HAPPY NEW YEAR!
A Ginormous shout out to all of you, my super special readers, for sticking with me and this story. I truly appreciate all of you. Thank you so much :)
Shout out to my amazing beta reader, DoctorNiklaus.
Enjoy…
CHAPTER 8
Kisame's underwater cave
Rin was always moody when she was sick.
Moody and clingy.
His twin moaned petulantly, nestling closer into his side and burrowing her face deeper into Naruto's neck, left hand splayed flat across his stomach and mindlessly helping him vibrate Orochimaru's poison away from his vitals.
Naruto shook his head, holding her close and snorting with a barely held smirk. "Rin, I've got it. Focus on getting better."
"Nooooooo…" Rin moaned again, wiggling further into her brother's warmth and trying again to focus charged vibrations into his gut. She stuttered wordlessly, spitting without spitting, and groaning. "I'm being useless on this mission…let me help."
"If you keep pouting, I'll leave," Naruto breathed, eyes closed and sitting back on the hard stone wall of the cave. The campfire before them crackled, and a small pot of water boiled over it. He joked, "You're being unbearable."
"I'm sorry…Naruto, I'm sorry…" she murmured, breathless and queasy.
Apparently, travelling at high speeds inside the stomach of a shark sword gave Rin even worse seasickness, and now that it was close to midnight, Naruto was trying to put her to sleep so he could go out and do some light reconnaissance on their current location.
Samehada was good on its word, infiltrating Water country's tight border patrols and locating Kisame's underwater cave hideout.
It took some doing, pushing under and through the patrol boats, bypassing the occasional sensory sweeps from the ninjas onboard, and timing each burst onward as those ninjas shined their spotlights the other way.
It could be that this meandering and turning disorientated Rin, more so than any boat could.
The cave itself was fairly sized for the twins, being fifteen feet wide and ten feet high. The campfire was just small enough to not be too close to either of them, and stocked with dry enough wood to not pollute the cave with smoke; the twins could sleep on either side of the fire, but knowing them, they won't be able to keep their hands off each other.
The entrance of the cave looked like a wide puddle on the ground.
Samehada swam outside, pacing around the cave and snacking off fish wandered in its path; Naruto worried if the giant patrolling sea beast would clue onlookers on the shore of their presence, but when Rin moaned again, needling close to him and curling her legs into him, he tried to put that worry aside for another time.
The cave was cold, so the fire helped somewhat.
Rin, though, was more focused on soaking in the bonfire of heat and chakra, wrapped in her brother's embrace and yearning for more.
Naruto was always patient when it came to his twin, and his baby sister too. When she had wriggled into the right spot and pushed deep enough into his side, she would slowly slump asleep, whereupon his next issue would be stealthily untying her limbs from his body so he could escape the cave.
He chuckled at the thought and pulled Rin closer.
He had given her ginger ale tea and some pills to help with the seasickness, though whether those would help her sleep was up for debate.
Her groaning subsided. He thought she had fallen asleep, until Rin exhaled a question.
"Whatever happened to Yume?" she was now a ball, arms tied around his midsection and her face was wedged between his neck and shoulder. Her voice was dull, sleepy, and her hot breath drove chills down Naruto's back. She asked, "Do you still, y'know…talk to her? Since after that party."
After getting promoted to Chunin, their circle of friends knew that the twins weren't much for throwing giant celebratory parties, so a group of them–Genin, newly promoted Chunin, and civilians–hosted a small get-together at Piper's Cinnabon, an Akimichi bakery.
The group then walked to Ayame's place and started playing a 'harmless' party game.
Spin the bottle, shinobi edition.
Naruto and Rin were the youngest there, both being nine years old, and the oldest in the party was about fifteen.
Flashback
The bottle spun to Naruto, and his eyes furrowed at the suspicious hooting that went around the circle. He turned to Rin, seated across from him on the other side of the circle, and she sent him a heavy shrug, just as confused.
The person that spun the bottle, Yume Aburame, winced.
She was three years older than Naruto and had also received her Chunin vest with the twins, though she couldn't say she was particularly close with either of them. Quite frankly, she was a friend of Yugao, who was friends with both Itachi and the twins.
Seeing the smirking smiles tossed at her from the others, she felt bad for the boy looking inquiringly at her for an explanation.
"I…don't think this is a good idea, guys," she said, preparing to pay the fee for disagreeing to play the game–One Thousand Ryu–only to get stopped by a giggling Kakashi, fifteen years old and very much enjoying where this was going.
