ii.
Chapter Thirty-Five: The Best-Laid Plans of Snakes and Men
"Perfection does not exist; to understand it is the triumph of human intelligence, to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness." -Alfred De Musset
Otogakure was sort of a redundant name, Nanami thought to herself as she leapt over an outcropping of rock behind Kisame. The Village Hidden in Sound, but there was no village, not really. There was only a series of underground laboratories where Orochimaru and Kabuto performed experiments that ranged from morally dubious to things that would make even the most seasoned of killers cringe.
And on top of that, most of the sannin's bases weren't even in the land of Rice. There was only the one, and it had been abandoned already; sometime after the failed invasion during the chunin exams, which would have been almost four years ago.
This was where they were headed now, according to Kisame who was more forthcoming about their assignment than the ever silent Itachi. It would be Akatsuki's second attempt to retrieve Orochimaru's ring.
The first attempt hadn't gone well, the snake man wasn't a sannin for nothing, and his traps were both well hidden and deadly. Deidara and Sasori had barely made it in, let alone making it out again.
Raven Eyes, Nanami noticed, was different outside of their home. As if he had grown an icy shell around his personality. He had always been more on the quiet side, but his edges were usually soft, and endearingly patient. Out here he was quippy, to the point and his gaze spoke more of murder than tolerance. It had freaked her out for a solid ten minutes before she'd accepted it and moved on.
Raven Eyes was still Raven Eyes, no matter where they were.
Nanami looked back the way they had come and watched as the last of the sun descended past the horizon. The land of Rice was actually quite beautiful, with rolling plains dotted with rice paddies and farmer's homes scattered about. They had passed a village a few days ago that looked like it was half farmer shops selling feed and fertilizer and half some kind of tourist attraction with billboards advertising naked women blowing kisses and pachinko machines spewing out coins.
Kisame and Itachi had swerved to make a quick exit out of that district as soon as women had started coming out of doorways to coax them inside. One woman had even gone so far as to offer Itachi and Kisame their shops 'younger fair if that's what you prefer.' with a critical eye on Nanami.
Even if they hadn't been already leaving, they hurried the pace along even more after Kisame had let Samehada taste the whore's blood. It was Nanami's first time seeing Oceans… offended. Usually things didn't really get past his good humor and entertained exterior.
Itachi hadn't even bothered to stop the larger man, he just watched dispassionately while Nanami stood awkwardly to the side.
"We'll stop here for the night." Itachi murmured, breaking her out of her thoughts. Nanami looked up a steep hill to a set of stone stairs just as steep that led to a ragged looking abandoned temple. The ground was upheaved in places; like it had been the unfortunate target of some nasty A-rank doton jutsu. Trees that had probably once been lively and thick lay in shreds around it, roots flung high above ground where they didn't belong. There were spider webs hanging from the Torii at the top of the stairs, and all along the balcony awning beyond that.
Nanami shivered, more because of the feeling of this place than the chill in the air.
This temple had been the site of a vicious shinobi battle at some point, she was sure.
Kisame took to the stairs just behind his partner at an easy lope; both of them seemingly unconcerned with the feeling of dread this temple gave off. Maybe they couldn't feel it?
"I don't like this place…" She murmured, goose flesh rippling down her arms as her bare toes touched the first cold step. She clutched her plain black cloak tighter around her frame, and brought her deep hood a little lower over her face. (In her mind, she knew the fabric wouldn't actually ward away the feeling, but it felt similar to pulling the covers over your head to hide from the ghosts in your closet. She knew it wouldn't do any good but it was comforting nonetheless.)
Kisame looked down at her from the top landing beneath the torii, and grinned down at her. "Don't be afraid little cat, we're the only monsters here." He laughed at his own joke, and the sound of it eased some of the tension between her shoulders.
Right up until a shadow passed over Kisame, and she tensed again, looking up into the twilight to find whatever it was that had cast it.
There was nothing. Nanami shivered again, and Oceans turned to look at Itachi who was laying traps around the carved wooden double doors as if he hadn't even noticed the strange occurrence.
Nanami turned towards the flattest stretch of ground she could find and flashed through the only series of hand seals she had memorized before placing her palm flat against the ground. Summoning ink scrawled quickly away from her skin and she felt the drain on her chakra as white smoke burst into existence without sound.
