Notes: Written between fever-dreams and gut-puking. Dengue, it's a bitch. I also apologize for the last chapter – I was already feverish when I posted it and missed all the spelling and grammar things I normally comb over. It's training for TOEFL's, which scare the shit out of me. I hope I don't live to take them.
Warnings: Horror, not for the…faint-hearted.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Haunted Island
...because every pirate-fic needs one.
The island was really nothing more than a spit of land in the middle of the sea. A fleck of land obscured by a thick white feathery mist like icing on a mossy cake.
Cupcake, to be more accurate.
It was a tiny blob of marsh and rock that most seafarers and cartographers wouldn't bother noticing, a wayward islet that in sheer optimism hadn't yet realized it should be on its way to the bottom of the ocean.
From afar, where it was so small against the slate blue sky, a speck on the horizon, it wasn't worth the attached notoriety.
Quite in fact, Hinata could have fallen in love the moment she set eyes on it.
It was land, and it was green and it was tangible proof that the gods didn't decide to end the world by deluge again, as she had been theorizing with every day she saw nothing but water for miles around.
She never thought she'd be so glad to see soil in her life.
Hidan, however, absolutely refused to set foot on it. He'd rather starve, he claimed, something the rest of them weren't as paranoid to continue suffering. Hunger, the great motivator.
"Ill-repute doesn't even begin to fucking describe it!" The silver-haired man shouted, gesticulating hotly, reminding everyone of exactly who put the irate in pirate. "By Jashin, you unbelieving fuckheads, we should get the hell out of here! I don't care if we having to fucking swim away!"
"You don't honestly believe the legends of a haunting, do you?" Konan asked exasperatedly.
Haunting? Hinata's ears perked up.
"Or the witches?"
Witches? Her eyes widened.
"Or the demons?"
DEMONS? The island suddenly didn't seem as charming as it seemed grisly and sinister. It had been the film of desperation over her eyes.
Were they serious?
Seeing her telltale expression of disquiet wariness from the corner of his eyes, Itachi slowly inclined his head in what could pass for a nod.
(It said a lot about their unconventional anti-dalliances that he could read even her stoic game face near-perfectly now. He was starting to tell between her degrees of embarrassment, from merely shy to mortified to Kami-can-I-please-move-to-another-universe? She, on the other hand, could tell he was nodding. It was rather grossly imbalanced.)
"I'm sure that whatever apparitions you associate with this island are mere figments of your retarded imagination, Hidan." Sasori grunted impatiently. "You are thinking illogically."
Hidan rounded on him.
"Well, how do you explain those fuckers' disappearance the last time you needed to stop by here to, midget? Were four hundred pounds of vanishing asshole also my goddamn imagination? A sure swell way to sacrifice some good men there. Way fucking logical."
"That was circumstantial." The redhead said, with enough starch to make loaf of bread embarrassed. "Besides, this place is of unparalleled convenience for storing supplies."
"Circumstantial, my ass. They were drooling like rabid dogs, you remember, enchanted by the resident brujas, maybe even fucking possessed."
Possessed? Hinata took careful note of Hidan's pallor. He wasn't kidding.
"Are you afraid your god is unable to protect you, Hidan?" Kakuzu asked, innocently enough.
Hidan turned an ugly puce. Then his eyes suddenly gleamed as he regarded the masked pirate with a dangerous glee.
"You're being possessed by those damn demons, Kakuzu, trying to lure me to put Jashin-sama to the test, eh?" He brandished his scythe, making them all jump back. "I'll have your head, asshole! I'll fucking exorcise you right here!"
"Hidan will definitely not be going then." Pein sighed, as Hidan chased Kakuzu around the newly-reconstructed mast with an unholy light in his eyes. Everyone momentarily recalls the good ol' days when Hidan was still too chill to be bothered by idiocy.
"I was not about to suggest it." Sasori, who looked like a diminutive cabin boy rather than ad hoc mission leader, said. "The supplies which must be retrieved are relatively light. For this, speed would be prioritized over muscle. Although I am certain Hidan's spooks are entirely flights of fancy, I would like everything done as soon as possible."
"He creeped you out too, yeah?"
"I merely remember the foul slobbering." Sasori's mouth tightened in disgust.
"What, you forgot the gnawed out organs?"
Why?
Kami, why?
Why, of all characteristics, did Sasori need a team that was lightweight?
Oh yeah, it was because the island really was a bog and anyone as heavy as Kakuzu or Kisame would most likely punch a hole straight through it before reaching the solid rocky center.
And why did he also need a team with exceptional vision?
Another rhetorical question. Sasori had explained it clearly and succinctly: the supplies were hidden in all manner of paranoia. And no one really knows what happened to the map.
