Part V | Chapter 1
Her ears rang with the explosion of a long hissing firework. The storm had finally burst from the contained clouds. The earthquake shook the caged fence around her as it swung from the shockwaves and hit her from left to right, back to front, not an inch left unhurt.
Her hands bled as she held the offered missing piece, small sharp blades surrounding the ragged edges of that black heavy piece. After eleven years, it was finally hers. Gohama could tuck it into its rightful, truthful place. It didn't fit, she pushed it through the walls of flesh saved for it, meant for it, and the edges cut the spot carved for it.
This wasn't the piece. It couldn't be the piece. It had never been supposed to hurt so deeply, to tear through the spot where it belong. Truth was freeing and all Gohama felt was the birdcage shaking against her sides as all her earth shook, as all her world crumbled around that one slot of truth. Until there was nothing but the piece, nothing but the truth and the ash remains of her life.
"Why would they do it?" Her voice quiet asked.
"All I know is Akatsuki chose that day to capture the jinchuriki because Konoha was already attacking."
"Why should I believe you?"
He laughed that shrill, piercing giggle of his. "Look at them." Gohama didn't let her eyes wander from the ones smiling at her. "It's obvious."
Blue eyes stared back at her with the amusement of a child. They were almost beautiful, those mad, cunning eyes, terrifying because they didn't lie. They had given her the truth and now Gohama would watch the light of mirth wash away with their life.
"This is for Aiko, Haruto, Ryo, Kuro, Umeke and their families." She used her chakra to lock and raise him. Her hand wrapped in chakra. Her fingers tore through skin, shattered through bone and wrapped around a still beating heart. "Your heart for slaughtering my Village."
Gohama squeezed her fist shut and the heart burst through the gaps between her fingers. The blood warm and red. Then, she pushed her hand through the other side. The ribs cracking as she watched the flicker of life leave his icy eyes and felt the flames of chakra fade from his core. When he went limp against her, she let his body slide away from her arm and slump on the ground.
The tip of her tachi buried into the soil and her trembling fingers grasped the handle, her palm pressed to it with a desperate hold. If she let go of her weapon, Gohama would fall.
"We can go home now." Hansuke said behind her.
The two walls of cliffs ran beside the river, until it disappeared behind the green hill of the valley. The sky was clear and bright, the sun sparkled on the surface of the water, as little waves rippled south towards the sea.
What a cruel beautiful day. What a cruel thing for that beautiful voice to say.
"I have no home." Gohama watched as two sparrows chirped and flew away from the banks near the water. "My home is dead."
"Gohama…?" It was Nikato talking now. He was scared. He was scared of her. Gohama was scared too.
"Is it true?" Gohama needed the piece to come from their hands. Maybe then it wouldn't cut so deeply in its rightful, truthful place.
"Gohama… the bastard was making you turn agains—"
She didn't let Hansuke finish lying. "Is it true, Kakashi?"
"It's true." His drawled, blank voice pushed the piece deeper, as it settled dark and heavy, stabbing and cruel, in its rightful, truthful place. "The Arms were planning war against the Leaf. ANBU had the mission to contain the situation by assassinating the high-ranks."
The details carved new blades around the edges and her crack spread in deep spider webs around her heart. Gohama felt the flesh give out inside her chest as all the pieces fell into their rightful, truthful place and crumbled around that dark and heavy one. Things made sense now, but the cracks only grew from it.
Her heart finally shattered. If all her weight wasn't supported on her weapon, Gohama would have fallen into ash and broken shards. But the handle under her hand was solid and real, the blade that stabbed into the ground was flexible and strong. There was nothing left in her but that black piece of truth and her weapon.
Her weapon. Her weapon. Her weapon.
"Who killed Father?"
The question vibrated through the air and now there were no sparrows for Gohama to watch as they drank and flew. There was no answer and the silence responded back with the truth. A wave rumbled from her lungs, up her throat, it stung with bitterness as it finally left through her lips. A chuckle.
"Underneath the underneath." She uttered slowly, bitingly, every syllable long in her tongue as it rolled inside her mouth and her mind. "I told you I would find out, Kakashi. This is why you disappeared. This is why you are always so guilty. Finally some fucking sense." Another chuckle. "You were the murderer underneath the white mask. Underneath the underneath. How fucking poetic." Gohama pulled her tachi out of the soil and extended the blade, so it spread as a shining slit through the air, ready to cut, ready to kill. "I'll rip that heart out of your chest."
