I'm waiting in my cold cell when the bell begins to chime
Reflecting on my past life and it doesn't have much time
'Cause at 5 o'clock they take me to the gallows pole
The sands of time for me are running low
-'Hallowed Be Thy Name' by Iron Maiden
Sasuke disliked Sai the minute he met him.
The other boy's expression was an eerily complacent smile, his eyes blank, perfect mouth shaping perfect, meaningless words. And it wasn't even as if there was anyone important there to impress with his textbook shinobi expression; they were sitting at a corner bar, Kakashi at the end of the counter engrossed in his book.
Sakura stepped forward and took the offered hand, watery smile on her lips as she said, trying and failing to hide resentment,
"It's nice to meet you."
"And you, too," Sai said, eyes flickering up as he continued, blandly friendly, "You have a very large forehead."
Sakura stared.
"Uchiha." He glanced back at Sai, hating him, hating everything about him, hating the very fact that he existed, was necessary.
"What?"
"You have a small penis." Sasuke couldn't even muster the energy to be surprised. Kakashi's lone eye peered over the top of his book, askance.
"Fine," he said, turning around and staring down at his soup. 'If he's trying to ingratiate himself, he's failing miserably-' He spun back around as he caught the tail end of another sentence, feeling his eyes bleed red, the Sharingan whirling.
"What did you say?" he bit out, teeth grinding against each other with every syllable. Sakura's face was pale with fury, her fingers clenched into fists, vibrating with the urge to take a swing. Sai tilted his head, ran his fingers along the top of his sketchbook.
"I said that the Uzumaki traitor-"
Sasuke leaped from the stool, let it crash to the ground behind him, found himself with his hands wrapped around Sai's neck, holding him up off the ground, slamming him back into the wall of the bar.
"Don'tever call him a traitor. You're not worthy to speak his name, you piece of filth," he hissed, fingers tightening. Sai merely met his eyes, unafraid, unconcerned. He growled, infuriated-
Some small part of him remembered Naruto's growl, the red chakra cascading over his skin, eyes red like the heart of a flame, the blinding, shocking pain of a kunai sinking into his side, held by the boy he had called 'friend'.
That didn't matter.
What mattered was the promise he had made, the promise to bring him home.
"Sasuke," Sakura said, laying a hand on his shoulder. Her hand hummed with chakra, a blade in its own right, another one of the many techniques Tsunade had been teaching her. "Leave him be."
His fingers unclenched, one by one, and he stepped back, the Sharingan fading from his eyes. Sai hit the ground, caught himself, and brushed his pants off, the damnable smile still planted on his lips.
"Well! I can see that we will all get along just fine," he chirped, smiling.
Sasuke stared at him, looked around at Kakashi, hiding from the world in his book, at Sakura, her green eyes cold like chips of jade, at the sick, horrible, hysterical parody of Team Seven, and wanted to vomit.
Gaara took a step forward, gritting his teeth against the pain as his newly healed muscle protested, and another, finally exiting the damp, cockroach-infested room and standing, blinking, in the sunlight.
Naruto, Katashi, Yugito, and the child were waiting for him in the courtyard. He nodded to them in greeting, before frowning. 'Odd.' His brow furrowed as he turned, folding his arms, staring across the yard to the dark windows on the other side.
He had grown used to the constant flow of information given to him by Shukaku: soil composition, types of minerals, depths of subterranean aquifers. But this- this sudden new ability, this bone-deep knowing of glass, of its consistency, its composition, its distance and brittleness- was new.
He clenched his fingers into a fist, testing, and watched as cracks spiderwebbed across the panes like ice breaking up in winter, the pieces of glass trembling as gravity forced them down. His fingers uncurled, and the pieces sagged in their frames, broken, waiting to be called upon, waiting to be used as weapons.
His lips twitched in a mirthless smile. Broken weapons, sharp and dangerous, cutting open the flesh of those who wielded them: it would be hard to find a better metaphor for the jinchuuriki.
"Hey, Gaara!" Naruto called, shifting Moriko in his arms. "Let's get going!"
