"I am in misery,
There ain't nobody who can comfort me,
Why won't you answer me?
The silence is slowly killing me,"
-MiseryXCPR
Matsu stopped and stared as I walked up to him and held out the chikuzen-biwa.
"It's not May," he said, looking at it as he wiped sweat off his face with his shirt.
"It isn't," I agreed.
"How did you do it?"
I smiled a little. "I asked." And Naga asked Ren, and Ren asked the fire daimyo.
"That's it?"
"Should there be more?"
He reached out to take it hesitantly, touching the air next to my hand before he corrected and brushed his fingers against the wood. "Why would they—" he stopped and looked at me. "It was your birthday."
"It's what I wanted."
He took it from me, and his smile was sad.
I hummed, "You wanted it for someone else?"
"I used to," he answered. "But when I asked you for it, it was for me."
"Urakawa?"
"None of your business," he said, plucking the strings. "Did it come with something to play it with?"
"Play it with?"
"It's fine," he dismissed, turning it in his hands. "Is it too late to say happy birthday?"
"I don't think it's ever too late as long as you mean it."
"Ah, can't say it then."
"I could take it back."
"You can do that after I learn to play it."
正常
Water sprayed around me as I backflipped away from a small fireball and pushed off the water, making half-signs, dragon, tiger, hare. I shot a concentrated stream of water at Yahiko and he shot another fireball at it, blowing steam between us.
Naga was shooting air bullets at me as I fell.
I dropped straight into the water and it burst above me.
A silver-red blur shot out of the steam as I poked my head above the water. Naga didn't dodge, but raised his arms as Yahiko substituted with the nagamak. He didn't budge when Yahiko's foot hit his arms.
Yahiko grinned, twisting to kick Naga in the head and Naga freed an arm to block it, grabbing his ankle—
—and let go as Yahiko made the tiger seal, quickly putting space between them, but Yahiko didn't shoot fire at him.
The tip of the nagamaki stopped above my head, shaking against the sudden pressure, and his clone laughed as I looked up at him.
"Truce?" he asked.
He was knocked off his feet, tumbling and disappearing beneath the water as it was pushed away from me in violent wave. Water splashed over Naga as he and Yahiko clashed kunai.
I was standing on the surface as Yahiko climbed out and ran a hand through his hair.
"Nice of you to not attack me while I was down there."
"I didn't think your clones were that durable."
He laughed. "You'd know if you sparred with me more." He was in front of me suddenly, blade sweeping the water where my feet had been as I hopped back.
Water hissed around the blade as he twisted the handle, throwing steam at me, blanketing everything misty white again.
"Training Hidan is more than enough for me," I said, aiming my palm at a glint of silver in front of me. I pulled, expecting a substitution or a trick, and the nagamaki propelled over my shoulder, trickless, heat warming my neck.
I paused as it sank into the water, glancing at the tear in my shirt on my shoulder. It didn't break the skin, but it burned.
"I get the feeling he wouldn't be happy to hear you call it that," Yahiko drawled from somewhere in front of me.
"What else would you call it?"
"I'd call it Hidan not knowing what tactical retreat means." He went silent.
I ducked a punch from behind and he batted my foot aside when I aimed backwards at his knee. His kick swung above me as I rolled forward, aiming my palm at his other leg without looking.
He slid but flipped backwards before he could fall, twisting his arm to block my punch as he landed. My right palm was already against his stomach.
I had the split second thought of him switching with the nagamaki and so twisted to drive my foot into his side as hard as I could, but he didn't burst into water.
He flew sideways, and I realized that Naga was in the path of the Yahiko-shaped projectile I'd kicked at him through the dissipating steam. He'd positioned me here.
Naga's attention snapped to him just long enough for the clone to elbow him hard in the chest and shove him back. It tried to catch Yahiko as he collided with it and it burst into water, slowing him as he rolled and slid back on one knee. Naga fell to his knees, coughing hard.
Yahiko laughed through a wince, holding his side as he sat up. "Worth it," he gasped.
