Part VI | Chapter 6
"Long time no see, Hatake Kakashi." The masked man leisurely commented while still sitting on the tree branch. "As for you, Kyura Gohama, I don't think we've ever met. I did try, a decade ago, but Buki sure wanted to keep its precious biju safe. Maybe if the vessel had been the old Blue Beast they could have kept both biju and village."
A shiver crawled up her spine, muscles taut and chakra boiling. Gohama felt naked in front of that sharingan mask. How had he known of that guilt? How had he known of all those anguished silent nights where she stared at her jinchuriki seal and cursed the day they had ripped it from Grandfather and branded it into her useless flesh?
"Kiddo." Seiryu warned steadily as he felt her control slide, at the same time Kakashi put a placating hand around her bicep, that damned hand with that damned chakra.
But the shudder in her chakra wasn't from fury, it was from that vicious rooted self-loathing stuck to the walls of her. She was standing before the man that had planned the massacre of Bukigakure, the memories of it flashing behind her eyes, no less horrifying than they had always been to her.
Yet there wasn't a drop of anger, hatred, resentment, not even duty, in her. She was too emotionally exhausted, the past weeks having spilled whatever emotions the vessel of her heart had saved and Kakashi's sudden appearance stirring those last drops of it, drops she was honestly too terrified to consciously name.
She would fight him because she had to fight him, not for duty, not for hatred, not for want, for survival. How long had it been since she had fought for her own life? That mission with her team where they had almost died, Seiryu's chakra bursting through her with that disturbing uncontrolled wildness.
"Or should I call you Shuriken now? Heard you were making quite a fuss around the missing-nin of this world. They'll be thankful when I take you out, particularly because I was the one to hire them for that special night."
His head signalled to them with a careless throw. "Except for Copy-nin over there, Konoha took care of that for me. I hadn't expected you to slip right through my fingers though, Kyura Gohama. With the Godaime and other Kyura occupied, I'd thought their children would have been easier to catch, who would have thought his daughter was such a sneaky little thing? How did you do it?"
She let her lips twist in a vicious sneer. "Is your ego hurt that you got bested by a nine-year-old in a game of hide and seek?"
"I'll win against the twenty-year-old self."
"Good thing Gohama's twenty-one then."
Her heart jerked in her chest and that was a dangerous thing because she needed a steady sharp beat for a battle. Her face turned slightly, eye glancing above her shoulder to see if his words had meant what they had meant.
Kakashi eye-crinkled at her, probably the same expression he would have given her had they been in Konoha and nothing had ever happened to ruin them, not Buki, not that last mission, not her.
"Oh. Happy belated birthday, kiddo. You should have said something even if you were brooding. I can't believe not even Yukine remembered."
"It's fine, I didn't remember either."
Had Kakashi remembered her?
"Particulars, Hatake Kakashi. The ten tails belongs to me."
"Seiryu belongs to no one but himself."
The man threw his head back in a throaty faked chuckle. "Is that why you keep him around for your personal use?"
"He just has a soft spot for me. You should feel how his chakra is boiling with the need to kill you." She let Seiryu's chakra leak through her pathways. "Maybe I'll show you."
Kakashi's fingers, still holding onto her arm, pressed tighter into her skin. "Wait, Gohama, let's not rush into this. I know more of his fighting style."
"This is my fight to fight, get out of the way, Hatake Kakashi."
"It's my fight too."
With a harsh yank, she pulled her arm away from his grasp. "Just stay out of it."
"You know I can't do that, Gohama."
Gohama clenched her teeth. "Seiryu, we're getting out of here."
Her right hand reached over her shoulder. "Give me your face." And Kakashi did, taking one step forward until he was standing right behind her, his face leaning above her shoulder. It was one of the reasons she knew this was a bad idea, because he blindly trusted her when she had tried to kill him.
Her palm rested onto his temple and she moulded Seiryu's chakra to seep inside the pathways around his sharingan, flooding the circuit with it so it wouldn't suck in Kakashi's own chakra reserves.
"Thank you." He whispered as she dropped her arm, his voice sounding too close to her ear and her senses heightened for battle fired at it.
And because she needed to do something about the jittering muscles, erratic heartbeat and push some distant between Kakashi and herself, she tugged at Seiryu's chakra and spread it through her pathways, the familiar powerful weight of it solidifying her killer's nature.
She had wanted to go through a month at least without it, had wanted to see how she would live without that part of her. It had been wishful thinking, whoever she was now could never not be a shinobi, it was branded into every cell in her body, into her past and her future, because even through all her identity crises Kyura Gohama's ghost would always spread around her like a shadow.
The murder would always be stuck to her, chase after her, Shuriken mask pressed to the skin of her face or not, Gohama's name belonging to herself or not. Just as she had failed fleeing from Onee-sama's life shadowing her own, just as she would always fail fleeing the murderer she had been moulded to be.
Above all she was a shinobi, had always just been a shinobi and it was naïve of her to think she could not be one. Not even Uncle as a monk in a monastery life had ever lost that edge, that cunning, that bloodthirst for when it was needed.
Only dead shinobi stopped being shinobi, especially when they were the ten-tails jinchuriki.
And so, Seiryu's chakra burst through her core, the power igniting that bloodthirst that growled low inside her, kill, kill, kill, the strength sharpening herself into a perfected weapon.
Her movements were as natural as breathing, as she neared the masked man in an instant, her chakra soaked fist passing through him and piercing through wood, as she had known it would do. She needed to test his abilities for herself, know of how they felt when she battled them because only then could she learn them, acquire them and shape herself into the best weapon of victory.
He passed through her and she felt a hand at her back, holding the flesh of her neck. A force pulled at it, different from the touch of human fingers. It felt as if a current of gravity twisted and sucked her body in. The adrenaline in her veins jerked, tachi already in her hand to slash beside her torso and pierce the yielding muscles and guts behind her.
