Disclaimer: The characters belong to Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.
Author's Note: First of all, thank you, Rain Dove for that wonderful review, and Guest, I am so glad I caught you out! Hahaha, it's so much fun surprising people. Rosebunse, if I have creeped you out too much, apologies, but I hope you are still sticking around to find out how things end. Second, thank you to everybody who has favourited and followed since last time. Thirdly, to all who continue to read this story, thank you so much for sticking by me. My apologies for posting this so late. I've actually been editing this for days. My comfort zone? I lied. Sasuke introspection is perhaps harder than...harder than action scenes! Now I know why Kishimoto just brought back Itachi from the dead to talk to the kid. There's no way Sasuke was going to sort out this mess on his own. If I can convey confusion and multiple dimensions of motivation, then for that alone I will be happy. Without further ado, one whole chapter of Sasuke and a guest. I hope you enjoy this installment, Best, Zen :D
The first wolf appeared five hours into travelling, sometime around sunset. Light filtering between the trees was a soft dull orange and thick as treacle. The wolf in the long blue grass kept pace with languid strides and watched Sasuke from a distance.
Fending off the large animals of the forests was one of the many reasons ninjas travelled in teams. Some said that there were no bears within five miles of Konoha because Tsunade had pounded them into submission until they declared her an honorary bear and made that section of the forest Tsunade's territory, but, on the whole, conflict with animals was avoided.
Sasuke, however, was alone and the wolf was following him for a reason.
As the day went by, the ice on Itachi's body had thawed. The water had soaked into Sasuke's clothes. The decay that should have started weeks ago began to take hold. Smells of old blood and fat curdled in Sasuke's nostrils.
Flies had been easy enough to keep away. Sasuke had kept a current of electric chakra running through Itachi's body to shock whatever landed on him. Unfortunately for Sasuke, that meant his collar was getting steadily filled up with crisped and smoking flies.
He was hungry, but he was pushing that thought to the back of his mind. The smell coming off the corpse was making him nauseous. More to the point, he couldn't afford to stop moving. Madara might have already returned to the laboratory and set out to catch him and if Madara caught him this time, Sasuke doubted he would ever be able to leave again.
The wolf trotted on through the shadows. It looked as though it could go on all night, waiting Sasuke to fall and drop his burden to the ground. Sasuke leaped over a tree root snaking over the path and Itachi's arms flopped over his shoulders.
There had been times like this in the past, hadn't there? Sasuke dimly remembered. Two brothers together, one carrying the other on his back, travelling down one path. The world had been bigger then. The days had been warmer. Ridiculous, of course. The world had been bigger because he had been smaller and too ignorant of the world to know better, and as for warmer days, well, it was still spring. Summer was yet to come.
The dead body was heavy and weighed down on Sasuke's shoulders. He paused to take a breath, saw the wolf stop in the distance. He pressed on. He wasn't afraid of it. It irritated him more than anything, but it was a powerful reminder that he was on the run and needed to stay running as long as possible.
The body slipped down his back. He pulled the arms over his shoulders and shifted the satchel on his side.
There had been a time when Itachi had carried Sasuke on his back as lightly as if he weighed next to nothing.
Sasuke allowed himself a small smile. There was nobody in the forest to see it. It was ironic really, because Sasuke had never been anything but his brother's heaviest burden.
Had not Sasuke effectively been the hostage Konoha held against Itachi to ensure his loyalty? Had not the threat to Sasuke's life been the last grain that tipped Itachi towards his terrible decision? Perhaps if Sasuke had never existed, things would have been different.
No, they wouldn't have been, he thought bitterly, as the branches above him snapped in a sudden wind, because Konoha would still have been the same. The ninja world would still have been the same, still built on foundations of blood and rotten all through. Konoha would still have manipulated Itachi and found some other way to bend him to its will.
Uchiha Madara had been right. Konoha hadn't deserved Itachi. They had used his love for the village and twisted his kindness to suit their own needs. Sasuke couldn't understand what Itachi had seen in the village for him to be so loyal. Itachi had grown up in war. He had seen terrible things done in the name of Konoha, more so after he joined ANBU and done those terrible things himself. How and why did he care so much when he had seen so much of Konoha's worst?
