A/N: MY GOD. I am still alive. Also, Shana has been instrumental in getting back into the swing of things and is enduring my constant rambling with good humour, so please show her love.
I have now started just randomly posting in-world snippets on the tumblr. The great mystery of the Gairano/Uchiha romance generations ago has been revealed, up on Northwrought. Also I wrote the Uchiha's perspective when I was meant to be doing this, so someone send help.
ONWARDS!
Raiku knew for a fact that they were being watched.
She brushed another leaf out of her hair, sure (yet again) that it would be the last and she would finally be free of foliage. Next to her, Ryuu walked with its typical light steps.
She trudged, just to be spiteful. And while she was on the subject: 'Are you sure that this is the right way?' she asked, dragging her ruined gloves off and replacing them with one of the three spare sets Yamada mandated she carry at all times.
Ryuu shot her a baleful look and didn't dignify it with a response.
She threw her hands up. 'Sorry for questioning you, my lord.'
Really, she was just trying to fill the silence. She ducked under a branch and let her mind drift towards the small nexus of conductivity in her mind, the typical blend of running water and metal that told her exactly where Iji was in relation to their position. With any luck, they'd get there before it was particularly late, though it was already dark. They would have been there already, except Ryuu had decided her "significantly elevated risk of brain trauma" shouldn't be exacerbated by "totally unnecessary power usage", so walking it was.
It was probably a little odd she could no longer decide when the real Ryuu would have been genuinely concerned versus condescending, but she could chalk it up to history. She had given up trying to keep her distance from it in the dark, the thing automatically gravitating to her trademark glow, and had to settle for ignoring the way their shoulders would sometimes brush against each other.
So really, it came as a relief to realise they were being watched.
'I think I see light ahead,' Ryuu said, carelessly letting the branch it had pushed aside swing back to narrowly miss her. 'We must be getting close.' Raiku clambered over a fallen log and made a general noise of agreement, just ignoring the casual disregard for her safety. It would have been a good sign, if she were more fanciful, but Ryuu wasn't coming back; it could get the hang of him, but it wasn't him.
Right. Being watched.
It wasn't that she could feel eyes on her, because to be totally honest, Raiku was paranoid enough to feel that way most of the time. It wasn't any of her standard senses, it wasn't the extra one, and it wasn't any of the weird shinobi ones she'd never really gotten the hang of, either.
They were being watched, and that certainty was one hundred percent based on a lifetime of terrible novels. Also because, as it became more obvious that Ryuu was right and they were approaching the village again, she could see the Plot sliding along trees like another shadow in the light and vanishing in the spaces between. And the little bastard had holes in it like eyes. Smug little eyes.
Raiku realised she'd been frowning so hard that her forehead was hurting.
That. That was uncalled-for. That was just petty behaviour.
'What do we do when we actually get there?' she asked. Ryuu glanced back at her. She swung under a low branch as an excuse to break eye contact. 'I mean. If they really did lie to us, then we can't just walk in.'
'We're absolutely going to walk in,' Ryuu sighed, sending another branch snapping towards her in what was absolutely a deliberate way this time. 'We're just gonna go to the inn and see if there's another team there who can help us. They're not some enemy camp, and you're super obvious anyway.'
Raiku huffed. 'You were the one everyone was staring at before.'
'What was that?'
She rolled her eyes. 'Nothing, nothing. Let me guess: if there's no one there, we're going to go off and find a patrol to send a report back.'
It grunted in agreement, picking up into a light jog when the trees parted enough to show a low, stone wall, the lights from the window beyond spilling out over it.
She lengthened her stride to keep up, but wasn't willing to let it go. 'And what, we're just going to leave Daisuke and Yamada behind?'
'We don't have a better idea,' it pointed out, deftly vaulting over the low wall and into Iji proper. Well. Iji-back-of-someone's-overgrown-yard proper. It swung around a clothesline, making for the weathered garden door to the backstreets.
