A/N: Aw yes, slowly we proceed despite hayfever season and the entropy of the universe. Or possibly the fact I was travelling a bunch. But Shana stayed on me!
I own nothing but original characters and story.
It was easier, in the light of day, to firm her resolve. It probably had nothing at all to do with how it seemed so much smaller in daylight, how much less expansive it seemed when it wasn't just bleeding into the dark, everywhere and everything all at once.
Nothing at all!
Well, it was also smaller overall now. She could even see skin at the joints and through the inky slashes over its face, where the Plot had assimilated into flesh instead of just resting over it, trying to find a way in. It had already found ways in, and Raiku had been up for half the night filled with crawling, sympathetic horror, sure each time she woke that she'd feel narrative impetus somehow seeping in through scars and the pores of her skin. It was blackness and voices only in patches now, its eyes too yellow and its teeth even sharper, like the few parts of Ryuu left soft around the edges had been rubbed raw .
Raiku paused for a moment, impressed; that nostalgia sure had crept in fast.
After that moment of contemplation, she finished rolling up her bedding and tucked it away, feeling a great deal better about her situation. Sure, she was going to have to kill Ryuu. That was going to happen. And sure, he'd been her friend for quite a while now and only tried to murder her for most of that time, but it wasn't like she really had a choice and it wasn't like it was really Ryuu at all.
The key here would be to remember that.
Behind her, Daisukenojo was making some indignant rebuttal to something the thing had said. Something probably nowhere near as personally crushing as Ryuu would have, Raiku thought loyally, and she dusted her hands off and stood up. 'So! What's the plan?' she asked brightly, turning to face them.
It has its arms folded and didn't bother turning to look at her when it answered. 'Yamada's gone to get some more water and after that we're going to split up and do some recon.'
Split up, Raiku marvelled; was life always this linear for people attached to the Genematrix? Did terrible but dramatic decisions really make themselves so attractive? Were there just neon signs everywhere saying "come get us, dramatic rivals! Maybe talk about some highly traumatic past incident to rile us up for good measure!" But she couldn't help but comment, or it would have gotten suspicious. 'Doesn't that sound… high-risk?'
Daisuke gestured at her. 'See?! Not just me! It's a goddamn terrible idea. Last time we split up, Raiku almost got lynched.'
Well that was hardly fair. Technically accurate, sure, but not… okay, it felt unfair.
'They're civilians.' It said.
'Civilian criminals,' Daisukenojo countered, narrowing his eyes. 'Who have already killed highly-trained shinobi. Better trained than us, in fact! I don't care if they aren't shinobi, people can always find ways to hurt other people, you stupid shit, that's why shinobi exist in the first place!'
Raiku blinked. That had gotten weirdly intense.
It didn't seem to notice the sudden spike of dramatic depth. It probably thought it was normal. Maybe it was now. 'We're just looking around, and you sure as hell didn't have these objections when Yamada agreed!' It was slouching and for a moment she couldn't figure out why that was wrong, because if Ryuu wasn't eventually taken out of commission by one of the many enemies he was going to make, it'd be permanent damage to his lumbar spine from a lifetime of terrible posture. As Daisukenojo almost smacked him in the face from sheer frustration, though, it became more obvious. It was reassuring, oddly, that it was getting Ryuu slightly wrong, because Ryuu didn't slouch as much usually when he was arguing with Daisukenojo. He tended to straighten slightly to use his height to loom, usually just to piss Daisuke off even more, and he wasn't now.
Not Ryuu, she was reminded and sighed happily.
"If you half-sized morons are done?" Yamada asked, pushing his way past some branches and lobbing a full canteen at fake-Ryuu's head.
Raiku frowned. That had been a bit awkward. She was going to have to at least use his name, while at least part of him was still alive in there.
It... Ryuu caught it effortlessly. 'Yeah, I think we are,' it said, giving Daisukenojo a narrow glare.
Daisukenojo gritted his teeth and caught the follow-up missile from Yamada when he said nothing, tucking the canteen away.
"They filled you in, yeah?" Yamada asked Raiku, giving her a suspicious once-over. She nodded, eyes creased in an expression of mild cheer. "And you're good?"
She nodded again and caught the slightly more gently thrown water bottle when he finally deemed this accurate.
"Good. I want everyone to keep this low profile; we're just familiarizing ourselves with our newer, shittier location, get me? We want the lay of the land so there aren't any more goddamn surprises. I want you idiots to know every rock, tree and potential hiding place within throwing distance, get me?" he demanded.