"Shinobi rules, remember? You can't pay to get out of this." He chastised her playfully.
Anko joined her perverted friend, grinning ear-to-ear. "Now, get going, ya crazy kids."
"Um, what the hell is going on?"
Everyone wanted to facepalm that Naruto, and likely Rin too, decided to play a game that neither knew the rules of, but no one answered him, deriving some sort of enjoyment from their innocence.
Yume's chest buzzed, not a fan of them taking her discomfort and Naruto's confusion as a form of entertainment.
She calmed her hive.
"Fine." She got up and jerked her head to the downstairs bathroom, adjacent to the room they were playing in. "Let's go."
Shinobi rules.
Kiss inside that dark bathroom, and get a mental confirmation from a Yamanaka mind walker afterwards, or have a deep, dark, extremely personal secret revealed. Either way, it was always risky having your surface memories prodded, given that there was the chance other memories would pour out.
Whatever happened inside that bathroom wasn't just an innocent kiss.
Reading Naruto's red face and blushing at the thoughts raiding in his mind, an intensely mollified Rin grabbed her brother's hand and stormed out of the apartment with him.
Due to their connection, Rin knew the sordid details of what occurred in the bathroom, but she had been too scared to receive verbal confirmation from her brother.
End of Flashback
"Please don't lie," Rin whispered, pleading. "I promise I won't get mad."
It could be the sleep delirium dragging up the emotions she had been bottling up ever since, a question that had stayed at the tip of her tongue for the better part of eight years.
Naruto didn't want to lie, and he didn't.
"We still talk," he admitted in a breathy murmur, leaning into Rin as her body tensed at the validation of her worries. She was well aware Naruto and Yume still talked, albeit when she wasn't present. Twenty percent of the time she wasn't with her twin, so that was a given. "But we haven't done anything." The sincerity of his next words lulled her heckles down.
"Then…" she wondered quietly, beckoning him with a shy look up at her brother to answer the unfinished question.
"We just…talk," he shrugged with one shoulder, not wanting to jostle his sister's sleeping place. "She has a girlfriend now, so I've been showing her good spots in the village she could take her out on a date." He quickly pacified Rin, saying, "Nothing happens; I show her a good café, a good lookout spot, or whatever. Her girlfriend's part Kurama, part Inuzuka, so art shows, dog shows, museum tours, and pet salons. That's the way to go, I think. And I know Yume isn't lying, too. She's really, really doing her best to make it work with Hana."
The Inuzuka clan head's daughter, Rin remembered. Hana Inuzuka was at the party that night, she also recalled.
"What else do you two do?" Rin pressed, not sensing any dishonesty from Naruto. One thing, among others, the twins excelled in was telling lies and falsifying the truth. The same was the stark opposite when it came to analyzing each other; for Naruto, Rin was like an open book, and for Rin, she knew Naruto better than she knew her chakra. He wasn't lying to her, and the relief she felt at the realization relaxed her shoulders.
"Well, since Hana doesn't like bugs and insects, and Yume talking about them with her clanmates is dull, she and I talk about them all the time. Or she'd invite me to her clan compound to look at a new bug they found. Don't even get me started on how she lost her mind when I showed her my praying mantis summons. She was the one that convinced me and Shibi to start an Aburame branch praying mantis nest."
Rin got the feeling that Naruto was Yume's closest friend. Aburame friendships were a preciously tight knot. Yume had been out on a mission at the endpoint of the Chunin exams, so she wasn't around to visit Naruto when she got wind of his injury from Orochimaru. Rin wasn't exactly on speaking terms with Yume, and the Aburame was too nervous to reach out to her friend's twin.
Naruto and Yume's relationship was strictly platonic.
It was nothing to worry about, really, but Rin still felt worried. "But, Naruto, we talk. And–and we can talk about bugs too," she stuttered at the end.
Naruto smiled at her not-so-subtle jealousy and her stammering reasons for him not being so close to Yume anymore. Bringing his hand up to her face and gently ran it down her rosy cheek, softly tipping her chin up to look him in the eyes. He spoke the words that removed every fear, worry, and doubt in her entire being.
"You're my one and only, Rin."
She smiled and closed her eyes, accepting a gentle kiss on her brow, leaning back into Naruto.
He added, smirking with amusement. "So, stop being jealous, ok?"
