Leah falls forward against her desk, choking.
"Leah-sama?" Rin asks, sounding more than a little worried.
The pressure is too much. Something is wrong, broken and torn and shaking the universe to its foundations, but Leah's the only one here that can feel it.
She flares her power, pushing away anything and everything until she's got the pulsing eldritch wrongness held at bay.
"…Leah-sama?" Rin hesitantly tries again.
Leah takes a deep breath. "I'm fine."
"What happened?"
"I don't know yet," Leah says, getting to her feet and walking around the desk. "But I'm about to fi—"
The first soul drops into the massacre halls, screaming rage and betrayals.
Rin's head snaps to the side. She breathes out a single word. "Uchiha."
"…souls first," Leah says, setting off. "And then we'll see."
o.o.o.o.o
Leah feels the bottleneck before she even reaches the halls, and sends a bundle of magic in the shape of a magpie to hunt down Yahiko and bring him to her. The walls of her domain pulse with green light in patterns that look as though they're reflected off of water, even in the driest areas. Rin steps along behind her, three paces behind and with a pen racing across the papers on her clipboard.
The doors slam open as Leah steps forward, her arms crossed over her chest as she surveys the souls that are appearing in her domain. They're freshly dead, still covered in blood, still screaming or sobbing and too out of it to even recognize her. She closes her eyes and pushes away at the pressure that's building into another wave, already knowing that she's going to have a migraine. Someone needs to corral and control these souls while she checks on the bottleneck and the mysterious breakage.
"Get Shisui," Leah says. "And Kushina. Yahiko and his subordinates will come to the living world with me."
"Yes, ma'am," Rin answers with a sharp nod. "And the… thing from earlier?"
"We'll see."
o.o.o.o.o
Leah and Yahiko step through an acid-green portal into a literal massacre.
"Oh, that's gross," he says, making a face at the smell in the air. "You sure we need to be here?"
"Bottleneck," Leah reminds him. "Too much, too fast, too localized. Start working the edges inward. Whoever did this isn't done yet."
Yahiko hesitates. "You think it's that Itachi kid?"
Leah nods, and he vanishes. On feet too silent to be real, she walks towards Mikoto's house. Death surrounds her, and though she's apprehensive of the pressure that still pushes at her very being and the fabric of reality, a smile grows.
A twist of magic brings her formal wear to the forefront, the light fabrics swishing about her feet. The humans cannot see her, but the dead souls, still stumbling about near their bodies, recoil as she passes them by. They don't know who she is, not really, but something in them recognizes her power, or simply the reputation she has cultivated.
One dead shinobi tries to attack her. He is weak and slow with the fatigue brought on by how recent his death is, but he still tries. She tilts her head and looks at him, once he's realized how bad of an idea this is, with his throat held tight by her fingers. She does not feel the cold, but no doubt he feels a certain terror from the chill of her hand on top of everything else.
"Have you a name?"
He chokes and flails, tugging weakly at her hand, though she doesn't know whether he's trying to answer or just that desperate to take a breath he no longer needs. She drops him and waits.
"You bitch."
"Your name, human."
He looks up at her with murder in his eyes, and Leah smiles. Wisps of green pass from her fingertips, and in seconds the man is chained to the ground, blocky light around his wrists, like that one comic the child Loki had laughed at.
(Green Lantern? Something like that.)
"What are you?" He demands.
"The Goddess of Death."
She turns and continues towards the main house, thinking. She's made plans, plenty of them, but had committed to nothing until today.
"Yahiko! To me!"
He's by her side in an instant, legs fusing into a ghostly tail that trails behind him as he floats along. "Orders?"
"Stay by my side," she says. "We wait for Konoha."
"No reaping until later, got it. Can I ask why?"
"They've been questioning my public form's intentions. I choose to introduce them to the goddess instead."
"So you want them to see the collection. You know, if you show up too early to the main house, they might try to pin it on you," Yahiko warns.
