Published: 7/26/2015
Edited: 8/9/2015 to tweak the end of the fight a bit.
Age 13: Part 6
"You never told me about this..."
"You didn't need to know. Besides, if I had, I'm sure you would've have yanked me right back out of the Forces again. And it's not like we were on the best of speaking terms back then, either."
"I... you're right. It's just—it's not easy to swallow... that's all."
"Suzu, letter for you!"
Blinking awake, I sluggishly rolled out of my sleeping bag and shuffled over to Kushina, who was wide awake and beaming. She was quite an early riser; she already gotten up, bathed in the nearby river, and cooked breakfast. I, on the other hand, was my usual morning self—crazy-haired and drool-faced, that is.
"Here," she said, handing me a thin scroll.
"Thanks," I mumbled sleepily, tearing off the seal and rolling it open. Then I snapped out of my drowsiness. "Oh, it's from Tsubasa!"
"Your boyfriend?" Jiraiya piped up from his seat on a nearby stump. He had taken the dawn watch, so he'd been up for a few hours now as well. "He liiikes you," he teased, rolling his tongue like a dumb blue cat from another shounen anime.
"Well, ojisan did give him permission to flirt with me," I said thoughtfully, sitting down to peruse the missive.
"What?" Kushina gasped, darting over with a hopeful expression. She was, I had soon learned, a truly diehard romance fan. "Really?"
"What, are you being serious?" Jiraiya immediately looked skeptical. "That hardass Souhei did? I don't believe you."
"It's true," I assured him. "I'm a big girl now, so I'm free to date." Not that I hadn't been a "big girl" for a while now. And that he hadn't known it.
(Huh, I wonder how Jiraiya would react if he found out Uncle Souhei was from the same universe I was. Or if he found out there were several of us.)
"That's great!" Kushina squealed, hands on her cheeks. "You're almost the exact same age I was when I fell in love with Minato! Ooh, how exciting!"
"You're so noisy first thing in the morning, shut up," Tsunade groaned from across the clearing, pulling her blanket over her head. We had just left a huge gambling town last night, so she was expectedly hungover. Shizune was still snoozing away beside her; Kagemori was sleeping a couple feet away from our side of the campsite.
"Hmm, would I date Tsubasa?" I murmured to myself contemplatively. Well, he wasn't bad-looking, and he was nice enough, even if he did put his foot in his mouth on occasion. We shared a lot of common ground, too, and as Hideaki had pointed out at the meeting, we were matched perfectly in age. Something to consider, I guess.
"Hehe," Kushina giggled, seeing that I wasn't opposed. I couldn't help but smile at her, amused.
"Ah, must be nice to be young," Jiraiya sighed dramatically, looking at us both with an overly-wistful gaze. I rolled my eyes and turned my attention back to the letter.
Hi, Suzu!
Hope your mission is going well. You've been away for like two months now and it sucks, since we just got to meet each other, but I guess otherwise things have been okay. Make sure you come by Kyouya's as soon as you get back. I'm pestering him into letting me build a treehouse, and it would be awesome if you could come and make a secret hideout with me. I haven't had a secret treehouse hideout in forever.
Hideaki told me he would help out if I could convince Kyouya to let me use the big sugar maple near the back gate. I'm pretty excited, though I hope he won't bring Asshole Aoi along with him. You haven't met him, but let me tell you, he's a total prick. I can't imagine how those two are friends. Here there was a little squiggle of illegible words, too small to read, but judging by the upside-down exclamation point a few accent marks, he had written something unflattering in Spanish. Anyway, though, I told Nana and the boss and the others to start gathering up rugs and cushions. I'm telling you, this treehouse will be the best.
The letter went on to detail more treehouse ideas, and even included a surprisingly detailed and well-done sketch and floorplan, full of pointing arrows and dimensions.
"Wow, that's really impressive," Kushina remarked, looking over my shoulder at the drawing.