Gaara limped out to join them, watching Katashi finish shoving his onigiri down his throat. 'How disgusting.' He turned to Naruto, shifting his weight onto his good leg.
"Where are we going, Naruto?"
"There seems to be something going on in the town square," Yugito answered, staring pensively at the sky, pale eyes reflecting the white-blue luminescence of dawn. "I heard the sounds of construction last night; I would like to know what they're building."
"Yeah, and maybe we'll find the jinchuuriki!" Naruto said, bouncing up and down, having lost none of his boundless energy.
Katashi made a muffled noise of agreement, swallowing as he bounded towards the gate, waving them on impatiently.
"You're going to get sick," Gaara observed as the five jinchuuriki left the inn courtyard. Katashi opened his mouth to snap a retort but paused instead, his mouth open in amazement. Gaara turned to look at what had the younger boy so enthralled, and paused, brow furrowing as he understood what he was seeing. Even Yugito looked vaguely interested in the goings-on.
Huge crowds, full of people in festival garb, bright yukatas and kimonos catching the growing sunlight and reflecting it back in jeweled tones, hurried through the streets, young children atop their parents' shoulders. Bento boxes clacked and clattered against each other in their bags, the air full of the cacophony of people talking, laughing, shouting to each other, and two words, two small, solitary words, permeated the air.
"Jinchuuriki," they said, and "execution".
It had the air of a festival.
"Look," Katashi said, in a voice of hushed awe, pointing down at the town square, at the space between buildings where the inhabitants of Kerumigakure were gathering, pulled as if by a siren's song. Gaara looked, and wished he hadn't.
A black shape stood out against the soft morning light, harsh and cruel in its geometric precision, in the beam of oak and the bundles of oil-soaked wood piled around its base, steaming softly as the sunlight caught them. The oak was old, charred, and Gaara felt sick as he realized the number of executions that had been performed on that stake.
This, then, was why the village was said to be hidden in smoke.
"Is that-" Naruto began, voice fading as he lost the will to speak.
"Yeah," Katashi confirmed blithely, "it's a pyre. We had public executions in Kiri all the time; you don't have those in Konoha?"
Naruto's silence was his answer. Gaara glanced at him, at the slowly fading light in his eyes, and mourned the passing of Naruto's faith in humanity, in his optimism that was being chipped away with every injustice they encountered, every jinchuuriki's situation.
But perhaps, he thought, as the five jinchuuriki moved into the crowd and were swept along in the onrushing tide, perhaps it was not the fact that his faith in humankind was going that was the heartrending thing.
It was the fact that it was going in such little ways.
They were washed out into the brightness of the square. Yugito glanced about at the crowds crushing in on them from all sides and snorted in disgust, jerking a thumb at the rooftops.
"Up there." She leaped onto the top of a unagi shop, and Katashi followed. Gaara gritted his teeth as his leg buckled, a breath of pain hissing out from between his lips as he dissolved into sand and reappeared on top of the shop, collapsing into a rickety chair that Katashi helpfully pushed out for him.
Naruto stumbled and nearly fell as he came over the edge, plopping down with a sigh. "It is way too early to be up," he grumbled, sprawling in his chair and staring out over the bright crowds. Katashi mumbled agreement, leaning out over the edge of the roof, gazing about in fascination.
"Oh," he blurted, pointing, "there's the death cart going to pick up the victim!" Gaara formed a Sand Eye and manipulated it to peer over the rooftop, interested despite himself. The gray cart creaked through the crowds, drawn by an old spotted mare, her thin head hung low as she clopped on, expecting nothing.
"Should we follow?" Naruto asked, joining Katashi on the side and watching the cart retreat into the shadows of an alley.
"Yes," Katashi said firmly, folding his arms across his chest. "And I'm going, this time." Gaara glanced at Yugito, who was gazing at Katashi with consideration.
"That's fair. I'll go with you. Naruto, Gaara, you watch the crowd for any signs of an assassination attempt." Her lip twitched in revulsion at the seething mass of people below. "I wouldn't put it past these maggots."
