Lightning Country

He was pretending to be a Nara tonight, for the shadows were his friends. The shadows had been his friend for a very long time now – perhaps his only friend; Itachi wasn't going to be stupid enough to consider anyone in the Akatsuki trustworthy enough for any of that. Yugito Nii was a dangerous individual, famous among her peers from Kumogakure for a reason; the best way they could think of to minimize losses would be through stealth.

Now, why the hell Pein had chosen Deidara to go on this mission with them even after knowing that fact was a mystery to Itachi, but if this failed then he wasn't complaining. As long as he didn't die before his time as a result. The state of his lungs was limited as it was. Chakra could only sustain him for so long. It had kept back the worst of the symptoms for most of his life, while he was growing up and training, but it wouldn't any longer. Every time he coughed, he could feel more and more mucus gathering in his air passageways.

Perhaps Pein was sending them on this mission out of sheer impatience. It would certainly explain why they had suddenly changed the plan – trying to pin the disappearance of a Kumo nin on Konoha, rather than the other way around, even though having Kumogakure be the guilty party in this one made more sense –

BADOOM!

"What the heck?" Kisame hissed.

"Deidara," Itachi groaned under his breath.

Kisame sighed exasperatedly. "That idiot."

Why had they brought him, again?

Oh, right. Because apparently, this mission required four people rather than the usual team of two, on the account that Yugito Nii would be better guarded and better trained than the other jinchuuriki, who had been rogue or traveling alone. Also, because some genius had managed to convince Pein that Deidara and Sasori were a better choice than Hidan and Kakuzu.

Itachi gave himself an invisible pat on the back.

"Should we get out of here?" Itachi asked drily.

"There will be trouble if we fail," Kisame said. "Pein won't be pleased if we don't return with at least something."

Itachi nodded mutely, and signaled for Kisame to follow him in a wide circle around the area where Sasori and Deidara had intially engaged Yugito Nii. The initial plan had been for Itachi to distract everyone with a mass area effect genjutsu first, and then use force in the likely case their targets managed to notice and dispel the illusion in time. Naturally, Deidara had decided that plans weren't his thing, and that rushing in and bombing everyone like their land was full of black gold was his preferred mode of operation.

That wasn't Itachi's problem.

The terrain was rough, and all the smoke made it difficult for even the Sharingan to see through, but from what Itachi could tell, a few explosions hadn't hurt Yugito Nii much. If anything, they had only made her even more irritated. Both her hands glowed with bright blue chakra, shaped into claws; one swipe from her could easily disembowel an elephant. True, Deidara was too far away for her to reach, having realized that climbing onto one of his birds and flying far far away was the smartest thing to do right about now, but that didn't mean he was in any less danger.

She spat fire.

Deidara might have used explosives, but he was just as immune to their effects as any other man. That is to say, not very.

One jet from her killed his giant clay bird and burned off one of his arms. She could not do any more to hurt him, for at that moment, Sasori had killed the last of her comrades and was now turning his puppets on her, but that did little to help Deidara, who was falling hundreds of feet from the sky.

There were cracks in the rock radiating from where he had hit the ground.

"Go help Sasori, Kisame. I'll take care of Deidara," Itachi ordered, watching Yugito Nii demolish yet another one of Sasori's puppets. Another mouse-shaped fireball burned through the strings of five more, and Sasori, normally silent, cursed loudly.

Kisame nodded, and drew Samehada. For good measure, Itachi cast a quick genjutsu, to "help" out Sasori just a tad, and then snuck his way over to the clump of shrubbery where Deidara had fallen. He was injured, but not dead; the bushes had broken his fall, and he had spat out enough clay at the last second to shield his neck and head from the worst of the damage.

"Uggghh…" he groaned, crawling out of the wreckage. Itachi grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him out of the pile of ash and earth when the sky lit up yet again –

He saw Yugito Nii's stray fireball coming, and jumped out of the way.

Deidara, still disoriented from his fall, didn't.

His life ended there.

A bit depressing, that he had just barely escaped one death, only to walk into an other one.

