Intended to be read 90+
"And it's the same the whole world round,
The hurt I see helps you compound,
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
is just somebody's unholy hoax,"
-Dear God, XTC
"Those kids don't know what they're doing," Mamoru said, picking weeds off a small stone pillar. There were two, side-by-side, different only in the shape of the stones and the names that had been painstakingly carved into them.
忠夫 – Tadao
修 - Osamu
He doesn't know who the words are for. If they'd been here, he'd like to think they moved on a long time ago.
He pulled up a few wildflowers that had grown under the makeshift headstones, but only Tadao was buried here, the only one with a body to bury.
"And now they've run off and left me with their mess," he still said.
Mamoru had been forcibly thrown back into a leadership position with only a letter given to him by Etsudo after they were already gone, and had learned that the way those brats did things was... inefficient, to put a name to it.
The market was only barely established, the districts only vaguely outlined, and the towers half-built because Nagato and Yahiko had tried to do everything, and so finished nothing.
If it was Tadao in his place, it wouldn't have taken it all being laid out at his feet for him to see it.
Tadao would've been a hands-off kind of teacher, but not unapproachable, not like Mamoru.
It was seeing the end of the help they never felt like they could ask for from him that made him realize that he hadn't had a serious conversation with those three in years.
Oka had disagreed with the way he'd wanted to die, Yahiko had disagreed with him about Hanzo, and that had been that.
It had been what, three, four years since then?
Osamu wouldn't have known what he was doing involving himself in this kind of work, but he would've still tried to advise them with the honest earnestness that had kept him alive for so long.
But, well, they didn't have them. They'd him and Joji.
Joji at least knew he wasn't cut out for the sensei business, and had told them all so repeatedly.
Those three just never listened to him.
Mamoru had a reason, his own personal issues that had kept him stagnant, but it still made him feel like he'd failed them again.
Those reasons didn't change that they'd needed an adult and instead he'd stepped away.
"That brat Yahiko did this on purpose," Mamoru said unhappily to the dead. "That kid was always scarily clever like that. You would've liked him."
Mamoru eyed Tadao's stone, then went back to pulling weeds.
Yahiko hadn't been in any shape to travel, last Mamoru had checked in on them, but he still had. Him and Nagato not being here forced him and Joji to take a long look at things, instead of a quick glance at whatever they were doing every once in a while.
It was wondering who put three kids who didn't know how to run a village in charge of running a village and realizing the obvious answer.
Not that Joji knew much about the running part, but they'd been sitting on a lot of money and they clearly didn't know where it should go.
Those quick, impersonal check-ins had lulled Mamoru into thinking they'd been doing fine. The people were being fed and clothed and the opinion of the Akatsuki was mostly positive, had improved even since the time that group of civilians had come asking for change.
Mamoru had heard, through Asuka, that root was still causing trouble, but that was an outside force. Nothing could be done about that unless he went back in time and stopped Hanzo from agreeing to use them to bolster their forces, or had the salamander hold up his end of that deal.
If he looked at it like that war hawk making them pay him back in full by taking every scrap of information he could get his hands on, it made a sort of sense.
The grim kind, if he thought about it.
It had taken Mamoru looking at all the written reports of construction that those three had going on to realize that no one was living in any of the towers yet.
The opinion of the Akatsuki was rooted in the stubborn belief that they were gods given flesh, which made anything Asuka heard biased, but Mamoru had spent too often lingering around Etsudo's forge to see that for himself.
Mamoru almost told them about her, but stopped himself. Instead he just thought it, that she gave him the sense that he could manage to go full civilian.
An unrealistic dream that he could work in a half-weapons shop, half-forgery built somewhere not too populated, but not too quiet. Etsudo would make weapons in the back while he'd man the front while Asuga hovered between them and nagged lessons out of him.
And in that fictional world where being under a proper roof or around more than a handful of people at a time didn't make Etsudo unable to breathe, or where that roof collapsing on top of her hadn't made her unable to have kids, maybe they could've had one or two.
Mamoru dragged his hand down his face.
"I'm getting old," he told his ghosts, and stood.
Thinking about dreams, or about different paths, or what should've happened, or could've—
When did you get so damn sentimental?
Tadao had died so long ago, but Mamoru could still his playful sarcasm as clear as the sky above him.
He forcibly turned his thoughts elsewhere.
There was a small, still-forming group out there in the village that called themselves the followers of the paper angel. They were determined to remember Konan as a felled goddess, and worshipped her as such, and it made Mamoru feel ancient.
