*Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or any of the characters in it. I simply borrow them for my own musings and fantasies and do not get paid for their use in said musings or fantasies. –Nira
Chapter 16
Yuriko, Yamato, and Kakashi found themselves bowing before the Hokage in full combat gear and their masks atop their heads, listening intently to their new mission.
"Our intelligence has reported a lab near the border between the lands of Fire and Sound suspected of conducting human experimentation. It is thought that their subjects are kidnapped from a nearby village due to the high number of reported disappearances over the last few months. I want you to infiltrate and destroy the lab leaving nothing behind," the Third ordered in his gruff voice full of sincerity.
"Understood," the three said in chorus and took their leave to prepare.
It was their first mission in weeks and Yuriko was actually relieved to be going. Her routine around the village had grown boring. There was only so much she could do in the village when she wasn't wandering, training, or gathering ingredients to make random herbal remedies or teas to pass the time. And, when she wanted to spend time with people, especially Kurenai, she was always away on missions or otherwise busy. Even Iruka and Naruto were a lot more occupied with training than usual so Yuriko couldn't even ask why they were suddenly so busy.
The only things that Yuriko brought with her were her weapons and some of the remedies that she'd concocted. Anything else would be too bulky and slow them down. As she was leaving, so was Kakashi and he smiled at her.
"Before we go, I wanted to give you something," he said, reaching into his pocket. "I thought it might be useful to you."
He pulled out a lavender silk carrying pouch with golden swirls painted on and a gold braided cord with white tassels on the ends tying it closed. When she opened the pouch, she pulled out a metal fan and her eyes widened. It was the fan that she'd admired on one of her morning wanderings around the village when she'd perused the farmer's market. The lavender canvas was taut over the hollow metal ribbing that housed a senbon already loaded into each of them, and a white lotus flower and gold swirls were painted on.
"How did…? When did you get this?" she inquired, completely floored.
"I remembered from our last mission that you'd had troubles quickly generating wind for one of your jutsu, and I saw you examining it one morning. You looked really upset when you put it back, so I thought I'd buy it for you. I just didn't know when or how to give it to you until now."
Yuriko couldn't hide her blush as she clutched the fan to her chest despite bowing her head. The fact that he'd paid enough attention to notice her struggles creating her vortex jutsu, remembered when they'd gotten back to the village, and bought it for her because he'd remembered was overwhelming and she was beyond flattered. That was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her.
"Senpai… thank you so much," she beamed, looking up at him with joyful tears threatening to spill over her eyelids.
Kakashi's body stiffened and he had to fight the almost overpowering desire to brush the stray lock of hair that had fallen into her face as she looked up behind her ear, and caress her cheek as he wiped away her tears. He hardly ever got to see her genuinely smile, but on the rare occasions that he did, it warmed him through and took his breath away. Instead, he nodded and grunted a confirmation, afraid of what would have come out of his mouth if he'd tried to speak. He turned away from her, covering his face with his ANBU mask and putting himself into mission mode to further distract himself. He couldn't afford to dwell on his foolish emotions. She was his subordinate and teammate, after all. There was no place for attraction within a working unit.
Yuriko followed suit, getting serious and putting her mask on. They met up with Yamato at the gate and Kakashi took point, sprinting his way toward the objective. They traveled for several days stopping only at night to rest, eat, and regather their bearings before taking off again at first light. When they'd arrived at the location marked on the map by previous reconnaissance missions it was the middle of the night and pouring rain. The entrance to the suspected laboratory was the mouth of a cave and according to gathered intelligence, the cave didn't have traps set up at the entrance or immediately inside, but an extensive reconnaissance mission within the cave had not been completed so the team had to exercise extreme caution.
With Yuriko's wind and water affinities, she felt that she had an advantage with the rain, but they also didn't know what they were up against so she didn't want to go in with a false sense of security. Kakashi gave the signal to move in and took the lead, followed by Yuriko and Yamato brought up the rear. They slowly made their way down the long hallway, the torches lining the walls casting long shadows behind them. They'd been walking for several minutes, but the scenery never changed and the end of the hallway where there were several doors never got any closer. Kakashi gave the signal to stop and looked behind them. The distance from where they'd come from and where they were going was exactly the same and he realized that they were caught in a genjutsu and had been since they first entered the cave.
Kakashi pulled his cloth mask down, exposing his Sharingan eye under his ANBU mask. The hallway was an intricate web of chakra lines from floor to ceiling and in either direction– the entrance of the cave or the end of the hallway– the lines tapered to a point which, he figured was how their distance remained the same. Essentially, they were in a ball, spinning in place within an optical illusion. He released the genjutsu to find that they hadn't even made it twenty feet into the cave and they were surrounded by… they weren't quite sure. Each of the figures was hunched over, clad entirely in black, and they all had what appeared to be several sets of beady eyes visible just under their black hoods. There were at least twenty of them, slowly creeping in around them.
