chapter title: the deep end (part 1)
summary: it's been seven years since the Akatsuki took over, but in the dark underbelly of Konoha's criminal underworld, a silent war is still raging. As the heirs of the city's fallen leaders are picked off one by one in a bloody rebellion, Uchiha Sasuke returns with vengeance in his heart for the one who betrayed his family.
dedication: xIchaIchaParadisex, who managed to make a shit week not so bad in the end. this one is for you, pal. i hope it infuriates as much as it clarifies.
(and the holy trinity, MAY IT RISE)
Dead End Street
There was something about the tense line of Neji's lower lip that made Ino uncomfortable in the skin she wore. Hana was pretty girl coasting on her looks, on the lithe curves of her body in the strobe lights and she knew nothing of politics. Nothing of loyalty.
The weight in her chest – that was all Ino and the knowledge that people she cared about were being backed into a corner. Hiashi had not flinched when given his ultimatum, but Neji had gone tense all over and lounging across from him, she could not forget who and what she really was.
Leave, she willed him, trying to compel him with nothing but her unspoken thoughts. Leave me to my game and I can salvage this.
He couldn't though. Neither of the Hyuuga's could; there were guards on the exits with guns openly visible on their persons and Konan wasn't done gloating yet, wasn't done rubbing salt in open wounds. Hidan, too, watched them with unconcealed glee.
"Hey, hey," Deidara laughed, flipping through a series of images on his phone. "Looks like Tsunade's lot have found your little brat, Hyuuga. Here's your chance."
"For what?" Hiashi asked delicately, distaste faintly written in the corner of his mouth, his eloquently folded hands.
"A chance to prove where your loyalties lie," Konan said softly. "Hana, be a darling and get me a martini would you?"
"Shaken or stirred?" Ino purred, slithering into the other woman's space for a slow kiss. "You want olives with it?"
"Surprise me."
Grinning widely, she flounced up and towards the bar, making sure to keep one ear pricked for their conversation and ignoring Hidan's barked command to bring him a beer.
Playing pet could be inconvenient at times, but she wasn't stupid. She knew what sort of threats Akatsuki were making, what tipped scales they were offering.
Warn them and she dies is about the gist of it, I reckon. Glancing back at the table from the corner of her eyes she could measure the pace of the conversation by how tightly Neji's shoulders were wound.
He was too honourable for a rigged game like this.
The bartender was shaking the drink vigorously, too heavy handed. The man did not have Shikamaru's easy skill with spirits, was trying too hard for flash were subtlety worked wonders.
What if he dies tonight?
Akatsuki had set a trap and half her friends were walking into it. How did they find out?
They could die. They could all die out there while I'm stuck in here acting the whore.
"Looking pretty sweetheart," the bartender leered at her, pushing the martini glass towards her.
Ino stuck her tongue out coquettishly and tipped the glass at him with one hand, a mocking salute. "Darling, I'm a kept woman now."
It took all her strength of will to take her time walking back there, to be the uninterested, unconcerned airhead that Hana was.
Konan smiled at her absently when she handed the martini glass over, but there were razors in her eyes, in the curl of her fingers around the stem of the glass.
Neji's eyes swept over her once, the disinterested glance of a man used to dismissing women like they were nothing more than errant butterflies fluttering in his vision.
You, she thought, a little of that calm she desperately needed settling back in her bones, will make a wonderful politician one day.
"Do we have an understanding?" Konan asked.
Hiashi and his nephew were silent for a long time, their faces betraying nothing while Deidara leaned back in his chair and laughed, white powder dusted around his nostrils.
"We do," Hiashi murmured at last.
The Akatsuki didn't shake hands, Ino noticed. There was too much honour in a handshake, something which hinted at fair play – or respect at the very least – and the Akatsuki were neither an honourable or respectful enemy.
Konan smirked against the glass, the dark lipstick she wore imprinting it there for all to see.
"Deidara," she purred, not taking her eyes from Hiashi's face. "Hidan. You can go now. Make it hurt."
Like a pair of vicious bloodhounds, they went. Neji was very, very pale.
"You're dismissed," Konan said, losing interest in them abruptly. Her hand slid slowly up Ino's uncovered thigh, fingers toying with the lace at the top of her stockings.
"Now, you and I have some business to attend to," she murmured, "don't we, sweetling?"
There was a cold space inside her where her heart used to be. Ino thought of Kiba, his hands spanning the circumference of her waist. It hadn't felt like safety exactly, but it had felt a hell of a lot safer than this.
He'd called and called, but there was no getting through. Tenten's number went straight to voicemail every damn time he dialled and it was setting his teeth on edge. Sai rubbed at his dry, burning eyes with the heels of his hands and wished there was enough coffee in the world to make this feeling go away.
"It's Tenten. You know what to do."
Her cheery voice crackled through the silent room on speaker, mocking him. He'd done all he could to trace the phone, but could only pinpoint it as far as the river. All he could think was that someone had disposed of it beneath the churning waters – though whether it was Tenten herself on the run, or someone with much darker intentions, Sai had no idea.