"You gave it-it had more chakra—" Naga broke off with a groan.
Yahiko stood, even as pain flitted across his face. "One of the only benefits of not having much chakra. If I give enough to my clone it'll have more than me. It's the only thing I have left that you don't know how to counter."
"Yet," Naga said, coughing again.
"Hidan isn't that fast, and he doesn't do taijutsu more than he has to," I mentioned. "But when we fought, you reminded me of him. That's why I thought you were the clone."
"Are you calling me slow?" he asked. "I'm offended."
He didn't answer the why, and I hummed—
I tilted my head and aimed my right hand at the shore, hearing them before I saw the tied blond hair, the plain green kimono, and the pack full of scrolls next to her feet.
Pretending to be civilian, even though she had too much of a presence, but she didn't seem like a ninja.
"Hangaku," Naga named her through a wheeze. "You're early."
I lowered my hand, but she didn't stop staring at me.
"Yes. Baron Miyashita left earlier than he planned to attend to an urgent matter within the imperial court," she explained, nudging the bag at her feet. "Your teacher refused to accept the materials."
"Mamoru-sensei is Mamoru-sensei," Yahiko drawled, hands behind his head.
"Urgent?" Naga pressed, in the way that made his requests sound like suggestions.
"It's not truly," Hangaku said, hiding a smile behind her hand. "Many extended members of the royal family think he was not punished sufficiently enough for his actions here. They know he despises court and express often how they miss him."
"The infamous favored nephew," I hummed.
Hangaku eyed me. "Infamous?"
"Naga is a gossip," I said matter-of-factly, and he spluttered and hurried to stand.
"I'm not," he said quickly. "They know as much as they do because we lead the village together. I don't know if Baron Miyashita told you—"
"Oka," she named me, realization in her eyes as she turned. "And Yahiko."
"You don't have to go to court with him?" I asked.
"I leave Watamura when he does, and return as he does," was all she said. "I would like to spar with you three, if you don't mind."
Yahiko shook his head, walking onto shore. "I'm done. Too exhausted."
Maybe he was, but it was more because if Hangaku saw him fight she'd know that a samurai trained him.
"Both of us?" I asked.
Hangaku pulled out a scroll hidden beneath the back of her kimono, opened it, and caught the handle of a naginata. "I have no preference. I am the guest in this situation."
Naga backed off and sat on the sand next to Yahiko—
She appeared in front of me, throwing up sand and water in her wake, chakra extending from the tip of the naginata that hit my palm and was absorbed.
Her chakra was like a metal sheet, refusing to bend into my chakra.
She slammed the point into the water suddenly and vaulted over me, dodging a push that gouged the water where she'd been.
I breathed her chakra out and made the half-dog sign.
"You sensed the pressure," I mused as the point of the naginata thrust down where my other hand would've been.
She landed behind me as a cage of water tentacles formed around me.
"You should've attacked Naga first."
Hangaku held the handle against the water, eyes flitting to each tentacle. "Thirteen," she observed. She bent backwards as a tentacle shot over her head, spinning the naginata to cut apart two tentacles that tried to slide around her arm.
She never stopped moving, twisting between tentacles or spinning around them, and it was like watching a dance. She spun the naginata like a shield that minced anything that hit it, but stopped and adjusted just as fast to slice a tentacle that caught her knee or tried to grab her from a blind spot.
She eventually gave up on closing the distance and stood on the water farther away, panting.
I didn't stop making the half-dog sign. More tentacles rose around me, and she looked at them warily.
I smiled and said, "I could do this all day."
狂気
"Why didn't you tell me before?" Nagato asked, gently prodding the bruised skin down his side. It was too-soft like rotted fruit.
Yahiko squeezed the part of his shirt he'd rolled up, the only sign Nagato knew he'd give to show he was in pain. "I did," he claimed, waving his other hand. "I had to go over how Sasori and I met at least three times, and you were there for at least two of them."
The bruise was in the shape of his liver. Nagato didn't need to use chakra to know it was swollen and pushing against his other organs. He was already showing signs of early liver failure.
