Chapter 29: Legend Has It
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Doctors of death curing our patients of breath. We oughta pay you the trust. Crooked at work, cooking up curses and slurs, smoking my brain into mush. I became famous for blaming you fucks, maiming my way through the brush. There is no training or taming of me and my bruh. Look like a man, but I'm animal raw.
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A/N: I usually don't do an author's note at the beginning of chapters but... Someone who I asked advice for on this chapter said that I should probably put a warning up front soooooooooooo...
There's some mentions of torture in here. Like, I didn't look up what the CIA did to prisoners in blacksites and write it out levels of torture, but there's a few mentions of things. So if you're squicked out by that, just a heads up so that it's not too shocking.
Yeah.
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Hanako wished that she was back in the hallucination. It would have been better than this. Her neck and upper back felt seized up, raw, and burning. Every jostle and bump only aggravated it, and she could do nothing but curl up as best she could in the strange ninja's hold. Instead of being slung over a shoulder, this time she was being carried bridal style as the two ninjas ran with inhuman speed over the ground.
She tucked her face away into the shinobi's chest to block it from the wind. He smelled of sulfur, woodsmoke, oil, iron, and the musk of an unwashed body. Hanako didn't think that she smelled much better, having been on the road for the last – she couldn't remember how long. She had woken up on a table being branded by a white-hot iron poker drawing patterns in excruciating detail on her back. From there it had been a blur. Staying still helped the pain to subside some. It never went away though. Her white linen shirt had been torn in the back quite a bit, exposing her skin to the winds.
The terrain around them slowly changed. When she had first awoken from her nightmares to enter this one, she had been in a city above the water, surrounded by swamps and wetlands. Now they were going north, following a river. The terrain changed slowly. First, a wetland. Now, they had entered forests again. Hanako could smell the crisp scent of pines and evergreen trees. Branches and brush whipped by, a few almost grazing her as the ninjas leaped over obstacles in their path.
Finally, toward late afternoon, they stopped in a small glade. The dark shinobi that was carrying her set Hanako down with considerably more care than the big one had.
Hanako glanced around. Only two. The big one was gone. It was only the dark-skinned one and the smaller blonde one now. Hanako half crawled over to a boulder and sat against it, careful not to aggravate her back, which was no easy feat. Through a gap in the trees, Hanako could make out the blue-white peaks of mountains in the distance. Only a few were capped with snow, just on the very tips. The air wasn't unpleasant, but the temperature was a little cooler than what it had been in Ashiya. Once it was dark, she would probably want a jacket.
The two shinobi were poring over a map they had laid out, ignoring her but to toss a piece of jerky at her to eat. It was due to their aim, not her catching ability, that it landed in her lap. She chewed it slowly. The meat was tough, but the flavor wasn't bad. Her stomach was barely satisfied with the small morsel. She found herself hungrier after the snack than she had been before, as her belly growled for more.
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. At least in her dream, she hadn't been helpless. Not like she was now.
Hanako awoke with a start to a touch on her shoulder. She hadn't even realized that she had dozed off. Her back wasn't hurting as much now. More tender than screaming pain.
The blonde shinobi was looming over her. The sun had changed position in the sky, shadows elongated. She had slept for an hour, maybe two.
"Go relieve self," he instructed. "We move soon." Hanako did as she was told, albeit very slowly. There was a stream nearby this time, flowing swiftly and clearly and she did her best to wash her hands and face. The civilian was a little disgusted by the amount of dirt that came off with the water. She resisted the urge to scratch at her scalp, she could feel the dirt and sweat in the hairs making them stiff.
Raising her left hand, she reached over her shoulder and felt her back. Rigid lines met her fingers. Like a hardened scab. Feeling further and further, it wound and looped from her neck to drape down around her shoulders. She had been branded, after all.
Tears dripped from her lashes against her will. Hanako squeezed her eyes shut even harder to stop them. She could feel the cool trails they made down her cheeks.
Time wasn't on her side to grieve. Her kidnapper came to find her again. Hanako was given enough time to adjust herself before the blonde shinobi picked her up in his arms and they were off once again.
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The shinobi disguised themselves with henges. Their utilitarian white masks, carefully bland and unpainted for this mission, were left in place on their faces, in case they were dispelled. Most of the assembled ANBU took generic disguises, but a few made sure to adopt the looks of Lightning countrymen and adopted their accents and manner of speech. A few not-so-conspicuous questions and they had the location of the only seal master in Okisaki Gai.
Okisaki Gai was a smelly city. All the waste and filth of the city was dumped right under it, causing the water to smell rather putrid. The catfish loved it though.
Normally, they would have infiltrated the shop through the windows. Any seal master worth their salt would have booby-trapped the windows with seals. So, they went through the front door, like normal, regular folk.
