Unsung Story of the Inconspicuous
A/N: Alright, things are heating up in here! And! I got more reviews than usual! Shine on, you crazy diamonds! For this chapter, you can thank Shana the Short, who is my new and totally amazing beta, who managed to wrangle my wordmonsters overnight. Also me, if you feel compelled to express gratitude, but you know I love you all.
Don't own, won't profit.
Iwao had mostly recovered by the time they reached the outskirts of the desert, almost two days later. His problems had largely been solved with rest, his injuries minor enough that his chakra depletion had been the greatest risk to him. He was practically a new shinobi by the time the windswept, towering dunes became visible across the horizon, as well as a foreboding shimmer of heat emanating from them.
Raiku had not.
She felt sick.
Iwao had taken to twitching with thinly veiled anxiety the further they went and forcing stops as often as the morning of the second day, however, it was obvious that resting wasn't going to be enough, that Raiku's energy and enthusiasm were coming wholly from her ability and her willpower. By the third, she was running entirely on the potent energy that her body generated in seemingly endless supply, hadn't been able to eat even what little they had. He'd braved a look at her injury and there was no sign of infection, just an ugly, gaping series of gashes that bled sluggishly when she strained herself. But that had been the first day and she'd been like a wounded animal in her protection of it ever since.
From his perspective, her strained cheer and seemingly endless supply of optimism, even as she visibly deteriorated, had to be a mask for the pain she was experiencing.
From Raiku's, it was genuine. Iwao was nice. And emotionally stunted, but nice. This was already a pretty shitty trip, so there was no need to make it more unpleasant by brooding and generally making a nuisance of herself.
Her Plot disagreed. Several times, she had found it leaning towards her and promising Dramatic Monologues, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. And by the time she realised they were in Wind Country, she was too tired and in truth, a little too disoriented. The sight of that intense heat shimmering over the shifting golden sand was unbearable, the warmth they had been dealing with already intolerable.
Raiku made her way to a tree cautiously and leaned against it, slowly sliding down into a seated position. Iwao padded over quickly and sort of hovered as close as he felt was safe, his hands twitching at his sides with the restrained desire to do something. She smiled at him tiredly, giving it her best shot even if he was inconsiderately blurry. The light breeze was dry, but chilled the sweat she hadn't registered on her forehead and neck. 'I don't think I can do that,' she said, moving her head a little towards the desert.
'Yes you can,' he told her firmly.
She smiled at him again, wanly. 'I don't have any shoes and neither do you. I'd be dragging myself through glass.'
'Your chakra-,'
She snorted and shot him a look of patronising amusement. He fell silent for a moment and rose to his feet, starting to pace nearby in thought. She knew she'd been making it worse, but she hadn't been sleeping. Raiku hadn't been able to bring herself to close her eyes for even minutes at a time over the past few days, so worried that in her state, she would lose herself again, killing Iwao and who knew who else. They didn't have enough water to make it across the desert at the pace they'd been going, and she was already feverish and dehydrated almost constantly. She was going to be a burden and if Iwao didn't go on without her, they were both going to die of exposure. They had no shelter, either, had been doing the best with what they had, which would be nothing in the desert.
She could try to use her ability to make her way across the desert. She would be fast enough, certainly, but she didn't feel comfortable doing it, given what had happened the last time she had done so with her current health problems. In addition, she would probably be killed immediately by Sand's defenses, who wouldn't know that she wasn't a threat. They would detect her the second she was in range, and then she'd be exposed. Forever. To a village that only a short few months ago had invaded Konoha, the hometown that probably thought she was dead and so wouldn't go looking for her if they decided to abduct her. Which was probably overestimating her own importance, but her father had made it very clear that it was an issue; especially obvious now that she knew Ryuu was a child of gene theft, that he'd been stolen because of what his DNA let him do.
The only logical thing to do would be for Iwao to take the majority of the water and to travel as fast as possible to get help, and she just needed him to reach that conclusion.
'Look,' she said generously, deciding he was taking too long. 'I'm not gonna die if you leave me for a few hours-,'
'Then why didn't you leave me?' he responded immediately, with what she now knew to be uncharacteristic assertiveness.
She rolled her eyes. 'Because you would have died- okay, I see how you might be confused,' she admitted with a thoughtful frown. Eloquence wasn't Raiku's field, really, but she gave it her best shot. 'I'm not bleeding or … oozing, so I can't really be in any danger, but I can't keep up and we're not far from your patrol zone. You'd be back before the day was even over!'