"That's enough, Gohama." Again Hansuke with words that made her skin cringe. And when she thought the piece couldn't hold any more black and any more blades, it grew and it smothered and it drowned.
"Hansuke, how old were you eleven years ago?" She asked calmly, but her voice still trembled. Another silence, overflowing in truth and pain. "How old? Just answer me… How old?"
"Fifteen." he breathed.
"What was the mission that made you leave ANBU?" Silence, so much burning silence she was turning into ash again. "Please, Hansuke… please. Please… Please…" the pleading was dripping in despair. "Just say something… Say something! Fucking talk to me!"
Something boiled deep inside her core and it made her eyes sting. Even if she tried, Gohama wouldn't be able to keep it in. But she didn't want to keep it in, she wanted it to explode freely out of her and maybe things wouldn't hurt so much then. Rage was finally catching up to her skin and with it that monstrous chakra that devastated anything he touched. She welcomed the fire swirling in her pathways, she welcomed the burning of her seal, she welcomed the devastation that would come.
"Gohama!" Hansuke shouted over the roaring in her ears and in her body. "Focus! You have to control it! Gohama, listen to me, please. You can't let it break free."
But she wanted to, she craved for it to finally burst out of her pent up veins, her overflowing flesh. It was alive and she was losing control. How amazing it felt to let go, to give in to it. In a sudden burst, dark blue flames circled around her skin in frantic, destructive curls. Gohama was the ten-tails jinchuriki and with Seiryu she was the strongest shinobi of Bukigakure, with Seiryu she was the weapon, the shuriken.
"Gohama." Hansuke called as he took a step closer to her.
In a flicker of time, she had the tip of her tachi pointed to his throat. "Don't move."
Fear. Every single one of those Konoha shinobi exhaled terror and this time she welcomed it, this time she craved it. Her power only burning stronger from it.
"Your eyes, Gohama…" Nikato whispered and she pierced his dark ones with the slits of her pupils, which breached through sharp blue. "And your tattoo."
Her dragon eyes shifted down to where her seal swirled out of her forearm guard. Focussing chakra on her arm, she watched the leather and metal char and melt away from her flesh. There was no need to hide it now.
"You are the lost jinchuriki." Kakashi said, the same impassiveness as always, but his chakra couldn't fool her. He was scared too, he was terrified. He had said so that night, the Copy Ninja of Konoha was terrified of her.
"You're my parents' killer." Her finger pointed to Furuta's chest hole. "I'll crush your heart just as I did to his, just as I did to the other twenty-three shinobi that slaughtered my Village."
"We won't let you kill him."
Her eyes pricked through Kisamaru's byakugan and she giggled. "You can't stop me, Hyuga. Besides, this has nothing to do with you."
Before any of them could react, Gohama had two chakra fields around the younger jonin and pulled them to her. Her hand absorbed almost all of their vital energy and, when they were unmoving before her, with a flick of her arm, she threw them across the valley.
"Fuck, Gohama! What are you doing?!"
"My duty."
"I have to go to them. Hold on for a second, Kakashi."
Gohama chuckled again, as Hansuke ran towards his fallen teammates. Of course he would and now she had Hatake Kakashi all to herself, his heart ready for her fist.
"Do you remember me?" She asked while sheathing her tachi. Her jinchuriki cloak would be more than enough to fight him.
"Yes… I remember everything."
With a fast push of her feet, Gohama was running across the humid ground towards her parents' killer. How she had longed for the day she would fight the man in the white mask. How she had longed for the day she would see his fleeting heartbeat vanish with a squeeze of her fist. How she had longed for her duty to be fulfilled. Now was the day and nothing would stop her from crushing the life out of Hatake Kakashi.
Her pulled-back fist crashed against the spot where he had been standing, dust rising around her. Before he could flicker away, Gohama extended arms of Seiryu's chakra and caught him only to throw him away across the valley, following his trail with her own chakra-augmented speed. Before he landed across the cliff, her biju-powered fist was already connecting with his stomach.
Gohama looked down at the man as he raised himself up from the ground. "Come on, Sharingan no Kakashi, pull the hitai-ate up, you fucking bastard!"
"I'm not going to fight you."
"I'm going to kill you anyway, so, at least, give me a little bit of respect with a good fight." The corners of her mouth upturned in a sadistic smile, as her sharp eyes matched her demand. "After everything you've done to me, I deserve respect."