She playfully hit his chest, pouting childishly but still smiling in jubilation. "Shut up."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
12:23 am
Naruto slowly backed away from his sister, keeping low. He was waved away by his Shadow Clone, nonverbally assuring him that his sister was still sound asleep.
He almost envied his smug clone, cuddling with Rin and waggling its eyebrows at its original, but Naruto steeled his nerves and straightened as much as he could in that quaint underwater cave.
He wiped his expression clean and sucked in a big breath, stepping back into the hole in the ground and plopping straight into the water. Immediately upon entering the water, he was pulled out of the vicinity of the cave by natural currents, giving him somewhat of a good view of the hidden cavern; it was a spherical bulge at the side of one of Water country's smaller islands, having its entrance at the button of the bulge and the interior itself being rectangular, rather than rounded.
Satisfied that he had memorized the location of the bulge in the underside of the small island, Naruto moved his arms around and turned to his back, where Samehada rocketed past his face in a flash of cold water.
The sword made a few more rounds around Naruto, its purple scales rippling with visible eagerness.
If Samehada kept spiraling around Naruto, a whirlpool would form.
Naruto kept his mouth closed, his teeth grit with frustration, kicking his feet to remain relatively stable.
He brought his hands together, hard, and a cloudy pulse of his red chakra puffed from his body, turning the area around him blood red.
This got the attention of the sword, slowing down and dived toward the chakra, until Naruto separated his hands and sucked his chakra back into his pores, diverting it back to his reserves.
Using sharp gestures, he pointed at his eyes with his index and middle fingers, and Samehada moved in a motion that barely resembled a nod, thrashing its head and handle up and down. Then Naruto swept his index finger over his head in a small circle, calming the sword at the circlet of red chakra that oozed from his fingertips.
Naruto poured more and more chakra into that circle, using his Chakra Construction ability to form a solid, albeit opaque, red disk made of pure, solid chakra. He caught the red disk before the current could sweep it away, slowly moving it left, and then right, up and down, making sure Samehada was raptly paying attention to the red disk and following his motions.
With his free hand, Naruto again pointed at his eyes.
Then he made a shushing gesture.
Samehada nodded, more vigorously.
Naruto then pointed at the cave.
Samehada nodded again, feral with anticipation.
Naruto threw the red chakra disk west of the cave and Samehada dove for it, snapping down on the chakra disk.
If it could talk, it would say Naruto's chakra tasted sharp and spicy, a curious taste Samehada had gotten accustomed to when Naruto had trapped it inside the water prison. The sword gnawed and ground at the hard chakra disk in its mouth, savoring it like a sweet. An extra spicy, extra hard sweet.
It wondered if Rin's chakra would taste similar–
It shook its head with a shudder, not willing to find out what would happen to it if Naruto discovered that it had taken chakra from his female companion without prior permission.
Samehada wondered if it should ask nicely…
While the sword contemplated, idly swimming the perimeter of the cave, Naruto nodded, content that the bribe he had given the sword would keep it occupied in the meantime.
Naruto swam close to the shore, keeping his head below water and only flipping onto his back, poking his mouth just outside of the water to inhale precious oxygen, turning back to his stomach, and resuming his careful patrol along the shoreline of the small island.
Water country didn't have a centralized government.
The country was essentially a long, bending, winding chain of broken islands, reefs, coasts, cliffs, and pools situated on the extreme west of the continent, all the way on the coast of the Elemental Nations.
Though it was still recognized as a country, starting from when the First Mizukage declared that any incursion on any of the islands, inhabited by people or not, was a direct attack on Kiri, and that it would be dealt with the full might of the Hidden Mist village. Back then, the First Mizukage was more concerned with avoiding the constant conflict on the mainland, and, for a while, this deterred invaders.
Kiri governed most of Water country, but they allowed bodies of islands to govern themselves with limited power since any sort of funding and protection came directly from Kiri.
The island Naruto circled was a tiny one inhabited by walruses and seagulls, lounging across the length of the land and enjoying the cool night.
He stretched his senses and searched for human chakra signatures, just to be sure.
He let his upper face surface the water, turning around and narrowing his eyes to the distance.
His purple eyes hardened and swirled inwards, shifting red as his Sharingan activated, spinning sluggishly when he saw a black bird soar by toward an island, unaware of the shinobi swimming beneath him.
Now, all living creatures had chakra.