The combat team went first, opening the door with barely a sound, save for the creaking of the hinges. The sound went unheard though, blending in with the cacophony of groans and squeaks of the building that came with building a structure of wood atop the water. The three cut the chakra from their henges, letting the illusions fade away as they silently entered. Porcelain white masks were revealed. A wolf, tiger, and a panda.
A small seal by the doorway glowed as they passed it. Wolf, the captain of the combat squad raised a fist, halting the other two. When nothing happened, they continued.
Papers were strewn around the shop, haphazard. A worktable was covered in drafts and edited versions of the same seal repeated again and again with minor adjustments. Jars containing various inksticks and ink cakes of different colors and qualities line the walls, as well as brushes of different sizes, bristles, and qualities.
A mumbling, moaning sound came from the back room of the shop. A sloppy, slurping noise. Two of the agents exchanged a look.
The door to the backroom was pushed open and they crept through, any sound they might have made muffled. There, was the seal master, the table in front of him a mess. Papers and suppliers were stacked and strewn all over the place, several sealing scrolls laid out. He had obviously been packing things together in a rush, but not in so much a rush that he didn't have time to indulge in a little fun.
A mirror lay on the table, a few lines of white powder formed from the larger pile, a paper envelope next to it which contained even more. A few of the lines were already consumed. The seal master sat splayed back on a chair, white powder crusting around his right nostril, and one hand forcing the head of a prostitute down on his dick. No wonder he hadn't noticed the alarm seal on the door.
The prostitute noticed them first. Her eyes went wide, and she scrambled backward. The seal master's head came up and he opened his eyes.
"Shops closed," he slurred in the Maelstrom dialect. "You'll have'ta come back another time."
"Some questions, first," replied one of the ANBU. He turned to one of his teammates. "The witness," he ordered in Fire Dialect.
Before she could so much as scream, the panda masked ANBU crossed the distance between them in two strides and snapped her neck with a single ripping motion of his hands.
"Hey! I paid good money for her," the seal master protested. Then, his drug-addled mind caught up with reality.
The seal master tried to jump out of his chair. The motion was countered by the hand on his shoulder that slammed him back down and the ANBU quickly tied him to the chair.
"You'll be free to go soon enough. We have some questions for you," Wolf repeated.
Outside, Panda gave the all-clear and ANBU filtered into the shop, gathering up the inks, papers, and documents that lay around. Several of them started looking through the documents and letters. One even located a hidden safe and started spinning the dial on it, ear pressed to it to hear the clunking of the tumblers better.
A tall woman in a Ferret mask entered the back room. "We ready?" she asked.
Tiger started off by punching the seal master several times in the face and gut.
"Please! I didn't mean to do it," Ichigo blabbered on in Maelstrom dialect. "I never even displayed a master's signet. I didn't mean to call myself a master. People started me calling me a master one day and I just went with it." He looked around, panicked and wide-eyed. "Please, tell Lady Uzumaki I'm sorry. I never meant for things to get this far! I'll pay tithe to the guild. I'll forfeit my journeyman status. Anything she wants."
"Interesting," Ferret studied a scroll on the wall with feigned interest. "But that's not what we're here for." Behind her, Tiger got in a few more hits.
A large Doberman poked its head through the door to the backroom. "Boss," it growled in Fire dialect to Wolf. "Asset was definitely here. The table in here reeks of her scent."
"Can you determine which scent belongs to the shinobi with her?"
The dog shook its head. "No, too many people've been in here. Need something only they touched."
Wolf exchanged a glance with Ferret, who turned her attention back to the fake seal master. "I'm looking for someone," she said conversationally in Maelstrom. "She's very important to us, you see. My friends here want to see her again." She poked around the backroom a little more until she opened a canvas bag and found what she was looking for in it.
Reaching inside, she withdrew a pair of pliers and a hammer and handed them to Tiger. "I think," Ferret supposed, "that you might have seen her. I want to know who brought her here, and where they are now."
"I – I don't know what you're talking about," Ichigo said quickly. And then screamed when Tiger used the pliers to rip the nail from his right index finger.
"Ah, ah," Ferret tutted. "No lies."
"Fuck your mother!"
Tiger ripped out another fingernail.
"They paid me for a seal removal," Ichigo gasped out. "I didn't ask any questions."
Another fingernail.
"Surely they said something," Ferret replied, glancing over a few papers, "Mister, ah, Ken Ichigo-san."
"They didn't, I swear."
"The fingernails don't seem to be working," Wolf said to Tiger. "You're right-handed, aren't you, Ichigo?" She didn't seem to be asking a question. "Delicate things, hands are. One of the most complex parts of the human body – a doctor told me that once. I wonder how easy it is to write seals," she said conversationally. "Have you ever heard of de-gloving?"