His hand moved up to his hitai-ate and, with a slow resigned gesture, he dragged it away from his eye. When his hand fell back, the sharingan shone with red deadly light and it made her chakra tremble and her muscles tense, survival rushing in her blood. Gohama looked straight into it, challenging him to use it on her, as she had asked that day. Instead, he flickered away.
Everything became a blur as they started fighting. The beast chakra seemed to guide her movements with a new unfathomable precision and wildness. She tore through every ninjutsu Kakashi threw her way, and she could have slashed him with one of her own, but she didn't. Her anguish ruled higher and her thirst for blood also meant a thirst for cruelty.
Every cell in her body was alive with the adrenaline of a good fight, a great fight. Hatake Kakashi and his sharingan weren't enough to win against her and even if her enemy kept on fighting, every blow, every little glimmer of uncertainty and determination in his eyes were enough to fuel the triumph singing in her chest.
Gohama would fight until she grew bored and then she would kill him.
One chakra arm tore through the air, a second away from hitting its target, when a wall of earth rose from the ground, absorbing the energy and impact. A Harada clan jutsu. Her eyes shot to Hansuke as he pulled his hands away from the ground and started running towards Kakashi.
"Don't get in my fucking way!"
They raced to see who could reach the fallen Copy-nin sooner. Her chakra-laden hand already prepared to pierce through a person's chest. Her elbow pulled back as her eye spied Hansuke's progress. Gohama only needed to put a little more chakra into her feet and she would beat him.
Her lips were already stretching in a smile, as she jumped. Her hand shoved through the distance between her and her parents' murder. She watched her fingers aim for the heart, as she fell from the sky. This was the moment she had waited for, she had craved for for eleven years. Mismatched eyes stared back at her, not a hint of emotion, of life behind them, as they watched death in her own.
Two hazel eyes replaced them. Gohama was falling, her hand with death already marked into it. There was no stopping herself now. She shouted as her chakra pushed into the floor on her left.
Her arm ended up buried to her shoulder. Not in flesh, but in soil. Gohama stared into the burns and cracks that spread from her arm through the ground around it. Her other hand rose to grasp the fabric over her heart, as it thundered against her chest, after stopping for too many seconds, as her breaths left in fast quick puffs. The soil crumbed inside her fist as her fingers twitched around it, around it and not around the muscle of a heart. It was granny, not mushy. It was dry, not wet.
Gohama had almost killed Hansuke.
"I told you to get out of my fucking way." She whispered, still on her hands and knees, her gaze fixed to the hole around her arm, Seiryu's chakra still coating it.
"Gohama, please. Enough."
That made her rip herself away from the earth and stand. Her sharp dark blue eyes turned to Hansuke. "Enough?! You know how not nearly enough this is! I told you about the man in the white mask and every time you knew it was him! Is this why you always try to talk me out of my duty?"
"Gohama, it's not your duty."
"What do you know? I'm a Buki shinobi. It is my duty!"
Hansuke took a step towards her, his arms opened. "I was there too. Another white mask. It's your duty to kill me too."
A lump pressed against the walls of her throat. "Don't test me."
Another step forward. "Will you kill me too, Gohama? For duty, will you crush my heart?"
"I said don't test me, Giranai!"
"Don't call me that!"
"Harada-senpai!"
"You promised you wouldn't forget that I love you. You promised me, Gohama. You promised you wouldn't forget those years."
"Those years where you did nothing but lie to me? You have no right to ask me to fulfil a promise when it was based on a lie."
"I didn't lie about that! I told you you'd see me differently and you promised knowing that."
Her gaze turned down to the jinchuriki seal, alive and burning around her forearm. It lifted to Buki's hitai-ate wrapped around her bicep. The hitai-ate her Yukikage had given to her as a symbol of her life as an Arms-nin, who had sworn to protect, sworn to honour. "If you interfere in my duty, I'll kill you."
"We both know I won't stop, not even for you, Gohama. And we both know you won't survive that."
"I never planned on surviving past my duty."
Gohama enveloped him in chakra, making it leak into his pathways and stir with his own energy. With a fling of her wrist, she threw Hansuke away from her and the Copy-nin.
He continued to watch her with those impassive eyes of his. Why couldn't she get a rise out of him? Why was there only determination in him, not rage of terror, not even guilt anymore.