Raiku paled slightly; they'd used Yamada's throwing range as a unit of distance before. Lesser men could die of exposure if they tried to reach its outer limit without the proper supplies.
"Get me?!" Yamada repeated when no one answered. They replied with a chorus of reluctant noises, which he seemed to think was good enough. "So pick a direction and get moving!"
Daisukenojo and Ryuu immediately turned for the same direction and entered into a corresponding face-off to see who would get it.
Raiku scanned her surroundings more leisurely, secure in the knowledge she could pick whichever way she wanted while they sorted that out. She knew which way they would end up, of course, because of the Plot trail that had sidled up to take over in the night.
She took the time to look directly at it, actually a little relieved to look at one behaving normally, pathetically, instead of taking free will away from people for no reason. It was a long bar of shifting darkness stretching from Ryuu's feet like a second shadow, plunging into the woods. It was twitching and jerking in place roughly, almost thrashing against itself; oddly tetchy, but then again it was probably trying to pull Ryuu towards itself faster, unhappy with the delay. Bizarrely opaque as well, but it didn't seem fully formed yet.
Raiku allowed herself a little smugness. At least everything wasn't going smoothly for it. Daisuke and Ryuu were facing the opposite direction so she deftly stepped over it and followed it into the woods. After a moment she jumped up into the trees, just because it felt like the thing to do. She knew intellectually that she had spent most of her life on the ground, but it just didn't feel like a realshinobi thing to wander around all flat-footed and she felt like a fraud a lot of the time anyway.
It was a relief to just flit around for a while, leaping from branch to branch through the leaves, static building in her hair from her clothes rubbing against her skin, the thick canopy overhead providing some relief from the growing heat. The Plot below was still active, but she couldn't feel Daisuke or Ryuu anymore, and could only peripherally sense the various metals Yamada kept on his person.
Though when she really focused, there wasn't a lot there. Yamada had barely more than a civilian, and most of what he did carry he largely kept for Raiku's convenience. Wait, without the usual weapons, how did Yamada fight? She'd never really seen him in action… Did he just stare at people until they cried? Wait, he was no Uchiha. That was impossible.
Oh god, the Uchiha. Sometimes, Raiku thought as she pushed aside a particularly leafy branch, she was very grateful that the Gairano didn't have to deal with that particular wasp's nest anymore. Apparently they'd been both clever and psychotically tenacious, which was pretty standard for shinobi clans; unfortunately, they also took exception to any other clans, potential or otherwise, and gave the Gairano the side-eye for their numbers alone. And only getting worse with each generation. Sasuke's brother what's-his-name had been widely regarded by the Gairano as The Worst for having an overabundance of both of those defining Uchiha qualities, only ousted once Naruto decided to become Hokage and ruined everyone's lives forever.
Thank god that guy had gone crazy before that became an issue, Raiku concluded, being a member of perhaps the only family to regard a massacre as a natural or even inevitable cause of death. You couldn't have two people be The Worst. And it wasn't like one of them would just step down, either; you couldn't expect Characters to be polite.
At the end of this rambling tangent Raiku stopped, crouching on a worryingly spindly branch. It occurred to her that she had, for years now, largely assumed for some reason that Yamada's overwhelming size and strength existed purely to intimidate her and served no practical function at all. How did he fight? That was answered pretty quickly just by looking at him.
Huh. Huh.
God, Raiku. Get it together. She launched from her tiny branch and it splintered behind her, an obvious sign of her presence she would usually be horrified by. But why bother concealing it? Keeping an eye on the Plot far beneath her, Raiku was pretty sure they'd all end up in the same place anyway, though it certainly felt weird to be following one instead of crushing it. But if Ryuu's new consciousness was too strong to be repelled at all by her presence or by an entire history of only sporadic narrative significance on Ryuu's part; she didn't really stand a chance against it by herself.
Not for the first time that morning, Raiku wished her dad was there.
She shook her head, leaving some faint scorch marks on nearby leaves. Her dad wasn't there, so she would just have to buck up. If she couldn't hit it directly, she could wait for it to fully commit to a narrative line, which it seemed close to doing already. As some random burst of Characterization, it was basically invulnerable. She couldn't stop something until it did something, so all she had to do was wait until it did, and for it to consequently open itself up to attack.
Gairano tended to call these openings Plot Holes, because they were suckers for terrible, terrible metaphors. Cheesy name aside, it would get the job done.
