A/N: What's that? Is that... a rogue author?! In the underbrush? No, it's me. To those who kept reviewing: thank you. To those who sent me various, uh, fanfictions of this fanfiction: you're weird and I love you. Please stop pairing Raiku with Itachi. She's so afraid. That one Madara shipper? You know what you did.
And it was excellent.
Edit: I now have a tumblr. Tumbltown. Tumblog. Find me at Northwrought!
Go ahead, you crazy kids, you do you. Love it.
Their hostage was dead by the time they got back. Raiku hovered at the edge of the clearing, reluctant to move forward after she'd seen him crumpled there, unsure why he seemed so much… deader than the others. He wasn't torn to pieces or, unlike some of his cohort, burnt to a crisp. He was just lying there on his side, the breeze ruffling his hair against a motionless head, all of him so still. He was no more murdered so than the rest; he even looked less injured. There were only small bursts of blood against his skin and the wound on his chest she'd seen before. The blood splashes made his clothes stick stiffly where they dried, where they weren't still sticking wet and red.
Yamada's hands were very clean. She couldn't stop looking at them.
"He stuck to it," Yamada confirmed for them. "But I still don't like it. Something stinks."
'Maybe you couldn't get it out of him,' Ryuu pointed out, its hands in its pockets.
Yamada looked at them and as a group, the three Chuunin suddenly felt, instinctively, that was somehow not what had happened.
'Ye-eah,' Raiku drew out, 'I don't think that… is likely. But what if he just didn't have all the information?' She, admittedly, was coming from a place where she would always know something that everybody else didn't, but it still seemed a reasonable conclusion.
Yamada nodded. "Exactly."
'So what are we meant to do?' Daisukenojo asked. 'Any sign of where they came from?'
Yamada grimaced with impossible efficiency. Confused birds for miles would feel that same level of foreboding it evoked in Raiku, possibly disrupting the ecosystem for generations. "Yeah."
Raiku shifted nervously. 'Why do I get the feeling we won't like this?' she asked slowly, because the Plot may have been expediting things but there was a reason Gairano hated them so much.
"Rivers," Yamada informed them. "But they've come through Iji, and recently, get me?"
Raiku paled. 'Not Tadano!' She wasn't sure why she was so convinced about that. He had laughed hysterically when she fell of the roof that one time, and then the one time after that. But he hadn't been malicious or resentful; he'd just been a guy with unruly customers and why the hell would the Plot feel free to just incriminate the people of Iji without caring at all about-
That was a stupid train of thought, she recognised far later than she should have. The Plot would do whatever it wanted and she could get as angry as she wanted, but it wouldn't change anything.
'Who the fuck cares about that; ANBU moved through there the same time we were, and they sure as hell would have noticed something was up,' Ryuu argued, folding its arms and clearly forgetting Yamada had been ANBU for more of his life than he hadn't.
Yamada rolled his eyes. Sort of, he wasn't that mobile in facial expressions. "ANBU on a mission tend to get tunnel vision and they were en route, get me? We could have screamed 'grand larceny' from the roof and they'd have said 'your problem' and pissed off. Their jobs are a hell of a lot more time-sensitive than ours."
'That doesn't seem very team-oriented,' Raiku criticised, because there was efficient and then there was inconsiderate.
Yamada ignored this observation. "These clowns came from somewhere in Rivers, tracked some teams through Iji and wound up here, picking us off. So if they've been through Iji then either we missed something or a whole bunch of people have lied to us, get me? And I'd like to think I'm not that goddamn old yet that my eyes are going."
'How old are you?' Daisukenojo asked, eyeing him because actually, now that Raiku thought about it, how old was Yamada?
Yamada heroically ignored this too, but a muscle in his jaw was starting to twitch and he couldn't keep it up forever.
'So do we go back there and… what, try again?' Raiku asked dubiously. 'I mean, it's not like there could be many left.' Drawing attention to their environs, which was the say, their little group of merry corpses.
'What if this was just part of the group? We still don't understand how they even found us,' Ryuu pointed out, casting a bored look her way with its stolen eyes. Raiku flicked her fingers carelessly, trying desperately to channel some flippancy. The resulting bang! made her skitter a few steps in the opposite direction, fingers burning hot.
