Haku

Haku struck. Not from desperation, though he was desperate but from an understanding that even great shinobi could be taken by surprise and that whoever attacks first generally wins. Chakra coursed through him as he unleashed the power of his kekkei-genkai – Ice Release: Kit of Needles. The black-robed figure of the Akatsuki lifted into the air, gored by glittering pinions of ice that speared through his body from every angle.

Itachi grimaced, gagging blood, limbs jerking as he thrashed…only to vanish in a riot of black birds.

The Demon's Apprentice cursed and circled, knowing it was important to keep moving. Was he already trapped in the Uchiha's genjutsu? The memories and experiences of the forty-seven mist-ninja souls imprinted on his told him no, it was only his power to suggest – still a potent, hypnotic technique but not as crippling or immersive as genjutsu.

Don't meet his eyes! Haku warned himself. No matter what happens.

That much was obvious but was far easier said than done.

The ravens banked and soared, twisting ribbons of ebony against the gray Kirigakure sky, circled tightly then swooped at Haku, transforming into razor-pointed kunai as they flew. Knives struck each other in mid-air with the unnerving ring and spark of metal, changing their trajectories. Haku wove and danced from their paths but it was his blood-gift that saved him; the protective embrace of his circling winds blasting the knives astray before they could reach him. The boy flung senbon back, sending flight after flight of silver needles at the Akatsuki who evaded some with supernatural agility and batted the rest aside with a kunai, who wasn't surprised in the slightest when a sudden gust made those that had been thrown wide veer sharply back, targeting his eyes, his neck.

The heady rush of combat exhilarated, frightened, absorbed Haku in the intensity of the moment with suffocating, crushing pressure yet also liberated him – this is what he was good at, had been trained for, had been bred to do going back generations into a history that pre-dated the rise of the Hidden Villages. It was the strange reality of his existence. He was never freer, never more expressive, never more truly himself than in moments like this – an instant away from death or murder.

Itachi arced up the scorched wall of a tenement building and around, his black and red Akatsuki cloak rippling as he went, then darted straight toward Haku, forcing the overmatched teenager to fall back. Haku countered with a wall of ice and then an Ice Dragon but these were not the kinds of techniques that would stop or even slow a jonin like Itachi who easily overcame them, dodging around the first and obliterating the last with a Phoenix Fireball.

A sense of mounting peril washed over the boy. He was being corralled in a strategy his enemy didn't bother to conceal. Itachi, wounded and spent though he was, was older, bigger, faster, much stronger, and vastly more experienced. At close range, it would be a simple matter for him to destroy Haku with his bare hands and feet or slice him apart with his blade. The teenager was not fully recovered either.

The infamous jonin grinned slightly, undoubtedly knowing everything Haku knew. His hands flashed through a series of seals and he spat forth another blast of fire deliberately left of his target to force the younger ninja to evade right - right where he'd intercept him. Itachi closed fast, his sword lashed, splitting the water clone in two before it burst apart but the real Haku was not that far away.

The former leaf-shinobi sprang, closed in and slashed again but it was just a feint this time; his opposite shin thudded into Haku's guard, wobbling him and sending him stumbling backwards. Still off-balance, the teenager rolled under the jonin's onslaught, then again, making a one-handed seal as he went. Coming to his feet, he deflected the tip of Itachi's sword away with a bundle of senbon, then circled behind a pair of summoned clones. Itachi's slash cleaved clean through the first which splashed apart but the second one had been ready to receive it, seized the naked blade in both arms and clutched it tight against its body, trapping it – this one was not water but ice. Haku lunged at the Ataksuki's exposed sword arm, would have pierced it had Itachi not abandoned his weapon and darted away only to flash right back immediately resuming the attack. His fist battered through and past Haku's upraised arm, leaving a gash bleeding across his forehead. The teenager fell back under a storm of blows that, for all his years of dedicated training, for all his magnificent abilities, he was all but powerless to stop.

