"Yeah, so, they say that boys don't cry,
'Till we say it's okay, I guess it's bye bye bye,
But someday you'll realize your way,
In a song like a dream, come tell me what you find,"
-Sand Planet, JubyPhonic
I stopped at the entrance to our alley because only Kisame and Mangetsu were there.
"Where'd they go?" I asked.
Mangetsu, drinking from a beige, kidney-shaped canteen bag, hooked his thumb to the right, back where I'd come from.
They were probably past that path that led up into Minakami, where the ruins were.
Mangetsu watched me curiously, like he'd heard something about me that interested him.
I glanced at Kisame at this, and Kisame who hadn't moved from the wall, just grinned.
Mangetsu lowered the bag, smiled with teeth, and asked, "We're not good enough company for you?"
"Not really, no," I said, pulling a brown-spotted orange out of the bag.
Mangetsu blinked.
"Told you she was strange," Kisame said, not taking his eyes off me either.
"Still—" Mangetsu caught the orange automatically with his other hand when I tossed it, then blinked at it, then up at me. "What's this for?"
"I have too many," I answered, digging out another one.
He stared at the orange like it might give him a different answer. "The last day has been full of surprises," he said, seemingly to himself.
I considered Kisame, holding the orange, and his grin turned sharp enough to cut.
"They left us here alone. That doesn't concern you at all?" Mangetsu asked, picking at the brown spots.
I paused, speaking to Kisame as I said, "Knowing them, you were asked to go with, but said no."
Mangetsu didn't say anything, his eyes shifting between us as he used his fingers to dig out an inner piece of the orange.
Knowing that Kisame would watch it hit the floor if I threw it at him, I walked around Mangetsu's legs and stood in front of him, holding out the orange.
He had the kind of presence that made him feel untouchable, like Minato. But that didn't matter, because I didn't want to walk on eggshells around him. If he was going to stay, I didn't want to spend days, or weeks, or longer, learning the language of his grins, or to think and overthink what I should say until I figured out how to talk to him.
I did that enough with Hidan, was doing it enough with Sasori. I had enough of it.
"What do you think this is going to do?" Kisame asked, staring down at me.
"Make me have less oranges," I answered.
He said nothing.
I stood there for a while, and then I hummed. I pressed the orange to his arm.
He went rigid.
I doubted that, before our spar, he'd let me do it.
"I'm not afraid of you, Hoshigaki. I told you that before, and it's still true," I told him, looking him in the eye. "You're not my friend, but you're not my enemy. You don't have to trust me, or them, or Chojuro, but we're not your enemy either. We can both stand here forever, or you can take it and believe me."
His eyes looked a little wider, and the only sound after was Mangetsu eating orange slices behind me.
He still didn't take it.
"Fine," I said. I reached up, dropped the orange in the space between his crossed arms, and he tensed more.
Samehada was starting to respond to his agitation, waking up behind him, but I only pulled out another orange and balanced it on his arms.
His eyes were wider. He looked baffled watching me reach into the bag again. "I could just drop them. What then?"
"Then I'll have to pick them up," I answered, dropping another orange on his arm.
His pupils shrunk. "Words are cheap," he said, suddenly harsh. "The only thing that matters is action."
He quickly reached up and yanked Samehada off his back. He swept her down and jerked her to a stop above my shoulder, right next to my head, blowing my hair back.
I stared at him. He'd been expecting me to flinch.
Someone who was afraid, or even just cautious of him, would've at least tensed.
Yahiko had, even as his voice stayed steady, even as he lied through his teeth.
Scales poked through the bandages even as they remained tight around Samehada, stopping just short of cutting my cheek.
He was giving me the same feral grin he'd had right before he'd charged at me.
I was still staring at him as I put my hand in the bandaged space between scales and nudged Samehada back. He let me, watching me bend down and pick up an extra bruised orange.
I held it out to him again as I stood.
He lost his grin, just staring at me.
Maybe he hadn't heard me when I told him that intimidation didn't work on me.
Maybe he hadn't believed me, even after our spar. Or maybe, after not-Madara, he'd stopped believing in truth. All truth.
