Chapter 24 - Bring Me to Life

Evanescence

Naruto stared at Kakashi and Ren suspiciously. They were chatting but something was just off about them. The three of them had gathered in the morning to see Ren off on her mission. The first suspicious thing was that Kakashi was early, Naruto being the last to arrive. Then, the two of them talked and smiled about the strangest things but wouldn't look at each other or him in the eyes when doing so.

"You two are acting weird…" Naruto whispered mostly to himself.

Both looked up to Naruto with red cheeks and denied his accusations.

"What are you talking about?" Ren laughed nervously.

"We're not acting strange…" Kakashi added.

It wasn't like Kakashi Sensei or Ren to be so sensitive. Naruto squinted his eyes and smiled mischievously.

"Oh, I see…," he said.

Both Ren and Kakashi started sweating, their faces getting redder by the minute.

They stared intensely in Naruto's eyes, all the while hearing their own hearts beating very loudly in their ears.

After a long moment Naruto broke the silence: "You two ate the goodbye gift without me!"

Ren and Kakashi stood still for a moment, and then their shoulders relaxed, realizing they were in the clear.

"You got us, Naruto." Kakashi said, while stretching the back of his head smiling. "We got tired of waiting and ate it all." He squeezed the brown paper he was holding behind him, squishing the expensive cakes inside.

"Yeah, you know Kakashi, he's a pig." Ren added cheerfully. Ren and Kakashi made eye contact laughing and then looked away casually.

Ren cleared her throat. "Anyway…"

"Well, I guess that means you owe me when you get back, Ren." Naruto told her with a kind smile on his face. The wind blew softly, the way it always seemed to do when Naruto said something impactful.

Ren smiled back and nodded to her teammate. "I'll make sure to come back and do so." She always appreciated Naruto's confidence in her, and hoped to live up to it.

"Oi, lets go!" A female voice sounded near. The three of them looked over and saw Anko wave her hand as she approached them.

Ren's stomach clenched with anxiety of the impending conversions she would soon be having with her newly assigned teammate. She didn't imagine that Anko was all that fond of her, and who could blame her? Ren too would resent the person she was compared to and would never live up to. She feared there was nothing she could do to mitigate this situation.

She swallowed and decided to face her fears. "Alright, I better head off. Thanks for coming to see me off." Ren said, looking from Naruto to Kakashi and lingering some on Kakashi's eye.

Kakashi nodded to her and spoke, "You've got this."

She smiled and turned away, joining up with Anko.

Ren and Anko had only been traveling for a little while when the pleasantries ran out and both were left in silence. They really were quite similar it seemed, neither particularly enjoying the other's company but also not trying to be rude.

However after a couple of hours of silence they were interrupted.

The three offenders were rogue nin from the sand, who wanted to pilfer their goods, and didn't give a moment to hesitate. It was made obvious then that Anko and Ren were trained from the same master as the two of them seamlessly disarmed the three rogues in what some would consider record time.

"Not bad for someone who failed the chuunin exams." Anko said smiling to Ren after the ordeal was taken care of.

Ren cleaned her kunai and placed it back in her pocket. She was happy for the compliment as inaccurate as it was. She tried to think of something clever to say back, but everything she thought of seemed to push boundaries or would come off as 'too close to home' so she just said "thanks" instead.

Anko seemed to recognize the internal struggle Ren was having, perhaps as only one in a similar circumstance could. They started jumping through the trees on their journey again when Anko spoke.

"You know… you're not at all what I expected you to be."

Ren made eye contact with her. "I'm not?" she asked, curious as to where this conversation would go.

"No offense, but you aren't like the girl Orochimaru described to me so often as a child. He made you out to be some sort of Goddess. Perfect in every way, but you are just… normal."

Ren smiled, "I'll take that as a compliment."

"You should." Anko replied.

Ren decided to be brave. "... I'm sorry for how he compared you to Ume. Trust me when I say I understand how you feel."

Anko seemed intrigued. "You were compared to… yourself?"

"The Ume that Orochimaru remembers, no one will ever live up to. Not even Ume herself."

Ren allowed herself to remember the bits of conversations she had suppressed for the past year. The subtle things said, the unbelievable expectations.

"Isn't it strange that we're sent to rescue the one man that caused us both so much harm..." Anko said to herself quietly.

Ren made eye contact with her and nodded, grateful to have someone who understood the horror of the mission they were to accomplish.

The next couple of days of travel were uneventful. They were heading northwest to where Kabuto had last been spotted, and were making great time. In fact the lack of contact they had with other people made them both suspicious of being followed. Ren took some time to use her sharingan to survey their path but every time she checked there was no one to be found. But even so they remained wary.

She and Anko talked more easily now, though neither brought up Orochimaru by name again. No need to bring up the inevitable sooner than necessary.

On the eve of the third day they rested at the edge of a waterfall with good tree coverings.

"... I think we'll find him tomorrow," Anko said over her dinner that night. She was pouring over the map and marking the progress they had made in the day.

"What makes you think that?" Ren asked.

Anko rubbed her shoulder where her curse mark was. "Call it intuition." She looked up at Ren, "It doesn't seem to affect you the same way though does it?"

Ren knew Anko was referring to the curse mark and the accompanying pain. Ren thought of her response carefully. "No, it doesn't."

Anko looked up from the map and took another bite from the bread she was eating. "Why do you think that is?"