"What was it? A raikiri for Father and a ninjato for Mother?" She took a step towards him, making sure her words where loaded with contempt. "Which one did you enjoy the best, Copy-nin? Definitely not the washed out mother, killed only from a blade to the chest, bleeding out on the tatami of her own home. Nothing but a squashed bug. But a Yukikage… Now that has to feel good. To kill the shuriken of Bukigakure. How fucking admirable, how fucking powerful."
Gohama stopped when she finally stood in front of him, the distance enough to burn him with her jinchuriki cloak. His face was covered in dirt and blood, as a gash on his forehead oozed down and soaked his mask.
That was what he was today, a mask. Just as he had worn a white mask on that fatal night, today he wore a mask of nothingness. She wanted him to crack as she had, she wanted his barriers to crumble just has her life had, she wanted to see the defeat fill his stolen sharingan and his dull grey eye and then watch as the blankness of death spread through them.
But as long as he had that mask up, the heart she crushed would be nothing but a fake shell. She wanted Kakashi. She wanted the man with the wild crackling chakra from that night.
"Did you enjoy it, Copy-nin? Did you want to kill me too?"
Her slit pupil was a void in the cold blue of her dragon eyes, filled with disdain, filled with hatred, as it demanded of him to jump out of his act. Still nothing. Kakashi didn't even use the sharingan on her. She was an easy prey to that kekkei genkai when she studied the swirl of the tomoe around a sea of red, a sea of blood.
"Come on, fight like you want to kill me. Where is Cold-Blooded Kakashi? Where's the shinobi that slaughtered a kage in his own home? I'm sure he'll have a blast trying to kill me."
That made him snap. His hand reached for her hair and pulled her head back, but he didn't threaten her with anything else. Gohama had a kunai pressed to his throat.
"We both know that's not true." His other hand circled her own holding the kunai, waving it, letting it nick his neck. The smell of burnt flesh reaching her nose, but even then he didn't pull away from her. "So stop the fucking trash talk and the fucking stalling. Come on, Gohama, do your duty, honour your family. Kill me. If you have the skill and guts to do it."
And with that suicidal challenge, the tables turned. His last words hit the exact right spot and the biju chakra countered it, the only way it knew how, with more power, more destruction.
Gohama shoved Kakashi away from her and she fell to all fours. Seiryu's chakra burst out of her core and she growled. Never had she felt its power as devastating, as engulfing. Another tail grew behind her and she glanced over her shoulder. The fourth tail.
"No. No. No." Gohama whispered as she tried to fight back the chakra drowning her own self. She could feel her consciousness slipping through her fingers as she held on to it. With four tails, she would lose control of herself, leaving behind only a body of chakra that could do nothing but destroy. It was too late. She was too weak and the chakra was too overpowering.
Gohama was gone. Only a raging mass of monstrous chakra left.
Her entire body scorched and Gohama retched both from the pain and the smell of burnt flesh, as she finally came back to herself. The cloak had disappeared, but the aftermaths of a fourth tail were still agonisingly clear. Her entire body shuddered and it made the pain more unbearable.
With effort, she opened her eyes and all she could see was a blurred mass of brown dirt. Was she on the ground? Her fingers shook and under them, under the pain, she could feel the coarse feel of soil. She was down.
Seiryu's chakra was quickly healing the burns it had caused. Her bundled mind cleared slightly as the pain washed away from her flesh. Her chakra sense kicked in first and she searched for any signature. Hansuke and Kakashi. They were both alive.
"What was that?" She hear Hansuke's voice, breathless and tired, and Gohama searched for his silhouette behind the curtain of dust around her.
"A seal Jiraiya-sama gave me. Gohama isn't the only jinchuriki I have to deal with."
The cloud faded and finally she could make out their forms. Kakashi had already looked terrible before, but Hansuke had a new chakra burn stretching across his back and side.
Gohama pulled herself to her elbows and knees with shaking muscles and then failed an attempt at standing. A step forward and her unsolid legs gave out. She unsheathed her tachi and stuck it to the ground before she could fall. It was always her weapon that supported her up, always her weapon that pushed her forward. Still, the dizziness was catching up to her. Two Kakashi's swam in front of her and even her fast blinking couldn't focus her tired mind into seeing the truth behind the image.
Hansuke's chakra signature moved in on her. "Don't. Don't touch me." He obeyed, more out of sympathy, than any authority in her raspy pitiful voice.
