From the Depths
Scroll 890; Memory N35
Category: Abilities Post-Conjunction
Our strength grows with time.
We are Chosen by the elements, one for each of the Five. We are a multitude of things for them, but for simplicity's sake, let us say the Chosen stand upon the World for the Five. As such, we are granted authority over our element. We are granted command of our blessing.
This sovereignty of sorts manifests in many, many ways, but there is the one most overt manner that we all share: control. Our will dictates the shape of the element around us. The possibilities are, perhaps, incalculable by the mind.
I can stand upon seas. I can drive the waves upon the shore with a thought. I can raise oceans against land with a flourish of my hand. I can sit in the deepest depths, the places where no light ever reach, where Water meets Earth, and see all manner of creation swim above me as I breathe ocean as air.
But I could not always do these things. Command is a right, but not a birthright. As time passes, we accustom. We train. We hone. We become more.
In pursuit of this, many of us adopt mundane skills. We know many crafts and many trades, many schools of knowledge and sciences. We unravel the world with our human hands, as the rest of humanity seeks to do.
Perhaps, most of all, we take to martial arts. Knowledge of conducting conflict with steady hands often lends us insight into our own powers. It is only natural that a thing of man reflects our own nature of command over nature.
The forest was uncharacteristically quiet.
From his perch on a meaty branch more than capable of holding something far greater in size than a boy of eight going on nine, Naruto looked left and right, sweeping his gaze across the hazy distance, his view obscured in part by the massive trees rising into the air like wooden pillars and columns to hold up the vast ceiling of green far above them all. He was not surprised to see nothing immediately dangerous – natural camouflage was a pretty common occurrence here, after all. He was, however, surprised to hear nothing immediately dangerous.
"Huh," Naruto murmured to himself, head tipped to one side as he considered the implications of nothing trying to kill him at the moment.
So... he mentally drawled for a few seconds. That means no giant tiger attacks, no snakes of unusually large size trying to strangle me, no clouds of hallucinogenic mushroom spores, no enormous fly traps disguised as entire clearings, no acid-spitting leeches, and no damn bears. And that means...
For the first time in a month, he wasn't spending his days in this godforsaken forest fighting for his life against giant animals that wanted nothing more than him in their stomachs!
Naruto slouched against the thick bark at his back, lifted his head to the rolling green canopy more than fifty metres above and laughed in wanton joy at the lack of things trying to eat him. Just thinking that phrase brought a tingling rush of respite down his spine as he continued to laugh his ass off, and it felt good.
It was good, because for the first time in a very long time, he could actually relax for a moment down here.
In a yawning sigh that Shikamaru would've been mightily proud of, Naruto felt his muscles coiled like springs unhinge, rubbed a tired hand along the aching neck he constantly craned from side to side in efforts to hear and see what was coming after him next, and, finally, released the ironclad chokehold he kept on his chakra.
Relief flooding him like the cooling breeze so very absent from this humid slice of hellish paradise, Naruto let the wind in his gut, resting at the very core of him, flow out of him like water from the floodgates at long last. He welcomed the sudden burst of windy reprieve to his worn soul like an old friend.
And there was some deeper truth to that, because he felt the wind surge in the warm air around him, his oldest friend returning in greater force. Kaze brought renewed vitality to the stagnant forest air he'd grown sick of breathing, full of floating leaves and moss and vines and the cute little humming birds to the damn scary falcons that made their homes high up in the boughs a world away from the deadfall and dirt of the forest floor.
He smiled, and then he laughed at the first sentiment he heard and felt rising on the brand new breeze, cool and refreshing despite the sun standing at the peak of its ascent, rays of midday light piercing the canopy like gilded spears.
"I've missed you, too, Kaze," Naruto all but hummed in his moment of virtual reverie. In the space in front, the seven-metre span from him to the oddly drooping limb of the next tree, the wind whirled in loose, casual coils, spreading heat thin across his body as more cool air branched out towards him.
Naruto sighed again. He really had missed this, this old way of understanding, the resplendent awareness of everything around him granted to him by greatest wind. He hadn't had the luxury quite so often in recent days. But he had it now, and he would make the most of it.
Naruto, breathing in deep, letting his lungs fill, inhaling slowly of the forest scents of wet earth, gentle rot and tender decay, he immersed himself in the hidden beauty of the forest he had not had the time to stop and see in so, so very long.
He ran his hand across the rough surface of the bark, letting his fingers trail up and down the many weaving paths the outermost grain had once taken. He had felt the bark of a number of trees such as this in his time here. Each was different, each not quite the same as the last. The passage of time had seen them grow to differ, to change from their brethren. The stories of those times of growth, of change, of brethren, were etched in the bark, beginning in the deep centre of the tree and spreading ever outward as wood became bark and new wood grew within to supplant the old.
Reaffirming the once iron grip on his core, Naruto breathed in and breathed out slowly, recalling the method that brought his chakra forward carefully, simply because he had the comfort of time. The slow trickle of the breeze turned to hushed shrieks and muted wails in his coils, and his chakra flowed forth. With a little bit of energy swirling unseen across his palm, wind whistled ever inward, resonating with the curious patterns of the tree in a curious noise he could describe as an echo that did not fade. Instead, the echo grew, and Kaze whispered to him the etched tales of the tree.
