Grieving for you,
I'm not grieving for you.
Nothing real love can't undo,
And though I may have lost my way,
All paths lead straight to you.
'Like You' by Evanescence
Yugito followed Katashi out of the alleyway, leaving Naruto and Gaara to pack the boy's clothes and buy rations with the money Katashi had stored away. The air was cold, but the citizens of Kiri, thronging around them, seemed to not feel it, even the children- she saw a girl, and in her face was the face of a man whose spine she had severed in the Kiri War- dressed in tattered shorts.
Katashi led her to a cemetery, and even she, who had become familiar with graveyards out of necessity, out of the need to keep sane, to push away the Nekomata's yowls, somehow found this cemetery to be…
Sad.
The cracked, crumbling gravestones leaned against each other in silent consolation, the only sound the whistling of the salt wind over the worn pathways. The gray moss of the island covered everything, but she didn't need to look at the blurred names, worn away by wind and tide, for she already knew their lives.
The mouthless dead were speaking, muttering, talking of children and life and the ways that they died, tape recorders of their last thoughts that would never wind down, would never be truly silenced, as long as the Nekomata walked the earth. She wondered where they had gone, and found it bitterly fitting that even she, jinchuuriki of the Nekomata, wandering the border between life and death, did not know what truly lay beyond life.
Katashi wandered the pathways, trailing webbed fingers over the crumbling stone, his bloodied lips moving in something resembling a prayer. Bile rose in her throat at this, the needless expenditure of energy, the blatant vulnerability. 'Save your prayers for the living,' she thought, leaning back against the wall, watching his sad eyes glance over the worn curves, 'the dead have passed beyond all cares.'
The jinchuuriki of Isonade halted by a gravestone at the back, bowing his head, and she joined him, staring down at the paltry grave, the decaying stone with the name washed off by the rain, one of the tough ferns of the island growing beside it, carefully tended. Katashi ran a shaking hand over the top, as if he were touching the woman as she had been in life.
He took a shuddering breath, and scratched out, the letters ill-made, quivering with emotion,
We argued the night before she died, and I told her I hated her, that I wished I'd never seen her in my life. Yugito was silent, irritated by Katashi's sentimentality, and wondered if all the other jinchuuriki were going to be like this: so easily distracted from the mission by their past. She was lucky to have made a clean break when she was young, becoming able to sublimate all of her grief into action.
Apparently, this boy couldn't do the same. His hand shook as he continued, his breathing whistling through the gill slits behind his ears like wind through the trees,
And she died thinking I hated her. Yugito closed her eyes, hearing Rei Higurashi's voice, and knelt, letting her fingers splay out against the cold stone, feeling moss crumble underneath her fingers.
The voice strengthened, the voice of a dead woman, talking of her husband, long gone these forty years; of her child that the Isonade killed, and the mourning that followed; of the genocide she had committed against the clans, and the way she could no longer stand to look in the mirror; of how the Seven Swordsmen disbanded, the other six betraying the village, and how she stayed, only to become guilty by association; of how she laid down her sword, weary of blood and death.
And there, the memories of Katashi, of seeing his sodden form, huddled in the flickering light of a street lamp; of offering a hand and taking the boy, the human form of the Isonade, the three-tailed shark that killed her child, into her apartment, because she was selfish, and sick of loneliness; of sharing soup; of four years of pranks and laughter and joy and love.
She stood, dusting her hands off on her trousers, and said, her voice still raspy and soft from the Nekomata's chakra burning her throat,
"More than being a shinobi, more than her husband or her sword or her country, it was you, Katashi, that gave her life meaning. She loved you more than anything else in this world, and she knew you loved her, even as she died." Her lips twisted in a bitter, resentful smile.
"She never, not for one moment of your four years together, doubted that."
The slate dropped to the ground with a clatter, and Katashi fell to his knees before her, throwing skinny arms around her waist, his thin shoulders shuddering with sobs, the front of her shirt becoming damp with tears.
Yugito stared down at him, lip curling in a disgusted sneer. 'How pathetic.' But then… Katashi was a jinchuuriki, and more than that, he was just a small boy in pain. And Uzumaki said that jinchuuriki had to stick together, had to comfort each other. So she controlled her instinctive urge to flinch away, to kill this boy sobbing into her belly, and knelt on the earth before him and let his tears soak her shoulder, her arms around his trembling back, because they were jinchuuriki, and that was what they did for each other.
She wondered if this- this sudden, deep connection, formed because you were the same, were the only ones who could truly understand what it meant to be 'other'- was what it felt like to be a mother.