Having had a chance to get used to Itachi saved him from an even worse beating. The initial shock of being in combat with a legend had worn off and he no longer felt the fearful presence of the man's reputation, no longer sensed the ghosts of all his past victims that included his entire family save one. He could see too now just how seriously the Akatsuki had been hurt in his previous battles with Inoue's Nephilim, with the Kyuubi. Itachi's movements had slowed, lacked some of the crisp precision and energy they'd had before. His posture was bowed just perceptibly and he favored a leg. For all of that though, the man's power, skill and speed, the perceptive, predictive power of his eyes were nearly beyond description. Half a tiger was still a tiger, still every bit as frightening. No one who'd never faced him could fully understand.

Haku ducked a wheeling hook, felt the rush of wind, heard it whizz dangerously just over his head, then went spinning as the back of Itachi's leg thundered though the back of his ankles. Turning in mid-air, the boy set his thoughts past the pain and shock of the impact, conjured his chakra and, when he landed, send a blast of wind back, carrying specks of dust and debris flying into the ninja's eyes.

Refocusing immediately, Itachi sprang after the backpedaling teenager and again flashed through a series of hand seals, summoning a score of shadow clones.

Haku kept his expression level but his heart leapt. There was a chance here! Where Itachi might have had him right then if he'd pressed, he'd gone instead to jutsu to help ensure his odds. Maybe the Akatuki's own thoughtfulness would prove his undoing. Haku circled away, both hands forming separate seals – water clones and hidden mist – and turned the battleground into bedlam. With the added knowledge he'd gained, the greater control over his blood-gift, his hidden mist was now penetratingly cold and spun with unpredictable torrents of wind and flurries of blinding snow, an effect that Haku prayed would make this gambit work.

Blades and senbon flashed in the mist. Haku sensed his clones having some success by working in roving teams of four against each of the Uchiha's one but that wasn't to say he was winning. By any numerical analysis, it was a slaughter but hopefully it wouldn't matter.

The snow ceased, the mist cleared and what few that remained of Haku's clones fell apart in watery gushes or toppled over as inert statues of ice. In the soggy, fog-ribboned courtyard surrounded by shabby, fire-blackened tenements and the charred shambles of Okino's Coral Pavilion, Itachi's doubles stood triumphant, their numbers depleted only slightly.

The presumptive 'real' Itachi leaped down from the top of a neighboring building from which vantage he'd been waiting and cast his glance around the snow-dusted landscape.

"He fled after all," the Uchiha observed, "undoubtedly gone to help the jinchuuriki. Scatter, find him. He could not have gone far."

The ninja had barely turned to go himself when two of his own clones lunged at him in murderous flashes of coordinated movement. The rest of their shadow clone brethren evanesced in bursts of dispelled chakra. The point of the first clone's kunai hovered close to Itachi's neck, not a hair's breadth from piercing his jugular but the jonin had seized the offending wrist behind it with a crushing, tyrant's grip. In his other hand the Uchiha's sword hovered, having speared cleanly through the second mutinous double which lost its shape and color, turned first into a semblance of Haku and then into solid ice.

"Well done, Haku. Using clone and transformation jutsu together - that was clever," offered Itachi as he wrenched his attacker's wrist hard, slapped aside his opposite fist when he tried to counter then surged forward, pushing his mirror-image across the courtyard and slamming him into the unforgiving tenement wall hard enough to crack it. "Against anyone else, it might have worked."

The Demon's Apprentice gasped from the collision, his agonies magnified and redoubled through every blow Itachi had landed previously; his transformation jutsu vanished. Don't look, don't look! he warned himself, repeating it almost as a mantra, but he was in a killer's hands now. He should have known better than to think a tactic like that had worked well enough once against Naruto, that Naruto had himself invented, would fool someone like Itachi. With his breath racing furiously, sweat plastering his hair to his face, making every cut and scrape sting, Haku felt the hard edge of Itachi's forearm under his jaw, forcing his head up. He tried to fight it but the jonin clenched the teenager's slender wrist until it broke and his resolve failed. The young shinobi's vision filled with the sight of Itachi's shovel-cheekboned face just inches away from his, those demonic Sharingan eyes that spun with teardrops of black. As he watched, those eyes flared. The droplets within swelled into pin-wheeling continents of iron rising through a sea of fire.

"Tsukuyomi," Itachi intoned.