Lighting roared between her and the masked man, Kakashi's hand shoving through empty matter, and the sucking pull vanished. She twisted around, Kakashi at her side, to face the two tomoe slits. Inside the left one, an eye shone purple and deadly, the flickering light of lightning painting it in eeriness, its power quivering through her.
The masked man slithered away from Kakashi's crackling arm and jumped onto another tree.
"What is tha—"
Kakashi interrupted her with a curt answer. "Rinnegan."
Her eyes widened at the sound of a distant name from quiet winter nights as the wind roared outside and Gohama drowned in blankets, Mother's gentle voice reading to her of old tales. "As in the freak eye out of shinobi myths?"
"One and the same."
"Fucking Uchiha." She spat through clenched teeth.
"Couldn't have put it better." Kakashi answered with a light tilt to his voice, as if they were discussing the weather and not the most overpowered mad clan in shinobi history.
"And people compare us Kyura to them. They're clearly much worse."
"Um…"
Her hand shoved his shoulder as she rolled her eyes. "Shut it, Hatake."
"In the Uchiha defence, there was one that even if somewhat annoying could redeem the entire clan."
"Fair." Gohama huffed with a softer voice, knowing he was speaking of Obito.
"But I can say the same thing for several Kyura."
Gohama stilled, her heart fluttering again, as her eyes lowered to the ground, a small sincere smile upturning her lips.
"How is your chakra sense?"
"Better than ever."
"We're regrouping." Kakashi said with his commanding team leader voice, offering her a piece of the steadiness she was severely lacking, and his fingers went through a series of hand seals.
The air around them was filled with a heavy mist and they jumped away. She crouched on the tree branch beside him, her senses sharp for any change in the masked man's position. The mist Kakashi had settled around them clear enough for her to see his grey eye and closed sharingan.
"So, what can the rinnegan do?"
"Manipulate attractive and repulsive forces, augment the body with mechanised limbs, weaponry and armour, read someone's mind and remove their soul, summon big creatures, absorb chakra, including ninjutsu."
"What the fuck? How is that even fair?"
"It isn't. And now apparently his sharingan can also suck people in, which means he touches you and you're gone."
"But it stopped when he dematerialised, which means he needs to be tangible. We can work with that. It also has to have a limit to how long he can keep it up, like your kamui." She met his gaze with a self-satisfied one of hers. "How's your taijutsu, Copy-nin?"
"Your plan is to drown him in a taijutsu fight?"
"And once he has to materialise we destroy his eyes."
Kakashi averted his face from her, his eye fixed somewhere on the wall of mist around them. She surprised herself on how easily she could still read the small inflections of his expression, the unconvinced light frown between his eyebrows.
Her arms crossed below her chest as she stood up and looked down at him with a raised eyebrow. "Do you have a better plan, Copy-nin?"
He stood up too, with a resigned sigh, his eye boring into her own as he looked down at her. "You can't let him touch you, Gohama."
"When he does materialise to touch me, you'll just stab his eyes."
"I have to say, I'm not a fan of the idea of using you as bait." His voice was light even if she knew he was being honest.
"I'm not a fan of you being here, so get used to it."
His hand rested on her shoulder, thumb pressed to the pulse point on her neck. It made every instinct in her body freak the fuck out, but she allowed him. Only a few minutes ago, Kakashi had allowed her to press her bloodied hand over his heart.
The touch edged on uncomfortable and irresistible, it has been too long since anyone human had touched her and that dangerous crave of before ravaged back into her skin.
The humour in his gaze dropped at the same time as it lowered to watch where his hand touched her throat, the soft skin jumping against the pad of his thumb with each strong fast beat. She tried to read it, but Kakashi was still proficient at the droopy bored stare and he was clearly trying to hide whatever he was feeling. She couldn't find what he thought of how her heartbeat fired under his hand.
"Remember our fight with Itachi and Kisame?" Kakashi started. "It's the same now, as long as I'm alive I won't let him take you."
The reality of it crashed into her at his words. The man with the mangekyo and rinnegan was there to kill her. Her life or death would be decided in the next fleeting seconds and minutes of an hour and all of them would be wasted in a fight.
And Kakashi was touching her and he was looking at her with that tenderness of his and that craving made a stupid selfish urge flutter in her mind. Just from the slight darker shadow on the mask below his lower lip she could see what his mouth would look like, could imagine how it would feel like.
Was it fear of death that made her hope for impossible things? Or fear of all the impossible future possibilities that marked themselves painfully impossible now? Fear that she would drag Kakashi down with her.
"Promise me something else."
His hand glided up her throat, the slide of his fingers over her skin dragging a shiver from her. Kakashi held onto her cheek so gently, his hand so irresistibly warm, and Gohama fought against everything inside of her not to lean into his touch.
"What?"
"You'll never let me drag you down."
His fingers curled on the back of her neck and through the strands of her hair. Kakashi shook his head softly, an even more terrifying fear than hers not completely hidden behind his mask. "What are you planning?"
"This isn't about this battle, it's about... everything really... I wish I cou..." Her words waned against the lump in her throat and she steeled herself. This wasn't the moment for wishful thinking and regrets, not when the reality of things was so achingly marked into her.
"Don't let me drag you down over anything, Kakashi. I don't want you to get dragged down with…" A pang of self-loathing resonated through her. She grimaced at the flash of an image of Kakashi like he usually stood in front of the memorial, shoulders weighing down in defeat and regret, and no actual body to bury, no actual grave to visit. "with me."
His other hand rose to cup her cheek and his thumbs soothed down the curled sides of her lips. "No, Gohama, don't make that face, that's the face of…"
"When I tried to kill you." She completed with the tone of a question and all the certainty in the world.
"No, of when you called yourself a worthless piece of shit."
Surprise shot through her eyes, because those were usually secret insults she spat only to herself inside her own mind. Maybe she had voiced them on that last night in Buki, it had been fitting then, as it was still fitting now.