Naruto watched Katashi and Yugito throw their packs into the small sailboat, Gaara working on coiling the rope while Naruto walked up and down the dock, rocking Moriko back and forth, trying to calm her.
"Come on," Yugito called, stepping into the boat, helping Gaara into it.
"Ready to go, kid?" he asked Moriko. She stared up at him solemnly, muddy green eyes grave. "I guess that's a yes," he said, handing her to Gaara and getting into the boat as well. Katashi performed a quick jutsu, eyes narrowing in concentration.
Waves leaped up behind them, pushing the boat away from the dock and out of the harbor, curling and licking at the wooden sides of the boat.
"Awesome," Naruto said, watching the harbor recede behind them, swallowed up in the mist that surrounded the island. Katashi shrugged, scrawling,
It's a jutsu they teach all the Academy students. We have to know how to sail, but if there's not enough wind, we do this. He glanced up at the sky, searching out a star, and looked back at the water, black with the fading twilight. We're on course. We'll land in the port of the Land of Fire.
He stood, grinning as he stripped his shirt off and threw it into the corner of the boat, his body launching in a smooth arc as he cut the water like a knife, disappearing beneath the choppy waves, webbed feet and hands propelling him down and out of sight.
"Naruto," Yugito said, "Have you been practicing the Raikyu?" He cracked his knuckles, nodding.
"Yeah. It's hard, though."
Yugito snorted, "Many things are going to be hard. Killing your first man will be hard. Your first child, even worse. But killing gets easier with practice; jutsus do, too."
"I know," he said, turning away to watch the last streaks of red in the west fade. An orb of lightning zipped by his face, making him jerk with a shout of surprise. He turned, frowning to Yugito, who was watching him, her lips twisted in a slight smile.
"Try to do that."
"Fine," he sighed, tired and irritated with her constant insistence. He bent his head, hands flickering through seals as he called chakra. A blue ball of chakra, no larger than a pea, formed between his hands, the soft humming of electricity lost in the pounding of the waves against the boat's hull.
"Is it stable?" Yugito asked. He looked up, blinking, seeing Yugito crouched in front of him, blue eyes fixed on the chakra, her hands cupping his.
"Yeah, I guess." Yugito bent closer, lower lip caught between her teeth.
"Good. Feed more in." He did as she asked, watching the tiny ball grow larger, the humming louder. Even Moriko, lying at his feet, appeared interested, one tiny arm reaching up for the orb of light. Sweat broke out on his brow, his throat dry as he swallowed, sparks flying off the orb, singing his hands, leaving black spots of soot and blisters rising in their wakes.
"Stop," Yugito said. He sighed, relieved, anticipating letting it go. "Now hold it," she finished.
"What?" he yelled. Her voice was flat, brooking no arguments, as she stood and went back to her seat, crossing her arms and watching him struggle to keep the orb under control, keeping it from fizzling out. "Hold it, just like that. I expect you to keep it going for at least ten minutes."
"You said you wanted to learn it," Gaara added from where he was huddled miserably in the bow, the sand crawling snake-like over his skin in agitation.
Naruto glared at him, then stared down at his hands, concentrating. Another blister formed on his palm, skin cells shriveling, dying, destroyed by the electricity dancing in his hands like the heart of a star.
He held his breath as lightning lashed out, snaked by his hair- the acrid stench of burning hair suffused the boat- but managed to keep it going, sweat rolling down his nose, down the back of his neck, cooling as the salt wind brushed over him.
A long minute passed, then another. The pain in his burned hands was becoming excruciating, like someone had added ground glass into the joints in his fingers. He winced, bit his lip, tasting blood as his teeth split the skin.
The Raikyu shuddered- 'Damn it, don't do this to me- don't you fucking blow out on me,' – and flew apart into thousands of bright little sparks zipping through the darkness like hummingbirds as he lost control of the jutsu.
"Damn it," he muttered, punching the bench underneath him and doubling over as his hands throbbed, sharp, stabbing pains radiating up his arms with every movement.
"Hurts, doesn't it?" Yugito observed, legs crossed at the ankles, her hands playing with the kusarigama she took from Tenten, as a memento. They had been lucky, he knew, that none of the shinobi from Konoha had tried genjutsu, since Yugito couldn't fight genjutsu off at all, another drawback of the Nekomata. "It'll subside soon."
A fish came sailing over the edge of the boat and landed with a wet slap, water splashing over Moriko's face as she gurgled, giggling when the fish continued to slap its tail against the bottom of the boat.