Madara had said that Itachi had cared about peace above all else. If that was the case, then what had peace to do with Konoha?
Sasuke shook flies out of his ears, and white sparks of charge crackled over him. Dusk began to turn to night and the shadows thickened. The wolves, he saw them out of the corner of his eye. There were three now, perhaps four, grey and brindled, and their yellow eyes gleamed. They were still following him.
Had it all been a mistake? Killing Kabuto? Burning the laboratory? Turning his back on Madara? What was he doing carrying a dead body through a forest at night on his shoulders? He should have left it there, it was a dead weight, it was a –
" – lump of meat –"
No, it wasn't. Sasuke shook his head furiously as Kabuto's voice whispered in his ears.
Ninjas, soldiers, men of the world – bonds so tentative and bonds so strong – Sasuke had only ever had a few bonds and they were all broken, and of one this weight was all that remained.
Sasuke looked up to the criss-crossing branches. "I regret nothing."
The wind in the trees seemed to laugh.
It wasn't like him to chew on the wherefores and what ifs. What was done was done. There was no use thinking about the past and everything that had already happened. More important was what came next. That was always how he travelled.
Where in the wilderness was he? He had seen no landmark he was familiar with, nor met any other traveller, and Madara's illusions about the laboratory had disorientated him. He could still taste the bile at the back of his throat from the moment he had forced through the illusions that had protected the lair.
Night drew in and the air chilled his damp clothes. It was time to make camp and find some shelter. Soon he found a ring of pines by the bend of a stream. There was water. He was grateful for that.
Sasuke lowered Itachi's body onto the grass, pulled off his coat and laid it onto the ground. He rolled the corpse onto the coat. Once he had checked that the contents of the satchel were still intact, he dug a hole into the soft earth with his fingers and collected tinder for the fire.
The corpse stretched out on his coat was ghoulish. It was pale, mottled, dripping from where joints had snapped. Sasuke had been in a hurry to get out of the caves. There had been no real time for his brother to defrost.
He flipped his hands through seals and blew fire onto the strips of birch. Build a fire, dry his clothes, perhaps boil the stream later and see what floated to its surface. Water, fire, secure the clearing…Sasuke's mind took him to through the routine with a comfortingly mechanical familiarity. A small voice at the back of his mind noted that it was a while since he had needed to do all this alone.
Eyes flickered at the edge of the clearing. The four wolves had encircled him as he set up camp. They gazed between Sasuke and the dead body on his coat as scavengers would, waiting for the deadlier predator to relinquish its prey. One whined at him and another licked its black lips.
Sasuke leapt to his feet. "Disappear, you pitiful scroungers!"
Jagged bars of blue-white lightning exploded from his arms, hopped and spat across the grass and the wolves dashed away, yipping into the undergrowth with their tails between their legs.
When the sounds of the wolves had faded into the distance, Sasuke relaxed the chakra flow to his arms and slowly breathed out.
"Well, that was quite a show," said a dry voice.
Sasuke turned away from the pines and his eyes shone red.
On the other side of the stream was a man. He was short, ruddy-faced, with a dark cloth cap. With one hand he was lowering a purple bundle to his feet and with the other he was leafing through the pages of a book that was clipped to his belt. There were bookmarks between the pages. Sasuke recognised it as an old edition of the Bingo Book.
"Good show, good show," the man continued, still turning through the book until he finally looked up with a grin. "Uchiha Sasuke, am I correct?"
Sasuke shifted sideways to stand over his brother's body. He was disturbed that he hadn't detected the man's approach. Footsteps he might have masked in the moment Sasuke had scared off the wolf pack, but Sasuke hadn't sensed even a flicker of chakra from him.
The man closed the book and regarded him from the other side of the stream. Sasuke said nothing.
Eventually the man cracked a smile. "You're a quiet one. Well, ain't this my lucky day? I've been scouring this area for weeks for pickings, and today, I got two sick little sparrows falling straight into my pot."
"You're a bounty hunter," Sasuke realised. He narrowed his eyes. "Without chakra. A civilian bounty hunter."
