AN- A huge, ginormous THANK YOU to everyone that reviewed! Seriously, lots of warm and fuzzies and motivation to keep working on this.
Chapter 11
Sasuke's brain was somewhere in the past. Or maybe the future. He had Sakura's blood on his hands, again. Or for the first time. He couldn't get his mind's eye to decide if Sakura's hair was long or short when he left her lying there. If the look on her face had been the shocked look of betrayal or the awed look of the recently rescued.
What he really wanted to do was curl up into a little ball and scream until his voice was gone, but he didn't have the time. The fox's charka was pressing down on him from all sides and if he didn't do something soon, bad things were going to happen. Very bad things.
Naruto was trying to get at Orochimaru but the snake kept intercepting. There was little to no reason behind Naruto's lunges, lips pulled back over elongated teeth and eyes a feral red he simply kept coming and coming, not caring at all when a strike from the snake crushed him into a tree trunk. Naruto sunk two kunai into the snake's head and vaulted over it and towards Orochimaru.
Sasuke saw the exact moment Orochimaru figured out what Naruto was. It was the look of a puzzle piece clicking into place and Sasuke was moving before he even knew what he was going to do once he got there. He managed to get between them and a hand on Orochimaru's wrist moments before Orochimaru's hand was going to come in contact with Naruto.
Time seemed to slow as Sasuke yanked down hard on Orochimaru's wrist. Naruto overshot his mark and flew past them, Orochimaru turned his slit eyes to consider Sasuke bemusedly, and Sasuke's stomach tried to crawl out of his throat.
Bemusement morphed into glee and before Sasuke could do more than gasp, long thin fangs were headed in his direction.
Pain. Fire. Failure. No. Agony. Defeat. Weak. Worthless. No. Shackled. Marked. No. No. Owned. NEVER.
He was moving on instinct and a pure primal need to get away and working with the knowledge that he had no more charka to burn, otherwise he would have never even considered using that jutsu. Fingers flashed through signs before slamming into Orochimaru's chest, pushing and pulling simultaneously.
The first, and only, time he used this jutsu he had been calm and cautious, pulling gently at the other man's charka system and funneling it carefully into his own. This time he was neither calm nor cautious and didn't funnel so much as opened the floodgates wide.
He'd been on the wrong end of a few water jutsu's that had enough force to peel layers of skin off. This was like swallowing one of those. That offhand comment of exploding was echoing in his head.
Time slowed to snapshots of senses. The burning fire in his veins. The snap as his eyesight shifted to the too familiar starkness and then past that even, slamming through the mental doors Itachi so helpfully opened in another lifetime. The screams of the wind that echoed in his skull, shifted to the wails of the dying that haunted his sleeping hours.
He could feel the charka pushing and stretching, looking for an escape beyond what was already rolling off him in waves of black and blue clouds. He had to get rid of it before it tore him to pieces. His mind couldn't focus beyond getting it out of him. He threw his head back and screamed, forcing the foreign charka out, his hands splayed wide and held above his head.
He felt the pressure ease as the noise increased. Could taste the coppery tang of blood in his mouth. His hands and arms were on fire but he didn't stop until it was nearly all gone.
The silence was sudden enough to make him start as if he'd been hit with an electric current. His eyes were spinning and recording and sending messages to a brain that wasn't quite ready to receive them. He took a shuddering breath and added ash and ozone to the blood that still coated his tongue.
Slowly, so very slowly, his brain started to grasp at the information flooding it. The waves of charka had dispersed and the looming forms around him morphed into blackened and scarred tree trunks. Another breath brought the smell of burnt flesh to his attention and he stared in abstract fascination at his burnt and bleeding arms.
"Magnificent."
The sound had him jerking his head up. Orochimaru stood, braced against a blackened trunk, fingers buried to the knuckle in crumbling bark, just a half dozen yards from him. Rage boiled up within him like a black tar nearly choking the air from his lungs.
He wanted to kill him.
