The Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous
A/N: Sorry for the delays, but real life is an invasive thing. In this chapter Raiku makes glass and a terrible friend.
I do not own Naruto or any of its characters or affiliates.
'I hope you're happy, Raiku-chan,' Ryuu hissed as the medic bent over him, hand glowing as it hovered over a particularly gruesome slice. 'So happy.'
'I am, thank you,' she said primly, sitting on the seat on the other side of Daisukenojo's bed, legs drawn up to sit cross-legged. 'My teammates are going to recover well! Of course I'm happy.'
Daisukenojo's lips tilted upwards, eyes narrowing at Ryuu.
'Shut the hell up,' he growled, reaching across and pulling the oxygen mask up and letting it jerk back to his face with a snap. Daisukenojo winced, eyes watering in pain. Raiku rolled her eyes at the medic, who shot her a similarly exasperated look.
'You really ripped some sizeable chunks out of your friend here, Hatori,' the medic criticised as the slice began to close. 'You may have deserved being put in here.'
'Luck,' Ryuu said, glaring over at the redhead invalid. 'Sheer luck.'
'Got the drop on him?' Raiku whispered to Daisukenojo, who nodded wearily. She grinned as Ryuu growled at her, accepting the knitting of his flesh without complaint or flinching. She could admire that sort of pain tolerance, given that she had none.
'My hand seals began to channel a chakra type I was unfamiliar with,' Ryuu muttered, glaring at her as though he could hear every word. 'I had to quit mid-seal, and when I did so, he attacked.'
Raiku blinked in surprise. 'Sneaky.'
'The next time it got away from me, I couldn't afford to stop,' he said, glowering over at Daisukenojo. 'Which is why we're here.'
'Your chakra blades sound very impressive,' Raiku said to Daisukenojo sincerely. She tilted her head curiously. 'Was it a modification of your mother's medical chakra scalpel technique?
He nodded weakly. Raiku beamed. 'That's excellent, Daisuke-kun!' He smiled slightly in response, eyelids slowly drifting closed. The medic glanced over to the various monitors attached to him, quick and assessing gaze easily taking in the relevant information.
'Gairano, you may want to go take a walk,' he said gently, removing his hand from the thin, angry red line that marked what had once been a horrific gash. 'Hatori is about to undergo another round of treatment, and I don't think he would want you to see the effects.'
Raiku looked over to Ryuu reflexively, brow creasing in concern. He gave a small nod. She smiled. 'Alright,' she agreed, sliding her legs off the chair and rising to her feet. 'I should go check on Lee anyway. Should I stay away for long?'
'No more than half an hour,' the medic guessed, moving to the clean cut through Ryuu's eyebrow.
'Thanks for getting my face, asshole,' Ryuu grumbled to the increasingly unconscious redhead.
Raiku smiled at him happily. 'I think the scar makes your face more interesting,' she commented, nodding to herself. 'Less like Sasuke!'
'You thought I looked like that overly emotional bastard?' Ryuu asked in a low, dangerous voice.
'You're less pretty and more handsome,' she offered awkwardly. '...Now,' she added guiltily.
'Run. Run now.'
'Running!' she confirmed cheerfully, saluting with two fingers and sauntering out the door. She slid it shut behind her, exhaling heavily to release her tension. Ryuu's symptoms were characteristic of a Drama Rank Three- the maximum rank for someone who wasn't Naruto or one of his close friends. Mysterious, uncontrollable techniques, strange and borderline traumatic events as well as scars that enhanced rather than detracted from attractiveness. She'd have to inform her family, and get him moved up in the Ranks from his original Two. Daisukenojo could be moved from borderline Two to One again, which should balance it out nicely. She smiled to herself faintly, hand still resting on the door. At least they were both alright, though Ryuu seemed more frightened than Daisukenojo. She could empathise with the fear of one's own capabilities, though it had been a while since she herself had felt it. He would learn to deal with it- he really was strong. Daisukenojo's current state of debilitation would serve to give him motivation to learn control, as she had failed to do.
She nodded to herself resolutely, fishing the paper with Lee's room number out of her pocket and checking it again. He was a floor up, in the more restive ward for the patients that required less paranoid observation and more time for only casually attended recovery. She wondered who he had had to fight, and decided not to ask him.
No need to prompt revelations or bonding, no sir.
She made her way back to the relative darkness of the stairwell, eyes casting a gentle, illuminating glow over the walls as she padded up the steps. A low, gentle sound issued from somewhere below, and after a moment's consideration she labeled it as air from the air conditioning escaping through a bad seal on a door. She pulled on the door handle to the next floor, yanking harder as it refused to budge. 'Come on,' she muttered to herself, continuing to pull. 'Don't do this...'