"But that's not the goddamn point here!" Yamada snapped, and suddenly she felt far more certain of where they all stood. "We got lied to by villagers inside our own Nation. That's not just dangerous- it's goddamn embarrassing, get me?"
Raiku nodded, looking down at her feet and kicking at the ground slightly. This was that one very understandable and very minor total devastation of the countryside from her Genin days all over again.
Yamada snorted. "Yeah, we should all be goddamn ashamed of ourselves. Not good enough, get me?"
'So what do we do?!' Raiku burst out, trying to gesture with her hands tucked safely into her armpits again- she could feel a warning hum in the fine bones of her wrists and hands, and that would likely end badly for one of them. And if history was any indicator, that one of them would be Daisukenojo. 'What's good enough?!'
Yamada raised his non-brows at her. Raiku kept her own raised challengingly, even as the rest of her shrunk back."It's a moot point," he said eventually, when she'd shrunk far enough away that he felt her appropriately apologetic. "Our job was to get rid of them, and we've confirmed this was all of them in at least this group. We go back to camp, send back our report and if they recall us or send new orders, we go from there, get me?"
'But you said something stinks!' Raiku protested. 'Something that is obviously connected to and a part of the job!'
Yamada shook his head. "No, Speedy, our job was to kill the gang, and now we've found something more serious. Any bigger systemic problems around our intel in the area are a different thing. A whole different kettle of fish, get me?"
Daisukenojo and Raiku exchanged uneasy looks. 'But we're not done,' Daisuke pointed out. 'And we're already here.'
Yamada looked unimpressed. "Oh, so being in the neighbourhood decides which jobs we get, huh?"
'It'd be efficient,' Ryuu said, after this left them in silence for a few seconds.
"Yeah, but training a new squad of replacements when we get murdered for not looking before we leap is probably less efficient, get me?" Yamada replied. "Plus, we get picked off and what, Konoha just scratches its head and sends another squad because we didn't tell anyone what we goddamn found? They're just out of the loop and keep up that revolving door of death, huh?"
Raiku blinked. That did make a certain kind of sense. They certainly were in the process of leaping to the next thing.
Wait. Since when did Raiku ever volunteer for more dangerous work?
Something stirred the hairs on the back of her neck just as something shuddered through what Plot she could see on Ryuu. Raiku tensed, immediately tuning out of the conversation and throwing her senses wider. Her stomach churned; what the hell was this thing up to? It wasn't behaving normally, though her frame of reference was admittedly for Plots rather than… whatever the hell this thing had turned into.
She couldn't detect any metal, or any unusual conductors nearby. No one was approaching or if they were, they weren't conventionally armed. She couldn't detect any chakra signatures and even if she could, Daisukenojo would have picked it up ages ago. Ryuu was behaving itself for now.
She frowned. The initial tremor- could it just have been the Genematrix settling on a new course? She looked around their feet, casting a quick glance at the roots of the trees they stood amongst, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
She tried to let her shoulders relax, suddenly aware that she'd stiffened up and started looking around suspiciously and it was only their preoccupation that had stopped her teammates from noticing, but it still felt off. The tension building in her stomach hadn't dissipated; in fact, it felt like her anxiety was only building.
Raiku drummed her fingers on her leg, trying not to shift too obviously. What the hell was it up to? Oh god; was it going to multiply? The knot in her stomach seemed to twist and she took a deep breath that didn't help.
"Either way. We're returning to the nearest outpost to send back an update," Yamada said, jerking his head in some random direction. "This is part of a strategic border zone and it's too sensitive for us to screw around here without updating Konoha on what we've found, get me? We'll do one more body-check and go."
The three junior teammates set about gathering their things and trying to erase the most obvious signs of their presence. Not the bodies; those would be left behind. Anyone worth their salt would know what had happened anyway, so all they could do was conceal who had done it.
Not, Raiku thought sourly, that it wasn't obvious once whoever would find them found out about her little display at Iji and put that and two electrocuted corpses together. Plus, checking the bodies was not her favourite part of this whole gig.
Another deep, calming breath. Boy, that really did nothing! Also, she found upon a quick check of the area, she hadn't really left much, so she couldn't even drag it out to put off body-searching.