"I think someone is watching me," she'd whispered on the phone and in her voice he'd heard an unexpected trace of vulnerability. She was frightened.
He didn't like it.
It was late, but he reached blindly for the vat of coffee he kept on his desk and took a long draught. It was bitter and cold, but it cleared his head more effectively than any bucket of cold water ever could.
Turning back to the screen, he cracked his knuckles and set to work. The police department's firewalls were laughable easy to break through once he put his mind to it and Sai, well. Sai was very determined. He'd grown up playing with switchboards and circuits, had learnt to breathe code around the time he turned ten.
He brought up the personnel files of all the names Tenten had given him and set a search running for anything suspicious. He wrote a code to look for false identities and criminal records for the whole employee database.
He hacked the security system to watch the halls of the police department and set to watching. He watched her in the lab, watched her move through bustling halls, watched her enter the car park glancing uneasily over one shoulder.
And then he saw who followed in that moments before the lights went out.
"Shit."
Sasuke had never been good at carrying dead weight. The life of a killer-for-hire left no room for heavy burdens, he'd learned – they would only drag him down. So when Kakashi stumbled for the second time, white-faced and fading fast, he cut his losses.
"You're slowing us down."
Shikamaru, half-carrying, half-dragging the bleeding man, gave him a look of deep dislike. "He's been shot."
"I saw," he replied dryly. For every minute which bled past all he could think of was that they were running out of time. The longer they spent in this old mausoleum the more at risk their lives were.
"I'm not leaving him," Shikamaru said, but the expression in his eyes was a mixture of defiance and desperation.
Sentiment, he thought scornfully, will get you killed every time.
He'd come too far to lay himself down on the cross for a stranger with a name he barely remembered.
"Suit yourself," he said, turning away from the both. He had enough ammunition to last a few rounds and a ticking clock at the back of his mind. "I thought you wanted to find Haruno and Hyuuga, but you can waste time dragging a dead man around if you want."
"Asshole."
"No he's right," Kakashi said weakly. "I'm not worth compromising the mission for."
"Kakashi –"
There was a sound, a wet, slippery sound like Kakashi had swatted Shikamaru away with blood-soaked hands.
"Leave me," he said, leaning heavily against a balustrade. "Get the girls. Get them out."
Sasuke didn't need to be told twice. He marched away into the dust-ridden darkness, turning his back on Kakashi's moment of martyrdom and Shikamaru's wasted protests; their doomed ties of loyalty were more than he could stomach.
You were that loyal to someone once, a voice whispered at the back of his mind, but he pushed it away. His eyes were intent on the signs of Sakura's trail instead – her footprints in the dust-soaked carpet and the larger ones following, a small smear of blood on faded floral wallpaper.
If he hurried he might find something other than a mutilated body at the end of this trail. Sasuke had a feeling that this once-glamorous hotel had seen more than its fair share of them.
The radio crackled suddenly in his ear, more static than reliability.
"You can't just fuck off like that." Shikamaru sounded furious. "We have a mission –"
"Whine to someone who cares."
He turned a corner and the air immediately came more oppressive, the dust thicker, the silences deeper. It raised the tiny hairs at the back of his neck. In one slow, sinuous roll of his shoulder, Sasuke raised the gun in his hand a little higher.
"And grow a spine," he added in an undertone, intensely alert of the way his skin prickled. All seemed abandoned, but he still felt like he was being watched. Perhaps Sakura had felt like that too, got distracted by his insistence over the coms and didn't notice her attacker in time…
"If you want to survive in this life you gotta learn to cut your losses. Or didn't Tsunade ever tell you that?"
There was only harsh breathing on the other end of the line; Sasuke didn't know if it was a private conversation or if every one of Tsunade's minions could hear him, but he was far beyond caring. It was a lesson they should have learnt years ago.
"There's more to life than just surviving."
He couldn't stop the sneer that slipped free, though there was no one around to see it. Instead his attention was caught by a grand set of double doors, the gold inlay set against the white wood somehow marking the suite of rooms beyond as apart from all the others he had passed.
There was blood marking the door – startlingly red against that faded ivory paint. Hardly daring to breathe, he nudged it open with his foot very slowly, listening for the slightest creak of rusty hinges.
Inside it was dark and musty, the heavy velvet curtains blocking out the windows mouldering slowly. A faint beam of moonlight illuminated the mahogany floor, the red, wet blood shining on its surface.
So much blood, he thought – and then somebody screamed.
It was only years of training that stopped Sasuke from jumping out of his skin, but he heard a noise in one of the adjoining rooms and stalked towards it, heart pounding in his chest like a drum.
When he kicked the door open it was Haruno.
"You!"
He half expected her to glare up at him, but her expression was disarming for how rattled it was. All the colour had drained from her face and she looked, in the darkness, very young.
