to me I shivered as it reverberated up and down my spine. It shook me so much that I had to land, or crash trying to say in the air. And it was an awkward, shaky, landing, too. An embarrassing spectacle, if anyone was watching.
It occurred to me that I was tired, or just feeling the loss of adrenaline, as I was panting and shaking slightly. "Take that, you monster." I murmured with my new, exhausted voice, and wiped my hands together as though wiping off grease or dirt. I raised my voice, knowing he could be around here somewhere, watching, bleeding, and in pain. "I wonder how long that wound will take to heal!" I was opening my wings, chuckling to myself, and I was about to take the step that would start me off on the journey back.
But something happened. Something horrible.
A white hand reached out of the ground and grasped my ankle. The hand was cool like the grass I'd walked on just after escaping from Chambers and landing, and made me cold as the blackest winter of the Arctic. Zetsu had a grip on me.
Escape. Had to escape. I flapped as hard as I could, so hard that I dragged his whole arm, plant-thing and torso out of the ground. The plant appendage opened to reveal his split face. Zetsu appeared to be…gritting his teeth, having trouble holding on! Good! Very, very, very good!
I pulled harder, flapping my wings like a raging animal, making a powerful wind, and I even gave a kick to his hand, which sent an electric, cold thrill through me. Wait! Why didn't I think of this before! Retarded, retarded self! I showed my open hand to Zetsu, and both his evil eyes went wide before a blue, electric streak struck the plant-creature's shoulder. Zetsu groaned and immediately the wound began to spurt blood through a hole I'd shocked through the shirt, but he didn't let go.
Has he always had such endurance, such tolerance to pain? For the length of one flap I stared at him and marveled, and he showed his strange golden eyes to me. He looked disappointed, and the tooth-edges of his plant-thing curled. But what kind of judge was I now, almost captured and on the verge of losing it?
It didn't matter, for that expression was gone as soon as it had gotten there. Just a second or so later, Zetsu's face warped into a smile once again. The feathers on my wings bristled, and I felt something coming from behind me. Turning my head around, I saw the background of the scene first. Deidara and Kakashi stood to the side of the burnt clearing, in the dark and dappled shadows of trees. I didn't see the foreground of the scene until it was too late. Coming right at me was Neji with his metal dollar dully shining and his claws spread. I gasped, the only thing I could do, as I realized that I had been tricked by a completely neanderthal plan.
It'd been Deidara and Kakashi's job to bait me, tempt me, and when I finally landed, Zetsu and Neji would bring me down. Come to think of it, I'd gotten far too angry in this fight, tempted by their willingness to fight me, by my stupid need to beat them and hurt them. It sucks to have such a temper. Here, now, it would probably be the death of me.
You know, it would have been nice if my old Chambers personality had come up a little. If I had been able to be silent and avoid the males at all costs, stay absolutely alone and be absolutely un-trusting like I had always done in the Chambers building, and attack solely from the air, from a safe zone, all those things I would unfailingly do, I might have won. I might not be about to die. But I was now. I'd been too emotional about the fight and about them, and now I'd pay for it. Neji would pounce on me, rip my throat out, kill me. I didn't have to time to shoot him with electricity. I was still three feet in the air with a monster holding my foot and keeping my earthbound. My mind was full of pictures of gore and failure, and Karin taunting me.
I saw him leap up several feet in the air to my level and God played a joke and made me see it in slow motion. It was unreal how determined he looked, how triumphant now that he knew he'd won and there were no scientists to stop this trial.
Then the wind was knocked out of me as Zetsu let go of my foot and Neji's body slammed onto mine.
We fell together and my back hit the ground. His hands held my wrists on the ground to my left and right, preventing me from shooting electricity at him, and I was on my back with my stomach and neck exposed, and a monster experiment sitting on me. This was the number one most vulnerable position ever. If he wanted to smash my ribs open and rip out my heart and eat it, he could do it and I could do nothing.
As Neji stared down at me, panting and smirking with totally undisguised pride, I realized that I was still very, very tense. If I went limp, I would be considered submissive. I'd be admitting he had won and he could do whatever he wanted. 'But I will not do that. I do not, will not, give in! Not even now! I might still turn the tide...maybe...'
