I do not own Naruto. Triggers for gore. Warning about many things.
The red light district is where Watanabe Ryuishi was born, where she was probably meant to work. Looking at the section of the village that she hasn't seen in years, she wonders how much has changed.
The cracked concrete paths are still covered in gritty black grime and puddles that smell suspiciously of piss and sake. The walls are still filled with holes and broken pieces where succulent green vines peek out and creep out to reclaim more land. There is still trash and grit on every corner. It's midday, and there is little sunshine. The heavens are clouded grey and overcast, threatening to rain, and the air still has the chill of eternal cold in it.
Girls in colorful kimono still line the streets like butterflies, flittering to and fro, calling out to buyers and soliciting the unaware. Their smiles are cherry red and they laugh behind fans, but their eyes are dull and hazed, not even seeing the person that stands before them. Long hair in delicate updos shimmers with fake gold and cheap silver, and she can smell the potent mix of scents that move like waves off of them, hiding the stale stink of sweat and sex.
When she casts her gaze into the back alleys, she can see the drunks and the pickpockets that mingle with corpses of varying sizes. Syringes and broken opiate pipes lay used and forgotten in the gutters. Ahead of her she can see a man with a bottlecap necklace fencing drugs, looking all too healthy. Wartime is always kind to dealers, she thinks, everybody is looking for an escape. She knows how fake his charming smile is. She knows the deal. In another life, she was just like him, pushing product that she knew would kill anyone willing to purchase.
Nothing has really changed.
Walking through the fog-covered streets now, though, she still feels like something is different. Maybe it's her.
Her feet don't make noise on the broken stone beneath her, and even the swish of her pant legs is hard to hear. Her steps are no longer quick and hurried, but loping and apathetic. There is no fear in her eyes any longer, because she has seen worse than these streets. No strange man or woman could force themselves on her anymore, no hungry Okiya mother could snatch her up and add her to the stables to make her quota.
Ryuishi can feel eyes on her that were never there when she was a toddler, peeking out from corner alleys and everyday stalls. She may not be the best ninja in the world, and she may not see very well, but she knows what is watching. She can read these signs, the quick little feet and the defensive maneuvers. Something in her gut squirms, an unnamed mix of foreboding and pride.
She slinks into back alleys that once frightened her with ease, sliding through the muck and ignoring the physical incarnations of broken dreams and lost hope that lay like corpses in the dark. Kagami has called her, and like the curious child she is, she has chosen to answer. Yet, as she walks into the higher end of the akasen, she is stunned by what she sees.
The street that her brothel is on, destroyed.
Buildings on this street all sport some sort of damage, and a few are still hissing and smoldering against all odds. There is rubble in the place of the building that once housed her, and the grand sign that welcomed patrons is shattered on the ground. She notices bodies on the ground, lying in coagulated blood on the street, dirtied by the stagnant water and apathetic world. There are only a few, but the tale is telling.
There is only one person alive in this place.
A familiar head of steel speckled dark hair catches her eyes, and she has to bite back a bitter wave of despair. She has never seen Kagami look so old. Stooped low as she picks through the ruins of the block like a crane stepping through water. Her back is hunched and her robe is torn. She looks like this village, she looks like a broken beauty.
Creeping through the demolished streets, she feels dread settle in her gut.
Her footsteps leave prints in the grime that has formed from the ash and dust from the wreckage, and they stand out a peculiar grey against the black. The old woman turns as she makes herself known, but doesn't say a word. Her once frightening and stern eyes are hollow and cold, drained from the force of whatever happened. She lifts a single, gnarled hand and points to a kimono clad form on the streets. Ryuishi's heart leaps into her throat.
Slowly, ever so slowly she makes her way to the body, already knowing who it once was.
She squats in the layers of soot and water before the pale skinned beauty who lies as still and broken before her like a shattered doll. She is dressed in a beautiful kimono stitched with autumn leaves, and her hands are perfectly manicured. They are so small, so clean.
Ryuishi feels cold regret sweep through her heart.
Keiko's face, once so clean and whole lies smashed in like a rotten pumpkin. One of her dark eyes is still staring up at the sky, while the other is like clear jelly, popped and smeared with grey matter and bone shards. Red hunks of flesh like fish guts are all that remain of her right side. Half of her long, beautiful hair is still pinned up in an elegant updo that lies matted in gore below her. No longer does she smell like cinnamon and perfume, but rather the smell of a skinned carcass fills the air, which is ripe with bile and rancid shit.