His neck was bruised down the middle, but not as dark or obvious. How hadn't he noticed before?
Naga only looked at him, and Yahiko patted him on the shoulder.
"I think I knew Emon couldn't do it back in Hyozan, but I didn't want to admit it. Fear is something that I like to put in a box and pretend it doesn't exist, and I did that for way too long," he said. "What kind of summoner could admit that he overestimated his summon?"
"A good one."
Yahiko didn't smile. "Emon kept me alive this long. I thought I could endure it. Can't exactly ask our puppeteer for the antidote when he might just give me something worse and I'd never know."
"And then your liver started to fail, so you called the medic."
He laughed.
Naga had to concentrate to feel the chakra-barrier keeping the poison contained to his liver. He'd used the smaller pathways through it to do it, changing the flow of chakra in a way that would've left anyone who wasn't Yahiko with organ damage.
"I thought you trusted Sasori," Nagato pointed out.
"I gave him the village, didn't I?" Yahiko countered. "But, yeah. At the very least, he won't give it to me unless I give him what he wants, and I can't do that yet. He hasn't finished that lab, and we haven't gotten to him yet. There's nothing else keeping him here."
Nagato had nothing to say to that. "How much pain are you in, Yahiko?"
Yahiko tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling. "I need to learn that move that samurai from before used on you. Hangaku? The one where she wouldn't let you make hand signs?"
Nagato prodded the spot again but Yahiko didn't react. He hesitated to use medical chakra. He didn't know how the poison would react to it.
"Joji-sensei claims he doesn't know it and told me he left before he'd finished training. But I think there are some things about being a samurai that he just doesn't want to remember."
"You owe Emon an apology," Nagato said.
Yahiko closed his eyes. "Yeah, I know."
It was just another distraction and they both knew it.
"It'll hurt," Nagato warned him.
And Yahiko laughed.
He didn't know how the poison had changed with Emon's attempt at an antidote, or how trying to pull it out of his liver would affect him.
"I saw you looking—it's not that hard to make chakra barriers," Yahiko said. "I just abuse my body's defense mechanisms—"
Nagato distantly heard his hiss as he touched the bruise with glowing fingertips and sent a weak pulse of chakra into his liver, just enough for a picture to form of what he'd need to fix first—
His hand jerked back automatically, seconds before he was blinking back to himself, and he felt Yahiko's fingers digging into his shoulder. He realized what happened as his best friend caught his breath.
The poison had responded to his chakra, just in a way that left him stunned. It'd started metabolizing his chakra to take on its characteristics.
He'd never had a patient who had a bad reaction to medical chakra. He was always careful, but it was also because any medic-nin who knew what they were doing knew to take advantage of how the body didn't see medical chakra as harmful.
It was why Yahiko's chakra barrier didn't work against it. It was why if there was a poison that could move around freely disguised as medical chakra—
Nagato breathed out.
It was a poison made for medic-nin. It was a poison made to hurt the person who was left alive. It was a poison that told him that Sasori had intended to leave the Third Kazekage behind.
who would he want to hurt like that?
No, he knew. Who had personally met Oka and Yahiko because they wanted to find him?
It hadn't finished. If it had, Yahiko would already be dead.
But Nagato could almost see what Sasori intended in his head. If he found the Third Kazekage fatally injured, would he have been hesitant and cautious, or would he have tried to help right away?
It was a poison that sounded like it was made for Tsunade-sensei.
He'd almost killed his best friend.
"Minato—he-he used fuinjutsu that could suppress chakra. Most wouldn't question it, but I-I kept wondering how he could do that without his enemies organs shutting down," Yahiko managed. "It's because-because organs produce more chakra than pathways. So-so even if your pathways are cut off, you heart keeps beating. I use some of that extra chakra."
Nagato couldn't speak.
Yahiko leaned heavily on his shoulder and pressed a fist to his chest. "Talk to me, man. I'm too tired to keep talking about chakra."
"I didn't think I could ever be surprised again by techniques," Nagato finally admitted.
Yahiko laughed a little. "That bad?"