"Can Samehada eat oranges?" I asked, not moving, even as Samehada shuddered hungrily under the bandages.
Kisame didn't answer, but for the first time, he seemed confused.
His hand rose slowly, palm up, and I dropped the orange in it. He stared at it like it was a foreign object and I picked up another one.
"Let me guess, I'm next?" Mangetsu asked, having eaten all of the orange except the skin.
I put the orange in Kisame's frozen hand, then turned to him and said, "You already took one, so I don't have to, but want another one?"
Mangetsu held up his hand, and I pulled my last orange out of the bag and tossed it at him.
Kisame had put away Samehada when I turned back, and I gathered up the other oranges off the floor, forcing him to use his other hand to hold them all.
"Feels like a genjutsu," Mangetsu spoke, peeling that orange with his fingers too. "You're not the Hoshigaki I know."
Kisame tore his gaze away from me, arms full of oranges as he said, "Would you like to see the Hoshigaki you know? He'd be happy to show you how ineffective liquification is against Samehada."
Mangetsu dropped skin on a pile on the ground and said, "I think it'd be plenty effective."
"You can be the first of your clan to test it, then," Kisame said, grinning at him.
Mangetsu leaned back and took a long drink from his canteen bag before he said, "You need to get a sense of humor. You could use it, Hoshigaki."
"I have one. You'd know, if your jokes were funny."
I left the empty bag there and left them to bicker. Even as they did, they both watched me.
.
.
.
I followed a half-buried stone path to the right, trailing my fingers along the wall of one of the ruins I'd looked in before.
It was tall, and maybe, before the war, it had touched the sky. But now the top was only a few feet above me and blackened with the memory of fire. It was a colorless gray and had no clan graffiti anywhere on or near it.
The plainness made it feel like it wasn't part of Minakami, like even they'd abandoned this place.
My hand fell away as I reached the end and it faded into the mist behind me as I kept walking.
I distantly heard shouting, which vaguely sounded like Chojuro, and turned blindly to the right. I passed what had probably been a lookout tower, but was covered now in bushy patches of grass.
And then I was looking at Chojuro and everyone else scattered around a cliff, sparring.
Hidan rolled out of the way of a blue hammer three time his size as Chojuro slammed it down, caving in the earth underneath it. It was made of pure chakra, and it was enveloping the Hiramekarei.
Chojuro's feet touched the ground two seconds after, and the chakra shrunk as he turned to stare, panting, at where Hidan crouched.
I watched the chakra become a small blue outline around the Hiramekarei and his hands, and then be absorbed into his skin.
"You're fucking slow," Hidan told him, looking bored. He wasn't wearing his cloak.
"You keep saying that!" Chojuro shouted back, hefting the Hiramekarei sideways like a giant fan. A blue outline formed around the blade and it never left his hands as he swung it at Hidan as hard as he could, his whole body moving with the swing.
Hidan only looked down and wedged his sandals deep in the dirt, and I saw why as the chakra shot from the sword and took the shape of blades, carrying with it a tunnel of wind that ripped up grass and carved deep lines in the dirt in its wake.
Hidan only raised an arm to protect his eyes, but most of the blades dissipated before they reached him. A bone deep cut opened across his arm, but as the wind died down I looked at his feet.
So much of the ground had been carved up that his sandals were showing. It was only burying them that had kept him rooted there.
I hummed.
Chojuro might not be fast, but he had power.
He was on his feet, but barely. He'd stuck the Hiramekarei in the ground and was leaning heavily on it.
"Doing that while you were low on chakra was fucking stupid," Hidan said, waving his injured arm and throwing his blood around. "You didn't even have enough left to cut it off."
"If you collapse the cliff, only Oka can use earth style," Naga mildly reminded them from where he stood facing Yahiko.
"Oh! S-sorry!" Chojuro said, looking guilty at the marks on the cliff. He frowned at the blood on the ground around Hidan. "Shouldn't you try to stop the bleeding? Even if you think, or uh, you're immortal?" he asked.