Mamoru had, as his first order as acting Kage, stopped construction on the market, the would-be fishing docks, the repair work on the broken boats, the effort to make sturdier and bigger fishing nets to attach to the boats, the bridges that would act as the attached ways in and out of the village, the Academy building, anything and everything in the unnamed, vaguely defined crop district, and several other projects that made his headache worse.
The workers had been stretched thin, but frankly overpaid with food.
Mamoru had directed the work effort towards the unnamed housing district, square in shape, directly northwest of the just as unnamed Akatsuki tower.
He left that tower to Sasori, who had yet to ask for any steel or building materials, but Mamoru had not, and would not think about that.
He already had too much to micro-manage.
The other thing he refused to think about or touch was the sort-of economy they had going with money circulating through the market.
That was Joji's mess to clean up.
Mamoru had also set Joji on making an actual budget instead of relying on Yahiko's scribbles of how much money should put towards something and then Nagato's neat handwriting crossing out and correcting those scribbles.
They'd wasted more than one scroll just using it to write things down on.
Anyone else willing to work he'd set on the hospital, which was done, but an empty building that used by squatters.
Those kids didn't know the first thing about contract workers, or how to even go about hiring them, as told by a lengthy discussion Yahiko and Nagato had through messenger birds while on opposite ends of the village from each other.
They needed woodcutters to make furniture, they needed to attract traveling merchants that might have valuable goods like thread, ninja wire, stitching tools, or something rarer, and he needed to potentially look into hiring caravans that might be willing to simply deliver what they needed from a town that was willing to sell to them.
All of that meant that Mamoru had to dig up old contacts that he hadn't used in years, most that the war had set fire to.
The war, even being over for so long, had made traveling workers like craftsman scarce, too terrified of being caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, but an old friend in Iwa had told him that they were startling to reliably move around again.
But Mamoru wouldn't do anything until Joji was done using his old connections in the underworld to see if they could get the transporting done for cheap through one of the nearby corporations that employed missing-nin, or get some of the items without needing to jump through the proper hoops and contact the proper people.
At the same time, he was seeing what the rumors were surrounding the village.
Mamoru at least had been aware that rouge-nin had gotten it in their heads that Amegakure was offering itself up as a haven for their types, as some kind of shield between them and the other hidden villages.
Suna had yet to respond publicly about Sasori, and Yu had only quietly raised the bounty for Hidan.
Mamoru knew the border-nin had turned away a handful D-ranked missing-nin a few days before, but what they and Orochimaru couldn't know was that Hidan had been a whim, plain and simple, and Sasori had been a gamble.
That gamble hadn't worked out the way Yahiko wanted it to, but the point is that Sasori hadn't come here on his own looking for asylum.
Mamoru rubbed two fingers in a circle on his forehead and thought about something else before his headache became a migraine.
It was Tuesday, so Joji would be assessing the skills of all the kids Mamoru had gathered and sorting them into groups before sending them home for the day.
There were twenty-one of them that had found Mamoru or been found by him, between five and thirteen, all parentless and convinced his kids were gods.
Mamoru hadn't and wouldn't touch their beliefs even if paid to do so, but he'd done his end by using a charcoal pencil to dutifully write down their names, ages, and interested fields on the back of a used scroll, had given that information to Joji, and then he'd body-flickered out of the area.
And then he'd given Taeru and Saku the task of assisting Joji, since none of Joji's would-be students knew how to sign, and it was unlikely that Joji would go through the effort to teach them until he'd weeded out those without enough skill.
Mamoru was too busy to play teacher to those two, and with any luck they'd learn as much as those kids from Joji.
He'd learned that Taeru wanted to be a ninja to defend herself, so Mamoru had started her on that path while trying to convince her to teach what she'd learn to others one day. If she'd started training at six, she'd be around jonin-level now, at nineteen. But she hadn't.
Eventually, she'd hit a wall and not be able to move past it because her chakra coils had never developed properly and encouraging her down an alternate path was his way of letting her down easy.
Oka had compared those two to Matsu when she'd dropped them on him, and his situation was similar, but his genetics saved him from hitting the same wall someone born of civilians would.
Matsu's coils were stunted, sure, but not starved. That kid might not be the powerhouse he could've been if he'd started early, but his coils never struggled to circulate his chakra, and none of his chakra points had closed because they hadn't been used. But Saku made it easy for him. She liked books and learning more than the actual training, and was open to his suggestions to becoming a civilian teacher.