"If you're going to kill me, you better hurry up and finish it!" I spat. Neji raised a brow at me and flicked one brown cat ear. Of course. Since when could animal-brained Neji understand a word in English? But shouldn't me shouting give some kind of message? If you shout at a dog, at least the dog knows you're angry! "Come on! I know even wild animals like you know the meaning of kill! If I'm going to die now, I want to die with some scrap of dignity!"
The smirk widened, and for a second I thought he understood my talking, that he was about to tell me he'd make my death slow and agonizing and hellish. A part of my brain might have even suspected it. I was completely, utterly, mind-blown, to say the fucking least, when the first piece of that prediction actually happened.
"Whatever made you think…I was going to kill you?"
What...in...what?
"You can't talk." Don't I sound smart. But who the heck cares. How is he talking.
"You can hear us! This...this is a miracle." Wait, that didn't come from Neji's mouth. That was a new voice. Fearfully, I turned my head back to see Zetsu, half buried of the ground, plant limb opened. Zetsu. Zetsu had talked to me, too.
"Did you hear me, Sakura? I said it's a miracle...that you can understand us."
"Maybe you've had too much human clouding up your brain. Maybe your animal side has control now." Was that a third voice? It couldn't be! It had been Zetsu's mouth that had moved! Or, it had been the black side of his face that had moved. And that was a distinctly deeper, more chilling voice…How can he be…how can he have separate voices, be two different people—I mean plants—I mean…entities? Yes, entities. How can Zetsu be two different entities?
I could hear the scrunching of dirt and grass bits that meant Deidara and Kakashi were walking over, and I heard murmurings of their own voices. They sounded anxious, nervous, even. Kakashi started saying something to his companion, a long and drawn-out sentences surely with many verbs, articles and parts of speech Kakashi is far too stupid to know and be able to say. Deidara said something short and choppy but I tuned it out, like a television screen showing static.
This was not happening. My enemies, these beasts, were talking to me. They had me in their grasp, they could stomp on my ribcage if if they wanted, but they weren't!
Something had to be wrong. They must be tricking me. Or maybe my mind is tricking me into thinking they're talking, but really they're doing nothing but making their usual animal noises. Because there is some sort of problem here, somewhere.
Now I turned my head back up to Neji, who still lay over me and held my wrists in a grip of iron. My brain didn't even care how weird this pose was. My brain was very busy with other thoughts. My brain was considering the fact that maybe it was stoned or been paralyzed. My brain was about to explode.
"This is a nightmare." I concluded, staring into Neji's strange, white eyes. "Or I'm losing my mind. You can't be talking to me. You can't possibly understand me. I'm having a buildup of adrenaline. It's hit critical mass and is making me hear voices. Oh, if I'm hearing voices I really am losing my mind. I'm done. I'm so done." All through my rambling, Neji shook his head, denying what had to be the truth, slowly tossing his long hair one way and the next.
"Don't get delusional now," I looked away from Neji and saw Kakashi crouching next to me. He had his twin scarves as usual, which covered his left eye and forehead, and the other his mouth and nose, but the bottom one was crinkled and curved the slighest bit upward. Kakashi looking down and smiling at me. Smiling. Thank God I have an empty bladder. "You could get even crazier than you just were, shooting little forest animals. You burned up a bird. You know, you're always the last person I had thought would hurt birds."
'Well maybe Sasori and Naruto will pop out of the woods and start a conversation about democracy! They can talk about the recession or cereal or Schadenfreude and make this all even more lifelike!'
Deidara sat down, not caring that his wingtips were dragging in dirt. His hand reached out and touched my hair. Someone help me. "Stop this right now. You're not even really here." I said, and tried to recoil from him, but with Neji holding me there, it was both useless and embarrassing. "I'm going to believe you're all a nightmare until either I die and realize it was real or I wake up on the couch and realize I was right."
"You're simply scared because you can understand our talk." That was Zetsu…I think. If the black side sounded evil and dark, this must have been the white side, whose voice would have sounded comforting if only it was human. "We know how hard it is for you to calm down in our presence…but you'll have to anyway, I'm afraid…We have something to tell youuu…" The sentence faded into a soft growl. What now? Was my brain reverting back to normal? Back to hearing animal noises from them again?