Hidan shook his head and stood, ignoring the blood dribbling down his arm. "The most sinful heathens are the nonbelievers."
"I-it's just—I've never heard of the Way of Jashin, or anything like it—" he sputtered. "It's hard to accept something like that."
Hidan called him names and I tuned him out, glancing towards Naga.
They faced each other a few feet apart. Naga was in the middle of raising his hands to make the dragon sign and Yahiko was running, crossing the distance between them in two seconds as he swung the nagamaki up towards the middle of his hands—
—and froze, the edge of the blade just below Naga's palms, because it had been enough time for him to finish the dragon, tiger, and hare sign.
Yahiko lowered the blade and took a small step back, wiping his eyes with his sweaty shirt. "Tell me how that samurai did it again."
"If gods are real..." Chojuro trailed off and frowned as I paid attention again as Hidan finished 'educating' him. He was sitting, cleaning off the Hiramekarei. "N-Not that I don't believe you, I do! But why are they—that'd mean they're just watching. Why don't they help?"
Chojuro looked up at him for an answer.
Hidan picked half-dried flakes of blood off his arm as he blandly said, "Goes against the Way of Jashin. No heathen would need help if they got over their fears of pain and death."
"But you dodged my attack," Chojuro said hesitantly, like he thought it'd lead to more insults.
"Nothing to do with pain," he corrected. "Healing takes too damn long to let everything hit me. Red-head over there won't heal this shit, and I can't feel this arm. It's fucking useless right now," he said, waving his injury at Chojuro.
Chojuro stayed silent but looked disturbed.
"Maybe it's because of the barrier between the living and the dead," I answered Chojuro. "If there wasn't one the dead would still be here, helping the people they love any way they could."
"You think the gods are in the afterlife?" Chojuro asked me, sounding grateful to not have to touch Hidan's beliefs anymore. His lenses were smeared with dirt.
"Not exactly," I said. "I think Jashin isn't on our side of that barrier, but not dead."
Chojuro went quiet again.
"Lord Jashin," Hidan corrected me.
I met his eyes. "I think Lord Jashin is on the other side of that barrier," I amended.
Hidan blinked at me. He dropped suddenly into a crouch and scrubbed both hands through his hair.
"What?"
He didn't answer.
I walked closer. He was glaring at the ground. I leaned down, and Hidan looked sideways at me as strands of my hair brushed his shoulder.
"Feelings are stupid as shit sometimes," he finally said, sounding deeply annoyed at himself. He scratched at the side of his head, like he could dig them out. "Wish they'd fuck off."
I stopped, because what else could he mean but—
"I don't know what you see in me," I said suddenly, and when he didn't say anything, wasn't sure why I said it.
He tsk'ed, glaring in the opposite direction for a long time.
"You're pretty," he said, like he was being tortured into admitting it.
"Mei is pretty," I pointed out.
He squinted at me. "You trying to sell me on her?"
"No." I didn't know what I was trying to do.
Hidan glanced at my hair, then quickly away, fully sitting down, "That too," he said under his breath.
I looked at the loose strands, as if they'd tell me what made them like-able.
"Hey," Hidan interrupted me. He crossed his legs, leaned his elbow on his knee, and leaned his cheek on his knuckles. "Stop trying to get me not to like you. It's not going to work."
"I wasn't." I didn't think I was.
"Why the hell would I have kissed you if I didn't like you?" Hidan asked.
"Don't know," I answered. "I just don't... get it."
He blinked slowly at me. "Didn't ask you to fucking get it," he told me. "Didn't ask you to understand. I like you, and that's it. Why the fuck are you making it so complicated?"
I tilted my head. "It is complicated."
"Why?"
"Because..." I trailed off.
Hidan slow-blinked again. "Because," he mocked me, making his voice high-pitched and confused.
I pressed the heel of my foot to his shoulder and shoved him over.
His expression didn't change. "Because," he mocked again, from the ground.
"Because it feels like it should be," I finally said. "There should be more, maybe. It should feel like something changed."
"You're making my head hurt."
"You could tell when Yahiko told Konan he liked her. She was different. Not by that much, but still some," I tried to explain.