"Looks like I've caught some poor, unsuspecting little flies in my web," came the smooth, alluring voice of a woman from further down the hallway.
Her hair was oil black and pulled into a tight sock bun atop her head with eight tendrils sticking out like the legs of a spider, two framing her angular face, and her eyes were extremely unusual. She had two white pupils per eye that moved in sync with each other and black where eyes are normally white. They contrasted greatly against her powder white skin, and her lips and eyelids were painted a bright crimson giving her entire appearance an extremely eerie, almost otherworldly feeling. Just looking at her gave Yuriko the creeps.
"If you'd just stayed there in your little cocoon for a little longer, your deaths would have come swiftly and practically painlessly and my pets could have feasted on your remains."
Kakashi looked down and realized that they were all slowly being drained of their chakra through the woman's chakra webbing. "We have to act, and quickly," he warned his teammates, and Yuriko immediately started weaving one-handed signs, preparing for an attack.
"I can feel it," Yuriko stated, her limbs growing heavier with each passing moment as if there was venom slowly coursing through her body, paralyzing her.
"Ready on your command, Captain," Yamato declared under his breath.
The trio steeled themselves, and the spider woman stood taller, her gaze hardening at the realization that they were planning to struggle against her. "Kill them," she demanded, and the creatures lunged, mouths agape revealing glistening fangs and screeching like bats.
Yuriko's gaze was fierce and focused as she unfolded her fan and drew her katana simultaneously, blowing a large group of them away and into the wall. Instantly another wave rushed toward her and she was forced into defensive counters and strikes. It didn't take her long at all to realize that the creatures weren't using any chakra and were acting and attacking on pure instinct. Kakashi and Yamato had also noticed the creatures' strange behavior and nature and Kakashi used his Sharingan to further investigate. As he countered each of the creatures' attacks, he could see that they all had chakra, but it seemed blocked or clouded by something and slowly draining, almost as if their bodies were possessed by a chakra parasite of some sort.
Meanwhile, Yamato was having difficulties with his crowd control, also forced to defense versus offense. No matter how hard he hit the creatures, or squeezed them or used any kind of non-lethal force, they simply wouldn't lose consciousness. Yuriko found herself having the same problem, so she switched tactics and went for the death strike on the nearest creature. As soon as her katana pierced through its heart, the sound that came out of its mouth wasn't only the feral screech that she'd originally heard from the attacking creatures, but a very human scream of pain in conjunction with it.
Everything around her seemed to stand still as she watched in horror as the body fell to the ground, and the blackness that had covered it writhed and squirmed and screeched as it shrunk into the very large body of a spider around her katana, its legs curling under and green blood seeping and melding with the red of the blood from the host body that it was still attached to.
Yuriko's mind fractured. She screamed out and swung her fan, charging it with a massive amount of chakra. The senbon from the fan and her wind pierced through the air turning a large group of the creatures into pincushions as they penetrated into chakra and pressure points, paralyzing their bodies. Kakashi and Yamato both followed suit, aiming to immobilize rather than kill, and the spider woman's eyes widened in disbelief and terror. With each paralyzed body, the spider woman seemed to age years instantaneously.
"No! No! What have you done?!" she screamed, watching as her beloved pets quickly fell to the trio.
She turned to run further into the cave but Yamato caught her, wrapping her in a wooden cocoon and Yuriko summoned a tidal wave from the rain outside to reach out and encase her in a bubble. Her rage was ferocious as she squeezed the water bubble around the spider woman until she was right about to pass out when she released the jutsu.
Before the woman could even catch her breath, Yuriko was at her neck with her katana, drawing a small amount of blood. "Tell me how to extract the parasites," she demanded, eyes ablaze with an unspeakable fury.
The spider woman laughed between gasping breaths, her once pristine hair now a mess and sticking to her now wrinkled and weathered skin. "You can't," she cackled, a wicked grin across her face. "They're symbiotic... Kill the parasite, kill the host."
Kakashi and Yamato both steeled themselves with the new information, their expressions turning somber.
"Why?! Why would you do that to these innocent people?!" Yuriko screamed, her voice cracking and tears overspilling her eyelids behind her mask.
Kakashi nodded to Yamato who nodded back in understanding. Yamato walked away to put the hosts out of their misery and Kakashi took one more concerned look at Yuriko before he walked deeper into the cave to the laboratories and libraries, leaving her to whatever she was about to do. Whatever she decided, the vile woman deserved it. He walked around each of the rooms placing exploding tags at all of the key structures before burning everything else.