Raiku slowed her persistent path forward as the Plot below started to fade, already difficult to see in the sun-dappled underbrush. She came to a halt perched as high up as she could, largely obscured by leaves even shifting in the wind. Taking a breath and concentrating, she tried to figure out what it was up to. She couldn't feel any large quantities of metal ahead, so presumably the criminals weren't nearby. She couldn't smell smoke, or feel any storms incoming, nothing to indicate the kind of natural happenings that had taken out the other teams. After shifting around on the branch and peering through the leaves, she concluded that she couldn't and hadn't seen any obvious signs of recent traffic. Even her limited chakra senses were drawing a blank, but that was fairly standard. Overall, the Plot seemed to be taking Ryuu somewhere where nothing had happened yet, indicating that his presence would be the trigger for some event rather than a participant in an existing one.
Raiku traded her crouch for a cross-legged position, settling in to lean against the tree trunk and allowing herself some space and time to think. And to get some much-needed vitamin D, but that was a side-benefit.
The thing was that Raiku had grown up reading terrible, terrible books. She'd tried to lobby for some better ones once she'd realized that, but the Gairano family were universally raised on the greatest clichés of fiction simply because that was what they would all come to expect. An awful novel was an invaluable tool for any Gairano in their quest to understand the total lunacy that could and would happen in their everyday lives, so subtlety was just a waste of time. Subtlety hadn't been a necessary part of their education for generations.
So, she mused, absently rubbing her palm with her other hand; which tropes would Ryuu get?
Obviously a romance was out, unless the Genematrix could drag one up for him at the last second. She was the only nearby female and while a teammate would ordinarily be perfect, she was hardly going to get trapped and it didn't have enough time for that build-up anyway, not at the rate it was going. Ryuu didn't have any ex-girlfriends for it to summon, or any lost loves, so another route gone. Additionally, it wasn't overcast and it wasn't as horrifyingly hot that day, so the standard rain-drenched-aesthetic or heat-induced-stripping tropes were out of the sexy ballpark.
God. She shuddered. Ryuu had no place in any kind of sporting arena, let alone that one. There he could really have done some damage.
Back to the topic at hand! Ryuu did have all the earmarks of a tragic protagonist, but then again, most Characters did and tragedies were generally pretty easy to spot.
Yes, Raiku thought, deliberately not thinking of someone now long-dead; tragedies were fairly easy to identify. It hadn't given off those kinds of noises either. Tragedies tended to be quieter than the others, anyway. They tended to be intensely personal, internal things, not the ostentatious creature Ryuu had been smothered by.
She spared a thought for some sort of comedy, but no, that didn't fit Ryuu at all. Ryuu was a Drama magnet and always had been. A comedy would just ruin that potential and the Genematrix would want to drag as much use out of his history as it could get.
So a familial drama it would be, goddamn. Raiku worried at the fingertip of her glove with equally covered teeth, just for something to chew on that wasn't her growing anxiety. It was always going to be a family thing with Ryuu, but surely it wasn't too much to hope that it would just be a personal arc where he discovered some… god, some family tombstone and felt a sense of closure?
In the distance, Raiku felt Ryuu's familiar abundance of metal wander into range.
Of course it was.
Raiku sighed and allowed herself to slide sideways off her perch, neatly catching herself on her hands on a lower branch and propelling herself into another jump.
She had to get moving anyway. Yamada would come and yell at her if he sensed her staying in one place for too long. It didn't take long for it to catch up; she hadn't been putting up much of a fight, mostly investigating what had seemed like a rabbit-hole that had ended up belonging to some sort of terrified mole creature, replaying past conversations with trees so that she actually had the upper hand socially for once... Normal stuff.
'You having fun frolicking around?' Ryuu asked her when their paths eventually crossed.
Raiku huffed indignantly, hanging upside-down from a branch by her bent legs where she had been pretending for a moment that gravity was responsible for the direction her hair stuck up in. She folded her arms.
She wasn't… she wasn't frolicking. Raiku was an electrokinetic mastermind with a surprisingly flexible moral outlook on murder, okay, she didn't frolic.
Harmless thoughts. Harmless thoughts. She pulled herself to sit upright and looked down at him. 'Aren't you supposed to be somewhere else?' she asked.
It shrugged with one oil-streaked shoulder, the gesture achingly familiar. 'We're all covering the same ground anyway. Overlaps are bound to happen.'
Raiku frowned. 'Yeah... I don't think they're meant to happen on purpose.'
It looked at nothing in particular for a while, noteworthy only because it wasn't looking anywhere near her. '… We were talking, yesterday,' it said eventually.