Raiku wasn't going to pout. She wasn't. She wasn't going to pout because the Genematrix beast had made a decent point, because even a broken clock was right once to twice a day depending on whether it used twenty-four hour time or not. She was going to swing past this with minimal drama, make her way back to the conspicuously (now ominously) named innkeeper Tadano Taro and if this thing had any sense of symmetry, Yamada and Daisuke would be there when they arrived.
Her thoughts distracted her just long enough for a light to switch on in the backyard they were trespassing through. 'What the hell are you doing in my yard?!'
Raiku yelped and broke into a sprint.
'What the hell are you doing back?' Taro asked, not even bothering to look up from what was intimidatingly small writing in a needlessly large ledger. He had little semicircle glasses, perched precariously far down his nose. 'Didn't you have some mission to get to?'
'Tadano. Tadano Taro. Can I just say, it is so good to see you,' Raiku said, leaning over on the desk to prop her chin on her hands. 'It really is.'
He glanced at her over his glasses. 'Didn't you start a bar fight and flee town?' he asked suspiciously. He scanned her charming visage. 'Or beat up some of the landscaping?'
Something tugged sharply on the back of her head. As she clapped her hands there, Ryuu dropped a twig wrapped in several long white hairs onto the floor. It pushed her aside. 'Have you seen anyone else from Konoha here today?'
Taro looked back down at his stupid, stereotypical ledger. 'No.'
Ryuu frowned. 'Really, no one?'
'Yes, really, no one.' Taro groped around for an eraser, because apparently the conversation was over.
Ryuu and Raiku exchanged looks. Or they would have, if Raiku had been able to look closer than its right ear without shuddering. She drew it to the side, not actually sure what to do. Yamada and Daisuke should have been there. Or some sort of clue, maybe? The Plot was doing its own thing, as far as she could see. Just sort of… woobling around, which was just a less committal form of wobbling. 'Do you actually know where a patrol route intersects with us?' she whispered.
Ryuu gave her a haughty look.
She narrowed her eyes. Ryuu might have known, but who knew what details had been shoved out of his head to make way for whatever this thing needed to know. Probably all sorts of emotional details were cluttering up the joint now, where Ryuu had stored cold, hard facts instead.
'…No,' it finally conceded.
'Why didn't you just say that?!'
It made an abortive, frustrated gesture. 'Are you going to complain or are you going to help me think of what to do?!'
Raiku rocked back on her heels and folded her arms. It had a good point. She wasn't exactly being helpful. She hunched slightly, drumming her fingers on her arms.
...Not that she had to be helpful. This was all going to go precisely one way, after all; whichever way the Genematrix had decided it should when it did this to Ryuu. Just long enough for it to get over-excited and for her to kill him.
'We could wait for someone to pass through,' she said eventually, keeping her eyes on the floor. Pretending to be deep in thought, but more monitoring their eerie dark hitchhiker to see what it went for next.
It had paused in place.
Typical. So they were playing a game of chicken, were they? Joke was on the Plot; she was the biggest chicken alive.
'Do we have any money to stay here?' Ryuu countered. 'No. We do not. You see my wallet anywhere?' It patted its pockets in a needlessly sarcastic fashion. 'All I've got is loose change.'
'You saying you're too good to camp?' she hissed. The ink-blotch of Plot remained still.
'We can't camp in the middle of the village, where we need to be.'
'Could you take this outside?' Taro asked, sounding bored. While they'd been hiding in a corner and muttering like a couple of totally normal people, he'd started switching off lights. 'I'm closing the front desk for the night.'
Raiku, as decided earlier, was not going to pout. But it was warm and dark outside, like the shitty day was showing its soft underbelly to lull her into a false sense of security. She didn't trust her judgement when he metaphors got that weird. She made a last-ditch attempt. 'Can't we… start a tab or something?'
Taro flicked the lights off in the dining room with a decisive click. 'No tabs.' He ushered them both, all one-point-five people outside into the dark, and shut the entryway light off behind them. The door didn't slam, but the spirit of finality still came across.
Raiku skittered to a stop on the stone, put her hands on her hips and just took a second to mentally regroup. Ryuu was muttering grumpily to itself, which would buy her a few moments free of the black hole it felt like to her senses.