Nagato couldn't imagine— "How much pain are you in?"
"So, everything living thing has chakra, even trees and plants—"
"I'm going to talk to Sasori."
"What?"
Nagato gently untangled himself from Yahiko.
"What do you think you can say to him?"
Nagato did what Yahiko always did to him. He stood and left the room without giving him an answer.
.
.
.
Nagato stared up at the skeleton of a tower.
It was like a tree in the Land of Fire if it was made of metal and grew crookedly trying to find the sun. He'd seen it on paper. He'd sat with Keitaru and let him turn his ideas into something concrete with a brush.
It was unfinished, half as tall as he wanted it to be, and didn't have many finished walls. It reminded him a little of the old towers, but not. He could see where the face would be at the top. Something different from what the old ones had been.
Yahiko had been the one to suggest the tongue sticking out.
Nagato thought of all the work being done on the first ring of apartment towers and swore he smelled rain, but the sky was clear.
Unfinished pipes and drains that didn't have a purpose yet hung from the side of the tower, and puppets were all over it and never stopped moving.
A spiky-haired puppet hung from a beam between floors as it hammered, missing its left arm at the elbow, one eye hanging out of its head. Nagato looked away instead of watching it shake.
A puppet on the ground collapsed suddenly and a second with horns immediately turned to grab it under the arms and drag it over to a pile of broken arms and legs off to the side. Three of the horned puppet's six arms didn't work.
As it pulled the broken puppet around a cracked torso it locked up as it went to toss the other puppet, clicking and twitching until the fingers cracked open and it dropped the broken one.
A puppet fell from the tower in a crash of broken wood and got back up, leaving half its face and arm as it started to climb again.
It unnerved him, but Nagato didn't comment on them.
He saw Keitaru's sketches first on the ground around Sasori, and then the puppeteer himself sitting on a ripped cushion, surrounded by wooden pieces and ripped cloaks.
The cushion was stained red. Shuriken on the ground next to him glistened. The puppeteer had taken off his shirt, splattered red with blood, and left it folded on the ground next to a gray weapons pouch that wasn't his.
Nagato couldn't see any bodies around him, and also ignored the urge to question Sasori about it.
He still didn't know how to talk to Sasori.
The shirt Sasori had on was the same gray of a flak jacket and had longer sleeves.
Nagato didn't know enough about puppetry to know if it was impressive that he was only using one hand to control that many chakra strings.
Sasori idly spun a small stick between the fingers of his other hand, the top of it darkened with fish grease, telling Nagato that he'd been to the market to get something to eat. Sometimes it seemed like Sasori didn't move from that spot at all. Nagato noted that his nails were painted teal, blinked, and moved on.
"When did the attack happen?" Nagato asked instead.
Sasori didn't acknowledge him. Just as he expected.
Nagato moved closer anyway. "I want to make a deal," he began, diplomatically he thought, "If you give me the antidote to the poison you used on the Third Kazekage, I'll show you how to enter the underground tunnel network beneath the village. You could make your workshop there. There's more than enough space, and you won't have to worry about the heat or the rain."
Sasori stopped spinning the stick. "And why would I need you to find it?"
"There are traps," Nagato said. He knew how lame that sounded. And that, no matter how hard he tried, he was coming off as desperate. But there was nothing else for him to offer Sasori.
The puppets all abruptly collapsed, thudding to the ground around them or slumping over beams as the chakra returned to Sasori. He'd spread himself so thin, but only lost a little of it to nature energy.
"You're a fool," Sasori said without turning around.
Nagato persisted, "If you enter the wrong way, the entire place will flood."
Sasori paused. He put his hands on his knees, stood, and looked at him with cold eyes. "I think you severely underestimate my knowledge of fuinjutsu. Are you done bothering me?"
"There was no easy way to ask for your help," Nagato said after a second. "But no one knows about the tunnels other than the older ninja and the Akatsuki—"
"It's almost impressive that you didn't kill that other fool in your attempt to help him. If you're coming to me, that means you tried," Sasori said over him, not hearing him. "You're competent, but not enough. That fool will die and I'll take care of him. He'll be much more beautiful in death than he ever was in life."