"Is it the amount of time it'll take to disembowel me?" My tone was flat and, in fact, did an all right job of hiding the still-fresh surprise at hearing their almost-perfect English.
"Why are you so obsessed with death?" Deidara moved his hand over me, and the tongue darted out quickly to lick my forehead. I flinched and stared wide-eyed at the weird gesture, and I remembered when I had first escaped Chambers, when Deidara had licked the side of my neck. I hadn't had very much time to be scared or freaked out about that, but I had the time for this, now. And it was weird. It was borderline sensual. Brought on thoughts of rape, something I'd never had to fear but now, held down like this, maybe...maybe, how 'bout we think about something else, all right! "Why do you think we're going to kill you, mm? We're not."
I said nothing, because, hell, I didn't believe it. I believe that as much as I believe the oceans have no fish.
"Of course you are. You don't get to act one way for eight years in a row and switch now that you finally have me. I'm tired of you messing around with me. If you're going to end it right here, then do it. In a way, I'd like...some peace."
Kakashi leaned over slightly so I had to look him in both his eyes, his black and red. Inside, I cowered. "Sakura, what you said outside the lab...stunned us. We didn't know you thought that way. We loved those times we chased you in the white rooms because we thought you loved it. It was playful. It was a time we smiled and enjoyed ourselves. We thought...we were taking care of you." (What? What? Fucking idiot!) "But you really, truly thought we were out to kill you. Is that right?"
"Of course that's right! There's absolutely no reason to think otherwise!" They think they can attack me, try to grab me with their clawed hands and bare their fangs at me for eight years, and then suddenly decide no, that was actually playful behavior and they meant well the entire time? Bullshit.
His face deflated. Absolute liar though he is, I admit the expression looked painfully real. "...I'm...I'm really sorry you couldn't understand us before. We tried to tell you over and over again. We didn't expect you reply, just understand." Here he paused and from the movement of the scarf over his mouth, I think he closed his mouth and parted it again. "We also never expected you to talk. But we made plans to try and teach you. Neji and Naruto were with you a white room together once, and they tried to teach you to talk then."
"You are not the ones I would seek out in order to learn proper English." I said, and he and Zetsu both looked disappointed at something.
"Well...your language was already set with the humans and their English. Perhaps if you hadn't listened to the humans talking and learned their language first, could have understood each other. I'm sure you would have been happier that way."
Huh. He understands how languages are learned. That...shows reasoning. There is a little piece of me that is impressed, but fear is smothering it.
"What is your point, Kakashi? If I had learned your language first, whatever dialect of it we are apparently speaking now, then what would I have understood?" I said this as though I gave a damn. I could sense the bloodbath that would be coming soon, that would make this whole playact not matter.
Then Deidara burst out, "That we were playing with you! Laughing! We constantly asked you if you were sad and if you needed us!" My heart hammered so hard, so fearfully in my chest that it hurt. Now up and standing above me, he covered his face with one of his hands and dragged the other one over his sleeve and then his bare arm. It was a tight, distressed expression. So perfectly executed I could have placed him as human. What an actor. "This isn't right." He murmured against his arm, and his wingtips shivered. "This isn't how we're supposed to talk for the first time, mm." He came down again, on his knees and leaning slightly over me. "I played with you in the white rooms, every time hoping a little bit that you might laugh, or try to say something to me. But never things like this.".
He held his distressed front, and inwardly I raged against it. "Playing." I repeated. He nodded. It took some effort, some seriously huge effort, actually, to keep my voice level. "You call what you did playing? You stared at me like meat, and attacked me, every time. With everything you had. With your teeth. And you call it playing." He nodded, and from the corner of my eye, I saw Zetsu do the same. "Well...you're boys. You play rough."
I meant this to be scathing. But they grinned. And Deidara! Deidara was now so un-distressed that he started to blush.
He was the next one to reply, in fact. "Of course we grinned at you, 'cause we had fun. And we grabbed at you 'cause that's how you play Predator and Prey. You hunt somebody else and they try to get away. You both do whatever you can to win. It's no harm, mm."
"No harm, huh? What about when Kisame tried to drown me? Moved in front of me every time I tried to move up for air? That's harmless?" I tried to sit up, but Neji was dead-set on keeping me held down. "Or what about when Naruto uses his power? Turns the very air into a projectile and punches me with it? That's not how you play. Anything."