Suddenly, Haku was falling as if down a bottomless well, a hole in the fabric of the world, with the daylight above him vanishing through an ever-shrinking pore. Below him in the darkness, ravenous, unendurable pain awaited in every way it could be delivered – at the hands of men and with all the instruments at their command in chambers unknown and far from help; at the whims of nature and its ravages of disease, starvation and exposure, savage animals and predatory insects; from within, the anguish of failure, humiliation, loss and helplessness. For untold hours he plunged, awaiting the promised agonies that would stretch on for years, decades within the prison of his mind, teased with hopes of deliverance that wouldn't come. This was the unearthly power of the Uchiha's Mangekyo.

The pain that had been waiting, biding its time all this while, now seized him, seared him. Haku screamed into the black -.


But then it was over. As sharply and shockingly as the hell of the Uchiha's Tsukuyomi had come upon him, now was he returned back to the world whole and free as if he'd suddenly awakened from the sum of all nightmares. Never in his life had he been so grateful to see light again, even the muted, grayish kind of Kirigakure's. The surcease of pain made him tremble, his vision blurry. His heart thudded from the rush of euphoria and yet the fight was not over. The Akatsuki's dark shape was right there upon him, right where it had been but obscured now by swirling wisps of white. The sight of the Uchiha's hitai-ate filled his vision - that spiral leaf emblem of the Village Hidden in the Leaves cast in metal with a gash struck violently through it. Ice crystals clung to its face.

Cold, Haku realized as he felt numb tingles crawl over his skin, shivered from it for the first time in his life and was struck by the novelty of the experience. Aramata never got cold.

Why had Itachi released him? Was he just testing, teasing? Barely a second had passed in real time. Nothing of their situation had changed but Itachi grimaced bitterly, seeming to react in jerky slow motion. His bared teeth flashed white as the man clenched his eyes and flung himself away from Haku, letting the stricken teenager slump down against the ice-coated wall and collapse into a heap on the courtyard pavement.

Through palisades of angry vapor, over pools of hissing, liquid air, the Akatsuki staggered backwards, holding one frostbitten, swollen and discolored hand in the other, staring at the boy just as dispassionately as before though one side of his face was blotched, frozen and dead as well, perilously close to one of his supernaturally powerful, but ultimately still fragile and human, eyes.

Haku sat there, stunned for a moment, aghast. Memories reeled back – his childhood home, his father, all his neighbors impaled on spears of ice. He hadn't meant that. Maybe this was what he'd been bred for, trained for but it wasn't what he wanted to be. He'd come to Kirigakure no Sato to save lives, not end them, to prove that he could.

The present returned to the teenager with an overwhelming crush of immediacy and he recoiled, flailing his arms around his head, welcoming the prospect of being chopped apart or incinerated rather than face Itachi's Sharingan again. His mind reeled from the memory of his excruciation and though unable to put a single thought together Zabuza's training resonated through his body, commanding him to move. Trembling, gulping, Haku sought to slide to his feet and spring away but all he could do was roll to one side and push himself up, clutching feebly at the wall for support the whole way with his one good hand, supposing that Itachi would finish him off at any moment.

And then there were hands on him helping him up. Haku flinched, imagining it could only be Itachi himself, before it registered - a slightly built young woman and a boy with a mop of curly blue hair - Aya and Choujuro! Haku almost screamed at them, pushed them off, raving about how they shouldn't be here when he saw Yashako interpose herself between them and Itachi, with yet more mist-ninja gathering both at her side and scattered above along the parapets.

The teenager froze, his mind and body stalled as he tried to absorb these new developments while the previous ones still lorded over him. As the last few puddles of liquid air boiled away and the vapors began to clear, Yashako towered like a temple guardian, levelling the point of one ghost-head broadsword at Itachi and the second squarely at him.

"Don't get the wrong idea, Demon's Apprentice," the Swordswoman explained through the haze, her watchful gaze roving between Haku and the Akatsuki. "I'm only breaking up this party so I can cut the whole story out of you myself."

With his mind swirling, overcome with the residual rigors of Itachi's Tsukuyomi, Haku looked toward the Akatsuki then back at the imperious mist-kunoichi in alarm. "W-what do you mean?" he sputtered, horrified.

"Yashako," Aya championed him, "how can you say that after everything that's happened? He's with us!"