A seed fell from high above, and the dirt swallowed it. Rain fed it, and seed turned to sapling. The sapling spread roots into the soil, looking for more to make it grow. The sapling brushed against air, and the sapling was no longer a sapling. Time passed, and soft green things became harder, tougher and brown. It was a tree, and it searched for the light far above. It took long years, some full of rain, some full of none, to tiptoe towards the blue sky beyond the green one. Branches sprouted on its way, and the branches sprouted leaves. In part, brown became green again. When time enough had passed, the tree grew past its siblings to stand tall and proud in its place beneath the sun, its tale of triumph told fondly in the story carved in the bark by those long, long years.
The echo of the wind in the tree finally faded into the not-so-far distance, and Naruto tipped his head away from the bark after some time of lengthy sighs and wondrous understanding. He looked up into the upturned sea of green that stole the lion's share of light, leaving what little remained to filter down in weakened rays to the forest world below. He understood why each and every tree reached for the sky they could not see.
His mind wandered back to the trees of his home, and he considered the forests of Konoha for a moment. Those trees were not the storytellers that these were. He knew this from a young age, when he had first tried to truly listen to the quiet melodies of the breeze through the leaves that surrounded his village. Perhaps a little more than a hundred years was not enough for a forest to weave a tale in wood and bark, to draw in words from earth and water, to soak up songs from sun and wind. But here...
This one was ancient. Its roots spread back to a time when the world was... not as it was now, for lack of a better phrase.
He took his eyes to the vastness of the forest, both in size and scale. The trees were colossal, larger than anything he had ever seen. But from above, the sea of green and leaves that bathed in the sunlight stretched to the horizon, upheld by the pillars of a world below different in every way. Each of those pillars, those columns that beared the weight of an emerald ocean and its fluttering waves of jade, stood tall, each with a soaring pride and an imposing nobility befitting the most ancient of trees. Each had a tale, a grand piece of the grand saga of the forest told in their old wood and written in their older rings.
This place, though sharing a similar root, was not Konoha. In the natural way of things, it was greater than the forests of his home. And even for all its deadly trappings, the eldest splendour of the forest could not be hidden from one determined to see it in all its glory.
Naruto breathed in the changed air, and exhaled more of the same. It was cool, an invigoration that sank deep into his lungs and coiled tight, fierce and intense and terrible, but blessed with a gentle embrace all the same. Such was the wind of his weathered past, his intermittent present, and his hopeful future. Such was his bond with the wind of this world.
Such was his connection to wind that it let him know when something was about to kill him.
Move.
Naruto flung himself across the chasm of trees with an instinctive rush of wind, kunai in hand and then barely in the bark, the metal shivering in his grasp and shaking in the tiny slot it dug for itself in the tree. The bark of these giants was tough as stone, and it got tougher the closer he got to the ground. But the branch he left fell fast, no matter how much like a boulder it was. A lethally clean cut in place of the old, dense wood was what he saw as he clutched his trembling kunai, pressing his feet as tight as possible against the bark, tensing his legs and ignoring the fifteen metre plunge to the forest floor below.
But what he couldn't ignore was the man crouched on the tree opposite with a layer of chakra on his soles he couldn't help but envy, his right arm extended, a trench knife tight in his hand, air honed into blades rippling visibly from its keen edge.
"Close shave, kid," Asuma smiled down from his place on the trunk. "One second later and I might've taken something important off."
"Good thing I dodged, then," Naruto smiled right back up at him. "I kind of need my head."
"Damn right." Asuma's grin turned deadly. In the adrenaline rush that followed, the forest was no longer quite so beautiful.
He pulled his kunai loose and dropped like a rock. Shuriken filled the space above his head. Naruto flattened himself to the tree and hugged for dear life, the saw-toothed bark already making good on the promise of red streaks running the length of his arms. Taking in a sharp breath, a thrust of wind hurtled him around the broadside of the trunk until he found his feet in the right spot and kicked off hard.
He flew from trunk to nearest branch, fingers scraping painfully along the underside as he looped up and over into a crouch. Gusting chakra already numbing the pain, a tingle of air at his neck told him to move once more. One foot already on the bark, Naruto pushed up and flipped away, quickly an acrobatic metre above the blur that Asuma's fist appeared from when it gouged a violent chunk from the tree. Splinters spread like steam, coming out hot and fast against the arm covering his face, little bloody streaks sprinkled atop the patchwork of raging red scrapes.
Rushing chakra threw him from the air to the closest tangle of branches. Naruto touched down as fast as he could, scampering on all fours for lower heights as more tree gave way to Asuma's explosive punch one step from landing in his turned back, showering broken wood down like bits of tinder all around him.
Then he heard a click.
Light burst into life behind him, glowing lines of orange taking to the air from speck to speck, from ember to ember as it grew bright enough to make him squint in the spare second he had to summon wind before it all went up in his face.
The muffled boom and blossom of light and smoke blew him to the next bough, catching him square in the chest with a breathless thud that made him see stars. He hated that damn trick.
