"This awful kind of twisted, tragic small world,
Bears its fangs to tear it all,
You cried 'I wanted to be by your side,'
I can see your fragile heart about to break and fall."
-Otsukimi Recital, Will Stetson
Kamabara did a double-take when he saw the girl outside.
He knocked over his chair as he shot to his feet.
There was only enough room in the outpost for three chairs, a gas stove, and a cramped bathroom.
Her eyes lingered on his headband, then flicked down to his flak jacket.
He knew who she was. Black hair, brown half-shirt, mesh armor covering the rest. Purple, ringed eyes. It might've been the dull orange glow of lamp light, or that she took them by surprise (how did she know, who told the Akatsuki—) but her eyes seemed to glow as she looked at them.
A bloodline trait, other shinobi called it.
A dojutsu born to punish the Akatsuki's enemies, the civilians said.
The Akatsuki were thieves, murderers, and traitors. Others didn't see it, despite them making Mamoru their teacher.
Ignoring that the Akatsuki sought aid in Fire Country behind Lord Hanzo's back.
How could a group that accepted missing-nin make Amegakure better?
Kamabara glanced out of a slat in the wall, looking for movement in the dark, outlines hidden in the tall grass, her companions preparing for an ambush.
Purple Eyes was the distraction.
Was this retaliation for what Takarai had done? He'd attacked their leader, too impatient to wait for Lord Hanzo's return—
Because he wasn't dead. There was no body.
—willing to throw his life away if there was even the smallest, tiniest chance that he could've succeeded.
Purple Eyes threw shuriken at Sadakichi and Ogai.
Sada jumped out of the way, landed on the wall to the right and shot off it, hand outstretched to grab her. Ogai toppled his chair as he rolled left and went at her from the opposite side, short sword in hand.
Asukai knelt in front of the stove, made the snake sign, and shoved both hands to the ground.
Purple Eyes leapt straight up. Ogai cut empty space. Sada grabbed air.
She flipped and landed on her feet on the ceiling, just as the ground cracked open below her and a dozen earth hands shot out at her.
The grass outside didn't shift. Even if they were hidden on his blindside, what were they waiting for?
Her eyes flicked down. She rolled, four hands impaling the stone behind her. The hands dug in like roots, solidifying into bars between her and the exit.
Had she really come alone?
She rolled again, avoiding four more, and Ogai was waiting for her.
She shouldn't have been able to avoid the stab completely, but she stopped herself mid-roll and pushed off the ceiling on her hands, her body bending around the blade as it passed beneath her.
If it were a one-on-one battle, they'd never be able to land a hit.
But it was four against one.
A dirt hand clamped around her upper arm from behind as she fell. Her eyes flicked to it, but it slowed her enough for a second to snake tightly around her middle. A third bound her legs, suspending her inches above the ground.
No one came in to save her.
"No one on this side," Kamabara signed. "Asu, do a sweep of the right side. Kill anyone you find."
Sada frowned, eyes flicking to the doorway, but Kamabara noticed Purple Eyes following his hands with an understanding she shouldn't have had and lowered them.
Of course Mamoru the Traitor wouldn't have stopped at raising a group to topple Lord Hanzo, he would've taught them their code, too.
Asu noticed too, but he nodded once, made the snake sign, and disappeared underground.
Sada shook his head. "Regardless of why she came alone, it's dropped an opportunity in our lap. They'll come for her, and we can lure them out—"
Purple Eyes quietly laughed, shoulders shaking despite her restraints. And then she had the attention of the room as the earth hands were absorbed into her body.
She landed soundlessly and made the snake sign with one hand. Sada snapped out of shock first and darted at her from behind, kunai in hand. Purple Eyes' fingers brushed the ground, Sada's shadow looming over her, and earth hands burst out of the ground behind her.
A hand grabbed Sada's wrist and squeezed, kunai tumbling away. He drew back, eyes wide, but hands circled up his legs, more than a dozen grasping at his flak jacket, his arms, and then his face.
Ogai shot forward to help him, only to jerk back as Purple Eyes pressed her palm firmly to the ground and hands shot up in a half-circle around her.
They were warped and missing fingers, a twisted bastardization of the jutsu Asu used. An amalgamation that could've come from a child's nightmares.
It occurred to Kamabara that if she'd known how to make earth hands before, she would've countered instead of dodged.
Sada twisted his head back and forth, fighting to free himself, mouth opening as if to yell, but more hands wrapped around him and turned him into a wriggling mass of earth.
Purple Eyes straightened, looking between him and Ogai. "He said there'd be five of you," she mused.
Kamabara's feet were moving before he made a conscious decision to do so, the handle of a kunai cold in his palm. He'd sent Asu away. Sada was caught up in a jutsu. His options to retaliate were severely limited.
