A/N: So. This got intense. This got out so quickly due to both my perpetual insomnia and the tireless efforts of Shana, my beta. I own nothing but the original characters and plot. Plot?
Raiku fell asleep quickly despite the unlikely nature of their surroundings, but then, she always did. It had long been a source of friction between her and Daisukenojo, who maintained that no one as lackadaisical about murder as she was should sleep so well.
Getting back to sleep, though.
Raiku stared up at the ceiling, listening to the gentle sounds of Ryuu and Daisukenojo breathing in the dark.
Getting back to sleep was the issue.
Wind gently pushed against the tiny wooden house, boards creaking in the dark. It rustled through the tree outside their broken window, the movement of its branches in the dim torchlight making yellow shapes flicker along the ceiling.
Was Byakko asleep, she wondered. Was Byakko staring at the ceiling as well, still so desperate to see his brother? Was Zeshin pacing around the perimeter of this battered compound, sliding through the dark like a waiting knife? Still so angry, the kind of anger she'd seen in Ryuu yet never truly understood.
It wasn't easy, but she closed her eyes and tried to imagine it. In a world without her father, without anyone who understood the things she could see or what she could do, how would she feel? Would it be different without years of Gairano conditioning, would that white-blinding part of her mind be louder, harder, more the forefront of her life and less the backdrop?
She could feel it thrumming at the back of her mind even now, that charged foundation at the base of her thoughts. That deep, roaring hunger that she was so used to she could barely feel it anymore. It felt precarious, somehow; she could almost picture what it would be like, could almost feel her way to Ryuu's perspective. But her mind just wasn't bending that way; she could rationalise her way to a solution, but trying to actually feel it was like pulling teeth. Or reaching for a knife that she'd already thrown, or walking down the stairs and finding one missing when she'd already taken the step.
Raiku scrubbed at her eyes. Time to try again, to take a different approach. She squirmed slightly on the futon, sharp shoulder blades shifting down into the fabric, and closed her eyes again.
Not Ryuu, maybe, but Zeshin. What would her father have done, if she had been taken and he'd found her years later? If he'd found her again and then, once he'd clawed his way back into her life, discovered she'd wanted nothing to do with him? If she had hated him for being the victim of someone else's ruthlessness?
I killed her for what she did to you.
Her eyes shot open again.
No. The thought somehow felt careful in her mind. No. That wouldn't be helpful.
Well, what was she feeling?
Raiku stared at the dark ceiling, watching the patterns of shadows shift and change.
Hungry, she decided, and sat up.
No wonder she hadn't been getting anywhere, how was she meant to empathise with her stomach eating itself? She rubbed her face, pushing staticky strands out of her eyes. Stifling a yawn, she cast her bleary eyes around the rest of the room. They were probably planning on feeding Ryuu in the morning, which would now likely include her and Daisukenojo. Hopefully. Oh god, would they not feed her? No. No, they would. But they'd only had field rations once since the Plot event that separated them all, and Raiku generally had to eat about four standard intakes per meal to maintain the right balance.
She wasn't super willing to wait that long.
She turned her attention to the door. Zeshin had sealed it in a deliberately obvious way, and they were jumpy around her because of a couple of death threats and a single minor explosive event years ago. She shouldn't leave.
Her stomach grumbled. It was an oddly threatening sound.
Raiku gingerly pulled herself free of the blanket, sliding her leg out from under where Daisukenojo had thrown his over her in his sleep. For such a small person, he had a unique gift for taking up an enormous amount of sleeping space. Ryuu, at least, may have fallen asleep on his side facing her and been terrifying her that way, but he slept perfectly still. No need to be concerned about accidental clinging there. Just the unsettling thought that you maybe were sleeping next to a dead body.
Would Daisukenojo lock onto Ryuu without her in between? She looked down at them. Daisukenojo did have that tendency, but he'd lived a long and full life already. She shrugged and padded over to one of the broken windows, quickly hoisting herself up to poke her upper body outside.
Reassuring, cool darkness.
Empty paths through the houses, for what she could see in the sporadic torchlight.
A splinter digging into her ribs.
In other words, it was the perfect set-up for scavenging.
Raiku hoisted herself further up and rolled out through the window, dropping down into a perfect crouch. Because she was an excellent shinobi and things were always this competently pulled off. She dusted her hands off. Sure, Zeshin had locked them in door-wise, but how seriously could he have really meant it if he didn't seal the windows?
It was possible that he'd assumed they would take the hint, she supposed. But really, you could never assume that sort of thing; teenagers were naturally rebellious.
Raiku, who had at most been rebellious against gravity, ignored the trend she was bucking and crept down between the houses.
Food. Food food food. There were a lot of small houses, but generally there'd be a dedicated cooking area in wider clan compounds. Large gatherings didn't exactly fit in a single house, so there was usually a hall or something. The Gairano solved this by having potluck gatherings, but she'd never seen an actual clan take that route. She peered out from between houses, feeling out concentrations of metal. Kitchens generally had the most metal by far in the average home, even for shinobi. ...Well. With shinobi it came down to the kitchen and bedroom.
A thin line crossed her vision, falling from a roof. She blinked and tried to trace it back, momentarily afraid of a spiderweb.
The black mass of a Plot greeted her when she looked up.
Raiku choked.
It stretched in thin tendrils, draping and shifting restlessly over the roofs she stood between. What she had mistaken for a night sky was its large mass, slowly dragging itself over to the next building from the one she and her team had rested in.
She watched it, mute with equal parts horror and disgust. It ignored her completely, instead spreading thinner and thinner as it reached the next house and seeped in through the walls, through the cracks in the tiles. It was worse for how slowly, how… carelessly it moved, a whale amongst the fish she usually encountered outside of the main body of the Naruto arcs. It had a strange, sickly sheen of grey, like cobwebs across its oozing surface.
It was silent. The impressions she should have gotten at such a distance were muted, as if conveyed through several layers of something thick. Cold. The smell of smoke. A strong, dizzying sense of sickness, gone quickly.
Raiku realised she'd clutched her chest with one hand when she felt her heart racing under her hand, when the malformed Plot had gone on its strange quest through the brickwork of the next house and vanished there. She swallowed heavily, turning the claw of her hand into an open palm to pat her own chest in feeble reassurance as she stared at where it had been.
She'd never seen a Plot that didn't have at least the same exterior as the others. Even when Naruto trailed it everywhere he went and she couldn't help but basically fall over it, she'd never seen one so sluggish or, or webbed, she'd never—
'…Tsuji?' she whispered.
Silence.
Trying to keep as still as possible, she covertly glanced from side to side. He hadn't been subtle before; he'd just appeared out of nowhere. Was that what she could expect now? Was that what she…
'What are we looking at?' someone whispered into her ear. Raiku jerked and skittered away, and it was only years of exposure to Kakashi that kept her from screaming in surprise. Instead she gracefully shoved her hand over her own mouth and sort of silently convulsed, eyes wide.
Byakko looked at her coolly, warily, amber eyes peering out of the shadows. 'What are you doing out of the house?' he asked. Raiku pressed her lips together firmly, fighting the urge to yell at him for sneaking up on her. She made a strangled humming noise. Byakko took a step towards her. 'Gairano, what are you doing out of the house?' he repeated. That feigned look of curiosity always masked anger on Ryuu. She had a sinking feeling it was similar with Byakko.
'Zeshin said you were all going to speak in the morning, but here you are,' he said conversationally. Another step. 'Outside. In my family's territory. Between houses. While they're sleeping—'
'I was hungry!' Raiku exclaimed, before that could go to the dark place it was clearly headed. 'I haven't eaten properly in days and it's not like you guys left us with food!'
Byakko stared at her.
'Or water,' she added sullenly.
There was a long, strained pause.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. 'So you... Wait.' He made a vague gesture. 'Let me get this straight. You're telling me that you left the house that my uncle—a highly trained shinobi with years of experience on you and as far as you suspect, dubious motives at best—told you to stay inside, and started wandering around a hostile compound in the middle of the night, alone, because you were hungry. With no idea where you were going.'
Raiku coughed into her hand. 'See, when you say it like that, it sounds bad.'
Byakko leaned in, eyes wide and earnest and just wrong in a face copied from Ryuu's. 'Please understand that it is bad,' he said seriously. 'I need to know that you understand that. Even if you're lying, you need to lie better.'