Iwao glared at her, which she no longer found intimidating after finding out he had once left his marking paint lying around and his little brother had used it to finger-paint all over him in an attempt to be helpful.
'Come on. I'll be fine. If anyone comes, I'll just explode them! And no one's looking for us right now anyway.' She was actually not entirely confident in her ability to explode anyone right now without exploding everything, but he really needed to leave. Then she could finally spark herself up and kill any nasty bacteria that were swimming around in her injury. She'd never consciously done it before, but she'd also never gotten sick or infected before, so her dad had made the intuitive leap and she knew he was good at that sort of thing.
Iwao hesitated, clearly on the edge of giving in.
Raiku summoned another smile, her eyebrows raised slightly to give her a look somewhat like a plaintive labradoodle. 'I don't want to die. I wouldn't say it was a good idea if I didn't think you'd come back in time.'
And she could finally get some sleep, without having to worry about accidentally murdering him.
Iwao swallowed and it looked like he was on the verge of giving in. She let her head drop back against the tree and flapped a hand at him dismissively. 'Mush. Go.'
After a moment, she felt something press into her hand and then felt him spring away with haste. When she finally could be bothered, she lifted her hand to look at it and laughed, surprised yet again.
She tied the scant piece of fabric around her nose and mouth and felt better for it, felt something deep inside her relax a little.
She took this time to let the rest of her relax, concentrating on the tense knots of pain in the tops of her calves, paying special attention to the nasty ones in the small of her back and sighed in relief. Finally. Some space. She had a lot to work out, and she was already starting to doze as Iwao rapidly left her chakra sensory range.
But how much of what happened had been a hallucination? Her hand was burnt, so she knew that she had fallen. But afterwards? The smoke had been smothering; her lungs were aching even now. It could have been a dream, but that didn't explain the second explosion Iwao had described. It was possible that she had collapsed a second time and the first cause had repeated itself. She'd never felt the urge or even the possibility of that pulldragdevour that still flashed so vividly.
God, this was just too hard and her head was spinning already. She could just tell her dad, later, provided that Iwao didn't… oh, she didn't know, pass out on the way to Sand and not wake up in time to send someone before she withered away.
Raiku groaned in realisation of her own stupidity.
'Oh goddamn it.'
Luckily, Raiku had plenty of time to dwell on her possible mistake as hours passed. She was eventually forced to move further back into the cooler, more forgiving shade, still keeping the desert edge close by but deeply reluctant to let herself bake in the steadily encroaching sun. She dozed in brief bursts and kept jolting awake, the phantom feeling of stepping through the ashen shell of a man making her foot itch. She was going to have to go to a family trauma counsellor. They were going to receive gift baskets.
Oh who was she kidding, she loved gift baskets. Especially the ones with the little muffins in them. She swallowed at the thought of food, awkwardly draped over a log in an attempt to alleviate the throbbing that had started in her side a few hours earlier. Her mouth and throat were dry. How long ago, before they had parted, had they passed a water source?
She squinted at the sky to try and remember and realised that it was changing colour, slowly. No stars, yet. But it was getting late in the day. It was going to get dark. Not quickly, not at this time of year, but… quickly enough. If she was going to go and get water, it would have to be immediately.
But how far?
She couldn't remember. What if the return party missed her? If she was gone too long and they assumed she'd been picked off?
But then… what if Iwao had fallen unconscious, or been injured? Or lost?! She could die waiting.
Raiku groaned with indecision and rubbed her face wearily. Why couldn't this just be over, already? Why was she being kept in a state of constant gnawing waiting, always-
She glowered in warning at the Plot, which slunk a little further away guiltily, and felt her head clear a little. She drifted for a while in a state neither fully asleep nor awake and when she regained full consciousness, it had almost entirely passed into nightfall, the dim, pale light of some hidden moon making faint shapes through the trees.
She side-eyed the direction she had remembered the desert being. She should go over there. She should make herself as visible as possible.
Raiku exhaled heavily and waited until the resulting wave of nausea had crested before she hauled herself to her feet, immediately grabbing onto a nearby tree to help her balance. Her touch cracked and scorched it but didn't destroy it completely, which was something that gave her… mixed feelings. She pushed off it and propelled herself towards another that she propped her fist against for balance, unwilling to expose the burnt and blistered skin directly. Another violent surge of nausea accompanied the move and she swallowed back the taste of stomach acid rising at the back of her throat with a grimace.