A dry bitter chuckle wanted to gnaw up her throat, but Kakashi stopped it before it could, his hold on her face shaking her a little. "Don't. Don't say it, don't think it."
It was as if he could see right through her even when his sharingan was closed and only that lone dark eye bore into her, almost angry now. An angry Kakashi was a rare frightening sight.
"You know you're not worthless, Gohama. Even if you feel it, you know it's not true."
She shook her head, hands coming to rest over his. "Just promise me, please."
"I can't, Gohama."
She pulled away from him and his hand fell away from her. She turned around, her back to him, fingers opening and curling as they had started shaking.
"You should hate me. Can't I make you hate me?"
"Sorry, you have to think of something else as a belated birthday wish." Kakashi drawled from behind her, his voice with that teasing tone she hadn't heard in so long. Her eyes clenched shut at the sudden longing that hit her chest.
"Seiryu, don't let her do anything stupid." His voice was serious then, probably suspecting she would pull something against his stubborn wishes.
"Tell him I said your stupidity knows no bounds." Seiryu answered with all the amusement in the world and Gohama let out a sigh at finding herself attacked from all sides.
"I support whatever Seiryu said that made you huff like that."
Again a pang to her heart and those impossible dreams Gohama had always known were impossible as she dreamed them, and that slithered now through her mind in flashes.
"Ah, Kakashi. I like him even better now."
"Enough chatter, we don't want to leave him waiting for too long." She cut in and she jumped away from their tree branch, following the signature of the masked man's chakra in all its overwhelming power as Kakashi followed behind her. The masked man didn't even try to deflect her first punch, letting it pass right through his face.
They started their barrage of taijutsu, every blow passing through air and it felt ridiculous to punch and kick nothing, probably looked ridiculous too. She winced and whispered a little apology when one of her fists connected with Kakashi's side instead.
The masked man didn't let them play around for long, mere minutes of thrown punches passing through him before he hissed. "Almighty push."
Her breath left her lungs in a painful gasp as she felt her body being pushed back with an unbreakable force. Even the arms of chakra she wrapped around the trunks couldn't stop her flight, the wood giving out and shattering under the force. So this was what Kakashi had meant with repulsive force.
She hissed out a grunt as her back crushed through tree, a shot of pain spreading from her spine to her limbs. She ended up rolling across the ground, the grass and earth scrapping the skin of her arms. Once the push seized its reign over her, she managed to find her balance through the remaining momentum dragging her.
A path of tousled soil stretched in front of her, as she kneeled and searched for Kakashi's chakra signature. Her chest heaved with each laboured breath, but she had no time to worry over her burning lungs. Her pathways inflamed with Seiryu's chakra, the air around her smothered with it, until any other chakra around her became muffled to her awareness.
Her fingers shaped the seal for a kage bunshin, her hand pressed to her copy's stomach and flooded it with Seiryu's chakra. Already knowing her plan, the bunshin flared Seiryu's chakra and she let it wash away from her own pathways, hiding her signature.
With an earth jutsu, she opened a hole under her and jumped down on it, using another jutsu to cover the top layer, enough that people could walk over it. She pulled out the scroll kept on her ankle and unrolled it on the ground. Seiryu's chakra continued to roar above her and beneath its power she could feel the masked man closing in on her bunshin.
"Flare it more." She told her bunshin mentally and the foreign signature became only a whisper underneath Seiryu's, and hopefully her own was completely hidden.
This needed to be timed perfectly. Her hand pressed to the middle of the sealing swirls on the scroll and she pushed her chakra slowly and methodically, building up the energy required for the jutsu. The seal shone around the walls of earth, illuminating the threads of roots and bugs. A few grains fell onto her hair as the thin layer above her shook and she prayed it was thick enough to hold a fight between two shinobi.
"Are you sure about this, kiddo?" Seiryu asked, not hiding the doubt in his voice.
"If it kills me, I'm sorry for that, Seiryu. If it leaves me too incapacitated to fight, I'll kill myself before he gets you."
"I'm not reassured at all, I have to say. And Kakashi won't be very happy, this is one of those stupid things he talked about."
"He'll be safe, it's all that matters."
"Not for him."
Her eyes closed as she searched for the exact position of the masked man between the raging beast chakra, ignoring Seiryu's persuasion tactics and his ridiculous soft spot for Kakashi.
If Gohama was sure of one thing, it was this.
Her bunshin had done a good job of keeping him right where she wanted him. She needed only to make the last hand seal, timing it perfectly. "Let him suck you in." She told her bunshin.
With a stilled breath, she waited for the confirmation. Her hand not forming a seal soaking with chakra and, at the command, it tore through the layer of earth until her fingers wrapped around an ankle.
A spike of chakra into the fuinjutsu scroll and they were gone.
The masked man disappeared in front of her and she watched as Kakashi faltered in his run towards her, only to speed up with inflamed resolve. His wide eyes looked down at the crumbled hole carved into the ground, the earth seared with chakra. His head snapped up, his harsh gaze cutting through her, but what hurt more was the hint of betrayal in it.
"Where did you go?" Kakashi growled as he moved to grasp onto her arms. "Don't you dare dispel, where did you go?"
It surprised her, the certainty of death, lingering from the original as she had created her, even when to a bunshin death was a vague concept that had never held any weight. They sacrificed themselves every time for the original, their thoughts and emotions a mere wispy shadow of Gohama herself. Yet this time they burned deep and reached right to the surface of the skin at the emotion of Kakashi's eyes.
It scared her a little to think how much the original actually felt, if even the shadow pierced this hard. She was glad for being only a bunshin ready to dispel and disappear with no traces of herself.
There was that urge to kiss Kakashi, but she knew the original would never do that, so she wouldn't too. Above all the tugs and pulls inside her, which were also Gohama's mirror, what ruled the most was the want to follow Gohama's will. Kage bunshin were a jutsu tied by will, not emotion.