Tiger pulled out a knife and pressed it to Ichigo's thumb and began to carve a long, narrow slice, just below the skin.
"No, no, no, no," Ichigo panicked. "Don't, I remember now."
"Do you, now?"
"Yes. They spoke Storm dialect," Tiger halted the knife as Ichigo babbled on. "I don't speak much but they didn't think I could understand any. They said – one of them said – no, no, no, don't do that! One of them said something about being followed. And something about an order. They were gonna kill me if I didn't take the seal off."
"You did all of that for free?"
"No, they paid me, they did. It's on the table."
Wolf picked up an open sack of coins from a table. "This what they paid with?"
"Yes," Ichigo quickly responded before Tiger could put his knife to flesh again.
Wolf hefted the weight of the bag in his palm. "Mika," Wolf raised his voice again.
This time, a bloodhound with a droopy face and long ears trotted through the doorway. "Boss?"
"Can you get a scent from this?"
The dog inhaled deeply several times. "Got it."
"Let's go." Tiger handed the pliers over to another masked agent.
The rest of the ANBU filtered out, leaving behind only three.
"This looks like a good starting point," said Ferret, glancing over some of the documents the remaining ANBU had gathered. "Plenty of information here to go off of," she said.
Another agent hefted the pliers in their hands.
"Now," Ferret said, holding a letter in her hand and reading over it carefully. "About this friend of yours, Yuasa Gemmei. Tell me about them."
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The sun had sunk below the horizon. The little light visible through the leaves of the forest colored the sky a dusky gold.
The two shinobi were beginning to slow down, if only because they were having more and more trouble finding their way in the growing darkness. They didn't follow a path, instead choosing to make a straight shot through the forest to cut as much time off their trip as possible.
Hanako now had several scratches on her face and feet from branches that the one that was carrying her, Totoro he had said, hadn't seen in time and had barely missed. The two shinobi had started arguing, speaking softly in their language that seemed to Hanako to have far too many consonants put together at once.
Totoro was more careful than the other one. Nicer, too. He was considerate in ways that the other one wasn't. He would have just let her face get scratched up by the pine needles.
They picked their way carefully through the forest until at last, they reached a road.
The moon was rising, and Hanako's eyes had adjusted to the darkness. She was, at least, able to make out the open stretch of road in front of them that appeared paler than the darkness around them. Here, the shinobi began to run once again. The mountains ahead of them began to loom ever closer. If Hanako wanted to see stars in front of them, she had to crane her neck and look almost all the way up.
The wind buffeted at them, and it wasn't entirely unpleasant. The night air was cool and a very pleasant change from the heat of Fire Country. The further north they went, the more tolerable the summer was. She tucked her face back into Totoro's chest. He shifted his grip to make her more comfortable.
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She awoke again at another jostle. It was still nighttime. The road had narrowed and was no longer running through a forest but through a stone. Steep rock faces rose up on either side. The moon was shining even brighter, but even with that, shadows were cast across the road.
The two shinobi stopped short at some unheard signal. They waited for – something. Until a voice called out in a foreign language, and Totoro responded.
Three figures melted out from the shadows. The two shinobi visibly relaxed. A tall, dark-haired woman led the group. She greeted the shinobi and they spoke for a minute. The new shinobi beckoned Totoro and Haku to walk with them. Totoro didn't let Hanako down, even though she probably could have walked and there was no way she would try to run away. There was nowhere to run.
The shinobi led them up a hand-cut path in the rock face up to a small outpost. Here, Totoro finally did let Hanako stand on her own and he stood her on her feet, but not before binding her wrists together with a length of cord. She flexed her wrists slightly to keep the blood flowing. The outpost was built from cut rock, a small stone building with an overhang made of wood off to one side that covered a large stack of wood and various supplies in canvas bags. A little further away was a fire pit with a campfire flickering away, surrounded by makeshift benches created from logs.
In the light of the fire, Hanako saw that some of the other shinobi wore metal plates on their uniforms with a symbol that looked like a cross made from five small circles, others with small stylized clouds in their place. At some prompting that, again, she couldn't understand, Hanako's captors reached into their cloaks and pulled out similar metal plates engraved the stylized clouds and secured them on their uniforms.
The dark-haired woman that had greeted the shinobi brought Hanako a canteen filled with water and some bread and cheese, which she gulped down and ate with a speed that surprised even herself. The kunoichi gave her a pitying look that she didn't quite understand, but she thanked the woman for the food in Fire Dialect. She received a nod of acknowledgment in return. Hanako didn't feel as bad once she had eaten.
She let her gaze wander. Hanako watched the flames of the campfire numbly. She didn't know what to think, what to feel. A spike of ice had penetrated her chest again, leaving her unable to feel. Once again, she was caught up in a crazy ride that she had no control over. At least in Hidden Leaves, she determined at least part of her fate, had a say in her day-to-day life. But once again, she was caught up in events which she couldn't influence. Like a pawn in a game.
