Fish Bird (魚鳥）
By The Eternity Dragon/AcaciaBrown
Disclaimer: The manga confuses me and I miss Kakashi D:
Chapter 20: I don't care what you think, as long as it's about me
Part One ~ The beginning of the End
Inch by inch and mile-by-mile he ran, down twisting passageways and tunnels that seemed to slide sinuously down into the very heart of the mountain. He knew where he was going in the way that a dreamer tumbles down dark avenues that call to every fiber of their being. It was an unknown and unfathomable homing signal boiling through his blood and dragging his limbs forward over the ice-cold rocks, a magnetic beacon, or a genetic memory driving him towards a dark purpose.
It felt as if she had taken the breath from him and with it, what was left of his humanity. He was becoming less human, more ghost like, the essence of his soul slowly leaking through his mouth like moist breath and seeping down into the ground beneath him.
He'd crawled for what felt like hours through tunnels so narrow that they crushed his lungs and starved him of oxygen, his fingers where bleeding by the end of it, bare and stubby as he lay on the pitch black of the floor of a huge cavern, panting like a dog. The fine dust disturbed by his labored breathing swirled and danced on the eddies of his warm breath and raced away into the darkness.
The demons had surrounded him now. They had been with him the entire way down, he knew that much, perhaps they had even been with him always. Lurking in the corner of his eye always just out of reach, or prowling in the back of his mind, like an unseen monster he had no way of telling. All he knew now was that he was no longer afraid of them, no longer terrified of what must be done, no longer frightened of saving them, and sealing for the last time his own doom.
"You're early." She said, her voice cold and hard like stone.
In the pale illumination of his own chakra he could see the wraithlike outline of her person, her slim legs and long, long hair. Her hands stretched out towards him like spiders, fingers gliding over his body and cupping his chin to tilt his face towards her like that of a submissive animal… a pet even. She smiled at him, an expression that conveyed both cruelty and greed and he shivered, helpless like a fish out of water, whilst all around them the demons leaned in hungry for blood.
"I knew you'd come," she said smugly, "they always do come in the end."
Sasuke opened his mouth to speak, talking was an effort now, thinking even more so. His limbs felt heavy as though each were filled with lead. But he had just enough strength in him to ask, "Who else has come to you before?"
He could feel her probing inside his mind, as if her spindly fingers had slipped through his skin like hypodermic needles and were slicing apart his mind, layer by layer like an onion.
"Oh, hundreds, thousands maybe. Men, women, fathers, daughters, wives, sons and lovers." Her grin stretched wider and he felt sure she was lying, shuddering as he felt her fingers move round to clasp the width of his neck.
"Your brother even."
Sasuke struggled to sit up at this, but it was as if all the breath had been wrung out of him, he lay silently on the floor like a dying rabbit. His heart racing impossibly fast as if it was about to take flight as she shifted through his memories like flour falling through a sieve. Nothing was sacred to her and nothing was private.
His most intimate thoughts and memories were laid open, naked and bare for her inspection and the collective audience of demons behind her. Her and their thoughts merging as one, as the hive mind joins the queen and thinks through her, when she laughed they laughed, and to Sasuke's horror he could feel their laughter rolling through his mind as if they were somehow linked.
"Now you listen," she mocked, tucking a strand of jet-black hair behind the white shell of her ear.
"You listen because there is an Uchiha involved, and not just any Uchiha, your dear brother."
"He murdered…" Sasuke tried to spit out, the words forming in his throat but being swallowed back down again by a will that was stronger than his.
"Yes, yes I think everyone knows that pathetic little story." She snapped, but her eyes dark as long empty tunnels seemed amused by attempts to defy her force.
"You came to me so you could destroy your brother, the man who had destroyed your world. Your wrath and pledge to total vengeance was so strong, so utterly soul destroying and overpowering… it never occurred to you that what you were doing was in fact the very thing he had spent his whole life trying to protect you and all of your world from."
The silence seemed to spiral sickeningly, Sasuke breathed out, although there seemed to be no breath in his lungs. His skin feeling oddly clammy and wet, although he knew he couldn't possibly be sweating, whilst all around him nothing stirred.
"W-what do you mean he … you're lying!" he finished, somehow summoning enough energy to get to his feet, the words tumbling out of his mouth in a yell.
She gazed at him, her eyes wide looking somewhat surprised, her mouth open like an old fat spider deprived of its prey. Around her the monsters hissed, drawing back like snakes about to make the kill, Sasuke didn't even flinch. Hopelessly outnumbered he looked death straight in the face and had the audacity to glower at it.