Wanted nothing more than to watch the bright red blood run down pale skin until there was nothing left inside.
A small, quiet voice in the back of his mind reminded him that he couldn't. He needed Orochimaru alive for the moment, and more pressing, he didn't have the means to kill him now.
"Simply beautiful." Orochimaru basked in the rage rolling off Sasuke, his eyes nearly glittering in the gloom of the forest. "I'll be seeing you soon, Sasuke." With that he vanished in a cloud of smoke.
Sasuke stared at where Orochimaru was for a few moments, his rage slowly ebbing away as the pain started to make itself known.
"Sasuke?" The voice was hesitant, and slightly distorted, which Sasuke realized was due to the fangs still present in Naruto's mouth.
He turned achingly slowly, still inventorying injuries, towards Naruto. He was standing behind an upraised root, Sakura clutched to his chest in his arms. Sasuke felt his breath hitch at her apparent lifelessness, but then he caught the steady rise and fall of her chest and felt something ease slightly within him.
"Sasuke?" Naruto tried again a little more forcibly. Sasuke tore his eyes away from Sakura and focused more on Naruto. His eyes were more purple than blue, but they weren't the glowing red of the demon any more. "Your eyes…"
Sasuke wanted to repeat the words back at him but swallowed the urge. He closed his eyes briefly and when he reopened them the world he looked out on had lost its sharp edges and auras.
He took another deep breath full of ash and blood before answering, "We need to move."
XXX
Two awestruck pairs of eyes stared at a screen that showed nothing more than static.
"Fuck."
XXX
There was a deep and aching pain in Sasuke's chest. Which may have been due to the fact that Sakura was wrist deep in it, a contemplative look on her face as she pulled out a wad of tangled red string.
"This is going to take me days to straighten out." She shot him a half- hearted glare over the tangled mess in her hands as she started picking it apart. Firelight played against her pale skin and her brow wrinkled slightly as she concentrated.
"Why don'tcha just cut it?" Sasuke turned his head so that he could see Karin. She was seated cross-legged with a large sword balanced across her knees, painting designs on it in bright red ink. "And then just tie the pieces back together?"
Sakura scoffed. "Because it's not Gordian's knot."
There was a chuckle that had Sasuke swinging his head the other way. Juugo was hiding behind a familiar orange book but peeked over it when he realized they were staring at him. "What?"
Sasuke could practically hear Karin's eyes rolling in her head. "Why are you reading that trash anyway?"
"It's not trash. It's literature."
Sasuke just blinked in confusion as they argued over whether or not a book that included the phrase 'her heaving womanly mounds' twenty seven times could be considered literature or not.
"Just let him be," Sakura interjected softly, causing Juugo to hide back behind his book and Karin to cringe with what looked like shame.
"What…" But Sasuke didn't even really know how to finish the question.
A particularly sharp tug had Sasuke wincing and Sakura shooting him an apologetic glance before answering his half asked question.
"He's been handed a rather crappy hand this time around, if he wants to read," there was a pause, "those books, I say what's the harm?"
"This time around?" Sasuke repeated before a scream of pain jerked his attention away. He stared around them but the scream didn't seem to have originated from anywhere he could see.
A soft sigh had Sasuke focusing on Sakura once again. She stared sadly at him and then at the tangled string still in her hand. "I guess you have to go. Oh well, back this goes." She shoved the string back in his chest and then pushed the skin back together and watched it mend.
Sasuke wanted to ask where he was going, why he was going, what the hell was with the string, and what she meant by 'this time around' but the scene was already fading around him.
He blinked and it was gone completely. Instead he was staring at the inside of a hollowed out tree, his head pillowed on a bright orange and tattered jacket. The thudding sounds of skin hitting skin and the grunts of pain echoed oddly from outside and the when, where, and whys were starting to make a little more sense in his head.
He pushed up into a sitting position, pausing briefly as pain sparked white stars behind his eyes. Eventually he made it to his feet and then to the opening in the tree where he poked his head out to figure out what the hell was going wrong now.