There were at least twelve shinobi manning the outpost, she noted idly. The three that came out to greet them, two more, and several inside the outpost bunkhouse, whom she could see through the open door. Playing a game of shogi, reading, and two more were asleep. Probably even more either out on patrols or sleeping.
From the different plate designs, this was – a border outpost? Hanako scrounged her memory for her best mental map of the Elemental Nations. This was either the border of – Hot Water Country? Rice? She really wasn't sure.
The flames flickered and helped chase away the cold void that was barely on the edge of overwhelming her.
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Like everything to do with shinobi, when it happened, it happened faster than the civilian could possibly hope to react to.
Things changed, and Hanako wasn't sure when. She hadn't been sleeping. Her mind was awake. She had kept herself up mulling things over in her mind. Thinking about what would happen. Who these people were. Why they had abducted her. The campfire was still alive, fed periodically by the shinobi. Several of them had turned in for the night, including her abductors.
And then there were knives flying, a fireball launched into the bunkhouse, and the sounds of clashing steel all around her. She screamed bloody murder. Sparks flew from their blades in bright flashes of light in the darkness as two shinobi lunged and parried each other, their movements almost too fast for her to see. The firelight had ruined her night vision, so it was even harder to see what was going on. The ominous, oppressive weight in the air that she recognized as killing intent seeped in, emitted from the fighting shinobi.
Shinobi that Hanako immediately recognized as Hidden Leaf ANBU where fighting, their blank porcelain masks barely concealing the anger and fire in their steps. Several of the foreign shinobi were on the ground, bleeding out. The kunoichi that had given Hanako food earlier in the evening was locked in combat with a Leaf ANBU. An irrational hope sprang in her chest.
Heart beating quickly, she tried to keep hold of her head. It took all she had to not lose it, and she scrabbled for control over her panic. Cover, she needed cover. She was out in the open and was dangerously vulnerable. Hanako looked around. There! Keeping her head down, she made for the cover of a large rock that looked like it was thick enough to safely hide behind. Hands still bound together with cord, she began to crawl.
A wall of rock rose from the ground as a shinobi took cover from a massive fireball.
Another shinobi came skidding backward, nearly stepping on her before he regained his footing and dashed back into the fight with a war-cry. The stone bunkhouse was on fire, flames licking the roof and the woodpile next to it was starting to catch. The entire scene was bathed in hellish orange-red light.
A flash of silver blurred through several attackers, a glowing white blade slicing through its enemies, cutting them down as fast as they could arise. One ninja fell to the ground, nearly bisected. Another with his throat slashed through. More shinobi melted from out of the darkness surrounding them, most of them not Leaf ANBU. The white glowing blade cut through them all, coloring his uniform and his blade red.
More knives whistled through the air. Chaos. Pure chaos. She crawled faster.
Hanako registered a single footstep behind her before she was wanked up by a force, and a hand pressed a blade to her throat while another held her to a hard chest with an iron grip. Two foreign shinobi stepped in front of her, blocking her view of the Leaf shinobi. Hanako made an attempt to struggle only for the sharp blade to bite into her collarbone as a warning.
Throwing knives flashed through the air. One of the guards blocked a blade, while the other was hit in the stomach. He didn't go down, though. Barely a moment later, and a Leaf ANBU in a snarling white tiger mask was on the wounded shinobi and the wolf masked shinobi with the glowing white blade cut through the other guard.
And then it was only Hanako and the shinobi with a blade to her throat. He growled out something over her shoulder. The Leaf ANBU responded in low threatening tones. They were moving around him, she realized, taking up positions around him so that there was no escape.
An ANBU in a panda mask was doing most of the talking while the others got into position. The ninja holding the knife was midsentence in his reply when a glowing white blade appeared next to Hanako's face from behind her, and the side of her head and shoulder were hot and wet. The ninja slumped forward onto her, blade falling away from her throat, and Hanako realized that it was blood spilling all over her.
The ninja's crumpling body dragged her down with his weight and she stumbled forward. She was caught and steadied by large, rough hands. The wolf-masked ANBU with the white blade. He was covered in blood spatters, mud, and gore. She didn't care though. At that moment, he was her salvation. She clutched on to him as if he were life itself. Wolf brought his arms to encircle her in his embrace, one hand pressed to her blood-soaked hair.
"You're safe," he murmured into her ear. "I've got you, you're safe now," he said as she sobbed. The dam broke free on her emotions and she could feel again. She wouldn't be taken god knows where for whatever twisted reasons those ninjas had. These were Leaf ANBU and she knew them. They wouldn't hurt her. They were her protectors. Relief washed over her and she couldn't help but sob from the intensity of it. She was safe.
Safe.