Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous

A/N: Oh, oh dear, you are not going to like this.

Don't own, won't profit.


Reality was not gentle.

Raiku drew in a breath sharp as a knife through her ribs, eyes flying open to stare blindly at the black and orange sky. Her long fingers pressed and grasped at the ground, at nothing, trying to find purchase and she could feel coarse dirt sliding under her fingernails. Each desperate inhale burned and tasted like copper, like smoke and ash and it burned her throat all the way down.

Coming back to herself by degrees, her unfocused eyes started to perceive small grey flakes lit up with strange yellow light, drifting gently down, mostly blocked out by a sudden dark shape above her.

'-ku!'

Her ears rung painfully and made her sense of balance impossible to regain. Lying still, she still felt she was listing to one side. There was a deep and constant rumbling that made the earth tremor under the sensitive pads of her fingers and a higher, closer sound she could barely make out.

'-sh..-n't…-ea… me-'

Distantly, she started to become aware of herself, of her limbs, the feeling of the earth under her scratching at her skin. She jolted, but not under her own power and the world came into painful clarity like an avalanche of sensation crushing her under its weight.

Noise.

'Raiku!'

'We don't have time for this; she's bringing the place down!' Ryuu shoved Daisukenojo out of the way to where she couldn't see him and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her roughly. 'Raiku!' he snapped, face blackened with ash. 'We've gotta go!'

Taste.

She tried to swallow and choked- too dry, too much ash, blood. Smoke. The coughing forced her to jerk upright and the motion made her head spin, nausea rise in her stomach with sudden violence.

Sight.

When she drew her hand away from her face, shaking, her pale skin was totally bare, but for the blackness under her nails, across her palms. Her clothes, when she could focus on them and for what she could make out through the darkness, were totally grey with ash that shifted each time she shook violently. They were left in burnt tatters spread unevenly. Her mind was fuzzy and it felt like wading through fog, but-

Pain.

One of her arms was dragged up around her teammate's shoulders, Daisukenojo taking the other.

Ryuu-

Ryuu!

She tried to jerk away from him towards her other teammate and almost threw up at the agony that shot down her left side from the injury she had forgotten. She heard a distant cursing when her mind threatened to leave her again, felt him try and tug her back. 'Not you,' she croaked, eyes rolling in her head. 'Not you, not you-,'

'What the hell is she talking about?' Daisukenojo demanded.

Ryuu's face was sickly pale under the grey, but he studiously avoided both of their gazes. 'She's delirious; just help me get her up!'

She realised they were shouting- the roar and rumbling she had felt so distantly were real and deafening, something she had blocked out.

Fire.

The haze in the air wasn't her mind. It was smoke, filling the bamboo forest, now set ablaze with a heat so intense it was searing her down to her bones, an impossible heat. The area around where they had been, for almost a kilometre- the earth was completely blackened and burnt, not even stumps remaining of the bamboo forest they'd fought in until the wall of advancing flame. It was the bare earth that had kept them safe, the fire having nowhere else to travel, but they were trapped. If they didn't escape, they would die of smoke inhalation, or smothered to death by the heat.

They.

They.

She felt her lips crack open and start to bleed when she tried to speak, but all that came out was a rasp. 'The man-,'

'He vanished!' Ryuu snapped immediately, cutting her off. 'Can you walk?!'

She nodded but her first attempt to get her legs under her left her crashing back onto her knees and forearms, wracked with weakness, unable to see through the dark spots swimming through her vision.

She was so hungry.

She felt hollowed out, weak; there was nothing for her to support herself except for the other two as she tried to stand twice more and failed, before eventually managing to keep her balance on legs as shaky as a newborn foal.

She kept losing snippets of time, getting jerked back into reality forcefully.

'Our window's closing-,'

'Where the hell is Yamada!?'

'He's gone for the others, but nothing from Ichitaka-,'

'This way!' A third voice. She didn't recognised it, hadn't even known her own. She took a few staggering steps and heard Daisukenojo cry out for some reason, a reason she didn't understand until her bare foot made contact with something other than earth. He couldn't reach her before she looked down and her mind started spinning from something other than disorientation, flooding itself with profound horror.

Her father, warning her when she was so young:

How much electricity does it take vaporise a human body, Raiku?

She realised that she was speaking, whispering something over and over again, too dehydrated to cry but still, 'no no no no no,' over and over and over and over and-

That's why you have to be careful.

A charred skeleton, the pale of her foot disappearing into thick ash that would have been flesh and a melted band around the neck from the man she had fought before, what had she done to him-

Careful.