The beast chakra was locked inside her again, leaving her pathways as barren, worn rivers after a flood. There was only a weariness that pushed her down to the ground, that tore through her until her body was nothing but mush, melting down onto the soil, no substance, no shape, with nothing to hold it upwards. But Gohama had to keep fighting.
Her rage had washed away the weight of killing Kakashi and now she felt it, heavy and dark, on her shoulders. Still, it was her duty and duty was never without a burden. Gohama had given her life to the Arms and that always came with death. If death comes, may it be in honour of the Arms, she repeated in her heart, over and over, making sure it was branded into the insides of her soul.
Her honour didn't matter, it never had. She was Buki's jinchuriki, she was the weapon, she was the shuriken carved into the hitai-ate. A symbol of sharpness, power and death. Honour was never for the wielded metal, but for the hand that commanded. Buki was her commander and Gohama was their weapon.
Father had believed she would protect them all. How could Gohama run from honouring Mother and Father out of weak sentimentality? It was her duty as a daughter and her duty as a Buki shinobi. Kakashi had to die and she had to be the one to kill him. Hadn't she pledged herself to whatever burden would be set in her path? How could she fail another promise made to her Father and Yukikage?
Her arms shook as she pushed herself up with the help of her tachi. She stood, her mind stumbling, but her legs kept on being stout. The two Kakashi's merged into one and the darkness at corners of her eyes faded.
Her pathways burned from the abuse of a biju's chakra, but Gohama continued to coat her hand in chakra, as she pushed through any pain, any weakness. She flickered and this time not even Hansuke had the time to get in the way of the path that had always been marked into her. This time not even Gohama would stand in her way. There could be no thinking, only doing.
Green eyes stared back into mismatched ones, as her hand reached for Kakashi's heart. The black tomoe spun and changed and the red around it spread all around Gohama.
Painted red and grey, a devastated horizon unrolled in front of her. Distant screams and cries rang inside her head and pierced her with the memory of another devastated village, her Village. Above the echo of voices, one stood out, familiar and shaky. Gohama's heart stopped in her chest and her muscles froze underneath her skin.
Hansuke.
Where once the ground was barren, a thread of red, thick blood glided towards her feet. For too long seconds, her gaze lingered in that strip of blood, afraid to face the vision waiting for her head to turn up.
Another scream, her own shaky breath and her head moved.
Hansuke was slumped down, his extended hand twitching with the final signs of life and his eyes unmoving, as they stared up at the red sky. A woman kept on stabbing him and, without thought, Gohama was already running towards them and dragging the woman down.
Her fist was ready to carve her heart out, when two familiar eyes looked up at her, snarky and cold. Green, the only green thing in all that scenery. Green and evil, her eyes looked back at her. "This is a genjutsu" she thought, obsessively, repeatedly, but she couldn't release herself from it.
She let the women go and turned to Hansuke. His eyes did not look at her, they did not look at anything. Their hazel dull and murky and empty.
"Hansuke! I'm here, get up! Please… No, oh no, don't leave me… Hansuke, please…"
Her voice grew fainter, as her throat collapsed against itself, and her eyes stung with tears. So much tears, and she drowned in them and in grief. She remembered those green and evil eyes and turned her face towards them.
"Why?! Why did you kill him?!"
"Wasn't this what you wanted?" Answered the same voice, cold and amused. "Didn't you want to avenge your Village with all your heart and will?"
"Yes, I did and I do, but not him…"
"You have the ten tails beast inside of you and yet you're weak. What about your Village, your clan, your family? Don't you care about them anymore? Don't you love them? Did he make you forget? You are betraying your family because he eased your loneliness. So weak…"
"He was following orders… he, he, he was protecting his own village…"
"Unlike you."
"I tried… I—"
"So weak… You are Buki's jinchuriki; it was your duty, your order. This is your order." The evil woman said as she pointed to Hansuke's dead body. "I completed it for you. Oh, don't feel bad about it. He never cared about you."
"He did."
The evil woman laughed, a shrill bitter laugh that reminded Gohama of her own dry chuckles. "He was just trying to ease his conscience and clean his Village's name. He was following orders. He never actually cared for you, how could he? A beast so weak and pathetic? He was afraid of you. He was terrified of you. He doesn't love you. None of them do." she pointed at the materialised figures of Nikato and Kisamaru, staring at Gohama in disdain. "We are alone."