Raiku felt a blush coming on, but substituted it with a glare. 'This is bad?' she asked. 'You guys replaced my teammate with an evil twin after stalking him for three years, who are the bad ones here?!'
Byakko clapped a hand over her mouth and looked around. 'Lower your voice!' he hissed.
Raiku slowly narrowed her eyes at him and fought the urge, as hard as it would have been with the mask in place, to lick his hand. That couldn't have been a normal response, surely? No. She just couldn't get the hang of the casual touching business. People didn't just go around licking the hands on their mouths, Raiku, God.
He huffed impatiently through his nose, glancing up at the window she'd escaped from. 'Get back in the house,' he ordered, jabbing his finger at the window. 'Right now. Before someone sees you.'
Raiku hadn't been in the mood to wait for breakfast even before she'd climbed out a window, seen yet another rogue Plot, and then this guy was just…
She folded her arms. 'No.'
Byakko's eyebrows shot up. 'Excuse me?'
She couldn't pull off a pout, she knew, even if she hadn't had the mask on, but this would not stand. 'I'm not going back until I eat something,' she said firmly. She couldn't be sure, but she was pretty certain that Byakko wouldn't be able to resist the chance to get her alone. He was made of the sort of causal weave that couldn't ignore this Expositional opportunity. A normal shinobi, a non-Character, would have told her to get her ass inside and maybe stabbed her to drive the point home.
Byakko hesitated.
Raiku suppressed a smile.
He looked down either side of the path they were on, then jerked his head towards the darker way. 'Follow me. Try not to kill anyone.'
'Oh my god,' she muttered, padding along after him. 'It was one time.'
Byakko led her to a house near the building they'd been kept in and dragged her in through the back way. The kitchen they ended up in was small with a scratched, worn countertop. The wood was a pale kind she wasn't familiar with, which narrowed it down to everything but "pine" and "burning." It was actually a little like a smaller version of her own kitchen, complete with scorch marks. It did have a tiny lucky bamboo in a pot by the windowsill, which she caught a glimpse of before Byakko crossed the room and yanked the blinds down. That was a major difference. Poor little guy would never have survived on her windowsill.
So flammable.
'If I'm going to feed you, we're gonna have some conditions. Okay?' Byakko said curtly. 'One: no death threats.'
That was hardly fair. Raiku had only recently discovered how effective her death threats were and they were already taken away?
She was hungry, though. So she'd have to give him that.
'Two: once you've eaten, you go right back into the house with the others. Got it?'
Raiku awkwardly saluted. 'Got it.'
Byakko did not seemed reassured by what she had intended to be a very reassuring salute. But he nodded, hands braced on the counter and studying her for a second. Then he turned around and started pulling things out of cupboards, sliding a glass of water towards her while he moved around touching… food things. Raiku, not a fantastic cook, a good cook, or any kind of mediocre one for that matter, took the chance to study her surroundings instead of really paying attention. There were photos lining the nearby mantel, a word she had honestly thought was made up to confuse her until she realised Daisukenojo's house had one. The kitchen may have been small but the house itself was reasonably spacious and traditional to a fault. It had a dark wooden frame, old-world sliding doors and rooms with pale woven mats that made her feel acutely guilty for wearing shoes.
He waited until she took a sip of water before he spoke again. 'Three: you tell me how the hell to get Sei to trust us.'
Raiku inhaled water.
Byakko, like almost everyone she'd ever almost choked to death in front of, ignored her desperate hacking and gasping. He poured the boiling water into the small bowls he'd set on the counter, tossing some sliced spring onion in as well.
'What,' she coughed eventually. 'What.'
'Seiryu. Ryuunosuke. Whatever. He trusts you two. How can we get him to at least stop trying to murder us?'
Raiku tried to tell if Byakko was serious. He sounded serious, but her eyes were watering too much for her to make him out clearly enough to be sure.
'Ryuu barely trusts his mother,' she managed, thumping her chest and coughing again. 'Definitely… not me!'
'Do not,' Byakko said, raising a hand. 'Don't try that. You're not the ones he's trying to murder. You clearly have the advantage.'
The sheer insanity of that sentence left her stunned for a moment.
Surely. Surely he had noticed all the attempted murder while the stalking was going on? It must have come up.
Surely.
'Even if I did know,' she said roughly, swallowing again, 'I… wouldn't tell you…?'
Byakko shrugged. 'I assumed. But that's not really convenient, so you understand my reluctance to just leave it at that.'
Raiku eyed him. 'You're pretty blasé about trying to get an advantage on Ryuu, given how much you guys have... hurt him. I mean, your uncle roughed him up a fair bit.'
Byakko didn't answer immediately. She blinked hard, dispelling the last of the wateriness. He had his back to her, so she took the chance to quickly sip some water to clear her throat.
'Yes,' Byakko said finally. 'He did, didn't he.'
There was a strange tension in him that she didn't really want to investigate further. 'Where is he, anyway?' she asked. The photos around them were usually Byakko and Zeshin with others. Byakko, always smiling no matter what age he appeared as, Zeshin sometimes doing the same. It was confirming her suspicions:
Ryuu could have been a damn cute kid if he'd smiled once in a while.
It seemed to do the trick anyway. Byakko snorted. 'If I know my uncle, he's probably at my grandparents' house arguing our grandmother out of dropping in on Seiryu.'
'Your grandparents are still alive?
'Yes.' Byakko placed the bowl of miso soup in front of her in a small, plain green bowl. 'Sorry,' he said, snagging one of his own and the seat next to her. 'This late, this is basically all I've got at the ready.'
Raiku nodded, pulling the mug closer to herself. It smelt comfortingly familiar, tiny chunks of tofu bobbing in it. 'Why are you…' She trailed off. She licked her lips then tried again. 'Why are you being nice to me? You tricked us into coming here.'
Byakko raised his eyebrows. 'Is it that hard to believe that I'm just a nice person? That my family's not that bad?'
Raiku gave him A Look.
He looked down, hiding a rueful smile. 'Good point.'
'Yeah,' she said flatly. 'We have met your uncle.'
His smile slowly faded. 'Right,' he echoed.
That carried them into a deeply uncomfortable silence.
Fortunately, Raiku knew exactly how to fix this. It came from years of experience. She opted to totally ignore it in favour of yanking down her mask to hastily drink as much soup as possible while he was awkwardly staring elsewhere. By the time he looked back at her she was mostly nursing dregs, mask secured back around her nose.
He'd already had his hands all over her damn face, some mental voice said snidely. She responded to this with great maturity, and only had to restrain the one hair-pulling motion.
Byakko had taken ample use of this time for some pre-Exposition Brooding, evidently, but he had a few false starts before he could get a sentence out. 'I love my uncle, okay, he's not like this,' he began, brow wrinkled, 'he's not... With all of this, he's not being himself. He's…' Byakko took a long sip of his bowl of miso soup, stared fixedly ahead. 'He hates you,' he said. 'He hates you all so much.'
Raiku settled back on her chair and absently pulled her mug close to her chest once more. She let that idea sink in along with the warmth of the mug in her hand.
Byakko looked down in his soup, then looked at her, amber eyes serious. 'He will kill you if he suspects anything. He would have already if he'd caught you outside. But if he kills either of you, Seiryu will hate us just as much, won't he?'
Raiku raised her eyebrows. Because he seemed to genuinely be asking. Because he seemed to actually want an answer. So of course she was going to say, 'Yes.' She nodded and repeated it. 'Yeah, he would.' Likely would anyway, was what she didn't add. Ryuu wasn't forgiving. He would find it more comfortable to erase them than to forgive them, to hate them rather than to make room for them in his life after he'd left a hole in theirs. Ryuu was possessive the way Gairano were never supposed to be and he was proprietary about her and Daisukenojo, about every constant in his life. She could imagine the look on his face if he woke and found them dead or gone again.
She felt a twinge of guilt.
She should… probably get back before dawn.
Outside her internal monologue, Byakko nodded. He'd obviously expected that answer. His scheming was en pointe.
Raiku chewed on her lip. Byakko was hardly a good source. She could hardly trust him. He was literally made from a universal web of causality and lies. But…
'What do you even want from him?' she asked reluctantly. She had to know. 'I mean, he grew up with another family. He has friends and a life in Konoha. What did you think would happen? Especially if you abducted him?'
Byakko considered this, eyes distant, but he didn't snap at her immediately. Didn't insult her admittedly scant observation skills by telling her an obvious lie. He thought about it.
