Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto in any way and make no claim on its copyright or any characters from the series. Original characters are my own property.
Author's Notes: More stuff happening and greater character focus. There's nothing else much to say. Enjoy!
Please do comment if you read!
Other Gifts Continues
Suzumebachi's head hurt. This was a common thing, a dull grinding pain behind her eyes that afflicted her seemingly whenever she tried to focus too seriously on one thing. It was not supposed to be there, this pain, it was wound-induced, she knew that much. She had fallen from the back of her summons and struck the ground hard not long in the past. The medics claimed there had been no permanent damage, but something was wrong, she knew it, this pain was not right. Few believed her claims of pain, however, choosing instead to see it as a childish mechanism to avoid the ugly stigma of failure that clung to her every waking hour. Disobedience and failure, she had made this bed for herself, and though her punishment had been served out swiftly, the galling shame would linger forever, unless heroism should erase it. Suzumebachi held no hope for such heroism. She had lost all her hopes when she awoke with blood before her vision and pain behind her eyes. Only stubbornness drove her now, stubbornness and the not-forgotten belief in the justice of her course. She believed she had made the right choice, believed it to her bones and deeper. Failure had robbed her of all things to be reaped from her deliberate disobedience, but she would never forget that she had seized at least the ghostly chance of redemption.
Putting her hands before her face Suzumebachi let her eyes fall closed, reducing the aggravation by a woefully insufficient fraction, but still reducing it. She held her eyes closed for many long slow breaths, not wanting to return to the abject routine of report processing that consumed her every workday. Such was the composition of her duties, a ninja who would not undertake to return to the field where death walked. Coward, the walls whispered into her ears, and her eyes opened again, bodily denying the charge. Her head hurt! She was not merely thinking it, there was something wrong with her and she knew it, something that could get her killed if she went out in the field again. She did not want to sit in drab stony offices for the rest of her life, editing and correcting reports. No! She slammed her hands down on the desk hard.
A loud thump resonated, and Suzumebachi glanced around hurriedly, thankful that everyone else had already quit for the day. She remained to work extra hours to make up for time lost during her disobedience and punishment.
"The reports are not to your liking?" a cold voice crackled from behind Suzumebachi's right ear, laden with grim amusement.
Reflexively she kicked out, throwing the chair backward with enough force to strike the wall. She spun, reaching for the kunai hidden beneath her skirt and pulling it free as she did so, fueling all her repressed anger to strike out.
A bony grasp with impossible, mountainous strength stopped her right arm dead in space without the slightest budge. Her body turned on with wrenching pain as the tissues screamed and stretched, and then she re-exerted control and adjusted to the position forced on her by that brutal vise of a grip.
Suzumebachi looked into eyes glittering piercing crystal to bore into her very soul. They held her gaze solid for long second where she could not summon even the strength to breathe. All the while the grinding pain built to a fever pitch within her, but she could not find the power to cry out in pain, so fast was she held. In the end, though, pain won out, and her head jerked away of its own accord, slicing downward to stare at the bare gray tile flooring, away from the telling eyes.
The vise relaxed slightly, even as the kunai dropped from her limp hand. Suzumebachi looked back, seeing this time more than just those diamond-fire eyes, but the whole wrinkled face and withered form, somehow projecting incredible force. The Tsuchikage! Shock overwhelmed her with the impossibility of the moment. The Tsuchikage himself held her captive. It seemed so unbelievable. Suzumebachi was not a weak woman, and knew her strength well, and her anger. How could a man so old, well over seventy and perhaps more, hold her with such dreadful absolutism. All ninja in Stone village feared their grizzled master in at least some secret corner of their hearts, but in that moment fear blossomed into impossible, awful terror as Suzumebachi glimpsed for the first time and last in her life the full fortitude of a man with the strength to rule a ninja village for more than five decades. It was as to stand before the mountains themselves. She could not possibly summon speech, her body reduced to craving animalism before the imperial knowledge and potency of those stone frozen orbs, but she had yet a will, and stubborn as she was, stared back into that gaze with all she possessed, daring her master to label her a coward to her face.
"Not bad," the Tsuchikage muttered in the same grimly amused tones as before. "Many could not do so well. You are indeed a worthy candidate." His grip relaxed, so that no force held her now, but he did not let go and she dared not move, trying desperately to puzzle through these words. "The best of a bad crop I suppose, but sometimes the midden holds treasures greater than any counting house," he chuckled, stones grinding against each other deep in the throat, a joke whose answer only he knew. "You were not lying were you, when you said there was something wrong with your skull." It was not in any way a question; the Tsuchikage did not ask questions.
Suzumebachi only nodded her affirmation, still not finding her voice.
The bony hand released her wrist, flowing slowly through the still air toward her face. It seemed the only thing in the world the moved, the rest of the Tsuchikage's body was utterly still, totally composed. "The medics did not find it, but perhaps they were not looking in the right way," he seemed to be musing, but if so the topics upon which this voice mused could swallow lives whole. "Let me see," the bony hand settled on her forehead. "Do not move at all," a whisper of command it was, nothing more, a whisper holding life and death.