"It kind of is," I agreed, tilting my head and holding the scroll away at arm's length for a better look. "Looks like he's really serious about it. Hope Kyouya says yes."
Well, that's pretty much all that's new with me. I ran a couple of missions this week, but it was all boring perimeter patrol and gate duty. My teammates don't want to try to take missions out of the village, which is such a drag. Can't you tell me more about your mission? I know you said it was a secret, but at least tell me where you are! Are you still in Fire Country? Are you overseas?
Write me back soon!
Tsubasa
When I got to the end, a piece of paper fell out onto my lap. Curious, I picked it up and found it to be a flat origami rose, folded out of patterned paper.
"Oh my God, he's so cute!" Kushina squealed again. "Minato wasn't half as charming as this even when we had actually been dating!"
It was pretty well done; the corners were sharp, and the creases were crisp and clean. I noticed, though, that where the four points of the paper met in the middle, one of the edges was folded back very deliberately. Feeling a creeping suspicion come on, I waited until we were on the road again and everyone was lost in their own thoughts to take it out again and pull the flap back. The paper flower unfolded, revealing the message written in English inside.
Daisuke came to the last meeting looking for you.
Startled, I quickly refolded the paper and stuck it back into my pocket when Kushina glanced back at me. Misunderstanding me completely, she gave me a wink and an impish smile. I didn't protest at her knowing look; my thoughts were already leaping away in a completely different direction.
Daisuke Sarutobi was looking for me? He had come to a meeting for a second time after seven years of absence to see me again? My brow creased as a sudden sense of foreboding overcame me.
What did he want?
Furisode City, so named for the two curving rivers that flanked the city like a maiden's kimono sleeves, was where the trouble began. Oh, things had started ordinarily enough. We had found another inn to stay at, Kagemori had gone off to send a letter home to his aunt, and Kushina had stayed behind at the inn to write to Minato while Jiraiya and I went shopping for provisions. But then, while we had been in the process of sealing a bunch of jerky into scrolls, discussing whether or not we could bribe Tsunade to come back to the village, a hand seized the back of Jiraiya's collar.
"Wha—"
He fell over as he was yanked back, and we were both startled to see the Slug Sannin herself standing over us, arms akimbo. "What was that for?" the Toad Sage petulantly demanded, swinging himself back upright. I hastily shoved the rest of the food into my own scroll before gathering everything up and putting it into my pack.
"Come with me," she tersely said, and, giving no other explanation, began marching off back towards the inn. Exchanging looks, Jiraiya and I grabbed our stuff before following after her.
"So, what's the matter, Princess Tsunade?" Jiraiya asked once we had arrived back at our rooms, not sounding quite sardonic, but something close. Tsunade, ignoring him, put a hand into the fold of her kimono-style blouse and pulled out a piece of paper.
"Shizune's been kidnapped," she announced, slamming it onto the table. I jumped; Jiraiya's eyebrows shot up, and he reached forward to take the note. "She's being held ransom for my gambling debts. It's the same hitmen those moneylenders hired."
What? Well, that was certainly not something I had been expecting. I didn't think that this was anything that had happened in the original timeline, but what with the mess I'd been making of the canon, I guess I really shouldn't have been surprised.
Jiraiya, consummate ninja as he was, knew an opportunity when he saw one. "And what do you want us to do about it?" he asked shrewdly, setting the paper down and jumping on the chance for some leverage. Tsunade tsked and glared.
"I need you to help me get her back," she huffed, crossing her arms. "There are about eight of them, if they haven't changed up their group since we last encountered them. They weren't hard to defeat, but they're all skilled enough that I can't deal with so many of them in a hostage situation."
Meaning: I'll probably accidentally kill Shizune if I go all out of them.
"Besides, I've never smelled such an obvious trap in my life. The smarter choice is to have you go while I rescue her."
"So you want us to be bait, eh?" Jiraiya crossed his arms as well. "Sounds risky. What's in it for us?"