Still, her hand reached for his face, resting against his masked cheek, because she could feel the longing and the missing, the guilt of Gohama, and they seemed so unbearably heavy in her bunshin detachment – she wondered if all these thoughts were also a mirror of Gohama, she wondered if all the bunshin created before had thought as much as she was thinking now.
Even through the intensity, the fear, the betrayal in Kakashi's eyes he leaned into her touch. She smiled, wanting it to be how he last remembered her and knowing it was Gohama's will. "Goodbye, Kakashi."
His fingers tightened painfully around her muscle. "No, no. Tell me, Gohama. Please."
When she felt herself waver, she dispelled.
With a puff, the kage bunshin in front of him dispersed into snowflakes. His nails bit into his own palm as his hands clenched close once he was left holding nothing but air. A snowflake glided down the air and he let it fall onto his hand and watched it melt into his glove.
He should have known, he should have fucking known.
Kakashi jumped down onto the hole, his hands wiping the crumbled soil away to see the marks of chakra, but they were written in Kyura fuinjutsu language and he couldn't understand where it had taken Gohama.
Harshly tugging at a flap of his flak jacket, Kakashi pulled out his radio, the radio Gohama had used during their days in Buki to listen to music distorted with static.
"Hatake Kakashi, ninja registration 009720, get me this message to Snow's main hide-out. 'Do you detect any combat?'" After a few minutes, the ninja returned with a negative. "Ask the ANBU teams out there."
Kakashi waited as patiently as he could when his heart was hammering against his ribs and his chest was burning inside out.
"Kakashi-taicho?"
"Yes."
"Hide-out Snow relays that a squad sensed a great source of chakra from 100 kilometres north and 40 west of the main hide-out location."
"Do not engage."
He was in the Land of Rivers, close to Rain, and even if rationally he knew he would not reach Gohama in time to be her backup, Kakashi still ran because in his heart there was always hope for the people he loved.
Her knee landed on cushion of cold and snow, wet as it melted for spring and into the pattern of the twin seal she had marked on that forest ground months before. Her fingers were still wrapped around an ankle. She hadn't died and luckily hadn't ended up with her body cut into pieces, but the same could be said of her baggage.
A teleportational scroll had always the risk of defragmentation, especially when one added an extra load. She hadn't had the time to test it before, but apparently her research had payed off and she didn't end up killing herself.
This could have gone so very wrong and had ended so very right.
The masked man's awareness reached him at the same time hers did and he dematerialised under her hold. She jumped away, summoning her tachi into her hand.
"You brought us to the Land of Snow. Do you expect to die and wanted to make it back home? Or was it to protect a certain Copy-nin?"
Her bunshin dispelled and her memories surged into her own mind. Kakashi's betrayed look stabbed deep into her, even hate was easier to endure than betrayal. It didn't matter, either way, she would let a thousand betrayed looks of Kakashi settle over her face if it meant he was safe.
"Do you know why I want the biju, Kyura Gohama?" The masked man started with his low smooth voice.
She crossed her arms, eyes intent on his body position and senses attentive to any change in his chakra, discerning if she should allow him the monologue or cut the crap and just attack him.
"I call it the Tsuki no Me Project. This world is bleak and made for tragedy, suffering. Humanity was created to be unhappy, but I know how to counter our own nature in this world. For that I need the power of the biju.
"You can give your life for peace, Gohama, for joy and happiness, everything Bukigakure never had, everything you never had. You can give Kakashi happiness. You can give all of them happiness, if you just surrender the ten-tails to me, Uchiha Madara."
He had hit the target before with the comment about Grandfather, but this time it missed so far past its mark it was almost comical.
The corner of her lip lifted in a merciless smirk. "Happiness is overrated, anyway."
"Never thought there would be a day when I'd be thankful for all that broodiness, kiddo."
Her fingers wrapped around the leather at her wrist and ripped her arm guard way. With the tip of her tanto, Gohama sliced her palm and wiped the blood down her jinchuriki seal. Her chakra roared through her pathways and into her hand as she pushed it against the snow. The earth seemed to shake under her while she tore through the air, Seiryu's chakra rushing out of her body and into the ground under her.
Kneeling on top of Seiryu's head, his chakra soaking through the air around them, she brushed her hand up and down his scales. It was always different from the seal, the smooth feel of his skin sharper, the overwhelming rush of his chakra more alive, his presence under her realer.
"What was that about not summoning me again?" Seiryu asked with the cheekiness of a kid, his voice rumbling through the forest.
She punched him, the blow silly against the thickness of his scales and size of his head. "Shut up, you old lizard. I'm still mad at you for leaving me alone with possible vision Kakashi, but right now we need to fight for our lives."
She stood, arms crossed and neck straight, the magnificence of Seiryu spreading through her, hair swaying perfectly in the breeze to frame her face. She felt like a goddess looking down at the earth, aware of the power she contained, aware of the rule she had over death, eyes sharp and indifferent as they settled on the masked man before her on the snow. So tiny, so petty with his dreams of happiness and revolution.
Bastard. The name seemed fitting and as a goddess she would bestow it upon him. Bastard.
"I can feel your cockiness, kiddo. Calm down."
"I'm having a full out power trip right now."
It lasted little, the advantage in size diminishing as the bastard summoned six large beasts and copied her pose above the head of a gigantic ox. She couldn't forget she was not only fighting a dematerialising enemy that couldn't be touched, but also the Rinnegan.
The Rinnegan.
Her mind still hadn't caught up to it. The eyes had always been only a legend Mother had used to spur Gohama's childish imagination, her childish wonder over myths and fantastic things that felt real and unreal at the same time.
It seemed even less real now, and she was facing it in reality, not only through books and through her own head. She was seeing the purple swirl of it with her own gaze, she was feeling the amounts of chakra one single eye could move.