So. The inn had been a bust. The Plot was playing possum, or had possibly suffered from heart failure. She could hear crickets chirping in the humid darkness, and the winding, stone-walled paths of Iji were already growing darker as lights were shut off, as doors closed to them. Basically a recipe for her and Ryuu to do some appropriately back-dropped bonding for filler—or god forbid, end up cuddled up for the night—which was never going to happen. All of Iji was basically an enormous relationship-building trap, apparently.
She rubbed the back of her neck. Think, Raiku.
Right. If they were going to proceed, they needed to locate either a Plot Device, their team or someone from Konoha. Or an enemy, which...
She tilted her head back, eyebrows raised in consideration. The stars above them were dim and flickering, too buffeted by the turbulence such warm summer air always brought.
The enemy? Violence could be good! She could really go for some violence, all things considered. There was just something about meeting resistance, feeling it suddenly give way.
She turned the soothing rub of her neck into a harder clawing motion, shaking her head. No no! No there wasn't! That was the indignation talking. She had to be smart about this, she couldn't just zap her way out of this one.
'Is this the only inn?' Ryuu asked, breaking the peaceful night ambience. With its stupid, plagiarised voice.
Raiku didn't even bother to think about it now that it was clearly on a roll. She shrugged.
'How can you not know? You spent weeks here, you spent the most time here out of any of us!'
She waved a hand tiredly. 'Yeah, but the only places we deliberately went were of strategic value. And in case you didn't notice, we sort of had to stop doing that after—oh, how many was it—one place?!' She hesitated. 'Unless you count the takoyaki stand, but I'm really just thinking of the one venue.'
The less said about that bar, she thought darkly, the better.
Ryuu shoved its hair back from where it had started to fall over its forehead. 'Well, how likely is it that they would have mentioned you to any other shinobi passing by?'
She eyed it. As best as she could in the dark, anyway. 'You mean "how likely are they to remember that person who tried to blow the whole place up," and then kick us out immediately?' she asked pointedly. 'No. We're not going back there. I'll get lynched. I almost got lynched last time!'
Ryuu made a show of looking around. 'I'm sorry—how many other options do we have?'
The ensuing stand-off was only really interrupted by the crickets who, despite their best efforts, continued to add little value to the proceedings.
'How about this,' she said, steepling her fingers, widening her eyes and speaking slowly, clearly. 'I refuse to go back there, and if you try and make me, I will burn it down with everyone still inside.'
Ryuu looked taken aback. It was a deeply unnatural look for it to wear.
Raiku raised her eyebrows. 'Including you.' Especially you.
The seconds ticked on. Metaphorically, in the absence of either a clock or literally any amenities. Because they were broke, in the middle of the street and threatening homicide. A frankly worrying trend that had arisen in their lives.
'Ha!' she broke into forced, nervous laughter. 'Or we could use that loose change on food and regroup! We'll work something out, that would be the thing to do, definitely, that's what we'll do.' As if on cue, because it was, her stomach growled. Good old stomach, she thought fondly. So predictable. Also, so goddamn hungry.
It relaxed slightly, but the wary set of its features wasn't completely gone.
God. Threaten to commit murderous arson one time as a joke, probably.
'…The teahouse will probably still be open,' it said grudgingly, jerking its head in some random direction. 'Since it serves alcohol. Food'll be cheap there.'
She creased her eyes in a smile, too cheesy by half. 'Great! Greatness! Let's do it, come on!' She bounded a few steps ahead before settling into a more normal stride, shoving her hands in her pockets.
Ryuu scrubbed a hand down its face when it caught up, leading her down a wider, more worn stone path towards a better-lit series of buildings. The low hum of voices was carried towards them as they approached. 'Any idea of where to start? I'd rather not just run back to Konoha without the other two.'
Raiku hummed. She had known precisely three elite shinobi in her life, and from the available data there she knew they would behave in certain ways. She started to tick things off on her fingers. 'Yamada goes home to his family, which ANBU obviously can't do here. Or he yells at children until they exercise to the point of vomiting, which they... could do here?' She shook her head after considering it for a moment. 'But probably isn't standard practice. So the Hokage drinks and gambles, and Kakashi reads porn. Those are the only references I have.'