As Itachi observed the smouldering pile of smoke that had once been Deidara hiss and deflate, he wondered if he should feel even the slightest bit of guilt for abandoning a fellow Akatsuki member to his death. And then he decided, no. He didn't feel guilty for leaving Deidara to die. It was his own fault; if he had just followed the plan like he was supposed to, he wouldn't have died. Then again, it had been Itachi who had suggested the quietest, most boring plan he could think of, knowing that Deidara would disagree.

There was silence coming from the other side of the bushes. The fight was over; Samehada, his illusions, and the puppets combined had taken their toll on Yugito Nii. There work was done here. Now Sasori and Kisame were fast approaching. Hastily, Itachi shoved Deidara's chunk of clay underneath some bushes and stepped out to greet them.

"That looks nasty," Kisame whistled. He nudged Deidara's blackened body with a toe. "Maybe we should have brought Hidan and Kakuzu here after all. At least they wouldn't have died."

Sasori shrugged. "I hated him anyway."

"No matter," Itachi said, producing some pre-made evidence bags. "We should clean up. The boss said we have to make it look like Konoha was responsible."

Kisame willingly reholstered Samehada and took a bag, while Sasori grimaced, but dragged his puppets along anyway. Throughout the process, Itachi made sure to forget about one of Deidara's lumps of clay. There was a Kumo team nearby, though he couldn't make out more than the apparent leader, a woman with short blonde hair. If she was even a halfway decent Jonin, she would find it –

"Oy, Itachi, you missed this," Kisame said.

Damn. Never mind, then. "Apologies," Itachi mumbled.

"Hey, Itachi, you sure you're doing okay? It's not like you to make these little mistakes." If Itachi didn't know better, he might have mistaken that for concern in Kisame's voice. "How bad has your vision really deteriorated? Be honest."

"…Maybe a year before I go fully blind."

"Wow. Um. How fuzzy is it right now?" Kisame waved his hand in front of his face. "You think prescriptions would help? Unless you're afraid of looking ridiculous."

"Given my associates, I think that would help me fit in more, actually." Kisame punched him in the arm. It was as close to brotherly as they would ever get.


Fire Country

Desperation fogged all of her thoughts. Ino watched as Kakashi-sensei completely tore through the White Zetsu creatures like paper. With every kick, another one of their plants died, their earthy bodies burnt through, a tree struck by lightning. The clearing was littered with firebombs and chakra wires filled with current.

He was flying. Every explosion of electricity would bump him up into the air, and then he would disappear off to another Hiraishin seal marker, toes never brushing the ground, not even once. And while he could catch them, they could not catch him, no matter what they tried, whether it was growing out their arms and legs in twisted vines or joining their pasty white bodies into giant Venus flytraps – he was untouchable, unstoppable, unbeatable.

She was watching a god of thunder and lightning, all bright sparks and light feet. The monsters could regenerate their depleted numbers, split in two to spawn another one of its ilk, but for every White Zetsu that was born, Kakashi-sensei would murder three with his bare feet, and his wire traps would burn up five more.

And yet.

And yet the dark monsters of fear and anxiety clawed at her mind. They ate away at her brain, her self-control, her common sense. The Hiraishin no Jutsu was fast, amazingly fast, ridiculously fast, terrifyingly fast. More of the White Zetsu army were dying than being born. Eventually, the White Zetsu army would be whittled down to nothing −

But "eventually" wasn't good enough.

However fast Kakashi-sensei was going, it simply wasn't fast enough.

I don't care. I don't care. I just want to find my father. They needed to go find her father –

"Can you guys take care of the Water mask?" she asked.

Sasuke shot another glance at Hinata. Her stability was improving, for now. But of course, Ino realized, he was reluctant to leave her alone. Not because he doubted the skill of Naruto's clones, but because, by principle, teammates didn't leave each other behind. Ino would have clung just as tightly, had it been someone from Team 7.

But needs must. Sasuke had been one of the best fighters in the Academy, and they needed everything they could get.

Naruto nodded. The burnt-out clearing filled with fifty more of him. "Of course we can, but what are you planning to do − "

Ushi, Oo, Hitsuji, Mee.