What would Mother have thought as she told those stories if she had known her little girl would fight it one day? Fear probably, terror. Those were strangely subdued inside her now, the honed bloodthirst in her veins more thrilled than restless.
"The bastard is mine, take care of the beasts, Seiryu. And don't go too far, I can't keep the connection up with more than a hundred metres between us."
"Now that I'm out, who appointed you taicho of our team?"
"Oh shut up, do you have a better plan?" As an answer, Seiryu slithered through the air, Gohama holding herself on top of him with help of chakra. "I thought so too."
They had never fought with Seiryu summoned, but their flights between lands or for their simple pleasure had helped refine their harmonisation. He used his claws to pierce through a titanic bird, making him to disappear in a cloud of smoke.
"Tail." She said while jumping up, still surrounded in the summoning smoke.
Her back felt the gentle impact of one of Seiryu's tails and with a whip like motion he threw her towards the bastard. They had done this on their flights, her body begging for a release through adrenaline. Seiryu would throw her far away, her eyes watering from the cutting edge of the wind, and fly to catch her on his back before she could hit the ground.
With her tachi drawn out and her chakra flowing around its blade, Gohama broke through the cloud like a spear. The bastard had only time to dematerialise, but her target had already been pierced. The summoned ox roared as her tachi and most of her body stabbed its head and it vanished with a pop and smoke.
She turned in the air as she fell, landing to face the bastard, her eyes careful not to meet the sharingan. At her back, she could feel the massive gathering of biju chakra into a ball, her skin instinctively shuddering at it. When the biju bomb hit, its shock wave shoving through the air, she used the muddled raise of snow and crackled wood to hide her as she attacked.
The bastard was smart enough to dematerialise through the debris and consequently any blow she threw at him. Her mind was running with every possibility of a hit, one strong enough to be deadly by itself. She didn't let the dread raise to her lungs at how hopeless her cause seemed.
"We have a problem, kiddo. The dog multiplies with every hit. And it can also merge together again."
"I'll take care of it."
"All yours, that thing freaks me out."
Her fingers searched through her back pouch as she jumped towards the raging hound. She pulled out one of her shielding fuinjutsu tags, the largest she had made, containing in it months of gathering chakra and she had even injected it with some of Seiryu's for added impenetrability.
It was one of the things Gohama was most proud about, her own creation after years of studying fuinjutsu, of sleepless nights searching and deciphering Kyura scrolls, and after the help of one brilliant sannin. A creation that used her chakra and knowledge for ultimate protection that meant only to shield and not attack.
Calling the attention of the multi-headed summon, she let it follow her. When it was within the radius of the chakra dome, she pressed the tag onto the ground and with a spike of chakra the seal released. Her Kyura energy mixed with Seiryu's buzzed through the air as it fell like a blue veil of light around them. The beast stormed against the walls but they didn't waver, it had been effectively caged in.
As she passed through the layer of chakra, Seiryu hit the last of the summons and it disappeared with another pop. She was ready to ask Seiryu to catch her with one of his tails, when chains of purple chakra left through the bastard's hand and wrapped themselves around Seiryu.
His ancient low voice shrieked, the sound seeming to spurt from deep inside the earth, and Gohama groaned, her knees giving out onto the snow, arms holding onto herself. When Seiryu was out, they were connected through a tie of chakra and that meant what one felt the other felt too.
Her flesh seared with clear marks of chains, from her torso, to her arms, to tails she didn't have, and her lungs burned from the need to scream the pain away. She could feel Seiryu's chakra being ripped from them and, between the torture and Seiryu's piercing screams of pain, her mind was petrified.
"Unsummon me." Seiryu hissed through their connection.
Her trembling legs dragged her through the snow she couldn't feel, her face contorting at each new flare of pain, each new crushing squeeze of the chains, each new tug at Seiryu's chakra. Once her back felt the shadowy, light touch of a rough bark behind her, she supressed her signature and she called him back into her.
It was a risky move but Gohama would do anything to stop the sound of Seiryu's cries that brought with them all the pain in the world.
The overwhelming rush of Seiryu's chakra back into her core always made her pass out. Her eyes snapped open with a jolt to her heart and she made certain her signature was still hidden. Through the blurriness in her senses and her mind, she searched for the bastard's presence and found it a comfortable distance away from her. She still had time to pull herself together for a few moments.
"What was that?"
"Some type of sealing chakra chains. Reminds me of an Uzumaki jutsu. Don't let them touch you. Are you okay, kiddo?"
"Will be once I get my bearings. And you?"
"I'm fine, the pain's gone. I hadn't felt anything like that since the Kyura sealed me into my first jinchuriki."
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not asking for your pity, kiddo. It was a simple observation. Also, not your fault. He's coming, you know."
"I know." She rasped as she pushed her hands against the trunk and tried to pull herself up through still shaking legs.
She flickered to stand before him, not forgetting to leave long metres between them. Her pathways were still aching and she settled for holding her tachi at her side, free from a coat of energy.
The bastard stretched a hand for her, gentle and welcoming, and she snorted at the unfitting gesture. "Surrender the jubi, Kyura Gohama! There is no need for this fight. All I want is to give peace to the world, no suffering, no death."
She felt like laughing if not for her sore body, she also felt like slicing the head off his shoulders, but if he was willing to monologue her way into recovery then she would readily accept it.
"You are still human, you may play god, but you will always be human. You can't stop death. Death is the only certainty in this, the only truth, unstoppable truth in a universe made of mystery. Eternity can't exist, not in this universe at least. Everything that is right now will eventually not be."
"If people don't feel themselves dying then it doesn't exist. Only what affects us exists, only what we know exists. With the power of the biju, I can make people forget death and if they don't know her, she has no power over anyone. One moment they're happy then next they're gone. Death won't ever settle over them."