Tsunade scowled. For a moment, I wondered if she was just going to rescind her request and just go get Shizune herself—it probably wasn't beyond her ability, as skilled a shinobi as she was—but something seemed to make her err on the side of caution. Well, when all was said and done, Shizune probably was very important to her. Between being made to take a job she didn't want and risking the life of her assistant-student-travelling companion, she would probably rather just bite the bullet.
"I'll consider coming back to help with your fool's errand if you do," she muttered, sour. "Maybe. But don't get your hopes up."
"Hmm." The Toad Sage began tapping a finger on his bicep, looking thoughtful—too thoughtful, actually. Then he gave her a sharp grin. "You put up a good act, but I don't trust you. I know you'll run away the second the group is split. You and Shizune will obviously have a location you've both agreed to go to if you were to be split up, and she's a clever girl. If she hasn't escaped already and you're not actually trying to cop a con on us, she could easily slip away after we get her and meet you there."
"Tch." Tsunade looked away, and I was startled to realize that that was exactly what she had been planning to do, and I had fallen for it completely. I gave her an incredulous look. Wow, she really was a lot less principled than I had imagined.
"But it would be beastly of me to leave poor little Shizune out there to deal with the bad guys on her own," Jiraiya continued, smirking now, "so how about we do this. You stay here with someone from our group to watch you, and then we'll go break the ambush and see to the problem of these hitmen. And then you'll give coming back with us a bit more consideration."
"Bah," Tsunade spat, kicking back in her chair, "you're an unpleasant bastard as usual. Fine, do what you want. I'll stay here. Just go and get my damn assistant already."
"Excellent." He beamed. "Suzu, let's go get Kushina."
When we went to the next room over, Kushina was sitting at the desk and handing a scroll to Gamamitsu, a smile on her face. Saluting, the toad swallowed it before leaping off the desk and between my feet, jumping out the door and down the hall.
"Oh, you're back already?" she asked, surprised to see us.
"We've got a situation on our hands," Jiraiya shrugged in reply. "Shizune's been kidnapped."
"What?" Kushina jumped to her feet.
"I'll explain on the way there," the Sannin said. The he put his hands together, and in a puff a smoke, a shadow clone appeared beside him. It immediately henged, turning into…
Me. It was a flawless imitation; its hair, eyes, face and clothes matched mine perfectly. When I jumped back, it even grinned my exact same grin, right down the way the corners of my eyes crinkled.
"Don't do anything perverted while you're wearing my face," I immediately warned it. Then I paused. "Have you really been staring at me that much, if you can make a perfect clone like this?"
"Brat." Jiraiya brought his fist down on my head, though he didn't put any real force behind it. "Anyway, Tsunade is sure to try and knock you out and escape while you're watching her, so I've made sure this one can take a hit without dispersing. It'll go next door while you watch the roads. After she thinks you're down, she'll probably try escaping toward the outskirts of the city; your job is to make sure she doesn't get too far. Your wire techniques will probably come in handy for that, if you can get a hand on her."
"Eh?" I asked, eyes going wide. "I… are you sure that's a good idea? I'm not that great a fighter…"
"Your combat ability is pretty average for a chuunin," Jiraiya agreed rather insultingly, and I bristled. "But, before you get all angry, I'll tell you this: you run like a jounin, kid. You'll catch her when she goes. Don't worry."
Appeased, I crossed my arms and snapped my jaw shut. "Fine," I muttered, "I'll do it. Be careful, okay?" I added, looking over to Kushina.
"Always," she replied warmly, giving me a smile. Jiraiya promptly gave me an expectant look; I just raised an eyebrow at him.
"You should probably get going now, Pervy Sage," his clone said, crossing its arms in a way that was so unsettlingly me. "You'll have to leave now if you want to drag your fat behind over there before tomorrow morning."
For a moment, there was a beat of astonished silence. Then Kushina and I promptly burst out laughing; Jiraiya turned to look at it in disbelief.
"Hey, I'm just staying in character," the clone shrugged. "It's your own fault you're a masochist, anyway."