The sparks danced around her temples.

It was possible, she knew, to transfer lightning chakra across an insulated gap, if the gap was small enough and the electric power was high enough. It was also possible, she knew, to transfer lightning chakra over longer distances through direct contact, be it metal, string, or hair.

But transferring lightning chakra over longer distances across an insulated gap without assistance from a conductor had been impossible.

Up until now.

"What the heck – " she heard Shikamaru exclaim, and then the entire world was drowned out save for a soft humming in her ears.

The Yamanaka mental techniques, and really, any contactless or nonphysical techniques, were still also chakra constructs – wireless ones. Simply replacing the yin and yang chakra in the technique with elemental chakra, her lightning transformations, in the right amount –

Well, it was a bit like connecting a watermelon to a capacitor.

Three, two, one –

A fluorescent tunnel of glowing electromagnetic waves pulsed before her eyes. Her mind scattered into trillions of tiny charged particles. She was zipping through the air, puncturing through all the remaining White Zetsu clones; she was a bullet, an electron, a cannon, an atom, ripping them all apart at the structural level. Their cells popped before her face like soap bubbles, all the fibers and tissue shredding, ripping apart.

This was just her.

Just her, and her mind.

It was exhilarating, intoxicating, this power, to be able to control, to be able to simply think something and have it happen; she was a Yamanaka, and in their clan, the intent to kill and the act of killing were one and the same. She burned, hotter than a thousand splendid suns. Zetsu was strong and hardy against solid attacks, but earth was weak before lightning; they stood no chance. She may not be Kakashi-sensei, able to move her body quickly through physical space, but she could move her energy, and that the woody creatures were powerless against.

And then, by pure chance, she hit one of the creatures by its toes, where its roots were.

Oh, she thought. Oh ho ho. This is just too good.

The White Zetsu army, it seemed, also communicated telepathically. Thousands upon thousands of roots all running underneath the ground, each tree clone a node in their distributed information scheme. And, judging by the volume of random information bouncing around, it seemed like they were letting this thing running constantly. The sheer amount of power they required just to keep every single clone connected at once was absolutely massive.

It would be their downfall.

One network. One bloated, insecure, obscurity-reliant network that all of them were connected and forcibly contributing to.

And she had just gained direct access to it.

The soft electric hum in her ears doubled, tripled, quadrupled their frequency up to a maddening high-pitched whirr as she overloaded their root structure all the lightning she could muster. Given the capacity of power already naturally straining their system, it didn't take much.

Bark cracked angrily. Tree trunks spontaneously combusted. Twigs and leaves shriveled into thin air like they were stepped on by invisible men with bonfires for shoes. All their white, sticky, pasty wood burst into flame, fueled by their own internal sticky starch that made up most of the White Zetsu bodies, bright sparks fizzling out as quickly as they came, unable to withstand the force of her added current. The psychic pathways sawed through everything they touched, sharp like a web of garrotes.

Within the safe confines of her mind space, Ino let out a mad cackle.

She was unstoppable.

Before, she was simply destroying the ones in the direct range of her Mind Transfer, which wasn't very far – the Mind Transfer was very short-range, barely reaching anything that wasn't right in front of her face. But now, she could contact every Zetsu out there, see everything they were seeing, limited only by her own small chakra reserves. They might as well have let Shikamaru loose in their forest in the middle of the night –

NIGHT

BLACK

DARKNESS

BLACK

"You do not belong here."

"What – "

WHAM.

Suddenly her rocketing speed slammed into a halt. She crashed against a wall of ice. Sharp shards of freezing ink punctured her brain. In mere milliseconds she had plunged from the top of the world into a bottomless pit. She couldn't move; her brain was stuck in this tar, sticky and dense and too too cold and burning; she was swimming in a pool of liquid mercury with gold weights attached to her limbs and she couldn't see.

Snot dripped from her nose, but she didn't dare disrupt her chakra structures, so she resisted the urge to wipe it away.

Her tongue darted out. Wait, that wasn't snot.

Crap, nosebleed.

Her arms shook uncontrollably and her vision oscillated between too dark and too bright. Her face felt wet and too rough, her body shivering with blistering fever.