This was getting tedious.
She pushed through stubbornly and found herself suddenly adrift without support at the edge of the trees in freefall before she landed on one knee in the dirt, only narrowly missing the first smatterings of sand. Not that she could see them, but she was having a curious, disembodied sense of things, grown stronger since her unfortunate… incident. She had tried not to pay too much attention to it, but she gingerly shifted back to sit cross-legged and felt that maybe it was time she addressed it.
She couldn't feel the trees, but she had felt a visceral tug of almost glee when they'd approached water, a fainter pull now that stretched into the desert.
Raiku shook her head before she hung it, already knowing the answer. Conductors. Carbon didn't conduct well, so the trees weren't prominent. Water was, sand was… well, sand was sand. She could practically taste them, could feel herself being drawn towards things that would conduct for her. Sadly, it wasn't enough to tell her where the goddamn river was.
This was just ridiculous. Her name was terrible enough without her actually acting like an electrical current. She was a human. She had legs that carried her around, she didn't need… non-resistant elements to transport her from place to place.
This begged another question entirely. Could she use them? Or would her skin act as a barrier; was she just aching past the anchor that kept her in her bones?
Idly, Raiku tilted her head back to look at the sky. It was comforting, in a way; it still filled her with the same sublime awe, to remember that she was sitting on a green-blue ball, spinning in the dark and that none of this crap mattered to the universe.
All Gairano loved space. It made them feel small and unimportant. It made them feel dwarfed by the impossible, unknowable reaches of an objective truth, rather than the pretenders that they had to chase out of their homes with brooms on a daily basis.
For some reason, however, it lacked its usual punch. Probably because, after days of nausea and no appetite, Raiku was horrified to feel herself feeling... hungry. She ruthlessly quashed it and saw in surprise that her breath fogged a little in the air.
Right. The desert got cold at night.
Fortunately, Raiku didn't, so that was one peril that could be ignored. She almost wished for it - it would be a perfect distraction.
After a while, her strange conductor sense started to detect something.
To her extreme irritation, it did so long before her chakra senses did, despite her only having had it for days rather than years.
It was for that reason that she refused to look into it for a moment, fuming, before she realised that it was probably a shinobi. She tried to keep herself calm, telling herself that it was probably help.
But what if it wasn't?
Raiku found herself crackling at the fingertips and tucked them under her armpits, almost fainted when she forgot one armpit was not viable, and instead awkwardly crammed them both under one, looking like she was imitating a lopsided chicken.
With the greatest of reluctance, she extended her new awareness. It hit her with an intensity she wasn't ready for when she dove into it.
Metal.
It wrapped itself around her mind with a sense of intense satisfaction, a powerful drag that almost forced her onto her feet.
Sand.
That was less expected, almost invisible in her mind amongst the rest of the sand in the entire damn desert, but approaching, somehow? She frowned and shook her head.
Then, the less interesting. Water, diluted amounts. Carbon, mostly.
From the mix, she could hazard a guess of shinobi, one carrying enormous quantities of … sand.
Raiku almost wailed in frustration and a little bit of fear when she finally cottoned on to what that meant, fisting her hands in her hair. No! No no no no no!
Seized with the intensity of her reaction, she glowered at the sky. 'You! You did this!' she accused the universe, who unsurprisingly said nothing but seemed to glimmer down at her disapprovingly. Then she started coughing, her dry throat unused to speaking and certainly not hydrated enough, which made her calm down.
After a few moments of deep, careful breathing, she refocused herself.
There were four of them, she hazarded to guess. Maybe three, maybe five. Or maybe seventeen, she had no idea. Her guess was mainly based on how much metal the average shinobi carried, and wasn't necessarily accurate. The force split and it made her head ache when she instinctively tried to follow it for a moment, her awareness dissipating with her focus.
Great. They'd split up.
She eyed the shimmering sand balefully. She had a choice, here. She could roll herself onto the sand and then Gaara (if it was Gaara) would know where she was immediately. Or, or! Her brain pointed out hysterically, she could do literally anything else.
Raiku tilted her head. 'You make a good point, brain,' she muttered. 'I could do that.'
But.
But.
She couldn't, really.
With a whimpering sound of unhappiness, Raiku pitched forward and dragged herself along a few steps. Her side started to burn and she told it that it could just go… screw itself, because she had enough to worry about and it was just going to have to suck it up.
