Chapter 7
Uchiha Satsuki was a slave driver.
That's what he'd say if he were being charitable about her.
If he were to be a little less so, then she wasn't just a slave driver, but a fucking psychopath.
His tracksuit was singéd. A smattering of pores, like stomata on a leaf, had perforated the fabric, lending it a dozen micro-mouths; these, over time, and with subsequent exchanges, grew in size, each in itself was now an abyss, so that the remnants of his tracktop resembled a patchwork of loincloths sewn together.
His hair was askew. His breath came out in great gasps. Protuberances the size of pebbles raked from a stream's bottom welted his skin. These, violet in hue, were as plums rotted, and expelled pus, or rivulets of red.
Friction from skittering across stone and thorn had wrecked his sandals, blistered his soles, bled his toes. He'd kicked off again without complaints; for complaints, he knew from experience, went unheard, and only increased the intensity of subsequent exchanges.
Besides, it would be most unbecoming to beg.
As a result, however, he stood on torn flesh; each squelched step left a red crescent, and was accompanied by an audible wince. Yet Uchiha Satsuki, who did not have a strand of hair out of place and had not yet broken into a sweat, paid it no heed.
The wind bullets he spat at her bought him a second's respite. But now she returned to pressing him, delivering not blows but feather light touches, each like a crumb of grace offered, each with the finesse and dexterity of a piano player's tapping. His bones were as keys being tinkled. And there was an artistry in all this, one somehow free from the haphazard clatters and clangs and cleaves of barbarism; each touch was not the flick of paint onto a slapdash collage swift strung, but the heaven inspired daub of an expert's brush on canvas. Contact sounded like the twangs of a bowstring tightly wound.
If it weren't for the fact that he was half dead, he'd mayhaps appreciate it more.
Fighting Uchiha Satsuki was like fighting a Hyuuga, except worse, because none of them, he was sure, possessed her speed. His lungs burnt, and so did his limbs. Her fingers were coated with chakra. She blurred in and out of his guard. Their back and forth was a dance that in its thrusts and twists and twirls and pivots and pirouettes left him with no time to think or breathe, only react.
His nose was tickled by the scent of smouldered craters and sand set afire; his arms tingled and swelled under the tuning fork of those four fingered thrusts, each of which felt like being struck with a bag of cement. All purpose in life was reduced to reading the undulations of her shoulders, and reacting to the slightest shifts in weight, the slightest tensions of her body; he predicted and parried, exploited over-extensions, rolled with the blows, exploded into motion, and tried recognizing which hits to take, which to block, which to avoid altogether.
Not that it helped much.
She was relentless.
But her relentlessness had a method to it.
If she spotted a gap in his defences, she chipped away at it until he learnt how to adjust. Then she'd focus elsewhere, on another chink, and thus remedy another potential weakness.
She didn't talk much. But over the past month she'd drummed into him a decent spatial and temporal awareness, and what she called a semi adequate sense of position and anticipation. Each hit, which once felt like a seismic rupture, and often slipped through his guard, was now repelled with more tenacity, or endured more resolutely, and left behind only this tracery of bruises. He'd once lasted thirty seconds; it now took her over thirty minutes to put him away. Oh, she was holding back a lot, sure; but every day she left him with the sense of something accomplished.
Left him in agony, too. The nights were horrible. His body dissolved under the strain of a thousand adrenal-delayed pains condensing. And then he had to go back the next day and do it again.
And again.
And again.
He grit his teeth and pirouetted away from a stroke aimed at his head, then spun in the same motion and aimed a kick at her ribcage. This she parried, and kept up her pressure, though the edges of her eyes crinkled in approval.
She went for the head again. He pirouetted again, but this time his palm exploded into a blue swirl, still incomplete but (thanks to her) infinitely more potent and intricately wound than it had been a month ago. He brought it up in a barreling motion and went straight for the face, only to notice, at the last instant, that she had dropped her guard, and was doing nothing bar standing there with her jaw up and her arms by her side.
His rasengan froze a centimeter from her forehead.
The blue receded
She huffed in disappointment and pushed his arm away.
"Why didn't you take it?"
"Thought 'twas a trap," Naruto said.
But even as he said it he knew it wasn't true.
Her face draped itself in the vestments of a fond irritation.
"I hate it when you lie to me." She clucked her tongue. "This isn't the first time either. Not even the first time this fight. You had so many openings, yet you took none for the fear of hurting me."