Humans and animals had chakra.
Human chakra networks were developed, webbing from the heart and brain to the furthest reaches of their extremities, while animal chakra networks only encompassed their brain, heart, and bones. Evolution in animals and their relative disuse of chakra devolved their chakra networks to its basic function of keeping them alive and developing their nerves, muscles, bones, and tissue to adapt to the rigors of the natural world.
On the other side of the spectrum, human interest in chakra developed and evolved their chakra networks. It was believed that human chakra networks were still developing and evolving. This was also taking into consideration the difference between shinobi and civilian chakra networks.
The only known exception to the assumption on animal chakra networks, about them being primitive and almost needless, were animal summons.
Animal summons, just like humans, possessed developed chakra networks.
So when Naruto's Sharingan saw the chakra network of the black bird, he knew it was a summon.
Naruto ensured to keep his chakra signature small, keenly observing the direction the bird was flying in. When the bird was gone, Naruto sank back beneath the waves and swam in the direction of the island the bird flew to.
He did so without chakra, not wanting to risk alerting any shinobi on the island nearby of his approach.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
1:11am
Naruto pulled himself up onto a pier and blurred onto the beach.
He knew what he was looking for.
His distant uncle–and the Uchiha clan head–Fugaku Uchiha, had shown him the way lost Uchiha clan members could leave clues only fellow Sharingan bearers could locate; they called it a bonfire.
Bonfires were chakra diffused thinly into a drop of blood.
A fire only a true Uchiha could see.
Naruto briskly walked on the beach, maintaining his stealthy crouch and stepping over the crabs burrowed under the sand. His Sharingan twisted anticlockwise, scanning left and right.
He didn't think there would be a bonfire located in the open.
Crow's Feet was smarter than that.
Then Naruto found it.
On the back of a dead crab, burrowed under the sand and utterly ignorable to the rest of the world. It was a short distance from the reach of the water and somewhat close to the village located on that island.
He knew where to look.
Finding his spymaster friend was another issue altogether.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
8:01 am
'The sun hasn't shone on Water country in twenty years.'
It sounded redundant, thinking about it. But it was no less true.
A soft yellow light skimmed above the thick grey clouds, its rays too weak to push through the gloom, settling for rolling in the sky from east to west as a vaguely visible yellow spot in the dark clouds.
The people became gray.
Reassured of their safety but soulless in their day-to-day lives.
Even children on their small island–and across the broken chain of islands that comprised the entirety of the Land of Water–found their shoulders heavy. When once they found some reason to smile, their heads sank with the gloom they found themselves under since the end of the civil war just a month ago.
The village orphanage, a poor shack run on pennies, had been devoid of laughter since the end of the civil war.
Ami held her side bag close to herself, smiling tightly at a pair of Kiri ninjas patrolling the village, stationed on the island some days ago. The two ninjas faltered for half a second, narrowing their eyes at her for a short moment before recognizing her as one of the nurses of the island's only clinic.
A good indicator of her profession was the light green nurse's gown and her white strip cap. She also wore a seasonal sweater, a pair of white pants, and an ordinary pair of white shoes.
The island was small, so everyone knew everyone.
Ami sighed, relieved they didn't ask for identity, trying not to look like she was hurrying away from them. She didn't like bringing out that identity and showing it to people that asked for it; it made her feel like she shared the same belief as those cruelly misguided people.
Yet that was the new world Land of Water had found itself in.
Keeping her eyes down and her steps marching forward, the sounds of a radio announcer from Kiri filtered into the air from the kitchen of a small house to her right.
"These people are all born innocent, but they are lawless and violent by nature. It is our responsibility as fair-thinking people to locate them and register them so that we can properly monitor them, hold them accountable for their mistakes, and teach them the right way to live and serve this great nation of ours."
Ami pursed her lips, hot bile roiling in her stomach.
"There is a reason for the considerable decline in violent crime since Lady Terumi joined forces with our great and wise Mizukage. She finally saw reason, as…violent as she used to be. This clear-sightedness on her behalf can only be credited to the patience and wisdom of our great Mizukage, teaching her the right way her people need to be held accountable."
"Very true, very true," a second person vocally agreed. The voices from the radio receded in the background as Ami quickened her pace home.
Hearing this manipulation on the airwaves every single day was tasking on her resolve.
Ami didn't have a bloodline and she wasn't from a clan, but she was certain that what the Mizukage was doing, and what he wanted to do, was utterly evil.