"I see your problem now, bastard. The world is centred around you. For you only what is related to you can exist. Selfish, narcissistic and a delusional bastard, aren't you? That isn't a great mix I have to say."
"All I want is to get rid of the evil that has festered for so long. You more than anyone else should know how evil this world is."
A new anger ignited in her, not from hatred over his actions, but pure burning indignation at his hypocrisy. "That's so fucking rich, you bastard. You were the one that made it evil!"
"The suffering I cause is a price needed to pay. The shinobi world is a sickness and the cure can only exist with a little pain. Can you deny this, Gohama, the last and lonely Kyura, the Shuriken of Bukigakure, Konoha's traitor?"
"The system is flawed, but a massacre is never justified, murder is always wrong."
The shinobi world was more than flawed, it was completely broken, a cruel vicious thing that mirrored the worse of human nature and the worse of the worldly suffering. The Hidden Villages had started with the wish for peace but their power deformed them into bloodthirsty nucleus that held no value over foreign life and looked at no means for the end of their own self-preservation, forging wars, assassinations, massacres, torture, human testing.
Missing-nin or village shinobi, none better than the other, they were all mercenaries, sacrificing their lives for money. All Gohama had ever wanted was to protect the things precious to her, but it had been naïve to think shinobi were meant only for that.
The masked bastard was foolishly naïve too, or maybe he chose to be blind. He believed that whatever his project was would remain what it had been in the beginning. It was the law of the universe, for things to wither, to rot, to deform into something filthy, from the grass under their feet, to the birds singing in the trees and a human being's heart.
He wasn't breaking the cycle, he was continuing it. There was no hope.
"You're just a delusional murderer that thinks he knows more than everyone else. You're scum, you're worse than scum."
His chakra shuddered and then ignited. "Interesting choice of words, Gohama." The bastard drawled with an eerie tone to his voice. "Where did you get them from?"
It was a trick question, a trap, she didn't know why, but she knew there was something more hidden behind his voice, a pool of meaning she could not understand only recognise that it was there.
Her skin prickled at it and she raised her tachi with both hands, blade glittering under the pale sun of May in Northern Snow. Her body had recovered enough and this conversation was only making the sucking disillusion in her heart gnaw deeper. There was no reason to drag this fight any further, would she live or die, it was time for her to meet that fate.
"You should know, bastard, that one of my biggest flaws is my pride. I will never let you kill me, I will never surrender myself alive. I am the junchuriki of the ten-tails beast, Seiryu, and I will never let him fall into hands other than mine."
"You underestimate Uchiha Madara's power."
Her eyes narrowed into a cutting edge as they settled over his mask, a sneer set on her lips. "You are not Uchiha Madara."
She flickered and landed behind his back, Seiryu's chakra burning her pathways and her movements. The first slash of her tachi sliced through nothing but air as he dematerialised, but she didn't ease her attacks, using the best of her chakra manipulation to force a hit on him at all instances, until they were swallowed up in a ball of chakra.
The mangekyo had to have a limit, Uchiha Madara or not, no one could keep it up forever. In her mind she was counting the seconds, but she couldn't be sure her clock was on time, either speeding up or delayed.
The bastard pulled the fan from his back and its metal clashed against her tachi, while his other hand opened beside him to absorb all of the chakra soaking the air around them. She expelled more of Seiryu's chakra from her pathways and her hand took a kunai from her thigh pouch. With a flick of her wrist, it was flying towards him. The fan slid roughly through the ground to stop the flight of her kunai and he finished absorbing all of their chakra.
Her eyes widened as she discovered another opening in his defence. He had to materialise to absorb ninjutsu with the rinnegan.
With a ruthless shove of his fan her hold on her tachi weakened and his weapon hit her side, throwing her away from him. She flung a chain onto the handle of the fan and with a chakra-powered pull tried to rip it away from his hold. She grimaced when instead he used his stronger hold to yank her back to him.
Her blade clashed against the fan again, the blow ringing up her hands and arms and making her spine flare with pain, and it absorbed the chakra around it. She had to keep the close-combat fight if she wanted to destroy at least one of his eyes. She groaned as she tried to shove back, her eyes meeting his burning ones from anger behind the two tomoe slits.
"You're quite the nuisance, Kyura Gohama." The bastard growled, at least she was crawling under his skin.
"It's about to get even worse." As her lips shaped those words her kage bunshin, deftly hidden in the ground as Kakashi had always so cleverly done during their spars in Buki, pushed a blade through the back of his skull and through the rinnegan.
The bastard didn't even flinch, his sharingan already shifted into the form of the mangekyo. Her breath seized in her throat, eyes widening until it was almost painful. Everything around her vanished with a silent sudden wave, all she could see was that achingly familiar shape.
"That's… the mangekyo, that's..." Gohama would always recognise that pattern of the shuriken-like swirl of black onto a red iris. "Kakashi… It's the same as… Kakashi's..."
"What did you say?" The masked bastard hissed as his hand shot out to grab her by the jaw.
"I don't… why… why do you have Uchiha Obito's sha—?"
Before Gohama could finish her line of thought and her words, the hand holding her jaw yanked her forward and she felt the slicing pain of a blade on her skin. Out of instinct, she pushed Seiryu's chakra out of her pathways, the heat of it burning her insides and everything around her. The bastard's motion was interrupted as he dematerialised in front of her, dropping her to fall onto her knees.
Her hand snapped to hold onto the cut flesh where her neck met her shoulder. Right away she could feel the warm wetness of blood seeping out onto clothes and fingers. And then came the dizziness, even if she couldn't feel any pain, not even the scorched flesh from the chakra explosion. Her hand reached into her pouch and she pulled out a blood-replenishing pill, popping it into her mouth.
She tried to fight the haziness spreading through her vision and limbs, as her eyes searched for the bastard through the rubbles of burnt trees, and her senses tried to reach out to his signature.