The kunai still in his hand held him steady for the two seconds of teary eyes and aching upper body he waited between gulping down a breath and preparing to drop ten metres on nothing but forest air.
His hands were barely free when half of the branch plummeted from the tree, almost taking him with it as wind tugged him from its path, slamming him back-first into the tree with a painful shudder and a dull crack to the back of his head. But his kunai slowed his half-baked attempt at descent just enough for him to hear what was coming next.
Well, crap, Naruto thought plainly.
Digging his feet into the bark and shooting down towards the forest floor, Naruto jetted away from the bark-splitting flying kick from Asuma that would've sent him headfirst into the dirt.
The leaves and soil filled his view fast as he tucked and rolled over gnarled roots and fallen branches, his whole worldview spinning for an instant. He shook his twisting vision clear and set off running with the wind at his back, weaving a complex path through the mammoth labyrinth of trees before he took to the branches above again with a hefty leap. But he could still hear the lightning-fast motions of his pursuer right on his tail, thudding into the bark and denting heavy depressions in the soil between chakra-driven flickers of the body. Asuma was hardly a moment away from his furious footfalls driven forward by the breeze.
He had an idea.
Nearest one is fifty metres on the right. The information poured in as chaotic soundwaves became clear in the echoing confines of his head. He dropped from the boughs on a cushion of air, rounded another gigantic, serrated tree and sped off to his target, dirt and decay tossed to the air in his gusting wake. He heard Asuma cleave through the misty trail of leaves half a second later. But he was already there.
Charging straight, Naruto's sandals clattered against the bark before he bent at the knees and used it like a springboard, exploding through the foliage in a burst of wind, only to come face to face with a hissing snake the colour of the trees and thicker at the neck than the boulder-thick branch it clung to.
Naruto stood dead still, muscles distressingly tense. The snake's forked tongue the size of his arm slithered free of its mouth, tasting the perturbed air once, then twice. He heard Asuma's soles press down hard on bark, enough to make wood groan and creak.
It all came together beautifully.
The snake struck like lightning, Naruto flowed around the creature's jagged hunting path like wind, and the beastly uppercut of Asuma's chakra-coated trench knife carved the monster's head from its body in a visceral spray of blood, gore, scales and more as it flew off into the trees, scarlet arcs whirling behind.
Jets of blood spurted every which way from the ragged stump of the slumping snake, a gush of hot crimson catching him in the eye as he blinked out the boiling red and dragged spiralling chakra from his core, pushed the swirling feeling up through his lungs, guided the floating sensation along his arms and out his splayed hands in a final coiled fist of wind.
The blast of compressed air tore Asuma off the branch and sent him smashing through the leaves, leaving a cloudy trail of red mist behind. Wind forced Naruto forward, past the flopping corpse of the snake, over the cracked and creaking branches matted with a few years' worth of reptile blood, through the airborne swarm of raining splinters and down to the forest floor at Asuma's falling form with the grip of a kunai scrunched tighter than ever before in his hand as he made for his exposed throat.
There was no way in hell he was going to miss now, not after six months of having his ass beat time and time again.
But Asuma had other plans.
His knife stowed away in a flash, Asuma's hands turned to a flurry of motion and signs that rapidly threatened to carry him out of range, out of the way, and out of reach. Naruto poured more wind out of his back in a last-ditch burst. But it wasn't enough.
His blade met a sudden log through puffing smoke before it ever came to rest over his teacher's neck; Naruto crouched on the deadfall of the forest, eyes wide at the fact he had actually thought he could ever hold a candle to a jounin as he was now. Asuma turned into another standing blur, flickering in front of him with an empty fist soaring through the billowing leaves, the cry of wind screeching behind the breakneck haymaker rushing for his face.
Naruto heard it, registered it deep in his head, and jerked backwards, just beyond the edge of Asuma's terrifyingly close knuckle for that whole stretched fraction of a second that whirled him by. Asuma spun with the fearsome momentum of his strike and his left leg lashed up and out in a back kick.
And then Naruto made the one mistake he knew never to make: he blocked.
His crossed arms almost crumpled beneath the shocking strength of the kick that sent him flying up into a branch as the forest passed him by in a stomach-churning blur of hazy shapes, bending him backwards and almost folding him in half before he flopped back down to earth in an aching puddle of bleeding arms and bruised bones. It was all he could do to just force down the bile he could feel building in his throat as the front and the back of him screamed bloody murder.
Then one of Asuma's trench knives, held in his clenched fist like brass knuckles, found a cold, cold place against the skin of his neck.
His teacher grinned wide, once more not looking as thoroughly bored as he often tended to be. "I win. Again."
"I noticed," Naruto groaned, voice half restrained by the razor-edge of the knife atop his neck.
The blade came loose, and Asuma sighed. "Not a bad plan you had with the snake distraction and that kickass wind blast of yours, but you forget about the Kawarimi. Just because you can't actually do it do isn't a reason not to account for it."
Naruto sighed as he hauled himself to his shaky feet, quivering like a leaf caught on a wild breeze. "No need to rub it in, Asuma-sensei." The mixed blessing that was his altered chakra was kind of a sore spot.