She was pulled back, blindly, by hands covered in fabric to protect themselves. Each step jarred the wound in her side, forgotten in the wake of what she'd done. Was it still bleeding? She couldn't tell, so smothered with the heat from the fire they were approaching.

She found herself in sudden freefall for a moment, released abruptly on each arm before an impact struck with the colossal boom of thunder overhead.

For a split-second her mind ascended pain with a rush of joy and a terrible strength, the nauseating guilt and horror and shame but then she-

'Gairano!'

-fell back into herself, into her flesh and bones that hurt so badly, heard her heartbeat thudding in her ears, knocks on a door she kept closing.

Hands seized her arms and kept pulling her forward, voices in a blur. Raiku let her head fall back helplessly and saw white flickering and lightning brewing in the clouds above them, still lit by below by the fire and shifting like the interior landscape of hell. '…s'not raining,' she managed in a slur, sure there was something wrong with this scenario, sure that dry lightning didn't happen this way, even as it greedily followed her from above.

'Of course it's not raining, it's you! You're doing it!' Ryuu snapped. She tried a few times and finally got her head to turn towards him and he was hiding so well that he was frightened, that he was so bone-deep afraid of her and himself and she knew because she knew that fear so well, saw his guilt. The Plot was gone, probably obliterated or carried off with the man who was his family, and Ryuu was himself but not knowing why he had been the person he had been for a moment; who he would probably be again when it came back for him. A person who would have left them both for dead, so much like Sasuke, whom he had loathed and disdained for so long.

'Ryuu,' she said hoarsely, forcing him to glance back at her from where he had been focusing on the path ahead, made clear by someone she couldn't make out, their movements frantic blurs in the corner of her eye. In the moment he made eye contact she swallowed, hard, like little shards of glass making their way down her throat. 'It's okay.' She tried to smile and it hurt, so unused to smiling with her mouth instead of her eyes, her lip bleeding.

He flinched like she'd hit him and then his eyes widened and he jerked for a completely different reason, shoving her roughly back out of the way.

Something fell past where she had been, scorching her hypersensitive skin viciously and burning the air out of her lungs as it passed by. She stumbled and threw a hand out to steady herself, felt her mistake in the flare of agony pushing its overheated way up her arm and let out a sound of pain and dismay, clutching her burnt hand to her chest.

'Raiku!'

'Calm down, you idiot, just wait a-,'

Daisukenojo's face, lit up on the other side of the burning pile obstructing her path through the smoke for a moment in focus, then lost to the blur again.

A dizzying moment of removal, another savage yank back to herself by the sound of wood splintering, cracking and expanding and the whoosh of falling leaves ablaze. It would be so easy just to fall down-

Raiku closed her eyes and drooped forward, now blinded almost completely by the thick, choking smoke, growing ever stronger.

She had to sleep. She had to rest.

'Raiku?! Raiku!'

Daisukenojo's voice was reaching a pitch he would ordinarily be ashamed off, a cry made out of an instinctive fear rather than a conscious decision.

'It's too dangerous!'

'Let me go!'

'We'll never make it, we have to go!'

'Raiku!'

A guttural sound and then nothing but the deafening cacophony of the fire.

Raiku let herself fall onto her hands heavily, felt her bones shake from the impact. Hands buried in the earth and grounding herself. Feeling power pour out of her and away, the scorched earth making her burnt skin sting even while it drained her dry.

She was so hungry.

It had been gnawing at her gut where her fear usually sat and multiplied, but she could feel it so powerfully now. It spiked with a sharpness that made her gasp. Clawed at her insides voraciously, trying to find something rip apart and consume and finding nothing. A blind, visceral anger directed at no one was rising, stemming from that unassuageable hunger that was infiltrating every part of her and sinking into her mind, filling the space she had made for her few lucid thoughts and making demands in the red-dark back of her brain.

A sting of pain. Her teeth were bared in an expression she hadn't registered making. Blood was making its way down from the split in the dry flesh, down from perfectly white teeth on an ash-smudged face. Sparks flickered in each breath as she sunk further down.

Raiku wanted to be afraid. She should have been afraid, the fire was so close it was licking the air around her as if seeing how she'd taste and she'd been left behind. They had left her here and it wasn't because they wanted to, it was because they didn't want to die, which she could never have begrudged them. Not angry, but she knew she should be afraid. She knew she would be, usually was all the time, but…

She was starving.

And it was strange, it felt like her emptiness was pulling, at first at her but she was starting to feel like it wasn't, quite, like it was pulling through her, using her skin to do something she didn't know how to do.