Then Purple Eyes turned to him, hand-shaped bruises on her arm, another bruise winding around her ankle, and raised her right hand.
Kamabara threw his kunai to stop whatever she was doing, already pulling out another, but it never reached her. There was a sudden pressure against the front of his body, hundreds of weights suddenly taking a vacation on his chest, and he abruptly went backwards.
He felt shock, confusion, and disbelief. And then his back slammed into the wall, hard enough to drive the air from his lungs. He lost consciousness for a second when his head smacked stone.
He came to as a wooden chair hit the wall next to him and burst into pieces, when his kunai flew back and lodged deep into his shoulder.
He choked.
The pressure kept him pinned to the wall and his bones ached under the strain.
Purple Eyes didn't lower her hand. She didn't look at him with hate or anger or even retribution like this was what he deserved. She stared at him like he was nothing to her. Like he was a twig in her path that took no effort at all to step on.
It wasn't Killing Intent that came from her, but a rolling tide of apathy.
Kamabara gasped when he felt a sharp, stabbing pain as his ribcage started to give, and it was suddenly hard to breathe.
He slumped and fell hard as Purple Eyes jumped back, Ogai's blade passing harmlessly in front of her.
Kamabara coughed blood, unable to help the way he shuddered.
He said there would be five of you.
He realized (too late) that she'd been stalling. She'd stayed on the defensive, used none of this overwhelming power before because she'd been waiting for Tomoe to come back from her supply run.
Because she wanted to kill them all at once.
He coughed again and felt wetness on his chin. He was a jonin, one of Lord Hanzo's most trusted, and yet it had taken one move for her to cripple him.
If this was their youngest member, what kind of monsters were the others?
They'd underestimated her, but even if they didn't, how could they fight against this? The power to redirect ninjutsu, the power to repel any physical attack, an ability to evade that surpassed theirs.
Ogai missed again and Purple Eyes threw up her hand. His friend stiffened, bracing for a push, but instead he was yanked forward. It was enough to make him stumble, for Purple Eyes to spin around him, like the whole fight was a dance. She held her right hand up to him as he turned to face her, the other making the snake sign.
"Ogai—" he called, too late, as an invisible force shoved Ogai into waiting earth hands.
Ogai slashed at them, cutting a few, but more and more surged up to replace them, latching onto every part of his body until he couldn't move anymore.
Purple Eyes turned to him, and Kamabara was left wondering if she was human. Her dojutsu was like none he'd ever seen, her power like nothing he knew.
Her apathy burned hotter than hate.
Kamabara tried to stand and realized something else was broken. Something in his leg, it felt like. It was hard to tell through the agony in his chest. He collapsed.
The ground beneath Purple Eyes softened in a circle around her, her bare feet sinking into sudden mud.
She looked down, a second before it erupted. A pillar of water swallowed her and broke through the ceiling, shooting high into the air.
Tomoe.
Kamabara knew it would be a swirling vortex within, the pull too strong to make hand signs, the pressure enough to crush the unfortunate person caught within. It was Tomoe's strongest ninjutsu.
It should've been over, but when the pillar splashed down (after four long seconds), Purple Eyes stood at the center, unharmed and completely dry.
And Kamabara felt a little hysterical. He tried to push himself up again (missing her grimace, the way she squeezed her own arm, like it was too much) but couldn't fight through the pain of his broken leg.
Purple Eyes abruptly jumped, narrowly avoiding Asu's hands breaking through the mud, grasping at air instead of her ankles. She landed sideways on the wall and made the dog sign, staring intently at Asu as he started to pull himself out.
Kamabara could only watch the ground soften more, watch Asu sink in the mud, watch a pillar engulf him as he scrabbled for the edge of the circle.
It wobbled, water falling off the edges, spinning slower, but when Purple Eyes lowered her hand, Asu slapped down onto earth, lifeless all the same.
"How did you know he was there?" Kamabara croaked.
If she was a sensor-nin on top of everything else they never would've been able to capture her at all.
"It's what I would've done," she said and hopped down. She approached and his eyes flicked to the doorway, but Tomoe being able to sense Purple Eyes didn't mean she was close.
Purple Eyes stopped in front of him. Tomoe wouldn't make it on time.
"What the fuck are you, kid?" Kamabara asked. Because even for a village like this, she was abnormal. Because the cold efficiency in which she took lives came from field experience. Because she could still talk to him like a person, despite never intending to let him live.
She didn't have to answer his question. She didn't have to let him speak at all.
He knew, just by the way she looked down at him, that she could've killed him before he opened his mouth and it would make no difference to her.
Purple Eyes seemed to find the question funny, because she turned her head away, covering her mouth to stifle a laugh. "'What am I?'" she repeated.
She crouched, pulled out a kunai, and held the point to his chest. "I'm a monster," she whispered, and it chilled him to the bone. "I was born on a battlefield, sharpened into a blade, and fed the blood of people I loved, people I hated, people I didn't know at all."