"Seiryu…"
"Yeah, kiddo…?" He answered in the softest voice she had ever heard from him and that familiar instinctive fear made cold lead sink into her guts.
"The wound…"
"I… I can—I don't…"
The hand supporting her up clenched around the wet soil, the snow had melted under the burn of the explosion. "I just need to finish this battle, as long as I finish this battle, I'll be okay."
Her blurred vision fell onto the burning mask that had fallen from its place at her waist. The flames fed on the lacquered wood and Gohama watched as the red tongues flickered around the shuriken carved onto its forehead.
She let it burn, Shuriken was gone and there was no one to replace her role.
It was no longer about her village, it was no longer about the Kyura and it was no longer about her weapon as a shinobi of Bukigakure.
There was something greater. Something greater to defend that ignited the last of her sense of duty, the last of Goahma's burning desire to protect.
The last battle of Kyura Gohama would be a battle to protect the future.
A life given for the greater glory of the world.
Seiryu's chakra wasn't fast enough to save her, but it would prolong her life and for now that was enough, for now all that existed and all that her life encompassed was this battle.
The bastard's chakra signature appeared suddenly into the air and Gohama stood up with no shadow of a wound drowning her. The next moments of her waning life were nothing but a flash, the bloodthirst simmering through her spread across her movements, all the killer instinct the Kyura had bred in her drowning any concrete thought she could have formed in her mind.
One moment Gohama was jumping for the bastard, the next she was kneeling in front of him, her lungs straining for each breath, but so were his. Her numb fingers still held on stubbornly to her shoulder, even if they couldn't stop the bleeding.
He had her summited, but Gohama wasn't losing.
Gohama looked up at the bastard, part of his mask was gone, showing deep creases of scarred skin between flesh seared with burns. His right arm and side were nothing but gunk falling as drops onto the ground, the cloak he wore half-burnt as he leaned into his better side.
Her chest stirred with triumph even if Gohama was dying. The untouchable man had been seared with her and Seiryu's chakra and their touch was marked into his flesh. Her lips upturned in a smile as she craned her head back even more, her eyes meeting his, not sparing him from the victory bubbling in her blood.
"The Kyura were always a selfish clan, bastard. If the seal feels it's being severed and it will self-destruct, bringing jinchuriki and biju with it."
His sharingan eye widened, now unveiled for her to see, all its small inflections oozing through it, so clear when she was used to Kakashi's droopy blank stare. The thought of him tightened as claws around Gohama's heart, and she couldn't stop remembering her team too. Hansuke. Nikato. Kisamaru. Even through all her urging for them to let her go, her death would still affect them.
A small chuckle fell from her lips. "Even if you get me, you'll never get Seiryu."
The masked bastard growled and his remaining hand tugged at every pouch in her, emptying them onto the space between them. Gohama had no energy left to stop him, saving the last drop for if she had to kill herself.
The three scrolls fell onto the ground and he picked them up, roughly pressing them to the side of her neck, soaked in her Kyura blood. Her Kyura chakra he had absorbed earlier rushed to his hands and he released the seals protecting the jinchuriki scrolls. The decorated paper flowed in the air as they unrolled and then he sucked them in.
His fingers buried in her hair as he pulled her face near his. "This is not over. I'll rip the ten-tails from you, Gohama."
And with a swirl he was gone.
Her trembling hand reached for the closed scroll the bastard had thrown carelessly onto the ground. Gohama unrolled it, the beacon of Hatake Kakashi making the claws pierce deeper into the muscle of her heart. Even if Kakashi had said he couldn't, she still hoped he would fulfil the promise she had asked of him. Gohama hoped she would no longer drag anyone down once dead.
Her shaking fingers were sloppy as Gohama drew the final name and words, branding it into the scroll with all the lives that had never truly belonged to Bukigakure. Except for hers.
Gohama had always been Buki's.
Gohama stood up, pressing the scroll to her chest, set on leaving the destruction of the battlefield and into the forest. Even if in the end it really didn't matter where Gohama died, somehow it still did.
The adrenaline hadn't washed away yet and Gohama still couldn't any pain, only a dizzying shadow that loomed right behind her eyes. She couldn't move her right arm, but her shaking legs were enough to lead her somewhere. With small wavering steps over the melting snow of May, Gohama walked through the forest, the brown green pines and cedars embracing her from all sides and spreading through the white pure snow.
Seiryu's presence shimmered all around her, but he wasn't talking. Gohama didn't needed him to, his presence was enough for the loneliness to blur and no words could ever encompass a moment as this.
A higher mound of snow made her stumble and in her numbed out state she easily fell onto the ground, cheek pressed into icy wet snow. Gohama could hear the gurgling fresh water from a stream and her soul craved for it with so much thirst.
Her palm rested on the snow and with a little chakra she called for Yukine. Gohama didn't want him to feel her death without warning, but as his graceful form broke through the cloud of smoke, she could see it in the depths of his gentle trembling eyes that he already knew she was dying.
"Yukine." Gohama rasped and he lowered his head to nuzzle her cheek. "Where's the water?"
"A few steps away."
"I'll just rest a little and then we can go there. Turn me around please."
As gently as he could, Yukine used his muzzle to lift her torso slightly and rolled her with his side. It sent a flash of pain through her spine, but it quickly numbed, as Gohama watched the flickers of sky through the dark green of the cedar leaves and Yukine's head rested, present and warm, on her belly. Gohama could have been just outside Buki and it would look the same.
"This is a beautiful place…" A beautiful place to die. Gohama was glad she would die in the Land of Snow.
Now that she rested above the snow everything felt heavier in her limbs and her spirit, realer. The soil absorbed Gohama's blood with eagerness, reclaiming what had always belonged to it. A red path was drawn for death to follow it, whether it came dressed as cold, animal or weariness.
It was okay.
It was okay.
It was okay.