Ren looked over at the waterfall. There was a bird's nest on the cliff and the mother was feeding her chicks. "When I was with… him, I learned that the curse mark was made with a lot of my chakra to begin with. That's why when I was bit I didn't feel much pain, because the substance was primarily my own and my body didn't reject it." She didn't mention that the curse mark seemed to let Orochimaru get inside her head with dreams in lieu of the pain.

"Mm," was Anko's only reply.

Ren remained staring at the bird's nest. Her brow furrowed.

"Anko, someone's here."

Anko looked up from her dinner sensing their presence too. Both women stood up and took defense positions. Anko asked, "Do you know who it is?"

Ren only nodded.

Out of the ticket of trees behind them walked her old teammate Sasuke.

"Well look who we've found here…" A boy with almost shoulder white length hair said who stood just behind Sasuke. "If it isn't the legendary Ume Uchiha." Ren had never met him in person but remembered his interactions with Sasuke. His name was Suigetsu, she thought. There was another boy behind him, although he was more man than boy and looked like he could hold his own quite easily. His name started with a J but Ren couldn't recall it.

Sasuke stood there confidently with a dead look in his eyes. Was he really the same Sasuke, her friend, her family? He was now much taller than she was now. Even in the year they hadn't seen each other he had grown, and his eyes had darkened.

"It's been a long time, Ren." Sasuke said.

Ren's brow furrowed more. She remembered their last interaction, her vomiting on the floor, heartbroken, weak. It was not a time she ever liked to recall.

"What do you want from us, Sasuke?"

Sasuke took his time replying and adjusted his belongings casually, a show that he was not intimidated in the slightest by them. "We're here for the same reason you two are."

Suigetsu gave Sasuke a peculiar look. It seemed as though he hadn't been let in on what that plan actually was.

"Why bother us then? We don't have Kabuto." Anko asked with gritted teeth.

"Because first…" Sasuke continued speaking, "I intend to eliminate the competition."

Ren couldn't believe her ears. Who was this man? What had he become?

The redhead boy-man in the back objected. "Sasuke, if you are wanting to bring back Orochimaru do you really think killing Ume Uchiha is wise? She's the only leverage we'd have over him."

Sasuke's eyes remained on Ren's. "That's exactly why I want her dead. Orochimaru is too unpredictable with her around."

And with that the fight of Ren's life began.

No words could do the battle justice. Both activated their sharingan and began moving at a speed that only the Uchiha could. Ren's mind didn't have time to think, only to react. Sasuke was hitting her with everything he had. His hand signs moved quickly in patterns that only she could see.

She couldn't believe this was happening, not her Sasuke. Each powerful blow she only reacted to defensively. She knew she wasn't stronger than Sasuke, and she didn't want to be. She loved him, he was her family, the only family she had left. She didn't want to hurt him even if she could.

Anko took on the other two and it hardly seemed a fair fight from what Ren could glimpse.

Sasuke hit her with something hard that caught Ren and sent her spiraling backwards over the waterfall. She used the water as a cover as she caught her breath. Sasuke jumped down and stood on the water waiting impatiently for her to resurface.

When she did, it caught him off guard from behind. They began fighting in hand to hand combat on the water both just as quick as the other. Ren blocked his every attack which just fuelled his growing cold anger. Eventually Ren blocked an attack and bounced back giving them several meters of distance between them.

"Sasuke, you don't need to do this! You and I, we're the only family we have left!"

That seemed to strike a nerve in Sasuke. His eyebrows lowered and he showed malice on his face.

"Family?" He laughed. "I'd rather be alone in that case."

Ren was shocked and hurt.

"What have I done?" She asked desperately.

Sasuke regained control over his facial expressions and peered at her with dead eyes once again. His hands shifted into the appropriate signs and then attacked Ren with snakes, but she had been with Orochimaru longer and knew how to use those jutsu better than he did.

She blocked and redirected the snakes elsewhere. Her mind flashed back to all of the memories she and Sasuke had together. The good times, the bad times. They had always been there for each other… until…

She used the same jutsu Sasuke had but instead of using the snakes to kill she directed them only to constrain. It wouldn't take him long to escape but she didn't need too much time.

"Sasuke…" she said out of breath. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry I abandoned you and left you alone in the leaf village. It was selfish of me. That's not what family is supposed to do."

Sasuke's rage returned as he sliced through the constraint snakes with hot iron swords.

"... That's what family always does!"

He increased his attacks with a fury Ren could not defend against. She tried her best to deflect the blows so that neither her nor Sasuke would get hurt. The moves infuriated him more.

"Attack me, you weakling!" He yelled.

A kunai skimmed past her face nearly killing her, but she moved quickly and instead it cut her cheek. It seemed to stop Sasuke in his tracks for a moment.

Ren touched the blood on her cheeks with her hand and looked up at Sasuke. She replied very coolly.

"Never."

His attacks began again and this time there was nothing more she could do. She was exhausted, and almost completely drained of Chakra. She tripped and fell back against a large treetrunk. She looked up to see a sword less than a centimeter from her nose. She knew she would die here, but she never guessed it would be at the hand of her brother.

Ren looked up to see Sasuke's face and saw for the first time in a long time the hurt boy who was her friend. He looked at her, drew the sword back and with one smooth movement knocked her out hard with the back of the sword handle.