"Right!" Naruto saluted, grinning, his irrepressible happiness bubbling up from inside like it always did.
"Good. Katashi, ready?" The Isonade jinchuuriki nodded, and the two leaped over the edge of the rooftop, landing on cat's feet and stealing silently away into the shadows, following the cart.
Yugito watched Katashi move with startling quickness, impressed by his stealth. 'It must have been necessary, back in Kiri.' The two chased the cart, dodging the last few stragglers who were filtering into the square, down narrow streets, the old man driving the cart hunched over, whip dangling impotently from his hand as the mare plodded down the same old paths she had trod thousands of times before.
"You've… seen people being burned at the stake before?" she asked as the cart turned a corner, the two pursuers sheltering in a corner, watching the back wheels disappear before following.
Katashi shrugged. "Sure, lots of times."
"And once they light it, how long will we have to rescue the jinchuuriki?"
Katashi frowned, counting on his fingers, third eyelids flickering across his eyes and lips moving as he murmured to himself. He finally looked up, unhappiness etched deep in his face. "I don't know. It depends on the executioner." He hunched his shoulders, as if ashamed of his former village's barbarism. "If you got the good one- the one that killed you quicker- they'd tie a thing of black powder around your neck so your head would get blown off and you'd die faster." He snickered, the sound like waves crashing on the shore. "Except sometimes the powder was wet- actually, the powder was wet all of the time- so then it'd just burn, and that was worse."
"But if they don't do that, and they just tie the jinchuuriki and light it, then we should have about fifteen minutes before the jinchuuriki dies." He grimaced. "Except that's really cutting it close, you know?"
"Yeah," she said, leaning out from her hiding place and watching the back door into the clinic they had taken Gaara to swing open. "We will endeavor to be quick, if we can."
'Fucking hell.' A procession of ten shinobi exited first, and then another ten, surrounding a man that stood head and shoulders above them all.
There was no way they could rescue him until the shinobi disappeared.
The man was tall, over six feet, and broad-shouldered, hazel eyes empty of everything, uninterested. His blond hair and beard were grimy with dirt and grease, and his shirtless torso was seamed with scars and recent whip marks. Two old manacles cut into his wrists, scar tissue grown around them, and chains held his hands at his waist, kept his ankles so close together that he was forced to move in a painful shuffle. He glanced back at the open door as the shinobi harried him on, yearning obvious in his eyes.
"You'd think the fool would want to get outside," one of the shinobi jeered, spitting. The glob of saliva hit the jinchuuriki's cheek and trickled down. He didn't blink, didn't react, only gazed back at the yawning darkness.
"Varg's been in that cell for nineteen years," another one shrugged as he unhooked the jinchuuriki's chains and clipped them onto the cart, flicking a whip at Varg's back. "He must want to go back in there; probably feels safe." He snickered. "Like a dog." The whip lashed out and curled around Varg's shoulders, tearing the skin open, blood trickling down the scarred back.
Katashi had bitten through his lip in fury, trembling as he controlled himself, tried to stop from leaping into the fray. Yugito laid a hand on his shoulder to calm him, watching the Isonade's midnight-blue chakra ripple over the boy's lip, repairing the long tear. 'I'll kill that one myself,' she thought with cold loathing, watching the glass-studded tails of the whip carve long tracks in the man's flesh. The man with the whip coiled it up, aimed a kick at Varg's ankle. It connected, the sound of crunching cartilage and bone filling the air.
Varg- a strange, foreign name, nothing like the liquid beauty of the Hidden Countries' languages- ignored the blow and stepped easily up into the cart, sitting as another shinobi yanked him down, chaining him to the bench.
'Is he mute?' she wondered, fading back into the shadows as the cart began to move, pulling Katashi with her. 'Or perhaps he simply is just a child in his mind; he looked barely twenty, and to spend nineteen years with no one to speak to but the demon… he must have the mind of an infant.'
The injustice that had been done to him made her growl low in her throat, the Nekomata's chakra roiling in her throat, peeling mucous membranes and tonsils apart, blood trickling from the corners of her mouth.