A dappled brown buck danced on agitated hooves before her, his large sprawling antlers twisting this way and that as his dark eyes took in the area she'd brought him to. A doe with a similar coat stood more calmly at the male's side.
"Little human, good evening." The doe greeted her politely. Nanami smiled and rose off her hands, pulling her hood back just enough for them to see her face.
"Good evening, would you two mind keeping an eye out for me tonight around here?" and then a little more quietly as she leaned closer to them, their ears flicked towards her. "I have a bad feeling about this place."
The doe bobbed her head, and calmly rose a foreleg to paw at the ground. "Yes, we will keep feet to the ground, and ears to the air for you. Rest well, the herd will keep watch." She assured calmly. Nanami nodded to her and the duo turned towards the trees to begin their rounds.
"Just about ready?" Kisame asked impatiently as Nanami joined him at the top of the steps warily. Something about this place was horribly off.
Itachi didn't acknowledge him, but he did push one of the double doors open and slip inside the very dark temple. Nanami's eyes widened, she couldn't let him go in there alone.
She made quick strides across the jagged upheaved stone pathway and onto the groaning wooden porch to slide between the open door after Raven Eyes.
Ocean's came in behind her casual as you please.
It was pitch black inside, the walls lacking windows. It smelled stale and musty; no one had been here in a some time.
But what caught Nanami's attention was the faint trails of old residual chakra, leading from one end of the room to the next and back again, criss-crossing over itself in hasty tangled lines. It's dim glow was the only thing she had to see by, and Nanami felt her worry rise when she saw Itachi's outline come very close to one of the chakra lines.
It was so old though… it couldn't possibly mean anything right? Perhaps it was just the remnants of some old jutsu.
"Katon: Sukoshi Hi." Raven Eyes' voice caught her attention as he lit the room up with a small ball of fire above his hand, which he transferred over to an old torch that hung on the wall to the right of the front door.
The place was a wreck. Floor boards torn to pieces, scorch marks all over the walls and the rice paper dividers shredded to bits; their frames laying strewn across the expanse of the room like long forgotten corpses.
An entire section of floor was missing in the far corner, leaving a large gaping hole to whatever lay beneath.
Kisame kicked at a section of burnt wood, pushing it towards another pile and sat himself down in the roughly cleared space with folded arms and a disgruntled look on his face. "How much farther, Itachi?"
Nanami thought it was a mature way of asking, 'are we there yet.'
This wasn't lost on Itachi either as he shot his partner an irritated look.
"Another hundred klicks at least." He replied anyways. Kisame gave an exaggerated sigh that seemed to echo hollowly through the abandoned temple.
"This place is so creepy." Nanami whispered, ducking beneath a strand of chakra. Raven Eyes gave her a strange look at her odd movements as she weaved around things they couldn't see.
"There so much chakra here." She continued, talking more to herself than to them. They shared a look with furrowed brows.
Itachi's sharingan swirled to life, giving an eerie red glow as he swept his gaze over the room before it disappeared once again.
"I'm not detecting any traps, perhaps it is just residual from whatever confrontation occurred here." Ocean's relaxed minutely, and Nanami nodded in agreement, having come to a similar conclusion.
Still… that feeling of wrongness itched along her skin, prickly in the back of her mind.
The torched gave a heavy flicker as if pushed with a strong breeze.
The air remained deathly still.
Nanami reached up to grasp her upper arm over her cloak and shuffled over to Oceans' side to sit close to him. He grinned down at her, rows of sharp teeth that reminded her of safety.
"Try to get some sleep." Itachi murmured from his place next to the doors, looking like he had no intention of doing so himself. "From here forward we will need to proceed with caution. This is Orochimaru's territory."
Kisame snorted rudely and leaned backwards onto his palms after adjusting Samehada on his other side. "Snake face always was a creep." He told her with silver eyes that glowed in the torch light.
She nodded in agreement; a savant mad scientist with a penchant towards venomous animals would set anyone on edge. Except her Red Clouds, they were all pretty unflappable in their confidence of their own abilities. (And she agreed, they were all deadly in their own rights.)
Nanami pulled her cloak tighter around herself and curled down on the floor, her back flush along Kisame's folded leg. He didn't complain. She thought most of his protests about her sleeping in his bed back home was due to the fact that he took up the entire mattress on his own, and wasn't willing to share what little space might have been left available.