'I don't know,' he said eventually. 'It's strange. It was hard to pretend to be him. We thought about getting Zeshin to do it; he's more experienced, more like him, but we didn't know if your teacher would detect the disguise. So I had to learn enough about him to replace him, but...' He shrugged one shoulder, still not looking at her. 'I don't know him at all. I don't know what I expected, really. We just… wanted him to come home. I wanted to know my brother.'
'He's. Hard to get to know,' Raiku said hesitantly. It didn't feel right to comfort Byakko, but he was there in front of her and she knew with impossible certainty that Tsuji would come for him eventually. It wasn't his fault that he came about the way he did. Frankly, it was probably her fault.
Raiku's grip tightened convulsively on the mug.
Wait. Was she responsible for Byakko?
Byakko finished his soup, ignorant to her sudden dismay.
He had come about when she had disrupted that Plot, she thought. He'd been produced by that excess, the excess that was her fault.
Raiku eyeballed the oblivious Byakko.
What was her, her… Plot baby?!
She shook her head rapidly. No. No no no. No. That couldn't be real. Her dad certainly wouldn't stand for it. Plot grandchildren. Oh no.
'Safe,' Byakko said suddenly, interrupting her sudden spiral into madness. She looked over; he had a cool, calculating gaze. It was a strange change from the fury Ryuu's usually held. 'We make him feel unsafe. Even if we hadn't done anything, we're challenging to what he needs to believe about his life, about your village.'
Startled, Raiku stared at him.
'…But not what you believe,' he continued, casting her a look out of the corner of his eye. A considering look that she definitely didn't enjoy.
'Nope,' she said lightly. 'Not me.'
The corner of his mouth curled up slightly. Faced with that crooked smile under those cool eyes, she had the strangest feeling that he was satisfied in some way. That that was some rare thing, besides.
Oh you bastard, she thought in a mental voice strangely like her father's; you're trouble.
'So I guess that's that,' he murmured.
Raiku couldn't really justify slapping that confusing look off his face, but her fingers still twitched. 'Yep,' she said with a nod and her eyes creased in a smile. 'Guess so.'
He slid his bowl across the counter to stop near the sink. 'Alright then. I'll take you back.'
Raiku left her own sitting where it was and hopped off the stool. Their walk back to the house was quiet but oddly, the silence didn't seem particularly strained. Either he genuinely hadn't expected to get any information from her or he'd decided he would have to try another route, but either way, he wasn't taking it very hard. When she came to the window she'd escaped from, he crouched down to give her a boost. Raiku wished, oh how she wished, that she could kick him in the face, but instead she just jumped up and wiggled through on her own.
As she landed noiselessly in the dark, she heard his muffled chuckle before she felt the trace metal on him move away.
Raiku crept across the room and put her hands on her hips, looking down at the boys. Daisukenojo had been shoved off the futon and was curled on his side on the floor. He had definitely tried to latch on to Ryuu, she decided, based on the bump on his forehead. Ryuu had moved to lie on his back, but had his eyes mercifully closed.
'Where were you?' Ryuu asked, when she'd managed to pry Daisukenojo off the edge of the sheet and lay down on the futon, just nestling in when he spoke.
Raiku paused in the act of guiltily pushing some blanket back over Daisuke. 'What?' she whispered.
'Where were you?' he repeated. He wasn't whispering. His voice was quieter than usual, but it didn't have the intimacy that whispering often gave voices.
She hesitated. 'Bath… room?' she offered.
Ryuu's eyes opened to the dark ceiling before he turned his head to face her. She expected him to look angry, but from what she could see of his features, what was lit of them by her own faint glow, he wasn't even irritated. She didn't recognise that expression. 'You don't have to tell me,' he said eventually. 'But don't lie.'
Raiku swallowed, having a hard time meeting his eyes. She nodded.
Seemingly satisfied, Ryuu rolled onto his other side to face away from her.
She fell back asleep before she had a chance to worry about it.
'Morning!'
A bright light suddenly jolted Raiku into wakefulness. She groaned, covering her eyes with her arm. 'A… ha?' she slurred, for no reason she could immediately recall after such a long night.
'Who—' Daisukenojo's sleep-rough voice paused. 'Why'm I on the floor?!'
Something prodded her in the side. Squinting, she made out Ryuu standing over her. Wide awake, clearly having been up and about for some time. 'Wake up,' he said, and she realised he was pushing her side with his foot. 'They're here.'
Raiku's waking mind took a moment to process that, then she shot up immediately.
Byakko smiled crookedly at her from the doorway. 'What's up?' he asked, wisely staying beyond the frame, out in the daylight. Zeshin stood behind his left shoulder, expression much more neutral than the day before. Actually… Raiku rubbed sleep out of her eyes.
Actually, he looked a little exasperated. Just a little.
'Byakko,' Zeshin said, a low and muttered warning. She'd heard that tone of reproach from her own father. 'We'll talk about this later.'
'Morning?' Raiku said with the kind of desperate cheer she usually reserved for any given interaction with Kakashi. It still came out sort of as a question in her uncertainty. Daisukenojo dragged a hand down his face and groaned.
Byakko shifted to let Zeshin walk in ahead of him, following with a small pile of wrapped bundles.
All of Raiku's senses immediately honed in on them. They smelt like baked goods. 'We brought some food for you to have before we talked,' Zeshin began, but Raiku had already started her ungainly stick-insect clamber across the futon towards Byakko.
She ignored Zeshin's raised eyebrows. 'That's incredibly unsettling,' he observed before Daisukenojo dragged her back across the blanket by one foot.
'Hey! No! You know the rules about shared food!' he exclaimed, stepping over her. He made sure to step on her on the way past just so she knew she was in trouble.
Raiku whined. 'But it's right there!' She buried her face in the blanket and groaned.
'No buts! We get a serving before you just go in there and demolish everything. You goddamn animal.' He quickly started taking things off Byakko's surprisingly well-balanced pile, handing them back to Ryuu to sort them out. 'Anything else?' he asked. Byakko nodded and jerked his head back to an exceptionally short woman standing behind them, holding a tray with a teapot and assortment of cups. Ryuu shoulder-checked Byakko on his way past and took the tray from her, giving her a surprisingly polite, if stiff, nod. She beamed at him.
It must have been because she was his mother's age, Raiku thought. Ryuu had been carefully trained to be polite to her friends after The Great Face Pinching. The thought was enough to cheer her up a little where she had smushed her face into the blanket.
Ryuu seemed briefly tempted to hurl the tray into Byakko's face on the way back past him, which was probably why Daisukenojo quickly snatched it. A few seconds of quiet mathematics between them and Raiku got tossed two warm, deftly wrapped packages.
Raiku glared at him balefully. 'Two?'
'There's only four, asshole!'
Glowering, she tore one open while Daisukenojo played host and poured tea out. To her surprise, Byakko and Zeshin sat down amongst them, each sliding an empty cup to him. Raiku, who had just discovered that the little wrapped packages were freshly baked bread filled with some sort of… salty, sauce-covered meat, was far too blissfully engrossed to really care.
After a startled pause, Daisukenojo poured tea for them as well.
Zeshin took a sip before he spoke. 'I wanted to apologise,' he said, looking at the three of them. Well, he sort of glossed over Raiku, but she was eating with her usual efficiency, so that was pretty understandable. 'I know that I have behaved badly, and done more harm than can be excused. I'm sorry.'
'Yeah,' Byakko agreed. 'Don't be fooled by his pretty face. His social graces are actually close to zero.'
'Thank you, Byakko,' Zeshin said in a voice as dry as a desert wind. 'Whatever would I do without you here to keep me humble?'
'Holy shit you remind me of Ryuu,' Daisukenojo blurted out. Raiku nodded fervently, mid-chew. The ambient temperature of the room dropped about four degrees.
'Really, man?' Daisukenojo asked Ryuu with a scowl, quickly swigging some tea for the warmth. 'Don't tell me that you don't see it.'
Ryuu continued to eat his delightful bread-thing with far more grace than Raiku. He did not deign to respond.
Daisuke did have a point, though: Zeshin, without the murky black veil of Plot, certainly did look a lot more like Ryuu. He wasn't totally free of it, but it was certainly the most liberated she'd seen him. Was this a more genuine version of him, then? Dry, proud, but ultimately willing to humble himself?
She couldn't know for sure, but it was still sort of interesting.
'Does this mean you won't be trying to strangle us again?' she asked around a mouthful of bread.