Ryuishi kneels before the corpse of the woman who brought her into this world and brushes her cheek softly, before closing her eyes forever.
She feels a presence behind her, standing over the splattered remains of a whore and her child. "What happened?" she asks quietly. Her voice is a husky whisper, laced with venom. She needs to know.
Kagami reads this, and her own tone is bitter when she speaks. "Shinobi on leave," she answers in a clipped, concise manner. "Out in the brothels for a good time. They were rowdy and drunk. There was gambling, an argument over a bet."
Ryuishi closes her eyes. "Did they mean to…?"
"No," the once-matron tells her on the graveyard of her life's work, "This is just collateral."
Cold, quiet rage blooms in her heart and pumps through her veins like poison. "Will there be compensation? Punishment?" she asks, fully knowing the answer to come.
"No," Kagami answers quietly.
This, she thinks, is it. This is the last straw, the one that will cut her forever. She has given this filthy, wrecked shithole of a village every fucking chance and it has spit on her for the last goddamned time.
Eleven years. Eleven fucking years she has lived this horror, this extravagant lie. She pretended that the nightmares never happened, that she was never attacked and assaulted when she was four. She told herself she couldn't feel a dead man's fingers on her thighs and his breath on her face. She would dream of it, screaming out for help with no one to answer her calls, that faces would laugh and tell her that they could make her feel good. She said that she could still trust strangers and that the world was okay, because he was deaddeaddead.
She told herself that she would accept the fact that a hundred, a fucking hundred children died for no goddamn reason at all. She chanted it over and over again as their accusing faces stared up at her. As their broken, mangled bodies dragged her down into hell, reminding her that she should have known, she should have saved them all. She represses her memories of the smell in the air, the memories of a little Hozuki boy with pure white hair and laughing purple eyes, children playing little games. If they do not exist, then they cannot die, she told herself, shoving it all down and locking it up.
She lied through her teeth and told herself that it could get better, that she could last through a war and be okay. That in the end she would be alright, but here she is looking at the corpse of this body's mother and she can't even cry. To her, Keiko has become another statistic, a civilian casualty in a shinobi struggle. The battlefield stalks her at night and claims her soul in the day. She hears the telltale crackle of fire when it is not there, and the whistling of kunai cutting the air when it does not exist. She shakes and dreams of waking up bathed in white hot fire.
She pretends that she does not feel guilt for outliving her squad, for deceiving her teammates. For lying to children's faces every day, because the boys she has come to love know nothing about her. She acts like she is not mourning the family and friends she knew for years before this. That she does not cry for a lifetime that existed before this.
This village has ruined her, warped her from the person she was, and it will pay dearly for creating such a monster. It will regret the day it forced her into its ranks and taught her how to kill. It will weep bitter tears and beg for mercy, and she will show them what they showed her. Kiri has no mercy.
This city will be nothing but ash by the time she is done. She will set it ablaze and salt the earth so that nothing can grow here ever again.
When she stands, her fists tremble with anger by her side. "Kagami," she says and her voice is so cold, so empty as she stands beside her birth giver's corpse.
The broken woman looks at her, the child she called lucky, as she transforms into something she has never seen before. The air around the child roils with something dangerous and deceptively calm, a placid surface that hides the currents below.
"Do you want vengeance?"
The woman, who is only alive due to her past skills as a kunoichi, looks, really looks at the child before her. She has known from the day she was born that this girl was not meant to be, that this child was strange and unnatural.
She has known her from the moment of her birth, but looking at her now, she doesn't think she has known anything at all.
The girl's hands are fisted and shaking by her side, her body tense and ready to burst. Chakra oozes from her pores, weeping a strange, unnatural hollowness that makes the old woman's skin break out into goosebumps. Her breathing is slow and tightly controlled, her chest heaving to a timed beat. Her hair moves like tentacles around her face and the very mist in the air shifts to answer her call.
Ah, but it is her eyes, her dark, endless eyes that key the tired woman in. There is no sorrow in them as she stands by her mother's corpse, only regret. They are empty and forever, spinning madly with the something she cannot name. In them she sees worlds she has never known, and the haunting emptiness of forever. She sees war and famine and destruction.
In her eyes, Kagami sees the promise of death.
Standing in the tattered robes she has worn for two long days, her hair grimy and unclean, the aged matron feels like a mortal before a spirit. She sees something she cannot comprehend, something that the living were not meant to know, a creature from a fairy tale thought only to exist in the stories of children and old monks.
