Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I do not own Naruto or any of its affiliations…I am merely borrowing its characters and settings to indulge my own fantasies and then share said fantasies with other people who equally do not own Naruto. I am not making any profit off this.
O O O
How does it feel to be loved?
O O O
Intangible things were not of his favour.
Sasori didn't particularly care for or pursue that which had an abysmal longevity. It was too wasteful to give in too long to things like abstractions, or fancy, emotions. There was noting sensible in doing so. He preferred hard quantities, fixed qualities – those sorts of reliable things. But his preference did not entirely carry over to actuality, despite his efforts. He required partnerships, he felt annoyance, impatience, other nugatory and unavoidable fluctuations – as he liked to think of them.
Eyeing the bits of his prized possession littering the ground around the Leaf kunoichi, he was experiencing an even more particular type of fluctuation. He had felt this sort of thing before, hadn't he? Years ago but he recalled those at-odds sensations; elation so filling he wept, pressure on an ache until it felt good, eyes that burned when wet with tears, pleasure so intense it was painful.
In that moment he was so angry he was excited, which he tempered for his outward appearance, but his mind was racing. That slight girl, a no-name thing, standing over the ruptured mess of his most feared, most powerful tool – a despicable sight he found beautiful.
And beauty, really, when properly preserved, endured. Unblemished and outside of time.
"I'll be your puppet," she said.
Sasori smiled, perhaps she agreed with him.
The kunoichi helped Chiyo to her feet and they were leaning together to conspire their strategy, and then the kunoichi was squaring her shoulders as she faced him. Eliminating Chiyo's famous ten had taken more effort than he would have liked, but this was a Round Two for which he had waited years.
"Ready, are we?" He thought his voice was betraying some of his anticipation, and he shed his cloak with a smirk. Calling to her, "we're a proper pair of shinobi, then, the both of us acting as tools. I, too, will be the puppet in this fight."
He was one to appreciate a piece up close.
The girl moved well, comfortably dodging the swing of his blades and the blasts of his jutsu. She hadn't the need to delay to figure out his tactics due to Chiyo's expertise, and he found they circled one another and evaded hits as if they were executing a familiar dance. Avoid the poisoned traps, avoid her damning fists, and they moved with a tense barrier between their bodies, each pushing in on the other.
He would send parts of puppets to her and she would dangle out of their reach, cutting off his strings with her own scalpel of chakra. Clever. Tried to attach his own strings and they would slip off Chiyo's armoured hold on her.
"How is it, girl?" He asked, recovering from a wide punch to slip beneath her high swiping kick. Her expression showed her confusion and Sasori clarified, "giving in to the release of another's control?"
She frowned.
"You take to it," he told her. It was erring reason to get so near to the kunoichi physically, but he liked not having to raise his voice. Exhausting and exhilarating as they stirred around one another. He was curious and pleased. "No jerking resistance, you've simply a fluid acquiescence about you, child."
"Stop that." Her foot hit the ground and the earth was roiling.
He lifted himself above the resulting spikes and valleys with the aid of the metal coil from within his torso cavity, not suffering any damage. "What should I stop?"
"Calling me a child."
"You're how old?" He asked, his glance purveying her body.
"Well enough beyond being a child," she replied.
"Oh? So we're alike in that way." Sasori produced a sound like laughter, short and not entirely pleasant. He liked her little looks of bewilderment. "Neither of us look our true age."
His comment tripped something within the girl that made her falter. An opening and Sasori was quick to strike for his grandmother, sending the end of his coil straight through the girl to whip across Chiyo's throat. The old woman deflected the strike to avoid instant death, but he managed to draw blood and poison her.
"Unlike that one," he murmured and ignored his grandmother's crowing as she fell and then went quiet.
Sasori pulled back on the coil, spread wide the claws at its end so that it caught at the Leaf kunoichi's back rather than slide out of her. Her body remained upright, but she was unable to keep from stumbling forward with the impact.
"Are you healing yourself? Don't bother. The metal is covered in –"
"Poison. It's in my blood already."
"Are you going to extract it by hand, little medic?" Or was she merely halting the bleeding? There was a hole with a foreign body an inch round through her middle, he wanted to tell her no amount of emergency treatment would help that injury.
After a moment her hands stilled and fell to her sides from the paralysis and she went entirely slack. A light sheen of sweat on her skin and she was breathing harder. He had to prop her up with the coil.
"You didn't answer my question before. How was it, being on the end of Chiyo's strings? What was it like?"
"You want to compare our experiences as puppets?" A dry tone. He narrowed his eyes until she relented. A bend in the metal pushed her chin up so she was looking at him when she spoke. "It was like a spider's web wrapped around me."
She twitched when he made a thoughtful hum, probably trying to raise her eyebrow.
"Well," he mused, "compare that spider's plucking with being under my guidance."
He smiled, observing the limits of limber human muscles under his ministrations. The stretch and reach, the turn and arch. As she mimed a fight against an invisible opponent, Sasori wondered again, "why is it you look so young, kunoichi?"