His chakra flowed about quietly, pulled inwards and contained close to his skin for the sake of keeping their location hidden.
Nanami could still feel it though, as close as she was to him and it soothed her anxiety in its perfect mimicry of ocean waves.
She hummed a contented sound quietly, and breathed in his scent of sea water and clean skin.
Kisame chuckled above her, and she felt rather than saw as he adjusted the hood over her head, and her cloak over her shoulders to his liking.
Itachi silently counted Nanami's breathing late into the night; mostly for lack of anything better to do. The girl was awake, which wasn't unexpected. She'd been having trouble sleeping back at the compound; he would have been fairly surprised if she managed to find it here- in this place.
Kisame was sprawled at her side with eyes closed. He had at least obtained the shallow kind of sleep that active duty required.
Itachi startled out of his calm when Nanami sat bolt upright, eyes wide and staring up into empty air above her. Her hood slipped from atop her head to pool around her neck, revealing her wavy waterfall of brown hair and feather adorned braids that fell from behind an ear.
Her lips parted in surprise, and he didn't miss the way her pupils dilated in fear. Her hand flashed out to gain a death grip on Kisame's Akatsuki cloak, and she tugged on it harshly without looking away from whatever it was that she saw above her.
Kisame sat up too, snapping from sleep into wakefulness seamlessly like only a war veteran could achieve. He looked from her up into the empty air above her. Itachi did the same, his sharingan swirling to life, looking for whatever it was she could see that frightened her so much.
There was a strange outline there, some kind of highly condensed chakra construct, and he narrowed his eyes in an attempt to make out it's faintly visible shape.
Nanami's mouth parted further, and then snapped shut with clicking teeth before she opened it again.
"Nanami, what is it?" Itachi called to her.
She didn't look at him as she rose to stand, and Itachi and Kisame rose with her, looking to each other with unsure glances.
Neither one of them enjoyed not knowing what was happening.
Nanami lifted an arm, fingers slipping from the long sleeves of her cloak as if reaching for something.
"Nanami-" Kisame called, placing a hand on her shoulder, and she jerked as if she'd forgotten he was there. Itachi's frown deepened; it was unlike her to lose her sense of her surroundings.
Her little fingers reached higher above her head, and Itachi saw the strange, dim outline of the construct shift and reach down to meet her.
Oh, that couldn't be good.
"Don't-" was all he managed to get out before there was a bright explosion of burning chakra without sound; like a flash grenade had gone off in the abandoned temple. Itachi resisted the urge to turn his eyes and protect the sensitive sharingan from the light.
His tomoe spun in maddening circles as he memorized what took place in front of him.
Thick heavy bands of chakra made themselves known all throughout the room, condensing together compact enough for him to see, weaving between themselves like spiderwebs glowing brightly as they shifted and tightened around Nanami's body like a finger trap game. They burned away at the edges at a rapid pace, dissipating at the ends; lit like the wick of a bomb and quickly came into contact with Nanami. Her image flickered, taking on an incorporeal transparency as whatever jutsu this was took hold of her.
Kisame turned, folding the crook of his arm in front of his eyes even as he attempted to grasp Nanami and pull her backwards.
His fingers met empty air, and as her little body sank into the floorboards, the amorphous chakra construct she had touched followed after.
If he had blinked, he would have missed it.
Nanami had just phased through the floor like it was nothing more than the surface of a lake.
"What the fuck just happened?" Kisame asked him, and his spinning red eyes met unflinching silver.
Outside Itachi heard the clatter of hooves on stone as her summons began to approach, only to be followed by two simultaneous pops as they were dismissed.
"Her summons?" Kisame had heard it too, Itachi nodded.
Itachi's thoughts flattened in his mind's eye, and he spread this information out before him like sheets of paper in the wake of the silence that followed Nanami's disappearance.
A summon could be dismissed in several ways; the first most obvious one being by the summoner themselves. The second; if the summoner became too low on chakra, or too gravely wounded to maintain them on this plain. The third being if the distance between the two became too much for either party to keep the connection. Distances varied from contract to contract and from summoner to summoner.
His sharingan could detect no barriers on the floor that would hide Nanami from him, there was no residual chakra from what her death would have left, and her signature was no longer within his moderate range so he came to the quick conclusion that it was a high probability of being the third option.
Nanami did not have a large amount of chakra. Itachi estimated she had about as much as a genin as she never used jutsu and therefore never expanded her reserves. Her summons were the only exception to this, and her chakra strings used little to no chakra at all.