Suzumebachi locked her gaze to those frightful eyes, trusting them to hold her fast even as they bored past her own, traveling on a journey she could not conceive deep into the depths of her skull. How long they held that position she could not surmise, counting the shallow and irregular breaths she allowed with great trepidation served no purpose, her fear having robbed them of consistency. She felt something within her seem to shift and tug, something she could not properly feel, more the echo of feeling. The pain spiked brittle and cutting, then returned grinding stronger than ever till it seemed her skull would split apart, and then suddenly was gone, all in a moment that exploded from her throat in a gasp.
Suzumebachi shook uncontrollably for the length of the exhalation as the Tuschikage calmly pulled back his hand. "A mineral deposit," he explained, clearly for her benefit. "Concentration was shifted when the bones where damaged in your fall, it was affecting the nerve behind your eye," a simple, matter-of-fact explanation for a thing that had mystified the medics completely.
"How did you…you…not a medic…" Suzumebachi stammered, her voice returning.
"No," he smiled slowly, a sharp motion that touched only his lips, never his furious eyes. "Medicine I do not know, but the mineral composition of the human body, this thing I know so well as how to put on my robes in the morning."
Nothing more than a silent nod could be brought out to acknowledge such a statement, as Suzumebachi recalled all the furious rumors endlessly circulating about this man, the rumors of the strange powers he possessed. Twenty years had passed since the Tsuchikage was last observed in a battle, longer than she had lived, his abilities had passed from the realm of the known to that of myth, hidden by choice and obscured by time. Eventually, after a long pause, Suzumebachi remembered what she ought to say. "Apologies, you have my most sincere thanks, Tsuchikage-sama."
"Never thank me again girl, and you will be doing well in remembering the nature of your world," he replied evenly. "I do none beneath me any favors when they gain my attention."
Again, only a nod was available as a reply.
"Straighten up your reports," the Tsuchikage ordered. "You are done with them for today."
"Yes sir," Suzumebachi replied hurriedly, and swiftly sorted out the reports she had been working on, placing everything in order so she could begin against the next. She almost turned back to her leader then, but barely recalled in time the chair lying against the wall, and went and restored it to the desk before she returned to face him again. "It is done."
"Good," his thin smile reappeared and then faded away once more. "Follow me."
With careful strides Suzumebachi did so. It took some consideration, for she must moderate her pace carefully, as the Tsuchikage walked slowly, his age telling in his motion. He carried a cane-like short staff, but rarely leaned up it, or seemed too weak to walk at all, only slow and creaky. It seemed to her that he was an old mountain, weathered and ground down, but with bones strong as the heart of the world. She said nothing, only walked beside him.
"You have presented me with a small puzzle, Kamizuru Suzumebachi," the Tsuchikage began, speaking as idly as his grim and grizzly voice could manage. "Knowing full well the rules you took two subordinates beyond our borders to undertake an unauthorized activity on what was supposed to be your training time. You engaged in foolishly aggressive activities, kidnapping and engaging ninja from the Hidden Leaf. Moreover, you pursued a goal of no concrete value, grasping at a dream, and you managed to fail to crown the whole measure." Suzumebachi grimaced with the recitation, but made no moves to deny, it was all completely true, her quest had been a ghostly chance from the start, but it had been her great hope. "And yet," the Tsuchikage continued with an odd tilt to his language. "And yet you returned, admitting to it all. You took the complete blame for the incident and for your companions as well, and accepted the full punishment. Scream in pain you did, anyone would from the privations you earned, but you never screamed for them to stop. It is all very interesting. Tell me Kamizuru Suzumebachi, why did you do this?"
"You have already heard my answer surely, Tsuchikage-sama," Suzumebachi replied, for indeed, it seemed she had explained to ever one of the disciplinarians, every teacher, all her family members, and everyone, she had done it till the explanation was sickening to recite. She had no desire to say it again.
With frightful speed he spun about, pulling her head level with his face and bringing the drilling fury of his vision within inches of her own. "Tell it to me!"
The command was absolute, and the words spilled forth with brutal immediacy.
"I want my family's place restored to the Village! Restored! Not lost! I could never leave, ever! I will not dishonor my family that way! No matter what my crime!" Suzumebachi realized she was screaming into the Tsuchikage's face, but she did not care, the truth of her position torn from her without mercy. "Even if the village abandons me I will not abandon it!"
"Good," he said simply, and released her, continuing to walk as if nothing had happened. "I thought so."
They reached the door leaving headquarters but did not pause, continuing on outside. Suzumebachi had not expected this; she had thought they would take the stairs up to the Tsuchikage's office. "Tsuchikage-sama," she managed. "Your pardon, but, where are we going?"
"Curb your curiosity little wasp," he chuckled, and it seemed as if the universe rolled beneath the irony of his mirth. "We are going to remake your hopeless shell into a form that has a future once again."