Zeshin slowly exhaled through his nose. He didn't look at her.
Wow. She really pissed him off, huh?
'Don't feel too special,' Byakko advised Ryuu offhandedly. 'He's been scaring the shit out of my friends for years.' The tone was better, she observed suspiciously. More like Byakko was commiserating with Ryuu, but without implying too much intimacy.
He was learning too fast, adapting too quickly, especially irritating from someone who was at most, a few days old. Maybe it was the tiger-camouflage connection? It was a bit of a stretch thematically, but when had that stopped anything before? Raiku licked some crumbs off her gloves and dusted her hands off, quickly scanning the others. Ryuu was already done, but Daisukenojo hunched away from her the second he noticed her looking. He promptly crammed his remaining bread into his mouth in one go, flipping her off.
Charming. She made a face at him.
'So. What do you want?' Ryuu asked, turning to more fully face his two relatives. Daisuke and Raiku shifted easily to sit alongside him, now that he was clearly sending them back to the "us versus them" scenario. 'Let me guess: you're going to try and convince me that kidnapping me was for my own good again.'
Zeshin shook his head. 'No. I just wanted to show you a few things. From your parents' house.'
'You said that house burnt down,' Ryuu said warily.
'Well, it won't take long.' Zeshin's mouth had a bitter curve to it. 'Not a lot survived.'
Byakko handed a slim leather folio to Zeshin, which he opened slowly, with the kind of gravitas she would usually associate with a ritual and the smell of incense. 'This is your mother, Fuka,' he said, taking out a photo slightly yellowing around the edges. Raiku tallied up what she expected, Plot weaving around the thin slip of paper: beautiful, statuesque, dignified. Curiously wistful in that way people were in old photos.
Ryuu didn't lean forward to touch it. His expression hadn't changed since Zeshin had walked in. In the end it was Daisukenojo who awkwardly leant in front of him to take it from Zeshin, tilting it so that the three of them could see.
She wasn't wistful, Raiku noticed first. Fuka—no, too personal—Ryuu's mother had the kind of beaming, joyous smile that most people grew out of. Her front left canine was slightly crooked. Her hair was long and she wasn't beautiful, but she was lovely. Her face had a softness that Ryuu's hadn't for years, a dimple in her left cheek.
Raiku side-eyed Ryuu's cheek. A muscle clenched under his jaw, but there was no sign of dimples. Asymmetrical or otherwise.
Thank god, she thought, transferring her gaze back to the photo, to Ryuu's biological mother. There was enough there to call it a resemblance, something about that shape of her eyes that looked a little like Ryuu but more like Byakko. Above all, she was young. She was very lovely, and very young.
Daisukenojo gently pushed it into Ryuu's fingers. Ryuu stiffly took the photo but said nothing.
'And this… is all of you together,' Zeshin said. Byakko leaned a little closer. 'Fuka and your father, Hiniku.' Raiku shot Daisukenojo a look from behind Ryuu's back. Hiniku like… sarcasm? He wasn't looking at her. That was probably for the best. She wasn't being super respectful of the moment. She quickly looked back at the picture.
The ink was faded despite the obvious care that had been taken with it. It smelt strongly of smoke, which reeked equally of Plot manipulation. Raiku shook her head slightly; the content was what was important here. For the Plot, and for Ryuu.
The photo.
There were two adults in it. Ryuu's mother was recognisable immediately, even older, her hair messier and pulled into a low bun against her neck. She had that same radiant, joyful smile, this time directed with soft eyes at the baby pulled closely to her chest. There was a taller man standing close to her, holding a second infant. Both babies had that vaguely startled creased and grumpy look that newborns tended have.
Well. Raiku examined the faded image of Ryuu's father. That explains a lot.
Had she not known exactly what kind of failed narrative experiment this whole family was, Raiku would have looked at Ryuu's father and wondered when the Uchiha had gotten loose. As it was, the solemn and dark-haired, dark-eyed man just passed for a doppelganger. She had assumed that the similarities between Zeshin and Ryuu meant that Ryuu inherited his looks from his mother, but it was clear then how strongly he favoured his father. How closely he echoed the sharp, clean planes of his face. His stupidly long eyelashes. The resemblance about ended when it came to the baby clutching onto the folds of his shirt, braced there by a large, strong hand. It was Byakko, probably—more startled, less grumpy. The one the mother held looked grouchier, like he was on the verge of tears or screaming, but his mother just looked kindly down at him, frozen in time.
'Who…?' Daisukenojo asked, pointing at something low in the photo. Raiku squinted and leaned a little closer. What she had initially mistook for water damage resolved into a more recognisable shape the longer she looked at it. A set of wide, blurry eyes peered directly into the camera from the bottom of the photo, looking at them down what seemed to be part of a nose, obscuring the lower half of the parents' bodies.
'Suza,' Zeshin replied. 'Suzaku, my niece. She would have been twenty-one this year. This is the only photo of her that I have.'
'Suzaku.'
It was the first time Ryuu had spoken. He looked like he regretted it.
'Your sister,' Zeshin confirmed.
'Cute,' Ryuu said dully. He might have gotten away with it, Raiku thought, that slight thickness in his voice. In a universe where Zeshin's past hadn't been rewritten to include Byakko, to give Zeshin a lifetime of experience in almost-Ryuu's mannerisms, it wouldn't have been noticeable. As it was, Zeshin smiled sadly and the black wavering connection between them and Byakko wove a little thicker.
'She wanted to learn everything,' Zeshin said, eyes disarmingly soft. 'She was so excited to be a big sister.' The edge of his smile turned wry. 'Couldn't keep her out of anything.'
From the angle, Raiku guessed he'd been holding on to her. He'd probably had her braced on his hip or held close by a relative, maybe to peer upwards into the camera while he took the photo for them and instead she'd looked around at the lens at the critical moment. Curious, or maybe distracted, the only Suzaku ever photographed peered at them from almost seventeen years in the past.
She wasn't real, Raiku repeated mentally. Suzaku wasn't real. Byakko had only come about recently, which meant it had probably made Suzaku up as well just to add to the set. Another name from the list. And even if she had been real, Raiku rationalised, she was long gone and just fodder for a tragic backstory. She'd been a Character for her short, poignant life and then she'd died, exactly the way she was meant to. She couldn't have saved herself any more than the Konoha shinobi who killed her could have stopped themselves, couldn't have turned left when the Plot said right.
They weren't Gairano. There was no choice in any of this. She told herself that, over and over.
'You had a brother before. Genbu,' Zeshin said. 'He would have been the oldest, but he died when he was very small. Before you or Byakko were born.'
That made the full set of four, but it didn't bring a sense of relief to Raiku like she had expected. That was all four accounted for, no loose ends left. No faces to loom out at them in the future.
None left. Not anymore.
When she snuck a look at him, Ryuu's jaw was still clenching and unclenching. He hadn't glared at the photos in minutes. His gaze kept skittering up and to the side. His breath was too consciously steady. To Raiku, who didn't have Plot guidance but had spent years in wary surveillance of Ryuu's moods, none of these were good signs. He was clearly broadcasting that he was experiencing an emotion he was either unfamiliar or uncomfortable with, which was likely what he'd stuck so firmly to anger to avoid. Daisukenojo, who was generally better at human feelings, had shifted slightly closer under the pretence of getting closer to see the photos.
Raiku found herself holding her breath.
It couldn't last.
'I don't want to be here,' Ryuu said in a careful, very even tone. 'I want to leave now.' His eyes flickered up to Zeshin, then fixed on the door visible over his uncle's left shoulder.
'No, you can't leave yet, you haven't even met our grandparents—' Byakko protested, too quickly for Zeshin's quelling glare to shut him up in time.
The delicate balance of Ryuu's emotional state responded predictably. It crashed down on the side of anger. 'You just said I had to meet with you, no one said anything about staying!' he growled. The wet shine to his eyes nicely blended into rage.
Byakko made a sound of protest that provoked Ryuu into a standing position. Like any sound that Byakko could have made at that point, Raiku reflected, standing somewhat more reluctantly.
'He didn't mean that you had to,' Zeshin tried. He stood as well, hand held out in a pacifying gesture.
Raiku winced.
'You're right, I don't have to,' Ryuu said darkly.
'Ryuu, man, sit back down,' Daisukenojo said cautiously. Curiously, this prompted Ryuu's head to whip around so he could glare at Raiku. Like that was fair.