Ryuu was giving her a weird look. She didn't even need to check, she just knew.
'…We need to find better role models,' she concluded, dropping her hand. It grunted in agreement and gestured to the building at the far end of the street. It was a classic wooden affair, with green cloth drapes to mark the entrance and the cheerful chatter of customers who weren't homicidal drunks, so Raiku liked it already. The earthy, indefinably clean smell of tea wafted out.
Ryuu gestured. 'After you.'
Probably hoping to get any lynching out of the way before it had to walk in, she reflected, but walked in anyway.
There was a trend, she had noticed, of people slapping the label of "teahouse" onto what were, in fact, just little restaurants that served tea and made the waitresses wear more traditional clothing. There was a series of long benches and tables, forcing people to sit with strangers—gross—and it could have passed for pop-up stall, if the floor hadn't been hardwood.
'I'll go order,' Ryuu said, coming up behind her.
'You don't know what I want!' she protested.
'Oh, yes I do. You want the "whatever is affordable" special. Go find a table.'
Good point, actually. Another, which was a trend she didn't love. She The furthest end of the far table was free, probably because everyone else was as uncomfortable passing by literally everyone in the restaurant to eat, just like she was. Because her fears were totally normal and definitely shared by others. She stuck her hands in her pockets and made her way over, pretending she couldn't feel the weird looks. She pulled the bench out slightly so she wouldn't have to awkwardly fold her long legs into her seat, bracing a hand on the table.
Bang!
She blinked.
She looked down at her hand.
The wood had split open and cracked lengthwise down the length of the table, immediately seared black under her palm. The civilian sitting across the table stared at her, frozen in the act of lifting his teacup to his mouth.
Raiku stared back, wood of the table continuing to smoke under her fingertips. '…Well then,' she said eventually. 'That will… This… This was a lesson. To everyone. Everyone involved has learnt something important today. Yes.' She yanked her hand back up and brushed the splinters from her gloves, yanking one long one out of her palm. 'Yep!'
The man's teacup had broken in his white-knuckled grip, but he just continued to boggle at her.
'You… you should probably, uh, see someone about that!' Raiku said lamely, trying valiantly to summon up some cheer in the face of frankly depressing odds. She squinted. 'That looks… oh, yes, that's blood, you're bleeding.'
Without blinking, the man slowly transferred his gaze to his hand like he had never seen it before. Blood dripped to the table.
'Well, I think we can go ahead and call this a resounding success,' Raiku gritted out to Ryuu. It snorted and pushed past her, the nonchalance of the act ruined somewhat when it jolted, a thin arc of electricity passing between them.
'Fuck!'
Raiku recoiled, either from the jolt or the curse, it could have been either, and heard a crunch when she stepped back. Looking down, a small bowl she had knocked off the table was now crushed underfoot. 'Oh come on!'
She had to leave. This was escalating again. Either she or the town was cursed, and only one of them would come out of things unscathed if she stuck around.
'What the fuck is with you today?!' Ryuu demanded, stalking after her and back to square one: the great and awful, irredeemable outdoors. 'First you threaten me, then you assault some random civilian,' and she could hear its footsteps and she was moving away, it was grabbing her arm and pulling her back to face it with its stupid hands and its stupid voice and its stupid, stolen face-
Ryuu slowly breathed in, so close she could feel it on her face, too close, and Raiku dimly registered that she was the one who had closed that distance, left them inches away from each other. She was the one with her hand splayed across its chest and her long, pointed fingers digging into its sternum hard enough to feel flesh start to give beneath her fingertips, enough for her bones to vibrate with the strain of not dragging down and tearing it apart herself. Enough to feel her tendons fray.
'Raiku,' it said slowly, softly, its too-yellow eyes watching her from its too-perfect face. 'What are you doing?'