She didn't have much longer before she would start shutting down. Her brain pounded from the sheer exertion it took to keep herself conscious, which only made things worse as she expended more strength to make up for her draining weakness.

And there, a wave of nausea, crashing down upon her again, but she could not close the connection, as much as she wanted to.

"Arrogant little girl. You thought just because you defeated some White Zetsu clones, that you could wander into the realm of Black Zetsu, and walk away?"

The cold fingers of the black shadow coiled around her neck. The noose tightened.

"No. It is not that easy."

Panic descended.

Let go of me! Let go of me letgoofme letgoletgoletgo –

Ino screamed.


One moment, we were launching the last of our explosives at the final mask of Kakuzu, and the next, Ino had been blown back fifty feet into a tree.

Faster than a blink of an eye, Kakashi-sensei's Hiraishin rampage died down into nothing, and then he was curled over her, looking simultaneously every bit too old and too young, weary yet vulnerable, feverishly, frantically, pouring what remained of his chakra into her ribcage, trying desperately to restart her heart.

"Ino, you're going to have to lie down – you completely messed up your own head with that technique, foolish girl – "

Even from where I stood, I could see the electrical burns zigzagging across her palms and face.

"Oh gods," Naruto moaned in terror. "Ino – "

"You couldn't have known what she was planning," Choji said quickly. "You trusted her, and you can't blame yourself – "

"Fuck the blame game." I snarled, irrational fury tearing my brain apart. "What the fuck just happened?" I snarled. "What. The fuck. Just happened."

"Does it look like I know?!" Naruto spat. "Whatever technique she used fried all those White Zetsu things simultaneously, it must have backfired somehow – "

I shook my head. "Just looking at it, I can tell what she did. She took the Mind Transfer, replaced some of the normal chakra with lightning chakra, and let all the White Zetsu blow themselves up. That should not have been enough to rebound against her. No. Wherever her mind went, she must have run into something else," I said darkly.

Fucking hell, though. Way to take down a regiment of cannibalistic plant-men. She had decimated their ranks in less than a second. And after all that she just dropped like a sack of potatoes? Something must have happened −

Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw it.

A little oily puddle, dense and pitch-dark, and yet smoky and light, attached to the heels of the one White Zetsu still standing.

Just like a shadow.

Crawling…feeding off all the light and life energy in the area…sucking everything happy into its black hole of a stomach.

To this day, I have no idea what possessed me to do such a thing.

But I reached out and touched it.

Perhaps there was a power in it that I recognized as my own. Both of us were like shadows, in a way, and whatever we touched, we had a burning desire to take over and manipulate. A taste of my own medicine, so to speak, of all the times I had dared to use the Shadow Possession Jutsu on others…

As soon as my fingers – and shadow – made contact with this – this thing – I immediately knew one thing.

I had just pulled the most monumentally imbecilic move of my entire life up until this point.

And that was saying something, because even though I knew I was smart I had done some magnificently stupid shit when I got into things way over my head. (There would be dumber things later on, but for now…this one took the cake.)

Again, I had – still have – no idea why I did it. This…thing…I suppose the most apt name would be Black Zetsu, seeing as it was simply the inverted version of the White Zetsu trees…this Black Zetsu thing, somehow, affected me more than Ino's Mind Transfer ever had, affected me more than anyone else in the area.

And now I was stuck, trapped like an iron shaving on a magnet. I tried to get it off me. Thump. Thump. Thumpthumpthumpthump – Blood pounded in my ears, as fast as a rabbit's heartbeat. Rabbit rabbit rabbit – No such luck. It seemed completely resistant to anything any of us threw at it. Chakra, elemental techniques, weapons…all of them sunk into its great writhing mass.

Use your brain, damn you, I scolded myself. There's got to be a way −

An idea popped into my head. "Naruto, give me your chakra now! Please, I need it!"

Naruto was shaking. Somehow, I could tell he was the real one, not a clone. "How do I – "

"Feed your chakra into the – " I gestured at my own shadow with my chin, only to freeze as I saw the glowing blue and orange sputter and die.