"You didn't detect me, did you?" the man crowed. "Surprised, aren't you? Plague and all, a chakra-less civilian like me can earn a fair living from hunting ninja rogues. I find them when they're weakening from the sickness. I track their steps, wait for them to fall. You should see the look on their faces when I finally get them."
Kakashi's voice echoed in Sasuke's ear and for a moment Sasuke was back on a road near Ageha, pinned down by a sword and bound in wire: "Be thankful we found you first and not a bounty hunter."
The bounty hunter unhooked an instrument from behind his back. It looked like a sickle or a grappling hook attached to a short range bow. Whatever it was, it was clearly a device of the man's own making.
"You're a lucky boy," the man continued, wading into the stream with the device stretched in front of him. "The word is out to bring you in alive. Konoha will pay a good price for you, but those eyes - those pretty, pretty eyes – you could live without them. If I clean them and disinfect them, they'll fetch a good price on the black market, oh yes. Clean them and disinfect them, I don't think anyone will complain about the sick little ninja they came from."
The bounty hunter thought he had the Plague. Sasuke wasn't surprised that he appeared ill. He was shivering from the clammy dampness of his clothes. He was tired from running all day with a dead body on his back. Kabuto's dried blood was still all over his face. No wonder this odious little man thought he was easy pickings. He looked like a ninja in the Plague's final bloody stage.
Sasuke palmed a scalpel in each hand and waited for the man to come closer.
"That's it. You don't want to make any sudden movements," the man breathed, as he held out the vicious-looking crossbow. "You've got to be gentle with yourself in the final stages. I see your friend over there's already popped off, eh? You want to calm down, kid. It'll ease the pain – "
Two scalpels were thrown into the man's eyes. A bar of white lightning extended from Sasuke's fingers. Drawing his fingers sideways, the beam of light sizzled through the bounty hunter's neck.
The body splashed into the water moments later, and one more man who enjoyed the sound of his voice too much was dead and gone. The man's head landed in the stream and bobbed away on the current.
Sasuke scanned the clearing and listened. The stream bubbled against the body. Far away, a wolf howled and another answered. Apart from that, there was silence. For now, it was just him, two dead bodies and the smell of burned flesh from the bounty hunter's neck lingering like a shade.
He turned back to the fire-pit and finally sat down beside it.
The stream was filling with the bounty hunter's blood. Washing his clothes would have to wait another day and he certainly didn't want to drink from it anymore. He turned his mind over the list of things he needed to do. He needed to set traps around the perimeter, perhaps move Itachi's body up into a tree…
It was warm by the fire and so easy to forget about the thawing body beside him.
Sasuke realised that his eyelids were drooping and blinked quickly awake. He couldn't afford to sleep yet. He had no plans. His best option was to find the nearest town and try to lie low amongst the locals until everything was over. It would be better to find a ninja town, one where there were enough surrounding chakra signatures to act as noise to cover his own. Then again, what was he going to do with Itachi's dead body?
The flames leapt in front of him. Once his clothes were dry, he should probably snuff out the fire.
He could return to Konoha, of course. If he was going to have his vengeance, he was always going to have to go back there eventually, if not to burn the place himself then to watch the town fall apart as the Plague took it. And Itachi, if there was anywhere he wanted to be buried, it would probably be there. Although after what he had said to Kakashi, Sasuke doubted they would let him back in so easily or give him the necessary freedom to burn the place down. They would throw Sasuke into a holding cell, incapacitate him and try to use him to generate a cure.
Kabuto loomed in his mind with his glasses glinting and his smug smile.
"Wasn't Konoha the town your brother loved more than his own clan? Didn't your brother die for Konoha? And now you're setting out to destroy the very thing your brother wanted to protect?"
Kabuto, Madara and Itachi - they all had a way with words that Sasuke just didn't have. Their words got under his skin and twisted like parasites. They leeched at his thoughts. He took a stick from the fire, raked the tinder into a heap in the centre, glanced towards Itachi's dead body.