Her neck of the village was quiet, aside from the murmurs of children in the orphanage, attending morning classes.
Ami had been released from the overnight shift at the clinic and, even though the doctor told her to rest for the rest of the day, she still took it upon herself to moonlight as one of the orphanage's nurses. Her house, like all of the houses on the island, was old and constructed from wood; one bedroom, one living space, one kitchen, and one bathroom.
Similar houses were planted in rows on both sides of the street, mostly empty now because the occupants made the mistake of having bloodlines. Some bloodline holders had returned from Kiri, and Ami smiled at them, sending a friendly wave.
They stopped what they were doing, cleaning out their houses from dust and rot, and waved back.
Ami's smile dulled and her fingers drooped with her hand.
The falseness of those smiles made her sick.
Their smiles didn't reach their glassy eyes, holding in unwept tears, and the very corners of their lips trembled as if fearing that Ami would discover their sorrow and report them to the authorities.
'For what crime?' Ami thought, turning to her door and fumbling in her bag for her keys.
The drone of children saying the alphabet added another weight to her conscience.
She found her keys and jangled them into the lock, twisting to the right twice and turning the door handle down for her to push into her apartment. The inside was small, having only a threadbare couch facing a stool, where a radio sat. The door on the left side of the room led to the tiny kitchen, and the door directly opposite the front door was the bedroom.
The windows were closed and the curtains were drawn.
Same as everyone on the island, she couldn't afford electricity. The house was understandably dark.
Pulling out her key from the front of the door and closing it, she poked at the lock of the door with her keys, searching for the keyhole with jittery hands and a barely hidden nervousness, until she found the keyhole and snapped the door locked.
She doubted that it would hold from a well-placed kick from a Genin, but it at least helped provide the illusion that she was safe.
Standing at the door, inside that dark house, Ami riffled through her bag and pulled out a fluorescent lamp, flicking it on and setting it on the stool; the clinic was receiving funding from Kiri, so they were one of the only places on the island that had a working generator, which the doctor turned on every night or whenever they desperately needed to use their computer. Ami always used the chance to work on her shift in the clinic to charge her torchlights and her old radio.
She was a fairly unassuming woman, tying her straight-back hair into a tight ponytail and pushing her thick glasses back up her nose when they nudged down slightly. She was in her mid-thirties, widowed, and childless.
She wasn't fat or thin, tall or short, pale or tan.
Growing up on the island, she hated how utterly average she looked, but now she was glad for her meek features. In every sense, she was unassuming and ignorable.
She dropped her bag on the couch and used her lamp to better see what was inside. She took out a palm-sized container of burn lotion, and that was when her heart began beating rapidly.
Beads of sweat pricked her brow. She pushed her glasses up again, sliding down her thin nose.
'Ok.' She squared her shoulders.
Holding the ointment in her left hand, Ami gulped, carefully approaching her bedroom door and holding up her right fist.
She knocked twice, rapping her first against the wood twice again.
Shifting closer, she set her ear against the door, listening closely for a reply. She didn't hear one, and not wanting to impolitely push inside the room without getting one, she cleared her dry throat.
"Mister Feet…? It's me. Ami." She scrunched up her face, trying her hardest to listen for something; she saw the plate of food she left in front of the door the night before was gone, and he hadn't been able to move much since she found him. He couldn't have gone–
She frowned when she heard weak, tittering laughter on the other side of the door.
"Can I come in?" she asked, not feeling too pleased that he was taking amusement from her anxiety. "I brought more lotion."
She had picked the herbs, crushed them, and mixed them herself.
Thankfully, it was working on him, from what she could see.
"Come in," the man inside called back, his voice grating with stifled pain.
Ami straightened herself and opened the door; the room was dark too, so Ami had to step aside as she entered so that the light from the fluorescent lamp could flood inside.
She couldn't see much of her guest.
He was dressed in several layers of dark cloaks, tattered at the ends of his ankle to show a pair of dark shinobi boots, and had sleeves reaching his wrists, showing his black gloves.
The last thing her guest wore was a plain, eggshell white mask. It had a single eye–the right–and there were three black markings on the outer corner of the eyes, extending from the sole eye to the ear. His hair was black and short, spiked up.
The bottom corner on the right side of the mask was scorched black.
She would have been scared of the floating white mask in that dark room, if not for the eye glittering pleasantly at her.
