"I am in misery,
There ain't nobody who can comfort me,
Why won't you answer me?
The silence is slowly killing me,"
-MiseryXCPR
Matsu stopped and stared as I walked up to him and held out the chikuzen-biwa.
"It's not May," he said, looking at it as he wiped sweat off his face with his shirt.
"It isn't," I agreed.
"How did you do it?"
I smiled a little. "I asked." And Naga asked Ren, and Ren asked the fire daimyo.
"That's it?"
"Should there be more?"
He reached out to take it hesitantly, touching the air next to my hand before he corrected and brushed his fingers against the wood. "Why would they—" he stopped and looked at me. "It was your birthday."
"It's what I wanted."
He took it from me, and his smile was sad.
I hummed, "You wanted it for someone else?"
"I used to," he answered. "But when I asked you for it, it was for me."
"Urakawa?"
"None of your business," he said, plucking the strings. "Did it come with something to play it with?"
"Play it with?"
"It's fine," he dismissed, turning it in his hands. "Is it too late to say happy birthday?"
"I don't think it's ever too late as long as you mean it."
"Ah, can't say it then."
"I could take it back."
"You can do that after I learn to play it."
正常
Water sprayed around me as I backflipped away from a small fireball and pushed off the water, making half-signs, dragon, tiger, hare. I shot a concentrated stream of water at Yahiko and he shot another fireball at it, blowing steam between us.
Naga was shooting air bullets at me as I fell.
I dropped straight into the water and it burst above me.
A silver-red blur shot out of the steam as I poked my head above the water. Naga didn't dodge, but raised his arms as Yahiko substituted with the nagamak. He didn't budge when Yahiko's foot hit his arms.
Yahiko grinned, twisting to kick Naga in the head and Naga freed an arm to block it, grabbing his ankle—
—and let go as Yahiko made the tiger seal, quickly putting space between them, but Yahiko didn't shoot fire at him.
The tip of the nagamaki stopped above my head, shaking against the sudden pressure, and his clone laughed as I looked up at him.
"Truce?" he asked.
He was knocked off his feet, tumbling and disappearing beneath the water as it was pushed away from me in violent wave. Water splashed over Naga as he and Yahiko clashed kunai.
I was standing on the surface as Yahiko climbed out and ran a hand through his hair.
"Nice of you to not attack me while I was down there."
"I didn't think your clones were that durable."
He laughed. "You'd know if you sparred with me more." He was in front of me suddenly, blade sweeping the water where my feet had been as I hopped back.
Water hissed around the blade as he twisted the handle, throwing steam at me, blanketing everything misty white again.
"Training Hidan is more than enough for me," I said, aiming my palm at a glint of silver in front of me. I pulled, expecting a substitution or a trick, and the nagamaki propelled over my shoulder, trickless, heat warming my neck.
I paused as it sank into the water, glancing at the tear in my shirt on my shoulder. It didn't break the skin, but it burned.
"I get the feeling he wouldn't be happy to hear you call it that," Yahiko drawled from somewhere in front of me.
"What else would you call it?"
"I'd call it Hidan not knowing what tactical retreat means." He went silent.
I ducked a punch from behind and he batted my foot aside when I aimed backwards at his knee. His kick swung above me as I rolled forward, aiming my palm at his other leg without looking.
He slid but flipped backwards before he could fall, twisting his arm to block my punch as he landed. My right palm was already against his stomach.
I had the split second thought of him switching with the nagamaki and so twisted to drive my foot into his side as hard as I could, but he didn't burst into water.
He flew sideways, and I realized that Naga was in the path of the Yahiko-shaped projectile I'd kicked at him through the dissipating steam. He'd positioned me here.
Naga's attention snapped to him just long enough for the clone to elbow him hard in the chest and shove him back. It tried to catch Yahiko as he collided with it and it burst into water, slowing him as he rolled and slid back on one knee. Naga fell to his knees, coughing hard.
Yahiko laughed through a wince, holding his side as he sat up. "Worth it," he gasped.
"You gave it-it had more chakra—" Naga broke off with a groan.
Yahiko stood, even as pain flitted across his face. "One of the only benefits of not having much chakra. If I give enough to my clone it'll have more than me. It's the only thing I have left that you don't know how to counter."
"Yet," Naga said, coughing again.
"Hidan isn't that fast, and he doesn't do taijutsu more than he has to," I mentioned. "But when we fought, you reminded me of him. That's why I thought you were the clone."
"Are you calling me slow?" he asked. "I'm offended."
He didn't answer the why, and I hummed—
I tilted my head and aimed my right hand at the shore, hearing them before I saw the tied blond hair, the plain green kimono, and the pack full of scrolls next to her feet.