"Shut up! There is no we!" She cried and her fists closed around the fabric of Hansuke's shirt, wet and cooling.
"Can't you see that I'm you? I'm the real you, the powerful you, the Kyura you."
"I could never kill Hansuke…"
"Oh, you could and you want to, you're just too weak. For now I did it for you. And how good it felt!" the image of Hansuke's killing appeared before Gohama's eyes and she couldn't look away from it. "His warm blood in my hands, his childish begging, his eyes—"
"Stop! Stop!"
"—filled with pain and fear as life left them. If you would just let me rise, we could be great."
"I don't care about greatness…" Not when Hansuke lay dead under her hands.
"What do you care for? Friendship, love!" Another mocking bitter laugh. "Don't lie to yourself, those are not for you, they never were. You can't love and you can't be loved. There is only vengeance and power. Perfection! Or did you forget?"
The scenery faded into Gohama's old family home. Her father being killed and his blood splashing on her face. Then the masked man showed his face and Kakashi appeared, staring back at her with amusement in his red eye. The background changed once more to thousands of bloody corpses, lying in indistinct bunches, legs and arms bundled together, wide open dead eyes staring back at her. Mother, Father and Brother beside her feet.
"Don't you remember the Massacre? Where's the love for your Village? Did Konoha make you forget? Don't you owe them honour? Don't you owe them duty? Your own life when they gave theirs for yours?" The woman gripped Gohama's jaw and glared at her, the green of her eyes full of scorn, of shame. "You're a failure." As she spoke she forced visions of the Arms' massacre to unfold around them. "You failed your Village. You failed your clan. You failed your family. You're a failure!"
Tears ran freely down Gohama's cheeks, as she tried to pull the woman away from her with shivering hands. "Please… please stop… No more…"
"That's what they all said when you killed them."
Gohama found herself with blood in her hands. In front of her, laid Konoha, its multi-coloured roofs buried in a sea of debris and devastation. Beside her, Nikato crawled away, as he whispered. "Why, Gohama? Why would you do this?"
"Justice. Honour. Duty."
She couldn't control herself. She was the one moving, but she had no will of her own. She followed Nikato with the foreign intent to kill. Blue dragon chakra pierced through his heart and he cried in pain, as she lifted him in the air. His head fell and Gohama threw his body away towards the other corpses around her. Kisamaru ran towards her, his lavender eyes knotted into rage, his hair chaotic, and a crazed, foreign scream tearing through his throat. Again, she pierced his heart as she had done to Nikato.
Images of the destruction and death appeared and faded away. She had caused them all. It had passed hours and the scenery kept changing. Her throat was tattered and the taste of blood coated her tongue when the images finally began to fall apart.
The background was now completely dark and Gohama lay down, small little whimpers leaving pass her lips. The one with the green and evil eyes crouched beside her.
"This is what we could do. What I could do. It's our duty." Again she gripped her jaw, forcing Gohama to look into those green dreadful eyes. "You'll never stop being a failure unless you give in to me."
Gohama gazed into those eyes and looked back at herself. There was only her. She was alone.
A blade of pain pierced through his left eye onto the back of his skull. He could feel the toll of using his mangekyo for a genjutsu. Gohama hadn't known of his mangekyo sharingan and had fallen into his almost unbreakable genjutsu. His hands were trembling by his sides, the well known heaviness of guilt shoving him to the ground. Kakashi had suspected what her turmoil was, but watching it directly, materialised through his genjutsu, the one he had cast on her, tore through him.
Gohama was kneeling in front of him, her hands sustaining her weight, her dark hair falling wildly to cover her face. Every muscle in her body shivered, he could hear small whispers break from her heavy and fast pants. He had never wanted to do that to her. Panic had snatched him and made him act with no thought.
That genjutsu played with the victims worst fears. He had never wanted to play Gohama. He had never wanted to hear her desperate cries. He had never seen her cry before, much less shriek and howl. It was horror now that drowned him. What had he done? How could he have hurt her like that? Hadn't he done enough to make her miserable?
Hansuke ran from where he had fallen to meet her. He laid a hand on her back trying to comfort her. Kakashi couldn't stop staring at her, his eyes wide and his body weak.
"What did you do to her?" Hansuke asked.
Kakashi kept staring at Gohama as she lifted herself slowly; how could she after what she had been through?
"Answer me!"