He snorted and went back to staring at the fire. Itachi's decisions had been Itachi's decisions. Sasuke's decisions were his own. It had been Itachi's decision to barter their family to maintain peace in Konoha. Sasuke was under no obligation to approve of that decision. On the contrary, as Itachi's brother, Sasuke had a better right than anybody to disapprove of his brother's decisions.
Look where Itachi's decisions had brought Sasuke – out into the forest, stalked by bounty hunters, pursued by wolves, experimented on by psychopaths, made into whatever tool people saw fit…
No. All of those consequences were due to Sasuke's own decisions and his alone. He had chosen to leave the village. His own two feet had carried himself to the Uchiha hideout and he had let Madara use him. He had nobody to blame but himself.
Besides, Sasuke would never reduce himself to a tool. Unless that helped to further his own agenda.
"That is curious. You only have yourself to blame really. If you hadn't killed Itachi, he wouldn't be dead…"
Itachi had been dying of MK. He would have died without Sasuke anyway. Sasuke had done little more than help his brother along. Actually, he hadn't even done that.
But Sasuke was right in some respects. Itachi's decisions had never really just been Itachi's decisions. Sasuke had always played an unwitting part in them. Itachi had fought him at the hideout and chosen to die at that moment when all he thought he could possibly do as his older brother had been done. He had always thought of his younger brother.
Should Sasuke think about his brother's wishes when he thought about Konoha? Konoha's destruction was a goal of Sasuke's own design, the first step Sasuke had taken off the road Itachi had made him. It was something he wanted to do for himself.
Suddenly all Sasuke wanted to do was put his head in his hands and laugh.
He lifted his head and looked into the dark across the stream. "I know you're there. What do you want?"
The dark rustled and out from the shadow of the trees stepped a figure in a high-collared tunic, its head covered in a strange black hood. The eye holes were covered in dark glass.
"Uchiha Sasuke?" The figure seemed surprised. "I should have known. I thought I sensed a familiar signature. Perhaps you remember me – Aburame Shino."
Sasuke looked the young man up and down. He couldn't say he did. He had a vague memory that there had been someone of that name back in his days at school. Another voice from the distant past, his father's voice, offered details drummed into him about old Konoha clans. The Aburame was the clan who gave their bodies over to chakra-sensitive insects, the clan with the tradition of hiding their eyes. Sasuke's father had suspected it was because their sockets were empty, but had never tried to find out more. In any case, the Uchiha did not think highly of a clan that hid away its eyes.
At Sasuke's silence, Shino's shoulders sagged, as though he had grown long-accustomed to people forgetting about him. He sighed. "No doubt you are wondering what I am doing here. I am here to collect something that belongs to my clan. I was observing you from a distance to decide whether there would be any need for combat or not, but I do not believe there is."
The oddly clipped syntax was vaguely familiar. Sasuke raised himself to his feet and readied one of Kabuto's scalpels. "Has Konoha sent you after me?"
"Nobody has sent me. I live here. My clan left Konoha not long after the Plague broke out because our insects could not tolerate the smoke from the pits. We have been living in these parts of the forests since and we do not go near the town." Behind the black hood, Shino seemed to be grimacing at the thought of the smoke. He came forward to the stream. "If you do not want Konoha to find you, then the Aburame will not turn you over. We owe you a favour of sorts, and I do not like the idea of being indebted to you."
"You owe me a favour?"
Shino gestured down and Sasuke found his gaze directed towards the headless body of the bounty hunter damming up the stream. "This man killed one of my clansmen who was weakening from the Plague and stole a sample of his hive. I am here to reclaim what he stole."
Shino stopped beside the hunter's bundle and unknotted the purple cloth. The cloth fell away to reveal a large glass jar. Inside was a severed hand and, at Shino's touch, a small cloud of insects drifted out from the wrist.
"I believe he was planning on selling them on the black market," Shino said darkly, peering into the jar. Sasuke could only stare in disgust. "Disgraceful. This even contains a developing queen. No matter. I shall deliver this back to my clan. It will be something to remember my cousin by. Since I have explained myself, I would like you to do the same for me. What are you doing here, Uchiha Sasuke?"
"It is none of your business."
Shino straightened and nestled the jar against his chest. "Then what do you intend to do with the corpse you have there? Don't try to hide it. My insects have been trained to recognise decay. It makes them exceptionally good for tracking down bodies about the forest."