Actors could benefit from observing Kakashi's hurt, crinkled brow. "That's...that's because you offered no fight." Kakashi explained. "It doesn't hurt you if you stay limp when it touches you. His powers use muscle tension against the enemy and hurt them that way. I'm surprised you didn't learn that from the scientists. And I don't...I don't want to say it was your fault you were hurt by that, but it was."
"He told me about that day. He was trying to goad you into fighting back, to prove you have strength." Neji told me with a flick of his brown cat ear. "They put him to sleep somehow at the end of that trial and you just swam up past him to get air. I heard the scientists saying that."
'They listened to the scientists when they talked? Like I always did? How much did they listen...? That doesn't matter! Back to subject at hand!'
I tried to explain this slowly, like to a child or an intelligent animal. "If I fought back, it would be an anomaly. They would investigate it. They would cut open my head to study the neurons in my brain, or make slits in my muscles to see how quickly they grew back together. I saved myself some suffering by offering the same old cowardly behavior every time, and gave them more reason to try something new like the outdoor trial. I made progess a little bit faster and my plan progressed a little bit more."
"It worked." Zetsu said from the ground.
Oh, gee, did it? "Yes, and I was having a great time of it up until twenty minutes ago."
"I did believe you were mute, Sakura. And it hurt me to know that." Neji tried to hold my eyes. I switched my gaze from pupil to pupil for my own sanity. "Sometimes I'd think about trying to teach you how to talk." The very idea of that was so dumb it practically put me in stitches. This piece of shit teaching me ESL.
But I was not in a laughing mood so settled for a little giggle and pitying smile. He did not take it the cynical way I had hoped. I tried to avoid the problem by looking away, and right there in the path of my gaze was Deidara, and his hair that moved just enough to let me see his covered eye. The device on it had been changed. It was smoother, darker, and had a slightly biger lens. I must have broken the other one, but I wonder exactly how long it took to break, and if it hurt any part of his skin beneath.
"Do you have that because of what I did?" I asked him. He nodded. "Can you see out of that eye at all?"
He chuckled and nodded again, adding, "A little better than before, actually, hm. And we each got our own collar like yours, but it's for tracking, not so much shocking." The latter statement I filed mindlessly away, having already guessed at it. Not that I had planned to use my electricity to shock Deidara's eye that night, but I still felt that some plan had backfired, to know that he was better off than before. It made me cringe and want to squirm around with disgust, to know he was even better than before. I did squirm a little, and Neji's hands clamped tighter around my wrists.
Kakashi raised his head slightly and asked, "What if Neji lets your hands go? Where will you go to?"
Is he serious? "An undisclosed location far, far away."
"Someplace cold, yes?"
No answer was needed. He knew he was right. It was no secret back in the lab that Number 9 reacted more positively to areas with...you know, air conditioning amped up to level ten. "You know, we listen to them, too. But probably not nearly as much as you did. I remember hearing Hayate talk about how relaxed you were in a forty-five degree room. You'd fly to Canada, wouldn't you? Or someplace even farther north?"
"It doesn't matter." I spat back. "Suppose I did choose Canada. It's a massive country with thousands upon thousands of miles of land. But even with the eight of you working together, and my constant flying around, it would be months before you even glimpsed me. Years, I'd bet, if I challenged myself and flew overseas. It's really very easy. A very easy way to never see any of you again." Suddenly I was sweating. In Pacific-Northwest January.
"You're not leaving." It was Deidara's voice. His clawed hand rubbed against my forehead again, lower on my face like a total creep...this is categorized as petting. He is petting me. "It's funny how you think you're getting away when you trapped and surrounded and outnumbered, all at once, mm. We got you. We won the game, finally!" His smile was big and proud, like a kid who caught his first fish. Which is a metaphor Hidan told me.
I didn't look at him, but I could feel the tip of his hair on my head and knew he had bent his head nearer to mine. "Also, dunno if you know this, but my sense of smell is one of the most powerful in the world. Even if you went up to middle-of-nowhere Canada, I could still find you, mm. I could catch your scent a hundred miles away, Sakura. I always know where you are."