Raiku tilted her head. This was familiar. It was, she realized after a moment of confusion, an almost exact replica of the circumstances of a very recent conversation. The Genematrix sure was hitting the parallels hard for this one. Her in a tree, him… lower down in a tree as the seemingly reluctant participant, the first breeze in days rifling through their hair. Almost exactly the same, right down to the sun playing over his face.
But, she reflected, his face had belonged to him then. It could never have really been the same at all.
It was looking at her expectantly. Raiku quickly tried to recall what it had last said. Something about mirroring past events of Ryuu's actual life to try and get a feel for how best to mask how it had stripped him of autonomy and left him a vessel for his most dramatic Character traits? No, that probably wasn't it.
'We were talking!' she agreed eventually. 'We talk pretty regularly.' She made a vague gesture with her hands that could have referred to a balance in a more abstract universe. 'It's… a thing that happens!'
It continued just looking at her. 'Yeah,' it agreed, 'and yesterday we were talking about something in particular.'
Raiku swung her legs just to have something to do.
Well. It may not have been as direct as Ryuu, but… it was still making itself pretty clear. 'I don't really know what you want from me,' she said helplessly. 'I mean… you said your family wasn't going to contact you and you were right,' had been wrong, they would probably crash in any second now, 'so I was wrong! I am sorry! Sorry to have said that…?'
'Big surprise. Why did you even think they would?' it asked bluntly.
Oh fuck no. Raiku took a slow, carefully breath. She was being used for, for some sort of clumsy attempt at foreshadowing! Foreshadowing right before something happened! God, what kind of lazy, uninspired Plot would even—
'I didn't think they would, necessarily,' she corrected slowly, unable to help herself because there was trashy and then there was lazy. 'I thought you might be reminded of it because we're in a sort of adjacent region to where it happened and I wanted to see if you were okay, but I didn't… I mean, I don't know them! Never really, uh, talked to them, except for how I…' She broke off with a wince. Put a foot through that one guy's charred corpse.
After … charring and turning him into that corpse.
And probably disintegrating a fair percentage of the others. Wow. They had both sort of dropped the ball by never bringing how she'd accidentally killed a bunch of his biological family. That should probably have been discussed. 'Was there for that whole thing,' she said instead. 'So I have no idea! They could all have died.'
Awkward silence. The leaves rustled around them in the gentle breeze Ryuu had presumably stirred up for his own comfort after weeks of still, hot air.
She coughed. 'Which. I am sorry. About.' She widened her eyes to try and look sincere, or at least helpless enough to skate by. She was absolutely not sorry just because it wouldn't have happened if they hadn't attacked them first. Don't start something you can't finish, to paraphrase every shinobi teacher she'd ever had.
This oddly seemed to satisfy it. 'Well, I'm fine.'
Raiku creased her eyes to fake the smile because it wasn't fine, it wasn't fine that it had done this and it wasn't fine that it was making her go along with it.
'Good,' she said instead of that, of any of that, instead of telling it that it wasn't Ryuu and she wasn't going to forgive it for that. It wasn't like she could address it directly, anyway. It was a force of causality, not a person, and you couldn't talk to a Narrative, tell it plainly that combining dramatic traits and a backstory didn't make a person, that the little details and quirks and bad habits it thought were extraneous were more important than any checklist of baggage.
She couldn't talk to a Character. There was just Exposition and Foreshadowing and Development and suddenly she missed Ryuu, really missed him in that way she'd just have to get used to.
It nodded firmly. 'Good,' it repeated, at least mustering enough of Ryuu's menace to tell her clearly that the conversation was finished and not going to happen again.
'Good?' she offered warily, just because awkward was what was appropriate here. With that out of the way, they just had to wait there until whoever was coming showed up.
It tilted its head and narrowed its eyes, opening its mouth to speak before a sudden, convenient spike of chakra shot up from the direction of the campsite. Raiku shot to her feet and pushed away, confident the thing would follow her. Wow. Right when the conversation ended. Way to spoon-feed it, she thought with no small amount of literary snobbery.
Maybe there would be less senseless massacre this time, Raiku hoped, ever the optimist.
Drawing closer, there wasn't the battle she had expected to find. Daisuke intercepted them shortly before they made it back, waving them over to his perch halfway up a tree that was implausibly able to conceal Yamada as well.
Raiku scrambled up, Ryuu just behind. 'What's going on?' she asked, only to be immediately shushed.