"I don't believe this," Jiraiya muttered, slapping a hand over his face.
No more than fifteen minutes after that lighthearted exchange, I was fighting for my life. My life and Tsunade's, in fact. How had things managed to escalate so much in a half of a half of an hour? The explanation is both simple and not.
Kagemori Aiba.
As Jiraiya had predicted, Tsunade did indeed knock out the clone and try to skip town. She noticed that I was on her tail halfway out, though, and an epic chase ensued. Things would have been sticky had I not been a chakra sensor; I would have lost her the moment she broke my line of sight. But luckily for me, I was a sensor, and though I had to maintain a five-minute sprint at my top chakra-enhanced speed to catch her, at the end of the stretch I finally managed to barrel right into her, stopping her in her tracks.
"Ugh… you really don't give up, do you?" Tsunade groaned when we rolled to a stop. I ended up half-flopped over her stomach, but I was so busy gasping and sucking in air as fast my lungs allowed that I could hardly speak, let alone move. Sure, I maybe I did run like a jounin… but so did she. In fact, she was a jounin. A jounin and beyond.
"Why are you doing this?" I panted once I'd regained enough of my breath to do so, crawling off of her. Tsunade grimaced and sat up, batting some dirt off her sleeve. "Surely coming back to perform a single surgery isn't that bad. And it's not like we're conscripting you or anything. We did say we were going to pay you."
"You wouldn't understand, kid," she told me, standing up and straightening her clothes out. "Besides, it would take a hefty sum of money to make me set foot back in that place again."
She turned and made to leave, but I launched forward and grabbed her leg. She immediately tried to kick me off, but I clung onto her like a iron-clawed koala. The resulting spectacle must have looked quite humorous, what with a grown woman trying to shake a thirteen-year-old off her leg.
"I'm not letting go," I said stubbornly, locking my arms. "No one else can help Rin but you."
"Listen, brat, sometimes people are just meant to die," Tsunade growled, finally grabbing me by the collar and yanking me off. "Even if I save that Rin girl's life, do you know how much she's going to suffer when you undo that seal? You don't just take a one-hit kill assassination technique to the chest and walk away without consequences. She'll have to endure countless painful physical therapy sessions and she'll probably need assisted respiration for weeks until her lungs have fully healed. That means pipes and tubes stuck into her all over, eating through a plastic straw, and being confined to a single hospital room for months on end. Let go of her before you do something unsightly."
I would have responded to that, but then I saw the person sneaking up behind her. Tsunade, seeing my eyes widen, whirled around just in time to get splashed with a face-full of blood.
Given for the fact that had just been giving me an incredibly jaded and cynical speech, the scream she let out right then sounded like it came from a different person. But it was a terrifying one—and a terrified one. I darted forward, throwing myself in front of her.
"Misuzu-san," Kagemori murmured, looking down at me as he lowered his arm. His right hand light up with a green glow, and he held it over the cut on his wrist until it had healed completely. No longer dressed like a civilian, he was wearing a dark blue shirt and black pants, its ends held down by bandage wrappings. His zouri had been traded for the iconic ninja sandals, and there was a Konoha hitae-ate tied around his head. A long slash had been carved through the leaf's center.
Missing-nin.
Kagemori was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Will you move aside, Misuzu-san? I have no quarrel with you. I am sorry about your friend Rin, but my business with Lady Tsunade must be attended to."
So he knew about Rin? I slowly sank into one of Hurricane Gale's defensive forms, pushing a foot out behind me while positioning one arm in front of me. He had been eavesdropping, then. Or maybe he'd heard us talking on the road. He had been gathering intel this whole time, hadn't he?
Damn. We've been sloppy.
"Will you move aside?" he repeated, gaze darkening. Behind me, Tsunade was whimpering, shaking and staring blankly down at her hands. The sun was still high in the sky, and I could hear birds chirping somewhere off to my left. A sweep with chakra sense told me that no one else was around—he'd come alone.
"I will not," I said.