Wait. That was because Daisukenojo tended to accumulate her belongings out of habit, even when they weren't doing long treks. She straightened and padded over to where he was crouching by one of the bodies with his back to her, taking advantage of the convenient pose to start casually rifling through his pack.
'You mind?' he asked flatly, no doubt feeling her liberate her tiny cooking pot from his neatly organised pack.
'You don't have to carry my things all the time, Daisuke,' she replied, shoving it into her more haphazardly packed bag. 'I'm stronger now! And also much bigger than you. So much bigger than you.'
'I could snap you like a twig.'
'That's true,' she admitted, but he hadn't really put much feeling into it. 'You alright in there?' she asked, leaning around to try and see his face, just in time to see him reach out and close the dead man's eyes.
Raiku blinked. 'Oh.'
'Yeah, oh,' he said gruffly, dusting his hands off on his pants and getting up. 'Excuse me for not wanting to be left like that,' he finished, turning to face her with an unusually grave expression.
Raiku stared at him. 'Well… you have a death seal,' she said eventually. 'So your body should. Disintegrate. Or, uh, explode, as the case may be.' Not something she'd ever have to worry about researching, but she'd sat through the same quiet talk that all of them had when the war with Sand had started, and it had never become less relevant after that. It should have been worrying, the strange serenity she felt when she remembered that she'd probably take out a square kilometre and whoever had gotten her first, she reflected even as the warm, peaceful reminder of that knowledge settled somewhere above the knot of her anxiety and Daisukenojo glared at her. 'They had to die,' he told her sternly, 'but they were still people.'
Raiku looked down, adopting a shamed expression. She was ashamed, she told herself firmly. She had been shamed and she felt bad now. Daisukenojo huffed and walked over to a man lying half-turned onto his stomach, the skin above his neck mottled grey and blue. Ryuu's, then.
'Sentimental,' Ryuu criticised from too close by. But that was any distance at all, so Raiku had to try not to shift away from someone standing over two metres to her left.
'Not sentimental,' Raiku corrected, sticking her hands in her pockets. 'Respectful.'
Ryuu scoffed quietly, but changed the subject. 'Are you ready?'
Raiku turned towards it and looked at the ground at its feet instead of its face, shrugging. 'I've still gotta check mine.' The Plot still stretched towards the forest, back the way they'd came. It wasn't any bigger, or any more obviously complex. Maybe it had just been reacting to her fail-field? Throwing a little mini-tantrum because she'd stopped it from drawing out the fight?
… Which, given they were civilian criminals, it would have had to have done by throwing something Dramatic out there. Damnit, damnit, damnit, how could she have been so stupid?! Raiku didn't bother taking another deep breath- clearly breathing was overrated and she'd already suspected as much. It was probably the missing link between here and where they'd been in the forest and how was she so terrible at this so suddenly? This was not her area. It really, really wasn't.
Her stomach gave up on anxious gurgle-cramping and turned to outright pain and nausea. Great. She'd already fucked it up. She'd walked right into its stupid little hands and gotten Ryuu … devoured, or replaced maybe, and now she wasn't even mercy-killing him efficiently. Not her week. She turned on her heel and made for her two victims, treading particularly hard, like she could stamp her frustration into the ground and leave a trail of it behind her.
Gairano weren't meant to go around just crushing Plots whenever they wanted, she told herself over and over. There were consequences for them and for other people but, to be honest, mostly for them. She'd gotten so used to being able to interact with them directly that she'd started interfering with the ones that weren't directly trying to entrap her. All she was meant to do was keep out of them herself and let them happen to others.
It had gotten Ryuu, though, she argued to herself silently, already wrist-deep in one victim's apparently empty pockets where he lay half-beneath the log she'd killed him under. Ryuu wasn't others, in the same way that Daisukenojo and Yamada weren't. They belonged to her. They were her people.
She stopped and sighed, suddenly tired, and absently brushed the man's eyes shut. No, the Gairano were her people. They were her family. Daisukenojo and Ryuu were her friends. If they were able to be free of Plot, they would have been born with fail-fields as well and they hadn't, so they weren't. She had to remember that. She was getting emotional- perfectly normal for a teenager, a voice suspiciously like a certain book's author said condescendingly- and not thinking clearly, but now that'd she'd realised, it was her job to get it under control.
Ryuu was not one of her people, and it had to die.
