A/n: I totally forgot which chapter this is supposed to be...
And, you know? I absolutely just randomly changed my mind. I'm going to skip one chapter, because it's just...eh. It gets explained later. There's no fight scene. The little details are kind of cute, but...eh. Maybe I'll post it when I've posted everything else, as a deleted scene or something.
Which means that we spend less time out of basically Pein's point of view. Because the cut chapter is absolutely from Ren's point of view. Except it...no, the cut chapter itself is just Ren's point of view.
It also means that there will be absolutely no focus on my lesbian OCs. I hope nobody was expecting yuri (except that I'm vaguely tempted to...never mind. Ren would somehow find her revenge on me, even though she doesn't exist. And Pein would be distressed over a notstraight kid...:coughcoughcough: oh well, that most certainly won't happen in this story, will it?)
Dude. Have you ever noticed...Haruka and Shikai are Ren's aunt and uncle? Sortakindatechniclyalmost? Huh? Huh? Yeah, that would make that potential pairing a touch more awkward...
If nobody understands what I'm implying, that's just fine! Good for you, you're not perverts who don't even limit themselves to the opposite gender:hackcoughwheeze:
Absolutely skipping. Makes no sense, I'm sure. I seem best at just writing when I'm half-asleep. Otherwise I get bogged down with the details and will go, "Seriously, what's he going to say?" instead of just having the plot interrupt their conversation and it doesn't matter what he was going to say.
And I made a second decision. No cutting. You're getting that chapter that doesn't really matter. In the odd case that you don't like that idea, please be calmed. I'm officially done with the writing on this story, so I have no reason to not come straight home, do my homework, and go straight to the computer and post the next chapter.
Disclaimer: Akatsuki is copyrighted to Masashi Kishimoto. Sucks to be them.
Ren, Haruka, Shikai, Sayuri, and the Otogakure dude(tte)s, who don't really appear but are definitely in the story, are copyrighted to me. It could very well suck even more to be them.
Ren halted just outside her grandfather's door, having heard him respond to the lure and now being rather worried about him. Anger boiled inside her. 'He never listens, does he? Old people, I swear…'
Her surrogate parents would listen, though, and so she ran as she had been taught in the ninja academy back to their room, slamming the door open and exclaiming, "Otou-chan! Otou-sama! Ojii-sama's been kidnapped!"
Ren's grandmother perked up, her head snapping toward Ren and away from Sayuri, who now had two rather large balls of slimy fluff sticking to her sides. Before she could say anything, though, the man in the orange mask laughed. "That's a good one, Ren-chan! You should go into acting!"
"Tobi!" the blue-haired woman snapped, turning attentively back to Ren, her eyes expressing a very serious question. "Ren, why do you say this?"
"He was just kidnapped!" Ren responded agitatedly. "I heard them talking about it, and that they were going to lure him to a window or something and then he goes and opens the window! And now he's gone!"
Tobi—yes, that was his name, as Ren occasionally forgot—seemed surprised. "You mean—seriously?"
"Otou-chan, when am I not serious?" Ren demanded. "Are we going to help Ojii-sama or not?"
Ren's other father answered coolly, "We shouldn't."
The blue-haired woman whipped to face him. "Excuse me?"
"Finding him would be a tactical error," he answered levelly. "The enemy could easily just be using him as bait. Besides, we've already planned for this situation. He'd rather that you take over than for you to die trying to bring him back."
She glared back defiantly. "He's not dead—I'm not in control yet. As second-in-command, I do, however, have the power to say that we go to find him. Round up everyone else—now. Meet in the kitchen, and we'll discuss everything." Her eyes to Ren as the two black-haired men left the room rapidly. "Ren-san, I'd like to leave you with Haruka-chan and Shikai-kun, but I need you with us. How far did you get into ninja training?"
Ren almost smiled. She had a bit of a pride complex, and she took this moment to push her chest out slightly before answering, "I was going to graduate at the next testing opportunity."
"Then you can make shadow clones?" her grandmother fired.
Ren nodded proudly.
"Make three," the blue-haired woman ordered. "Leave two in here with Haruka and Shikai and the cat—have the other stand guard outside. And you'll come to meet us in the kitchen."
"Okaa-chan?" Haruka squeaked—Ren was proud to know at least her name. "What's happening?"
The woman paused, then leaned in toward her daughter with a warm smile on her face. "Haruka-chan, Okaa-chan has work to do to help get Otou-sama back from the bad people. All you have to do is stay here with Shikai-kun and Sayuri-san, and everything will be all right."
Haruka didn't seem to trust her, but finally she extended her hand, balled into a fist except for the smallest finger. "Pinky promise?"
Shikai scoffed. "Haruka-chan, you know that nobody's going to take you seriously like that."
Her mother blinked, but smiled again and wrapped the smallest of her own fingers around Haruka's. "Pinky promise."
"Say it fully," Haruka insisted, pouting. Shikai rolled his eyes.
Her mother closed her eyes for a moment and answered, eyes still closed, "With this pinky I do promise that everything will be fine so long as you stay here with Shikai-kun and Sayuri-san."
Haruka seemed pleased by this, and her hand separated from her mother's as her blue-haired elder stood and walked out of the room, sending a cool glare to Ren as a reminder that there were things to get done.