The cart rounded the corner, and she and Katashi followed it. "Can you soak the wood from a distance with enough water to put out the fire when they start it?" she asked.
"Yep!" Katashi replied with a child's confidence, the idealistic belief of a boy who had not yet failed.
"Good," she breathed from a throat weeping blood, the two of them leaping onto the roofs, running over the tiles back to where Naruto and Gaara were waiting. "You will soak the wood, prevent them from lighting it, and while Naruto distracts the crowd by starting a brawl with his shadow clones, Gaara will use his sand to teleport the both of them back to me, so that we can all leave with no one the wiser. It will go down as an unusual disappearance, probably attributed to the demon's abilities.
Got that?"
The two of them landed silently on the roof where Gaara and Naruto were, Naruto spinning kunai around each finger. The blonde turned to them, grinning, and presented the knives.
"Twenty kunai from twenty different people. Kerumigakure's definitely intolerant; they hold grudges. Did you see him? What's he like? What's-"
Yugito held up a hand to forestall any more questions, filled the two of them in on the plan, and gazed down at the squirming crowd of imbeciles before answering, "He's tall and blond. A foreigner. Name of 'Varg'." She glanced at Moriko, at the girl who suffered still from the effects of the shed, and continued, "He seems to have the mind of a child. He looked to be in his twenties, but-"
"-the bastards said that he'd been in a cell for nineteen years!" Katashi interrupted, filled with righteous fury.
Naruto stopped spinning the kunai at Katashi's words, secreted them away in his pocket, his eyes tired, weary with grief at another testament to man's ignorance. Gaara looked up from where he was feeding Moriko. Naruto looked down at the square as the people began to shout, shoving each other aside to make room for the cart as it passed slowly into the open space.
A short laugh, empty of joy.
"Well, we aren't the lucky ones, that's for sure."
Varg blinked against the tears welling in his eyes at the too-bright touch of the sun, and looked down at the shackles around his wrists.
The old, old pain of scar tissue creeping around the edges of the metal rings, of hands that had been gangrenous and rotting for years as the Rokubi labored furiously to repair them, to knit together broken blood vessels and dying muscle…
The pain had never left him. He thought that perhaps he did not want it to, because the shackles were safety. As long as he wore the shackles, as long as he stayed in the cell, he would never have to make a choice.
People were all around him, pushing at the cart, grabbing at his clothes, nails raking across the wounds on his back, tearing skin open. He looked, but did not see a face he knew, did not see his mamma, his pappa, Freyja.
Looking for them had become instinctual; he could not stop it, even though he knew they were dead, were buried in a potter's field somewhere. Every time someone had entered the cell, he had looked, and finally the sharp disappointment that pierced him every time began to fade, slipping away to be replaced by dull sadness.
He hadn't killed them- he knew that, clung to it with unrelenting ferocity, that knowledge the only thing that kept him sane- but he knew who had.
It had been so quick, so silent. The memory was still fresh, still sharp and vivid, the only thing he had held to himself in the gray silence of the cell.
Standing from where he sat playing in the dirt, soil encrusted beneath his fingernails, tattered pants smeared with brown mud as he held a frog in his cupped hands, peering into the red eyes, running home to the tiny little house on the edge of the wood, calling for his mamma, his pappa, to come and see this new creature.
The smell. He had smelled it with strange keenness, a new strength given to him by the beast sealed into him scarcely a week before while his parents screamed for their son, held back by the imprisoning arms of shinobi. It had been a final betrayal of hope, a final death of their belief in the promise of this new land.
The smell had been pungent, acrid like lutefisk, and he had entered the house with caution, holding the tiny frog close to him as if its pulsating heartbeat could affirm life in the midst of death.
There had been a man standing over his parents, his syster, hidden in black, fire smoldering in his hands. His mamma and pappa had been as black as the murderer's clothes, skin charcoal, white bone gleaming like whales' tusks from the cracks. Freyja had been dying, then, her blue eyes burned away, her voice a high and thin, reedy wail, failing, falling, disappearing.