She stood and made her way to the other corpse, ignoring Ryuu's impatient yell from the other side of the clearing. Her other civilian's pockets had come up depressingly empty, except for the standard murder-paraphernalia of some knives and the inexplicable tiny shreds of paper that ended up in everyone's pockets.
'Would you hurry up!?' Ryuu yelled, its voice not even having the decency to get all high-pitched like his used to when he yelled. Now it had learned to project or some shit, and its voice was clear and even. Raiku sighed and reached out to brush the man's eyes closed, and her hand caught. Probably on some hole she had burnt into the poor man's face, so she tugged and glanced over with no small amount of irritation because this, this is the sort of gruesome fare that compassion bought you-
It looked at her with eyes gone black and wide.
She froze.
It was looking at her. She knew it was, though there was no white there, no pupils, or maybe it was all pupil, the eyes of something cold and dark.
No, no it wasn't! It was Plot, she knew, because it had to be. Some vestige caught in a dead man's skull, looking for a way out and just eerily placed. She carefully withdrew her hand and stood, but found it hard to look away.
It was looking at her, until the moment passed and then there were just the man's unremarkable brown eyes, looking at nothing, not ever again.
'Hey, one thing's bugging me,' Daisukenojo said from behind her, and she managed to tear her eyes away long enough to stumble awkwardly towards him.
She made a non-committal noise that he apparently took as invitation to continue. 'Shouldn't this all have been, I don't know…' He trailed off vaguely.
'More complicated?' she guessed, because training with Kakashi had made that her go-to guess. 'More insane? More to do with sadists dropping on you out of trees and holding knives in your face until you admit weakness and cry!?'
Daisukenojo stopped and stared at her. Raiku casually looked skyward, like she was just taking in the weather and had done nothing wrong or unusual. It was possible, maybe, that she had brought some of that to the table with her.
'Hey, you look just like him again,' he said after a moment, shoving her shoulder. 'You sure picked up a lot of mannerisms from that guy. We're gonna have our own mini-Copy-nin!' He gasped and flung out a hand, hitting her solidly in the chest. 'Copyniniature,' he breathed.
Raiku slowly lowered her gaze, enough to shoot him a narrow look. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'I dream of killing you.'
'Copycat? No, no- copykit! Because you're the baby version,' he continued, because Raiku didn't have dreams and maybe never would, and he started to walk forwards with that stupid grin still stretched across his face. 'Who's also weaker and more awkward. Whose eyesight isn't as good, who has weird and awkward, fuzzy hair-,'
'Who thinks kittens look weird?' Raiku protested. 'Who thinks that? Is this all part of your baby phobia? Why are you talking like Ryuu, suddenly?'
Daisukenojo waved a hand, but the thought struck her. Was he talking like Ryuu?
She looked around. Yamada was talking to Ryuu, his arms folded, likely unhappy about the yelling when they were already visible enough. The ground was… ground-like, and didn't seem to be possessed by any narrative force, malignant or benign.
What had she been doing?
Her anxiety was seeping back in, ramping back to full force. What the hell was happening? How had she gotten distracted, again? She couldn't keep a thought together for more than a minute before it started eroding around the edges and it didn't even hurt, it didn't even register? Everything hurt! She knew that- everyone knew that.
Oh. This one was clever.
She frowned beneath the mask and quickly checked the three others over. Yamada and Ryuu had wrapped up and were doing an equipment check- this likely meant Daisuke had done one for her while she'd been distracted, that little champion. That… moderately-sized champion? Actually, Daisuke was basically her assigned buddy by default a lot of the time, so he was pretty used to assessing her inventory at a glance. He was sort of like a very angry babysitter, which was an irritating thought. Sure, she had a tendency of magnetising metal objects after too long, and she lost gloves regularly from burning through the fingertips, but to-
Wait, no! Raiku dug her fingertips hard into her palms, trying to summon some grounding pain. Not again! There was nothing there, but there was something there, she may have been flighty but she was never-
'What the hell?' Daisukenojo asked, breaking her from her rapidly spiralling panic. She glanced over at him, to find it was apparently his turn to stare at the sky.
She glanced up. The clouds that had been drifting over them for weeks were growing darker, finally. Finally. Some good luck. She sighed in relief. 'Maybe we'll get some actual rain?' she said hopefully. 'And it'll cool down?'