Naruto bowed his head.
Her eyes softened.
"I've told you before: if this hesitancy carries over to the battlefield, it will get you killed." She reached out and patted his cheek. "And after all the time I've put into you, I would hate that."
"I can't help it!" He burst out. "It isn't because it's you, or something. It's…" he sighed. "It's a reflex at this point."
She cocked her head and looked at him quizzically.
"Because you don't want to hurt anyone?"
"You say it as though the very idea appalls you."
"On the contrary," she said, "I understand it fully. How could I not, after the conversations we've had? Besides, I was once the same." She brought up two fingers and shifted the collar of her hakama, so that he caught a glimpse of skin and, running from the rim of her neck to her clavicle, the jagged outline of a scar. She let go and pulled the top back in place.
"How…?"
"Very few Shinobi are born callous." She shrugged. "I, too, was once misled and naive, and I almost paid for it with my life. I'd be a terrible teacher if I let you repeat my mistakes."
"I'm not misled and naive," he protested. "And not being a savage isn't a mistake."
Satsuki smirked.
"It isn't," she cooed, her voice lightening, taking on a sing-song lilt, "but forbearing from savagery is only an option for the strong— and you, dear student, are far from strong."
She reached out and patted his cheek again.
Naruto's eyebrow twitched.
"And you, dear teacher, are far from humane," he grumbled. But there was no heat in the remark. And considering how her smirk widened, she knew it too.
She was weird.
He'd been so certain when she was assigned to him that he wouldn't like her, but then their conversations had happened; and while it solidified his impression of Uchiha Satsuki as a consummate Shinobi, willing to kill or be killed for the cause, he'd caught glimpses, too, of something else, something underneath the formal veneer that suggested the existence of a self beyond the one enameled in sombre professionalism and glossed over with a fresh coat of bluster and fanaticism.
He'd noticed shades of an actual person.
This was someone his age, who enjoyed a back and forth with him, and often provoked it without cause; someone sharp tongued and quick witted and passionate, and often humane, though prickly; someone who, after that first day, never insisted on being called sensei, and instead of demanding respect earned it through action— this via the severity of her regimen, which inspired in him a reluctant though primal joy.
Through her sessions she'd discovered for him an inconvenient truth, one that he still shunned when conscious, and avoided confronting, but one that misted over his mind at night and cracked its crystal plane; emerging in sleep, slipping through the sieve of his dreams, sedimenting his wakening thoughts with a shame so visceral, that days and days were now spent in a pent up self denial, a rejection of the self.
What she had helped him discover (though herself unaware) was this: the blood of the warrior which sang in his veins was addicted to training, and to pain. The intensity of their sessions divested him of his shroud of jocularity, stripped away the self selected cloak of buffoonery; and for once, instead of drifting, or deflecting erratically from life itself— like a compass needle brought too close to the unlike pole of a magnet— he could take a myopic view: focus on her, as on a singular dot at the centre of a wall, and have her be the vessel into which he poured forth the froth of his frustrations. He could cleave, and cleave, and cleave again, and pretend that it was destiny itself he fought— that the exhaustion in his arms was from an exalted mutiny to save humanity, and not from a routine spar. His frame in these moments was torrential with a vigour unconstrained; his blood was a brimstone sea, thundering in his ears, sundering all infirmity, sweeping away into the bottomless deep of eternity the dissolving debris of all that revolted him. Vested in him was the firebrand will of each person who had traversed the stream of time and opposed the Shinobi nations— institutionalized cult of death— and thus perished.
And he loved it. Loved it despite denying himself this sensation for two years. Loved it with some joy and a lot of shame. Shame, because it struck at the heart of everything he held dear, violated every tenet he maintained.
Not that he'd ever tell her that, of course.
"Sit," Satsuki said, and that brought him out of his thoughts.
She was eyeing his feet.
He limped to a rock that the violence of their routine had not split in half, then sat.
She knelt before him and conjured up at the tip of her fingers a balmy green. Her other hand procured a towel, which she wet with a suiton spurt. Then she held up his right foot. Assessed the damage done.
All Naruto could see was a red ruin.
She nodded in approval.
"I know Jonin who would've stopped for less." She applied the towel, ignoring the stream of profanity that poured forth from his lips, and watched dispassionately as the towel lost its whiteness and took on the tone and tint of blood.