Physically, Kagami is taller, but she feels like a speck of dust to the child, a fly caught in a spider's web. Her presence looms out unchained and swallows the world around them, devouring it all with a careless hunger.
Silently, the thing, (because it is not a girl, its eyes are emptyemptyempty) stretches out a hand.
"If you do everything I say, I will make them suffer."
The old woman thinks on it, the village which has forsaken her, the place that threw her away when the first wrinkles lined her face. The home that has taken everything from her. She thinks of the uncertain future promised by a spirit hiding in a child's body, the pain and the bloodshed she says she will rain down.
In the crumbled ruins of the her life's work, she reaches out her wrinkled hand and laces her fingers with the girl's, and she sells her soul for the very chance of revenge.
They leave the rubble and the corpses behind them, and Kagami packs up the last of her bags. Ryuishi leaves her with instructions on what to do. Discreetly, but quickly, the old matron will make rounds to every brothel owner she trusts and spread the word. She will be a messenger, a leader, and a hand of Ryuishi. The girl herself leaves for another destination.
Her mind is a jumbled mess and she can't think straight. Her personalities are mixing up, blending and obscuring. She can't remember who she is supposed to be anymore, what she is supposed to do. All she knows is the plans she has constructed, the web her spiders have woven, the girl she has raised.
She stalks the streets like a staggering drunk in her mind, weaving in and out of focus, her blurry vision fading and then sharpening. What she is going to do is traitorous, treasonous and foul. If anything goes wrong she will die, and those that follow her will die with her.
She doesn't care anymore.
(Maybe, this time, she can go back. She can go back to her own home and meet her family again. There will be cars and computers and arguments at midnight. Maybe it's better if she dies. She was never meant to be here.)
To any outward observer though, her steps are clean and precise. Her head is held high and she is keenly aware.
(This is a lie. She is a lie.)
She makes it to the trade district, sees a flash of feathers and torn robes. She breathes in deep, and whistles high and loud in the shadows of the village.
The previously empty spaces between warehouses fill with curious, mistrustful eyes. The ghosts of the mist peek out to gaze upon the one who has cried out their call.
"Bring me Hanako," she hisses at her spiders, "Tell her that her the one that knows you matter has come with a choice."
Sharp little eyes cut through the fog, disbelieving and awed. She hear the footfalls of runners being sent off, the quickened breathing of the nameless. A few even step out of the shadows to look at her, the one they have spoken of in myths. The one who started the tribe, the founder of the family. She is younger than some would expect, and she looks deceptively innocuous.
(She has always hidden in plain sight.)
This, they whisper, is the one. This is the creature who taught us how to find food and gather clean water. This being brought us together, showed us how to hide from prying eyes and dangerous hands, to come together as a tribe. She left us food in the alleyways, and gifts in the night.
Ryuishi stands before them, leaking that same uneasy aura. She has never been deaf or dumb. She knows what Hanako has made her to be, the stories the nameless tell at night. Ryuishi never left her children alone to face the world, because they are hers. She created them, pushed them together and molded their minds. She shoved past the front of useless gutter orphans and saw potential in the children, who were so desperate for love and affection. She saw the hungry need for acceptance when she was four years old, and she gave it to them. She planted seeds inside Hanako and the two, who planted seeds of their own. She fed them ideas that had no place in this world, thoughts of equality and human rights. She told them that they were enough, that being alive was enough, and she would accept them no matter what.
She spoon fed them things they needed to hear and manipulated their lives, until they took a shape that pleased her.
Here she stands, watching a crowd of ghosts gather before her, each infected with philosophies and ideas that are revolutionary in comparison to a caste system. She poisoned the eastern philosophies of feudal systems and clans with her own words, planted a seed and watered it so it grew and flowered. The product of years of plotting stands before her, wily and sly.
Her offspring have grown into the backbone of this village. She started with children, those who were younger and older than her, and over the years those children grew. The nameless became the dock workers, the restaurant chefs, the stall keepers and store owners. They were the drug dealers and the whores, the day laborers and the maids, the cobblers and the apprentices. She stole the entire generation of the lower class in secret and she made them hers.
A blonde head parts the crowd.
Hanako, her beautiful girl, stands before her almost a woman grown. She is older than her by years, and her beautiful eyes have turned into gems. Her body has welcomed the changes of adulthood gleefully, and though she is still thin, she is healthy as well. She is fierce and proud, and her wild hair is filled with braids and tokens.