(Hinata prayed she hadn't inadvertently tossed it overboard.)
Lightweight.
Exceptional Vision.
Both this attributes pointed all fingers rather unfairly to two people to go along with Sasori, who knew the terrain best, and Deidara, who would provide all the firepower necessary to totally topple the place.
Hinata, while not inclined to believe in hauntings, being a firm follower of the saying seeing is believing, was also not too set on deliberately tramping into a place that would possibly make her reconsider that old adage.
Her survival instincts rebelled at the idea.
But it had been a very quiet rebellion. Not even a word of dissent as she got dragged into what should be retrieval and could turn out ghost hunt. Curse her meekness.
God may bless the meek, but Ye Jolly Akatsuki trampled them underfoot.
That is why she now found herself in the smaller boat with Itachi, Sasori and Deidara, riding amidst dark, churning waves towards horrorlandia, asking Kami why this was happening to her. Were her identity and survival issues in this world not enough that supernatural had to added in as well?
But maybe she was getting ahead of herself.
Yeah, right.
If nothing else – and certainly nothing else – she'd learned to watch out for preemptive strikes from the training with Akatsuki. It only required being overly sensitive and horribly pessimistic. There was no such thing as getting ahead of oneself.
Everything that could happen… will happen. The only thing she could do was anticipate how to deal with it.
So…
Did anyone bring cloves of garlic?
No – they ate those too (and consequently held zero conversation for half a day afterwards – for pirates, who were supposedly infamous for their down and dirty ways, the Akatsuki were surprisingly sensitive to hygiene, thank Kami for that).
She looked up and glanced around.
Her companions were intensely quiet as they gazed at the destination, possibly mentally going through all possible disasters that may occur, from hemorrhagic fever to native jujus to underwater volcanoes.
Such prospicience.
Three geniuses in the flesh and two in her mind. What was she, some kind of flypaper for geniuses? They all gravitated to her, without necessarily liking her in the process.
And, in stark contrast to the genius thoughts that were probably running marathons in their heads, all Hinata could think of were dancing shadows and tricks of light.
And cheap, plebeian methods for warding off bad spirits. Garlic indeed.
She could not deny that Hidan had her spooked and recalling all kinds of ghostly tales from her childhood: hunched crones and disembodied bloodsuckers, demonic babies and giant hairy tobacco-smoking men in trees, bony wraiths and snakemen necromancers, fathers in tutus and uncles in drag…
(Wait, no, the last two were nightmares.)
Her teeth chattered in remembrance, breaking up the solemn quiet of the boat.
"You know, someone doesn't fit in here…" Deidara commented offhandedly, staring daggers all the while at Itachi, who was acting very well like the blond didn't exist.
Hinata pointed questioningly to himself, feeling quite left out on the mental front.
"Not you, Hinata, you balance out very nicely," The blond reassured. "Someone else is a black splotch on the beautiful artistic canvas, yeah?"
"Why don't you be more direct?" Itachi asked, with a harmless smile so cold the surrounding water should have, by all accounts, iced up.
But, ah, this was unusual. He was, for once, not acting as though Deidara's dig sailed merrily right past him.
Was it actually getting under his skin? No, this Hinata was sure of, it just wasn't possible to get Itachi to acknowledge a barb.
Was Itachi also so disconcerted that he too needed to fill in the large, gaping spooky air with conversation?
The thought made her want to bask in the moment. It was so rare that Itachi acted more human than devilish automaton. A fact which Deidara was also acquainted with. The sudden twist in otherwise normal proceedings shoved him into a situation with no ready comeback.
His mouth flapped open a few times before Hinata, without a scrap of decorum, put in some unsolicited input.
"I-It's the hair."
"Hair?" Itachi said in an obnoxiously self-satisfied manner, though his eyes remained flat like he couldn't bother investing more interest than what he was already showing. "How juvenile. We're not thirteen anymore."
"It's not the hair, un. Don't be a retard." The blond snapped waspishly at Hinata. "It's just that Itachi never fits in. He ruins the harmony of everything, yeah?"
Well, that was rather unflinchingly honest.
"T-that wasn't necessary," she rebuked weakly.
"However, it is generally regarded as true. I am used to it." Itachi feigned indifference – well, actually, it wasn't feigned.
"So you should be, yeah? Freaking alien."
"W-what is it with your p-preoccupation with estranging I-Itachi?" Hinata asked, frowning. "W-we are a team, not h-him and us."
"Fine, fine," The blond acquiesced. "There is no him." Here, he put a hand to Hinata's chin, pulled her close and smirked. "Us, however, can be taken into consideration, yeah? How about it, Hinata-chan? You, me, fireworks?"