The man had moved, hand chopping down on the back of his neck. He fell forward, and the frog stared with cloudy red eyes at him, unmoved by his pain.
He had whispered something before falling into darkness. He couldn't remember it.
Isamu. The mayor had visited him before, but to kill him was so useless, so painfully stupid that he had never tried, staring into the man's face with fevered eyes, searching for the reflection of his family's deaths in the black eyes as cold as the northern seas that his family had sailed over in search of a better life.
The reason for their murder had been simple: they could not tell, could not let anyone know of the injustice in their village, could not let Konoha know that its vassal village had sealed a tailed beast in a foreign child, one with no allegiance.
Sound slammed into him with something like physical force, the touch of light on his skin so painful that he recoiled, squeezing his eyes shut, cowering away, fleeing.
The world was too huge, too bright, too overwhelming, so he sank back into himself, back into the place he had spent the last eternity (he did not know how long it had been since he had been thrown into the cell; he had tried for the first year to mark the days, but when his birthday came, and he spent the night sobbing fitfully in the corner, he saw the uselessness of it all).
The gray mists stretched out around him, featureless and as empty as the cell. He stared through the mists, at the blue-white bolts of lightning zipping from one spot to another, finally slashing down to scorch the ground before him. A voice spoke, echoing like thunder.
::You're pathetic,:: the voice sneered, the voice his only companion during those long years, the only thing that had kept him alive.
'I know, Freyja,' he replied, thought the only form of communication he had left, now that his voice had withered and died into silence. The voice was silent, unsettled by his easy acceptance, his delusional belief that it was Freyja.
Sometimes, Varg broke the delusions enough to know that the voice was the Rokubi, the weasel of lightning that had scythed across the forests, burning them to the ground, but-
But it was so much easier, so much better to believe that Freyja was here. Freyja, his syster, his everything, the one he had sworn to protect.
::Would you like me to lie to you now?:: the voice asked gently, lightning caressing his cheek, opening a bloody slash, a kiss of betrayal, of absolution.
Varg felt, as if from very far away, the chains binding him to the cart come undone, the rough hands forcing him onto the platform, binding him to the stake, but ignored the phantom feelings, focusing only on the voice, only on her, so that he would die with her name on his lips.
'Yes.' His mental voice shuddered. 'Thank you, yes.'
The voice morphed, changed, taking itself from his memories, molding itself into Freyja's, into her tiny high-pitched voice.
He reached out blindly, touched nothing, lightning crackling off his hands, burning, but he would bear it to hear Frejya again.
The voice returned.
::Jag älskar dig, broder.:: The tears on his face burned away, boiling into nothingness as the heat of the lightning arced across his skin. ::Jag älskar dig.::
He repeated the words softly, reverently, embracing the phantom memory, the shapes of the words on his tongue as he waited for the pyre to be lit-
Something-
A child was crying, a high, thin, reedy wail.
Freyja.
Gaara bounced Moriko on his knee, muttering meaningless platitudes as he tried to calm her, to prevent her wails as she reached out for the empty bottle, her face purpling with fury, the seal disappearing in her skin as it turned darker and darker. 'Is she ever going to stop believing she's starving?'
"Hey!" Naruto whispered, jostling his shoulder. "Something's happening!" He looked up, held Moriko closer, her head resting on his shoulder as he got up.
The jinchuuriki's bowed head came up, flicking his dark gold hair back, hazel eyes fixed-
Not on them.
On Moriko.
The people in the square began to heave back and forth like a sea in a storm, their voices merging into a thunder of 'kill him'.
Yugito's fingers flickered through seals, lightning growing in her hands as she crouched on the edge of the rooftop like a sailor on the deck of a tossing ship.
The jinchuuriki's muscles bulged against the chains, veins standing out in sharp relief. There was a high-pitched creaking, the chains giving way as he grunted, yanked against the ring, tearing it free. The chain came with it, swinging between his manacled wrists.