"I knew it," she whispers, rushing up to the child she called teacher, "I knew yah'd keep your word!"
Then she is rushing forward, and Ryuishi has to fight down the urge to go on offensive. She throws her small arms wide open and accepts the embrace from her first student. Her arms are warm and tight, and Ryuishi shoves down the guilt for the gauntlet she has put this child through. Years of waiting were never easy, she knew from experience.
"I said I'd come back with a choice, didn't I?" she answers, slipping into her role.
The teenager leans back from the hug and determination sparkles in her eyes. Her hands tighten minutely on the eleven year old's shoulder, as if to make sure she is real. Sometimes, Hanako had doubted that the child she knew would ever come back. She thought her young teacher, the first one to show her love, would never come back. She had heard rumors of a dark haired girl's skill as a kunoichi, the way people called her a monster. She heard that only one girl had survived the slaughter of an entire group of children, that she had been paired with demons for a team. She had thought that she had been forsaken.
Then she heard the stories of gifts in the alleyways, she caught glimpses of the growing child on treks to other districts. She saw the same girl from the rumors interact with demons, she saw the way the monsters looked at her with affection and comfort.
She had shown them love too, Hanako had thought, and her heart had been put at ease.
Because no matter what people said, she still loved. Her teacher still cared for them, still left gifts at the open end of dirty dens. She loved so much that she gave it away to demons and monsters, to ninja and soldiers.
Hanako feels a hand, unfamiliar and callused, close around hers in a familiar way. She looks and sees the same dark, empty eyes and long lashes. The nostalgic warm smile and clean, dark hair. She squeezes it tight.
"Yah, ya did," answers the blond.
"You know what I am offering, then?"
Hanako feels unease, but looks out to the gathering crowd. The ones she hand picked, the people she has grown beside. They look at her with the same respect she gives them, they teach her the same way she teaches them. Her people. Her tribe.
They deserve better, she thinks. They deserve to be safe and warm, to have their voices heard when they cry out.
She looks back to the thing that looks so much like a little girl, the nameless spirit born from the mist. Her eyes are empty and her skin is cold, but her soft smile is so warm, so promising. The plan they began years ago is coming to a head, and Hanako knows she should be nervous and afraid. She knows the consequences if they fail, if it does not work. She has gone over it a million times, has tweaked here and improvised there. She knows what should happen better than almost anyone else. Only her teacher knows more.
"I do," she says.
"Know that there will be no consequences from me if you do not. Tell everyone that it is their free choice," her teacher says solemnly, "But let them know that the waiting is over, and that it will happen whether they join or not. Be warned, It will not be pretty."
Hanako holds the girl's gaze and breathes deep.
"Day after tomorrow, Hanako. We have one day to gather our things and say goodbye. If you and your tribe are in, I need to know by tonight."
Hanako's face is grim, but she nods. That is soon, but the boats and the bags and the bottles are ready. They have been ready for years now. The idea that the plan is happening, finally happening, with so little warning, well… It numbs her a bit.
"I will gather them all and offer the choice," she says quietly. She feels a cold hand squeeze her own again, and the comfort it offers is welcome.
"When you are ready, ask for Watanabe Ryuishi. I will see you tonight," she whispers in her ear, slipping from the blonde's grasp.
The teenager watches her go with the rest of the crowd, eyes all locked on the proud form of their benefactor. She has never forgotten what it was like to watch her easy, stalking gait, or the melancholy way it felt to see her go. As she turns to her people, she smiles.
She finally has a name to give her teacher.
Ryuishi's mind is a mess, and the soft rage that boils beneath her skin is heady and strong. Tonight she will have her answer and meet her army. Tomorrow they will lay the last traps.
On the third day, Kiri will burn.
Her spiders will escape to the four corners of this world, infect every shinobi nation and elemental country with her brand. They will sing the song of western ideals, and slowly, so slowly, things will change.
Her tribe will go out, and Kagami's whores will go with them. The will leave the trade gates in boats, bags carrying their whole lives on their backs. They will forage and thrive off the land like she has taught them, and they will travel. Her flowers will be caught up in the wind and wave, and their seeds will be planted in new lands in foreign soil. They with bloom like gutter weeds, and the ideas she has given them will burn through this world.