Cue in crimson blush even when all she wanted to do was face-palm. Deidara – the little slut – was fond of little jests like this, blissfully ignorant that she was, in fact, happily engaged.
Okay, happily was strangling the truth a little. But still.
"And what a frightful sight that is," Itachi said, looking towards the island. The absolute snark in his voice, however, gave no doubt to what – or rather, whom – the comment was directed. He and Deidara stared balefully at each other.
Somewhere above and between them, lightning crackled.
"Children…" Sasori muttered.
The beach where they landed was all wet, dirty sand covered with slimy, dead seaweed and jellyfish remains, and rotting oysters that indicated a shellfish pandemic of sorts.
"Ladies first."
The sentiment wasn't as gentlemanly when it was singularly for using her as a trial run, in case they've stumbled onto a spot of quicksand or something.
"U-uh, n-noblesse oblige?" Hinata gingerly stated. She might as well have been talking to three statues for the reaction she got for that statement.
Doing a perfunctory scan of the surrounding area, Hinata carefully disembarked and waded to shore. Her foot sank into the moist sand, which had all the consistency of mousse, with a squelching sploosh.
"I-It seems okay," she said through the mist, voice weaving in with the soft sounds of the surf.
The three males joined her ashore, heaving the boat behind them where it threatened to carve out a new river delta along its trail.
"We'll split up from here."
"S-split up? I-is that prudent?"
"Into pairs, standard procedure."
You HAVE standard procedures?
"Deidara… with Hinata," Sasori picked, so each pair would have the necessary eyes and muscle and lack of unnecessary animosity. "I will endure Itachi myself. You all know what to watch out for?"
Incidentally, no.
"Ah, w-will you please refresh me on it?"
That meeting – ever since the words off lookout duty hit her ears, Hinata had been oblivious to everything else for a short while. Of course, during her state of blissfulness, all the important mission details sailed right past her.
Their expressions might not have expressly said "ignorant skank" but they were clearly towards that direction.
Hinata gave her best effort to look contrite.
"Tch, just follow me, yeah?" Deidara scolded. "Better make fast, as danna said."
"We will start from the opposite end," said Sasori.
Without further ado, they split up.
The Itachi-Sasori team trudged stealthily along the beach, presumably towards the other side of the island, until they disappeared into the fog. Hinata and Deidara, meanwhile, crept of to the edge of the gnarled forest and marshy vegetation that looked just as dead as the beach and plunged straight in.
The boat creaked where it floated, as if reminding them that they still had a lifeline even they skedaddled fast enough.
"I'm worried," Pein admitted as he stared out over the jagged horizon. "Perhaps the supplies were not worth it."
An hour into the swamp, Hinata wondered if Hidan wasn't greatly gladdened by the fact that he had a convenient excuse for not going on the mission.
Crates. They were supposed to be looking for rotted wooden boxes containing a mélange of things, the least important of which were hardtack and dried meat – only nutrition after all. It shouldn't have been difficult to find – the malodorous scent of desiccated animal alone should have provided a trail of black flies – fat and having the buffet of their lives – to follow.
Yes, the stench was there – dank and bitter and unbearably musty. And the insects had to be present somewhere, she could feel the pinpricks on skin and the steadily worsening itch that would, perhaps, be somewhat alleviated by drowning herself in calamine.
But Hinata could see nothing but a chiaroscuro of pale, artificial-looking, green-tinged sunlight and cool mist and slimy mossy things that dripped into their hair as they went deeper. Like the island was salivating on them, tasting them and commencing the initial digestion process.
There was nothing resembling crates – only the slimy chocolatey mud of the marsh and their own ankle-deep footprints. The ground had been soft when they first entered and, being particularly charitable, had just gone boggier and boggier since. Hinata and Deidara had chucked their sandals long ago when the blasted things refused to be unglued from the watery black muck.
(If they ever came across powdered glass, their feet were done for.)
"Disgusting, un." She heard the blond mutter from behind her as he kicked at the sludgy ground, splattering bits everywhere. "Useless stuff – not even clay – just decaying matter without any form of usefulness…"
Hinata resisted the urge to wonder exactly what sort of decaying matter she was plodding her way through and dearly prayed it wasn't of her own species. Instead, she carefully alerted the blond's attention to a gnarled mangrove with an X mark carved on the trunk – one of Sasori's landmarks. The angry face sketched below it [8-(], she decided to ignore.
They slithered closer, narrowly avoiding tripping headfirst into a small murky saltwater – like someone had a pissing contest in it – puddle colonized by massive fungal species of the noxious variety.
A thousand eyes followed their small but highly embarrassing movement, unbeknownst to them.
The X led to nowhere.