"This is actually a rare moment when I'm not." She answered smugly, her white teeth glinting at him from the out the gloom, like pale bones beneath a film of ice-cold water.
"Have you spent your entire life thinking that the only enemies where the ones that attacked the village from the outside? Did you honestly think that the members of your grand council know nothing of my existence? Do you honestly think that the Biju where a mistake?"
She laughed at him, a sound that seemed to shake the earth and rattle the inside of his bone marrow. The whole world felt as though it was about to collapse in on itself and that nothing could save it, for nothing could stop her.
"What am I Sasuke?" she asked, half a flirt, half a threat, spoken like a secret.
He didn't answer, he backed away until he felt the smooth, cold, unyielding press of rock against his back, and knew he could move no further.
She said it again, "What am I, Sasuke?"
He opened his mouth, and then shut it.
"I…I don't know." He admitted, hating himself for what he'd done, knowing there was so much to give up but he no longer had a choice.
"I am Death," she told him, the words flowing so smoothly that they almost became a song.
"I am the bones that will not die and I am the yellow river. I am timeless, I am ageless, and I am not of this world. I am a demon, I am the mother of all that is unholy you see before you, and from my own essence have they cut from me my children. And in their turn made monsters of their own children whom they chose to be their vessels."
Her mouth was hard and cruel as she stared at him; a lock of hair slipped away from her scalp and fell to the floor with a soft 'thulmp' and Sasuke's gut twisted in horror as he realized she was rotting.
Right now, right this very second her stolen body was decomposing, her skin was sallowing and her flesh was beginning to decay.
"You love him," she snarled scathingly, "and he is in part my child."
"No…" He wanted the nightmare to end, for this to go away. It was too much, too real, too raw…
"Did you think the Biju were accidents? You never stopped and wondered that maybe the powers at hand created them and tried to tame them? You never once thought that perhaps your 'friend' was born to become a monster? That they had assigned him a life of pain and cruelty before he had taken his first breath? Don't under estimate humans Sasuke, what I have become, is what they have made me."
"What you have become," he growled back in response, nausea permeating through seemingly every cell in his body, "is what you have made yourself through your own actions. You are a rotting, walking, talking corpse with no heart and no remorse for others!"
"Itachi spent his life trying to protect you," she told him, grinning wildly now. "If you ever had a heart you have killed it yourself with your own bare hands. You have spent your whole life trying to solve the puzzle of what really happened that night, and not even once have you come close to solving it. You think it all revolves around you Sasuke, but it never has done, this has never been about you, this… this greater world that He and I envision involves what he cannot give me but you can. Itachi fought against our future but no longer is he here to stand in my way, and you will give me freely what you are holding back… even now between death and hell. You are quite remarkable Sasuke, Madara did always think so too…."
"Madara…" for the first time he looked unsure, "Madara is dead. He's been dead for over hundreds of…" but even as he spoke he could feel his words falling into a pit of nothingness. Words like 'death', 'time' and 'end' had no meaning down here.
He watched her smile gleefully at him, "Of course he is."
"He isn't?"
She shook her head, and waved her finger like a mother berating a naughty child.
"Now Sasuke, I don't want to spoil the ending of this grand plan, now do I?"
"This is not a game, damnit!" he shouted, the feeling of something thick and heavy pressing against his jugular but he struggled against it. "People are dying because of you!"
"People are dying because of you! You're the one that set all of this into action, every innocent death has been on your hands Sasuke, you are also the one that is drenched in blood, not just me." She poke it calmly but her eyes betrayed the voracity of her wrath, like an endless desert starved of water she stared intensely at him, as if to drink in his soul through her eyes.
"Well I'm here now," he had everything to lose and nothing to gain. Something he had to offer she wanted, had been scheming to obtain from the very beginning, from the second he'd made the deal, to the moment he'd seen Naruto again and to what seemed like the endless years they had spent in the tunnels together.
"Take what you need and leave them alone."
"I can't, you won't give it to me…" her gaze never wavered, all around her was the clicking and rustling of the inhuman creatures that lurked as shadows in the darkness.
"I'm here aren't I?" he thrust his hands out towards her, all cool anger, stony defiance and unfaltering grace. "I'm here, I'm willing, what more do you require?"
She tossed her dark watery hair and let the smile slip like black silk from her lips. "Something which, at the moment you cannot give me."
"I don't…" he began, but she raised a hand, and the sound vanished from this throat.
"You will, be sure of that my darling. But we need to wait for him to come first."
Kiba stood up.