Pretending to be civilian, even though she had too much of a presence, but she didn't seem like a ninja.
"Hangaku," Naga named her through a wheeze. "You're early."
I lowered my hand, but she didn't stop staring at me.
"Yes. Baron Miyashita left earlier than he planned to attend to an urgent matter within the imperial court," she explained, nudging the bag at her feet. "Your teacher refused to accept the materials."
"Mamoru-sensei is Mamoru-sensei," Yahiko drawled, hands behind his head.
"Urgent?" Naga pressed, in the way that made his requests sound like suggestions.
"It's not truly," Hangaku said, hiding a smile behind her hand. "Many extended members of the royal family think he was not punished sufficiently enough for his actions here. They know he despises court and express often how they miss him."
"The infamous favored nephew," I hummed.
Hangaku eyed me. "Infamous?"
"Naga is a gossip," I said matter-of-factly, and he spluttered and hurried to stand.
"I'm not," he said quickly. "They know as much as they do because we lead the village together. I don't know if Baron Miyashita told you—"
"Oka," she named me, realization in her eyes as she turned. "And Yahiko."
"You don't have to go to court with him?" I asked.
"I leave Watamura when he does, and return as he does," was all she said. "I would like to spar with you three, if you don't mind."
Yahiko shook his head, walking onto shore. "I'm done. Too exhausted."
Maybe he was, but it was more because if Hangaku saw him fight she'd know that a samurai trained him.
"Both of us?" I asked.
Hangaku pulled out a scroll hidden beneath the back of her kimono, opened it, and caught the handle of a naginata. "I have no preference. I am the guest in this situation."
Naga backed off and sat on the sand next to Yahiko—
She appeared in front of me, throwing up sand and water in her wake, chakra extending from the tip of the naginata that hit my palm and was absorbed.
Her chakra was like a metal sheet, refusing to bend into my chakra.
She slammed the point into the water suddenly and vaulted over me, dodging a push that gouged the water where she'd been.
I breathed her chakra out and made the half-dog sign.
"You sensed the pressure," I mused as the point of the naginata thrust down where my other hand would've been.
She landed behind me as a cage of water tentacles formed around me.
"You should've attacked Naga first."
Hangaku held the handle against the water, eyes flitting to each tentacle. "Thirteen," she observed. She bent backwards as a tentacle shot over her head, spinning the naginata to cut apart two tentacles that tried to slide around her arm.
She never stopped moving, twisting between tentacles or spinning around them, and it was like watching a dance. She spun the naginata like a shield that minced anything that hit it, but stopped and adjusted just as fast to slice a tentacle that caught her knee or tried to grab her from a blind spot.
She eventually gave up on closing the distance and stood on the water farther away, panting.
I didn't stop making the half-dog sign. More tentacles rose around me, and she looked at them warily.
I smiled and said, "I could do this all day."
狂気
"Why didn't you tell me before?" Nagato asked, gently prodding the bruised skin down his side. It was too-soft like rotted fruit.
Yahiko squeezed the part of his shirt he'd rolled up, the only sign Nagato knew he'd give to show he was in pain. "I did," he claimed, waving his other hand. "I had to go over how Sasori and I met at least three times, and you were there for at least two of them."
The bruise was in the shape of his liver. Nagato didn't need to use chakra to know it was swollen and pushing against his other organs. He was already showing signs of early liver failure.
His neck was bruised down the middle, but not as dark or obvious. How hadn't he noticed before?
Naga only looked at him, and Yahiko patted him on the shoulder.
"I think I knew Emon couldn't do it back in Hyozan, but I didn't want to admit it. Fear is something that I like to put in a box and pretend it doesn't exist, and I did that for way too long," he said. "What kind of summoner could admit that he overestimated his summon?"
"A good one."
Yahiko didn't smile. "Emon kept me alive this long. I thought I could endure it. Can't exactly ask our puppeteer for the antidote when he might just give me something worse and I'd never know."
"And then your liver started to fail, so you called the medic."
He laughed.
Naga had to concentrate to feel the chakra-barrier keeping the poison contained to his liver. He'd used the smaller pathways through it to do it, changing the flow of chakra in a way that would've left anyone who wasn't Yahiko with organ damage.
"I thought you trusted Sasori," Nagato pointed out.
"I gave him the village, didn't I?" Yahiko countered. "But, yeah. At the very least, he won't give it to me unless I give him what he wants, and I can't do that yet. He hasn't finished that lab, and we haven't gotten to him yet. There's nothing else keeping him here."
Nagato had nothing to say to that. "How much pain are you in, Yahiko?"
Yahiko tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling. "I need to learn that move that samurai from before used on you. Hangaku? The one where she wouldn't let you make hand signs?"