"Who screamed?" she demanded.
"I don't know."
She didn't seem to want to stand up, or maybe she wasn't able to so he strode forward and hauled her gracelessly to her feet. He was suddenly frightened that the blood in the other room was hers.
"Hurt?"
"Nothing I can't walk off," she answered shakily. "It was – they caught me by surprise. I just – just barely got away from them."
If it wasn't her blood whose was it? Sakura seemed to remember who she was talking to then and stepped abruptly away from him, hiding behind a cloud of pink hair.
Frowning, he tapped his earpiece impatiently. "I found Haruno, she's unharmed. What the hell is going on out there?"
There was a burst of static. Sasuke thought he heard Naruto trying to get through, but even after several attempts he could not distinguish words from the feedback.
A feeling of unease crept rapidly up his spine.
They shared a look of repressed worry.
"Something's wrong. Let's find the others and get out of here." Sakura hesitated. "I think I know where Hinata is."
He wasn't fussed about finding the others, but getting out was definitely a priority. But more than that, he wanted the answers she wasn't giving him, the reason for the fear she was only barely hiding. That day in the warehouse she had not been frightened at all.
"What happened?" he demanded.
Green eyes blazed at him. "I told you. I was caught by surprise, okay! Could you maybe not be an asshole about it, it happens to everyone."
"Tell me the truth."
"Oh fuck off," she said and stormed past him to the door, but there was an edge to her anger which hit him all wrong, like looking down the barrel of a gun and seeing the eyes of a child looking back. The sort of terror deep enough to drown in.
As she left the room he stooped to touch the blood, still tacky and saw it then – the family portrait hanging over the mantelpiece.
Three pale ghosts smiled at the camera, distantly familiar in the way that many adults in his parents inner-circle were, all colour leeched from the image by time. Both parents had their eyes scratched savagely out, their frozen faces mutilated forever, but the little girl –
The colours were faded with age, but the little girl's shy smile remained pristine, the only untouched thing in the whole room.
They had been gone for too long.
For the first time in his life Naruto appreciated what it was like for Sakura to always be the one waiting in the car, eyes on the clock, on the gun on the dashboard, on the darkness closing in. His fingers itched to shoot something, to snatch Hinata out of danger.
"Guys," he tried the radio sets again, but heard only static. "Guys, you've got ten minutes tops."
The silence unnerved him.
I shoulda heard something by now.
What if they hadn't found her? What if they were all hurt or dying inside the hotel? What if it had all been an elaborate trap?
Naruto shifted restlessly in his seat. Ino was doing her part far across the city, he had to trust that she could hold them for long enough.
It should be me in there.
He'd spent months trying not to imagine what the Akatsuki had done to Karin before they made her body disappear, spent years falling asleep to the memory of his father toppling over the front of the podium with his brains splattered around him.
Fingers flexed on the steering wheel, agitation fizzing through his entire body, a storm no shell could contain. Sakura called him reckless.
Tsunade called him a stupid asshole kid.
Naruto knew he was all these things and that the person he loved most was inside that hotel and it was taking too fucking long.
"To hell with this!" he snarled, ripping the headset off. He reached for the gun, his free hand grabbing the door handle and as he did so, the rumbling sound of engines met his ears. Angry. Jeering. He knew those engines, knew the snarling, raging sound of them.
Immediately, he ducked down low in his seat and threw the van into reverse, hiding in the deepest, blackest shadows of the alley by the hotel. They were close – and getting closer all the time.
"Fuck," he whispered.
He threw the door open and ran for it as the first of the Akatsuki turned onto the empty street, headlights blazing. They'd known all along.
Naruto ran.
The glow of the screen was the only source of light in the room, bathing the floor directly beneath it in an eerie, white luminosity. Only the man's shoes could be seen – shoes of red crocodile skin with pointed, gold-capped toes – and a sole, nail-painted hand which held a small remote.
His thumb moved abruptly and the image on the screen paused.
For several long minutes there was only silence, a silence thick and deep enough to drown in. The man was utterly still, frozen it seemed, as he gazed at the girl on the screen.
Her face was older, all the baby fat practically melted away by the intervening years since their last meeting, but he would recognise those eyes anywhere, recognise that soft, vulnerable mouth. The shape it made around the sound of a scream had haunted his dreams for years. Nothing, he thought, had ever quite matched it. He'd begun to believe that nothing would ever match it ever again.
Slowly, the body unfroze and leaned forward, gold eyes alight with a sudden, burning fervour, utterly fixated on the screen. Slowly, a grin unfurled.
"Oh," the Puppet Master sighed. "Oh, yes."
tbc
notes: whaddup i'm sick as a dog
notes2: no seriously, i hate these antibiotics but daisy updated full throttle so i gotta kill this writers block while i'm off work
notes3: how'd i do folks? it only took ten million tries to get this one right and i'm still not happy with it.
notes4: as a sidenote, office crush is now office boyfriend. win.