"Not like you'd let me," he rasped, his eyes shut. Dear lord, it hurt so fucking much…
She hummed.
"Maybe, maybe not. But this—" she prodded his foot, "this is never a bad thing. There's much to be admired in your tenacity. It is a precursor to greatness."
She pulled away the rag and pressed her palm to his foot. The pain eased. He opened his eyes and watched skin re-knit.
"Or to brain damage in combat," he said dryly. "All it shows is I can take a beating."
She smirked.
"Many, many beatings, I think. You're my favourite chew toy, after all."
Naruto shrugged.
"And I'd just started to see myself as a real Shinobi, too."
She applied the bloodied rag to his other foot, the smirk fading away and the humour leaving her eyes. Something he couldn't quite place gleamed instead.
"We'll get there someday," she murmured.
Evening found him in an odd mood. Yes, his body bloomed with its daily portion of aches; skin and soft tissue was a quilt lacerated, sutured back together by the power of will alone; but this was routine. What wasn't, was how his mind— partitioned at the moment into three parts frustration, one part melancholy—churned.
He'd been happy when he returned. Afternoon was spent in a daily flipping of pots and pans, a daily scrubbing, a daily assemblage of ingredients, a daily measuring and chopping and stirring— in other words, in a daily preparation of an intricately flavoured lunch. It was one of the small joys still left to him. The taste of food hard won after a day's toil was heavenly. Pleasure eddied outward with every bite.
Then he'd settled down for an afternoon nap.
Only, it never came.
Naruto twisted and turned. The activity inspired a discontent that dug through the soil of his mind and raked up, like wriggling worms, half forgotten memories, half formed wraiths of thought best left buried due to their impracticality and their self immolating nature. But once brought up, they wouldn't go. And so he thrashed about, and so gnashed his teeth, and so, in trying not to think, deeper and deeper entrenched himself in a waist deep bog of wishful thinking, till every remnant of joy from his productive morning bled into it, and was sullied.
And then there was the voice.
He had a sense of deja vu the second before it hit.
A sinking sensation.
A sudden blankness.
A rigidity.
And then a shuddering, as though in the thrall of an epileptic fit.
Then malignant laughter, so suffocating, so corrosive, so like wildfire, that it cindered in a second both head and heart; crumpled him, crushed him, bent him backwards, folded him over.
A strangled sob burst from his lips.
I have seen your heart. I know of the darkness that dwells there.
Each syllable was a scalpel.
His eyes watered.
The air around him was a malevolent mist.
Give me my freedom, and I will give you yours.
The room spun and spun, smoked and dissolved; he was a mere morsel being assimilated into the palpitating stomach of a great beast— crunched with each contraction, swathed in digestive fluids, crumbling into acid-eaten fragments.
I will leave all that we loathe a charred slagheap. The world, thus cleansed, will be my gift to you— yours to rule, mine to terrorize. For you and I are the same...
"Shut up," Naruto whispered. "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"
The laughter diminished in pitch, and was drawn out into a mocking note. Then it receded altogether. The oppressive aura thawed. It left behind its proof only in the sweat he was drenched in.
He stayed motionless an entire minute. Stared at the ceiling.
"We're not the same," he mumbled to the empty room. "We're not…"
All at once he stood, and set out for an evening jog.
Shafts from a dying sun dappled the road like rose petals strewn. A breeze licked at his exposed nape, and for an instant became the balm of fingertips pressing down in a massage.
He was headed nowhere in particular. It was his mind that he was running from. So it was with some relief that he accepted the distraction of storefronts, each in itself an iridescent province, governed by the iron fist of miserly shopkeepers, and populated with cabbages and cauliflowers, brinjals and bitter gourds; with boutiques and bouquets; with ornate carvings and earthen urns and tupperware; with row on row of weapons. Customers approached like a diplomatic delegation and haggled with the hardheadedness of a hostage rescue team.
The ludicrousness of this thought brought some respite, and to further forget his shitty afternoon it was with gusto and in glottal rhythms that he recited aloud the silver lettering atop stores.
People turned.
People stared.
Naruto did not care.
He whistled. Threw his arms about in exaggerated motions. Felt the first churnings of a lightening, a brightening, a conscious forgetting.
And his spirits were lifted.