"Then what do you do with the bodies you find?"
"We bury all the dead travellers and record the date and place we buried them on a map in the main house. Once the Plague ends, Konoha might come looking for those who were missing and we thought this was one way we could still be of service to our fellow ninjas, whilst being incapable of sharing in their pain back home." Shino shook his head and glared at Sasuke. "I must admit disappointment in seeing you enter the body-snatching business, Uchiha Sasuke. The black market for ninja bodies may be rich and lucrative, but the Uchihas were such a proud family and to see you stoop so low – "
"This is the body of my brother."
It was a mere ripple of turbulence, like a flick of a fish's tail under the surface of a pond, but in that instant, there had been more ragged emotion in Sasuke's face than Shino had ever seen before.
Shino looked down to the jar cradled in his arms, at his cousin's wrist he had retrieved, and then back at Uchiha Sasuke standing across the stream.
"Perhaps I went too far with my assumptions," Shino eventually conceded. The news that Uchiha Itachi had died had reached Konoha weeks ago. Clearly there was a long story behind the current circumstances, so he buried down his confusion deep as a beetle grub and decided not to pry. "Then what do you intend to do with your brother's body? You won't be able to travel far with a body on your back. There are plenty more bounty hunters and wolves out here."
Sasuke ignored Shino's questions. Instead, he asked, "Where are we? Which part of the forest is this?"
Shino scrutinised Sasuke through the thick black lenses of his hood. It was clear that he thought Sasuke's behaviour suspicious, although if their positions were reversed, Sasuke would think the exactly same. "We're two days due south-east of Konoha."
Konoha was near, nearer than Sasuke had thought. Of course, it made sense to build a laboratory within easy access of a source for test subjects, and there was no larger pool of potential subjects than the Land of Fire's most chakra-dense population.
"Do you intend to go to Konoha?" Sasuke pursed his lips in a non-committal silence. Shino lowered his voice, "We don't get much in the way of news here, but I heard that there's been trouble there lately."
"Trouble?" Sasuke narrowed his eyes. "What kind of trouble?"
"Rioting, arson…a large part of the town went up in flames. My father was saying that Konoha had never seen such violence on home soil since the Third Shinobi War." Shino drew in a deep shuddering breath and Sasuke realised that, in the ninja's own stoic and solemn way, Shino was enraged.
"But as my father also says, Konoha may burn down over and over again, but simply putting a match to it will never destroy it. In this respect, a human population is much like a hive. So long as the people exist, Konoha exists. So long as there is a swarm, the hive will continue. A termite colony is defined by its living members and not the termite tower, and a beehive by its swarm and not its combs."
Although with the Plague going through the town, how much longer would the people last? Sasuke wanted to point out, but he decided that the remark was too revealing of his motivations to risk voicing. Then again, this news that Konoha had already burned was unexpected. He was momentarily at a loss for words.
Sasuke found himself raising his eyes to the treetops and scanning for a faint urban glow.
Shino was watching him closely. "You seem sceptical. Perhaps you think that the town will fall anyway, if the Plague took every ninja there."
"And you think the town won't fall?" Sasuke scoffed.
Shino replied simply, "It won't. There are Konoha ninjas beyond the walls of Konoha after all."
There was a contemplative silence. Shino was an idealistic fool, typical of every Konoha ninja Sasuke had ever known. He could hear the unspoken speech behind Shino's words, about how fire and sickness could never erase Konoha from a ninja's heart. As far as Sasuke was concerned, fire and sickness were exactly what erased 'ninja hearts' in the first place. If he erased enough Konoha ninjas, Konoha would end.
Exactly how many dead Konoha ninjas would be enough?
… the path of bone went nowhere but deeper, deeper down into a bloody well that went on forever.
Kabuto's face out of the dark, sly and thoughtful. "I could try to kill everybody, absolutely everybody, and leave no survivors who'd come after me…everyone must die – the whole world, if you want to be thorough. It's impossible."
Then Uchiha Madara was smiling behind a swirling orange mask. "To be the last man standing – that is the perfect revenge."