He almost lost his barely stable footing as Asuma slapped him on the back with an infuriatingly jolly series of chuckles.
"My bad, kid," he said with a shake of his head and a grin. "But still, you're lasting a hell of a lot longer than you did when we first started this."
Naruto only just held back a visible cringe at the memory of that particular fifteen-second thrashing, ending with him flat on his ass in total defeat and Asuma flat on his in riotous laughter. At least he was managing a bit better now.
"Just over two minutes and forty seconds by my count," Asuma said with a considerate nod as he gazed skyward for a brief second or so. "New best time right there. Good work, Naruto."
He would've muttered something along the lines of "Thanks", but the sudden absence of adrenaline coursing through his veins made him more than a little distracted by the bleeding and the bruises and the scrapes and the slight dizziness and the peculiar scratching sound he heard every time he blinked.
"Naruto?"
The voice sounded floaty, kind of like Asuma-sensei was standing nearby but not really as he spoke through a thin bubble of rather murky water that suddenly appeared over the leaves and the trees and his hand when he waved it front of his own face to see what was actually going on.
"Naruto?"
And then he realised it was just his vision getting cloudy. That was a relief. A giant murky bubble from nowhere would've been severely more terrifying, like that time with the spiders and the nest and the few claustrophobic minutes he'd spent in that cocoon. That had not been fun.
"Naruto? Hello? Anyone in there?"
That had not been fun at all.
"Naruto!"
He looked up, somewhat dizzy and somewhat dazed at the funny swimming sort of image he got of Asuma-sensei with an increasingly scruffy beard that refused to stay in place on his chin, instead choosing to crawl all over his teacher's face using the sideburns for arms until it coated his entire face in a thick layer of hairy fuzz. That was weird. "Yeah, sensei?"
"Here, swallow this."
Naruto didn't have all that much time between the spoken words and the odd white circle thing that got shoved in his mouth to voice an opinion, silly as it probably would've sounded if he was sure he could even talk properly. He had even less time before the pill went down his throat, went to work, cleared up his vision of the weird, watery forest entirely, and then sent these strange kind of curtains that blanketed everything in darkness down over his eyes.
And then he remembered the condition of him coming to the Sarutobi forest: he wasn't allowed to know where the village was precisely, so Asuma had to knock him out every time they went for a visit.
That certainly explained the pill.
Still doesn't explain that scratching noise when I blink, Naruto thought before he found a rather comfortable patch of wet leaves to drop into unconsciousness.
Asuma shook his head with a smile and a chuckle at the slumped, battered body of his student face first in the damp, already snoring moist dirt into the air with those almost explosive unconscious puffs of his. And those pills just made most people gassy. He never had gotten his head around how pills that caused gas translated to Naruto breathing with same sort of noise as a battlefield's worth of explosive tags.
"Oh, Naruto," he sighed as he leant down to grab a bruised and bleeding arm. "Always a mystery."
He hauled him up onto his back like he had a couple dozen times before, no less leaking bodily fluids now as he had been the first time he'd planted a fist in the boy's surprisingly resilient face. He always wondered why he hadn't broken his nose then, but Asuma just chalked it up to one more steaming piece of the weird-ass shit that came with the territory of swirling ink on a belly.
The Kyuubi was a whole different mess, but he supposed it was still just the littlest bit similar to the boy's insane affinity for wind. Oh, and the fucked-up, double-edged sword that they had decided to call his chakra.
He still couldn't figure out just why his chakra was purely elemental, with not the slightest hint of normality anywhere in sight. They'd looked and looked and looked for a solution to that in scrolls older than his old man when they'd first got to work on something resembling a training regime, but they'd turned up jack shit. In fact, they had turned up less than jack shit, because jack shit would've been some kind of precedent set in records past for chakra that was this damn weird.
The kid couldn't use ninjutsu beyond his element, he couldn't manipulate the most straightforward of seals, and he couldn't touch on genjutsu. More than that, he couldn't reinforce his body, couldn't augment his muscles, and couldn't even come close to anything resembling tree walking.
There'd been a few rare cases of shinobi unable to use ninjutsu or genjutsu in the past, but basic chakra manipulation within the body was always in reach. Except when it came to Naruto, because Naruto was still a mystery. He'd been training him for six months, running him ragged in survival exercise after survival exercise in the Forest of Death's great-grandfather, drilling him in stealth, evasion, trapping, taijutsu, and teaching him to control his crazy-ass chakra pretty much flying by the seat of his pants. He wasn't just putting him through a ramped-up edition of the Academy's old wartime curriculum; he was throwing in endurance trials that would've had anyone chuunin or lower rethinking their careers, dishing out ambushes every second or third or fourth or first day, making him lose sleep agonising over what was next when the kid could barely get a moment's rest in a place where the wildlife would kill him for even trying.
Yet Naruto – a quiet, extremely observant kid with a love for nature, a hate for his cigarettes, and an affinity for wind that could wipe out a small army – kept on going.