Leah pauses at that, head tilting. "I'd considered that. You have a suggestion?"
He smiles brightly at her, though she cannot see the eyes behind his uniform. "How dramatic are you willing to be?"
o.o.o.o.o
She watches Mikoto die, and while part of her feels pity for the circumstances, the rest of her is satisfied.
Mikoto is dead, and Mikoto is hers.
o.o.o.o.o
Leah ignores the latest shuddering pressure as she waits atop the Hokage monument.
Far below, Yahiko's energy flares, and Leah prepares her response.
Her power flares.
It's a sense of dread that settles over Konoha, something that has people stopping in their tracks and rushing for their windows to see what it is. It's a colder power than the Kyuubi, more impersonal and distant, the kind of fear that one feels around an uncaring ruler known to behead on a whim, rather than the terror around a raging beast.
It's the fear of a death god.
Grey fog drifts from Leah's form as she phases her image to something the humans can see, and she raises one arm ahead of her. Her energy rushes across the ground, finding what she needs, and—
Bones.
Animal, mostly, since she refuses to disturb true graves, but still bones.
Nobody can see her expression from this distance, but she keeps her face impassive as she moves. The bones float up to collect beneath her, forming a dirt-stained stairway towards the Uchiha Estate.
Every step she takes is accompanied by the bones behind flying apart and reassembling a new step further below, and there is nothing to hold the structure up. The distance is enough that she forces the stairs to move closer on their own, more like walking down a moving escalator than a normal staircase. The drama would die down if she were to actually walk that distance.
Also, she's impatient, so there's that.
The bones only have a structure to seemingly support the staircase once she reaches the ground itself, fog abundant, and she keeps on hand on the railing as she stop just steps from earth once more. She tilts her head, ignoring the swords at her neck, and surveys the compound.
There is but one Uchiha left alive within its walls.
Leah meets the Hokage's eyes, sees fear and suspicion and maybe a little hate, and she smiles. Her power flares again, and the waking dead, not yet moved on, come into view for the humans as well.
The dead do scream so sweetly.
The shinobi try to break the genjutsu they think themselves caught in, try to damage her, but all for naught. Leah steps past them, steps through them, and heads for the nearest soul.
A press of her forefinger to the dead woman's forehead has her dissolving to nothingness.
"To me, my reapers," Leah calls out, and Yahiko's made good on his word. A team of four drops down to meet her, and it's little effort to make them visible too. "Collection time."
"Who are you?" One of the shinobi asks, and Leah pauses in her strides, turns just barely to glance over her shoulder, and smiles. Her lips are painted a glossy red so dark that it is nearly black, and she's sure the sight is striking in its own way, especially given the fog that's floating about.
"I am the Queen of Helheim," Leah says. "I am the Goddess of Death."
"A Shinigami?" One of the shinobi demands.
Leah laughs. "He is his own story. I am mine. Shinigami-dono is a… coworker, shall we say. Our roles complement each other."
Leah walks towards the main house. Sasuke is as yet undisturbed, which is… good. It's good for her. It means she'll be the first to reach him.
"Hokage-sama, the grass…"
Leah smiles to herself as she walks, her reapers collecting soul after soul around her. The grass dies beneath her feet, and the koi in the pond she passes over do the same, but the shinobi do not try to touch her directly. They felt the cold when she passed through them the first time. They already know it would be fruitless.
"What do you want?" Sarutobi asks.
"To do my job, Professor," Leah retorts, laughing at the way his face twists. "We of Death have a sense of humor too, little mortal. God or not, dead or alive, a little comedy is good for the soul."
One of the shinobi sends a spray of shuriken through her. She ignores them.
It seems to be a cue for the others. Little by little, they do their best to kill her, likely on some silent, secret order from Sarutobi, and Leah ignores them. Only the genjutsu touch her, and that is but momentary.
Leah eyes the woman, using it as an excuse to pause so the shinobi do not see her steps falter as something far away shatters and forces her head to scream at the pressure. It is not pain, but it is not comfort, either.