Daisukenojo was still frowning when she glanced across at him. 'Hey asshole,' he called, not looking away. 'You said these were gonna clear up.'
'Yeah- so?' Ryuu's voice was mostly clear now, audible through the Plot noise but flanged, like someone was speaking over it at all times. 'I'm not a meteorologist, I can make a bad call.'
This was enough for both Daisukenojo and Raiku to look away from the sky and directly at it, boggling. 'What did he just say?' Daisukenojo whispered. 'Did you hear it too?'
Raiku stared as well, at the increasingly irritated-looking Plot amalgam that had eaten Ryuu. 'No way,' she replied, equally hushed. Even a Plot couldn't deviate that much, could it? Surely it couldn't get Ryuu that wrong. "Bad call"? an admission of fault.
'Shut up!' it said defensively.
Daisukenojo snorted and looked back up at the sky, probably trying to memorise this manifestation of one of Ryuu's only acknowledged mistakes.
Raiku rolled her shoulders again, the familiar crack-crack of released tension distracting her from this disturbing, out-of-character behaviour. She could tell Yamada was looking at her from what she could spot of him in her peripheral vision, and let her irritation spike for a moment. Of course he would think it was weird, for one of Ryuu's mistakes to pass with such little fanfare. But tolerating the creature was one thing- bantering with it was entirely another. With any luck, he'd assume it was because of her mistakes earlier that had led to this in the first place.
A cool breeze ruffled her hair, the first real relief she'd had in weeks.
'Thanks, man,' Daisukenojo said grudgingly, ignoring or somehow forgetting that Ryuu had refused to alter the weather for so much as a second for weeks, unmoved by any amount of begging, bribery attempts and at one dire point, overt death threats. 'It's a nice change. Maybe you've got a heart in there after all.'
Raiku almost choked on air. Or it could have been the thick wave of irony.
Both of them ignored her display. It snorted. 'Like I'd help you after your gloating just now.'
'Your weather predictions must be worse than I thought,' Daisuke snickered, cuing a round of bickering. It wouldn't matter how much of Ryuu it got wrong, it seemed; no matter what discrepancies, what gaps, the narrative stamp of RYUU across it was all anyone else would see.
Raiku rubbed her face wearily. She couldn't help but empathise with her father, who saw more of this shit than anyone. 'So!' she said, forcing brightness. 'I guess we should… move the bodies?'
Yamada shrugged and she looked at him, unable to help it despite desire to avoid his gaze. His every move just set off the threat-detection part of her brain, it wasn't her fault! "We could."
'…Could?' she echoed.
"Or we could leave them here," he said. "In case they really did have back-up, get me?"
Raiku cast her gaze to the man lying still, at where his hands had dug into the soil against whatever had happened. His bitten fingernails, just like Daisuke's. 'You… want to leave them as an example?' she asked slowly, and was proud of how her voice didn't waver.
Yamada was watching her, dark eyes unreadable. He nodded.
Raiku had never been the problem when it came to killing people; he knew it, she knew it, Daisuke frequently brought up her cavalier approach to human life as a matter of course. She had the same programmed moral outrage as anyone and a healthy dose of squeamishness, but she was much faster to turn it off, much quicker to leap to the capital decision than Daisuke or even Ryuu ever had been. It felt strange, now, for him to watch her so carefully when it just came to the matter of the bodies left behind. It felt strange, now, for some part of her to object to just leaving them out in the open. But they'd died as themselves- some part of that was a privilege, now.
'Hey, douchebag! Cut it out!' Daisuke's yell cut through the odd tension between her and Yamada. They both turned, breaking eye contact. He was bristling with outrage, struggling to keep his overloaded pack steady in the sudden rising wind.
Yamada exhaled audibly through his nose, a sharp sound of annoyance. "Sullen! Cut that shit out!"
Ryuu glared at both of them, one hand raised to its head to keep its hair out of its face. 'Oh, like all wind on earth is my fault?!' it snapped. It jabbed a finger up towards the sky. 'It's been shitty weather for weeks, and now I'm responsible?!'
Raiku cast her gaze upwards. The intensifying cloud cover had grown darker the longer they'd stood there, made darker still by the Plot-black flecks still drifting through the air. 'So fast?' she asked incredulously. 'Are you kidding me?' She looked around. 'Isn't this a little on the nose?!'