One half of him was bewildered by this young boy's incredible fortitude in relearning how to run, jump, fight and flee with nothing but wind when everyone else had chakra to lord over him. The other half was fucking proud of the battered, bruised and sleeping kid draped over his back, getting drool in explosive puffs on his recently clean flak jacket.
But there was time for all that later. He had a village of monkeys to get back to.
Asuma disappeared into the trees with a burst of chakra, barely taking note of the bleeding wounds and bruises on Naruto's skin already fading.
Pulling the thick cloak tighter over his shoulders, a foggy breath escaped his lips, steamy air spreading, fading and finally vanishing into the falling snow after one last moment of defiance. That truly was the story of each and every breath expelled from his mouth into the thin mountain air: futile struggle. A single puff of warm air could only withstand so much before the cloud was crushed in the bitter grip of the icy sky. To think otherwise was foolish at best, lethal at worst.
Breath alone wouldn't keep him alive up here in the snow and ice, hence the cloak, the thick jacket, the warm pants, and the heavy boots. Despite the warmth he felt glowing in his chest, his skin was still vulnerable to the world around, and by extension, so was he. It was one of a few weaknesses he could not easily eliminate.
Right arm stretched into the long falls of snow, his bare fingers upturned to the drifting flakes, jagged embers of white and blue sparked to life in little electric splashes above his covered palm, the dancing, crawling shards of lightning slowly swimming away and drowning in the frigid mountain air.
Even though it faded so quickly, Sasuke relished the moment of powerful warmth that filled the space around his hand before his focus returned to thoughts.
Unlike the gaping hole in his guard to cold and chill, he could not dress this weakness in warm robes and claim a formidable, functional defence in its place. Because as much as he could view it in the murk of weakness, he could view it so much more in the light of strength: lightning.
The one amusing part of such great difference was that if anyone else dared to change their chakra and release it into the air without a purpose more than warmth, it would be like sending up a flare for the world to see. Luckily for him, it wasn't the lightning that made one known. It was the flaring of chakra, the change from flowing neutrality to radiant, vibrating Raiton. A skilled sensor would spot either, but the overwhelming majority of those sensitive to chakra would detect only the former. Elemental chakra alone was all but invisible.
Amidst the snow, so was he.
Shaking his head and retracing his biological steps, Sasuke let loose another steamy breath and saw to the present moment amidst sparse pines and plentiful mountains, all coated in the uneven glare of midday white. He waited quietly in the snowy wings of swaying leaves, listening and watching intently for something beyond muted windy echoes and unending white.
Anything would do, such as the sound of a footstep. Or a spark.
He was glad that after enough time, he had learnt how to sense those striking electric signals without seeing them. Like an ever-present prickle at the back of his neck, a sensation enough to make those little fledgling hairs stand on end in the brutal cold, he could feel them when something out of the natural norm wandered into range.
Sasuke almost snorted. Like there was anything around these accursed mountains that actually wandered. The only things out here were the ones that hunted.
No matter how useful his bio-electric sense was, it could only do so much for him when he caught... well, wind of a balled, sparking mass hurtling towards him through the trees. His cloak, however, was surprisingly more helpful in that moment. One click of a buckle and the fabric unfurled around him as he slid from its warm embrace, right as a dog burst through it like a raging bull through a red flag.
He though it quite appropriate – considering the canine's name – when Bull blindly slammed headfirst into a tree.
When the dog recovered and shook the cloak to the ground, grunting and almost snarling, Sasuke was already chewing up and spitting out the distance he needed, blood charged with static, moving like a ghost through a world of white and wood to a good spot. The forest was sparse in places, but knotted and tangled in others, trees garnering thick, snow-laden underbrush – exactly what he needed.
Sasuke nestled low in the awkward curve and crook of a high branch, a light dusting of snow shed like unwanted skin as the bough settled beneath his feet. His chest rose and fell fast and heavy, an action just a few steps below heaving as he felt the electricity inside sizzle to life. The consequence of movement, motion, adrenalin was excitement, a deep stirring inside that spread through his veins.
Lightning wanted to play.
His bioelectric sense quaked as he felt something stomp into range. Sight alive, eyes nearly glowing from his place in the branches, he watched the approach of Bull.
Dealing with an animal whose strongest sense was smell in an environment comparatively devoid of noteworthy scents, it was only a matter of time before he was found. He was probably the most interesting thing for kilometres around.
But that was just because his blood was boiling with static, his scar that should've faded was prickling with electricity, and the lightning inside him was threatening to make his skin steam with the sheer demand he felt to move, to act, and to be.
And so what he saw changed.
Without moving from the spot, it was as if he took step after step back as he stared at the sky, watching endless blue marred with wisps of white grow ever wider across his field of view. The depths of the world around dove ever deeper, and the uniform of white was torn asunder by the new, impossible saturations of natural colours from far below the snow.
With all within his vision stretched to wandering infinity, the fresh expanse of world ahead slowed.
Everything slowed.