Because she did. Her skin, her muscles, her chest, her hips – all holding onto a certain vitality that was usually visibly churning at this age.
"You first."
"It's as Chiyo intimated. I was once a young man who wished to be a puppet. Now I'm neither puppet nor man."
Others might have asked, 'why do such a thing?'
"Tried to replace your decaying body with something inorganic?" She said as Sasori spun her with all the grace of a seasoned performer of the stage. Her voice was dissonant to her presentation, but he listened as carefully as he watched. She said, thoughtful and sympathetic, "I went the opposite route."
Sasori slowed the pulling of his strings.
"Have you ever heard that cells only replicate so many times before they die? That every time a body heals, our lives shorten?"
He nodded, feeling a little stiff as he did so.
"Someone once told me that to avoid such a consequence he found spare material from other bodies. You mentioned that person yourself earlier, I'm sure you can guess to whom I'm referring."
She stopped her steps altogether, faced fully to him.
"I'm not saying I took spare material from other people," she amended. "I mean, why would I? I've got the material inside me already to make new cells."
"To do something like that must take an exorbitant amount of chakra," he said, and the statement was wary.
"Yes, exactly. Of course, I don't naturally have the reserve of chakra to power a technique like that. Instead, I take –"
"From external chakra sources." He filled in, understanding something terrible.
"It was almost an accident the first time I tried, but then I spent a year in the forest with Tsunade-sama's summons, Katsuyu, figuring how to do it most efficiently."
"Your perception and manipulation of chakra must be excellent." Prodigious, even.
"It's better than yours," and the kunoichi gave him a small smile as he dropped his arms.
"The poison..."
She crushed the metal coil in one hand and used the other to yank the severed end through her back.
"...and your arm..." he said, and Sasori felt a contortion of his wooden expression. His legs buckled, and he dropped to one knee. "You weren't supposed to be capable of handseals."
"I made an antidote using the poison sample I took from Kankurou. And, well, about my arm," tossing the weapon's head to the ground, she shrugged. A hand went to the clasp at the top of her vest, pulled down to reveal a seal between her collarbones hidden under the fabric. A small diamond in purple ink settled between her collar bones. "I healed that when I got this."
"You learned that technique from Tsunade-hime..."
"More or less."
"And my own chakra?" Sasori found himself propped awkwardly against an upturned rock slab.
"I've been siphoning it since I got here, even sending out my own chakra to shadow yours."
"So when you were under my control just now –"
"Made it that much easier for me, yes." Her boots scratched dirt and rocks together under her steps as she approached him.
"And Chiyo..?"
"Another antidote."
He would have looked to confirm, but the woman was long out of sight from the debris. Sasori was silent, focused inward on the minuscule amount of gathered chakra in his chest. Finally, "how did you understand the capsule's structure?"
"Extrapolation, mostly. It's similar in form and function to Katsuyu's chakra system."
"What is your verdict then?" Sasori asked after another pause.
The kunoichi was crouched next to him, looking over the seal on his chest. Not following, "how do you mean?"
"Under my strings...how did it compare?" Anger and awe, disappointment and pride. "Did I get under your skin, kunoichi? Fill in those tiny places?"
Her eyes were elsewhere and there was colour to her cheeks, but she countered with some asperity, "pulsing through my system in the way your poison didn't?"
He might have said she reminded him of his partners, former and present, with her quips and her pursuits. Might have said too much about how very alike she was to him. Did they each not wish to break boundaries? Tread the forbidden darkness to grasp the light?
And then she said something ridiculous.
"A puppet amongst other puppets is with proper company," she thought aloud. "Surrounded by puppets as a man...that must have been very lonely, if anything."
Sasori watched her from the corner of his eye. "How absurd."
"You made those two puppets in likeness of your parents, didn't you? Trying to make yourself into a puppet, did you mean to join them? The three of you, puppets and a complete family again."
He despised the steadiness of her voice alongside such a – such a whimsical, flighty observation. Arrogance and naivety, dreams of a child. Her pointless conjecturing, fallible presumptions, he truly loathed it. Hated it enough to rouse his fingers into motion, to strangle the words from her lips.
His index finger missed her mouth and the skin of her cheek barely indented with the weight of his touch. Sasori watched the motion as the girl watched him. Infuriating how she was not at all concerned by his intrusion.
He said, still focused on his hand, "the last person who defeated me in battle, I went to touch her skin and it turned beneath my fingers to a paper flower. I doubt...I doubted it truly happened. ...It wasn't real."
Pointless. Why would he share that memory? Tell her of a connection that never was...
"And what about now?"
Sasori should have felt more hollow than he did, with the dearth of chakra. No energy remaining to keep his arm aloft and his fingers curled inward, drifted down her chin. She caught his wrist there and she waited for his answer. Her eyes were a soft, shadowed green. He thought of spring leaves waiting for the sunrise.
Dark around him.
"I think... it might have been."
O O O