Nagato prodded the spot again but Yahiko didn't react. He hesitated to use medical chakra. He didn't know how the poison would react to it.
"Joji-sensei claims he doesn't know it and told me he left before he'd finished training. But I think there are some things about being a samurai that he just doesn't want to remember."
"You owe Emon an apology," Nagato said.
Yahiko closed his eyes. "Yeah, I know."
It was just another distraction and they both knew it.
"It'll hurt," Nagato warned him.
And Yahiko laughed.
He didn't know how the poison had changed with Emon's attempt at an antidote, or how trying to pull it out of his liver would affect him.
"I saw you looking—it's not that hard to make chakra barriers," Yahiko said. "I just abuse my body's defense mechanisms—"
Nagato distantly heard his hiss as he touched the bruise with glowing fingertips and sent a weak pulse of chakra into his liver, just enough for a picture to form of what he'd need to fix first—
His hand jerked back automatically, seconds before he was blinking back to himself, and he felt Yahiko's fingers digging into his shoulder. He realized what happened as his best friend caught his breath.
The poison had responded to his chakra, just in a way that left him stunned. It'd started metabolizing his chakra to take on its characteristics.
He'd never had a patient who had a bad reaction to medical chakra. He was always careful, but it was also because any medic-nin who knew what they were doing knew to take advantage of how the body didn't see medical chakra as harmful.
It was why Yahiko's chakra barrier didn't work against it. It was why if there was a poison that could move around freely disguised as medical chakra—
Nagato breathed out.
It was a poison made for medic-nin. It was a poison made to hurt the person who was left alive. It was a poison that told him that Sasori had intended to leave the Third Kazekage behind.
who would he want to hurt like that?
No, he knew. Who had personally met Oka and Yahiko because they wanted to find him?
It hadn't finished. If it had, Yahiko would already be dead.
But Nagato could almost see what Sasori intended in his head. If he found the Third Kazekage fatally injured, would he have been hesitant and cautious, or would he have tried to help right away?
It was a poison that sounded like it was made for Tsunade-sensei.
He'd almost killed his best friend.
"Minato—he-he used fuinjutsu that could suppress chakra. Most wouldn't question it, but I-I kept wondering how he could do that without his enemies organs shutting down," Yahiko managed. "It's because-because organs produce more chakra than pathways. So-so even if your pathways are cut off, you heart keeps beating. I use some of that extra chakra."
Nagato couldn't speak.
Yahiko leaned heavily on his shoulder and pressed a fist to his chest. "Talk to me, man. I'm too tired to keep talking about chakra."
"I didn't think I could ever be surprised again by techniques," Nagato finally admitted.
Yahiko laughed a little. "That bad?"
Nagato couldn't imagine— "How much pain are you in?"
"So, everything living thing has chakra, even trees and plants—"
"I'm going to talk to Sasori."
"What?"
Nagato gently untangled himself from Yahiko.
"What do you think you can say to him?"
Nagato did what Yahiko always did to him. He stood and left the room without giving him an answer.
.
.
.
Nagato stared up at the skeleton of a tower.
It was like a tree in the Land of Fire if it was made of metal and grew crookedly trying to find the sun. He'd seen it on paper. He'd sat with Keitaru and let him turn his ideas into something concrete with a brush.
It was unfinished, half as tall as he wanted it to be, and didn't have many finished walls. It reminded him a little of the old towers, but not. He could see where the face would be at the top. Something different from what the old ones had been.
Yahiko had been the one to suggest the tongue sticking out.
Nagato thought of all the work being done on the first ring of apartment towers and swore he smelled rain, but the sky was clear.
He traced his way down following unfinished pipes and drains that didn't have a purpose yet and, finally, looked at the puppets. They were all over the tower and never stopped moving.
A spiky-haired puppet hung from a beam between floors as it hammered, missing its left arm at the elbow, one eye hanging out of its head. Nagato looked away instead of watching it shake.
A puppet on the ground collapsed suddenly and a second with horns immediately turned to grab it under the arms and drag it over to a pile of broken arms and legs off to the side. Three of the horned puppet's six arms didn't work.
It pulled the broken puppet around a cracked torso and locked up as it went to toss the broken puppet, clicking and twitching until the arms spun and it dropped the broken one.
It unnerved him.
A puppet fell from the tower in a crash of broken wood and got back up, leaving half its face and arm as it started to climb again.
Nagato politely ignored them.
He saw Keitaru's sketches first on the ground around Sasori, and then the puppeteer himself sitting on a cushion, surrounded by wooden pieces and ripped cloaks.