Raiku raised her eyebrows. Nothing to see there, she had absolutely stood up when he did. She wasn't the one trying to de-escalate Ryuu; she'd learned a long time ago that he was like the world's most temperamental self-cleaning oven. Either he'd sort himself out or he wouldn't. Nope. He couldn't possibly find fault with her reaction.
… No. No, he couldn't.
He narrowed his eyes at her for a second, but apparently finding nothing offensive in what she was doing, he turned back to look at Zeshin.
'We haven't broken the deal,' Zeshin told him, hand still outstretched. 'Please. We just want to talk.'
It looked, for a moment, like Ryuu would go for it. Something flickered across his face, a split second before the Plot loosely drawn across the room snapped taut.
'Zeshin!' The door was flung open, light suddenly flooding in. 'We found the teacher! You have to come, now!' The man standing there was panting, words coming out in a wheeze.
Raiku perked up. 'Yamada?' she asked at the same time as Daisukenojo. She may as well have asked"Deus ex Machina" for all the function their teacher was serving.
Still, though. Even the idea of Yamada was reassuringly solid in her mind. An anchor-point for their whole team that they could steady themselves around.
As her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw that the man in the doorway was bleeding. His face looked like—
Raiku peered at him. 'Oh, no,' she said. 'That's definitely a shattered eye socket.'
'Does look like Yamada's handiwork,' Daisukenojo mused, because yes, it did look like the man's face had gotten caught in a landslide.
'He's… he attacked us from the north forest, I had to leave Tai and Doumi there to keep him busy,' the man managed to get out, before sinking to one knee. There was blood seeping down his side from an injury high on his back, but even Raiku could notice the stiff swelling starting around his abdomen, hunched over as he was.
Internal bleeding probably. Seemed about right. Even if Yamada didn't fully hit you, the power behind that kind of attack would do damage no matter how lightly it landed.
'Wait!' Daisukenojo exclaimed, lunging just enough to catch Zeshin's pant leg. Zeshin froze, then slowly turned towards him. Daisukenojo ignored the ominous look and powered through. 'Yamada specialises in wide-scale destruction, he's going to kill all of you without us!'
Zeshin's face went from ominous to irritated, but it was Ryuu's turn to cut in.
'We know exactly what kind of damage he can do,' he said. 'If he sees us, he'll realise we're not harmed and stop attacking. He must have figured out you're holding us prisoner.'
Conveniently, the man by the door chose this moment to collapse. Kanji rushed to his side but Raiku, who'd seen the Plot discreetly kick his legs out from under him, just side-stepped him on her way out. 'Well, time's a-wasting,' she said cheerfully. 'We should probably sort this out.'
When she turned to look where she was going, she yelped to find Byakko already standing there.
'Oh, like you're going without me,' he snorted at her obvious shock.
Ryuu shoved her aside to look Byakko in the eye. He glared.
Raiku rubbed her shoulder. 'God, the Drama,' she muttered. 'Let's just go already.'
Daisukenojo fished a knife out of his bag and held it up meaningfully. 'Let's get armed and go,' he corrected.
Raiku flushed. 'Yes. Weapons. Agreed.'
This was already going super well.
'Well, fuck.'
Daisukenojo did have a gift for summarising their circumstances, Raiku noted, because that about did it.
Well. Fuck.
While whatever concealment that kept the Takeshita compound secure hadn't failed, it was only a few minutes of flat-out running before Yamada's presence had made itself known. Raiku, who had racked up about two solid days of scouring the forest by that point without ever having gotten close to the compound, couldn't help but be impressed. He hadn't been off by much.
But then, with this kind of destructive capability, he didn't need to be that accurate. They had come across a vast swathe of broken, shattered trees, broken logs sticking up like claws into the sky. Scattered through the detritus were sudden outcroppings of rock, huge spikes jutting upward. The chaos stretched out from their feet as a splintered, uneven wasteland.
No, no need for accuracy. It would be like bothering to aim at a fly when your weapon was a meteor.
Raiku couldn't help but feel that it was a little hypocritical. So what, it was fine when Yamada got to destroy a forest but when she did it, then it was a bridge too far?
This reaction was not shared by the people with her. 'Doumi?' Byakko asked, stepping forward and squinting.
She could see a dark-clad figure in the distance, enormous enough to seem closer than he was. Spotting their erstwhile teacher was made easier by the desolate wasteland he'd apparently spent some time preparing for them. It wasn't like anyone else was really built on such a scale, and the sight of his giant, immovable form made the knot of tension between her shoulders start to unwind. Doumi must have been the person he was holding up by the throat. Whoever Tai was, she couldn't spot them.
'Yamada!' Raiku shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth. He shook the person in his grip like a ragdoll before dropping them. Their limbs were disturbingly limp even from that distance; they crumpled as they hit the ground and did not rise again. Yamada half-turned towards them. Raiku tried to take a step forward but something stopped her. She looked down to see Zeshin's arm outstretched, catching her across the chest.
'No,' he said. 'Something's wrong.'
'Nah, he always looks like that,' Daisukenojo said dismissively, pushing past them. 'Hey Yamada! What the hell took you so long?!' he called, lifting an arm to wave. 'We're fine, no thanks to you!'
It was easy to forget that a man, any man, of Yamada's size wasn't necessarily slow. He used it to his advantage a lot. People assumed he was slow, physically and mentally, and Yamada sat back and listened and watched and when he was ready, they never saw him coming. After so many years spent trying and failing to run from him, it was one mistake that Raiku had always sort of assumed she wouldn't make. But he was in front of them before she'd registered him moving.
Raiku took a single step forward and then, when she really saw him, two steps back.
It was Yamada. There was no mistaking him. That wasn't the issue.
'Yo, Yamada!' Daisukenojo repeated, waving a hand in front of their teacher. 'You alright in there?'
She thought for a second that Plot had gotten him, the same Plot clearly fighting for real estate on Byakko and Zeshin, but it wasn't right. It didn't look right. It was Plot but it was almost opaque and it wasn't moving properly. It was stuck over Yamada in a shape like old webs, abandoned by their spiders long ago. Decrepit. Impressions of it were trailing off it in wisps, muted and faded, warped like an old photograph.
'Yamada?' Daisukenojo asked, starting to frown and Raiku just tilted her head and tried to listen, tried to make something coherent out in the haze.
an un-scarred mouth twists beneath a white mask he promised her I promised her
It was already over, she realised. The Plot had already concluded. It had been done and over and gone and now, impossibly, it had been summoned from nothing. From that graveyard of the Genematrix that no one had ever seen.
'What's going on?' she asked faintly, and Yamada raised a hand. The ground started to rumble. She could feel something just there in the narrative weave, hovering on the periphery, something so achingly familiar she could almost taste it, could almost name it as—
there's just one way for this to end, Suzu
—violence.
'Scatter!' Daisuke shouted as the earth yawned open beneath them. Raiku leapt free in time to land safely, crouching immediately in readiness to jump again.
She heard a raised voice that she somehow knew was Byakko, barely audible over the noise. 'What's going on?!'
Raiku grasped for something believable, something, anything to explain why they could feel no chakra but Yamada still wasn't in his right mind. 'It must be the thing that grabbed us! The same thing as before, it's still got him!' She winced—hardly a good improvisation. Fortunately, it was hard enough to think with Yamada just looking at you, let alone bearing down on you. She'd just have to rely on that. That and the Plot still trailing after the three Drama magnets they had with them, trying desperately to find a reason for this sudden abomination to fit into its storyline.
'Yamada! It's us, snap out of it!' Ryuu yelled, vanishing in a blur of wind before a spike of earth erupted from where he'd been.
Raiku lunged and managed to catch a tail end of the trailing, resurrected Plot, quickly disintegrating in her hands with a flash of electricity and the smell of burning. It felt wrong, ashy and fragile rather than slick. Wrong. Wrong. It wasn't dying the way a normal Plot did when a Gairano touched it, just fragmenting, hollow and brittle like dead leaves.
Shit.
'Don't you dare fucking kill him!' Daisukenojo bellowed across the field, but Zeshin was already in a fighting stance, hands flashing together in unknown combination.