Katashi hauled himself in, dragging more fishes with him, the third eyelid retracting, leaving his eyes glinting in the starlight. He tossed one at Yugito, who caught it with a muttered 'Thanks', gutting the fish with one sweep of her kusarigama.
Dinner, Katashi wrote, plopping down on the bottom of the boat and pulling his shirt on, covering the seal that stretched over his back, the black waves curling over his protruding shoulder blades.
"How'd you find them so fast?" Naruto asked, picking up one of the trout with fingers that tingled from the residual electricity on his skin.
Something the shark can do, Katashi wrote with his free hand, the other one occupied with cleaning and descaling the fish he had in his lap. Rei said it had something to do with sensing the electricity put off by living things or something; not quite sure what it's called.
"The Ampullae of Lorenzini," Gaara said from the bow, his eyes fixed on watching his sand absorb the blood on the bottom of the boat. "Pores in the skin that allow sharks to detect living things in the water, as well as orienting themselves to Earth's magnetic fields."
Katashi blinked. Are you a walking encyclopedia or something?
"No," Gaara said, taking the question completely literally. Katashi rolled his eyes, and bent to his task, the waves pushing the small boat onward, through the dark, stormy waters.
Tsunade stood in the doorway of the small ward in her surgery scrubs, watching the medic-nins hurry back and forth. The ward had only four beds, and had been built in the last war to house genin teams after studies had proven that teams healed faster when kept together.
As Gai's team was doing now.
The team had been lucky to be found so fast; the shinobi of Kiri had dropped them just inside the borders, in just the place for a routine border patrol to stumble upon them.
Lee and Gai were sedated, the green synthetic cloth of their suits melted to their skin. Two medics were with each of them, one cutting the dead skin away while the other followed them, regenerating the skin as best they could. There would be scars, large patches of skin deadened to touch, but that was a small price. They had gotten off lightly, she knew, being familiar with the technique Nii had used: one taught to the Hunter-nin of Kumogakure, traditionally used for incinerating the bodies of missing-nin.
Tenten was slouched in a chair, another medic grasping her chin and shining a light into her eyes. Her hands were shaking, Tsunade noted with a jaundiced eye, making a mental note to check for brain damage when the preliminary exams were finished. So much electricity was particularly dangerous to the brain, as it overwhelmed the natural electrical connections between synapses.
Neji was a whole other case, and almost as damaged as Lee and Gai. Electricity had flooded his brain, and the weight attached to the end of Tenten's kusarigama had shattered two of his ribs, the bone chips perforating his liver. He was still anesthetized, having just come out of surgery to remove the chips and stitch up his liver, but she expected him to wake up soon.
"Did you see any of Nii's weaknesses?" she asked, coming into the room and dropping her gloves into the trashcan. Tenten shook her head, wincing as the motion made her face turn green.
"None, Hokage-sama. She's very skilled at taijutsu- well," she laughed, bitter, "-she'd have to be to do that to Lee and Gai-sensei- and she had a huge amount of chakra. More than most jounin, but I suppose it comes from the demon." She looked at Neji, her face hardening. "We didn't try genjutsu. She had black fire on her skin, too."
Tenten sighed, smiling a little. "Well, if anyone tries to say that girls can't be good shinobi, I guess we just point them at her."
"What about the others?" Tsunade asked, pulling up a chair and placing her hands on Tenten's head, sending out feelers of chakra to search for damage within the skull. Tenten shrugged.
"Uzumaki was thinner than usual. The boy from Sand-" her eyes flickered in Lee's direction, "-looked the same. The baby looked fine, I guess. Nii looked fine, too. But-" She rubbed at her eyes as Tsunade removed her hands and sat back, "-they were all so thin, and short."
"No brain damage. You all got off lightly." She looked down at Tenten's last comment, reminded all over again that the shinobi they were chasing were not true shinobi; not true humans; nothing but shells for demons, abused and used by the villages they served.
"They probably all suffered from malnutrition as children," she said reluctantly. Tenten rested her arm on her knee, leaning forward.
"And Lee and Neji and Gai-sensei? What about them?"
Tsunade held out a hand, one of the medic-nins in the ward slapping a clipboard into it. She pulled it over, flicked through the papers, reading the assessments. Not as bad as she had feared, then.
"They'll be out in a week, but restricted from any strenuous activity for two months. So you'll be limited to C-rank missions, at most."
Tenten groaned. "God, Neji is going to be so pissed that he lost."
"I don't doubt that," Tsunade said, regretting the decision to send them after Uzumaki all over again. She needed to get out of the ward, out of seeing the price Gai's team had paid for her underestimation.