Raiku forced herself to exhale slowly through her nose, dragging another breath in with equal, measured care. She knew her eyes were opened too wide, too focused; she knew her whole body was too tense, too clearly broadcasting intent with her every muscle, but she didn't feel angry, why wasn't she angry, why wasn't she mad when she should have been, she got to have just one second to-
'Is everything alright out here?' someone called, because actually, no she didn't. Disoriented, Raiku dragged her gaze from Ryuu's face to see the waiter standing in the doorway to the restaurant, her inadvertent victim hovering just in sight behind him while a taller companion awkwardly pressed a napkin to his bloody fingers. She realised how close she was standing to the monster, the warning vibrations in the air of the Plot encountering Entirely Too Much Gairano in one place and starting to get skittish. She stepped back. Ryuu reached up to rub its chest absently.
'We're fine,' it called over its shoulder. 'Long day.'
The waiter grunted, apparently satisfied they were at least not coming back in, and disappeared back inside while the injured patron hovered for a few seconds, likely terrified she'd change her mind and come back for him, before his friend dragged him away.
The two of them stared at each other in the waning light.
This wasn't working.
She could try anything she wanted, she could make any decision that she liked, but if it didn't feed into the right machinations, they were never going to get anywhere.
So...
'What if it was your family?' she asked, hating herself for the way the Plot grew outwards, like a living shadow under Ryuu's feet. Hating herself for encouraging it, even if it was the only way to hurt it in a way that would matter.
Ryuu stiffened.
'You said you'd never heard from them again, after they attacked us last time,' she persisted. 'But I don't think that's true.'
'Raiku,' it said, in Ryuu's deep voice made even lower. 'Stop.'
Raiku felt a hum start to build in her chest, that tooth's edge vibration resonating through the heavy, blank place its head had rested. 'Have they come back for you again? Is that what all this was about, them just trying to lure you here so they could kill the rest of us off and—what, abduct you?' She flexed her hands uselessly into fists just to crush something, just to squeeze out that space between her fingers. 'Kill you?'
'Raiku. Stop talking,' it said softly.
She would have been frightened of Ryuu, to see that look on his face. To hear him speak that softly. She opened her mouth to speak again, eyes closed to brace herself when Ryuu made a small, choked noise.
She looked up.
Ryuu was frozen, the blood drained from its face. Raiku quickly spun around to see what had it so petrified, but the street behind her was dark and empty. She couldn't sense anything. She turned back, confused, and it didn't react. It stood stock still.
'What?' she demanded, trying desperately to detect anything out of the ordinary. Nothing. She waved a hand cautiously in front of its face.
Nothing.
Raiku moved to take a step back, and that's when she saw him.
There was a man looking at them, his hands in his pockets and shoulders relaxed and he could have been an innkeeper or a store clerk or a florist or any other number of civilian archetypes because her eyes were watering just trying to find a defining feature on him. She went to wave and found her hand unresponsive, where she had clenched it at her side.
Him.
Him? He could have been twenty five, or fifty five, his hair a sort of unfortunate mix of browns that could have been grey or just dull. His eyes weren't entirely brown but they weren't entirely green either, and they were slowly moving over them like he had all the time in the world to just… take it all in.
Him.
She jerked her head like she could shake the thought loose.
Him, though? There was nothing special about him, and with a certainty that seemed to come from her bones, not learned but instilled through generation after generation of Gairano genetic inheritance, Raiku knew that this was all, somehow, because of him.
He looked at her blankly, looked right through her and Ryuu still wasn't moving.
It seemed impossible. There was nothing offensive or even remarkable about him but there was a feeling, hot and vicious, growing at the base of her spine, something stretching to her fingers and making her feel, suddenly, exactly how sharp her teeth were.
He walked over with his hands stuck in his pockets, as casual as can be. As he got close to them, Raiku still transfixed, he pulled a knife out. It wasn't a kunai, or any of the weapons she was used to; it was a wood-handled knife, a short, utilitarian thing that wouldn't be out of place in a kitchen. The sort of thing her dad would like; a knife just meant to cut things and to do nothing else.
It was so banal in its simplicity that Raiku just watched for a moment, fingers twitching and eyes caught on his ordinary and impossible face, until he started to raise the knife towards Ryuu's frozen neck.