He rounded a corner. The stores were left behind and the street ahead was vacant. There was a bench some way off, removed from the road, adjoining a park, cocooned in the embrace of verdure and shaded by the approaching dusk. Its osiered edges were painted over, and glinted with a gun metal tint. This place, he knew, was on some nights a lovers' paradise, a rendezvous point for those seeking to celebrate their illicit passions under night's cover. Here he had, in the past, espied teenage girls and boys furtively pawing at each other, and attempting to peck each other's faces off.
And it warmed the cockles of his heart to startle them with a whooping war cry, then take off as they sputtered and panted and cussed.
Ah, the little joys in life!
With similar mischief in mind, he approached. Only, this time the sole occupant was a slender girl in a turquoise tank top. Her nose was buried in a sketchbook. Paint faintly flecked her cheeks. Her hair was unbound, and the wind whipped it about like ripened sheaves of grain. A brush artlessly rested behind one ear. Another loosely dangled between her fingers. All at once she looked up, unseeing, and chewed the inside of her cheek, her countenance distending in distress.
Naruto blinked.
Rubbed his eyes.
Blinked again.
Uchiha Satsuki was near unrecognizable without her bun and her hakama and the stoic frown of cold command that he chalked up as lineal— some unfortunate side effect of inbreeding, no doubt. Frankly, she looked nothing like a Shinobi, and could easily be mistaken for the pretty but uppity daughter of a civilian trader.
He inched closer and examined her.
When seen like this, there was a naivety to her, a beauty which went beyond her visage and beyond the body that she'd liberated from the stuffy formality of what she usually wore. No, her beauty was in the way she chewed at her lip, and squinted, and sighed, and shook her head; in the way she brought up a free hand and played with an errant lock—twining, twirling, smoothening, then letting go. She seemed enclosed in a field of attraction of which she herself was unaware, made all the more magnetic in ignorance; her half lidded eyes seemed at once to take in everything and nothing, somnolently scooping from either memory or an imagined reality figurines for her art: and with each brushstroke it was not just her canvas she filled in, but herself— she herself her greatest masterpiece. As she painted, her etiolated skin gathered a rosy hue. The angular edges of her face attained, as he watched, a refinement powdered by the first dabs of moonlight. A vortex of emotion that whirled therein humanized it, and superimposed on the initial impression of supernal perfection— grafted in his mind's eye— gradations of earthen texture, earthen contour.
This was beauty personified.
And for the first time, Naruto was viscerally aware of the fact he was looking at a girl his age, or thereabouts, and not a sexless marbled monument of competence and professionalism and snark.
He firmly shut the lid on where his thoughts threatened to take him.
Satsuki had gone back to her sketchbook. The world around was quite obviously dead to her, a monochromatic blur.
So he did the decent thing.
He snuck up to her, and somberly announced:
"Boo."
To her credit, bar a slight tensing of shoulders she did not react.
"Bit late for a jaunt, isn't it?" She asked, not lifting her eyes from her book.
He plopped down next to her and stretched his limbs. Yawned. Caught the aroma of perfume.
Huh. That was new too.
"Right back at ya," he said.
"I'm a Jonin." This she whipped out with a crisp note of finality, as though it were the answer to all questions, all the world's problems.
"And I'm now Shinobi corps. Ya also see to it that I've no day life. So nightlife it's gotta be."
She rolled her eyes and did not respond. Simply went back to her sketchbook.
They were both silent for a minute.
Naruto ruptured it.
"Taken a liking to fashion, sensei?"
She glanced at him from the corner of her eyes.
"Not everyone can subsist on one tracksuit. That thing stinks. How old is it, anyway?" She extended her finger and picked at a singéd hole the size of a wart to emphasize her point.
"Hey." He pretended to be incensed. "I got a wardrobe full of em." He puffed out his chest and leaned in conspiratorially. "It's a two in one sorta deal. Uniform and casual wear."
"Hn."
"So," Naruto said, after another minute's silence (another minute of her pointedly ignoring him and pretending to paint) "waiting for your boyfriend?"
That got a reaction. Her brush stopped mid stroke. She shut her sketchbook and glared.
"My...what?" The way she said it, one could be forgiven for assuming that he had in one breath spewed the vilest of obscenities at her: insulted her parents, her clan and her entire village.
Naruto had a sudden sense of impending doom.
"Ya know this is a lovers' meeting point, right?" He amended hastily, waving both hands crosswise, as though to ward off evil spirits.