Meanwhile, the woman wheezed and cackled, refusing to answer and Yuriko couldn't take it anymore. She summoned the water bubble again, slowly encasing the woman. When the water had reached past her mouth but below her nose so she could still breathe, Yuriko pushed wind chakra into the bubble with her steely gaze staring straight into the woman's eyes as they widened. The water began to roil and cloud red and the woman's agonizing screams were drowned as she was slowly torn apart and Yuriko walked away, leaving her to die excruciatingly slowly. She wasn't sure which would kill her first, the drowning, the blood loss, the shredding of her body until there was nothing left or the constriction, and she honestly didn't care as long as her death didn't come quickly. She deserved to suffer for what she'd done.
Kakashi had made his way back into the hallway and his eyes widened at the grizzly sight of the spider woman completely motionless now fully submerged in a roiling bubble of her own blood and water. He'd been called ruthless and merciless for what he'd done to enemies on prior missions, but nothing that he'd ever done compared to what Yuriko just did. He and Yamato shared a perturbed look, wondering if they should be more cautious of their third teammate. They'd successfully destroyed the research and experiments, and now all that was left was the laboratory itself. The trio exited the cave, making it a safe distance away before Kakashi activated the exploding tags that he'd placed. The entire earth shook with the force of the blast and the cave collapsed in a massive cloud of dust, ash, and smoke.
Forgoing sleep to start their journey back home since the sun would be rising soon, the three continued on through the day in complete silence, none daring to mention what had transpired in the cave or why. When they'd stopped that evening and set up camp in the woods, Yuriko sat at the edge of the campsite as far away as possible but still within sight of her teammates with her legs pulled tightly to her chest and chin rested on her knee. Kakashi watched as she played with her chakra, forming a water ball and then adding her wind chakra to it to create a miniature version of the prison that she'd trapped the spider woman in with one hand. With her ANBU mask securely in place, he couldn't decipher anything about her expression and for the first time since having met her, it bothered him.
"Yuriko-san, where did you learn to control your chakra like that?" Yamato inquired from his watchstanding perch, attempting to break the strained silence between the three of them.
Yuriko turned her head to acknowledge him, her eyes vacant but her jutsu never dispelling. "Rin Chizue-sensei…"
"Your teacher from the academy?"
Yuriko shook her head "no," though he wasn't exactly looking at her as she condensed the ball from about a five-inch diameter to just under two inches. "I never went to academy. Rin-sensei took me in after my village was destroyed… My parents taught me basic ninjutsu, but it was Rin-sensei who taught me advanced techniques like this one. She told me that the shinobi who had attacked my village were far stronger than what basic ninjutsu could handle. She said that if I wanted to protect myself or anyone else, I needed to grow stronger, too, mentally, physically, emotionally…"
Yuriko dispelled the jutsu, not wanting to do anything rash in her emotionally turbulent state, but she needed to release her anxiety somehow and she didn't feel comfortable leaving the group to find a body of water. She pressed her head to her knees and grabbed fistfuls of her hair, racking her brain for a non-destructive outlet, growing more and more frustrated as she drew blank after blank.
Kakashi watched as she pulled her hair harder and harder and remembered when she'd done the same right before she'd asked him to fight her to help her relieve her anxiety and tension after their argument. She couldn't scream this time, in fear of giving away their location and possibly complicating their mission, and they couldn't fight it out like then, either, for the same reason. As the time passed, her body shook more and more with the strain of keeping everything contained.
"Yuriko-san…" Kakashi called out softly from right beside her and Yuriko snapped her eyes open, instantly releasing the vice grip on her hair and looking up at him.
Kakashi slowly pulled her hands from her hair, his movements gentle, tender, and cautious as if he were handling an injured animal. She hadn't realized that she'd begun shaking or that she'd started crying, but as he removed her ANBU mask with the same leery affection, something within her broke and she crumpled into him, bawling in agony.
With the fox mask set safely aside and her lilac eyes bearing everything in her soul, Kakashi saw the heavily damaged, but amazingly strong woman that he'd begun to build a rapport with. What she'd done to the spider woman wasn't done simply for the sake of cruelty and malice. It was done for the sake of the villagers that she'd ripped from their homes and families and used without remorse. It was done because Yuriko's heart broke even more than it already was when she heard that villager's screams as she'd run him through, and for each of the villagers whose screams Yamato was kind and generous enough not to let her hear as he'd followed his orders to leave nothing behind. It was done because, despite the cruelty of the world and everything she'd seen and experienced, Yuriko loved people with all her decimated little heart to the point that their pain became hers.
She cried and cried and cried in Kakashi's lap until exhaustion overtook her. Kakashi's heart ached, watching her be so broken and not being able to do anything to stop it. As she slumbered in his lap, still crying in her sleep, he sighed and smoothed her hair. Despite her immense skill as a kunoichi, she wasn't cut out to be ANBU. She didn't have the mentality or temperament for it. And maybe it was time for him to put down his mask, as well. He hated to admit it, but these missions took a toll on him. When they returned to the village, he had a lot to report to the Hokage.