If nowhere were the remains of a stream, water to mid-calf meandering ever so slowly, ever so languorously that it may as well have held still for water striders to use as a dance floor. Above them, gnarled mangrove tress and dead gray bushes created an arboreal arc that fractured whatever stubborn sunlight bulldozed its way through the mist.
In the distance, they could hear crickets chirping to the beat of bongo drums and rustling leaves.
They were now walking slowly in great lurching strides, praying not to lose their balance.
"Are they sure we're in the correct ocean? Seems like this place hasn't been disturbed in years, yeah?"
"N-no, I think s-someone had been here. T-there's a t-trail cut here." But maybe that was just wishful thinking.
"Heck, we could be following danna's trail for all we know." Deidara grumbled hopelessly, having reached the limit of his patience, not that he actually had to reach – it wasn't that long.
"W-what happened last time?" asked Hinata, architect of her own misfortune.
"You want to hear about that now, un?" Deidara regarded her unflatteringly, like she'd lost the few brain cells she had left.
Hinata, swallowing all manner of sense, nodded stubbornly.
"It was a dark and stormy night, un," Deidara began honestly, realizing he might need this kind of masochistic therapy too. "Everyone was complaining about Tobi's fucked-up cooking again – rightfully so, since his meatballs made sunk more ships than danna's latest stuff at the time. Zetsu – you've never met him – was 'specially sick, yeah? He kept groaning on about how he'd rather eat human flesh."
The hairs on Hinata's neck stood straight up like the finest troops in the Navy when the commander comes around.
(Witch, mental Neji chanted, eyes comically wide and freaky.)
"Anyway, we docked here, lots of strays that night jumped ship like the devil was chasing them. Of course, that had been either Hidan or Konan – in the rage of those who don't age gracefully, un – trying to maim each other in the dark. Turns out the devil was on this island, because none of them came back. Next day we found them as danna said: damn disgusting."
Deeper in, the ground started getting a semblance of being solid. By this time, however, Hinata's skin was crawling so much she thought she could see it traipse past her.
Deidara, while prone to going off on tangents nobody cared to hear about, had been a vivid storyteller. An unnerving silence followed his tale.
It wasn't supposed to be this silent.
Suddenly, in the corner of Hinata's eyes, something moved.
"What was that?" She asked in a voice that would shatter the eardrums of dogs, sticking so close to Deidara that they might never come undone again.
"You shouldn't have asked, retard," Deidara hissed, looking a bit wild-eyed himself, making no effort to shove her away. He looked around, slapping Hinata with his matted hair, then cursed colorfully.
"A-are we lost?"
Hinata had dreaded this probability, dreaded it like her first public "date" with Uchiha Sasuke eons ago, when the very sky seemed to catch fire from all the fangirl rage.
"The damn place can't be more than two miles across, un. How the hell can we get lost?" Deidara whisper-yelled. This was really his way of saying 'yes, we're completely lost'.
And there was something out there. Something she couldn't see but could feel, something she wanted desperately to see and not see at the same time. It was watching them. It was stalking them.
It was chasing them. Oh god.
Her guts, quite aside from complaining they were hungry, were telling her to run.
Deidara felt it too, the way his arms suddenly rippled in goosebumps.
"Hinata?"
"Y-yeah?"
"Who, out of the two of us, do you reckon is tastier?"
"So you get that feeling too?"
They jumped faster from squelchy hummock to ever-more-mushy hummock, no longer at odds in terms of ideals but a solid team in the face of pure terror.
Flying across a sunlit-clearing, Hinata finally saw It in stark clarity – their pursuer was wearing some sort of headgear of the horticultural variety. No wonder she couldn't spot him earlier, he blended very well with the surrounding gothic foliage.
"Aw shit, un! It's ZETSU! Run, un!" Deidara's voice had a quality to it that reminded Hinata of the travelling circuses she had visited very young, stab-quick and heart-stopping, it made her want to cry.
Instead, she pragmatically ran faster, keeping pace with the blond.
Up, up they went, up a tree and finding it could not support their collective weights, splashing into a scummy pond of rotten frogspawn, crashing into rotting logs, stumbling face-first into squelchy sticky mush, leaping over great big toadstools…
"He was supposed to be dead, yeah?" Deidara huffed, hair whipping behind him.
"Y-you were sure h-he was dead?"
"The body was lifeless on the ground, yeah?" Deidara swallowed, as if not yet ready to acknowledge the next thing he was about to say. "And the head… was hanging from a tree."
Suddenly, clammy hands grasping at her skin. Hinata let out a bloodcurling scream.
Then, the swamp exploded.
Deidara had probably turned cupcake-island into a doughnut in the admirable effort to lose the bludgeoning, pursuer. Hinata was so happy she didn't even care that she will probably never be free of slime the rest of her life.