There was a moment of absolute stillness. Then we sprang into motion, and everything blurred as we launched straight into a taijutsu bout. I kicked, aiming a foot for his ribs; when he deflected, I spun to keep my momentum while bending my other knee, dropping down and trying to uproot his stance with a sweeping kick. He avoided me by jumping up into air, and in the two-second gap where I had to recover my balance, he threw a fist toward my face.
Because I lacked upper body strength, I disliked using blocks. Unfortunately for me, though, I had neither the time nor the positioning to dodge, so I was forced to raise my arms while still half-crouched on the ground. I was immediately pushed onto my back by the force of his strike, so I quickly brought my knee up to prevent him from locking me on the ground. Very much wanting to avoid a hit to the groin, Kagemori threw out his off hand and cartwheeled over me. Straightaway, I put my palms on the grass and kicked myself upwards with my other leg, flipping over my head in an attempt to clip him with my heel. Unfortunately, he evaded me, and I let myself fall backward to right myself before he could strike again.
Just as I had situated myself back into a proper stance, my opponent launched a vicious series of punches at me. As expected of a male teen who was older and taller than me, his strength was significant; I was instantly on the defensive, ducking and dodging and taking several steps backwards.
Recognizing that I was being herded, I swept his fist over my head and disengaged, stepping around his back to buy time. As he swiveled around, we pivoted in a half-circle back to back, and I took the few precious seconds to mold my chakra. Sensing that I was shifting to ninjutsu, he immediately drew away and spat a volley of thin needles at me. I began rushing through hand seals.
"Fuuton: Kami Oroshi!" I shouted, thrusting my hands out kamehameha style and letting a blast of wind scatter them. Such needles were almost always poisoned, and I did not want to risk even getting grazed by them. Better to block these than dodge.
Using the cover his projectiles had given him, Kagemori drew two kunai in a reverse-grip and dashed forward, veering left to avoid the blast of wind. Tsk, he knew I wanted to avoid short-range combat, so he was intent on sticking as close to me as possible. I had to make him keep his distance somehow.
Just before he reached me, I clapped my hands together and let wire explode outwards into his face. The instant each strand lit up with chakra, he aborted his charge and circled back, trying to to find an opening at my rear. I circled with him, throwing my arms out at my sides and letting the wires spread out around me.
"They do call you Bloody Threads, don't they?" Kagemori asked, smiling grimly. I narrowed my eyes at him. What was his game, opening dialogue like this? Did he want to stall, or was he trying to distract me? Surreptitiously, I laid a touch seal in the grass with my foot.
"They do," I replied, taking up an offensive stance this time, gauging his face to see if he had noticed. It seemed he hadn't. "Do you want to see why?"
Kagemori tried a few tentative approaches, but soon learned that the deeper he pushed my defenses, the deeper the cuts the wires gave him. Though they had next to no mass, they were painstakingly sharp, so they needed very little force to slice through flesh. He disengaged again, knowing that any further attempts at taijutsu would grate him like cheese.
And then, without warning, he launched his needles at me again. Completely by reaction, I snapped off a Great Breakthrough; then, as my wires were swept up with the wind and drawn completely to my front, I realized my mistake.
Popping away in a substitution, Kagemori's chakra signature jumped from across the clearing to right at my back. Whirling around, I realized that he had switched with a fallen bough at the edge of the treeline and shunshin-ed forward to reach me.
"Shit!" I swore, flipping a kunai out of my sleeve and swiping my arm back, hoping I would catch him in time. I didn't; there was a little prick at the back of my neck, like an insect's bite, and then suddenly the feeling of cold metal sinking into my skin. Eyes going wide, I launched myself away at once, regardless of the fact that I was bringing the fight back toward the still-incapacitated Tsunade. As I went, I saw what was in Kagemori's hand.
It was not a senbon, as I had feared, but a syringe.