This is what she has been planning for her whole life. Everyday since she saw the power gap, the need for a social leader. Sneaking through mists and teaching the nameless to be ghosts so that they never caught the Kage's attention, Danzo's attention. When she sets this powder keg off it will burn so fast, so bright, that no one will be able to turn away and ignore.
Some people might have tried to change the characters, to befriend the villains and prevent deaths. Someone else may have spread the knowledge of the future around so that it would have to change a little bit. They might have informed their Kage, been taken for a tool.
Ryuishi took the sideline characters, the background world itself and set it to explode. She made faceless people stand up and rise, she gave them rights, the ability to say no. Leaders will look at street rats and gutter urchins and know that if they treat them wrong, if they deny them, they will rise up. They may die, but they will die tearing at the structure of the village and the social classes. The ninja will strike out in fear, but you can not kill an idea.
How much will they push the civilians around when they can embargo them? How will ninja villages survive without trade goods like metals, foods, textiles, woods, glass, herbs and liquors?
If her people die here, it still will not be over. The nameless have become merchants and traders already. She infected every orphan in every war torn villages she came across on mission with ideas. If they die, they become martyrs.
She is eleven years old, and has undermined the social order.
There is only one thing Ryuishi never, ever planned for, and that was to meet a blue boy with a smile full of knives. She never counted on the boy with spiky hair and dark brown eyes. They were variables she never saw.
She never counted on making friends with two boys who were born to die in canon. She never foresaw herself coming to depend on them so hard, to love them so very very much. For them, Ryuishi had stopped all of her plans for a long time, but not even they could make her stay here forever. This village is toxic, it is a poison, and she can no longer live with the way it is killing her.
They are her best friends. Her family. Her world, and she has to leave them behind.
She cannot do it without saying goodbye, without giving them one last gift.
She slowly, so very slowly, makes her way back to her bunk room in the barracks. She doesn't want to do this. She doesn't want to leave them behind in this cold world, to abandon them to their fates.
In her mind, part of her is screaming. They are her boys, her wonderful, psychotic, monstrous little boys. She wants them by her side forever and always. The part wants to smother them in warmth and love and kindness, to protect them forever and always, to take away the hurts they have seen. She wants to sleep in a big bed with them at her sides, her arms around them. She wants to see Kisame roll his eyes and finally fill out his tall body with muscle. She wants to play with his course blue hair and feed him his favorite foods every night. Ryuishi wants to watch as Zabuza finally takes the sword he was born to have and ascend to his rightful place. She wants to wrestle with him and tease him. She wants an atmosphere filled with snark and violence and family.
Another part of her knows that no matter how much she loves them, no matter how much she will yearn for them, they need to grow without her. They need to make themselves into the men she knows they can be, and for this to happen, she must leave. She must do the best for the tribe she has created and the civilians she has lead on, because she made them what they are and the responsibility is hers.
(This is another lie she tells herself, another excuse she forces down.)
She knows that after this, Kisame will hate her. He always hated liars and dishonesty, and to him, becoming a missing nin is the worst thing someone could do. It will be her ultimate betrayal to him, abandoning her unit.
Zabuza will stew quietly at the disobedience of his tool. He will be foul for weeks after she leaves, and spit on her name. He might not hate her, but he will always make her regret not following him.
She takes the stairs one step at a time, heaving herself up for to her room. She has some gifts to give, some time to spend before she disappears in chaos and destruction.
Ryuishi opens the door to her bunk and set to work, packing away the meager material possessions she has come to collect in this world, stowing away things for a journey that will likely last a very, very long time. She doesn't have her kimono from the Okiya, or the ribbons and perfumes that Keiko gave her.
(Keiko is dead, and she hadn't seen her in years. It aches.)
What she has is a weapons maintenance kit gifted to her by Kisame when he noticed that her blades were getting dull. A set of kunai she has yet to use from Zabuza, who was always hoping her aim would improve. She has the ingredients to their favorite foods, their preferred dried goods. She has a picture of them pinned to her wall, all nostalgic and tiny. It was not too long after they got recruited to the front lines, and she had forced the two in to take a picture at some podunk town in the middle of nowhere. They were glowering at her and she was smirking at the camera, pleased as punch. Right after that they had eaten most of her candy stash and refused to sleep next to her that night. They had glared at her from across the way in a show of pissed off male solidarity.
She carefully unpins it from the wall and cradles it in her hands.
These boys have written themselves across her life. They have watched her cry, watched her rage, watched her cuss and joke and plead. They have seen her brought canyon low and ride the mountainous heights.
She loves them, and she is going to betray them.