This was a revelation to me, the earth-shattering sort that destroys men and destroys cities. I felt the horror of it sinking in, gathering in my bones and shaking them. I stopped them only with a backdraft, a traffic jam, of thought: yes, Deidara's sense of smell was powerful but could it really be as insanely powerful as he says? Was the curve of his nasty smile a knowing one, a lying one? A bluff? And if not, what in the hell is the scienctific excuse of the parrot experiment getting a better olfactory system than than the fox or wolverine?
These thoughts drifted through, calmed me. A quick analysis, a quick critical study of things, made me feel better. Enough to laugh at him a little. "Deidara, I escaped Chambers' laboratory, against everyone and everything around me. Escaping from you is nothing in comparison. I've been through worse than whatever you think you can trap me with. And once I get through...it, I'll get through it and..." I saw something in the sky, and my sentence trailed off as I stared at it. Kakashi cocked his head, unsure of why I had stopped speaking, but I didn't care.
"Get through it and...?" Zetsu's black side pressed.
"That...is that...?" As Neji was holding my wrists down, I managed to point a finger upward. They followed the line of my finger and my eyes and stared up at the night sky, and saw tiny white things falling from it.
"It's snow," Kakashi stated, or should I say stained, because this was the first time I'd ever seen snow and he was soiling it with his monster presence. "The scientists say every snowflake in the world is different."
"Ah, we saw this last week didn't we?" Neji watched the white, little things fall all around us without making so much as a sound. They collected on his ears and melted from the heat there. I felt them doing the same on my wings, and my exposed arms and legs. It was cool and ticklish. It was delightful. Especially that now that it was here, the other experiments were no longer staring at me. But I felt the slightest bit cheated, that they saw this before me.
"When did you see snow?" I asked, and tried to make my voice smooth, quiet. Forgettable among this.
"A week before you left, we saw it." Zetsu's pale half explained. He still only had part of his torso above ground "The rest of us were taken outside, to get used to the outdoor environment. It snowed while we were out there. Naruto thought the flakes were nanobots and were going to get in his body and infect him, so he attacked them."
I was too stunned by the snow to offer a sort of reply to something that sounded similar to the type of weirdness I might dream about. I watched the tiny white pieces fall onto my whire tee and disappear there. Even in my short sleeves and shorts, and sitting outside in the middle of January, I felt comfortable. I attribute this to a wonderfully high blood circulation, which keeps my extremeties and most other parts of me from freezing over. Science was on my side in this situation. And I loved it. Snow. I loved it.
"This is beautiful." I said.
"No, this is." Someone's hand went into my hair, and slowly whisked the tangles out of it. I didn't care. They couldn't pull me away from this event.
Someone was purring. I acknowledged them by flicking my wingtip, and forced myself to ignore the animal sound. Even the experiments' purring, which almost always prophesized them pouncing at me, could not distract me from the wonderful epiphany that snow was white, the color of Chambers, and yet not tainted by them. I felt an increase in the density of flakes. I began counting them. First by threes, then by sevens when three was not fast enough. Around five hundred eleven, I could see frost forming in the dirt out of the corner of my eye. Around five hundred and ninety, Neji let go of my hands.
My mind told me I had to get airborne now, now, now nownownow, to escape these four beasts. I knew it was perfectly true, but I only moved my wings to let the heated parts catch cold snowflakes. I don't think Deidara's hand ever left it's place on my neck. If the tongue licked me again, I don't think I felt it. It was still in shock. Shock of snow!
BAM!
Then a silver sporadic bullet shot past Zetsu's ear, near my arm, and goddammit why didn't I use thier distraction and leave earlier? Immediately, he turned around the face the intruder, and pulled himself up completely out the ground. I stood up at the same time, prepared to attack. But as I stood up I saw Kakashi was in front of me, and it occurred to me that maybe he was there so that I couldn't be shot. But I found that insulting, unfortunately for him, so I moved around him, to the side. He didn't try to get in front of me again.
"Hikers or hunters?" Zetsu's white half muttered. Slowly, he rose from the ground, and more and more of his body and dark clothes emerge.
"No." It was Kakashi who answered, flexing his claws. "It's them." It was bone-numbingly obvious who them was. But I was almost shocked out of it when a second bullet passed by, and Neji caught it—in his teeth.