Reflexively, she looked back on the ground. The Plot wrapped around Ryuu's ankles thrashed impatiently.
God, she thought wearily, give her the patience to deal with some Genematrix theatrics, these ridiculous Plot histrionics without losing her mind. Again, so soon after it had forced matters last time? And come on, storm clouds? Hadn't her own Plot had enough of that particular portent? Oh no, she sniggered sarcastically in the back of her mind; not a thunderstorm. Anything but the combination of things that her team was uniquely poised to manage without issue. Anything but heavy-handed symbolism.
There was a clap of thunder in the distance, the flash of dry lightning that rung hollow to her without the grasping heat it usually drew from her. She huffed petulantly.
"Speedy?" Yamada asked, low and warning, wind catching enough to whip his words away in the growing noise.
'It's not me!' she protested, offended, sinking into a crouch like she could get away from the goddamn sky, or possibly the doomcloud of Yamada's outrage. 'I can't feel it at all!'
Yamada turned. "Sullen?!"
'I told you it wasn't me!' Ryuu shouted, over the rising wind. 'I can't feel anything!'
'Do you even use those stupid senses!?' Daisukenojo's yell was becoming increasingly hard to hear; the storm had blown in within seconds and she could feel the wind tearing at her clothes, the ambient drop in temperature and a strange sharp, metallic smell. 'It's fucking windy!'
She turned, hands clapped over her ears to protect them from the stinging wind and Ryuu was basically tearing its hair out, a look of agonised confusion visible through the hair being whipped wildly around its face. 'No, it's not!'
"It clearly goddamn is!" Yamada bellowed.
There was a sudden thunderclap, loud enough that Raiku could feel it.
But she couldn't.
A sharp spike of chakra from Yamada. "Speedy!"
'Does this look natural to you?!' she shouted, voice already hoarse from trying to be heard over the din. It was too dark to make out his features clearly, anymore.
Yamada's arm was straining – Yamada, straining- against something so thin her eyes watered, something too weak to matter but so black it was like a slice through the air.
Really, the Gairano part of her asked; really? She could guess what would happen next, and furtively looked around for the telltale sign of shinobi in the area, knowing Ryuu's family would show up at any second. For dramatic monologues, no doubt. She was already skipping ahead to try and work out the best way to cut it off, or at least abbreviate what she was sure was coming.
Which would be, in retrospect, a mistake.
There was a sudden lurch around her midriff and the dizzying jerk of the world around her, abrupt weightlessness from what she realised was herself starting to get shoved off her feet by the wind and her own startled scream. She tried to flatten herself and ended up being bodily dragged backwards by something part-wind and part-not, the icy, oily ache of Plot wrapping around her feet. She shrieked, fingers dragging against the ground and leaving raised furrows, the fabric of her gloves ripped through from the friction of resisting and her failing grip on the ground.
"Speedy!"
'Yamada!' she screamed, trying to scrabble back to the safety of the ground. She heard Daisukenojo's faint cry and a hand shot into her vision, grabbing at her own.
'Raiku!' Ryuu's voice cried. 'Hold on to me!' She shook her head desperately, her whole body trying to recoil from it even as she tried to hang onto the ground more firmly. Her grip failed just as Ryuu reached her, wide black eyes too blank in its lovely, terrified face before she flew backwards, a solid impact to the back of her head sending her into a red-black flash of pain.
It's Mura that she thinks of.
Raiku hadn't thought of her as often as she maybe should have, but it's Mura's face there. Her father's face as he sits across from her, the way the two seem somehow the same.
I killed her. The words on his newspaper stretch across his hands, his lowered eyelids, down his arms, neatly printed over and over. I killed her for what she did to you,
and then it pulls him apart.
She was warm.
Raiku's mind dredged itself up from the depressingly familiar abyss to register that first: she was warm. Warm enough to feel the tackiness of drying sweat on her temples, the backs of her knees and the small of her back.
The second, her exhausted brain doggedly continued, after it had absorbed enough new information, was that she felt like shit. She jolted fully awake with a gasp and a groan, muscles overtaxed screaming at her in protested when she tried and failed to curl into a ball. A heavy weight across her midriff stopped her. Or that could have been the hot, throbbing ache in the back of her head, or the sharp sting of her ribs when she exhaled.