'We've got some people in the camp,' Daisukenojo whispered, a branch lower than Yamada and so defying all natural laws. 'Nine of them, armed.'
'Shinobi?' Ryuu asked, its voice lowered as well. Raiku barely avoided rolling her eyes. Of course they were, because they'd collapsed their site and without the usual signs of a campsite, there was no way that civilians would be able to—
Yamada shook his head. 'Civilians.'
Raiku's eyebrows shot up. 'What? No!' she hissed, more to the narrative weave of the universe than anything else because come on. 'How did they find us, huh?! We hid that campsite! Yamada hid that campsite, there is no way they found it on their own!' Being this outraged this quietly was confusingly contradictory, but she forged ahead. 'One of them has to be a shinobi in disguise or something!' There, she was giving it a way out, damnit, she was giving it a way to make sense that it had to take!
Yamada shook his head, jaw tense but expression oddly calm. Apparently not. "Not a one," he said slowly, obviously preoccupied with the same issue.
Raiku settled into a low, annoyed growl. That made no sense. That made no sense, it was just—
Well. It hadn't caught up yet, still stretched into the woods; apparently this one was trying to conserve energy.
What an asshole.
'They feel like civilians,' Ryuu agreed. 'But she's right. How did they find it?'
'I'm more worried about what they're doing,' Daisukenojo said, gazed turned inward. Probably using the chakra senses that he had and was capable of using, like all good shinobi.
Raiku fumed.
'They're just waiting around.'
'For who?' Raiku asked, idiotically, totally deserving the looks sent her way. 'No way it's for us,' she said flatly. 'Nope. We're not going to get… get ambushed by people when we know exactly where and how many there are. They can't think that'll work.'
Really, she asked the universe at large; really? This was Ryuu's Plot as a Character? Despite herself, she was a little offended on his behalf. This wasn't worth losing his identity over. She cast a quick look through the branches to the forest floor, but couldn't see the little shit to give it a proper glare.
Wait, Yamada had been concerned that these guys had back-up from another source. That would probably have been where Ryuu's family came in. She relaxed a little; sure, she wasn't going to let it get that far, but at least Ryuu's destruction was being paid some respect.
"We're here to take 'em out, so that's what we're doing," Yamada said, folding his arms. "But I don't like this, get me?"
'I could just kill them,' Raiku pointed out when no one else seemed to remember the fact that surprise mass-murder was something of a natural specialty of hers. 'I mean, you guys clear out, I stay here, I go boom and we all go home.'
Yamada raised his non-brows. She shrank back slightly, feeling self-conscious. 'Well I could,' she muttered.
Daisukenojo frowned. 'I don't think starting a massive fire would be good here.'
'I can do it without starting a—one time, you traitor, one time, you know nothing about conduc—'
"Can you?" Yamada asked directly.
A little off-balance from the interruption but utterly confident for once, Raiku nodded. 'Yep.'
He seemed pleased by this, settling back against the tree to consider it.
And then, 'but it's a trap, and they've already used it to take out ANBU.' Goddamn Ryuu. At least it had his habit of ruining her plans down, wonderful. 'Where are the random disasters and coincidences that took out the others?'
Raiku eyeballed it. 'I don't think a thunderstorm would help them here, Ryuu,' she whispered sarcastically.
It smirked. 'A landslide would, Gairano.'
Oh, that was so low and so very incorrect. 'Shame there's no mountain here, last name omitted. Use your brain!' Oh god that felt so good to say for once.
Ryuu narrowed its eyes into slits. 'What did you just—'
"He's got a point," Yamada decided, dropping the hammer on their argument because they were talking about how to murder some people waiting nearby, way to be professional. "New plan. Nab and stab, just like we practised. We all clear on our part?"
Raiku wasn't sulking because her attempt to mildly inconvenience the Plot had failed. She wasn't. 'Yes,' she grumbled.
"Good. You and Sullen take quadrants one and three, Shorty can take four. I'll be on two, everyone pull back to the emergency rendezvous point the second something suspicious happens or I give the signal, get me?" Yamada asked, meeting each of their eyes in turn to make sure they were listening. "The second."
When they had all agreed emphatically enough for his satisfaction and repeated it, individually, he seemed satisfied. "Get going."
Despite the name, Raiku's part of the nab and stab had less to do with nabbing or stabbing and more to do with taking her clothes off.
Wait.
That sounded terrible.
She mused on this unfortunate fact as she darted through the branches to the west-most point of the raggedy ambush circle, eventually landing silently on a branch high above one of the men apparently killing Konoha-nin.