She had admitted to him that she only trained at all to keep up with Taeru.
Mamoru had her studying math and English, both as a test of his own teaching ability and to prepare her to take over for him as soon as possible.
Joji had coerced Mamoru into being his messenger as payback, to tell Matsu, Enyo and Maho about the shift in their training. When they talked it over, Joji told him he'd train Matsu and Maho on Friday, and Enyo on Saturday. Joji had been willing to give three days to his would-be students, and that left one for accounting and whatever other thing needed his attention.
It had been easy enough to track down Matsu and Enyo, but Maho...
The kid was running himself ragged trying to live up to his reputation as Nagato's apprentice. Mamoru needed to sit him down eventually and talk with him about being a medic-nin and overwork, and maybe it would teach him a thing or two to bring up with Nagato.
Mamoru pinched the bridge of his nose again and closed his eyes, because he could feel the awkwardness already. He didn't know the kid at all, and now he was going to go act like he'd ever been any kind of teacher to him.
Tomorrow. He'd find Maho tomorrow.
After a few seconds he raised his head to look at the forest around him.
Tadao and Osamu were near Jiraiya's abandoned hideout. Other than the overgrown grass and the moss hanging down from the white trees, the whole area was untouched. People knew it existed, but not that it belonged to the sanin. It was left untouched out of respect for the Akatsuki, until now.
Three people in the woods were watching him, having all appeared sometime in the last minute. He could see the glint of a weapon in the shadows.
"Can't even visit the dead in peace," Mamoru sighed, his hand flashing into the half-snake sign.
The response was immediate. They sprung out of the forest at him.
The mud and paint markings on their masks vaguely resembled a salamander. They all wore similar black outfits that hid anything identifying about them.
One surged at him from the front, pulling a rusty short sword from their side, probably pulled out of the sea, while the other two ran around at him from the left and the right.
Mamoru added the half-rat sign and instead of projecting his chakra at any one of them, waited for them to enter his area of effect on their own.
They all faltered at the same time, but shook off the demonic illusion without even pulsing their chakra before he could move, and it confirmed who they were, or who they were trying to imitate.
Back during the war, there had been a unit that had been made up of people naturally resistant to genjutsu. They were trained to fight Uchiha and Hyuuga, because anyone from those clans that knew how to use their eyes could devastate a battlefield. Every village, if they wanted to stand a chance, had something similar.
They were war relics, or the children of war relics that someone had given a new purpose. They were no doubt followers of Hanzo too.
The one on the left made the ram, then tiger sign, aiming specifically at the stone pillars, the graves, and it didn't surprise Mamoru, because ninja always used every advantage in a fight.
Mamoru whipped out a kunai, about to throw it, a second away from substituting himself with it when that masked-nin froze and choked, grabbing at a blue thread suddenly squeezing their neck.
Sasori stepped out into the open behind her or him as they gargled, water from the aborted jutsu spilling out from under their mask.
The puppeteer had one hand raised towards the masked-nin, a blue thread looped around his pinky.
Mamoru hadn't felt his presence at all.
The one on the right immediately took over, making the same signs as Mamoru made snake sign and—
And they stopped to dodge senbon.
Sasori's other hand was half-raised. Mamoru paused. He was the one they were trying to provoke, but he somehow felt unneeded.
The masked-nin directly in front of him had stopped mid-charge, slashing through chakra strings that had tried to wind around his or her arm. Their blade was glowing with chakra.
A broken, stumbling puppet emerged from the right side of the forest, half of its face missing, a hammer held by three of its working fingers.
Sasori had more chakra strings looped around his middle finger and his thumb like rings, his expression blank.
The masked-nin in front of Mamoru surged at him again, even with whatever plan they'd had falling apart, and Mamoru, still holding the snake sign, couldn't finish the thought to use his chameleon jutsu before the masked-nin was distracted fighting off more chakra strings.
Watching them fully convinced Mamoru that they weren't that skilled unit, but some relative of them with genjutsu-resistance built into their genes and ideas put into their heads.
The masked-nin to the right of him planted their feet and pivoted, sweeping a foot at the middle of the puppet to knock it away, and seemed just as surprised as Mamoru when their foot went through the puppet, making it burst apart into wooden pieces.
Part of the puppet's shattered knee froze in the air, caught by a blue line, and shot at the masked-nin's leg before they'd fully put it down.