The moment was his, almost frozen in time as he watched everything play out. Through the delicate drifts of falling snow, he watched Bull charge over frosted roots he could see so clearly, through the snow-dusted brush made dark by winter's embrace, and towards the shaky branch of hoarfrost leaves he crouched on. He watched Bull leap, the tank of meat and muscle and black fur lined with white tear a heated swathe of rolling mist through the air, hot breath pouring from his gaping maw in droves like steam shrieking from a kettle. He watched teeth – gleaming fangs just as deadly as any kunai – knife and machete and shred icy wood like wet paper. He watched as the wood splintered, as canine teeth jutted through the surface and into the bottom of his sandal, forcing him to his feet and to another tree as he took to the air at a leisurely tempo.
Despite the forcible relocation, he was fine. He was better than fine
He could see, he could stare, and he could gaze upon all as he saw fit. He could look, move, and act at his own pace, unbeholden to time in a way none knew. In a moment's span, reduced to a glacial crawl, he was free.
And the feeling was intoxicating.
One.
The dog could chase, hound and harass him to his heart's content, but Bull would never quite catch up. As long as the world was one step behind, Sasuke would always be two steps ahead, the power of lightning driving him ever onwards.
Two.
He wondered what it looked like to a dog, or to others. He wondered what it looked like to see him move unrestricted and unrestrained from another's eyes, from a point of view that could not see the world as he saw it now. Would it be a wondrous sight to behold, to see one chosen by an element to immerse himself in it? Would it be terrifying to watch a human move with speed and grace that belied the body, that which defied the limitations of life? Would it seem alien, to watch a being gifted with an otherworldly power merely step where another would leap, to create thunder that rocked the heavens where the wake of another would only shake leaves? He really did wonder.
Three.
Sasuke blinked. And then he stopped meandering within his mind when his mental count reminded him to look outwards, and he realised that Bull had nearly caught up to him, a big dog's leaping jaw full of teeth right in front of his face.
Normally that would've startled him, but he just blinked twice more. Considering he had the freedom of time on his side, he thought it better to use it than let it go to waste. Bull's looming fangs inched a few more centimetres forward in that next standstill of a second, momentum carrying him forward through frosty space. He could see the intense vapour leaking from the dog's rather imposing mouth once more, steam rippling the rugged folds of long-worn skin with little more than the force of breath alone through his nose just as well. The spikes of his collar dragged fine lines through the air, almost imperceptible against the backdrop of misty white to his picture of a big, black-brown mastiff trying to chew his face off.
Well, I suppose I better move at some point, he pondered.
Sasuke, crouched on another branch in a different snowbound tree, leaned gently to his right, sloping his shoulder and almost stapling his arm to his body as Bull flew gently overhead with all the grace a lumpy, canine mass of meat and muscle could possess.
And then the dog careened directly into the tree behind them with enough impetus to break the frozen bark into another rain of wooden shards, Bull buried up to his ears in ice and trunk. But the dog wrenched himself from the trunk as quickly as he was injected into it, grunting like mad as Bull turned with a scrabbling of claws and leapt at him again, powerful hind legs pumping with enough strength to make the wood buckle and the tree shiver like a leaf in a strong breeze.
Bull swept forward in another prolonged bout of slow-motion, high-detail imagery of flapping ears and flopping gums, to which he just leant aside to watch the dog tumble headfirst into another tree. But Bull plucked himself out again, perching in a strangely birdlike manner on the low, curving surface of the frosty tree, and then tossed himself at him bodily like some sort of bizarre, canine missile.
In real – or regular time, as he preferred to think of it – it would've been extremely hard to maintain such a disadvantageous position, suspended solitary in a frozen grove of trees on a branch while a dog whose movements were already hard to track hurled himself towards him from every possible direction, again and again. But he had the time, and he had the choice. He chose to watch.
And if there was anything he could watch for a split-second of eternity, it was the sight of a flying dog, rolls of snowed-on fur and eager gums flapping and flopping in the chilly air before squishing hopelessly into a tree.
As he sealed his eyes shut, shook his head ever so slightly and did his best not to chuckle, Sasuke let go of the crackling, blazing lightning within for a micro-moment's space. The circuit switched off, and then switched straight back on. But the electrical disconnect handed Bull the chance he needed.
Sasuke's eyes flew open an instant after the instant he needed them, the sensory feedback of his electric sixth sense flooding his synapses with a static burst a moment too late. He was moving right without enough speed while Bull was moving straight with far too much, the fangs at his shoulder meant for his face as teeth tore through his clothing, flayed frigid channels into his skin, and sent an already crystallising mist of hot blood spitting and spattering through cold sky.
Mistake, his mind hissed at him as he fell into the numbing embrace of snow in a rain of his own sparking, crackling blood showering violently warm on his clothes, his face and the icy underbrush he lay in. He blinked once, and the bending, overexposed contrasts of colours and trees faded ever so slightly, endless blue and frost-white filling his view of the world around.
One would think an excess of time to act would grant an excess of careful, considered actions, but who could fill every moment with caution when there was such beauty to take in? Even as it weakened in strength, the brilliance with which he saw was not something he was ever willing to waste.
The sight that lightning granted existed as lightning did: in sparing, stormy moments, short bursts of blue forks and white sheets, flashes of light blinding to all but him. And he could see it still as the world returned to motion, faster and faster as he saw twigs shake at a known rate in the chilled breeze, heard growls no longer so stretched and distorted, heavy and heated breaths coming at him closer and closer, only felt so keenly in the sheer difference between the temperatures of an ice-cold clime and the hot grunts of a fanged, black beast called Bull.