And there, Sasuke realised, lay a paradox he could not solve: If Konoha resided in the thoughts, hopes and dreams of ninjas, then Konoha would exist so long as there was a ninja alive who could give Konoha a meaning – be it as an enemy, be it as the potential centre for ninja peace, be it as home or a grave for a loved one – and to Sasuke Konoha held so much meaning.
If Sasuke lived and outlived his enemies, as Madara had insisted, then Konoha would still exist inside him. He was his own enemy until he died, and if there was one thing carrying the dead body of Itachi on his shoulders had made him finally realise, it was that Sasuke stubbornly wanted to live and live his own life.
He began to realise his mistake. 'Konoha' had become for him an amorphous crowd of faces, a grey cloud of ignorance and laughter. Since when had Sasuke come to think of Konoha in such un-concrete terms? He had been fighting against the idea of Konoha, and slipping away from reality.
"It's just an endless chase in the dark."
He wanted a target. He wanted a physical enemy he could strike with his fist and see bleed, if not burn. He wanted a pin-sharp, precise vision of what was on the other end of his blade. The Konoha elders who had ordered Itachi to do the deed and cornered him into thinking there was no other option, they were the ones he wanted. They were the snake's head.
If he made the idea of Konoha his enemy it would have been like fighting smoke. He would have to deal with that eventually, but for now…
"…narrow the focus of my vengeance to killing just one man, and crush him to the ground…Push him down so hard that everyone will acknowledge that his death was justified…"
Sasuke had derided Kabuto's idea of revenge a coward's revenge, but he had to hand it to him – it was brutal in its precision. Unlike Kabuto though, Sasuke did not fear the consequences.
"If you are considering returning to the town," Shino cut into his thoughts, seemingly unnerved by Sasuke's long silence, "it is said they are being more lenient on their punishment of returning rogue ninjas. So many ninjas have been lost to the Plague, Konoha will take back any able-bodied man it can get, but perhaps it would be better to wait - ?"
"You say we are two days from Konoha."
Shino seemed taken aback at the abrupt turn of conversation. "That is what I said, yes."
Sasuke looked at the body behind him, pale and waxy in the firelight. "I will get there in one."
"Konoha won't let you in with a Plague corpse," Shino said solemnly. "As an expression of our gratitude for killing this bounty hunter, my clan can dispose of the body for you. Somewhere quiet, somewhere peaceful. We know these forests well now. There are wolves, and bears, but there are places where even they do not go."
"I don't want your gratitude. I killed the bounty hunter for my own reasons." He turned his back on Shino. "I'm taking my brother's body back to Konoha. You've got your jar. Now go."
At the abrupt dismissal, Shino remained hovering at the side of the stream. Sasuke prowled back to his fire-pit and begin to smother the flames with earth.
"I wish you a safe journey home," said Shino. "There are people waiting for your return."
The very thought of all the friends he had left behind in Konoha made Shino wistful. He thought about them with every curl of smoke that drifted from the town, and he wondered if they ever missed him – forgettable Shino, the one in the sunglasses at the back of the classroom that nobody really remembered. Still, so long as Kiba and Hinata and Kurenai-sensei were there when he returned, he would be happy just with that.
Shino marked where the body of the bounty hunter had fallen and the direction of the current that had taken its head. He would deal with them in the morning when Uchiha Sasuke had disappeared from the scene. The jar of kikaichuu buzzing sleepily in his arms, he left the clearing.
Behind him, in the ring of pines, the fire sank down to glowing embers.
Sasuke tightened his grip on the scalpel. "I am not going home to Konoha."
If home was a place where you came to rest, then with what Sasuke had in mind, Konoha was no home to him at all. Konoha was Itachi's home, not his. It would be asylum from Madara, but after asylum, then what?
A hunting ground. A prison. A grave.
Perhaps. If. Maybe.
The pieces of a plan clicked together.
Sasuke scraped earth over the last embers of the fire and they winked out like stars. Wolves called in the distance.
Thank you for reading!
Next time: Tsunade does an autopsy, Sakura visits Neji, Danzo and Naruto have headaches. And who's this traveller knocking on the door?