Adding to her happiness was the sight of Itachi and Sasori walking straight ahead. She actually felt like waving out to them like a loony war bride.
Deidara did it first. "Danna! Itachi!"
The two ignored them, very rudely, and continued to walk to a small crevasse saturated with smelly, stagnant and slowly-swirling water.
Surely that wasn't where the supplies were hidden?
"Danna, where the hell are you leading us?" Deidara called out angrily, clearly frustrated, his voice echoing eerily through the ravine.
The duo simply continued walking. Still feeling the remnants of their fleeting camaraderie, Deidara and Hinata shrugged at each other and followed.
Someplace in the back of Hinata's mind, a grand old piano began to play the type of haunting music that should never be heard outside a classical concerto. It replaced the carnival theme.
It wasn't long before Deidara and Hinata, twin souls in misery, realized that that they should have hightailed it.
Itachi and Sasori weren't leaving footprints in the soft mush. Upon close inspection, their faces were blurred, like and worse, smiling. The figures they were following cast no shadow.
Like a wave of horror it hit them: They were seeing doppelgangers.
Completely knackered, Hinata could think of nothing but what the hell?
She took three steps backward, in cold sweat, feet sinking into the mush.
The mirage turned to them and, as if sensing its trickery uncovered, streamed a myriad of locusts, wasps and worms from its abyssal grinning mouth.
Deidara turned doughnut island into a crescent.
One minute, they were both standing on solid ground. The next, they were hanging by a fallen tree over rushing water, watching a portion of the island float away. It was too ridiculous to process.
The branch started creaking precariously.
"Don't let go, okay?" Hinata huffed in exertion, hands already slick and slippery with all sort of disgusting things.
"The hell? You're the one holding me up, retard!" Deidara snapped, swinging angrily, exacerbating his own situation with all the will of a suicidal. "Don't even think of letting me go, yeah? If I go down, we're both going down."
Despite the thought that this might be the most needless thing she ever did in a history of stupid needless things, Hinata still found the energy to frown at his lack of gratitude. Such is the pettiness of heiresses.
The branch broke.
Deidara had the shrillest scream Hinata heard in her whole life and, considering how often she'd been in the company of Uchiha Sasuke, whose own shriek his followers cannot hope to live up to, this was saying something.
The ground was soft where they crash-landed, leaving two human-shaped imprints in the mossy mud.
Hinata, looking up at the ever-dark sky, seriously considered that possibility of being cursed.
In confirmation, the sky flashed with jagged lightning and thunder boomed and a heavy rain began to fall, turning soft earth into rivulets of mud.
"If only…" They could ask for some divine intervention at this point, despite their many sins.
"Don't – that's one phrase you can't ever say in situations like these, yeah?"
Somewhere near, a scream reverberated.
Like men (badly) possessed, Deidara and Hinata wiggled out of all the splintered wood and looked around in blind panic.
No matter what angle you look at it, the entire experience had been a show of horror like no other except for the stormy night Tobi sleepwalked like an axe-murderer on the loose.
Without warning, the ground opened up beneath their feet and began sinking them in sweet peristalsis, churning queasily, bubbling noxiously.
Quicksand! Deidara's baby-blues, made more vivid by indescribable fright, widened in neverending terror.
Hinata frantically looked for something to hold on to, ears filled with a strange buzzing.
Buzzing.
The quicksand pit was – some sort of insect nest.
Insect.
Nest.
Hinata had not been of those women who ran screaming at the sight of creepy-crawlies but this – along with those horrible simulacrums of the other pair earlier – was all her demented nightmares incarnated.
She did not want to die by digestion. She did not want to die. After all, she had only just begun to harbor hope of a peaceful – or at least non-apocalyptic – resolution to her days with the Akatsuki, had only just begun to regard the hellride as a fruitful learning experience, had only just begun to – and she will never admit this – enjoy it on the peripheral.
They were heartless, heartless bastards who could, for any of thousands of shallow reasons, skewer her bodily over a rotating spit (as they would anyone else including themselves), but made the otherwise difficult life at sea tolerable.
Hinata really didn't want to die.
Crack. Crack. Crack. The soft sounds of something slowly breaking stirred Hinata out of her state of unconsciousness.
They were hanging upside down by their ankles.
(Again, she was wearing cut-off trousers, possibly Konan's or Sasori's or even Deidara's or Itachi's. Anything that didn't reek had been pretty much free for all. Anyway, she shouldn't even be thinking about laundry at a time like this.)
She looked around while all the blood rushed to her head, rendering her more than a little blind and woozy. It was some sort of underground cave. Two lumpy glowing spheres at either side of the chamber provided a flickering, sinister illumination. The sound of dripping water echoed across the empty space.