"What is it?" I instantly demanded, stomach sinking in dread. My hand flew to the back of my neck, and I wondered if I ought to cut over the site and try to bleed it out. But—no, it had entered though an injection, not a graze, and I did not want to risk opening a wound on my own neck now that there was an unknown chemical agent in my system. There were plenty of fast-acting poisons that targeted motor control, and one slip would mean slitting my own throat. Besides, Tsunade was right behind me. More blood would definitely not help her condition.
"Poison," Kagemori replied, shrugging nonchalantly. "What else?"
"Bastard," I snarled, even as a strange haziness began settling over me. Soon it felt like the ground was lurching from side to side, and I found myself stumbling.
Oh, Lord. If it was the same kind of poison most ninja put on their blades, then I was done for. That stuff was often lethal enough just by being smeared on the surface of a weapon; I had just taken a whole syringe worth of something.
"Don't panic too much," he said, relaxing a bit now that I was swaying back and forth and trying to keep my balance. "The disorientation is more a side effect—the real killing mechanism of that specific poison is the anticoagulant. If you're careful not to cut or bruise yourself, you won't bleed to death."
Carrying a syringe of an anticoagulant while going after a hemophobiac… just then, I got a pretty good idea of what his intentions for Tsunade were.
"I've been obsessed with poisons since I was a child, you know," he told me softly, slowly walking forward now. "Back in the Second War, because Tsunade-sama was around, they thought it would be safe to send my father's regiment to Suna. If they used their poisons, the Slug Princess could just devise an antidote."
Slowly, Tsunade looked up. She was still shaking violently, but distantly, I think, she was registering his words.
"But Tsunade-sama didn't deploy with them, like she had been intended to," Kagemori continued. "She stayed behind in the village… because her lover had been killed. While she had been at home weeping over the loss of a man she hadn't even married, the entirety of my father's team choked on Suna's poison and then died throwing up blood. Of course, I had just been born at the time, so I wouldn't have known. My sister did, though."
Here it was… the evil villain monologue. As I braced myself on my knees and fought to steady my center of gravity, he came to a stop in front of me.
"But she's dead now, too. She became a medic-nin and she had been determined to be the best, so she could stop deaths like Dad's from happening again. But when she had been studying for the Tier 1 qualifications, she had come across the records Tsunade-sama had set during testing," he told me. "It would have been enough just for her to pass… but she wanted to break those records no matter what. So she studied and practiced and studied more. And then, on the day of the test… she couldn't break a single one."
He smiled bitterly. "I found her hanging from her bedroom ceiling the next morning."
Ah… it made sense. Tsunade seemed to be the common factor in these deaths, even if there was no logical way of holding her responsible. But grief, I knew, did not yield to logic, and scapegoating was a common coping mechanism.
"So you… became a missing-nin," I panted, squeezing my eyes shut as a wave of dizziness crashed over to me. "...lied to us, said you weren't a ninja… but you were waiting for an opportunity… this whole time."
"I thought I might get my chance when the hitmen came the first time, but Lady Tsunade is far too good a fighter to be taken down by the likes of them," he admitted. "I'm only a chuunin, anyway. There's no way I could take a Sannin in a fight. So I followed along after her under the pretense of wanting to become her student, just until I could find a weakness to exploit. And when she fought with Kushina-san, I found it."
And so he had. The hemophobia had made an appearance towards the end of that fight. And if he had been eavesdropping at our doors like I suspected he had, he had probably heard Jiraiya mention it when he had been explaining her past, too.
"And Shizune's kidnapping was the perfect opportunity." I smiled mirthlessly. "You weren't off mailing your aunt at all, were you? You were talking to someone... someones else."
"You're right," Kagemori confirmed. "I was."
For a moment, we stayed like that, staring at each other and digesting the situation. Then he drew his kunai again and made to push me aside. Rallying, I steadied myself as best as I could and refused to move, lifting my own knife as I put a hand on his arm and shoved him back. It was a weak shove, but he paused all the same.
"You're still going to fight me?" he asked incredulously. "If you keep this up, you're going to die, Misuzu-san. Move."