Purple Eyes paused, pushing the kunai forward, piercing his skin. "I'm Amegakure," she decided, and he grunted as the tip of the kunai slipped between ribs and slid into his heart, felt it futilely try to beat around the metal.
He breathed out and saw Tomoe's blurry figure standing in the doorway. He wanted to tell her to run. His body slumped.
モンスター
She came back just before dawn.
There was enough light to see her as she approached, bruised, blood dried on her fingers.
She fought five of the strongest shinobi in the village—earning that title by returning from the war alive, by being acknowledged by their ex-leader (by being the only ones left)—and came back with minor wounds.
Junpei wriggled uncomfortably on his leg, asleep. He felt sweat through the toddler's shirt.
And wasn't that something? For the first time in nearly forty years, he felt dry.
He still felt the ghostly sprinkle of rain on his skin occasionally, startled when he looked up and saw the sun instead of dark clouds, panic when he woke to warmth (thinking a fire jutsu reached too close, that he was in danger) when it was only natural heat.
He absently patted Junpei, watching Oka. She didn't seem to notice the attention she attracted, others rousing from sleep at the sound of her footsteps, pretending not to watch her.
It was twice that she saved them. Once when she made an earth wall to protect them and again with the red-eyed water dragon. He thought of her back then, blood matting her hair to her forehead, her sleeve soaked red from a stab wound, how hard her fingers shook as she stretched for the dragon, only half-conscious.
He remembered how, as it shot down, mouth open wide, his last thought was that he'd failed Junpei. All that effort to rescue him, to keep him fed and strong, just to die because his adopted father had the foolish idea that he could stand up to shinobi.
He'd ducked, bending himself over Junpei as some of the others only closed their eyes, having already given up. But the dragon never came down. For as long as he lived, he wouldn't be able to forget watching the dragon crumple in on itself, sucked up into Oka's palm.
He'd been in awe back then, and he felt something similar now.
She stopped next to the crate, nearly in the same spot she'd stood hours ago. She was unaware of the rumors that would spread about where she'd gone and what she'd done, more fuel for the incredible things they accomplished (the truth hard to find among the dozens of different tales for a single event).
There was the person who claimed they saw Yahiko go into Doro shelter alone at night and come out at dawn with a bloody blade and the sun at his back.
The other that said, no, it was actually Oka who killed him with her dojutsu.
If he believed even half the rumors about the Akatsuki, he'd think them gods.
Another swore that their medic-nin had the power to transform into a slug (didn't you hear of what he did at Shido Valley? How he fended off Hanzo and his shinobi by himself?).
No one knew what really happened except the Akatsuki, and neither Yahiko nor anyone else let them know the truth. Even if they had, it would've been lost in all the exaggeration and lies.
Hanzo didn't die in the shelter. It happened out on the water. Mamoru rightfully challenged him to a duel and won. 'Course there's no body. It's in the depths.
Who knew what the truth was?
That they defeated Hanzo at all without outside help seemed like an impossible feat. Not even Konohagakure's sanin could do it. It was why every rumor sounded like it could be true, why it was hard to tell if any of them were really lies.
Did the Akatsuki really take down Hanzo? Mamoru... he was a genjutsu expert, right?
What was an exaggeration when ninja could make mountains or oceans with a few hand signs and a little bit of chakra? What was a god if not an all-powerful being?
What were shinobi and kunoichi to people who had too-small pools of chakra? People who had their suspension of disbelief shattered daily when shinobi did things they could only dream of?
He saw why the rumors had spiraled out of control, but he didn't agree that they were gods.
He couldn't. Not when he'd seen Oka unconscious and bloodied, when he'd seen Yahiko vomit after overexerting himself, when he'd seen Nagato's hands shake.
He was one of a few who'd witnessed the Akatsuki as people, not shinobi. Despite all the shinobi and kunoichi they killed that day, it didn't happen as easily as others claimed it had. He tried to think of them as higher beings and instead thought of how they never came back for Michi and the others.
People capable of making mistakes. Child soldiers that took on an impossible task and won, somehow, but not without cost.
He closed his eyes, knowing it did no good to pity them.
"I want to know where more of them are," Oka said.
He looked up at her and carefully considered his answer.
He owed her his life multiple times over, but he didn't miss how she looked at him, like he was neither her ally, nor her enemy. If he sent her somewhere with civilians and she thought they were with Hanzo's shinobi, he had his doubts she'd hear them out.
Still, she waited for him to answer, which counted for something.
"Shinobi apartments. West of here. Most fell a long time ago, but I know at least one's still standing," he finally told her.
He saw the ghost of a smile, then she turned and walked away.
A/N: モンスター - Monster
Reminder that the Rinnegan is broken and I've made a terrible mistake giving it to Oka.