Intermission 10
- a love story in bits and pieces -
She refuses to talk.
They drug her body and Kushina has to threaten to bite the nether regions off of several men that come see her before they increase her dosage and leave her alone to toss and turn in her small room.
Kushina is delirious for days, weeks, she doesn't know. All she knows is that she hears murmuring in her ear. It doesn't sound like the one who brings her drugged meals. Instead, this low soft voice implores her to keep going, to not give up. It's masculine and heartbreaking familiar, and she thinks she hears the speaker's voice break a few times due to carefully contained emotion.
One day, her mind is strong enough to tell her body to start fighting the effects of the drug. She's practiced drinking liquids and coughing them out afterwards before. Uzu shinobi and highly-ranked villagers trained from near-infancy to avoid frequent assassination attempts. Kushina coughs out her water onto the coarse rug in the corner of the room, and blearily watches as the rough fabric greedily absorbs the wet patch. She does this for three days, three times a day, before her body feels clean enough to muster strategic rational thought on how to escape.
The first time she tries standing, her head is still spinning, but it's not from drugs. Kushina pries herself up and finds that, miraculously, there is no shinobi guard at the opposite end of the shoji door. So much for strategy. She clobbers two of the ordinary guardsmen that she encounters on her way to the back door, and knocks the chef of the kitchen unconscious before quickly stealing some food and escaping through the kitchen door.
Kushina heads up to the dense woods surrounding the port village as fast as her trembling legs can take her. When she's surrounded above by foliage, she tries to take a bite of the large half-loaf of stale bread she stole from the kitchen. Though her stomach trembles with want, Kushina realizes that she can't. Those bastards had apparently laced the piece of bread with the hallucinogen. She had stolen the very piece of bread they rationed out to her. Her stomach gurgles again, painfully, as the smell of food seems to have wakened it from its dormant unused state.
The red-haired kunoichi curses softly (even cursing takes a lot of energy), but resigns herself to wolf down one of the two apples she took instead. It's painfully small and shrunken due to it being kept in storage until the middle of winter. Her stomach protests, and she eats another, the last one, before her brain can stop her.
Without equipment or rations, Kushina trudges up the slope to the cover of the densest parts of the forest. The merchant-pig would be sending men to look for her soon.