After a moment of concentration, she slid further along and saw another. Two were in her killzone. One was far below and would have struggled to see her; he was crouching almost directly beneath her tree and was largely hidden by bushes, while the other seemed to have made use of a rotting, fallen tree to hide himself and was potentially a visibility threat.
Not bad, she had to admit. An inky patch of Plot wobbled at her threateningly where it was sliding into view on the ground below, obviously an offshoot from Ryuu's that would try and draw the fight out to make it as dramatic as possible.
She would have to deal with that shortly, but first things first. Only a moment's observation made it obvious that the men hadn't bothered to keep within visual range of each other; the one in the shrub was far further back, concealed from all angles but above, on lower ground and additionally, possibly not even aware of where the other was at all. When the wind rose and the leaves began to rustle she leapt down to near ground-level. She exhaled carefully.
There was no sign from the others to stop and she had a few seconds on their timeline- excellent! She flexed her fingers, casting her gaze towards the Plot pooling through the underbrush. She gripped the branch she'd been standing on, checking to make sure the width of the trunk kept her sufficiently hidden from both parties before shifting her weight. Below her it started to shrink away, which, rude. She dropped down to her hands and then to the ground, silently hitting the Plot feet-first and just as quickly pressing herself back against the tree. For a while she remained still, listening, but when the men ahead failed to react and the Plot predictably started to shrink, eventually vanishing from her senses altogether, Raiku felt she'd safely and justifiably abbreviated that fight scene.
She heard one of the criminals spit on the ground and shift in place.
He spat.
Raiku gaped in silent indignation, only the copious metal she could feel on him stopping her from blowing her cover and picking a fight right then. They couldn't even be bothered trying to hide themselves? What, winning before meant they'd be easy to pick off? There was Plot and then there was insulting, there was no need to—
There was a drop in the wind, the plan having taken off already and Raiku panicked, immediately ripping her gloves off and leaping forward onto the back on the hidden man closest to her, one bare hand clapping to his bare forehead, shoving his head down to keep his jaw closed, and the other coming to clamp down below his breastbone.
He convulsed so violently she was almost thrown away, the bush rustling too loudly for a moment before she shifted to compensate, head aching from how tightly she had clenched her jaw with sympathetic tension as a muffled sound of agony tried to escape from between his teeth, current running from one hand into him and then back to her through the other. Hands clamped onto him hard through the spasms, she relaxed only when she could smell burning flesh, when the muscles of his spine were twitching and jerking at random, when the only electricity in him was hers and then none at all. She lowered him carefully to the ground and crouched above him, the occasional residual spasm threatening to unbalance her as she gauged distance.
Raiku took a breath and let it out slowly through her mouth, flexing suddenly twitchy fingers. She dropped her shoulders, realigning her body and then leapt up, catching and swinging over a branch above and pushing herself off to land and roll behind her remaining target. He was already turning by the time she was upright and he reached for something—probably a knife, but nothing she wanted to know about—and she lunged forward, negligible bodyweight still too much for him to keep his balance with that kind of momentum, sending the two of them crashing into the log he'd been hiding behind.
He smelt musty, she noticed in some distant, quiet part of her brain, almost like the dead leaves they were pressed to and then she had a bare hand on his throat and she could see light beneath his skin where it was surging out from hers and he was choking in silence, his muscles were locking and his legs were jerking, meaty spasms where she had them trapped under her bony knees.
Raiku noticed that her pants were scorched there only when she pushed away from him at last, leaving him slumped and twitching, eyes staring at nothing and she took a few deep breaths to clear her nose of the smell of burnt flesh, feeling suddenly that she desperately needed fresh air.
A minute passed, and then another, before Yamada's familiar voice broke the relative peace. "Head count!"
'Two!' she yelled, rising from her crouch and cupping her hands around her mouth.
'Three!' She thought she heard in a distant yell from Daisukenojo.
'One!' Ryuu, closer by.
"Two! Get back here, all of you!"
Raiku tensed and darted around the log, beelining for Yamada immediately. That only made eight, that only made eight, how the hell could they have missed one? She couldn't sense anyone besides the other three, had one escaped?
She had a knife in hand and drew next to Yamada poised to move again, but he seemed relaxed. A man was lying unconscious behind him, face hidden in the dirt but arm twisted brutally to the side. "Good work," Yamada said, instead of telling them what the hell was going on.
'Where's guy number nine?' Raiku demanded, unwilling to relax.