It was dank and deep and moss was growing thick like Elizabethan carpeting on the walls. They'd apparently landed somewhere in wintertime. The air was almost as cold as the depths of humiliation she was regularly subjected to.
The cave reeked like high heaven of rotting corpses.
Beneath them, barely reaching the tips of her hanging hair, a cocoon pulsed like a slowly-beating heart. Whatever it was, Hinata tried not to imagine claws.
She tentatively turned to her companion, taking deep shuddering breaths. Her ability to take terrible shock in stride had much improved.
"Dei–" Looking very anemic, Deidara still hadn't come to.
Kami, please let him be okay.
"D-deidara –"
Deidara snapped one eye open, looking as though he'd just been praying. This analogy is, obviously, impossible and, hence, stupid. He grinned lazily at her, ridiculously happy about something she couldn't fathom.
"Hinata, we're in deep shit, yeah?"
Hinata came this close to wetting herself (and, considering her current position, that would have been very bad) at the sight of the newcomers suddenly dropping in, literally.
By some unexplainable, unfathomable miracle, Sasori and Itachi had also been captured by whichever otherworldly creature or sicko that terrorized the island (and Hidan's itty-bitty black heart, by extension) – and there went all their hopes of ever getting out of here.
Itachi and Sasori were barefoot as well, with their trousers rolled up to their knees and just as muddy – no, ever muddier – than Deidara and Hinata. If their manner weren't so distinctively them, Hinata and Deidara would have assumed they were the things from the swamp, given new form and mobility.
"What happened, un?" demanded Deidara, unjustly indignant.
Sasori scratched the back of his head, looking embarrassed. "We… panicked."
Somehow, incredulous was inadequate to describe Hinata's expression. Sasori? ITACHI?
Sasori and Itachi, despite their relative youth which she shouldn't even consider in the first place, were abominably relentless whenever delegated to the role of prey. They never paused, they never made incompetent mistakes like bombing themselves out of commission, and they counter-attacked whenever possible. Hinata, on principle, did not openly respect pirates but the fact the duo were as trapped as they were – minus the hanging – impelled her to think incoherently about impending apocalypse.
Deidara made a strangled, snorting, choking sort of noise, as though he couldn't believe that happened but, with all the shit going on, by now anything was possible. "What did you do, yeah? Jump head-first into a bog?"
Sasori made a face that plainly indicated that, yes, that is exactly what happened.
"That… sounds about right." Itachi confirmed verbally, suavely fixing his hair amidst crisis.
"Even I am at a loss," admitted Sasori, crashing down exhausted. He couldn't seem to care less that two members of his team were hanging by their ankles and in need of immediate help. To distract himself from admitting that, for once, he really was to blame for all the disasters in the world, he glanced around. "A cave – it brings back memories."
Deidara paused in looking murderous and spared a shamelessly gleeful smirk. "Fun times, yeah?"
"Perhaps," Itachi's mouth was turning up at the corners. Hinata wondered if it was her imagination running wild and creating all sorts of imbalances in the world – which is more likely – or did she really see Itachi preen. Her three companions looked absurdly young in that one moment.
Imminent death notwithstanding, she felt happy that a little unity was finally breaking through. "Y-you do like each o-other!"
Utter silence.
"I do hope your optimism is not catching." Itachi sighed tiredly, putting a hand to his muddy face. Coming from him, who was both master and miser of non-verbalisms, this was quite an extreme gesture.
Team Art nodded vigorously in agreement.
Someone started humming the funeral march.
"Stop that, un."
The man in the black hood descended the hidden stairs quietly, without the pomp or pretension of most overloards. The pirates (and Hinata) had to marvel at his classy entrance, wrecked only by the obscene creaking of whatever he was dragging around. The man was tall, but not imposingly so, and moved with the meticulous efficiency of well-paid secretaries or executioners.
"Let us go, you stupid fuck!" Deidara yelled immediately.
"That is a rude assumption," The man replied calmly, dropping his load. Training both eyes on it, overwhelmed by her own curiousity, Hinata saw that it was Zetsu or what-had-been-Zetsu-but-is-now-an-empty-carcass and promptly gagged on her tongue. "I am neither stupid nor a fuck. I am an entomologist merely trying to study in peace and isolation. It is fortunate I managed to control the insects before they finished digesting you – after that convenient tragedy a long while ago, I have been developing a method to quell their bloodthirst. You should thank me. It is entirely your fault, of, course, for very brashly interrupting in their mating season."
"The hell we're thanking you," Deidara growled, swinging angrily. "What the hell is wrong with you, letting out those creepers? You think you own this island, punk?"
"As a matter of fact, I think this island is legally under the name of the Aburame clan. I have every right to terrorize you here. Now you know what fear tastes like. Perhaps that will discourage you from trespassing too often."