Hesitating over and over, Raiku eventually took a deep breath and put one bare hand on a long stream of sand that stretched into the dirt. With a flash and a surge of heat that made her feel sticky and uncomfortably aware of the sweat she had slowly accumulated over the past several days, it fused and melted and stuck to her fingers uncomfortably. Despite herself, she watched with interest what happened: the extremely coarse and still sandy glass, fluid as it was, appeared as a stream of silver snaking into the edge of the desert because of the reflection of the starlight, stretching outwards before it cooled almost immediately.
And there it was.
Raiku lifted her hand free of the thickly oozing glass with a sigh, her chakra sense now picking up one of the others beelining for her.
Oh good.
This wasn't going to be awkward.
Maybe if she dug a hand into her injury, she could pass out and avoid explaining anything, plus avoid actually talking to Gaara!
It said terrible things about Raiku that she seriously considered this with hope for a moment, before that hope dashed itself on the sharp rock of reality, "Gairano" chiseled into its side.
No, because then when he tried to retrieve her, he'd get electrocuted then squish her for vengeance. Or stab her. Or strangle her - well no, not strangle, but something!
Also, the fact remained that Raiku wasn't a masochist, actually hated pain, and couldn't even look at her injury without wanting to vomit. She was a wimp. She knew that. That's why she hung her head and made sure her mask was on properly before she looked up, waiting for Gaara's red hair to appear over the nearest dune like the world's most psychopathic sunrise.
He didn't take long. Of course he didn't take long. He was in his element, which was the opposite of her element, which made him the worst.
Raiku wasn't thinking clearly, she knew that, but damn it, the point remained.
And there.
She must have been dozing or losing time again, which she desperately didn't want to consider, because the next thing Raiku registered was looking up at Gaara, while he looked down at her. Not knowing how long he'd been there, if he was really there at all. No - he had to be. She felt herself gravitating towards him, hungry for the promise of conductivity in the sand and trace metal, of power and movement before she stopped herself.
She'd been using electricity to keep herself awake, had been running on it instead of sleep and food and chakra and now it was getting greedy again, not finding the resources to burn in her that it it was going elsewhere, but it couldn't go there, she thought hysterically. Anywhere but there!
The silence stretched on.
She noted, with a sort of giddy hysteria, that the starlight made his hair look violet. Violet was maybe the least intimidating of all colours.
'You are not that terrifying,' Raiku told him, and closed her eyes briefly to try and block the words out. 'I mean,' she corrected in a slow rasp. 'You are. But not… oh god,' she sighed, shaking her head and putting it in her hands. 'I can't. I just… I'm just too tired.' And it hummed. He was armed. Barely, but the metal sang inside her head. She wanted it. She was so weak from blood loss and hunger and thirstier than she had ever been, more tired than she could remember. She just… wanted.
Gaara said nothing, but the smell of blood was in the air. She could hear sand shifting around his feet, felt more than saw him turn to look at her little glass spider-web.
She groaned again and told herself it was from disgust because that she knew where that sand had been, but she knew that the truth was she was too drained to care. She just hungered. She seemed to be doing it a lot lately. 'Can we just… pretend I was unconscious?'
Gaara turned back to look at her, black-rimmed eyes glaring at her. But she didn't like it. They looked…
She looked away, unwilling to meet his gaze.
They looked as though a thought was occurring to him that had not before.
Did everyone have to find out about this today? Wasn't it enough that she'd killed a few people; didn't that fill her Drama quota? Was it not enough that she was injured and drying up and seriously contemplating self-harm? Could she reasonably pass this off as a defensive jutsu? It wasn't like any of the Sand Siblings were idiots. No, they were all stupidly talented, non-gullible... things...
So she wasn't at her best.
He crouched, sandals crunching a little in the sand. Unwillingly, Raiku met his gaze.
Gaara never blinked. It was her least favourite thing about him. Other than his apparent desire to kill her, but she was able to excuse that pretty easily since it was a recurring flaw in the people she met.
'You said you'd kill me one day,' she reminded him, stupidly, but the Plot apparently decided that she couldn't be trusted with her own words and took over. 'Could that… not be today?'
Wow. It was even less eloquent than she was.
Oh please, Mister, don't murder me!
Well, you make a persuasive point, little lightning bug. I guess I'll spare your pathetic life.
She laughed a little despite her best efforts, shoulders shaking in silent amusement. This seemed to irk Gaara a little. Or maybe that was just his face.
