19
Turning in its sleep
Bird awaits the winter's end
Longs to fly again
As she was sorting the vials of poison that day, Inazuma's heart pounded in her hears, and waves of heat seemed to shiver up her spine.
She squinted at the label of a glass vial filled with bright green fluid, and read the numbers and letters that classified the toxin, before carefully nestling it in its proper place in a cardboard box. She then picked through a few more bottles until she found one, filled with black fluid, that had a matching label and the word "antidote" neatly written on the rubber cap.
She focused all of her willpower on not turning around and looking at what was going on behind her, but she could somehow hear (or imagined she could hear), the sickening sounds of scraping and sticky peeling. She squeezed her eyes shut and gripped the antidote in the palm of one hand, and swallowed repeatedly before cracking her eyes back open into slits. Her eyelashes blurred her vision.
"Sasori…" she barely managed to squeak his name. It tasted like hot poison on her tongue.
"What is it, brat?"
She screwed her eyes shut again and swallowed, hard, to clear her voice, "What are you doing?"
She heard him set down the scalpel and pick up a heavier sounding metal tool that clunked against the wooden table. After a drawn out eternity of a quiet, slithering, sucking sound, which Inazuma imagined to be a bone of some sort being pried from its resting place with agonizing slowness, he spoke.
"The world of ninja is harsh and merciless, kid." She heard a clunk as he set the tool down and a ringing shling of metal against wood as he picked the scalpel back up.
"I'm forging tools of war."
It was only later, as Inazuma lay shivering in her bed from something that wasn't the cold (there was a thick quilt pulled up over the top of her head), that she wondered if it had been the corpse he was talking about.
Her warm breath filled up the air under the blankets until she felt as though she were suffocating.
She clutched a kunai to her chest, somehow reassured by the feel of its handle in her hands, and vowed that she would not be turned into a human puppet.