Even Choujuro agreed, nodding vigorously, but was too cowed by the kunoichi's dread-inspiring presence to say.

"So I keep hearing," Yashako grumbled skeptically. "And why should I believe that? You know something I don't? Huh?!" Her eyes narrowed dangerously. "Come to think of it, you DO know something I don't. Enough games, Sakamoto, out with it!"

Aya's face froze with confusion.

"Don't give me that look! Zabuza got killed by leaf-ninja in Wave Country. Haku survived but was killed later by an ANBU team…YOUR team, Aya. You filed your reports, brought back his dust and crossed him off the Bingo Book. It's pretty clear now: that was all bullshit. So what's the real story? You'd better answer me."

Aya's expression wavered but only for a moment. "Pack-Leader Yamashite let him go," she revealed, eliciting a choked gasp from all the mist-shinobi within earshot. This was an allegation, not to mention her own admission, of treason.

For all her fierceness, the Swordswoman's eyes fell in an expression of disbelief and disappointment. "What?"

"He knew!" the medical-ninja blurted, shaking, as if she herself just realized. "I don't know how but somehow he knew…that we would need him, that he would come."

Still shaken, Haku glanced at her, cradling his broken wrist, mystified by her evangelical tone. Whether the kunoichi really believed what she said or not, he couldn't guess. Whether Toru had really seen something in him and if Aya even knew what, he couldn't guess. If she was lying, the woman had fully committed herself to it and was taking a frightful, frightful risk.

Yashako's expression curdled, her nostrils flared, but it was impossible to miss the change in her eyes – she believed her sister-shinobi even if she didn't want to. Maybe she'd known all along. "So Zabuza Momochi's apprentice is some kind of angel now, huh?"

"Yashako," Aya persisted in a way Haku had not thought her capable, let alone willing to exert on his behalf, "he's with us. You must believe me."

The mist-jonin glared at her colleague, probing for weakness, challenging her resolve, then turned back toward Haku. "Our Angel of Kirigakure," she crooned in a voice dripping with derision, with sneering sarcasm but she'd made her choice. "Is she right, snowflake?" the kunoichi asked. "Are you on our side?"

Given all he'd gone through in the course of this miserable adventure, what he'd gone through just now, this was more than Haku cared to take. He gestured toward the wounded Itachi who stood by with surprising patience or maybe just because it must have suited him in some inexplicable way. "Unfortunately…yes. And anytime you'd like to take over for me," he spat back, recklessly cavalier, "please be my guest."

"This is my village. You're damn right I'm taking over for you." She grinned and fixed the Uchiha with the same sour eye she'd given Haku, "especially if all I have to do now is take care of this douche-bag. He looks half dead already."

Haku cringed at the woman's gall but realized that maybe he'd gotten off easy with 'snowflake.'

Itachi, if he was offended, didn't seem like it as he said: "Let me spare you the trouble as well as the consequences, Swordswoman Yashako. By now, Kisame has taken what we came to Kirigakure for. There's no point in our being delayed in your luckless village any longer." And with those words, the shinobi spared Haku one last cryptic look, closed his eyes, formed a seal and vanished in an eruption of birds that rose, shrieking and flapping into the sky.

"Cool exit though," Yashako offered, nodding. "That's one way to get the flock out of here." She returned to Haku. "So what now, 'hero'?"

The young ninja's grey eyes lit. Naruto! he thought. Though the deck was stacked in his favor, war was always uncertain especially against the likes of the Scourge of the Hidden Mist, Kisame. Anything might have happened. Maybe Itachi was right and the jinchuuriki was even now in the clutches of the Akatuski on his way to some dungeon somewhere, having the Demon Fox's chakra torn -.

Blocks away from the tenement courtyard where they stood, a titanic explosion erupted from the direction of the Unagi Canal, sending pyres of sinister white flame gyring up into the leaden sky.

Haku stared, as they all did as one, mouths agape in surprise at this sign of further disasters to come but then the Demon's Apprentice alone grinned, almost broken by the wave of relief that crested over him. "Nothing," he answered, "not a thing."


Up next – the LAST arc: "Strange Angels".

Just THREE Chapters left!