Yamada glanced at her, but didn't seem concerned. "There were eight, Speedy, try to pay attention."
Raiku gaped, almost dropping the knife in shock. 'No, there were nine! Daisuke clearly said nine! Daisuke!' she appealed to him where he as emerging from some bushes, rolling his shoulder to stretch it. He shook his head.
'Nope. Eight.'
Raiku tucked her knife away before she scratched her head, luckily in that order after That One Time after That One Training Session.
She… she had heard him, hadn't she? Oh god, were there meant to be nine? Raiku glanced around desperately at the ground they were standing on, but the Plot she'd crushed hadn't had any impact on the one still surrounding Ryuu's feet, so at least she hadn't screwed up there. Maybe it… had tried to extend the fight by adding another person?
No, people were pretty easy to kill in situations like this. That made no sense. Unless…
… Okay, so maybe she hadn't been paying that much attention.
Ever a fan of Occam's Razor, Raiku could accept that her (understandable) lack of focus was the simplest answer here. And hey, it wasn't like she didn't have a lot on her mind! She relaxed, dusting her hands off and slipping her gloves back on. 'Alright! Then that was nowhere near as hard as they made it sound!'
Yamada jerked his thumb at the guy lying on the ground behind him. "Agreed." He sounded less happy about it than Raiku. "I'm going to ask this guy a couple of questions to make sure, get me?" He nodded at Ryuu. "Wake him up."
It rolled its eyes and crouched beside the man, rolling him over and doing something mysteriously medical while Raiku sidled over to check on Daisukenojo. 'How'd your stabbing go?' she asked brightly.
'You are always weirdly cheerful when you kill people, have you noticed that?' he asked, eyeing her suspiciously.
Raiku gasped. 'Excuse me! Here I am, just trying to check on my teammate and you go and accuse me of being some sort of… murder-enjoying psychopath—'
'Who said psychopath? You jumped there all on your own! And so quickly, too,' he mused, but Daisukenojo had a terrible poker face and was already struggling not to grin.
Raiku frowned at him, making sure to exaggerate her angry eyebrows above the mask just so it was clear. She elbowed him in the side. 'You dick.'
'Primadonna,' he shot back, entirely unaware of how devastating an insult that was for a Gairano. To ease her wounded soul, Raiku was going to have to fill his bed with glitter when they got home. Which was looking… reasonably soon? She double-checked the Plot at Ryuu's feet, but it just stretched back into the woods, back towards where they'd been earlier. Unhelpfully.
God. Raiku wasn't a Plot expert, was the thing. She could get impressions off the particularly noisy ones, she could sort of see the gist of most of them, but she couldn't- she couldn't really interact with them like her dad could. She couldn't just look at them, tilt her head a bit and suddenly know everything about them. And the thing was that he was the head of the family for a reason; he was better at it than anybody else, it wasn't reasonable to expect to be able to do the same, but at times like this, it sucked particularly hard he hadn't passed on that genetic advantage when he'd decided to procreate.
Rude.
'He's waking up,' Ryuu said shortly, getting up and stepping away from the man on the ground. Raiku peered down at him. He was heavy-set, had a few surprisingly well-kept weapons on him. Probably stolen from the previous targets. She'd put him at… mid-forties? Faces were hard. Ages, expressions—all of it. It certainly didn't help that this guy looked like he had a shattered cheekbone.
'What did you do to him?' she asked Yamada, trying to understand the complicated injury on the man's chest. 'It looks like he got into a fight with a… weirdly particular bear!'
Yamada didn't answer. Instead he dropped into a crouch by the man's torso and snapped his fingers in front of his face.
Oh god. Was this the torture part?
Raiku's breath started to come a little quicker. Weren't they too young for torture? Well no, not really, shinobi villages had weaponized children for generations and they'd always ended up torturing people, but she felt too young for torture! She didn't have the emotional maturity for torture! Sure, she had the physical knack for causing huge amounts of pain, which she'd spent a fair bit of time on during that stupid time-skip, but this wasn't—
'I'll talk!' the man wheezed the second his eyes managed to focus on Yamada. Part of Yamada. He looked and sounded terrified, probably because he'd actually realized he could only look at Yamada one part at a time due to the sad limitations of human eyes when faced with that much person to take in all at once. Raiku could relate. 'I'll tell you anything!'
Raiku blinked and exchanged a look with Daisukenojo. 'No torture… after all?' she said tentatively. Daisukenojo shrugged helplessly. At the word "torture", the man released a sort of terrified, croaky wail that devolved into painful coughing halfway through.