Naruto glanced up at me, terrified. "It's not taking it! I don't – "

I let out a massive breath. "…Shit."

"What?"

I let the bomb drop. "Your chakra and my − shadows must also be…" fuck "…incompatible."

Shit, shit, double shit. How could I have been stupid enough to forget? Our elemental natures, Wind and Earth, were neutral in comparison to each other, but the Shadow Bind, and all of its derivatives, including my shadow fuinjutsu, were all yin chakra types. Naruto's regular chakra, as well as the Kyuubi chakra, were disproportionately skewed towards yang chakra.

For what felt like hours, but was probably only about the span of five seconds, I had lost all of my ability to think. No, even worse – I could think, but I could not control myself. I could only watch, a powerless audience member in my own life as my limbs were disconnected from my brain. It crawled over my head −

"It is a fact of life that death exists also," it said.

− and it wrapped itself around my face.

It was also at the very same moment that the fuse on the ball of detonators attached to Kakuzu's Water mask – delayed by the natural moisture surrounding its target − finished burning up.

One moment, the Water mask had been readying a attempt at one futile final attack. The next, it had exploded, and the volume of water it was carrying in its cheeks spilled uselessly to the ground.

Right on top of me.

So.

Picture me, fighting the Akatsuki, standing all glorious in their black cloaks and red clouds. Also picture me, lying on the ground, with this Black Zetsu thing wrapped around my nose and mouth like a dense cloth or a plastic bag. And also picture me, with water being poured on top of my head, over this cloth, which was covering my nose and mouth.

Looking back, it all sounds so stupid. So damn stupid. It was just a little bit of water and I was fine and come on it wasn't even that bad it lasted barely a second really so stupid I knew onsen owners with stronger waterfalls than the comparative bucket that had fallen on me, the last choking bits of spittle of a dying mask, like come on I thought I had overcome it, I thought it was already behind me, I really did – for fuck's sake, I BEAT him, I BEAT Itachi Uchiha at his own game, so why why WHY was I LOSING HERE?

(Because my brain, my damaged traumatized scarred traitortraitorTRAITOR brain, with its perfect memory even in situations I would have rather forgotten, immediately assumed in a brilliant leap of association – )

"It's nothing personal," Itachi Uchiha smiled down at me. "You remind me of myself, actually."

The cloth went over my face. The bucket dangled in the air.

"Before everything went so. Horribly. Wrong."


The storm swirled around him. His mind, a complete haze. Gaara could hardly remember – the only thing he cared about now, was Inoichi's orders. Kill them. Kill all the Akatsuki. Gaara already knew too much about death; he would not let this man take away a person who had worked so hard to help him. His sand had shielded him from the worst of it, so he would have to be the one to do it.

There was so much dirt here. He was an entire ocean by himself. The sand went everywhere. Gaara didn't even bother to pay attention to his range. He could have flooded the whole forest for all he cared, just as long as the Akatsuki were killed. And then he could rescue Inoichi and then Inoichi would take him home to Konoha where he would get to meet Inoichi's daughter and Inoichi's daughter's friend who was also his age and a jinchuuriki like him and then they could all live happily ever after and it would be wonderful −

Gaara stopped.

Inoichi was on the ground, arms wrapped around his own gut, mouth still open in a silent smile.

"Inoichi!"

It was useless.

"Inoichi, please – "

His eyes were already blank.

"Inoichi, Inoichi – Medic! I need a medic – someone – please – "

Too late for that.

"No, no, no, no – "

His body had already been cold for the last fifteen minutes.

This is all your fault. You can never do anything right. You killed everyone you hated, Gaara, and now you can't keep the people you love alive, either –

But no matter how much Gaara tried to call him, he would not respond, except for a smoky burble of blood from his mouth. Even in his death, everything that exited that man's lips had come straight from his heart.

So this is where your story ends, Inoichi Yamanaka.

Death made no bargains. Nor would denial or grief settle the score. Thus it followed that there would only be one option left.

So Gaara saw rage.


A/N: I'm going to the hardware store to buy barricades for my doors and windows. How many do you think I should get?