He spat it out, sticking out his tongue stupidly at the horrible flavor of it. The five of us stood in a line, as a wall, ready to attack. I was in the middle. My hearing, though finely tuned, isn't as great as my vision. None of my senses detected anything wrong, any strange presence, but the other experiments clearly did. How they could, when I couldn't, is a mystery to me, and an insult. I burned at the fact that they were more aware than me.
Out of nowhere, Zetsu leapt at me and I instantly jumped out of his reach. "Dodge us! Dodge our pouncing like you always would!" Both halves of his faced screamed this at me as he jumped into a blackened tree trunk like it was some kind of pool of water. He melted into the structure. I was completely confused when Deidara made a raged cry and attacked, too. He opened his hands and both his long whip-tongues lashed out at me. I twisted around backwards and sideways to avoid them.
'That was on purpose. He missed my legs on purpose.' Deidara had never missed on purpose before, ever. Had I misjudged? Did he have vision impairment after all, or was he luring me into a different direction to be pushed closer to someone else? I took the clear option and dodged again, and avoided the slicing, grabbing claws of Kakashi, to whom Deidara had shoved me closer. His arm and a following rush of air blasting over my head and took off two of my feathers.
Things were coming back to normal. All except for the fact that nowadays, I prefer to fight back. So I sprung up on the power of one leg and rammed my elbow into Kakashi's shoulder. The crack it made upon impact was more satisfying than Sweettarts.
With a pained grunt, the wolverine-creature drew back and Neji came from behind him leaped off his back like a springboard. Claws extended, he began falling towards me, and I clapped my palms together to bring the electricity to life again. With a rush of unknown energy around my palm, a blue spear of pure energy blasted towards him, but he twisted in midair, and the strike shot aimlessly into the snowy sky. Lightning from the ground.
"Keep attacking! Keep going!" Kakashi came at me again, and I inhaled with a hiss at two kicks that came my way. It would only be seconds, surely, before Kakashi returns to using his claws, his best and favorite weapons. Kakashi lashed out his feet time and time again, and it mixed in with Deidara's tongues whipping in between us. It occurred to me that he hadn't once used his bombing ability since we'd last seen each other...what, two days ago? Two perfect days.
"Bastards!" I growled, and whirled around with a kick that cracked my ankle and made Zetsu screech. "Liars, all of you!"
"No we're not!" Neji cried. He had the voice of a screeching housecat.
"You can't smell it? Scientists are coming in cars. Karin and Anko are up front." It was Zetsu that spoke this time, and I jumped several feet in the air to avoid both his hands grabbing my feet. He made a groaning, bellowing sound that told me how pissed off he was at missing his target.
Far away from all of them now, close to the tree line, that is, cover, I landed. "Why would you tell me that?" I cried across the distance.
Neji's face was screwed up with anxiety, his tone, more so. "We won't let you be taken back there! You'll never go back there!"
Another destructive revelation. But I kept myself together. Told myself it was another lie. "Why should I ever believe that? Why?"
"You want proof?" Kakashi's one visible eye went wide and he made tight, angry fists as he faced me. "We spent our lives trying to reach you and touch you, and now we're letting you get away, isn't that proof enough?" Deidara either stiffened, made a spasm, or both. He made this action and snapped his neck angrily to glare at Kakashi, growing low and loud as his blue wings trembled in what I thought was anger. Kakashi's replying snarl had just the same tone. They clearly were frustrated at my escape.
Two or three more bullets shot near the tips of my wings, and I moved in time to dodge them. Kakashi had been right. The bullets had landed in the tree trunks behind me, and I could smell the medical, sickly smell that they gave off. They were in fact darts, not bullets, filled with enough tranquilizing drugs (Rompun, I was sure) to kill a normal human in seconds, but knock me out cold in minutes.
He'd been right about Karin and Anko, too. Now, they'd gotten closer, with my raptor-vision I could cars coming through the great sheild of trees, and even the tiny, brilliantly red speck that could only be Karin's hair. They were coming from far in front of me. They'd see the backs of the male experiments when their jeeps came rolling in through the trees. Zetsu raised his head and howled, and came running at me. This was unusual, I thought to strengthen my weak legs. He always sank into the ground or floor and hardly ever ran. His fists came at me, and he laced our hands together. Immediately I pushed against them, and we were in a contest to knock each other away or down.