Yamada didn't respond to the impending attack from Zeshin. Instead he dragged Ryuu out of the air and into tangibility somehow, a massive hand wrapped around his knee. Ryuu was yanked unceremoniously down, the leaner shinobi crashing down into Yamada but curling in the air even as he fell, knives thrown outward. Byakko appeared immediately inside Yamada's space, fingers glowing brightly and a hand boosting Ryuu out of Yamada's grip before he could crush Ryuu's limb in his hand. Yamada turned and dodged all but one blade, which sank harmlessly into the thick muscle of his bicep. And then Zeshin was suddenly there as well. It was almost beautiful for a moment, even to Raiku, who had never thought violence would be. Byakko and Zeshin were made for Ryuu and they were always where he wasn't, moving in perfect synchronicity to counter, to strike, and lash out where Yamada was vulnerable.
Following some invisible signal, Byakko suddenly dragged Ryuu back, both of them vanishing only to reappear far further away. Zeshin's hands came together and Yamada crashed into an invisible wall. The impact made the ground shake before he rebounded off it and skidded to a halt several metres back.
'Get back to the compound!' Zeshin shouted, hands again forming seals too quickly for Raiku to take in.
No, that wasn't going to happen. Raiku tore her gloves off along with half her sleeve by mistake, scanning the ground desperately to try and figure out where this was going. Rather than where the fight was going, which was always going to be her mistake.
'Look out!'
A red blur crashed into her side, shoving her out of the way as Yamada appeared with a flash in front of her. Raiku, thrown clear, grabbed at the ground to steady herself and saw Daisukenojo suddenly come into Yamada's path. He countered the first bone-shuddering hit and parried quickly, the two of them exchanging a series of blows that would have snapped Raiku in half like a twig.
nowhere but here for me Yama I promised
Yamada's form blurred, dragged forwards by Plot ineffability—whatever the fight this had once been, Yamada had not lost. An arm coming from the left was suddenly on the right and in his panic, Daisukenojo threw his arm up to block. He blocked instead of jumping back, years of conditioning doing him no favours; the blow didn't hit his sternum where it would have collapsed his ribcage, but crack! The bone of his forearm visibly bent, all wrong, beneath the force of the hit and Daisukenojo cried out in pain, buckling to one knee under the weight of Yamada's still outstretched arm, under the force of the sudden pain.
Yamada slowly raised his arm, almost absently deflecting Daisukenojo's hasty, limited swipe with the knife in his functional hand. He shifted his weight back just slightly, a motion they'd seen a thousand times. Raiku was already there, propelled more by power than her feet. Thunder rolling in the air behind her, she slammed into Yamada, electricity surging through his exposed skin.
'Go!' she yelled to Daisuke, feeling the power distorting, drowning out her voice. The vast network of Yamada's nervous system lay out before her but he was moving, he was still moving. Raiku realised her mistake immediately: any more than this and she'd kill him. But it wasn't enough to stop him.
And just like that, Yamada wasn't in front of her, he was behind her- she narrowly ducked a punch like the fist of an angry god, swung back just in time to avoid a following kick. She launched forward for the mesh of Plot wrapped around his throat but she could already feel chakra gathering around his body, in preparation for strike she couldn't safely block. Not if she didn't want to kill him.
It would be so easy, she thought distantly, and instead she wrapped her hand in Plot that gave like burnt paper beneath her fingers. It dragged free of his throat and there was still so much left that she could have despaired. She wrapped her bare hands around the knife still embedded in his shoulder and felt energy pour through it, felt him convulse and spasm, smelt the blood where the skin was splitting. She pressed closer in a desperate bid to expose as much of the Plot to her as possible, watched it flake off him in pieces.
Still not enough.
She couldn't do it, Raiku realised, her body wouldn't do it; she couldn't only half-kill a man.
'Raiku, get back!' Byakko was suddenly in her space, wrapping a hand around her arm like it was nothing, like it was nothing to touch that kind of raw electrical energy. He yanked her towards him and a wind that felt like a physical blow had them abruptly out of the way of an impact that shook the air with a deafening bang.
As the dust cleared, she saw them.
Zeshin had sunk to one knee, both hands outstretched and clawed in the form of an alien technique. Yamada stood suspended, bloodied arm drawn back to strike. She saw the thick muscles of his shoulder flex but he didn't, couldn't move, a titan held in suspended animation. There was still electricity crackling through his body, seizing him in shudders that he just ignored, that he didn't seem to feel. Another aborted motion from Yamada and one of the long bones in Zeshin's hand shifted with a crack and broke, skin discolouring around it.
'Kill. Him,' Zeshin gritted out.
A pale and bloodied man in green stepped—limped—forward but Ryuu turned and punched him swiftly in the gut, easily ducking the retaliatory strike and following up with a swift kick to the side of his knee that landed with a crunch. The man went down with a cry and Daisukenojo was suddenly at her side between her and Byakko, broken arm still held protectively to his midriff. Crouched in readiness, good hand curled into a fist. Byakko settled into a more defensive stance, shoved backwards by Daisuke's sudden appearance. Raiku found herself on the ground with her teammate, pushed off-balance in the same way and limbs trembling from the exertion, resisting that impossible call to just take whatever Yamada had and crush it in a blue-white grip.
Tension suddenly sparked to life where there had been none, and Raiku saw too late the Dramatic Confrontation that it had all been building towards.
They'd been helping, she thought. They'd been helping. Zeshin had pushed her back on her feet and Byakko had thrown himself headfirst to save Ryuu, to stop him from an injury that would have crippled him even if he'd lived and they'd been helping because the Plot said they were family and that still meant something. A decrepit trail of Plot caught her eye on the way past and Raiku dove, lashed out and, fingers scrabbling at the ground, she felt the Plot pass through them
blood smell fear cold hands SuzuI promise never again I promise I promise I
and it gave way in her grip.
In front of her, through the blood seeping down into her eyes from her forehead, Yamada froze. The black pits of his eyes shone once, then began to slowly clear.
He blinked once, then again. Swallowed roughly.
'… Yamada?' Daisukenojo asked cautiously, half-crouched over her with his good arm raised defensively.
Yamada's head jerked. His eyes flicked over them, his brow creasing.
His fingers twitched at his side. He lifted them to look at them uncertainly. It was a profoundly unnatural look for Yamada to wear, but it wasn't that eerie blankness.
'I think… I think it's over?' Raiku said with less sincere uncertainty, though she knew damn well it was; the ashy feel of a long-dead Plot was already fading from her hands. Zeshin stepped into view.
'I agree,' he said, and the knife flashed in his hand when he raised it overhead. A cry tore itself out of Raiku's throat and she just registered Daisukenojo dragged clear of her sudden surge of electricity, but a hand flashed to intercept before she could push herself off the ground.
Ryuu gripped Zeshin's wrist, the two of them tensed to push against each other. 'He was being controlled!' he snapped, knuckles white with the effort of keeping Zeshin's arm still. 'It's over now! We stopped him!'
Zeshin tried to yank his arm back but Ryuu didn't let go. 'I'm not taking the chance, I'm not risking our family!'
'My family is dead!' Ryuu shouted and Zeshin didn't flinch, not the way Byakko did in her peripheral vision. A moment of tension between their arms before Ryuu broke it, shoving Zeshin bodily away from him and Yamada. 'Touch him and I swear to god, I swear to god I'll finish the job!' There was a look in his eye that Raiku didn't, could not possibly have recognised, but she felt it resonate deep down.
That.
'Stop it, now!' Byakko appeared between them, a hand extended towards each of them. 'Enough!' he snapped. 'Uncle, he's dealt with!'
Zeshin opened his mouth but Byakko made a chopping motion and turned his back on Ryuu. 'You know that Ryuu'll never trust us if you do this! You have to stop!' He threw a hand back at Ryuu, at the fine webbing of bruising still around his eyes and throat. The marks now almost vanished under the damage the fight had done. 'He's our family, stop hurting him!' Byakko shouted.
Zeshin finally flinched. The blackness of the Plot around him started to recede and before Raiku's captivated gaze, started to drift towards Byakko. Zeshin's eyes slowly, almost reluctantly, landed on Ryuu, and his expression twisted.
'Seiryu, I,' he began, and faltered.
Ryuu glared at him.
'…Ryuu,' Zeshin said. A kind of dawning horror began to crawl across his face.
Raiku had seen it before. She'd seen Ryuu's face once, standing in hell, looking at her like he could throw her away and never think of her again. And then the same look that Zeshin wore now, when the Plot withdrew and there was nothing left but what he'd done, been willing to do because it asked him to.