God, she needed a drink.
Summer was fast fading into autumn, the massive trees of Konoha beginning to show hints of their fall colors, and the late afternoon light was warm and golden on the road, the air chilly with the first bite of cold.
Gaara looked behind him at the others. They were two weeks into their trek through Fire Country, and were now only a half hour from Kerumigakure, the Village Hidden in the Smoke.
Yugito was walking beside Naruto, lecturing him on how to better control the Raikyu, spinning her kusarigama on the chain. Naruto's hands were cupped, electricity sparking on his fingers, but he was occupied with talking to Katashi. They had begun to understand Katashi's unorthodox speech after a week, and now they were able to converse with him the way they did with each other. Katashi was playing another prank, busy dropping pebbles into Naruto's pockets with one hand while bouncing Moriko up and down with the other.
Gaara snorted- if the boy knew what was good for him, he would refrain from trying the same trick on him- and dropped back to walk beside them.
"I smell smoke," he said, the sand leaping up and blocking the kusarigama's strike as Yugito sent it at him. The woman grunted in irritation, reversing the arc and slashing it at Katashi, who dropped and rolled underneath it, juggling Moriko, without missing a beat.
Naruto simply stepped out of its path, his blue eyes focused on the orb of lightning growing in his hands, the white-blue bolts crawling over his fingers, leaving red, raised welts in their wake.
Yugito jerked the kusarigama back to her, the shaft of the blade smacking into her palm. "You've all gotten better."
'We would have to, with you attacking us with it at random moments in the name of 'practice' or 'making sure we keep alert,'' Gaara thought, glaring at her out of the corner of his eye.
Katashi sniffled loudly, pressing a hand to his heart as he pretended to faint, "Oh, happy day, that you acknowledge my skills!" He squawked as Yugito grabbed the back of his shirt, the wickedly sharp edge of the kusarigama pressing into his throat as Yugito grinned at him, her smile full of teeth.
"Don't push it." She dropped him and continued, tossing over her shoulder, "You should check your back pocket, Naruto."
"Yeah, whatever," Naruto said, an indrawn breath of pain hissing through his teeth as he finally let the Raikyu dissolve into millions of white sparks dancing through the air, "I suppose the brat's poured more rocks into it."
"'m not a brat," Katashi sulked, the thin membrane of his third eyelid flickering back and forth over his eyes in agitation. Gaara rolled his eyes, attempting to repress his acidic reply. He failed.
"In the past two weeks, you have attempted to steal Yugito's sword and kusarigama seven times, filled Naruto's pockets with rocks three times, created water out of the earth for the sole purpose of saturating my sand with it two times, and pushed Naruto into the river just yesterday. In fact, the only person you have not tormented on this trip is Moriko, and that is because she would no doubt find whatever you did amusing. And you still insist that you are not a brat?"
"It's not my fault that you guys always fall for it," Katashi said, creating an orb of water in his hand and throwing it up in the air. "I couldn't ever get Rei, and I couldn't prank anybody else because I'd get beaten up if I left the house. I'm just making up for lost time."
Yugito stopped, making Naruto, who was shaking his hands in an attempt to stop the pain, bump into her and stumble back, falling onto his back.
"Hey, what's the deal?" he grumbled from his position on the road.
"Shut up," Yugito bit out, turning her head, eyes narrowed. She reached up, unsheathed her sword, and glanced at Katashi. "You know how to use a sword?"
"Yeah," Katashi said. "Rei was teaching me-" he stopped talking as she threw the sword at him, catching it in one hand and lowering himself into a combat stance. The afternoon light washed down the blade like liquid gold, water seeping out of the earth underneath Katashi's feet, lapping at his shoes.
Three clones formed around Naruto, all with Raikyu- nowhere near as big as Yugito's, but respectable in size- humming in their hands. A fourth took Moriko from Katashi and flickered away into the undergrowth on the side of the road, secreting her away.
A circle of sand was rotating at his feet, shifting restlessly, demanding combat. Yugito was holding the shaft of her kusarigama in one hand, spinning the weight with the other, her shoulders a line of tension.
Four chakra signatures were rushing towards them, the controlled flicker giving away what they were:
Hunter-nin.
They burst out of the treetops in a mass of black, white masks gleaming in the sunlight as they landed without a sound on the dusty road, the leader gazing at Naruto, his voice heavy with scorn.
"There's the traitor; hard to forget a face with thosethings."