Her mind is a mess and the anger at the world still bubbles under her skin like molten stone in her veins. It mixes with absolute and complete sorrow. Together they form a passionate frustration. Frustration at the world, the government, the feudal system, at herself.
(She does not want to leave them.)
She hates who she is so much. She absolutely and completely loathes how easy this is, how simple it is for her to turn her back on them, to cast a whole world into civil war. Stinging, bitter tears leak from the corners of her eyes.
She didn't want to come here. She didn't want to go to war. She didn't want second puberty and its damn hormones or to make friends with children whose deaths she has read.
She wants her family. She wants hot coffee and her old house. She wants to introduce her boys to her best friend, and them show them the wonders of mexican food and comic books. She wants to play with her little sister, the brightest light in her life. She wants to rub it into her cousin's face like the petty child she is that she met actual, honest to god Naruto characters, then laugh as one bakes them delicious food and the other tells awful jokes.
Why can't she stop crying? She's supposed to be angry at them for what they represent. She's supposed to be happy that her plans are coming along.
All she feels is empty and cold, like the Void.
Ryuishi slides against the wall, staring at their dumb, scowling faces and weeps like the little girl she is. Her tears are hot and salty, and so, so sad.
She loves them, she thinks. She loves them all so fucking much. Her family, her friends, her world, her boys. Shelovesthemshelovesthemshelovesthem—
She cannot have them.
Her bag is by her side, ready to go. Her weapon is wrapped around her, set for action, but here she is, bawling her eyes out. She loved this village too, she thinks. She loved this world. It was her favorite, a long time ago, but now she loathes it so much.
She always knew that to really hate something, you had to love it once.
Her quiet, wet sobs shake her entire body and drive the air from her lungs. It's messy, and she looks horrible, but she is alone in her room and nobody will ever know. The picture she holds is carefully, slowly put in her pack with the portraits she painted so long ago, the ones that have faces like hers. In a weatherproof box in the bottom of her bag, she puts the pictures of her family together and locks them up tight.
"I will always love you," she whispers thickly. Her tongue is heavy in her mouth and her face red and wet.
"Always."
Zabuza is sharpening his sword when his tool walks in. She is quieter about it than usual, slipping through the seam of the open door and shutting it behind her. Her usually defiant face is hidden and turned at the floor, and she is fiddling with something in her hands. He does not falter, or even acknowledge her existence as she breathes deeply, the way she does when she is nervous before battle, or when she wakes up from a night terror. It is a calm, collected thing that goes by a rhythm he knows by heart.
Seven in, hold four, seven out.
He can count it like the fingers on his hands or the knives in his pouches. He knows her instinctively, the habits she does, the food she eats, the way she talks. She is his favorite tool.
Silently, and he is certain now that she is much too quiet, she glides to his side, where she belongs, still not showing her his face. It's beginning to really piss him off.
She keeps fiddling with that box in her hands, and watching him run the sharpening stone down his blade, lulling them into a quiet companionship. The air around her bubbles with a chaotic energy, and she seems to be content to just sit at his side for a while, absorbing his presence.
Not that he isn't pleased with the development, but there is still something… off about it.
Finally, after what seems like forever, the edge of his weapon is razor sharp. He wipes it down and slips in inside its sheath. She sits there, staring at the dirty hem of her pants the whole time. When he gets back and sits down on the stiff cushion of his bunk once more, she quietly slides the box over without a word. He grunts and accepts it. Finally, fealty from his tool. This is proper behavior.
Opening the small white square, he is confused to find a charm. A glittering gold medallion attached to a short but sturdy loop of chain, designed to dangle off the hilt of a blade. He picks it up and runs a thumb over its lustrous surface, taking in the engravings on it. A demon mask, a stylized shark, and a mermaid, all wrapped in chains. It is aesthetically pleasing, he thinks, but why did she get—?
"You can find me with it, just show it to the kids in the akasen," she says, and her voice causes him to look up. When he does, his blood boils.
Her eyes are red and puffy, swollen from tears. He can see where she washed her face because the skin is pink and soft against the tan.
"Who?" he demands, and she smiles the warmest, kindest smile he has ever seen cross her face. It isn't her usual smirk, or her bawdy grin. This isn't the fond one she gives him when he eats his food without complaints, or the feral upturn of lips she gets when they fight. It is so open, so different than what he knows.
"I'm taking care of it," she answers, and he feels like he is missing something, like he doesn't understand.