The cushion was stained red. Shuriken on the ground next to him glistened. The puppeteer had placed a gray weapons pouch neatly on top of his old, red-splattered shirt.
what happened to the bodies?
It was a question Nagato pushed aside as soon as he'd thought it.
Sasori's stolen shirt was the same gray of a flak jacket and had longer sleeves.
Nagato decided to ignore the spots of red on them too. He didn't know enough about puppetry to know if it was impressive that he was only using one hand to control that many chakra strings.
Sasori idly spun a small stick between the fingers of his other hand, the top of it darkened with fish grease. His nails were painted teal, and Nagato studiously ignored the urge to ask where, how, why—
"When did the attack happen?" he asked instead.
Sasori didn't acknowledge him. Nothing had changed.
"I want to make a deal," Nagato began. "If you give me the antidote to the poison you used on the Third Kazekage, I'll show you the underground city beneath the village. You could make your workshop there. There's more than enough space, and you won't have to worry about the heat or the rain."
Sasori stopped spinning the stick. "And why would I need you to find it?"
"There are traps," Nagato said. He knew how lame that sounded.
The puppets abruptly collapsed, thudding to the ground around them as the chakra returned to Sasori. He'd spread himself so thin, but only lost a little of it to nature energy.
"You're a fool."
Nagato persisted, "You don't know how to activate the entrance. If you do it wrong, the entire place will flood."
It wasn't a lie, exactly, since there were multiple.
Sasori paused. He stood and looked at him with cold eyes. "I think you severely underestimate my knowledge of fuinjutsu. Are you done playing your game?"
"There was no easy way to ask you," Nagato said after a second. "But no one knows about it other than the older ninja and the Akatsuki. You're Akatsuki."
Sasori didn't blink. "You want my help, fool."
"I do, but I wanted you to see that what Yahiko told you was true too."
"It's almost impressive that you didn't kill him in your attempt to help that other fool. If you're coming to me, that means you tried," Sasori said over him. "You're competent, but not enough. That fool will die, and I'll take care of him. He'll be much more beautiful in death than he ever was in life."
is he saying—?
"He'd make such an irritating puppet," Sasori continued, tilting his head back. "But I haven't created anything in such a long time. I'm getting tired of waiting."
He said it without emotion, and Nagato focused on the puppets behind him.
"Do you regret it?" Sasori asked. "He spoke with such confidence, acted so arrogant, all for it to mean nothing. His salamander is more average than I thought. How disappointing for you."
"You're bored of them," Nagato mused.
Sasori blinked at him.
"You don't like using them, but you're not willing to use the puppets you do like for this, so you have to," he explained.
"Are you dense?"
"I've gotten used to being threatened," Nagato answered. "And you didn't do anything wrong."
"I didn't do anything wrong?" Sasori repeated.
"Yahiko was worried that you wouldn't have a reason to stay," Nagato admitted. "He'd kill me for telling you, but it's not like we didn't have an idea of who you were before we went looking, and he still doesn't want you to leave after everything you did to him."
Sasori didn't call him an idiot or use killing intent. He just stood there looking at him.
And Nagato—he looked and saw the suna-nin who'd spent months and months alone during the war because he was thought too strong to need anyone else.
"If he died I think he'd still want you to be Akatsuki. Even if no one else would."
Sasori stared intently at him. "What's wrong with you?"
Nagato didn't have an answer, so he moved closer and gazed up at the tower. "Do you mind if I watch?"
"You're insane."
"I didn't bring any cards or games with me," Nagato said mildly.
Sasori kept staring at him.
A/N: 正常 - Normalcy, 狂気 - Insanity
sasori: I just threatened your best friend with graphic violence
nagato: wow I didn't bring any cards
sasori:
nagato: do you have any dice?
sasori: no, seriously, what is wrong with you
./.
patch notes
*the scene between Oka and Nagato in chapter 68 has been rewritten
*the last scene in 71 between Oka and Etsudo has been rewritten
*added scenes in 74 before the POV change
*some edits to 75. Changes were made, but nothing big enough to change the scene itself. Mostly recontextualizes chapter 63.
*renamed Michi (chapters 35, 57) to Sae. I realized I really like M names for some reason.
*moved many things to Tilt. Kill your darlings and all.
I haven't been happy working on Axis for a while now and had been trying to "push through it" instead of enjoying it like I used to. Wish I could kick past me for deciding to upload weekly and burning through my backlog so fast I didn't have time to do any editing on anything new, and current me for forgetting that I didn't start this story to meet a deadline. I won't be editing anything before 66 even though I really want to, because then I'd never leave the chapters between Memento Mori and the Hyozan Arc. Not to get sappy but uh, thanks for sticking around for so long. I do read every review, but I mostly just change things in editing instead of replying, aha.