A hidden blade left a shallow cut on their leg as they hastily jumped back, and then the piece clattered lifelessly to the ground. Mamoru put his hand in his pocket as the masked-nin dropped suddenly to their knees, scrambling for something to cut open the wound to try and drain out the poison, but then they started shaking, and then convulsing.
The masked-nin in front of him cut another chakra string, but they were slower, their left arm limp, the bloody ends of senbon at their feet.
The masked-ninja on the right vomited into their mask as Sasori let the body on the left fall.
Sasori turned to fully stare at the masked-nin who had yet to fall. The short blade dropped out of their trembling fingers.
More strings suddenly wrapped around their arms and legs, attaching to the trees and suspending them in the air and Sasori moved to stand in front of them, observing them as they died to his poison.
Mamoru didn't know what to make of it, or the fascination he seemed to have while observing them, but he didn't interrupt.
Mamoru spoke only after Sasori dropped the masked-nin like a discarded toy.
"You were following them follow me," Mamoru thought aloud. "Why?"
"You're the sensei," Sasori answered instantly, but didn't move as he stared down at the body.
Mamoru said nothing. Didn't know what to say.
With Hidan, Mamoru had learned to communicate with him by realizing his patterns. Hidan was predictable in what set him off. His empty threats had lost their bite after a while.
But Sasori, as young as he looked, had the kind of presence that made him think he was far older. It was the feeling Mamoru used to get from people who'd came back from the war stronger and more jaded than when they left.
It was Mamoru knowing, just by looking at Sasori, that he was outclassed. There was something jarring about realizing that Sasori likely had more experience than him on the field, that he'd probably killed a lot more too.
Mamoru always had the confidence that he could beat Hidan in a fight if he turned out to not be as willing to cooperate as his annoying students thought he'd eventually be. There would be casualties because Hidan would've probably started killing long before anyone who could do anything about it could be notified, but any team of jonin could subdue Hidan if they knew about his... unique body.
At least then.
Now, well, Hidan had proven to Mamoru that he was a lot stronger when he'd essentially taken out that hideout on his own. But as Mamoru looked at Sasori, he could only think that he was only able to stand around watching because the kid was letting him. It was rattling. Humbling. Terrifying.
He didn't know how his insane kids had faced down the Fourth Hokage once and simply had another story to tell after.
Sasori paused, sparing a quick, indecipherable glance at the graves, and then he went and pulled up his senbon.
Mamoru blinked slowly, showing nothing outwardly, but he felt surprised.
He was The Sensei.
After Sasori was done, he meticulously sealed each body away in a different scroll.
Sasori paused again, on one knee in front of a flattened patch of grass where all that was left was the imprint of a body, staring down at his broken puppet in silence.
Eventually, Sasori pulled out a blank scroll and sealed those pieces away too.
Sasori of the Red Sand was acknowledging that this place was important to Mamoru, that it was worthy of him cleaning up after himself, and Mamoru still didn't know why.
Mamoru silently watched the kid stand, packing the scrolls away in his pouch, and watched still as the kid turned and simply walked off.
"Sasori," Mamoru finally called out.
He didn't expect the kid to acknowledge him, but he did, turning his head enough to signal that he was listening, but not enough to look back.
"Yahiko, Oka, and Nagato are annoying brats, but they're genuine annoying brats. You might not fully believe them yet, but you should. Whatever they told you, they meant it."
Sasori stopped. He turned his head a little more, making eye contact, but Mamoru was too old to give his inner feelings away with something like a flinch.
Sasori stared at him for what felt like minutes, not blinking, but eventually he turned back around and kept walking.
Mamoru watched him leave and didn't push his luck.
人形
Sasori bent down as he entered the pipe that sloped down into Amegakure's underground city, one hand sticking to the top of the dirty wall with chakra and his feet at top of the slope.
Even though he couldn't see the bottom, he unstuck his feet, moved to sit, and then released his hand. He slid for three, four seconds, and then he was at the bottom, getting up in front of a bridge with only flickering, yellow lights beyond it.
He crossed it with practiced ease, followed the passage into a wide, open area, and stopped for a second to look at the other, unexplored passages.
The feeling of interest, as fleeting as a fire going out.
Sasori turned and walked down a familiar passage where the bulbs transitioned to white, but not new, not anymore.
As he started coming down here, the other occupant stopped.
Sasori stopped in a hallway with a drop on one side and old water stains on the wall to his left. Three white doors were in a row on the right. A steel table he'd pushed out of the first room was left abandoned in the middle of the hallway.