The smoke was thick, now, even down as low as Raiku was, provoking coughs each time she tried to breathe in.

A sharp wrench at her insides made her curl, gasping, around her abdomen, fingers sinking deeper into the soil and her heartbeat pulsing in her fingertips from the pressure.

No.

Not her heartbeat.

It was a pulse, she had recognised that much correctly, but it was now a dull tremor growing stronger by the second that she didn't understand.

And then she heard the noise.

She hadn't registered it before, too far gone into the darkness in her vision in her head, too consumed by heat and hunger to really hear, but it was… it was everything all at once. A sound so intense it reverberated through her ribcage, down her spine and made her teeth feel like they were rattling inside her head.

Slowly, drawn inexorably, Raiku looked up.

Power.

The light in the sky, the roar she was hearing; electricity, raw power brewing, feeding on itself and getting stronger and stronger, thunder from the air splitting from its movement above and the pull from inside her skin drawing it and keeping it trapped in place, keeping it from dissipating. Dragging it down.

Dragging her up. She was climbing to her feet in the smoke, unable to look away. Eyes wide, fixed upwards in her trembling head.

Her teeth bared again, she knew, only because she could feel the sting of her lip and the hunger in her gaze. She reached a bare and open hand up as far as she could, barely as high as her eyes and watched tendrils of electricity split the air in front of her to connect to her fingers, thin as spider silk, felt its power and its belonging and the warmth inside her that felt so much like love and she was

starving.

Her soul lit up and her mind went dark and Raiku inhaled smoke, fisted her hand and pulled.


'Raiku.'

She blinked awake with sudden clarity at the sound of her name.

There was no one there.

There was no one anywhere.

Raiku blinked again, hard and repeatedly to get the fuzziness out of her vision and found herself lying on her back again, staring at the sky. It was a soft grey of mottled clouds, gently casting white light over everything.

Daylight.

She blinked again and felt something brush over her cheek, raised her hand to see what it was and heard the faint sound of something dislodging. Ash was pouring off her hand as it came into view, only to touch more on her face. She stared at it, uncomprehending for a long while, until she put it back down.

She was in no pain but felt detached, cast adrift from her body even as she was, undeniably, present.

Her brow wrinkled ever so slightly.

She'd… been injured…?

She sat up slowly, watching the ash flake off her skin and remaining clothes unevenly, leaving her with pure white patches under the pale grey. She put a hand to her side cautiously and gasped at a sudden, violent surge of nausea, panting until it passed. No pain, not anywhere, so she decided not to do it again and that she wouldn't question it for now.

She raised her head to try and understand where she was. It was impossible to tell.

Grey.

Layers of ash covered everything, but there was little to be seen- in the distance, vague shapes could be seen, but nothing distinctive, and the earth before that and all around her, as far as she could see, was totally bare. Motes and flecks of ash drifted in the air, so slowly it felt like she was underwater, in some kind of suspension that rendered the world and air perfectly still. There were no landmarks, nothing that could be recognised. Just the burnt world. Until she saw it: a strange earthen spire, some distance away, and its height impossible to gauge without something nearby to gauge it against.

Raiku slowly, carefully, manoeuvred herself onto her feet, feeling strangely light. She took a tentative step in the spire's general direction and looked down. Her foot had sunken into the ash, a much thicker layer than she thought, and she could barely feel the soil underneath.

Was she dreaming, she wondered?

No. She couldn't be. She could feel her energy, even if didn't feel the way it usually did, and she had never before sensed it in a dream. It was at a high level, but languid under her skin, almost sliding instead of buzzing. It made her feel oddly content and dazed, made each step towards the landmark easier, automatic. She set off towards it with an odd sort of grace that came from her weightlessness, the heaviness of her constant, low-key hunger lifted and leaving her almost insensate.

Her Plot was happy to see her, she found along her path, slithering through the ash and leaving a solid black trail of exposed earth behind it. She found herself smiling slightly at the sight of it, strangely relieved. So she wasn't over yet, so this was still happening. It wiggled ecstatically at her recognition, circling around behind. She followed it with her eyes for a moment, seeing her trail of black footprints in the soft grey ash, before continuing onwards.

Each inhale, each exhale made the ash suspended in the air shift and flurry away, clinging to her clothes, her skin, her eyelashes until she reached it. She felt herself sway when she stopped, only slightly, enough to become aware that the dreamlike, soft world was starting to move, slightly. The dead air was being stirred by some small, brave wind, and this interlude was going to end soon.