A shinobi with a whip on his belt leaped onto the platform, tried to push him back, to secure him. Varg bared his teeth in a feral smile, whipped the chain around the man's neck, tightened it as he leaned back, the shinobi clawing at the chain as he was lifted into the air by Varg's height. Varg pushed his face into the struggling man's, twisted the chain, bones splintering and tearing like wet paper. The shinobi fell limp like a puppet, collapsing to the platform in a sodden heap as Varg let him go, turning to the next wave.
More piled onto the platform, grabbing him. Varg's eyes flashed red. He howled something- a name?- as the patch of bone-white hair by his temple grew, blue-white strands threading through it. His fingers spasmed, twisted in a shinobi's shirt, flung him back against the pole. His back broke like a dry twig, body curving around the pole in a way that the human body wasn't meant to do.
Lightning slashed down from a cloudless sky, snaked through the roiling crowds, festival yukatas and hair burning in its wake, slithered up Varg's outstretched hands. People began to scream.
Yugito jerked back, cursing, as the Raikyu in her hand was yanked free of her control, zipping down into the square, floating into Varg's hands. The jinchuuriki looked up at them, a strange intelligence in his eyes, and smiled.
Lightning flooded the square, white-hot and fearsome, crackling, snapping like the jaws of a wolf as it tore through the crowds, burning skin and hair and cloth. The shinobi closest to Varg were almost incinerated, only their masks saving them from complete blindness as the flesh on their uncovered hands blistered red and white. Screams filled the air.
Varg crouched, sprang into the air, the electricity following him, wreathing him in white. Then he was gone, and all that was left where he had been was a blue-white orb of lightning, floating, threatening and slow, over to where they stood.
The crowds were still screaming, running from the square, leaving charred clothes and skin and bones behind as they fled.
The ball of lightning descended to hover among the five jinchuuriki, humming menacingly, stinking of ozone.
Katashi, fascinated, reached out to touch-
There was a flash of light almost as bright as the sun, and Varg stood there, eyes fixed on Moriko, chain clanking in the wind. He reached out for her, tears carving white tracks through the blood and grime on his face, mouth moving in a name, voice dryer than dust, shrunken away to nothing.
'Freyja,' he mouthed.
Gaara glanced at Naruto, flicked his head at Varg in silent question. The man had just nearly incinerated a whole square of people; how could they entrust Moriko to him? Naruto met his gaze, sharing his confusion, and finally shrugged, nodding.
Gaara turned back to Varg, distrustful, but held Moriko out, sand rippling at his feet, ready to kill if Varg so much as twitched wrong. Varg took her, held her close, folded himself down onto his knees as he rocked back and forth, humming tunelessly.
"She's not Freyja," Katashi said indignantly, poking him in the shoulder. "She's Moriko!"
Varg glanced up at him, then back down at Moriko, who met his gaze calmly, muddy-green eyes fixed on his face, recognizing a new protector. Varg made a sound low in his throat, rough and hoarse, mouthing, 'Moriko.'
"This is all very cute," Yugito snapped, spinning the weighted chain of her kusarigama in one hand as she shifted back and forth restlessly, "But we have maybe ten minutes to get out of this hellhole before they notice he's up here. Gaara, can you walk on that leg?"
"Yes," he said. The medic-nins of Kerumigakure, no matter their mercenary outlook, did good work.
"Okay!" Naruto said, bounding onto the next roof as Varg followed, Moriko held in one arm. "Let's go!"
Gaara followed, Yugito and Katashi behind him, the six jinchuuriki on their way to the Land of Grass.
Annotations
'It was the fact that it was going in such little ways.' – An allusion to the poem The Spring and the Fall by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
'Would you like me to lie to you now?' 'Yes. Thank you, yes.' – Dialogue by Illyria and Wesley from Never Fade Away, the last episode of Angel.
'Jag älskar dig.' – "I love you," in Swedish. (Thanks for correcting my Swedish translations go to 'kyuubi's vixen, 'GreyGranian', and 'Demion69'.)
A/N: Review, please? All questions should go in the forum linked in my profile.