There had never been any hope for herself, there had never been any hope in herself. And yet… and yet… the panic that slithered cold through her skin made every cell in her body cry, a panicking piercing thing, to be alive. It had always been okay, but she still tried to find something good and real to hold on to.
This was good.
This was normal.
This was human.
Was her heart beating faster or slower?
With every drop of blood that fell onto the puddle under her one more possibility was lost into nothing. Gohama's future, which had never belonged to herself, was slipping away through the grasp between her fingers and she couldn't grasp onto it strong enough. There was nothing to hold on to and the fear was twisting into something deeper inside her chest, something harsher.
Grief.
Of all the things Gohama had thought she would feel for her dying, grief wasn't one of them. Gohama knew grief, she had it branded into every inch of her soul and yet it this one was new. Gohama had always grieved for others, and now she grieved for herself, for her own life.
Gohama wanted to live.
It almost made her laugh if it weren't for the weakness in her lungs – it was getting so difficult to breathe, each inhale and exhale a painful rasp in her lungs and throat – and for the grief in her heart she could have laughed. Because finally it was here, all for herself, pure and searing, with no shadow of obligation and duty stirring it on, the wish to live and live for herself.
And regret. Not even in death would it silence itself. It whispered, as the sibilant hiss of the cold wind of winter, it whispered of peaceful days with flowers at her feet and friends at her side, it whispered of warm stilled nights after too many glasses of sake, and sweaty afternoons on the grass beaten after a well fought spar, and the fresh breeze of dawn with her ear pressed to the steady heartbeat, hand resting above warm lightning skin and two tender mismatched eyes looking down at her.
Gohama could feel it now, herself, she could feel herself be as herself and be herself in the world and that made the grief sear deeper, because in a few moments she would no longer be. There was gratitude too. Gohama would die as herself.
Just for a little longer, Gohama looked up at the pale sky, her fingers numb around a handful of snow, just for a little longer, Gohama wanted to feel herself alive, feel herself be with all the things around her just for a little longer, a little stretch of time that she wanted to last forever.
Death.
It was finally here, after a lifetime of obsessing over it, it had finally come, and she had never expected it to linger so long, for its pull to drag on and still she wished it would drag on even more.
Gohama had thought of it more than anything else in her life, readied herself for it, wished for it, seen it in others. Naively she had thought she knew death as she knew the branches of her pathways, but nothing could ever have readied herself for this, not her thoughts on it, not the sleepless nights where it plagued her mind and seemed to burn into her stomach, and even not seeing others fall into it. All of that meant nothing now, as Gohama was dying for herself.
Death was Gohama's own-most thing.
"Yukine… help me up…" Gohama whispered, almost lost in the endless silence of the forest.
Gohama was dying, all her possibilities nothing but a thought in her mind, but at least she would make it to the water, at least she would feel it run against the tips of her fingers, at least that small thin future would belong only to herself.
Her hand, soaked in red, her own blood and it didn't feel like filth stuck to the creases of her skin, rested over Yukine's head. Her legs could make it to the water, she knew of this. One last step on the path of her life, one last step and it would be hers alone to carve, chose and to savour.
"I don't want you to see me die…" And still Yukine stayed rooted beside her. "Go, please… I'm sorry and thank you, but go… back to your pack… I'm on my way to mine…"
Yukine just looked at her with the aching sorrow she no longer felt, his voice silent, before he disappeared in a puff of smoke. The last time. There was no reason to stretch their goodbyes with forced meaningless words. What needed to be said and done had been said and done when Gohama had lived.
It was okay. The grief was washing itself away. Any anguish Gohama might have felt was muted by the wearing pull of death, so close and so touchable, it quieted everything but itself.
There was the stream, the bluest blue, bluer than the sky, and Gohama would make it there, Gohama would let the water of Snow wash away her body and her life.
Gohama fell onto the cold water she could no longer feel. Her clothes spread wide, as she floated through the current, soon her heavy clothes would drag her down, her dead body at the bottom of Snow's river, resting onto muddy death.
"Seiryu… I'm sorry." Just as Yukine Seiryu was feeling her die. "Thank you."
"I will always be grateful that you were my jinchuriki. I'm with you until the end, kiddo. We're in this together. Always."
"You're free, Seiryu." Gohama whispered with a small smile, a fulfilled promise that belonged only to herself.
"We're free, Gohama."
Now her eyes had only thoughts for the cedar leaves dancing softly as she floated, whispering her goodbye. The sky between them spread pale and infinite. It was just as laying on a sled while the dogs slowly pulled her after a day of hunting. Gohama would look at the escaping trees and strip of blue sky with the same innocent wonder as now, the same tiredness after a day of work, the same longing to reach the warmth of her home.
Father. Mother. Uncle. Yukine. I'm finally coming home.
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This is an important A/N.
I had planned to continue this story for one more part, during the Fourth Shinobi War, with a less sudden and more 'satisfying', happy ending. I already have the chapters planned out, some scenes written out, and some themes I was looking forward to explore and tie up for the ending, but…
After writing the last part of this chapter (which will not change even with a last VII part), I've endeared myself to the idea of this being Gohama's end, even if there are some things left to work through (but I guess the idea that not everything is resolved before death is fitting).
Through the entire process of writing the fan fic, I kept going back and forth with the idea of killing off Gohama and had ultimately decided against it (because really, poor Kakashi and OC's), but now that I wrote this death scene, I think it's a fair and fitting ending for this story and the character's journey of self-affirmation.
I'm 50/50 on either finishing now, or continuing and can't seem to make a decision for myself.
So, I'm here to ask you, my lovely readers, if you would like me to continue this story or not.
Send me a DM or review on your thoughts. Even if it's just one person, I will happily write the rest, because I really enjoy it.
Either way, I'm deeply grateful for all of you reading this monster of a story, especially the ones that have favourited, followed and reviewed. This really has been a great pleasure and I love sharing it with you.
As always, stay safe.
- RP