Like lightning, Sasuke discarded contemplation, threw aside the trees, cut through the sky, pierced the clouds, and existed fully in the freedom of the moment that was his. On his feet lighter than snow, on his breath faster than thought, in his blood hotter than fire, lightning blazed.
The moment that was his froze: a sight to match the state of the day. In the moment that was his, he saw what was to be. Towards the moment that was his, granted by Raikou's blessing, he moved.
The world resumed.
Sasuke slipped from the big dog's lunging maw and turned on an electric dime, a scarce centimetre between him and teeth before he flashed past the assault, rammed a lightning-fast elbow down into the thick rolls of skin and fur behind the head, and finally forced those fearsome fangs into the white below with every last gram of his weight and formidable momentum. The massive, steel-corded ball of muscle and mass that was Bull fell with a satisfying thud in the unpacked snow.
After the passage of that one second, Sasuke breathed. The adrenaline evaporated. The immense furnace of the moment that kept out the cold between the wounds and his blood dwindled. And then his body relented.
He fell to the powder, his naked fists pounding into the wet ice as his torso heaved and his lungs felt like aerated rags strapped to his innards. He hated this feeling with a genuine, burning rage, though it was strange how much powerful emotion that one, simple biological reaction could elicit: pain.
Because, now that he finally had the time to feel the lines in his shoulder, the ultimately shallow but wide fissure that had fell on his flesh when it had been sundered by fangs of steel through skin, his body crawled with energies. Like snakes, he could feel them slithering over him, through him and his weeping wound, swimming through his blood, within and without. The damp red dripping into the snow hissed, crackled, sparked and steamed as it leaked and pooled, and the flame-hot liquid his machine of a body ran on parted the white like waves. And it hurt.
Even now, he failed to understand why healing hurt.
Maybe it was the method – the smell of scorched, blackened and burnt skin as lightning worked its way through his flesh permeated the air. A mix of will and habit stopped him from gagging on nausea incarnate as the awful stench wafted into his nostrils.
But maybe it was the presence of so much blood – lightning flowed through him like water, and only through experience and wounds had he learned that blood was the conduit through which it ran. Every drop was alive with a thousand strikes and storms, brimming with flashes and thunderclaps. When it took to the sky, it exploded from his body with instants of violence, singular moments of the same entity spread across a million different facets of existence.
Or maybe it was just that it taught him a lesson – don't bleed so much.
He grimaced out a faint smile from the clutches of his fierce, paralysing agony. It was never this bad from mere cuts and scrapes. Perhaps this was quite a serious wound. But at least it didn't knock him out like it had the first time he'd screwed up.
As his shoulder pieced itself back together, blackened flesh spreading in a strange, twisted facsimile of new growth, the shudders of flowing energy thundering through his veins settled from their unbearable frenzy, wild, thrashing and uncontrollable. The fierce wisps of steam climbing from his skin vanished into the ether. The pain, loud, brutal and punishing, faded to a dull, ringing hum in his ears. His raging, tormented blood grew calm, and his breath knew peace.
But the world did not.
Because the violent reaction to an interruption of the circuit that was his body, the repair and maintenance of wires and conduits of flesh and bone, the automated thing that looked like healing but still felt like torture, stripped resources from places they were not needed. His electrical sense vanished for just a few moments while his body strung new cables and cords within, a framework and a roof over the wound to build on when time permitted. So he didn't feel the encroaching presence until the circuit breaker flipped and his sensory array re-engaged.
The kunai came down like black rain through the snow. But in the next instant, they were drifting down as gently as the snow itself hanging still in the newly frozen air, each blade as bright as day. His chakra surged and crackled, twisting electrical currents arcing out and filling his veins, his eyes, his mind, his muscles as it set his renewed blood ablaze with light. Time didn't slow, but he sped up with the mighty storm of Raikou's wordless voice in his ears.
A knife's edge away from a missing eye, Sasuke took one step to the left from death and let his vivid world of lightning fade. The snow resumed, and the air was full of blades once more that perforated the steamy shape of a body he left behind. The only corpse for Kakashi's kunai was made of heated mist.
But it did not stop.
Shuriken shot through the air, stars that streaked not light but steel. Sasuke's grasp on lightning did not waver, did not bend, as resolute as the metal that rained. Turning in one smooth, swift motion, he pulled a black blade from the tree behind as he stepped away from the not-unexpected, not-sudden blitz from his left, manoeuvring the kunai gently, only as he needed it.
The stars drifted straight, like the snow but not. The kunai clinked in a strange, echoing manner as it tapped and motioned and urged and ushered the sharp edges away from him, one that would not have made sense in the time his attacker would have perceived it all. The disjointed, slow progress of all but him would have been alien, an inoperable image, difficult to observe, harder still to stride through with the ease of lifetimes he had not lived.