"This is the one time I'll let you fly off." the white side murmured. "Now listen to us carefully. You will do as we say!" My eyes went even harder with defiance, but Zetsu continued talking. "Buffalo Jump. There is a cliff far north, up in Canada...called Buffalo Jump. You'll go there, and wait there for the others. They will meet you there, and so will we."
I pressed my hands harder against Zetsu's, and he was pushed back three steps. "And what if I take off right now and fly to Europe?"
Zetsu's green, long fingers held tighter to mine. He was holding my fucking hand. "I don't want to threaten you. But I will. This is for our friends, our brothers. This is the one thing they want, and they will have it!"
"They'll have what? My flesh? It's not happening!" I pushed against Zetsu's hands again and applied my electricity. I saw traces of sky-blue dancing around our fingers, and crawling down to his wrists. He growled and gritted his teeth, even backed up one step, but regained ground so quickly I was forced to go back two. In the background, I could hear cars and their engines coming closer and closer, and somebody snarling merrily, as though cheering Zetsu on in a fight.
"Don't make me threaten you. Please. I don't want to. Don't…make me." Those words made my feathers stand on end, like claws, a thousand claws ready to rip open his evil, insolent face. How could Zetsu threaten me? I could electrocute him so hard, his heart would stop beating; how dare he threaten me!
So I told him just that. "Zetsu, the days in which you could threaten me are done. You can't do anything to me."His face remained irritatingly impassive. "Why don't you tell me your threat anyway, let's see how much I shake in my boots."
"I will only use that as a last resort." Zetsu's eyes narrowed; he looked like he was getting ticked off. "Come to Buffalo Jump, Sakura. Come to us..."
"No!"
"Then the humans Kakuzu and Hidan will die!"
Zetsu pushed me a final time, and I was shoved into the trees, the trees that were still green and lush, and out of range of the vegetation-burning lightning I'd shot before. I heard the scientists in their jeeps clearly now, and Neji and Kakashi snarling like the animals they were. Many of them started yelling: "Look! Look, they're all standing down there!"; "Aah! I've found a grey feather!"; "Yes, she's been here, and recently!"
I stayed as still as stone in the bushes and plants, hidden from the scientists' sight, but with a perfect view of them. I saw Karin, wearing her white labcoat and some snow boots, running out of a blue jeep with large wheels. "Look at this imprint in the grass. Her skinny ass was sitting right in this spot. This can't be more than twenty minutes old! All of you, spread out and search!"
She must have meant the experiments. Neji and Deidara headed away from me, blasting opposite directions into the trees. Kakashi and Zetsu turned and began sprinting in my direction—oh, fuck!—but the both of them whisked so close past me that my hair was ruffled by the breeze they'd made. Or had that been…their hands ruffling my hair as they ran by?
The rest of me should have been ruffled, too. But that wasn't the proper word for it. I was...disturbed. And quiet. I was unsure of what to do. For now, I guessed, I should just sit here in silence and watch, and think, like I always used to do. I pictured Shikamaru, Hidan and Kakuzu, and then took the latter two out of the picture. It was an ugly picture without them in it. That image...wasn't real. No. Hidan and Kakuzu would never disappear. Would never be killed. I would care for and protect them always.
How could they? The experiments didn't know where the cousins went, where I sent them while I fought. While Kakuzu, Shikamaru and Hidan went away, I was luring the experiments in the other damn direction! They had only seen me looking out a window with those two! How could they know that they meant to much to me? But somehow they must know that they mean a lot to me, or they wouldn't have threatened to kill them. Could I take the two of them away and hide them somewhere? Maybe in Florida, or some tiny, deserted town where the male experiments would never look?
What was I doing, committing to this plan like I couldn't do anything about it? Submitting to a control Zetsu had put over me with a death threat? How dare he! If only Zetsu were here now, I would give him such a bloody, bone-breaking beating he'd never be able to stand up again, and he'd never want to stand up again anyway, since I'd cut up his weird freaking plant-thing with a steak knife till it was a Christmas tree, yeah, he'd be sorry he threatened my only friends! I hate him! I...I have to think!