Why, she silently lamented, did so many chapters of her life start this way? Why couldn't she just end the day by falling asleep and then wake up in that same place, rather than always dramatically losing consciousness the second a Plot touched her? This was why her family gave her shit about being a sissy. Who fainted the second the Genematrix looked at them? It was like the damn thing was determined to beat her up as much as it could possibly get away with. Using her as a proxy for the frustration all Gairano had caused it over the years.
It was probably a dead body lying on her, that same morbid corner of her mind said glumly. Or maybe her abduction-by-weather had left her paralysed. That would be her luck exactly. Though it was unlikely to be Yamada, or she'd have been crushed to death long before she woke.
Raiku sighed, trying to marshal the strength of conviction to open her eyes. She wanted to lie down. She was already lying down, but she was lying where, by the feels of her various aches and pains, she had been thrown. That didn't count. She wanted to make the choice to lie down and she wanted her dad to come in and say something mortifying and then tell her it would be okay, that her long day was over.
Her dad wasn't coming, though. She sighed again, tilted her head up and opened her eyes.
Her vision was grey. For a moment she almost had enough energy to panic, until she could focus enough to make out the little individual lines crossing her vision, the flickering streaks of black.
Ryuu, because of course it was Ryuu, exhaled heavily against the fabric covering her neck, its hair blown across her face to obstruct her vision because Ryuu could be an asshole in any state of consciousness. Raiku took this in stoically, the way it'd fallen halfway across her, the way its head rested on her bruised collarbone and the surprising weight of it, pressing her down into the ground. The grip of its hand still around her wrist, the skin there sore and hot with what could have been a fracture or a bruise. She'd assumed the thing would be lighter, she'd realised. She'd expected it to be hollow inside, to have discarded the parts of Ryuu he wouldn't be needing anymore.
She swallowed. Unceremoniously, she reached her uncovered fingertips and dug them into its hair to touch its scalp and jolt it awake.
There was that strange disconnect, that gap between what she knew and felt would happen and what did. Or rather, what didn't. Moments passed, just the silkiness of its hair and that curious, organic feeling of its skin resting against her fingertips before the creature stirred on its own, a huff against her clothes and the curious, alien feeling of muscles shifting against her.
'Raiku?' it asked, voice muzzy and barely coherent, lifting its head slightly.
She jerked her hand back like it had bitten her, feeling the catch of hairs between her fingers and ripping free of its scalp. It made a low noise of complaint and let its head drop back down, forcing the breath out of her.
What. The fuck, Raiku thought in a daze, staring at the hairs glinting between her fingers.
She nodded once, and then again, and then she just kept nodding until the feeling bubbling up in her chest exploded up.
'Get off me!' she shrieked, shoving it harshly. It jerked upwards and rolled away, letting her up enough to get into a painful crouch and desperately pat herself down like she could brush off whatever germs it had left on her.
'What the hell?' it exclaimed, fixing a glare on her when it rolled to a stop, propped on one arm and shedding the soil it had picked up on the way. 'What is wrong with you?!'
'Wrong with me?' she repeated incredulously, finding she did indeed have the correct number of fingers, toes and zero-sum of Plot. 'You were on top of me! You're what's wrong!'
'I was unconscious,' it snapped. 'It's not like I did it on purpose!' It got to its feet in what it probably hoped was a huffy way, but that looked too painful to sell as truly indignant. 'Excuse me for getting caught up in the same monster-storm that you did!' The effect was further ruined by the way it stretched its back with a loud popping noise.
'You're excused,' she hissed, straightening up with even less grace than it had. She braced her hands on her hips and tried to stretch out her lower back, cramped and agonising after lying on the ground with-
Her mind skipped the rest of the sentence. With what had happened, it supplied instead. She raised a hand to gingerly touch the back of her head and winced against the sudden sting, but it came back clear of blood in a small mercy. 'Shouldn't even had had to deal with that storm,' she muttered. Ryuu could have stopped it, she thought with no small amount of vindictiveness.
'We got thrown into a tree,' Ryuu grumbled, trying to get its tangled hair out of its face. 'More than one.' She had touched that hair, she thought a tad hysterically, fingertips twitching. She had gotten all up in that hair.