Taste? Hinata wanted to scream. She had chewed, gnawed and had "fear" stuffed down her throat.
Itachi murmured something in a voice so venomous that everything in his immediate vicinity should have spontaneously disintegrated.
"You're not in any position to interrogate me," The man smirked, showing just how laughable he found the situation. "You are entirely too sick and exhausted to fight. My mosquito colonies boast some of the most debilitating diseases existing today. I beg you not to irritate me. I wouldn't want to leave you hanging." He tapped a heel against the bug-infested corpse. "This one… irritated me. He had been acting very much like a dog. By the time I regained my sense of charity, well, it had simply been too late."
Hinata tilted her head in fascination. For some inane reason, while her three comrades suddenly tensed up at the admittedly cold-blooded tale that was unfurling, she was not scared at all now.
There is a phenomenon, in which two people who have never known each other, or have nothing in common, find an affinity with each other that is so attuned, an instant camaraderie, at there is an almost audible click when they realize it.
Click.
"Y-you wouldn't h-hurt us," Hinata said suddenly, because this is Hinata and she wouldn't know the meaning of the word restraint if her life depended on it…and only when it did. It was only in near-death situations that her bravery took root and exploded up into the sky.
"You wouldn't hurt us," She repeated, just to make it clear.
The man regarded her as a specimen surprisingly worthy of study, as though she had suddenly developed a fascinating mutation like horns or a curly tail or an actual spine. "I can easily do so. Bees. Wasps. Worms under your skin, chewing at all manners of organs."
"N-no, you would not," Hinata met his gaze unflinchingly, surprised at herself. "Y-you are going to let us g-go, completely h-healthy. It's an offer you c-can't refuse."
The three of them tried to not act completely cowed. Hinata's newly-discovered mercenary attitude was an unprecedented surprise. The heiress was either batshit insane from all the mud or this was the simply the natural order of things under the banner of legal society: Hyuuga dominating Aburame completely and utterly.
"What she probably means is, you let us go, she stays –" Sasori misinterpreted, glancing at the thing-formerly-known-as-Zetsu with disquieting fascination. "Hinata is dead useful, you know, or useful dead, whichever the case."
Shino waved him away facetiously. "I am not interested in you three, anyway – you are already dead to me."
Already dead to me. On the island, where the boundaries between reality and non-reality swayed like bureaucratic loyalties, the words rang with an undeniable truth.
"He really was very nice, you know, to let us go," Hinata insisted, as they trooped out of the cave, holding hands – Hold hands. That is an order. You may cut off any fingers you wish later. – to avoid getting lost in the darkness. Hinata, for all her latent and suspiciously nonexistent charm, had not been able to convince Shino to send his insects on a kamikaze mission to help them out of there.
(Bats, you know. He had explained, almost apologetically that Hinata mistook her stuttering for offense and started fervently apologizing herself.)
"Nice?" Deidara snorted disbelievingly. "Oh, sure he's nice. Gush all you want about the guy who near had us for pet food, yeah? Retard."
"Oh – s-sorry," Hinata quickly composed herself. "But I liked Shino. He was very nice. I knew he wouldn't have hurt a fly."
"He's an entomologist, of course, he wouldn't hurt a fly. I can't say the same for us."
"H-he wouldn't have, I-I'm sure."
"It didn't seems that way to me. He just ran out of space for us, is all – I wonder how many corpses he's already got stashed, about fifty from the smells alone…"
"I t-told you that odor of rotting flesh was from a specially bred plant for his insects." In truth, Shino had been smiling with exceeding creepiness as he said this, like the way Tobi did under his mask.
"Details, details," Deidara waved them away.
Sasori paused at the entrance to another freezing, slightly underwater cavern. Not a minute too soon as well, as he was mere inches away from those deep holes which presumably lead to the center of the earth.
"Ah, yes, I remember now. I know exactly where our supplies are."
"Sheesh, danna."
Sticky porous rocks provided enough suction for them to scamper up like walls like crippled iguanas. It was possibly a good thing the island was sinking – although it implied a bad investment for the Aburames – they didn't have very far to climb.
Minus the strong possibility of losing grip as she wormed her way through all the little tubelike openings in the rock and breaking her head on a stalagmite – Hinata thought the entire spelunking experience quite astounding. It was absurd how much she had missed by being a lady.
The recklessness. The adventure. The freedom.
It didn't mean, of course, that she wouldn't give civilization up for anything given a choice, but it was marvellous every once in a while to do crazy things like this. This was a once-in-a-lifetime and thank goodness for that. Hinata was not partial to ever traipse over an army of bones – if it hadn't been so cold their breaths came out in fogs, Sasori would have insisted on plundering those bones back to the ship as well – and bat guano ever again.