He did so silently, so not to wake Hinata who curled up close to him. She was supposed to be on guard duty, but the never-ending hours had (like with everyone else) eventually taken their toll on her.
Even in the somber darkness of the cavern he could still make out the delicate contours of her features. Her long beautiful blue-black hair splayed out on the ground beneath her like a rich inky sky, and her full mouth drawn into a plump pout.
He loved her; there was no arguing about that. He loved her powerfully, and totally in a way, which overcame his senses and spun him about to the wind. He'd never been able to tell her, and he never would tell her.
He had kissed her before when they were teenagers, young, stupid and flooded with hormones. He had been rough back then, (and was probably still rough now if he'd care to ask for Shikamaru's opinion) full of burning desire to explore her pale white skin and slip his fingers between her parted legs and touch the secret parts of her. It had always under the cover of night or after a mission. Just so he could listen to her voice rise and fall in a steady rhythm as her body, hot, slim and so wonderful writhed beneath him. It had meant nothing, or at least at the time these where the words that he had repeated to himself over and over again. When he had kissed Hinata and moved up against her hard, it was nothing more than feelings created by an ancient calling, older than the hills and the mountains, written into his and her DNA. He'd seen animals do it, cats and dogs, a smooth in and out motion, several times over that seemed more instinct than science.
Kiba had thought/dwelt/obsessed about doing it. When they were lying together surrounded by darkness in the early hours of the morning, the temptation had almost been overwhelming, despite the fact that their bones ached from training.
Her body lying next to his was always a thousand times more rewarding than his own hand on his own skin, her mouth against his jugular making his heart skip and beat and his senses scatter.
Despite her own shyness, her awkward virginal movements, and her stammered expulsions of apology when their legs became entangled in awkward places, and their elbows knocked together bruising his ribs he hadn't cared.
He'd been full of the site and smell of her, the touch of her hair beneath his fingertips and the taste of her body on the tip of his tongue.
He'd been in love with her since the age of fifteen, or at least he had been fifteen when he'd finally realized it, like a sledgehammer to the head or a capsizing ship.
It was too late to take back what was already done, what they had done, what they had wanted to do together. Perhaps it had been her way of defying the bourgeoisie role that society and her family had thrust upon her that had made her sit outside his bedroom window that night. Perhaps Kurenai had been on one too many missions that week and she had turned to him as an escape from loneliness of solitude. Or perhaps, she had loved him too.
At the end of it all the temptation had been too great, his common sense had been smothered by her lips, her breasts, her legs, her thighs and eventually he had touched that secret place and become a part of it, warm and wet, soft and silky, terrifying and breathtaking all at the same time.
He hadn't been very good that first time, he had declined all expectation and hurt her by going too fast and then too hard. But it had been raw – earnest even. His large, rough hands cradling her ass and the small of her back as he'd shuddered from release, gasping for air and kissing her as if he was about to die. She had lain in his arms after that, entwined about him, her legs like thick warm vines and her smile like the sun. He – Kiba had been embarrassed, being so sure of himself and falling so short of what he had wanted to achieve.
She had been proclaimed engaged the month after, and he never knew whether or not she had known that all along or not. Sweet sixteen is of course a wonderful age to have ones heart broken at.
Out of honor, respect for Neji, and the age-old tradition of keeping the Hyuuga bloodlines clean the physical intimacies between them had ceased, and he had told no one.
It couldn't be helped that he was of a mongrel breed, his forefathers and ancestors bringing their culture to whomever they mated with and sticking with them for life. Even his mother, had never once looked at another man, despite the fact that her own mate had been cold in his grave since the attack of the nine tailed beast, all those years ago.
Shikamaru might call him a coward, but at the end of the day he had never questioned Kiba's moral grounding for not claiming Hinata as his own. If his friend had had his way he would have damned tradition and the purity of the ancient customs and bloodlines. Shikamaru didn't believe in pagonist rituals, and why should he? He was smart after all and was able to predict answers before they were given. He didn't belong to the world that Kiba lived in, one governed by instinct, and intrinsic knowledge passed from generation to generation: the art of touch, smell, taste and sight.
To Hinata's sleeping form, Kiba could guiltlessly confess that he loved her, and tell her that he had never regretted that short time they had been together. He had pressed his nose against her cheek, and then set his lips briefly against hers before backing silently out of the cavern and vanishing into the darkness.
At the end of all things he must go.
He had to find Naruto.
The calling had stopped.
***
A/N yes, it will be finished soon. I've updated, kill me. Finishing exams, writing bits at a time, this took 3 months to put together – thank you for sticking with me.