His heart most definitely does not skip a beat when she takes his hand in hers, and what is he missing? What is going on? Her hand is cold like usual, and her calluses are rough against his own, but her palms are so soft, her hands so small against his own.
"Zabuza," she says, and he doesn't know what her voice is doing. She looks so happy, so vulnerable and weak, but her husky voice is so empty and… and he doesn't know. He isn't good at these things. She's the one who's supposed to explain what people are doing and why they act weird. Is she broken again?
"Thanks for being my friend."
He grunts because he doesn't know what else to say.
"You should go for the Kubikiribocho soon. I think you could whip that old man's ass," she tells him, and what is the point of this? What is happening? He demands to know.
She squeezes his hand and stands up, her feet hitting the ground softly. Why did she give him a gift? Why is she here?
"Keep that gift, it's going to become pretty valuable one day," she says, looking at the door.
"Sure," he answers her, eyes following their joined hands. She turns to look at him, staring at his face for a long time. He doesn't get what is happening.
Slowly, so very slowly, she leans down from where she is standing and her free hand raises up to run through his hair. He stiffens under the contact, and most assuredly, in no way, does he blush. He would kill anyone who ever said so.
Then, most surprising of all, she kisses his forehead, and he thinks… he can't think. He is very confused, but his impassive, stoic face never shows it.
Her smile is so happy, so accepting as she watches him, her hand clasped tightly with his. "I love you," she tells him, and his mind blanks out.
He can feel his hand slip out of hers, and her soft lips leave his skin as she pulls away and turns toward the door again. He cannot see her face again, and his vision is full of her retreating form.
This feels big, like it's important. His instinct is telling him that something strange is going on, but he doesn't understand what it is or what to do about it. She pauses with her hand outstretched to turn the knob and leave.
"Neh, Zabuza?" she asks, and her tone is so quiet, he almost can't hear it.
"What?" he asks, and his voice is as gruff as ever.
"We'll meet down on that beach in south one day, right?"
He takes his time, and he thinks he is slowly beginning to understand the implications of her words and actions. He isn't sure, but he has a sinking suspicion. His brown eyes harden with determination and ferocity.
"I'll find you," he tells her, and it is something like a promise.
He doesn't see her smiling sadly at the door, or feel the shudder she holds back. He never notices her grasp turn white knuckled, or feel the panic that tells her to stay, just stay. Don't leave him. He never hears her gulping down a second wave of tears, battling back another breakdown.
What he does see is her cracking open the door and sliding through, quiet like a ghost.
There is a knock at the door as Hoshigaki Kisame is idly flipping a kunai through the air. He tosses it up from his laid position on the bed, watching it spin through the air lazily as he answers.
"Come in."
He catches the wrapped hilt in his hand, feels the weight of it in his palm, and with a flick of his wrist, embeds it it to the corner of his room, right on the seam. Six other kunai stick out in a straight line below it.
He turns to view the newcomer and is mildly surprised to see the girl of his team standing before his closed door, face turned downward, a long box in her hands. Usually she doesn't knock.
"Ryuishi?" he asks, leaning up from the pillows, bracing his weight on his elbows.
"I got you a present," she blurts out, stretching out the hand with the box.
He isn't stupid. Something is definitely wrong here. Her voice is broken and heavy and she still won't show him her face. What the hell happened? Did her and the other brat have a spat? Does she have a black eye again? Man, she really is a vain little thing. Still, he takes the box from her, wondering what the occasion is.
He looks at the plain white rectangle, then up to her. "What for?" He doesn't catch her bitter smile.
"I saw it and thought of you," she answers, and well. That's definitely unusual.
He shrugs it off and opens it carefully, wary of it exploding in his face. She hasn't pulled a prank yet, but she seems like the type.
Inside, surrounded by flimsy white tissue paper is something his is sure cost a lot of money. He doesn't know what to say, because it really isn't his style, but it is something. He lifts up the chain wrapped braided cord and admires the quality of the metal. It is sturdy, strong enough to withstand breakage in a fight and made from many little pieces that could be useful if there was ever a need. In the center, wrapped by sturdy wire, is a glittering blue opal that gleams like the light through water. All in all, it is very pretty, but he isn't a chick. Necklaces aren't really him.
"The cords can unravel and are sturdy enough to be lock-picks or a garrote," she says hurriedly, fiddling with her now empty hands. Her voice is shaking and he thinks she might be trembling a little. "If you don't like how it looks it's still really useful and—"
"Brat, what happened?" he demands, placing his gift to the side.