Unsurprisingly and rather rudely, the door refused to open.
She sighed, turning around and walking quietly down the stairs to the other floor. She'd been gone roughly... two minutes, leaving about twenty eight until she could return to a hopefully less incensed Ryuu and a conscious Daisukenojo. She reached her own door and pushed down on the handle, trying to pull it open. More surprisingly, it gave a pathetic groan and refused to budge, only shifting slightly in the door frame. Raiku sighed heavily, picturing a skeleton lying in the stairwell until hospital maintenance could finally be bothered to do something about it. That would be her luck, really.
She crossed to the banister and leaned over to check that the stairwell below was clear, squinting into the dark that the windows on the top floor high above failed to illuminate. She sighed heavily, hanging her head briefly before turning and making for the stairs to the lowest floor.
'Where were you, Raiku?' she imitated to herself. 'Oh, I was just stuck in a stairwell.
'Well why didn't you just escape, Raiku? What kind of kunoichi are you?
'Obviously? A pretty poor one,' she muttered to herself in conclusion as her feet touched the cold tiles of the lowest floor. She slipped slightly, grabbing the banister for support. She looked around self-consciously, smoothing her hair ineffectually to cover an embarrassment no one was there to see. She sighed yet again, shoulders slumping. 'I am the worst ninja ever.'
The hissing sound grew louder as she crossed the tiles to the door, confirming her suspicions. 'AHAaaand it's jammed,' she began in exclamation and ended in grumble. She let her head fall forward to thunk onto the wood, hoping someone outside would hear. No real kunoichi would get into a situation like this. Clearly this was karma kicking her in the face. A real kunoichi would simply put chakra on her feet, walk up to the window and climb to freedom. Or better yet, just jump up. Raiku, who was probably not a real kunoichi, would have to wait for maintenance. And yes, she could jump up and yes, she could walk up. But the fact of the matter was, quite simply, that she didn't feel like it at the moment. She could wait for thirty minutes then escape, given that it was relatively peaceful in the stairwell and the stairs themselves bore little risk of Naruto Encounter. She exhaled in relief and turned her back to the door, sliding down into a sitting position.
Ah. Freedom from Naruto.
The hissing stopped abruptly and she concluded she must be blocking the hole in the seal, closing her eyes to better help her relax. The hissing picked up accordingly, changing to a higher frequency. Raiku frowned slightly, shifting to try and block it again. Shortly after this shift something soft and rank with blood slid up to press on her masked mouth, provoking an immediate and oddly mild response. Her eyes flew open, arms coming up to feel her face. She pulled a hand away when the substance gave but the pressure didn't alleviate, widening her eyes to increase the range of light and trying not to squint counter-productively. Her hand was shoved roughly back until the back of it slammed into the door, jerking so abruptly her shoulder gave an alarming twinge. The brightness of her eyes shot up until the eerie blue glow reached several feet away, still failing to show her would-be attacker. She kept her other hand out trouble to stop it from suffering the same fate as the other, trying desperately to remove her glove without drawing attention to the hand or using anything but her straining fingers and the floor. She stubbornly refused to let the sounds at the back of her throat escape, shoving as much power as she could into her eyes until sparks threatened to escape. The floor and the rough grains lying on it scraped the gradually exposed skin. The hand against the other cracked slightly as the sand pressing into it shoved down harder, sending a steady stream of pain up her arm.
Sand. Why was it always sand?
She jerked her head up, trying to free her mouth long enough to force out a question as the waves of blue light eventually revealed a familiar, pale face. In the pale blue light his hair looked a strange, purplish shade of brown, eyes reflecting the light back at her eerily. No reflection could hide the open animosity, or the first smile she'd ever seen on Gaara's face.
It was more akin to Ryuu's displays of aggression than Daisukenojo's open, bright one or her own fake, distracting ones. It promised her unpleasant things and nothing else, despite being little more than a contemptuous curl of his lip.
'You're weak,' he told her in a low, dark voice. He crouched amidst the slithering sands, perfectly still in contrast to the continuous shifts. With a particularly painful and unnatural twist, Raiku's hand was finally free of its leather prison. She slowly, cautiously drew it back to her side, staring at him with wide eyes.
'It would be easy,' escaped him in a low hiss. 'So... easy...'
Raiku panicked and threw her hand up, a strangled sound forced from her throat as electricity surged out of it with almost protective urgency, slamming into the wall of sand that instantly rose to defend him. Once the flash had cleared, Gaara's distorted face glared at her through a misshapen and transparent wall of flawed glass, the melted sand slowly oozing onto the floor.