Her summons were large creatures, with chakra pools of an average size on par with a jounin.
Itachi categorized his knowledge of these things within seconds, and calculated the distance that Nanami and her deer might possibly be able to maintain between them if they combined their available chakra pools.
Then he compensated for the drain of maintaining two summons, and how the additional chakra they provided would balance the available distance.
"Some kind of transportation jutsu. She's a minimum of eighty klicks away, possibly further." He told Kisame, who nodded.
"Let's get going then." The shark man took this development in stride as he shouldered his sword onto its thick leather strap.
It was not lost on Itachi that Orochimaru's base was a scant twenty additional klicks from the calculated eighty, assuming she had been taken in that direction.
He thought the probability was decently high, considering the glaring lack of any shinobi, let alone one powerful enough and talented enough in the area to pull off this kind of jutsu.
It wasn't easy to set chakra traps, let alone ones that appeared innocuous to his doujutsu. And then for it to be stable enough to maintain itself for an extended period of time. How long had it been here? Months, years?
Adding to that- whether or not this trap had been set for anyone who stumbled upon it, or if the chakra within the trap was set to search for a target that met certain criteria.
Itachi presumed the latter, since he was doubtful they were the only travelers to stop here, and the chakra had dissipated after moving Nanami. Which meant it had either met its limit of bodies it could move, or it could only maintain the ability to do it once.
Again Itachi calculated the latter- there wasn't enough chakra to move more than one person such a great distance, if the trap had had that much chakra, it would have permeated the air enough to become easily detectable from the moment he had stepped foot in this place. Instead it had only become barely visible to him even after it had already been triggered.
No, this was not done by any novice, not even close. This was a carefully planned, and clinically devised trap, set to seek a specific kind of person and ignoring others who didn't fit the correct criteria.
Itachi had to wonder what kind of parameters Nanami had met for the chakra to spring on her specifically.
He informed Kisame of his theory, and the man's silver eyes took on a grim cast as they exited the temple.
They shunshin-ed into the night without pause.
There were very few things in life that Orochimaru found pleasure in. He was not the kind of person who was prone to indulgence like his two idiotic teammates were. Cold, they called him. Clinical, calculating, manipulative. Orochimaru had been accused of being inhuman more than once in his life, and frankly, he didn't care.
Humans were little more than lab rats, useless creatures that felt too deeply and let their judgment be clouded by inconsequential and completely irrelevant things such as the concept of 'morality'. Progress, above all, should have been the ultimate goal, and for him it was. Orochimaru lacked whatever it was that others had that allowed them to think differently.
Or perhaps they lacked something he had that allowed him to see the goal over the means to attain it.
What was a few lives in the face of the cure to a disease that could save hundreds of thousands of people? (Not that he cared about the people themselves- he just wanted to be the one to find the answer.)
What was one, or two, or three hundred children in the face of reviving a long lost kekkei genkai- he honestly just did not compute why humanity let these frivolous notions get in the way of progress.
There were very few things in this life that Orochimaru found pleasure in, and his own personal progress was one of these things.
It had driven him to study the young human Jugo, and his sage-like kekkei genkai that allowed him to take nature chakra and make use of it with only the single adverse effect of mental instability.
A small hurdle to overcome, he had originally thought as he began to develop the curse seal; formatting it based on Jugo's abilities.
It was not so, he discovered as he watched many of the pitiful humans succumb to senseless rage under the effects of his prototype seals. Many died during these bouts of stupid berserker like rages. Many died simply from being incompatible with the seal itself.
That wouldn't do, Orochimaru would settle for nothing less than perfect, and while the rage was useful in some aspects; such as it had been when it had driven Sasuke to use the curse seal to it's fullest the first time, thus allowing its roots to take a greater hold on the boy- it was more detrimental than helpful in most cases.
If a shinobi could not control themselves, then they were no better than cannon fodder. Which is what he mostly ended up with- a whole lot of useless bodies to be tossed around like they were already dead.
What he wanted was an army of sages, what he got was a lot of garbage. What he wanted was the full reach of a sage's ability for himself, without the years and years of worthless wasted time meditating. He had better things to do.
Orochimaru had once upon a time- more than four years ago- come to the conclusion that although he was not satisfied with what the curse seal could be, he accepted that without further data he could do no more- and his time was running low.