When she looks up at him, he is lost. Her face is red and there are fresh tears running down her cheeks, and yes she is definitely trembling.
(She will never see him again, she is going to miss him so so much. She loves him, she loves them both.)
Kisame is silent because usually she isn't like this. Sometimes she'll cry about stupid things, like the time she found out their ages. Even then she'll hide her face, but this, this is different. Her eyes are watery and filled with something he doesn't understand, and she looks at him like he might disappear at any second. She's smiling warm and open like it will cover up the fact that she is weeping.
He is lost.
"Can I… can I play with your hair?" she asks, and he flashes back to the first day he met her, a petulant child with an attitude bigger than the whole village. She looks bigger now, here in his room, but still so small.
He doesn't say a word, and she takes it for acquiescence, or maybe she knows he doesn't know what to say. She stands before him as he sits up and reaches out her arms up and out, stretching her cold fingers across his skin like they were kids again, only she is smiling and crying.
Tentative, shaking fingers brush across the the length of his cheeks, the skin of his temple, the expanse of his brow. Slowly, sadly, they make their way up to his hair and settle in his his hair gently running over his scalp like a breeze on his skin.
For a while, they just stay there like that. She runs her hands over his head and memorizes the features of his face with her fingertips, like she is going to forget what he looks like. For some reason, he just lets her.
They must seem like a moving painting, the fading light of evening filtering through his window and illuminating them both. The little girl caressing the monster's face, smiling as she weeps for something unknown.
He can feel how heavy the air is, how much something is off. There is a discordance in the world around him, a weight that he usually only feels before battle. Only, his blood is pumping like a raging river in his veins and he feels no need to destroy. He thinks it might be similar to the way his skin prickles before a hard storm, or the tightness in his chest he gets when he sees his unit hurt.
Something about it feels sacred.
"What happened?" he asks again, breaking the silence with a hushed whisper.
She shakes her head and that stupid, caring smile doesn't leave her face once.
"I love you," she tells him, and he is floored by the statement. It isn't a confession, the way he has seen some people get them on the streets. It isn't a joke or a jest. It is just a simple statement, three small words that he has never heard directed at him before. It is a declaration of loyalty, of compassion and care.
He thinks to all the wounds she has taken for him, the hurts she has nursed away from their sights. The way she stares up at the night sky and the grins she gives them as they joke over meals.
He feel the soft press of lips against his brow, the wet press of tear stained cheeks against his skin and warm arms wrapping tightly around him, grasping on like she is afraid to fall forever. The the cold arms loosen and she looks him over again, forcing that grin onto her face. He wants to tell her to stop, to knock it off. Where is the joke? What is happening?
"You can use my gift to find me, when you want to," she tells him, and why does he need to find her? She is right there. She'll always be right there.
"Just use the akasenko," she says, and she slips away, dancing like a leaf on a lake's surface.
He doesn't understand. Is it a riddle? He doesn't figure it out, and she slips out towards his door.
"I'm sorry," she whispers.
"Don't be," he tells her, because she shouldn't be sorry for whatever this is. It's okay if she is weird in front of him. She has always been weird. He accepted it the day they met.
She doesn't answer him this time, and he watches her leave with confusion in his head and dread in his heart.
He clutches the necklace tight.
Ryuishi hitches the bag high on her shoulder and looks out to a serious blond haired teenager who nods at her.
The tribe has accepted.
She casts one last look around her, absorbing the image of the village that had housed her for so long, lingering on the barracks to her back, to the boys she loves. She shoves down the regret, the remorse, the guilt and turns back around. She takes a step forward, and her feet carry her away.
There is a village to destroy, and nothing will stop what she has started.
AN: Well, there it is. The main point of Ryuishi's scheming, the height of her plans at the moment. Now, take a look back and read it in that new light, that our twisted little girl has been plotting the downfall of Kiri for a long, long time. Her head never got fixed, trauma after trauma only exasperated the problem and she is shattering to pieces with no one to catch her. Will it work out? Will she die? Will her actions change anything? I know it might seem sudden and OOC, but remember that Ryuishi has a lot of sides to her, and most of them are pretty fucked up.
Now we begin the real trials.
A shout out to all my readers, sorry for all the feels! Thank you for my followers, favoriters and Reviewers.
Blessings for my Beta who had to deal with this monsterous chapter and all the feels as well, we love you ENBI!