The pillar was rough and jagged, slightly taller than her but far thicker. She tilted her head and her eyes flicked over it, before she felt a slight twinge in that disembodied part of her brain that registered chakra. She reached out and tapped it with one fingernail, sparks jumping harmlessly off it.

No response.

Raiku smoothed her hand against it and smiled to herself a little at the sensation, so unfamiliar, and then formed a fist.

She knocked, politely. It echoed a little, part of it undoubtedly hollow.

There was a long silence after the faint reverberations faded, before the sound of crumbling. Raiku stepped backwards nimbly, withdrawing to a safe distance as ash and earth shook itself off the formation, at first just soil, then larger pieces snapping off with tiny surges of chakra, until a young man staggered out of the ruin, black with dirt and limbs shaking violently.

Raiku cautiously peered over at him, tilting her head to the side to try and see his face when he fell to hands and knees in obvious weakness, obvious exhaustion. She caught a glimpse of yellow snaking down his neck under the dirt and smiled with the warmth of recognition.

Iwao eventually looked up at her, panting, eyes glazed over.

'Good job, Konishi,' Raiku greeted, some white-grey spectre in his gaze, eyes so bright, skin as pale as her hair and such a smile, electricity in her teeth. 'You thought fast.'


The attempt to use Iwao's compass had failed immediately, needle pointing unerringly towards Raiku and so they had used the mountain to make a rough guess as to which direction they needed to go. Raiku's euphoric high was fading with the return of her more earthly concerns- her burnt hand twinging with each movement, the pain of her bare feet across the ground as the ash slowly faded into earth, complete with sticks and rocks. The vague line she had seen on the distance was, as she had thought, more forest, but only the thinnest of lines on the other side of a small river that must have protected it from the fire, the secondary blast that Iwao had cautiously described to her. He had struggled to walk, at first, his obvious depletion and some small injuries making him stagger and fall, often. Raiku had hovered each time, unable to help him even slightly because of her own state of disarray, her remaining clothes fashioned into a haphazard covering of the essentials that she was steadfastly refusing to dwell on.

Each time, he got back up and she breathed a sigh of relief, a helpless bystander. Each time. After a while he seemed to function more or less out of sheer force of will, doggedly keeping pace with her.

After an age of silence, she had been able to prompt him enough to get a picture of what had happened.

There had been one, massive blast of electricity somewhere near Iwao and Yamada, which Yamada had protected him and one of the twins from, but that had started an enormous forest fire and obliterated a large section nearby completely. They'd spread out to look for their team and Iwao had found the other twin, who had stayed behind to help Team Yamada.

Iwao, like Raiku, had fallen behind and been left there in the panic, using an earth release to protect him at the last minute, but knowing it wouldn't keep the fire off him for long. Another explosion had rocked the area and Iwao had lost consciousness, but it must have been the end of the fire, since otherwise, he would have been cooked alive inside the spire.

It didn't quite fill the gaps in her memory- Iwao hadn't suspected Raiku's involvement, was passing his suspicions off even now as delusions from his trauma, from his exhaustion, which had made him mercifully accepting of her flimsy excuses for surviving.

They were quietly unified in their relief at having survived, their relief at having found each other and not being alone, and also in the mutual knowledge that they were closer to Sand than to Konoha and if they were found by someone else before they reached either, they would die.

Iwao was the one who eventually broke their silence after Raiku's attempts at starting conversation had failed some time earlier, still steadfastly not looking at her. 'You need to have that wound looked at.'

Raiku felt a lurch of nausea at the reminder, sickly instead of pained, dizzy instead of disturbed. 'No,' she managed after a heavy swallow. 'I think we should leave it for now.'

'It must hurt.'

'It doesn't.'

Unremarkably, this didn't seem to cheer him up at all. 'We're far from help. You should go on without me and send somebody back.'

Raiku eyed him with a weary expression. They both knew that he would probably have succumbed or been picked off by the time he could get back. He was being kind, but also, unacceptably self-sacrificing.

The shinobi side of her told her to take the deal and run.

The Gairano side wailed and started setting off Drama alarms, pointing out how many personal story arcs were kicked off by survivor guilt.

The newly formed, still malleable Raiku part smacked him on the back of the head and only felt a little guilty when it almost knocked him over.

'I am not going to have your noble sacrifice resting on my conscience forever. That's the first pitfall of Angst. Someone has to die for it.' Her Plot sagged in disappointment.