"I will not," I echoed myself, breathing heavily but still managing a wry quirk of the lips. "I won't just stand here… and watch you murder one of Konoha's Sannin. Maybe sometimes… people are meant to die. But she's not." My gaze hardened. "Not... not here. Not today. Perhaps I am… but not her."
A flash of anger darted across Kagemori's face, and then suddenly he was drawing his fist back and punching me across the face. The metal loop holding his gauntlet to his middle finger opened up a nice, sizeable gash on my forehead, and then suddenly blood was spilling into my eyes.
Oh, boy. Now it's starting.
As I went down, I activated the seal I had placed on his arm and yanked him down with me, pulling on the wire between us. Then we were wrestling on the grass, rolling away from Tsunade and trying to slash at each other with our kunai. He cut himself free of the steel threads soon enough, though, and made to stab at my neck; I just barely managed to jerk my head away, though ended up he slicing through my ponytail holder and taking a sizable lock of my hair off in the process. Well, that was what I got for having a side-ponytail instead of a regular one.
We struggled a bit longer, but under the influence of drugs as I was, it wasn't long before he got me. Finally, he managed to plunge his kunai in the soft spot just below my ribcage. I let out a strangled yell, muscles automatically seizing up in pain.
"I really didn't want to kill you," Kagemori panted, rolling off of me. "I really didn't, Misuzu-san."
As he looked down at me, I found myself believing it. There was true regret in his eyes, even if it was tempered with implacable resolve. He hadn't wanted to kill me… but he had done to get his revenge. Vaguely, I wondered if, had things turned out differently, this person could have been my comrade, or my ally, or my friend.
But that was neither here nor there; what was now was the fact that he was about to end my life.
"I have no interest in making you suffer," he murmured, looking away. "...For what it's worth, I'm sorry."
As he drew himself upright and raised his arm, I realized three things: one, that he was about to deliver a coup de grace and finish me off for good. Two, that I still had a bit of chakra molded. And three, he was on top of the touch seal I had planted earlier.
With the last bits of my remaining strength, I activated the seal and pulled the steel threads back as taut as I was able. The wires wrapped around his legs; I watched with grim triumph as they sliced right through his ankles. Kagemori suddenly found himself writhing on the ground next to me, feet literally taken out from under him.
I wondered if that would keep him from killing me. He certainly wouldn't be walking any time soon, but we were still within arm's reach of each other. Of course, at this point it didn't make a difference; I had already been dealt a fatal blow. It was over.
I struggled to stay awake so I could see myself to the end of life in consciousness, but it was a futile effort.
I felt a weight on my chest, and I vaguely had the thought that someone was listening for my heartbeat. After a moment, evidently, they found it; a rough, calloused hand began persistently slapping me on the cheek.
"Hey. Hey, wake up, kiddo. Open your eyes for me. Come on."
"Nghh…" I groaned, blearily prying my eyelids back for the sake of that voice. Someone had wiped the blood away, it seemed, because the image of Jiraiya's face appeared in my swimming line of sight relatively unmarred.
"Good," he said, seeing my eyes crack open. "Don't worry, we've got you," he assured me, grinning a tight grin that looked a little bit like a lie. "Kushina's taking care of that Aiba kid. I knew I should have done something about him…"
(Later on, Jiraiya would tell me that he had had a sneaking a suspicion he knew the name Aiba. And as it turned out, he did: his spy network had sent him an update on missing-nin in the area when we'd first started the mission. He'd glanced over it two months ago.)
"Mmm," I muttered, trying to make a noise of affirmation to show that I was awake. But then again, I wasn't really awake. Or at least, I didn't feel like it.
The world was starting to look awfully gray…
"Kid, don't make me kiss you," Jiraiya warned, thumping me on the chest. Belatedly, realized that I had stopped breathing for a second there, and I forced myself to take a big gulp of air. "There we go. You keep doing that, okay? I know you're not feeling too hot right now, but don't stop, no matter what, got it?"