Hidan laughed hard. "Fuck, you—you think it's some kind of transformation jutsu? What the fuck did they teach you—shit, my side—"
He leaned an arm on the ground as he grabbed his side. "I pulled a muscle. Shit."
"I don't think it's a jutsu," I tried to defend myself.
Hidan tried to speak and instead shoved his face to the ground, holding his side tighter.
I didn't say I'd said it because Yahiko and Konan were the only relationship I'd seen from start to end. Because they were the standard, the only standard I had.
Because I knew Mamoru-sensei was with Etsudo, but I'd never seen them together. And probably never would, knowing Mamoru-sensei.
And I'd only seen the end of Matsu and Urakawa.
"What the fuck do you think I want from you?" Hidan asked, shaking with laughter even as he tried to stop. "Shit, you're treating this like a fight. You need a damn strategy for—for this?"
My eyes widened because even now I was the last to know how I felt. I stared down at him and felt like I suddenly understood why I'd asked him what he saw in me.
It wasn't because I'd wanted to know that, but because I wanted to know what he wanted. But he didn't want anything. Was it really that simple?
"You need to take a break," I heard Naga say.
I looked away from Hidan as Yahiko shook his head. And then he fell to his hands and knees, the nagamaki slipping out of his grip.
Naga bent down and out on his shoulder, only to go still when Yahiko batted his hand away, coughing into the dirt.
I forgot about Hidan, and I forgot about Chojuro, who Namekuji had chosen to torment again.
I walked over to them, crouched next to Yahiko, and quietly reminded him, "You don't get to do that. We don't do that to each other."
Naga had already moved back to give him space, but his hand had lingered in the air for a second before it dropped to his side. He'd been hurt by it, even if his expression never changed.
"Oka, you don't need to do that," Naga half-heartedly protested.
I ignored him.
Yahiko didn't move for a long time, until he let out a big breath and leaned his forehead on his hand. Wordlessly, he pointed at his side.
Naga obligingly pressed a glowing hand just below his ribs, and then froze.
"You idiot," he hissed, quickly pressing his other hand there too. "You should've told me."
Yahiko laughed weakly. "This is why I didn't want you to touch me."
I glanced at Naga.
"Half of his liver is necrotic," he explained. "A lot of it is just dead tissue. The poison is gone, but it didn't heal properly."
"That sounds bad," Yahiko spoke. "But, to get ahead and defend myself, it didn't hurt as much as it did when I was poisoned, so I thought I just had to wait it out."
Naga's response was to shoot him a dirty look.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"Cut off the dead tissue. Make an incision so I can remove it. Stimulate the cells to regrow naturally, because the liver is the only organ that has that ability," he muttered, his voice becoming clinical and automatic as he fully focused.
Yahiko shuddered. He turned his head to look at me. "Recovering really sucks," he managed. "Sucks more when your body doesn't do what you want it to. A few months ago, I'd have that move down by now."
His smile was self-deprecating, and I knew there was nothing to say that he didn't already know, so instead I told him a story.
I poked his shoulder. "There was a fox on the moon once. She lived there all alone, collecting rocks and building friends out of them," I told him. "But they couldn't talk back, so she was still lonely, and she was sad all the time. But one day an owl crash landed on the moon and was hurt. Her ship was too damaged to work too. When the fox found her, she became happy, because she wasn't alone anymore. They spent a lot of time together while the owl healed. The fox showed the owl all her favorite things and wandered the moon with the owl looking for materials to fix the ship."
Yahiko silently stared at me.
I poked him again and said, "When it was finally fixed, the owl asked the fox to come with her, but the fox had never left home before, and was afraid. But the owl wouldn't leave her and said that she'd never go back home unless it was with the fox. That convinced the fox that their friendship was real, and she got on the ship."
Yahiko was quiet, waiting to see if there was anything else. "Was there a lesson in there?" he asked slowly.
"No," I said honestly. "I only wanted to distract you."
Yahiko blinked. Then he ducked his head and started laughing. He tried to keep it contained but couldn't. He laughed so loud and hard that his shoulders shook.