"..."
She kept staring at him. He wondered if he'd grown a second head.
"No," she conceded eventually. "I just come here every once in a while to paint."
"Ah."
Another thirty seconds of silence followed.
"So, uh, no boyfriend, then?"
Satsuki let out a long suffering sigh.
"What's it to you?"
Then, after a second's hesitance, she steepled her palms and placed them on her scrapbook.
"This might shock you, Uzumaki Naruto," she said, "but you and I have the same number of friends: which is to say, none. As for relationships, the line of work we are in isn't very conducive to them. I can pick a…" she pinched the bridge of her nose, "...as you so crudely put it, boyfriend, and settle down. Or I can serve. But not both. Not at the same time." She gave him a pointed look. "Guess which of the two I value more."
"That—" he began, emitting a horrified gasp and clutching at his heart, "that is such a traditionalist take."
"My traditions are my pride. The way of my people is my pride."
"...dear lord, ya always this serious?"
There was another silence. Something she said troubled him.
"What d'ya mean, no friends?" He asked. "You've done missions with half the village."
"They're colleagues." She looked at the sky, where the first stars were making their presence known. "I'm too young to be friends with those my rank. There's a generation between us, and they live different lives altogether. And those my age are my subordinates. They are— how do I put this?—ah, yes, intimidated. You cannot be friends with someone you fear, after all, or envy. No. No, it is for the best. They know they cannot keep up; they know they will always be left trailing in my wake."
For once, she sounded melancholy.
"You've a really high opinion of yourself, you know," he offered sympathetically; then exploded in laughter when she punched his arm.
"Still," Naruto said, rubbing his arm, "I guess we got some similarities, eh? What a formidable pair of shinobi we'll make. The friendless and the lovelorn. The cynic and the automaton. The nut-job and the anti-nationalist. Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Uchiha Satsuki did not seem amused.
"It is nice of you to remind me." She lapsed into a more formal speech. "I think you have made a lot of progress, and are now well prepared. So I want you to go home tonight and pack your bags. Because tomorrow, we will leave the village on a C rank."
"A C rank?" He felt his mouth go dry, his heartbeat quicken. He'd wished this day wouldn't come. But now that it had, he couldn't wait to see the world outside.
"Yes, a C rank. I took the liberty of collecting our mission this afternoon." She offered him a smile. "Our client is one of the biggest businessmen in the elemental nations. One of the provinces under his control is threatening rebellion. Our instructions are simple: to stay there a while and to ensure there are no eruptions."
"A'ight. So where we headed?"
Satsuki leaned forward. Her eyes glittered. Moonbeam mottled her face.
"You might've heard of the client. His name is Gato, of Gato enterprises. We are headed to Wave, where a set of fishermen and peasants and other rabble are organizing under a former Shinobi named Kaiza. Our instructions are to stave off this mutiny. And if that fails, then we are to quash it— by any means necessary."
A/N: Yes, yes. That Gato. And that Wave. I did say only recognizable arc, but with a twist. Leaf canonically being the good guys for the wave arc was a coin toss. If Gato had asked for em first, they'd have gone, assuming there wasn't more to be gained from picking the bridge builder. Naruto wouldn't have been happy, Sakura wouldn't have been happy, but it would be what it is.
Kaiza is alive here (you remember him!), and I've also made him a retired Shinobi, discharged from duty. This is defo non canon. I use it as an explanation on why Gato panicked and hired the might of the Leaf here (only the best of the best for my man), and not a couple of errant mist Shinobi (which also means no Zabuza and Haku here).
The romance will be slow burn. There will be a lot of bumps and pitfalls along this road. I intend to try and stay as consistent with the characters I've started with, and I desire to try and make their evolution as natural as my skill level will allow me. You have been warned.
A big apology once again for not responding to reviews, but even getting this chapter done took every last second of my spare time. Once more, I read all of em, cherish all of em, and will defo respond to some post examinations.
Which brings me to:
This will be my last update for at least three weeks. Have exams coming up. Even getting this done was a struggle. This was fifteen hours (approx) down the drain.
I hope to see you on the other side of that living nightmare. Or not, depending on whether or not you have had enough of this story. If yes, then in that case I thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this far and taking the time to go through every chapter. I also apologize for the time you've sunk on this.
Feel free to leave a review. See you on the other side!