There was still the mind-blowing matter that for some reason, I understood their language, and that they threatened people who were with me under the assumption that I cared for their well-being. They were smart enough to know just from looking at me standing next to those two that they were my friends. Smart enough to know that they'd would matter more to me than my own wing. Right…?
Okay, that's giving me some seriously bad vibes. Think about something else. Think, think! You can think for hours on end, self! Come on! Oh, here's a subject: were they telling the truth in anything they said? All that talk about caring for me all our lives?
No. They weren't. They were lying through their razor-sharp teeth.
All those years when the Chambers scientists stuck me alone with an experiment, said experiment was not trying to play innocently with me and express some deep sense of protectiveness. They were trying to attack me, kill me. Kisame had tried to drown me, not play tag with me. And Naruto had tried to punch me, not tickle me.
I mean their lies didn't even make sense! Trying to claw someone's eyes out and calling it playing? I wonder how they fight when it's a male versus a male. I've never seen two of the males stuck together, myself. I wonder how hardcore they get. I've heard tell from scientists, though, that sticking a male with me is much more interesting to watch. So I'm guessing they don't attack so viciously against their fellow men-folk.
Slowly, very slowly, I began scooting away from the Chambers people and their cars, and farther into the woods. I moved as fast as I could without disurbing the forest and making any noise. I had to move before the sight of those hell-reject people got me too scared or angry to move. Many, many steps into the woods later, infuriatingly slow steps between leaf litter and twigs, I took off sprinting. Where was I going again? To someplace, someplace...yes.
Buffalo Jump.
Because I couldn't risk my only friends getting killed, and I couldn't feasibly take them anywhere else on my own.
It was still horrible that I couldn't even go back to say goodbye to them. Neji and Deidara had run off in the direction of Portland, after all, to "search for me" on command of the scientists just five minutes ago. What a coincidence. If I went to search for Shikamaru's house, I could be seen by those two, and they'd probably kill the two cousins straight off, animals that they are.
But wait…I slowed my pace. Zetsu had been the one to threaten me like that. Zetsu alone. Was that just a threat he made up on the spot, by himself, or something he and his buddies had planned the entire time? I had no way of knowing! None! Between two cedar trees I stopped, feeling the frustration and anxiety and fear growing in me, mixing, making me sick. Without thinking, I lashed out my left fist and it swung round and smashed into a tree trunk. Splinters fell and cracks resounded and the wood was wounded. The tree gave a great moan, threatening to fall down.
I had to go. I had to. My only friends would die if I didn't do this.
If I didn't walk right into the darkest, hottest pit of hell ever known. I was going to walk straight up to the eight worst creations of man, and sit down...and practically submit myself to murder. My mind is reaching for pictures of kittens and soft clouds. It's using one of its favorite default deflection techniques, so I don't have to think of my death. Red, tearing, howling, and eyes rolling back, finally tasting my blood, the demonic pleasure they'll have, my last moments saturated to overflowing with the kind of fear most humans haven't the imagination to begin fearing and...And. Nothing.
This time, I didn't even get a running start. I just jumped, where I was, standing, and crashed through a canopy of leaves and branches and maybe a bird. Within a few minutes, I was several hundred feet off the ground, flying with the birds, the free birds that I dreamed to be like.
With this beautiful snow and these free birds flying around me, I'd head straight back to imprisonment, or death. I'd head to Buffalo Jump.
Well. I hope you enjoyed that. Because my mom came in my room at 2:45 AM and got seriously pissed that I'd stayed up so late on a school night. I finished it just now, one night later, and if she comes up and finds me up so late again, someone's gonna get their throat slit.
I imagine this chapter was confusing (hopefully still satisfying) because of the constantly conflicting opinions of Sakura and the male experiments. It's no spoiler to say that the male experiments are genuine in their feelings. They really always have cared about Sakura, and believed they were all buddies united by a common conflict all their lives...up until Chapter Two when she began to speak, and revealed that she thinks. And it's going to take a lot of convincing before Sakura will begin to believe them.
I know this may have been confusing for you, but all shall be explained in time. Buffalo Jump is a real place in Canada, that you can visit if you wish, and yes, buffalo were driven off the cliff and their dead bodies harvested and made into meat, tools, etc.