He tipped onto his good side, still laughing, and rolled onto his back.
"Hey," Naga said, annoyed at being broken out of his medic-nin trance.
"Ow," Yahiko winced, but still shook with laughter as he looked at me and said, "You don't know how much this hurts."
"You're the rabbit," I told him.
"Rabbit?"
"Fox," I corrected, and he grinned. "Stubborn," I added.
His grin widened. "When was the Fox stubborn in the story?"
"In the version I was told, where the rabbit stays on the moon," Naga answered.
"So you told me the wrong version," Yahiko concluded, looking back at me.
"I told you the better version," I said.
"Debatable. But I haven't laughed that hard in a long time," Yahiko said. "So, thanks. And sorry," he said to Naga.
"You don't need to—"
"Stop being nice and accept the apology. Or I'll get up and give you more work when my liver explodes."
Naga sighed, pressing his glowing hand back on his side. "Okay."
"You didn't—That's not—"
"I don't forgive you, carrot-hair. Is that better?" Namekuji asked, crawling up Naga's back.
I sat back.
"No," Yahiko said, blinking.
"I saw her again," I said suddenly, before Naga could fully focus again, sitting and pulling my legs up. "The ocean girl, or the seaweed girl. Or—"
Marie.
I could feel her hands suddenly on my shoulders, her nonexistent nails digging into my skin. Maybe she didn't realize that they knew, had known before I did that I used to be someone else, but she didn't want me to tell them.
Ruiner.
But I was aware of it now, what she was doing. It was easier to ignore. Maybe our conversation had done the opposite of what I was hoping, and it had convinced her to try harder.
Sad ocean girl. Why won't you go to sleep?
Or maybe I was imagining it all, that presence, and she was already gone.
"She was there. Actually there, I think. She wanted to—" I stopped.
ruin me right back.
"What did she say?" Naga prompted.
I looked at the puddle under my feet, slowly spreading out into an ocean, rising up to my ankles.
Ruiner, ruiner, ruiner.
"That I was using her," I said mildly, watching myself drown. "That—That Yahiko should've died."
They were both silent.
Naga's glowing hand was suddenly on my forehead, and his other hand was on my shoulder, and I didn't know when he'd moved.
"Did she say anything about not-Madara killing me?" he asked gently.
I looked at him and I remembered—
He'd already known that I knew things I shouldn't, because I'd told him all those years ago. Which meant Yahiko had known too, because it wasn't a secret I'd asked him to keep.
I glanced at Yahiko. His hands were behind his head and he was staring at the sky, but didn't look particularly surprised.
Oh.
And I understood, suddenly, the real reason why Marie hated me so much.
How unfair of me, the ninja with hands caked in blood, to be loved like this when you spent your entire life being unloved. Only your dog had ever loved you, and it wasn't enough.
Yahiko had his hand around my wrist, staring at me with a frown, and the water beneath me went down, receding into itself.
You saw that love, and you wanted it, but you couldn't undo the choice you made not to wake up. To let me live for you.
"Did she apologize anytime during it?" Naga asked mildly.
I blinked up at him uncomprehendingly. "For what?"
"You don't think she's done anything wrong?" Naga asked after a second, just as mild.
I looked at him. "Not that, but she helped me more than she hurt—"
"No," Naga said so firmly that I stopped talking. "You don't have to be angry at her, but I am. Every time you used to see or talk about her terrified me. I never knew if the next time it happened, I wouldn't be able to pull you back."
"You never told me that."
"Because it wasn't about me. It was about you," Naga said simply, moving back to Yahiko's side like everything I'd told him wasn't a big deal.
I watched him, completely still.
Yahiko let go. "Next time you see her, tell her your oldest brother hates her," he said, giving me a small grin.
I looked at him for a few seconds, and then I flopped down on top of him, and he only made a small grunt as I dropped on his upper chest.
"I'm going to have to make the incision now," Naga said. "It'll be better if you're unconscious for it."
"Going to be soon anyway," Yahiko grunted, spitting out hair.
All the water under me was gone.
How dare I use and use and use you, just like everybody else.