"Yuh," I agreed, incoherently.
As he set to trying to staunch my blood flow, Jiraiya quickly explained to me that the rescue had gone off fine, though Shizune had taken a hard blow to the head and was currently out for the count. Kushina was beating the shit out of Kagemori even though I had already chopped off his feet, and Tsunade… well, she was about as well as could be expected.
"Damn it, why won't this stop?" he cursed to himself under his breath; no matter what he did, it seemed, my wound just kept leaking. Even though he had been pressing his wadded-up haori over my side near two minutes now, the bleeding hadn't stemmed at all. Normally, I think the pressure he was putting down on the injury would have hurt like a bitch, but I was far too distracted by the sensation that my head was no longer attached to my body. For a second, I had the urge to say anticoa-something at him, but the thought drifted away before I could grasp it.
"Don't sleep," Jiraiya ordered sharply, grasping the skin of my cheek between his fingers and pulling on it, hard. The sting of it brought me back from the daze I had been drifting off into. "I'm warning you, if you sleep now, you will die."
Well, it was good of him to warn me, and I did manage to keep my eyes open for another minute or so, but after that it was just too hard. I tried, really, I did, but the human body has limits, and I had just about hit mine. It wasn't long before Jiraiya seemed to realize that I had reached the end of my rope; the look that formed on his face was none too good.
A grave silence settled between us. Things had gone off-color again, and there was black creeping around the edges of my vision. With distant alarm, I wondered if I ought to offer my last words now.
"Don't come over here, Tsunade," Jiraiya suddenly said. He was looking over his shoulder now. "No, it's not a good idea. It's looking pretty grim. You don't want to—"
"Just move, Jiraiya." Suddenly a hand was shoving him aside, and with my grayscale vision, I saw Tsunade's face appear at my side. She blanched when she looked down at my bare stomach—my flak jacket had long since been tossed aside, and my shirt had a great gaping hole in it—but to my wonder, she didn't scream. She didn't freeze up, either. She trembled and shook like she was having her own personal earthquake, but she didn't look away.
She began making hand seals.
My curiosity brought on a brief moment of clarity. Suddenly my head was whirring with questions—was she going to heal me? Had Kagemori hurt her at all? Was she over her hemophobia all of a sudden? How? But perhaps most urgently—
"Why?" I rasped, weakly lifting my head to look at her.
"Don't try to talk," she muttered, refusing to meet my gaze. Instead, she stared determinedly down at her green-glowing hands. "...Save your strength."
Strength… as my head thumped back onto the ground and my thoughts descended into fog again, I suddenly found that I had very little of it left.
A/N: Surprise! Triple update, this time with an extra-long chapter to boot! In fact, since I didn't want to cliffhanger you guys at that second to last scene break, I ended up writing the longest chapter of Glory to date. You can thank me by giving me all of your reviews, hm? :3
The inspiration was really flowing this weekend. Well, the fact that we're approaching a timeskip is also probably giving me a lot of excitement and motivation. I'd say that after finishing up Tsunade Retrieval, there's one more plot point to cover before we jump forward a few years. And then, after that, there's a little bit to cover we before hit the really big timeskip, which is where—in my opinion—the fun really begins. Akihiko is coming home soon, guys! Well, sort of. Ish. Okay, not really, but I'll be able to post the Sidestory chapters about him that I've been saving up. That has to count for something, right? And then when we're finished with the actual story, I'll be able to write the sequel.
(Yes, there is a sequel. It's already been outlined since it's so short—it's only a week long, actually! But no spoilers. /troll)
Oh, by the way, did I mention yet that I posted a Kakashi POV sidestory? I don't think I did. Well, now you know, so go check that out too.
Anyway, that's probably it for the Great Weekend Update Binge of 2015. Wow, I don't know where I got the energy from, but I just pounded out about 16,000+ words over the course of about two and a half days. I don't expect this will be very common once school starts again...
Anyway, enjoy!
Cheers,
Eiruiel