She blinked hard and finally turned to look around. Snapped branches and upturned earth greeted her everywhere she looked, but for one of her blackouts, it was surprisingly tame in terms of destruction. It was darker, she noticed, probably closer to the end of the day by now and moving into evening, but the trees around them swayed under a normal wind, in a normal way. Sans more than a few branches, but no sign of fire or whatever fight Yamada must have put up, so that was something.
At least it wasn't raining, she thought, casting a bleary eye towards a clearer, early evening sky. That would have just been the perfect finale to their day.
'I can't feel Yamada or Daisukenojo,' Ryuu said as it yanked a stick out of its arm and sealed it with a quick flare of chakra and a wince. 'What about you?'
Raiku rolled her eyes around to give it a dirty look, ignoring how even that made the pain in her head shoot down her neck. It stared back, darkness flickering through its eyes whenever it blinked, a second, oily eyelid. Good, she thought uncharitably; good. It didn't deserve to look at her with Ryuu's eyes, no matter how creepy they were.
'No,' she said as derisively as she could after it became clear it was still waiting for a response. 'I can't.'
Its lips twisted. 'Let me have a look at your head.' It stepped towards her, branches crunching underfoot. It stopped when she immediately skittered a few steps in the opposite direction, skin flashing and sparking for just a moment.
'I'm fine!' she said, voice high and tense. 'No need.' She rubbed the back of her head vigorously, the sharp uptick in throbbing making her briefly wish for death, and then displayed her hands for it to look at. 'No blood.'
It narrowed Ryuu's eyes at her. 'External bleeding isn't really the concern with a head trauma, Speedy.' It said slowly. 'Just come over here.'
Raiku looked at it.
I could do it, she thought. I could kill it right here, and no one would see.
Its ersatz eyelids flickered again.
Raiku grimaced. With the mask, it would at least look a little like a smile.
'We can't stay here,' it said eventually, when she said nothing, didn't bridge the yawning gap between them. 'If this is the sort of disaster that the other teams came across, Yamada and Daisukenojo could already be dead. We have to find a patrol and send news back.'
Raiku narrowed her eyes. 'I really doubt they'd leave us alive if they'd managed to kill Yamada. We'd be easy after that.'
Ryuu shook its head. 'We're stuck in the middle of nowhere. It's not too late for them to come and finish us off if we don't get out of here.'
Damn. That was actually a pretty good point.
It wasn't done, apparently, and it kept talking as it started brushing dirt and leaves from its clothes. 'If we can get up high enough, we can see where Iji is and use that to figure out where we are. Maybe swing back through there to send a message home.'
Her lips twisted. 'Yamada said they lied to us.'
It folded its arms. 'There are teams of ours moving through there, and it intersects with one of our patrol routes.'
Raiku struggled to repress the urge to fidget uncomfortably. Everything it was saying made sense. It all seemed perfectly logical. Everything it said was … right. It seemed right, and felt right.
But she knew damn well that it wasn't, couldn't be, and the fact she couldn't tell why was starting to make her headache worse.
Of course it wanted to go back to Iji, where the next step in this little drama would undoubtedly kick off. Its motives weren't the rational, sensible things that her and Ryuu would ordinarily have come up with.
But what if, her brain suggested, she didn't want to do that? What if they did… anything else?
What if she just lay down and died. What the hell would this amoral, soulless causality engine do then?!
Raiku dragged her palms down her face, stretching her features out, and groaned.
She had done this to herself, really. She was the one who had bemoaned this whole thing being too linear, too straightforward. Well, how was this for straightforward?
Apparently realising she was too wrapped up in her own thoughts to meaningfully contribute, Ryuu leapt into the trees. Probably to get a view of Iji, she mused, or to ... sprout wings of some sort and fly into the sunset, ruining that too.
A/N: And just like that, the beast lumbers on. By which I mean that I can actually proceed. Also, I am alive! Despite all expectations, including my own. Also, I've been sent an Ao3 invite and ... I guess I'll port this across, at some stage? I've been threatened into doing so. When I'm back into the swing of it? The main issue right now is just not doing everything I've wanted to at once. And also not just joining in the messages I've been sent and writing various improbable pairing drabbles for my poor, traumatised thundercloud, rather than actually advancing the plot.
See you soon!