Ami tutted, scolding him, "Mister Feet, I thought I told you to not wear that. It could aggravate your burns."
He was relaxing on the bed, wedging into a corner of the room. He grunted and wheezed, sitting up and shuffling so that his back leaned against the wooden wall. He smiled. "Thanks to your lotion, my skin isn't peeling off anymore."
Third-degree burns were no joke.
It was honestly admirable how this man seemed not to dwell on it for too long.
When she found him a month ago on the beach during a class excursion for the orphanage, he had been so badly burned on his right side. From his right cheek and half of his mouth, curving roughly over his neck, around his right chest and stomach. The burns had been whitish red, swollen yet flaky. Somehow, only the extreme tips of his right hand were spared from the worst of the burns.
Now, he looked better, though still long overdue for major restorative plastic surgery.
Yet she suspected that even before his burn wounds, 'Mister Feet' wasn't too inclined on revealing his face to anyone.
She had seen his face, though, and despite everything and despite the third-degree burns on half of his face, he was still a dashing young man.
"I can't tell you how grateful I am to you, Ami. I owe you a life debt that can never be repaid," the man said, appreciatively collecting the burn medicine. The stark difference between the man's kind voice and his dark demeanor still jarred Ami. "I'll be out of your hair in a few days."
"It's fine," she answered quickly, used to his gratitude at this point and just glad he was doing better.
She wished she could have gotten him some more pain medication but the doctor and one other nurse in the clinic were beginning to notice a small shortage. Again, Ami had to trust her medical knowledge and hope that the burn cream helped mend what tissue it could.
"You…still haven't told me who did this to you," Ami pressed, standing awkwardly.
Or who he was and where he was from.
Ami's fatal flaw–and she knew this-was that she was too sympathetic.
She would sooner risk having her head chopped off for harboring a stranger on the off-chance that this person was indeed a wanted criminal. Presently, she was housing him in her bedroom, readily and willingly relinquishing the room to him and treating his wounds.
The man sniffed, his coal-black eye darkening. He readily answered her inquiry, "A good friend. She set me on fire."
"O-Oh." Ami weakly nodded. It was the most information he had told her. "Well…I'm sorry to hear that, Mister Feet."
He chortled again, light and tired, trying his best not to move too much.
Her cheeks flared up at his laughter. Her hands clenched at her sides and she scolded him in a low, hissing tone. "I don't know why you keep laughing; you're the one that told me to call you that. Why don't you tell me more?"
"Never mind that." He waved off her irritation. "If I tell you any more, I'll be putting you in danger." Coming down from his enjoyment of her embarrassment, his eye became serious and he swore, "I can't have that."
The atmosphere was shattered by a soft pecking on the window.
Ami quickly covered her mouth, stopping the scream that surged up her throat.
With shuddering effort, Mister Feet shifted to the edge of the bed and planted his feet on the ground, standing up and grating his teeth at a sharp pinch on his neck.
"It's fine," he reassured her when she made to help him to his feet. Holding up his left hand and gesturing slightly for her not to worry, he faced the window and turned his back to her.
The many ruffles of his silk and cotton cloaks made him look somewhat overweight and sluggish, but Ami knew better. She knew the kind of fuinjutsu tattoos he wore on his arms and torso, recognizing none of them but knowing for certain they were seals that had been unaffected by the fire that burnt him. She had felt the toughness of his body in those early days, when he was too pained to move. She had seen under the eyeless half of his white mask, under his eyepatch, and witnessed the feathery creatures of darkness that resided in his soul.
She had seen the Konoha forehead protector hanging from his hip.
As if knowing her worries, the man promised her again.
"It's fine. I won't let anything happen to you, Ami."
He opened the window a tiny crack, allowing a black bird with beady red eyes to swoop inside and perch on his shoulder, leaning to its summoner's ear and whispering its report.
Ami hurried out of the room, not wanting to implicate herself any more than necessary.
She eased the door closed, and darkness summarily bathed Mister Feet.
Authors note
O.O
That's that about that.
The next chapter or so would talk about how (and why) Yagura killed Akatsuki/all of Hidden Rain. It'll also have Minato and Mikoto's sides of the story.
Anyway…
What do you think of the chapter?
What do you think of the story so far?
Let me know in a review, would you so kindly!
May your New Year be filled with discovery, joy, love, and growth. Here's to a fun 2023 :D
Happy New Year!