As they progressed, the cave floor became ever the more steeper – in fact, the incline became so sharp it rivaled Itachi's left profile. The rock became less porous, more slippery – in fact, as slippery as Hyuuga nobles caught in scandalous affairs with either pretty young things or public funds. Stakes began flying out of walls at regular intervals. The machinations were oddly familiar – in fact, they had Sasori written all over them – and that was how she knew they were fairly close.
Hinata didn't dare so much as to breathe out of place, afraid of triggering anything.
Apparently, Shino monopolized all the running water on the island – letting everything else stink up – and stuffed all of it down in the underground river. The current was strong and fierce and if only they had seen that last trap coming, they would have enjoyed watching it flow by rather than getting caught up in its freezing vortex.
Nobody was pointing fingers but it was all Hinata's fault for having the reflexes of a grazing cow. One wrong move and the rest had gone as nature (and Sasori) intended.
Death by drowning was a terrible – though strangely beautiful and oddly poetic – way to go, and the waters were all for imposing their authority over their weak and tired mortal bodies. The ebb of the whitewater was continuous punctured with the bubbles of her screams.
I'm sorry, Hinata wanted to say, clearly seeing mental-Neji's worry-stricken face pooling above her. It was I who told everyone how cute you looked wearing a ballgown and I authorized the public use of the Hakke and it was me who accidentally left your books not in alphabetical order …
As the list of regrets went on, Hinata realized mental-Neji was looking less worried and more bored. She stopped, feeling strangely at peace.
Take care of yourself, Neji, you are more an asset to the Hyuuga than I could ever be. And, please, for everyone's sanity, do watch Hanabi carefully –
Mid-vision, Sasuke's face replaced her cousin's – for some unknowable reason, as profound things never passed in the space between her and her fiancé – and Hinata was queerly relieved.
His eyes, so dark and impossibly sexy in that lovely, distorted face, were saying: I won't let you drown.
Flying out in a flurry of waterfall, Hinata hanged long enough in mid-air to catch a quick glimpse of the island's great vista. Ghosts and stench aside, it was a humbling sight.
Then, one by one, the four of them hit the water with a painful, resounding crash. To be more accurate, it was really only Hinata. The others had lived near bodies of water for too long and had had to suddenly jump ship enough times to dive in quite smoothly.
Floundering in the saltwater, for they were in the calmer ocean now and therefore at risk with sharks, rays and saltwater crocodiles, Hinata struggled to remember what it took to float.
Beside her, Sasori popped up, along with Deidara and several of the crates they had successfully retrieved. Their meat and hardtack would undoubtedly be salty and ruined, but there was no doubt the Jolly Akatsuki would ravage the kitchens for them anyway.
(Earlier, and this is no lie, as Hinata crashed headfirst into the wood while being chased by Zetsu, she had wondered at the nutty taste and if something could be done to improve the texture.)
Itachi, however, wasn't coming up.
"No!" Hinata cried, splashing aimlessly and without particular direction. He had saved her from drowning, after all, and Hinata always returned favors ten-fold whenever possible. "I-itachi!"
"He was a good pirate," Deidara bowed his head. "I will give you tribute." His eyes glowed suddenly. "Let's blow up the island, yeah!"
"Much as I'd hate to disabuse you of that pleasure," A voice fresh from the water commented, er, dryly. "But I'm very much alive."
"Damn, I'd take off everything but…" Deidara cocked his head to Hinata, who was steadily going into a yet undiscovered shade of red from all the shirtless pirates in immediate vicinity. Unlike them, she didn't have the luxury and lack of shame needed to shed all the clothes that smelled like swamp muck.
It didn't help that she was perched on Itachi, riding piggyback on all that smooth, slick skin, cool like satin, lots of sharp planes... Itachi was wearing his chain necklace. She wanted to bite at it, seriously.
Watch it, Hyuuga Hinata, your inner slut is emerging.
Hinata, fortunately, had more than her fair share of survival instinct and self-restraint, and unnaturally kept away from the siren call which would have defeated any other woman in her position. She squirmed uncomfortably.
"Are you just pretending to get an easy ride?"
"O-of course not! B-but p-please put me down! I can w-walk!"
"I doubt that," Sasori said from upfront, carrying more crates than he looked like he could carry. "Just carry on with the look out – one spider, one tiny fly, one ant – say so. I do not believe that man is above ambushing us."
"You're alive," Hidan said breathlessly, shirtless out of shamelessness rather than necessity, staring at them in disbelief. "Oh my god."
End.
Next Chapter: Man-made uprisings and natural disasters. And, finally, a glimpse into the past.
Random quote: "You can wear my heart. It's made in your size."
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