Wait.
That wasn't just his normal face.
Gaara was looking deep into her eyes, which was even harder than usual, since she could feel energy shifting to beam through the iris, trying to get as close to the sand he was covered in as possible. Extra bright. But he didn't really know how to not be intense, she reassured herself.
He reached for her arm with one bare hand and she flinched away immediately. She realised her mistake when this made his eyes narrow a little further and raised the arm in question, glowing slightly and crackling. She was too tired, now. She couldn't bring herself to speak and her head was lolling to one side, but he seemed to get the message, because his face once again smoothed into something blank. He moved - she heard the rustling of fabric and why hadn't she noticed that her eyes had closed? - and a moment later, something rough touched the bare skin of her arm. That surprised her - Gaara never touched anyone. Not ever. Even through a fabric barrier, which she was sure it was.
Then again, it wasn't like he had a choice.
'Hey, you found her! That was fast,' someone called approvingly.
More metal, more than Gaara. She found herself leaning forward with no memory of having done so, eyes fixed hungrily on someone standing atop the dune Gaara had crossed. Metalmetalmetal -
Gaara nodded to his brother, tying a knot that was slightly too tight around Raiku's upper arm, keeping a drape of fabric fixed in place before he moved to do the same to her other. Raiku made an injured, animalistic sound of pain and pulled away, eyes glazed over with sickness and agony. Gaara paused, the sand around his ankles shifting, and she felt Kankuro immediately dart over at the warning sign. It was Kankuro who knelt and accepted the fabric from Gaara, using it to lift her left arm up despite Raiku's feeble attempts to get away, her lucidity decreasing from the pain.
'Doesn't look good,' she heard, the words muffled by the ringing in her ears. 'Why didn't you use your sand?' Kankuro's voice was always more respectful when he spoke to his younger brother, never as brash as it was with others.
'She resisted.'
'I'm surprised that stopped you,' Kankuro smirked, moving a finger in front of Raiku's eyes to see if she could follow it. She could, but only through guesswork, which he immediately noticed.
Gaara had drawn back, arms folded across his chest, as distant and unapproachable as ever. He said nothing. He just watched her, teal eyes tracking her smallest movements. The hunger in her eyes as she scanned Kankuro for - something, it wasn't clear what. The tiny flickers of light under her skin.
Gaara narrowed his eyes and Kankuro masked his shudders with the ease of years of practice. He snapped his fingers in front of her face and she tracked the movement greedily - the backs of his gloves had metal plates in them that were starting to vibrate slightly at her proximity, becoming magnetised, but seemingly not enough for him to notice.
'Please,' she said hoarsely, wrenching her gaze up to Kankuro's painted face. She couldn't muster up anything, anymore. The energy she had been using was letting her down and she was falling, failing. So 'please,' she said again, eyelids drooping.
Kankuro responded appropriately, for once. 'She's fading fast,' he said over his shoulder with a frown. 'Are you sure you can't take h-'
Raiku pitched forward at last, into Kankuro's chest and dimly heard his sound of surprise, just thankful that she felt no surge of electrocution when she made contact.
A/N: And we're good! Ohoho, finally, she's met Gaara again! I'm sure she's thrilled about that. Just... thrilled.
Hurhur.
Reviews:
Shana the Short: oh hey there. I worry about pace a lot, so I'm glad to hear that you feel that's being done well. I get very impatient, I want things to happen right away. It is killing me to have to wait for some things. And yes, I will accept that wall of text! And probably return it in thousandfold ramblings. Thanks for the review and the beta-skills!
Fluehatraya: impressive! Multi-tasking like a boss. Yes, he did grab your attention, didn't he? You do make it sound so logical, but moths and light have a destructive set-up, I believe. Thanks for the review, as always!
Lake Jesus:Thank you! And now I'm listening to the Avatar OST, you can take credit for that. I'm glad it had that sort of vibe, though I hadn't thought of the scene at the time. Thank you for reviewing!
braidsinherhair: that's very flattering, so thanks!
1412 karasu: I CAN AND SHALL I'm sorry I didn't mean that. Ah, I'm sorry if it wasn't clear, but Daisukenojo failed to stop her from treading in the ashen remains of the man she had been fighting before, and had obliterated without meaning to. He wasn't hurt, but he had wanted to protect her from it. And your happy dreamland is still reality, for now! For now. Thanks for the review!