Nagato looked at him and didn't react.
"He'd make such an irritating puppet," Sasori continued, turning back to the tower. "But I haven't created anything in such a long time. I'm getting tired of waiting."
Nagato thought that if he were anyone else, knowing that he couldn't stop Sasori from turning his best friend into a puppet would've made him angry, or unnerved him, or made him not want to be around Sasori.
"Do you regret it?" Sasori asked, still not looking at him. "That fool spoke with such confidence, acted so arrogant, all for it to mean nothing. His salamander is more average than I thought. How disappointing for you."
"You're bored of them," Nagato finally mused, because most threats didn't work on him anymore. Not when Hidan had come up with new, creative ways to threaten him, and sometimes attempt them, every day before he'd stopped, but not before Nagato had gotten used to it.
Sasori stopped and just looked at him.
"You don't like using the puppets you brought here, but you're not willing to use the ones you do like for this, so you have to," Nagato reasoned. "That's why you've been leaving them everywhere."
"Are you dense?"
"You're not doing anything wrong," Nagato told him.
"I'm not doing anything wrong?" Sasori repeated.
"Yahiko was worried you wouldn't stay," Nagato admitted. "He'd kill me for telling you, but he still doesn't want you to leave after everything you did to him. He's afraid you might if he dies, or if you don't get what you want soon. He's dying, and that's what he was worried about."
Sasori didn't call him an idiot or use Killing Intent. He just stared blankly at him.
And Nagato saw the sand-nin who'd spent months and months alone during the war because he was thought too strong to need anyone else.
"I wouldn't be able to forgive you if he died, but Yahiko's opinion wouldn't change even if you let him, because the village comes first. Even if that happened, I'd fight the others to keep you around."
Sasori was silent for a long time. "What's wrong with you?" he eventually asked.
"I want you to know why Yahiko made you Akatsuki, why we leave you alone, and why we're not giving you missions," Nagato told him, still looking at him. "You're strong, sure. But when he made you Akatsuki, he made you equal to us in power here. You might not understand that, and no one here would see it that way, but he meant it, and the rest of us accepted it. I have nothing to offer you, but you're still Akatsuki."
Sasori didn't blink.
Nagato sighed, breaking the stare to gaze up at the tower. "Do you mind if I watch you work for a while?"
"You're insane," Sasori finally decided.
Maybe he was, but he only said, mildly, "I didn't bring any cards or games with me. But if I went to get some, would you be here when I got back?"
Sasori immediately turned his back to him and sat again, but it didn't feel like he was being ignored this time.
It felt like Sasori didn't know what to do with him.
Nagato felt a little amusement, but he stayed and watched, and Sasori didn't chase him away.
A/N: 正常 - Normalcy, 狂気 - Insanity
sasori: I just threatened your best friend with graphic violence
nagato: wow I didn't bring any cards
sasori:
nagato: do you have any dice?
sasori: no, seriously, what is wrong with you
./.
patch notes
*the scene between Oka and Nagato in chapter 68 has been rewritten
*the last scene in 71 between Oka and Etsudo has been rewritten
*added scenes in 74 before the POV change
*some edits to 75. Changes were made, but nothing big enough to change the scene itself. Mostly recontextualizes chapter 63.
*renamed Michi (chapters 35, 57) to Sae. I realized I really like M names for some reason.
*moved many things to Tilt. Kill your darlings and all.
I haven't been happy working on Axis for a while now and had been trying to "push through it" instead of enjoying it like I used to. Wish I could kick past me for deciding to upload weekly and burning through my backlog so fast I didn't have time to do any editing on anything new, and current me for forgetting that I didn't start this story to meet a deadline. I won't be editing anything before 66 even though I really want to, because then I'd never leave the chapters between Memento Mori and the Hyozan Arc. Not to get sappy but uh, thanks for sticking around for so long. I do read every review, but I mostly just change things in editing instead of replying, aha.