She leapt into action, hand lashing out to grip his wrist and twist it sharply. He gave a short, surprised yell, the knife dropping from his hand to clatter on stone. It sliced a shallow line through Ryuu's shirt on the way down, but it said nothing, did nothing even as it began to bleed sluggishly.
Raiku forced him to his knees, holding his arm at a cruel angle behind his back. 'What do you think you're doing?!' she demanded.
She could break his neck. She could see the line of it, the tension there pulling it back from his struggle against her grip, the awkward line of his body contorted around the twisted joint. She could break his neck, she could lean down and sink her teeth into that skin and pour lightning through him until there was nothing left but ashes and the taste of metal in her mouth, she could-
Raiku swallowed harshly, mouth suddenly dry. Her eyes were burning, like she hadn't blinked in a while. 'Who are you?!' She twisted the wrist she held just a little more, and couldn't have said why.
He made a sound, a nothing-noise of pain, but said nothing.
She shook him. 'What did you do to Ryuu?' do to not-Ryuu, the not-Ryuu that wasn't hers but wasn't his to take away.
Raiku heard a spare, minimal sort of noise, and realised after an uncomfortable moment that he was laughing through the pain. It wasn't a normal sort of laugh; it was stripped down, like the bones of a laugh laid bare and free of marrow, ringing hollow. 'You think that's your friend,' he stated more than asked. He had a strange voice, she realised distantly, one she could just make out through the roaring in her ears. His tone was even, the pitch mid-range, but it had an edge in it she didn't understand. Like a fine line had been drawn through it, now wavering just slightly.
'I think you tried to stab—' it, 'him,' she corrected with some difficulty. 'So you can start talking or I can start hurting you.' She yanked his arm up higher and could feel the strain of a joint barely holding on to its socket. 'It's really that simple.'
'How are you doing this?' he asked instead. 'Why do you see me?'
...This was a weird one, even for Raiku.
'Because you're right in front of me?' she said, the words coming out more of a question despite herself. Irritated, she shook him again. 'Hey! I'm asking the questions!'
'Just let me go,' he sighed, after he had obligingly made some further pained noises and wow, she had really gotten much closer to dislocating that arm than she had planned. 'There's really no point to doing this.'
What is this day, she thought to herself wonderingly. What kind of day should she even call this? In what universe did a weird-looking shinobi grabbing you, saying they would kill you, threatening to snap your arm off even, get this lacklustre a response? Was she that bad at this? Oh god, had Mayuko been right? Or Kakashi, for that matter?!
Ignorant of her brewing existential crisis, the man shook his head. 'I didn't have much of a window here,' he remarked. 'I guess I should have been more careful.'
'A window?' she pressed, 'what kind of—' she trailed off, gaze falling to the floor.
Ryuu's Plot was stretched out, flattened, immobile. She had seen that before she'd laid eyes on this asshole. But where she had forced this man to his knees, it had shied away, a perfect circle of free space around their feet. As if it couldn't bear to come into contact with one or both of them in any way. It made sense, for Gairano Raiku. It made sense for a Gairano and she saw it all the time with her father, the way the Genematric shuddered and cleared the ground in front of him. This perfect circle in the black was shuddering, starting to pour outwards like an overflowing sink.
Heart pounding, Raiku fisted a hand in his hair and dragged his head back to look at his face, past his pained expression. She knew every member of her family. She knew them all by sight and by sound and they all did, they all knew each other well enough to remember each other like no one else did. She did not know this man.
'How did you do this?' she demanded. 'Who are you?'
He had his eyes screwed shut with pain and cracked them open just slightly to look into hers, into her horrified expression. Something seemed to flicker in his eyes, for a moment, something like recognition and he opened his mouth to—
'Raiku! Raiku, hello!?'
It was getting too familiar, now, Raiku reflected; the sound of Daisukenojo breaking through her concentration, that was. His fingers snapped in front of her nose. She jerked back and almost fell to the ground, expected resistance from her captive where there was none. Where there was no captive.
She was still staring at her empty hands, uncomprehending, when Ryuu and Daisukenojo were predictably snapping at each other.