One of them broke away, pulling out a scroll and biting his thumb. Gaara didn't move; the sand did it for him. It coiled around the Hunter-nin's ankle, yanking him down onto the road for the sand to devour.
Yugito was off, her kusarigama humming, high and clear, as it scythed through the air, the weight darting in and out as she attacked the leader, who dodged her strikes, backpedaling as he performed an Earth jutsu, the earth opening underneath her.
Gaara filled the gap with sand long enough for Yugito to step on it and launch into the air before concentrating on his own battle, the Hunter-nin he had targeted having escaped the sand's hold. He had thrown the scroll to the side, realizing his danger, and was closing, a kunai flashing into his hand.
The impact of metal on sand vibrated through him, and he allowed himself a smile, spikes of sand forcing themselves up from the earth, piercing the bottom of the Hunter-nin's foot, becoming swept away into the bloodstream.
The man leaped back, fingers coming up to his mouth in a circle. Fire, red-hot, billowed out from his mouth, hit the sand, and Gaara snarled as he felt his sand become heavy, leaden, solidifying into glass as the fire continued to move, destroying his weapon.
The glass shattered in a rain of crystal as he tried to move it, to use it against the Hunter-nin who was coming closer, scattering on the road, useless.
Shukaku was roaring in his head, but he ignored the tanuki's rage, scrambling backwards as the tip of a kunai sliced the air just in front of him, the sand layered on his skin protecting him from the strike, zipping by him to thud into a tree trunk behind him. The blank white mask of the Hunter-nin infuriated him, enraged him, because he couldn't see the face of the man he was going to kill, couldn't see the fear in his eyes.
A sand clone sprang up from the earth, wrapping itself around the Hunter-nin's leg, slowing him, making him stumble, the orb of fire burning in his hand extinguished as he lost concentration.
The noise of his blood thundering in his head overpowered everything else, a low growl rumbling in his throat as he sacrificed his sand armor, the grains on his skin leaving to coil around the other man's legs. The nerve of this insect, daring to destroy his weapon, to boil it into useless shards of glass. He would suffer.
His hand curled into a fist.
There was a sound like paper tearing as the Hunter-nin's Achilles tendon separated from his heel and the man collapsed to the dusty road, blood spurting, swallowed up by the hungry sand. Gaara stalked closer, excited by the blood, by his pain. Shukaku rumbled a warning.
'What-'
Kunai flashed in the man's hands, rocketed at him.
There was no time to dodge, no sand to protect him.
One took him in the stomach, blood flowering out, crimson, dampening his shirt, and another hit him in the thigh, the metal grinding against bone. He jerked, his leg giving out underneath him as he crumpled to the road like wet tissue paper.
Synapses fired. Something- white-hot, like lightning in the brain- pain- tore him to shreds. It was his blood flowing onto his hand, his existence ending one minute at a time with every beat of his heart.
Someone was screaming, rough and maddened. He observed with detached interest that it was him screaming, his body writhing in the wagon wheel ruts, his bone gleaming white through the gaping wound of his leg.
He came back to himself, and felt the pain hammering against the inside of his skull, as if someone had taken an ice pick and was forcing it slowly into his brain.
He was in pain.
The Hunter-nin would pay.
He blinked unfocused eyes, saw the white mask of the Hunter-nin looming over him, the dark blade of a kunai upraised against the sky, ready to end his existence with one stroke.
That could not happen.
His fingers twitched, and the shards of glass lying on the road- grains of sand melted together into blades of crystal, but still his sand- rocked back and forth, rose from the earth.
Everything seemed so clear, he noticed, when you were about to die.
The kunai began to descend, and the pain pulsing at the inside of his head grew worse as the kunai came closer, the blank mask of the shinobi large in his vision as the point rested on his belly, almost ready to tear through the skin, to lacerate his organs into so much meat.
The countless blades of glass came together, sheathing themselves in another's flesh with a sound like a knife tearing through cloth. Red liquid, as bright as the hues of the sun, began to flow over the whiteness of the mask as the Hunter-nin let go of the kunai, letting it clatter to the road in a small cloud of dust. The corpse fell forward onto Gaara, warm and wet with his own blood.
There was a shard of glass the size of his hand protruding from the back of his head, streaked with blood.
Gaara stared up at the fading afternoon light, and couldn't muster the strength to push the corpse off him. Everything was silent.
The earth beneath him thudded as he felt the others come close, and saw Naruto's blurred face hover in his vision, saw Katashi behind him, the side of his face rapidly swelling. Yugito stood behind them both, her face pale.
He felt very tired, and closed his eyes.
A/N: Review?