He went to the first door, channeled chakra into his mechanical fingertips, and drew on the metal, making the locking seal visible, dark red with old blood. It stayed visible until he finished the word 'open' at the center of the matrix.
And then he slid the door open, went inside, and closed it behind him.
Puppet arms hung from the ceiling, and he ducked under them as he went further inside. They were remnants of ideas for new puppets that he'd never finish, now decorations.
A steel, blood-stained chair was against the left wall with papers on the seats and stubby charcoal pencils on the floor. Sasori picked a paper up, looking at the sketch of a water-proofing seal he'd been trying to modify to work on a larger scale.
They worked stitched into weapon pouches, but only with chakra as constant fuel. His modified seal hadn't worked at all.
He glanced at the prototype seal that had been sketched on the page under it. He wanted to create a locking seal that didn't need a blood-bond to be at its strongest.
Blood, unfortunately, was a better bond to an individual than chakra, which meant he needed his human parts until he could figure out why that was.
"Please..." a rasping voice gasped from the other end of the room.
Sasori lifted his eyes, past the wall he was tearing down between the rooms, but slowly, as to not weaken the foundation. He looked past the two unfinished human puppets hanging by their arms from the ceiling with ninja wire, past the neat line of his sterile tools on a blanket on the floor next to the right wall, to the man sitting against the back wall, his arms tied to a pipe behind him, one that had been sealed off from the rest of the system and wouldn't cause an issue if he managed to break it.
Blood was dried down his face from his broken nose and his eyes were swollen shut.
"Water..."
There were four bowls of water on the left side of the room, separate from the two red-tinted ones used to clean his tools.
"I've told you everything... everything I know... please..."
He was shirtless and had cuts down the front of his chest like incisions.
It was a cloud-nin who had been down here before Sasori, that man had told him as Sasori had made those cuts.
Some spy.
Sasori picked up a bowl of clear water. All of them were stale, but he had no access to fresh water down here, or any filtering system, and went to the man whose name he didn't know.
He bent down, pressed the edge of the bowl to the man's mouth, and waited. The man leaned closer to drink, then suddenly jerked his head forward and tried to snap his teeth around Sasori's fingers.
His teeth clicked harshly together around air, because Sasori had instinctively pulled the bowl back. It was lucky Sasori had. His teeth would've broken.
Sasori stood, drinking from the bowl himself until it was empty, and moved away.
"Fucking bastard," the man spat, coughing blood onto his lap. "What the fuck do you want from me?"
Sasori's eyes flicked back to him. He was unfinished, but broken. Swollen, mottled skin was harder to manipulate into the expression he was looking for than if he hadn't been hurt, but that had happened to him before Sasori brought him down here.
That man had attacked him, and Sasori had broken his face and body, but he'd stayed alive.
It had attracted his interest, and it had been difficult, but Sasori had brought him down here, treating him as delicately as he could. And he'd still stayed alive, which had inspired him for a time. But now that inspiration was mostly gone, because he couldn't work with that face.
Sasori put the bowl back down and didn't answer. They never liked it when he was honest.
He pulled three scrolls from his pouch, spread them apart on the floor, and unsealed each body from earlier. Sasori knelt and pulled off the first mask, breaking the straps as he did, and turned it back and forth as he inspected it.
The marks looked like a demonic red and brown salamander.
Odd.
Sasori stood and hung it over a handle on a pipe trailing the wall.
She, with her short, dark hair and expression frozen in shock, had been the one that had kicked through his builder puppet.
The second was a man with tired lines around his nose and mouth. He raised that mask towards the man chained to the pipe.
"I'm wasting my time with you. That's my answer," Sasori said, tossing the mask at him.
The man kicked it away, like just him touching it made it poisonous, and Sasori didn't blame him. If he was on the receiving end of someone with his reputation, he'd think the same.
Sasori got up and left the bodies. He went and stood in front of the only finished puppet in the room.
It hung limply from the ceiling, feet away from the still-alive man, staring down at Sasori. It was fully wooden, the kind he'd lost interest in a long, long time ago, but it wore an expression he'd been chasing in human puppetry ever since he created it.
It was slack-jawed shock on an old, wrinkled face. It was eyes frozen open, so horrified that the pupils were dilated and the blood vessels were visible. It was tight, concerned creases around the eyes and eyebrows pulled together in disbelief.
It was his grandmother, looking at him like he was a monster.
A/N: 人形 - Doll
shout-out to the animatic by darkenedmammal that introduced me to the song.