Note: And this is the end! Thanks to everyone for reading, reviewing, and all that jazz. If you've read my poetry collection Reflections, you might recognize the lines from the non-haiku at the beginning. :P I hope this final chapter does not disappoint, despite it's semi-shortness.
25
To wait ceaselessly for sunrise
As the residue of your waiting
Keeps you forever
Mesmerized.
Kankuro swept his hand through the air, twisting his fingers into complicated patterns and sending Sasori's body flying toward the Hidden Cloud girl.
Inazuma dodged Sasori's blades and shot a strike of lightning chakra at her opponent, missing her target because she was trying to avoid damaging the puppet (why she didn't just blast it to pieces, she didn't know).
Why wouldn't I, when there's nothing for me to lose?
Bringing sparking chakra to her fingertips, she managed to dart in and strike her opponent's shoulder, numbing his entire left arm and earning her a murderous glare. He swung his right hand and brought Sasori's body around, purple dripping from every protruding blade.
It's poison. If you tell anyone I'm here, you'll die.
Her mission was to steal an important artifact from a daimyo's castle. And just because someone else had hired this boy to do the same as her, they were pitted against each other in a deadly battle.
"But is there anything for you to gain?"
She struck him in the other arm, and his strings broke, letting Sasori crash to the floor. Her opponent snarled at her, purple face paint giving him the appearance of a demon from hell. He wasn't even much older than she was, and for all his terrifying looks, for all his evil actions, and for all his battle spite…
There is still hope for you.
She punched him in the face, zapping him one last time.
He fell to the floor, unconscious. She stepped over his body with hardly a glance and kneeled over the other one. The wooden one with the hair like blood. Inazuma turned it over, and it made an echoing clunk sound as its shoulder hit the stone of the floor. She swallowed, her throat tight with some kind of emotion she didn't care to name.
"All this time," she whispered, "And you were just a puppet, yourself."
Inazuma took a deep breath and set down his body (it echoed against the stone floor), for some reason sorry that he had no eyelids that she could close over those glassy, unseeing, decorative eyes of his. She clenched her small hands into tight fists, and got to her feet, feeling as though the floor beneath her was swaying - just slightly, like a canoe on breezy waters - but also feeling as though she was the most powerful being in the world, standing erect in the shadows in middle of this enormous, empty castle.
"Why would you let yourself die?" she wanted to ask, "Why would you let yourself become the puppet of another?" But she knew that he could no longer answer, (he wouldn't answer even if he were still there) and that the only answer she would get would be from herself.
Don't let the wrong hands forge your path any longer.
"I won't," she whispered to herself, timidly. Then she cleared her throat forcefully and spoke loudly enough for her voice to carry through the dim-lit hallways, loudly enough for any lurking enemy to hear her words.
"This is my path to change," she called, with the confident voice she thought she'd lost so long ago.
And she turned and brought her hands together, creating a flickering point of light between them, which grew brighter and brighter in intensity before exploding out of her hands and blowing a hole in the granite wall with a blinding, ground-shaking roar.
The snow floated gently down from the sky, lit up with the cold, white light of the sun veiled in the clouds.
She leaped out of the shadowy halls and into the sky without a backwards glance.