The hairs started to stand up on the back of Raiku's neck. There was a still, sickly feeling of wrongness rising in the air. She was naturally, natively repulsed by this overt display of Dramatic tension, the Plot clearly scrawling out the next steps. It was too close to a Dramatic Climax for a Gairano, and for a moment that was explanation enough.
Lightning started building again under her skin, too close to the surface still after she'd hauled herself back from doing what came naturally.
'Hey,' Daisukenojo said warningly. 'Raiku, what's going on?'
'Something's not right,' she tried to tell him, words thick and heavy in her mouth, but there was no answer.
Not from Daisukenojo, anyway. Ryuu's Plot shuddered as if in reply, but it wasn't its amalgamated voice she heard.
'I didn't think it would be that straightforward. But it's not hard for you at all, is it?'
Raiku closed her eyes for a moment when she heard him. She let the silence stretch on. It felt almost physical, like the quiet was trying to close in.
When she looked up, Tsuji wasn't where she expected to see him. She pushed herself to her feet, awkwardly ducking around the frozen Daisukenojo to stand. He'd sounded close, but there were only the statues he'd made of her teammates and Ryuu's family, stuck in a Dramatic confrontation that should have been moving forward. There was no wind, no ambient sound; the crack of broken branches underfoot sounded painfully loud.
After a few moments of looking around, she could make out a figure far away and half-hidden in the treeline. If there was any doubt that it was Tsuji, rather than another convenient family member to appear for illustrative purposes during the showdown, it was quickly dispelled when they raised their hand in a slow wave.
This is a trap, she told herself.
But she still stepped forward.
It seemed to take forever. Raiku wasn't slow, even at a walking pace; she had naturally long legs and wasn't particularly patient by nature. But dread seemed to weigh her down, layered over that curious sense of rage and emptiness that she had so quickly come to associate with even the sight of Tsuji. He had vanished by the time she reached the trees but that same growing, dark feeling pulled her further into woods toward some hidden point, pulling her past the trees that had escaped Yamada's wrath until she came to a more natural break in the forest.
Tsuji lifted his head, gaze distant.
Grey eyes, she saw. Had they been grey, before? Had they been grey, or green, or any colour, really? She couldn't recall. She couldn't picture his face in her mind. He was so close now, and she still couldn't do it.
'The Genematrix, and… Plot?' Tsuji asked, slow like he could taste the words in his mouth. Like he was trying it to see if he liked it. 'And it's… stories. It's fate in patterns.'
Raiku felt the blood drain from her face.
No. She hadn't said anything. She'd told him nothing. It wasn't possible.
'What?' she whispered.
'So I'd be… what,' he asked, meeting her gaze. 'A Plot Hole, I suppose?' He smiled slightly. Bitterly. 'I suppose I could see that.'
He was insane. He was insane. He was insane but he knew things now, he knew things she'd never told him. That she couldn't have. No one could know; no mind but a Gairano's had ever known the Genematrix and been able to hold onto it.
He couldn't. Tsuji couldn't be the exception.
'What did you just say?!' she demanded.
Tsuji threw his hands out towards the Plot chaos that Yamada and their fight had wrought, broken inky trails leeching sluggishly across the ground. 'I didn't know what else to do. You wouldn't talk to me, you wouldn't—' He broke off, shoving a hand through his hair in a frustrated gesture that didn't belong to him.
She fisted her hands at her sides. 'You…' Raiku looked down and around at the lines of Plot she had broken, seeping back the way to rejoin the Genematrix. What she had always known they did but—...no.
They hadn't, had they? They'd come back to Tsuji.
The damage she'd done to it was written out in its decrepit mass, splayed out like a Gairano fingerprint across its surface. 'You… set this up?' she asked. 'You… You did this? To Yamada, you…' She clenched her hands into fists. She could feel the horror distorting her features. 'You fed him to Plot so you could watch me break it, so you could sit there and read what I was doing—'
'No,' he said loudly, eyes wide and dark. Manic. 'Don't look at me like that, don't you dare look at me that way. You know what it's like, you know what I've been through.'
Raiku shook her head, stepping back. 'I don't,' she said faintly. 'No one can do what you did.'
Tsuji recoiled. She fought the sudden, irrational feeling that she'd betrayed him.
'No,' he repeated.
Raiku's skin was glowing and crackling and she moved forward again, her steps heavy with grim purpose. But the world swam when she tried to put her foot down on seemingly ordinary ground, the world blackening and twisting around the edges before she staggered back. She hissed and settled on more stable ground, checking around her for the Plot he must have been trying to trick her into.
'Haven't you seen enough?' she demanded. 'How many lines do you have to cross before you get the message?!'
Tsuji smiled at her, the line of his mouth twisted with something like regret. 'You can't see it, can you.' It wasn't a question and no—confusingly, infuriatingly, she couldn't see anything where she had tried to walk.
Raiku's nails dug into her palms, hard enough to hurt.
'God,' he said softly. 'You really are so alone.'
Raiku snapped, she hurled her words out like a weapon. 'You're the one who's alone! You had to hunt me down and trap me here, all because you've deluded yourself into thinking we're connected when we're not!'
Tsuji hummed, a strange, neutral sound. A tune with too many accidentals, sharps where she expected none. It set her teeth on edge and she searched the ground desperately with her eyes, with every sense she thought would tell her something, but there was nothing.
There was nothing.
Plot slid across the earth irregularly, pushed away by Tsuji's presence. Trying to escape him, but caught in whatever it was he had done. A long strand twisted and shuddered in the space between them before it flattened, spiralling and changing direction.
Raiku's breathing slowed. She narrowed her eyes, stepping back again.
The black waves of Narrative stretching away from Tsuji were warping before they could reach her, shifting in a way that was triggering something in the back of her mind. Something familiar and something important, but that was just out of reach.
It was something her dad had said. It was something he had told her, she could even see the look on his face when he said it; what had he said? He'd held something and it was significant enough that he wasn't smiling in her memory. He'd held something, and she'd watched the lights and—
The lights.
Raiku found she was shuddering.
Yes. He had explained it to her once. He'd shown her that trick that school teachers used, with a crystal and a white light breaking into different pieces on the other side of it. He'd told her that a Device was not a thinking thing, not an active one, but it changed things anyway, the crystal casting rainbows on her face.
It built up in her chest until it exploded out of her chest in a scream, in lightning lashing out and hurtling into nearby trees. 'You son of a bitch!' The electricity lashed and flickered across the invisible frame of whatever Plot Device he'd managed to, to find or to somehow drag here to them. Which was impossible, because Devices didn't… they didn't react like Plots, they didn't shift the way Plots did in their impermanence and flexibility, they couldn't just up and move because they had to appear where they were needed for things to work. 'What have you done?!'
'I am trying to help you!' Tsuji shouted, his weakened composure cracking even further. 'Why?!' That yawning darkness was open behind his eyes, dizzying and empty. 'Why isn't it working, why don't you understand?!'
'Which one is it?!' she demanded, jabbing her finger at where that empty space was twisting and refracting Plot faster now. Like whatever Tsuji was doing was wearing off, like it was getting greedier the more she spoke of it. 'Which Device did you hijack?!'
Which Plot had he derailed? What story couldn't fall into place without it sitting there, invisible and alien and refracting the Plots that passed through it until they were something new, something that could work?
She didn't bother to ask how he'd done it; it, like so many things about Tsuji, was simply impossible. But she had to know which one, she had to tell her father because what if it had been important? What if he was depending on it to understand the wider Genematrix plans, and now it was nowhere to be found? What if it was one of the Devices that were singular, unique, like so many of them seemed to be?
'Why?' he demanded. 'Afraid you'll recognise it?!'
'Why did you even bring me here?!' Raiku countered. 'What did you think—that attacking me, that attaching that thing to Yamada, that any of that would make me help you?!' She lunged out of the way just before a Plot surged to where she had stood, suddenly accelerated on its way out of the Device. She leapt up and over a crack in the earth and then swung up onto a branch, safely out of its way. The sky seemed to blur and darken for a moment, fading to grey before returning to blue.
Tsuji shook his head, he fisted his hands in his hair. 'It doesn't matter what we do, it's never what we do,' he cried out, pleading with her to understand. 'It's what we are!'
He could have been enraged, could have been on the verge of tears, she couldn't tell. Her eyes weren't trained enough. She wasn't good at this, she couldn't tell what he wanted. She could barely think past her sudden knowledge of the Device between them, that thing the Gairano couldn't see but knew enough of to fear.
