When Kakuzu brings her to the inn, she is delirious and soaked in tears. He lays her down on the futon, but she refuses to let him go. She clings onto his cloak like he will leave her, but he doesn't blame her for thinking that way. After all, he was the one who left her in Suna in the first place, the one who always found ways to disappear for hours without a word.
"Don't go, Kakuzu," she almost pleads with him as she grips his sleeve closer to her. "Don't go..."
She can't think straight. She can barely even see him through her blurry vision. To her, he is only a hazy silhouette under the sharp light of the room's single light bulb.
She squeezes her eyes shut as a few tears escape.
In the beginning, there was only a sense of calm, but then the pain came like a curse.
It hurts.
It hurts.
"It's an aftereffect," a voice speaks as the green-eyed man sends a kunai flying towards its direction. But it only lodges on the wall, only narrowly missing the intruder who spoke.
"What are you talking about...?" Kakuzu asks angrily, turning to glance at onyx black eyes.
"It was written in one of the archives," Itachi answers as he approaches despite the hostility in Kakuzu's gaze. "A child's body like hers can only withstand so much..."
That's right. Kigura is still a child, so why are they treating her like this...?
"Here."
"This is..."
"Sasori made it," Itachi says distantly. "It will put her to sleep."
For a moment, Kakuzu looks at the object in the boy's hand. Then, his eyebrows furrow at the realization before he takes a grab for the boy's cloak, but the Uchiha barely even flinches from the green-eyed man's sudden aggression.
"You want to drug Kigura to sleep?"
Kakuzu himself finds the words strange when they come from him. He has ripped hearts out of people, murdered innocent shinobi for the sake of their organization's personal goals. He has exchanged their bodies for bounty money, and yet... and yet the idea of forcing Kigura into induced sleep doesn't sit well with him.
"Do you want her to suffer longer?" Itachi responds back without blinking.
Kakuzu is already seeing red, but the Uchiha's words alone are enough to make him still. Because regardless of morality, he knows it too―that what Itachi said is far better than seeing Kigura whimpering half-conscious. So, despite his reluctance, he shoves Itachi out of his grasp and takes a step back, even if it takes a lot from him.
He can only do so much for her, and somehow that brings an unpleasant taste in his mouth.
"Sasori made it purely to induce sleep. It shouldn't harm her," Itachi says, as if to make the situation any better. He spoke so calmly, and yet when he seats himself beside Kigura, he finds himself pausing a little. The reality feels all too real all of a sudden, the words through the pages of the archives they have stolen from the Koori affiliates.
That, and the fact that to him, children weren't supposed to suffer. Her tear-stained face and flushed cheeks, the vulnerability in her glassy eyes―they all make him falter.
But after a pause, he crushes the pill in his hand nonetheless.
"No!" The child coughs as she feels the liquid spill to her mouth. And instinctively, she pushes against Itachi, something about the sensation making her remember the bad things. "Kakuzu!"
The green-eyed man is suddenly beside her, grabbing her hands to stop her from flailing. He doesn't even flinch even as he feels the spark of cold that permeated out of her skin to his. But his patience with her is what calms her too, even if it's only a bit.
"It'll make you sleep," Kakuzu speaks gently. "You won't feel pain then..."
"I...I don't want to." She sobs, shaking her head with terrified eyes. "You'll leave if I do. I don't want to sleep. I don't―"
"I won't leave," Kakuzu tells her. So short and yet enough, the hint of assurance, for her to hold onto his words and trust him so easily. And she continues to trust him so, until everything begins to obscure. She squeezes her eyes and his hand for the last time until she can't hear him anymore.
Kakuzu watches her fall asleep as her grip loosen. And as she now lies still, he wipes the stray tears from her cold cheeks and Itachi only looks on quietly. Perhaps, to the others, they would have found it strange for the miserly Akatsuki to be acting in such a tender way. But to Itachi, that's probably the only time he would ever understand what the green-eyed man is thinking.
To be afraid of losing something...
Itachi understands it perfectly.
Perhaps to Kakuzu, the child has filled the void inside him. The path they have taken is a path that has taken away so much from them. Holding onto something, something that gave them even just a little sense of purpose, it's perhaps the only way they kept themselves sane.
"Do you know why they call them horned children?"
Kakuzu looks up as Itachi begins to speak.
It's always how they are called, rarely horned entities even though it describes them best. It never really crossed his mind to wonder such a small detail.
"Of course, because of their bone protrusions when transformed... but it's because they were never meant to live into their adulthood," he continues, recalling bits of information. There's a certain glower in his eyes, but his gaze remains downcast. "They tear themselves apart before they develop awareness to think for themselves. Like the weapons they were called, they self-destruct, most especially when they lose their master."
"Are you telling me she's tearing herself apart?" the green-eyed man asks, his voice barely above a whisper. Itachi looks at him, but his silence alone answers enough.