He released his grasp, lightning faded and kunai fell, and Kakashi was before him at an opportunistic angle a split-second past the elongated rush of projectiles from the front and the left. The man loomed high and tall, a blur of hushed greens and greys tipped with silver vaguely shadowed by the muted sun at his back. A fist – a left jab, he recognised as it all slowed – hurtled towards him, for the neck.
Height made a quick, crippling strike easy for his elder, but lightning could level all. The playing field was no different.
Sasuke leant. Drifting like snow as Kakashi drifted him by with a follow-up right cross, he struck back –direct like lightning. With speed in his body and electricity surging in his fist, he aimed low.
Kakashi had his advantages. Sasuke had his.
Grasp fading, snow falling, Kakashi anticipating, a ball-numbing blow was avoided as his opponent rotated, his back to the blow – a move he'd pulled before.
Sasuke slowed it down, perceived the blur in pure clarity, and brought his left leg up to where Kakashi would arrive. He almost saw the knife's vague glint appear a millisecond too late.
Abandonment was an easy thing to think, but harder to put into practice when everything was so short. The distance, the time – everything but the kunai that emerged from Kakashi's approaching hand, curving around and across his body in a perfectly fluid motion, practiced and precise from years of honing his body to be as sharp as the blade in his firm but loose grip as it closed the gap.
The tip glanced as it drifted by, no more than a pinprick through the warm material that still managed to draw and throw blood into the air. Perhaps a centimetre in height was not impressive, but first blood was first blood.
He watched it rise, and he knew he had lost.
The instant he felt that little jolt of pain, that little interruption in his skin, the circuit was tripped, the process of repair, maintenance and improvement began, and the flow was re-engaged a split-second. But there was a gap, a moment when the stream of lightning in his blood fizzled, cut as he had been, a sudden flush of overwhelming, soul-crushing absence from the light of his life that hit him like a full-body blow he was only just prepared to take.
And just like that, Kakashi's blur was back in place, covering him, embracing him, wrapping him in the shadow of speed and skill that he was. Sasuke could only just understand what happened next as the clouds wheeled overhead and his sensation of sense keeled over like a boat on stormy seas, tilted and tempest-tossed.
He was glad he hit soft, numbing snow in place of hard, frozen tree as his chest burnt, his blood boiled and Raikou raged with thunder in his ears. He lay facing the clouds, feeling the snow on his skin, soft like sheets, gentle as it fell. Pain blossomed like bruised flowers in his chest, but he was gifted with this place of deepest winter, a paradise of snow-capped peaks that denied the presence of spring with every defiant, frosty breath. His vision wavered between white and black, blots and spots swimming and flashing over his view of the sky, waiting for his world to settle.
And then he felt a sandpaper tongue and floppy jowls dripping in saliva slobber all over his face.
Bull licked once more, Sasuke closed his eyes and took it like a shinobi under interrogation, and the world resumed.
"Having fun, you two?"
Sasuke opened one eye in a half-squint, doing his best to keep the cooling liquid out of his sight. Kakashi was crouched, knees bent, arms rested on his thighs, hands dangling with a casual quality that pervaded his teacher's being relentlessly. And, of course, his one visible eye was closed, curved upward in that oddly poignant facsimile of a smile.
Bull grunted. Sasuke did his best to remain stoic in the snow despite the drool on his face. Kakashi kept on smiling with his eye.
A few seconds ticked by, and Sasuke broke first.
"Fine. Help me up."
And then Kakashi was hauling him over his shoulders like the boar they were probably having for dinner, all because his chakra was spent.
He remembered what was said, the good advice he had dismissed at first because lightning was his domain.
"Bursts only, Sasuke, or you're going to run out of chakra real quick."
Kakashi was dead right, because running on overload was a sure-fire way to run him dry in a manner of minutes. If his chakra was oil, then he was setting the entire reservoir on fire and using the heady, toxic fumes that billowed out of it like the greatest stimulant there was and would ever be. Problem was, as soon as he ran out, the descent was sheer, sharp and very, very likely to make him drop dead midstride.
So, to reduce the risk of dying just because he liked the way the world looked in that overexposed, ridiculously saturated explosion of colour that came with it, he restrained himself to what amounted to second-long glimpses behind the door. Just a peek behind the curtain, and he was fired up and ready to go. Perhaps he made it sound a little too energetic, but tapping into the circuit of lightning that ran through him was always an experience in and of itself.
It was as if he ducked his head into his electrical stream, drank lightning like water, and set his voltaic heart alight in a visceral, vitalising rush as the world he knew departed for the space of a moment, replaced by a different kind of vast expanse in a single, explosive instant of brilliant colours and blinding light.
And it was like that every time. Hell if he knew why it was still so damn beautiful.
But then he had to go ahead and get caught up in it. Again.
Good work, Sasuke. Great job.
But it was good advice.
He didn't like it, he wasn't going to admit it was good aloud, and he was going to ignore it on occasion.
But being carried around like the evening meal, exhausted and fatigued, drained and dry, was quite the clever consequence.
Despite the terrible pounding in his head, the ache in his muscles, the weird palpitations of his heart, and the strange, phantom sensations that flitted worryingly about his nervous system, he supposed the worst part of it all was that a dog had come up with it.