But she knew what she wanted. 'Just shut up!' she howled, a roar sounding in her ears. Like thunder, rolling over itself. 'Just shut up!'
The world started wavering and blackening around the edges like there was some great Plot there but there wasn't, she would have seen it. She would have seen, she had time to think, before it shifted around her, surging out of nowhere. She turned in time to see it rise, a great wave of blackness like a tidal wave, blocking out the sun.
And then there was just the darkness.
Raiku turned in place in the void, checking for anything to mark her surroundings by, but no matter how much light she produced, nothing made itself clear. She could hear the dim thrumming of it surging beneath in her skin as power built, could hear her breathing echo as if she were in some great, empty space.
'You have no idea what it's like.' Tsuji's murmur ripped past her ear, too quickly swallowed up by the black. She spun and saw nothing, lit as brightly as she could but casting no shadow, illuminating nothing. Nothingness.
An exhale, a crack, that thin thread finally fraying and snapping on a sob. 'None.'
And she was alone in the pitch-black world, standing in that emptiness.
The light faded, her breaths just echoed off nothing. There was nothing there but what she made herself, realised, and then it seemed to fall in on her again.
You are Tsuji.
You are five years old and a monster wearing your mother's face has entered the room. 'Hello, love,' she says in a voice like bees buzzing, a roar of noise building and intensifying as you scramble back, as you open your mouth and scream and scream and scream. You want your mother. You want this doll made of string and static to leave but she comes closer, reaches her blurring hand towards your face.
'What's wrong?' she asks and the threads whisper to you what they are made of, what she will do when they ask, show you that they will drag her into place.
And you are screaming.
You cannot un-see.
You are Tsuji.
You wake up one morning wearing a stranger's face. You stop when you see yourself in the mirror, you touch your fingers to the skin of your cheeks. Gently at first and then harder. Your ribs won't move enough for you to inhale properly, your breath escapes hard through your nose because you cannot open a stranger's mouth to make way for the shrieking inside you.
There is a man in the room with you now. He touches your shoulder. His body is caught in threads and hooks that tug his mouth to shape words. Static pours from it and out of his skin, is pulled to flooding out of him. You reach behind you and clutch the sink pressing into your back, your hand grasps something thin and cold. You want him to be quiet, you want him to be gone and you lash out. He looks down and you know what he is looking at, you realise what you have done. There is warmth seeping over your hand. His face is growing pale.
You don't know him, but he looks at you and you have betrayed him. You don't know him. He takes so long to die.
The threads don't dissolve. They don't release him when his eyes glaze over.
You are Tsuji.
Your life is made of lives, now. You fill the void where fate is absent, you are forced onwards and fill spaces until it finds you again, when it pushes against your new form, pushes that life into place and pushes you out. It will not leave you but you cannot bend, you cannot breathe, pressed to suffocating where you fell through the cracks in fate.
You are so tired.
You are Tsuji, but are you? Were you? You are Tsuji. You are, you are, you are.
You are Tsuji.
You have had another face, another life yanked from you by the time you see your own again, your true face (once-face) smiling at someone else, you see your life from across the street hooked and bound in black threads and white noise. The threads that wrap around the world and twist, shift when you look at them. You grasp and claw at them and they may bend but they do not break. They will curve and bend to escape you, will distort and change shape if they must but they do not falter. They lead somewhere and lie too thickly on the path for you to follow. You struggle and shriek and you scratch but they lead somewhere you cannot go. You are not welcome there. There is no place for you here, you are surrounded at all times, on all sides.
You will not have this face for long, you know. You cannot keep even this.
You are Tsuji.
You start to warn people again, you start to tell them of the great and terrible things you see them pulled towards, the ignominious ends and dying gasps. They do not run, they come closer, and they thank you, they pay you. They start to come in droves and the threads wrap themselves around the people clustered around you, closer and closer. They will not suffer you. Not ever and not like this. You keep speaking and warning and you are never wrong—no.
You are wrong just once.
She is ordinary. She is a girl in the crowd and you are so used to the dark that the shape of her is wrong, all wrong. She is not static or black thread, she is blinding-bright and made of edges and hunger and the string of fate catches on her as she leaves and
it
snaps.
She is gone by the time you free yourself from the crowd. You saw her. She was real.
You saw.
You will see again. You have never been less alone than this.
you are Tsuji (who are you who are you who are you who are you)
there is a hole in the world in the shape of you
You are
No.
No?
No.
No.
No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO.
The rising, deafening roll of thunder. A shape made of lightning and teeth, ripping and shrieking and roaring, exploding out of the dark.
NO.
Raiku opened her eyes to blinding light, a wave of electricity washing back over her and settling back into her skin with a satisfied hum. She exhaled shakily. She was sore from the fight with Yamada, with hot spots of inflammation promising bruises tomorrow but there was something different. The rush of energy beneath her skin felt stretched and wired, like a well-used muscle after a long day.
It was almost serene. And then she heard the gasping.
She was sitting up before she realised she had moved.
Tsuji's teeth were blood-washed white in his burnt-black face when he parted his lips to speak. The glimpse of his mouth looked wrong, looked obscenely red and raw through his blackened, scorched lips. He rattled on the exhale; a wet gurgle sounded low in his chest. She stumbled over to him on uncertain legs. He couldn't possibly see her but she felt his gaze, from eyes so tired their weight seemed to settle in her stomach. She sank to her knees next to him, her entire body trembling.
'I knew you'd be the end of me.' His voice was almost recognisable. A rough, agonised rasp, the weak swallow around liquid in his chest. His lips twitched, impossibly. 'We can't help it. Neither of us.' He coughed, hard, and the motion shook his body so painfully that Raiku's skin crawled in sheer visceral horror.
'What?' she asked, whispering but not sure why. It was just the two of them. 'What do you know?'
What do you think you know, she should have asked, she knew she should have asked, but it felt wrong.
He knew something. He knew.
Red lines appeared in those black lips. She realised with horror that Tsuji was trying to smile, the ruined skin pulling taut and cracking. Cracked open.
She'd cracked him open.
'They're hard to see,' he wheezed painfully. 'They bend things. Change shapes.'
Raiku wanted to shake him. She wanted to close her eyes. She wanted to wrap her arms around her chest and squeeze this feeling out and she wanted to push her hands over his mouth and finish him off, she wanted him to say something that made sense and she wanted him to stop talking and just be silent and—
And she wanted him to stop looking at her like that, like she was some lonely, lovely thing worthy of gentleness from him, and not the one who'd torn him apart.
She'd stopped breathing. Her lungs were starting to burn.
She could hear her heart, pounding in her ears.
'It's not what we do, Raiku,' he rasped with unbearable gentleness and she saw that pain-red flash of his mouth again, the pink-washed colour of blood-stained teeth. 'You don't destroy.'
The inside of her head was filling with a red, hot static but she could still hear his every word perfectly, each painful syllable piercing through the din. Piercing through the agonising, disjointed feeling in her head of Tsuji, of having been Tsuji.
Of having been something wrong in the world, and the strange familiarity of it.
It would have been fond, the look he gave her, in a person less destroyed. In a body less crumbling around the edges. A sad, fond smile, seeping blood. 'You are destruction,' Tsuji told her. His hand was suddenly in hers. She hadn't realised she was moving this time either. 'And it's alright.' That gurgle in his chest. That wet sound of blood sticking in his throat. 'It's alright.
'We know what we are,' he sighed, he rasped, he came to an end. 'We know.'
Tsuji's body was starting to disappear under her hands, his features disappearing into a more generic, featureless corpse, into the sea of blackness he'd shown her that was already fading at the edges. A Plot Hole resolving. She frantically grasped at him but her grip slid free immediately, sliding off a face that was nothing like his, a body that was not and had never been Tsuji.
'No, no no no!' she cried, and tried to touch his face before it vanished and she was left with a stranger, the body of someone else.
Gone.
Just like that.
Raiku realised she was gasping for air, that her body was shuddering with great, painful breaths. She could hear her heart pounding, feel her fingers shaking where she'd buried them in the ground. He was gone. He'd been so wrong and terrible and lonely and there was nothing even left of him.
He'd been so afraid.
'I found her!' she heard Daisuke's distant shout. 'She's this way!'
And Raiku sat back on her heels and cried.
A/N: Look. She's had better days. Northwrought at tumblr is where I put my snippet about Byakko's life pre-entrance into USI.