Ren nodded and proceeded to use the hand seals necessary to produce three clones, having two remain within the room with Haruka and Shikai and the other following her out, diverging just outside the closed door to stand guard. Her actual self proceeded down the stairs and into the kitchen, where everyone else in the house had already gathered with solemn faces.
The blue-haired woman sent Ren a stare serious enough to be considered a glare and warned, "Ren-chan, if you are lying, right now is the time to say so. If this is a charade, this is your chance to admit to it. If you keep it up, when we find out, this will no longer be a place of residence for you, at the very least."
Ren felt a twinge at anger. 'They still don't believe me…' "Would I lie to you?"
The new leader's stare became, if possible, more grave. "I most certainly hope not." She turned to the rest of the group, her hands on the table as she stood with shoulders angrily hunched. "We need a battle plan to get Pein-sama back. Has anyone thought of anything yet?"
The blonde…person raised…its abnormal hand high above it ponytailed head. "I have one!"
He was ignored. "Itachi-san?" the woman asked instead, turning her head toward Ren's stolid father, expecting an answer when he hadn't offered one.
Itachi paused before answering, "Who is the attacker?" All eyes turned to the only possible source of information—Ren.
Ren hesitated. She hadn't picked up on who was doing this. "I…I don't know," she admitted. "They mentioned something about…" She tried to recall the conversation that she'd overheard. "…well, the one of them was talking about a snake…"
Her grandmother shifted her gaze sideways, as if exchanging a glance with someone who wasn't there. Her expression turned sour as she turned forward again and diagnosed, "Snakes would be a very Otogakure thing to be talking about…who thinks it was ninjas from Otogakure?"
Nobody responded except to exchange awkward glances. Finally, the white-haired man who couldn't die spoke up. "When the fuck did our opinions matter?" he asked tentatively. "The leader was always right before."
"The leader." Not "Leader-sama," not "Sir Leader," but "the leader." As in whoever was leader at the time.
The new leader didn't take that well. "He is right—he always has been right and he always will be right." As she went, a note of hysteria crept into her voice. "At no point in time will we ever be able to say that he was right, because he will always remain to be right. Which also means that everyone else has a tendency to be wrong, which means that even I am wrong, because I am not him.
"Now," she went on, her voice cracking once before turning back to her normal cool. "We need a plan, or Pein-sama will never be here to keep us in order."
Ren was vaguely aware of a faint buzzing sound. She itched her ears, hoping to get rid of the echo, but it remained, and she tried to block it out by covering her ears.
It seemed to work, and she relaxed somewhat, trying to keep up with the conversation despite such an obvious handicap, and failing. Eventually, however, the conversation seemed to hover, everybody sending suspicious glances about, and Ren sent a curious stare at anyone who might respond somehow.
At once—it was almost creepy, the unity of it—eyes widened for a split second before every other body in the room fell to the floor.
A/n again: You know the second reason I'm posting this first? I mean, sure, it won't be that long, but, I'd like to put off being shot.
You know, you'd think that having really really really good hearing would be a dissadvantage when fighting Otogakure. Apparently not. My explanation is that it means she gets the little clues like that and thus can prepare herself. (And that whole everybody-just-totally-fainted-or-something-oh-dear-that-can't-be-good thing is related to the whole apparently-those-people-from-Otogakure-can-control-almost-anything-in-your-body-with-sounds-dude-what's-up-with-that thing. Yeah...for plot's sake, okay? (of course, that's probably Kishi's reasoning for killing off the members of Akatsuki. Since I disagree with him yet do the same exact thing, I guess I'm a bad person.)
Preview: Skipping straight to the end--why is Ren so Mary-Sue, anyway?
Special: No material:
Yup. I'm out of special ideas. So instead I'll explain my plans for when I'm done posting this story.
What am I doing after this story? Four words:
National. Novel. Writing. Month. (if you're interested, I have the link at the bottom-ish of my profile)
Yeah, if you think about it, sure, I could continue writing off of this plotbunny thing, because they define a novel as a piece of fiction, which technically includes fanfiction and my NaNoWriMo last year was a fanfiction. But, if I'm going to do NaNo, I have to have an idea that will last...fifty thousand words. I seriously think that the sequel was kinda stretching it, and that I really seriously honestly would be better off for not-overdoing-it-ness in just leaving it, but trilogies seem more final. However, it would oh-so-very-seriously be stretching it too far if I made a FIFTY THOUSAND WORD third installment.
I have my idea for NaNo, but I guess I might not have thought it through quite as well as it could have. If I dead-end badly enough with that, and it's early enough that starting a new idea sounds cool, sure, I'll use the third installment instead. But don't hold your breath (yeah, like you'd do that anyway).
After November, I'll be totally free of NaNoWriMo, and then I'll either wrap up my novel, at least to a point where I can feel reasonably accomplished with it, and if I'm not going to do that, I'll skip straight into the third piece. Which is technically totally unrelated to these last two DRFs, and could very easily be considered just something else altogether, but I have a feeling it might get more popularity this way, and/or it would be more fun to throw Ren in, and that would really work best if it was tied to the story with her introduction.