She'd made noises like that. Raiku suddenly empathized with this man more than was perhaps appropriate. She'd have to watch for that.
'You punched him in the throat,' Ryuu criticized, looking over at Yamada like an idiot criticizing someone unbelievably terrifying. Or exactly that, no simile needed. 'You should've killed him and saved one less… punched in the throat. He has more bruised mulch than larynx left.'
Yamada ignored him but Raiku refused to believe he'd just gloss over that kind of insubordination. There would be a reckoning later. "Who are you working with?" he asked, already deep voice somehow more gravelly than usual.
The man tried to gesture in some way, but his hands just sort of twitched. Raiku had a sneaking suspicion Yamada had gotten him somewhere in the spine, as he'd always shown a preference for spinal attacks. Consequently, Team Yamada had long been known as "those spine-punching assholes," among other equally flattering monikers.
But she was getting distracted. 'It's just us,' the man rasped.
Yamada was, fittingly, as unmoving as a mountain. "How did you find us?"
'We looked around?' the man tried, looking bemused. As bemused as a man could be with probable spinal damage and Yamada crouching over him. 'Then,' he swallowed painfully, 'we waited.'
Yamada was silent for a long time. Then: "you three."
They snapped to attention. Raiku snapped to attention. The others looked over. "Go get some water."
Daisukenojo fished out a largely full canteen. 'But we already—'
"Go. Get some water," Yamada repeated slowly and deliberately. "Get me?"
'We get you! We so get you,' Raiku assured him, grabbing Daisukenojo's arm and almost Ryuu's by reflex and ending up almost hurling herself away from it instead, then determinedly steering around it with Daisukenojo by the arm.
'What do you think he's going to do?' Daisukenojo asked when she'd dragged him for ten minutes and through two bushes she could easily have gone around were she less panicked.
'Why wouldn't he let us stay?' Ryuu added shrewdly. 'It's not like we don't need to know how to do that stuff, and we're not exactly new to violence.'
'Okay, first off? "Let us"—no, no, actually, I don't care!' Raiku said shrilly. 'He's obviously going to hurt him and then kill him, so like you said, we know how to hurt people and we don't need to hang around.'
'Well that isn't—'
'And if that isn't the kind of hurt you meant then he has no reason to let us stick around because we aren't familiar with it and we haven't been trained so he can choose whether or not to introduce us to it now!' Raiku let out in one hasty breath, aware she was talking too fast, too high-pitched and not caring at all. Torture was a new line for her, one she wasn't willing to cross just yet. She would have to eventually, especially given—but not thinking about that! Nope.
Daisukenojo shook free when her path threatened to drag him through another thicket, digging his heels in. 'Okay, okay, I'm coming!' he told her when she spun around, his hands raised. 'But stop dragging me!'
Away from the clearing, the man, Yamada and their merry ring of corpses, Raiku relaxed a little. Daisukenojo grew less tense as well as she watched, obviously feeding off her mood like a tiny, unusually empathetic sponge. Not a great quality for your average shinobi to have, but a work-life balance was important? Maybe?
Wait, who cared?
Raiku shook her head, trying to clear some of the fog. It was impossible to concentrate. After yesterday, and having so little sleep, and trying to keep the Plots straight in her head… she wasn't hearing things properly, she'd almost missed her timing with the nab and stab… She sighed, rubbing the back of her neck. So much for a boring mission. God, had she resented being bored? What an idiot she'd been. She owed herself a good smack in the head, but that could wait until she had some privacy. No point being thought a masochist in addition to a secretive weirdo.
'You look just like Kakashi when you do that,' Ryuu told her on its way past, deliberately pushing her with its shoulder and either ignoring or not noticing her full-body shudder because gross. Even normal Ryuu gave her a wide-berth ordinarily.
'Holy shit, he's right!' Daisukenojo crowed, ducking past her as well. 'You even have the same outfit! Nice catch!'
'E-excuse me?! What did you say?!' Raiku demanded, dropping her hand from her neck like one or either was on fire. She spun around, only to see their retreating backs. 'Hey! Get back here! Take it back!'
She fell into a jog to try and catch up, even her exhausted, emotionally drained brain unable to accept this. 'You two! Don't ignore me!'
For a moment let herself get swept up in her indignation, just enough to ignore the Plot stretching out in front of them.
A/N: man, this would have been up weeks ago but it turns out technology hates both Shana and me. Well maybe hate is a strong word. But it's up now!