"I'm telling you she doesn't have a master. Not anymore at least..." Itachi answers, looking down at Kigura with a certain look in his eyes. "The drugs could barely keep up in restraining children like her."
Just the mention of this makes Kakuzu stiffen.
As a means to control them, the Kira used such an abhorrent thing whenever a horned child loses control. And its effects are immediate, the sense of calm, the sensation of warmth and safety that clouds their minds the moment the drug is ingested.
But none of that is really true.
The security is only temporary, and the second they wake up they long for a second dose to escape withdrawal. That, or bloodshed. But their bodies would continue to live in unease. The neurological changes that happened inside them made them addicted to the false sensation until they could no longer function normally.
Kakuzu understands it then, the reason why Kigura clings to him desperately.
This is the price of being born in a world that rejects their existence, the price the Kira placed on them.
If he stays by her side, maybe he can keep her sane. But if he's not enough for her, what if he loses her then?
Just the thought of that, it makes him laugh bitterly to himself as he puts a hand on his face.
"Why are you telling me this?"
Itachi looks at the green-eyed man but nonetheless finds his gaze wandering. He doesn't know it himself. To serve as a spy in Akatsuki for the Hidden Leaf, was what he told the Third Hokage before he was marked as a missing-nin.
He never meant to read the archives. But somehow, with the child's association with the masked man, he found himself learning more than what he originally bargained for, even with a few of its missing pages.
"I wonder it myself..." he says distantly.
And little does one know, the ripped pages lay on a certain Hokage's table.
·
"A half-blood from Koori in Suna... Are you sure you heard that right?"
"Things have been getting stranger... Don't you think even a horned child in a desert might not be so unlikely?"
"That's true, but still..."
The middle-aged man still remained unconvinced with his companion, but he couldn't deny what he had heard too. The strange behavior of the neighboring villages as the presence of ninjas increased in their non-shinobi town... Even the townsfolk who typically only minded the matters of civilians couldn't help but worry about their future.
The man clenched his fist as he replayed how people had screamed helplessly from the last shinobi conflict. For peace was only a farce that the shinobi villages had created to mask its past atrocities, something that deceived people into thinking that the world could never be so cruel. But even until now, many people still suffered from the aftermath of it all.
And if the winds of war become certain, weren't they the ones who would suffer the most?
Powerless civilians like him who cannot protect their family...
"That man..." His eyes followed as he caught a looming figure that passed by him, a familiar presence that the townsfolk knew very well.
"Don't look too much. I don't wanna mourn for a friend so early in my life if you wind up dead," his companion said jokingly, but there was an edge to his voice.
After suffering enough from the hands of shinobi, it would only take so little time before you begin to feel wary of them. But strangely, the middle-aged man didn't feel wariness. Rather, he felt something else—something only those who had experienced the same would understand.
"He... He's going there again, isn't he?" he asked, because that was the only thing up there in the forest.
Those who have been lost from the Third War.
A place loved ones are laid to rest.
It's almost strange, because in the end, the people who are feared and the people who fear, they are all the same. They have something to lose, even if they never really realized it for themselves.
And the same goes for Kakuzu.
But for the longest time, he believed that he didn't really hold any special feelings from the family he once created. She was only a woman. He couldn't even remember her name or what she looked like, only that she welcomed him whenever he would come visit with a child in her arms.
His child, he remembers her telling him. He can't remember what the child looked like either. It felt foreign and far away. He had wandered for so long with no sense of purpose, so he never really knew how to feel. He only remembered distinctly the cooing, the clenching and unclenching of small fists and bubbling giggles.
Until it wasn't there.
The Second War had reduced the small place he could have called his home into a pile of rubble.
At first, he felt nothing, because how can you feel for anything you never really understood yourself? Until there is only emptiness, a glaring hole that feels oddly heavy.
It's not that you only realize the meaning of something when it's no longer there. Because after that, he continued to live in indifference while occasionally paying respect to their graves.
Nothing had changed.
It wasn't until Kigura that he felt something different. It was subtle at first, something he hardly even noticed himself. He saw her as a nuisance. The only interest he showed in the beginning was when she would try her best to catch up behind him.
He didn't know when it started or how, when his often indifferent gaze suddenly found itself wandering towards where she was. In his eyes, she was only a stray cat that he wasn't given a choice but to take in.
She slithered like a weed, unwanted and misplaced, growing between his gaps.
"Kakuzu, look, water from the sky!"
An idiot, he called her, the first time she saw rain in Ame. But the longer he looked at her, the more he realized that it was him all along.
Yes, it grows on you, cunningly, quietly.
To lose something, it was never something he thought he'd dwell his thoughts on. But now, he understands it—how frightening it actually is.
"Don't go, Kakuzu," she would say. "Don't leave me alone."
It was her who held his hand first, but now he realizes that he's the one who refuses to let go.