"Kurenai, yes? Hm. You'll be one to keep an eye on, I imagine…" Leah muses, and watches Kurenai with a steadiness that hides her inner apprehension until she feels steady enough to walk again.
She puts up a force field behind herself, just enough to stop the weapons, and smirks to herself when cries of alarm reach her ears as they hit it. It wouldn't do for one to go wide and hit Sasuke, after all. She still needs to see where his fate leads.
Leah approaches Mikoto and Fugaku's souls, watching as dread recognition reaches Mikoto's eyes. The woman was always too perceptive for her own good. Leah smiles.
"I'll be seeing you and yours in Helheim," she says, and forces the word through All-Speak. They will understand where they are going, hear the word as it is but know it for what it is, and so will all the shinobi behind her.
A kusarigama swipes through their necks, and they fade from sight, dispersing like ash on the wind.
Leah ignores the corpses on the ground, and turns, mindful of her living audience. They yell at her, asking what she means to do as she turns Sasuke so that the back of his neck faces them. She brings two fingers to her face and presses them to her own lips, and when she withdraws them, a ghostly sigil floats above them, faintly gold with a green spark at its center.
She presses the sigil to Sasuke's nape, and forces more power into it than she has thus far. She will not turn Sasuke's story, but she will give him tools to make the journey as interesting as possible.
It burns into his neck, thankfully painless in his state of unconsciousness. There's no sign of it to human eyes after a few scant seconds, but Leah can see where it glows beneath the skin, the magic burrowing into him and giving him tendrils of her own power. It's bare drops from an ocean, but it will be something.
"The child's story is not yet over," Leah says, standing up and turning to the shinobi. "He is not dead, but once he is… his soul is mine."
She waits for their faces to drain of blood and color, and then lets her mouth widen into a Cheshire grin. "Take care of him, will you? There's not many that earn my favor, and I'd hate to think I bestowed one my first gifts to a mortal on someone who'll die before they can use it."
Leah turns and the bones from before fly in through an open window and construct the opening to a tunnel that would lead into the ground if the floor weren't in the way. They are only there to provide an illusion of structure, though, as all Leah needs is a way to disguise the fact that her portals as a goddess and her portals as a strange but supposedly human woman are the same. The portal is magic, and the reapers flit through before she follows.
She flashes another grin over her shoulder before she walks through, the magical force field finally fizzing out behind her.
She comes home to chaos.
o.o.o.o.o
Ragged and travel-worn, clothing in tatters and leaking smoke as signs of the horrors he witnessed that have reverberated out far enough to force parts of her own Helheim to ruins, Patri-not tells her, as only an old friend can.
"L͇̺͔̟͉̩ͪ̌ͨ͊́́̀a̜̫͚͔̜ͣ̓̑̌t̡͓̳͈̔͑͑̌̋v̷̥̱̞͉̦͙ͤͦͯ̏̐̚e̡̛̪͖͒r̩̜̦̖͉̤͇̉͂ͩ̋i̓̿̐̏͊̃ͧ͗́oͯ̐͛ͧ͢͏͉̘̬n̶̖̬͚̱͙̩̙̱͙ͮ̿́ ̦̫͇̖́ͭ̇̈͛ͩͦ͘í̸̩̼̘̲̝̯͌̀̉͆͆͗͑͟s̵̴̰͙̩̮̲̼̻͈͑͛̎̓̂͗͞ ̷͓̳̘ͮ̅̄ͬ̆̈́̓d̞̻̱ͫ̒ͥ͡e̯͇͉͒ͣ̃̑͋̒ͯͩ͞a̯͍̭̪̜̅͒̏͌̋ͤ̅͡ͅḋ̵͔͇͓̟̱̣̪̩̲̇͗̾̕.̵̵̦̗̯̟͕͚̲ͯ̏̋̄̏̎͞"
o.o.o.o.o
Next time: Rin gets some very pertinent need-to-know information.