Raiku's only free hand was free no longer, crushed back into the door with agonising force by the wrist, the sand carefully avoiding her glowing skin. Gaara shifted forward slightly, eyes narrowing hatefully. 'Are you still glad to see me?' he asked contemptuously. Raiku ruefully thought about how Sakura would never have this problem.
The sand shifted, lowering on her face slightly and pressing harder on her windpipe.
'Well?' he demanded. 'Are you still glad to see me, Raiku?'
Raiku coughed hoarsely, breath coming in wheezes. 'Sure,' she forced out. 'But the sand... is not as ... thrilling.'
In her defence, Gaara really was ruthlessly pretty.
It just wasn't fair.
'It sucks...' she wheezed before she or the sand could stop her. 'That you're... prettier... than me.'
Gaara's expression didn't change.
'Joke,' she added before the sand mercifully covered her mouth again, probably to stop her foot from landing in it as it so persistently tried to do. The Gairano part of her brain nodded in approval of this remarkably undramatic death, while a more incensed and possibly leather and mesh-clad part stepped up to the plate and closed its eyes, rubbing its figurative hands together. Quietly, the world exploded in a flash of white and a surge of intense and localised heat, restrained in a way she would never be able to consciously achieve. Raiku struggled out of a pool of rapidly solidifying glass with a gasp, clawing her way out of the thick ooze as the light faded from the area, sucked into her skin.
'Yeah,' she panted, on her hands and knees in the middle of the sticky, unpleasant puddle. 'Freaky is good. Good freak,' she congratulated herself. 'Covered in glass. But alive!' she panted to Gaara with a relieved smile, right up until she realised he was standing, unscathed, not far from her and probably still fully intending to crush and kill her.
She slumped wearily, dropping her head. 'You're not a very good friend,' she sighed. 'But I suppose it gets better with practice.'
'I don't have friends,' Gaara told her coldly, turning away with grace that, given the giant gourd, surprised her. He said nothing for a moment and simply stood with his back to her. 'I'll kill you one day,' he told her without looking back, and vanished in a (smallish) swirl of sand.
Raiku collapsed into the glass in relief, letting her head fall back and keep the current running through. 'Okay,' she sighed. 'He'll kill me one day. Okay.' Hysterical laughter bubbled up in her throat, escaping in something that sounded like a hiccupping sob more than a laugh. 'But...' she managed, tears of relief welling up in her eyes. 'It wasn't so easy to kill me, huh?'
The next time she tried the door to Rock Lee's floor, it opened easily. Somehow she'd known it would.
'What the hell happened to you!?' Ryuu demanded as she trudged back through the door after a highly eventful trip to see someone who didn't even have the good grace to be conscious. Daisukenojo's colour was better- slightly less blue- and he managed to widen his eyes when he saw her.
Raiku's expression was flat. 'I fell in the stairwell,' she said darkly.
Ryuu moved to stand, eyes narrowed. She held up a hand to stop him. 'I'm going to have a shower,' she announced. 'And I'm taking your change of clothes!'
Ryuu growled, low in his throat. Raiku rolled her eyes. 'It's that or take this stuff off and barbecue everyone! Is that what you want?!' He paused, taken aback either at the promise of relentless violence or partial nudity.
'Nice scar,' she added brightly, pointing at the new, thin white scar that cut through his eyebrow at the exact point at which it curved sharpest. Ryuu didn't respond, just settling back in his seat. He reached for the small black bag beside his chair leg and tossed it over grudgingly, scowling.
'Thanks Ryuu!' she said, saluting cheerfully and trudging to the small, inconspicuous shower door. As it slid shut behind her and the water started, Ryuu tilted his head. He was far from stupid. She wasn't wearing both gloves, and removing them was one of her last, close contact 'techniques'. He silently loped out of the room, not bothering to inform Daisukenojo of where he was going, confident that the shorter boy would assume correctly.
A/N: Raiku is really, really inconvenient for Gaara. She's just... always in the wrong place.
Reviews:
M&M: I can't think of a way to do that, but if you sign up I can send it through docX. I'm glad you like the story so much, and also that the conversation was as illuminating as I'd hoped. Thanks for reviewing.
envysXsin: I'll try to continue with my speedy rate of update, but it may have to be every other day as Raiku (and thus the writing) matures. Daisukenojo's attack was intentional, but Ryuu's wasn't. Daisukenojo is many things, but a chicken isn't one of them. Thanks for reviewing.
XxXTwilight-SinXxX: Mura will be a recurring character, yes. Even without the orders from the family, Raiku was going to drop out. Death? She thinks not. Thanks for reviewing!