He had desperately needed the Uchiha boy's shell at the time, and it had forced him to make the foolish mistake of rushing his prototype. In the end he had been forced to take a different shell regardless, and this chafed at him unpleasantly.
He hadn't gotten either outcome he had wanted, and his life's work remained incomplete.
Orochimaru always got what he wanted, one way or another.
He had long ago been informed by his bespectacled assistant of the feral child that lived among his former associates that made up the Akatsuki.
At first this had been nothing but idle curiosity. What did she have that played upon their interests? Surely they didn't keep her around for the company a small child could provide.
He hated children, disgusting, stupid little creatures the lot of them.
And then his informants within Sunagakure had informed him of the most interesting development, the ability to disrupt and sever chakra as it is being used was not something any shinobi he knew of was walking around with.
He would have known about something like that.
Oh. The things that he could do with that.
So Orochimaru had dug further, his interest in the child renewed tenfold and it had led him to his old teammates informant ring, and then into the ANBU records office within Konoha. It was a paltry effort for a sannin like him, with the kind of control he had over various people to obtain this information.
"Sage-like kekkei genkai that allows her to touch and guide nature chakra." He was informed, and Orochimaru didn't need anything else to spur his desire towards obtaining the girl, towards his burning desire to see his curse seal come to true fruition. It had all come rushing back to him like water cresting over the edge of a mountain's peak. He would have her, and her would spill her secrets open all over his lab just like he had with Jugo.
So he prepared. He laid rumors that his original laboratory had been abandoned, which at the time it had. Then he made sure to let slip that he was no longer in possession of his ring and hadn't been since he'd left that base behind, which had also been true- at least right up until he had returned.
He made sure the word got out, the bait to draw them in and with any luck, she would trail along behind. After all, what was the danger of sneaking into a supposedly abandoned base compared to capturing a jinchuuriki on its home turf?
And if not, well, he was a very intelligent man. He would just come up with another way to pull her out of Akatsuki.
Orochimaru found himself scoffing at the thought of her inclusion in their plans to retrieve the ichibi. The danger she had been in- all that research he could have lost. A live test subject was much more revealing than a dead one.
So Orochimaru devised the perfect trap, and he laid many throughout the area surrounding the supposedly abandoned laboratory. His research into the sages having provided the knowledge to create such a thing.
Orochimaru worked to condense nature chakra into strands, similar to how he had applied it within the curse seal, and use these to anchor the focal point of the trap to a stable location.
The focal point being a chakra construct born purely out of nature chakra. It was blurry and incorporeal in form to his own eyes, but because he was it's creator it looked very human like. Very much like him actually, if you knew what to look for beyond the indefinite lines.
This construct would be the spider laid upon the web.
And because this construct and the threads of the trap itself that tied it in place were made from nature chakra; only she or another shinobi that was within an active sage-mode could ever interact with, sense or clearly see it.
And then he waited, and waited, and waited so long he had almost given up.
He was sleeping when the alarm rang through his senses, and he sat up smoothly with all the grace of a devious snake.
A smile stretched his lips. It was a cruel, unkind thing.
Finally.
Unfortunately, as the sannin would soon come to know, for all his planning and carefully laid traps; it had never even occurred to him- in his arrogance and single minded determination- to think that a feral child raised amongst S-class missing-nin, with a kekkei genkai he didn't yet understand the limitations to- might, just possibly, be more than he would desire to deal with.
But he would learn.
AN: Goodness, this chapter was difficult! I really tried to get across how crazy smart Itachi was here. That, and I tried to keep Orochimaru's motivation's cannon as well, and I really hope all of that wasn't too super confusing. How was it? Did you guys follow along okay? I hope I didn't leave anyone behind!
PS. I actually wasn't sure what measurement they use in the Naruto-verse for distances so I went with klicks, which is a military term. Which felt fitting to me since the world is so militarized. 100 klicks is the equivalent to 100 kilometers, or for those of us in the states, about 62 miles.
PPS. I'm still trying to find a Beta you guys, if anyone knows any beta's that have an active account still (That seems to be the main issue with the Beta profiles here- most of them are so old and haven't been logged on in years.) Please send them my way. I was really hoping to find someone for this chapter but the lack of responses has been really disheartening so I gave up.
Next Chapter: Bitter Wings; Brother of my Brother