"Genjutsu…"
Hansuke looked at Gohama in concern. She was sitting on her heels, her head lifted up, the drape of dark hair sliding to show her eyes, which wavered between anger and hollowness. She lifted herself up with strained movements from her persistent shivering. Her green eyes never leaving his. He let himself be consumed in the hatred they held. He deserved it. Every single flicker of it. With a chakra-powered kick, she threw Hansuke faraway.
"Where were we?" she growled, with firm steps coming towards him.
Gohama summoned her tanto and cut through his tattered shirt. Kakashi kept his back stiff against the rock, his hands carving into it as he held himself up. She pressed her hand against the central spot of his torso, it was warm and soft and womanly. His chakra swirled inside his core at her command and flowed away from his body. She averted her eyes to the ball of stolen chakra in her hand. Her features creased in concentration, her flawless, un-scarred skin covered in soil. He could still smell the lemon of her hair through the salt of sweat and tears. He had never smelled tears in her. It was all his fault.
Electricity filled the air. She had stolen his chakra to form a chidori. The lightning globe made the shadows on her face dance in frantic blue hues and darkness. The smell of ozone. It was only fair he would die from the attack that he had used to kill. It was only fair he would die from a copied version of his jutsu.
Gohama pushed her other hand into his shoulder, pinning him to the wall. He wouldn't try to escape anyway. This was a fair death. He would die for his Village's and his own sins. He would die at her skilled hands.
Gohama pulled her arm backwards to gain momentum.
"Look at me." he asked "Gohama, look at me."
And she did. She lifted those so Gohama eyes that now reminded him of the forests of Konoha. He understood Rin now. It wasn't so bad to die if she was the last thing he saw. It wasn't so bad to die at all. He had been ready for a long time. He was ready now.
"It's okay."
Her eyes flickered with something deep and gut-clenching. She pushed her hand forward and when it hit the flesh above his heart, the lightening blue disappeared. He had always thought dying from the chidori would hurt, but all he could feel was the warmth of her palm.
Then his eyes widened. He looked down at the hand pressing against the steady and lively beat of his heart. When he went to look at Gohama again she wasn't there anymore. Only a gust of wind and Kakashi slumped down on the floor.
Hansuke had thrown her away from him. He hadn't realised she had stopped the chidori. Swiftly with his remaining chakra, he built a clay dome over Gohama that absorbed her energy. Gohama, though weakened, managed to escape by piercing the side with a chakra fist. She laid on the ground powerless and Hansuke moved to straddle her, preventing her from moving.
"Please, Gohama, please stop this."
"I can't. I can't. You know I can't, Hansuke."
"You have no chakra left. You won't win, Gohama."
"Are you going to kill me?"
"Of course not. I l—"
"You should kill me. If you let me live I'll destroy Konoha. You have to kill me."
"You don't mean that."
"I'll kill every single person in that fucking village." Her head fell to the left, towards the other side of the valley, where Nikato and Kisamaru still lay unconscious. "Including them."
"This is not you…" Hansuke's pained tone made Kakashi look away from them.
"This has always been me. I fooled you all. And you were always the easiest to fool."
"Run." The sorrow had vanished, leaving only the authority of a team leader. "If Konoha gets to you, they'll arrest you. I'm going to get off you and you're going to run." Kakashi heard the sound of shifting fabric and crunching soil. "I told you to run." Still, Gohama's chakra signature didn't move. "Run!"
Even Kakashi jolted at Hansuke's shout. He raised his eye in time to watch Gohama's green haori disappear behind the tree line of Hot Water. Hansuke continued to kneel and stare into his hands, until his chin tilted up and he threw a glance towards Kakashi's exhausted body.
It reminded him of that night eleven years ago, when he had come to Kakashi's house, had kneeled in front of him and held onto Kakashi's knees, who was sitting on the couch. He had said nothing but a whispered "Taicho…". Kakashi had seen the poorly wrapped cut, still bleeding, across his ANBU tattoo and understood. The black ops had never been the place for Hansuke.
Not even then, when his expression had been distorted in a mixture of fear, guilt and anguish, had Hansuke looked as miserable as now.
Then his eyes shifted to the spot where Gohama had disappeared and the angle made his tears shine in the sun. With a last shaky breath, he cleaned them with the hem of his shirt and moved towards him fallen students.
It was cruel that that mission would never stop haunting him. Kakashi should never have asked him to take Gohama into his team. Kakashi should never have ordered him to take that mission.