'Where the hell have you been?' Ryuu demanded. 'We dragged ourselves back here and you and Yamada were what, off sightseeing?'
'Hey, I don't have Yamada! I thought you had him!' Daisukenojo was, when she finally actually paid attention to him, in pretty poor shape. He still had his pack, and hers apparently, but he had rough scrapes up and down his shins, some along his forearms. There were long, shallow scratches on one side of his face and overall he looked… basically like he'd fallen out of a tree and hit every branch on the way down. He also looked tired and irritated, but that was to be expected. 'You can't expect me to carry all this shit, by myself, and keep track of Yamada!'
'Daisukenojo!' Raiku cried, finally catching up with events. She grabbed his shoulder in lieu of the more dangerous Hug option. 'I'm so glad you found us, I was so worried!'
He huffed, but seemed slightly placated. 'I knew you two would end up bein' lunatics somewhere,' he said gruffly. 'So I just followed the trail of destruction.'
Which. Hurtful.
Raiku pushed past it. 'But you haven't seen Yamada anywhere?'
'We've already covered that,' Ryuu sniped, but they both ignored him.
'Nah. There was no sign of him when I woke up. I ended up just outside of Iji,' he explained. 'Figured you guys would head back here at some point.'
That didn't make a lot of sense. 'That doesn't make much sense,' Raiku repeated for the benefit of those not dialed in to her thoughts. 'Who would go to all the trouble of trying to hurt some Konoha-nin and then... take the hard one?'
Daisukenojo raised his eyebrows. 'Good point.'
'Yeah, she's being acting weird all day,' Ryuu agreed. 'You all good in there, Speedy?'
Raiku rolled her eyes. 'Sure sure, it's hilarious that I can make valid points, ha ha. But seriously. Who would go to the trouble of capturing Yamada,' here she gestured somewhere about a foot and a half above her head, indicating his general Yamada-ness, 'but just leave us out in the middle of nowhere? We'd be way easier to kill off, and that's what they were doing before. Just killing them.'
Daisukenojo tapped his chin thoughtfully. 'They might have killed him,' he pointed out. 'And then decided we weren't worth the trouble.'
Ryuu snorted. 'Yeah, right. And where's the massive site of destruction that would take? I've seen him get hit by actual lightning,' they both shot Raiku a frankly unwarranted look here, 'and walk away. Guy's a juggernaut.'
Yamada was a juggernaut. He was also a gifted fighter, a skilled strategist and, unlike the other people she had met today, not possessed of mysterious fail-field capabilities, a sentient Plot who had taken over a close friend, or a highly traumatised civilian who had gotten blood everywhere. Like a douchebag.
Yeah, actually, that was enough for one day.
'That's it!' she cried, putting a hand on each of them and shoving. 'I'm not doing this! I want to eat and then I want to sleep and we can deal with this in the morning!'
'Uh, we just got attacked by some random storm that neither of you two could sense and we still don't know where our teacher is,' Daisukenojo said with a frown. 'I think you can do without your beauty sleep for a while longer.'
'Anyone have a different plan?' she demanded. 'Anyone? Anyone have an idea about what to do next that isn't "get some sleep and regroup"?'
Ryuu looked away, shoving its hands in its pockets the way Ryuu always had when he felt defensive. Well-played, Plot, she thought.
'No? No. So, let's find some... abandoned backyard, set up camp and decide what to do in the morning.' She grabbed her pack where it was hanging off Daisuke's slightly larger one, slinging it over one shoulder. 'Ryuu, you get to sleep on the ground or share with Daisukenojo.'
'He absolutely does not share with Daisukenojo,' said redhead decried. 'Not a chance.'
Raiku spun on her heel decisively and started off down the winding path.
Get it. Winding. Because Iji literally meant—
Raiku's hilarious wordplay was interrupted by further bickering, the constant background soundtrack of her life.
Wow. Not one thing was going to go right today, she reflected wearily.
A/N: No, Raiku. Nothing is going to go right. Come chat to me on tumblr if you like, and marvel at my inability to use the interface. Or, when I get my shit together, wander over the Ao3. Talk soon!