He didn't seem to get it, probably assumed she was rambling, that her injury and her blood loss was finally getting to her. Raiku kept stride with him until the sound of the river reached her ears and the air started feeling slightly moist, a blessing each time her scorched lungs drew it in. She ran, or jogged, really, towards it, cautious but desperate and sank to her knees in the damp earth next to it, uncaring of the mud sticking to her skin and remembered herself just in time to stop her from plunging her hands into it.

Her soul almost cracked when she had to stop inches away from it. She could feel the cooler air, it was clear and clean and the smell-

She forced herself to shuffle back before she could give in to the temptation. If she touched it, it would ionise and heavy water wasn't safe in large quantities. She watched longingly as Iwao finally arrived and stuck his hands in.

When he'd drunk enough for her throat to start burning enviously, she flicked her eyes meaningfully to the river and then his canteen, over and over, until he slowly filled it up and gave it to her, clearly not understanding why she hadn't just done what he had. She smiled at him, which obviously unsettled him when he could see her whole face. Unsurprising. Most people were disturbed by it after they'd gotten used to seeing her covered face, feeling like it was some violation of her privacy, like she just had too much face.

When she'd drained it twice and started using it to wash her face and neck, Iwao stopped in the middle of his own limited washing to stare into the river. She could see him flush on his wet face, eyes fixed down. Obviously about to ask or accuse her of something that his withdrawn nature found uncomfortable.

'It was you.'

Raiku grasped the meaning immediately and smiled at him again, sad and weary and mostly just accepting. He glanced at her, then back down, going slightly more red and clearly frustrated with himself at getting embarrassed at now, of all times.

She resumed and started rinsing off her arms until he spoke again.

'…I won't tell anyone.'

When she looked at him in genuine surprise, pleased as she was, he had already shifted away. '…Let's go. We have a long way to go until we get to Sand.'

Raiku laughed, startled and glad.


A/N: ... ta-da...? SO IT WAS WORSE THAN THE LAST CHAPTER. A lot worse, I know! Everything is terrible and everything hurts, but it can only improve from here! You think. I sincerely hope.

Alright! A bit of housekeeping, a few things: I am looking for a beta, preferably a fast one. Since I apparently have a lot of followers, I've been looking for one in the beta profiles, but I thought I'd see if anyone who's actually been reading it was interested. So, PM me if you like. ALSO. Speaking of my followers, please think about reviewing. I find it genuinely helpful to get feedback and I'm happy to answer questions as long as I'm not giving spoilers. I won't bite your head off if you give constructive criticism, I actually like it.

I know. It's sick.

Reviews:

Fluehatraya: pssht, it's just terrible of course I don't mind. I'm glad the nightmare-not-a-nightmare scene was effective, since I've never written anything like it before and I wasn't sure it was working. Ryuu hates Sasuke, he... hates him so much. HERE IS THE NEXT CHAPTER and I am so sorry about that. Thanks for reviewing!

LucklessObserver: your name reminds me so much of Raiku, may I just say. So apt. Love me again! Thanks for the review!

1412 karasu: Ohoho, does he have it in him, though, or was it just a Plot twisting him around? Ohohoho. Stay with me, thanks for reviewing! I live on them.

Shana the Short: oh my goooooood your review. Sorry. I got overwhelmed with gooey and embarassed and pleased feelings and had to read it a bit at a time. I'm actually not sure how to respond, other than experiencing the powerful urge to grab someone and just weep happily while they struggle to get away. It's amazing. I'm so glad that you like Raiku as a character for the reasons that you do, since that's why I chose to have someone I want to believe is an unconventional lead. I'm also extremely relieved that the genre-jumping and the mixing and matching of themes aren't a deterrent, since I know I tend to sort of flail all over the place. Particularly with the last two chapters, which have been very different, I think. Particularly this one. As for exposition, I know some people find it jarring not to find out a lot about characters as they appear, so it's good to hear that the slow exposition pace on some characters hasn't been boring everyone to tears.

GIVE ME YOUR WALL OF TEXT. I love walls of text. I am an unspeakable nerd and I love talking about anything written with anyone, even when it's my own story. Just expect rapidfire responses and a geeking-out reaction of phenomenal proportions. Or not, if it'll freak you out.

As for your reasons for RaikuRyuu. Made me laugh and squirm and write about it and I'm now studying my rough outline (changed every day or so) with an eagle eye to try and get his mother to act that way in the actual story. Thank you so much for everything you said, I'm extremely touched and flustered and luckily for everyone, I am both invigorated to write and just now, ten seconds ago, found some of my character and story music playlists, so this should keep coming at a reasonably consistent pace.

Katio: I, uh, have provided!