- Ghosts -
"Utsuho." Kiwa's worry cuts through the silence as she shifts from foot to foot. She wants to leap into the fray, but Utsuho's grip is holding her back. They see the smoke before the fire, flames belching smog into the sky for miles.
"Not yet." Utsuho warns her, turning back to Ruya. "Do it."
At his prompting, Ruya steps beyond their convoy, giving himself room to work.
Shikamaru has seen him do this before, so he isn't surprised when roots begin to elongate his arms. They form long, twisting points that engulf him from elbow to wrist. When he plunges his newly spiked fists into the earth, they penetrate the ground easily. A perimeter of roots jump to life around them, networking in every direction.
Even as distant as they are, Ruya's jutsu is able to pinpoint the fire. His roots become his unseeing eyes, sensing vibrations in the ground.
"3.2 kilometers north east. The lumber mill is on fire…there are people trapped inside. I can't sense any enemies but…" His posture goes rigid, wildly fearful. "Utsuho. There are kids-"
Kiwa loses herself at this. She's been on edge ever since they saw the smoke. She deflects Utsuho's grip with a strangled cry, hurtling herself down the sloping hillside. There's a winding path of switchbacks ahead, but she has no intention of taking the long way down.
"Kiwa!" Ruya screams, but their teammate is already gone. She's sliding down the rock face into the valley, a river of mud swelling beneath her feet. She cuts through the terrain like she's surfing a wave, leaving her teammates in her wake.
"God damnit-" Utsuho yells into the valley. Then he's following his wayward charge, Ruya running close behind.
Shikamaru is no better. The words fire and kids have done something funny to his sleep deprived brain. He careens into the valley after them, hot on Utsuho's trail. But something in him doesn't feel right. His nose for danger is screaming this is a trap. But if he's wrong, people will burn. He follows his convoy team anyway.
He will remember this moment forever as the time he should have known better.
Shikamaru's boots beat into the earth. They beat faster when he hears the screams. The barn is a two story structure before him, one corner alight and the other ablaze.
"Shikamaru, stay back!" Utsuho orders. He is still Captain and Shikamaru is his ward, too valuable to risk compromising.
Up ahead, Kiwa stomps the ground hard. Pillars upon pillars of mud erupt themselves up from the earth. They condense into terracotta clay, buttressing the corners of the building upright. Hopefully, it will keep the roof from collapsing in on itself. If the ceiling falls in, there will be no hope. The ash alone will smother everyone inside and there will be no one left to save.
Ruya and Utsuho spring into action, bolstered by their superior speed. They fly past Kiwa into the fold, leaping together in synchronized steps. The trio know each other's moves, familiar with their respective skills. Kiwa buckles under unseen weight, gritting painfully as her jutsu holds the burning barn together.
Ruya and Utsuho take over next. Shikamaru watches them run up the walls, chakra flaring at their feet. Ruya's arms twine over themselves, roots and vines projecting from his hands. He throws them like lassos into the flames. Despite the devastating heat, he successfully extracts a series of barely moving people from inside.
There are children in the hay loft above, cornered by the raging fire. Ruya splits his limbs, reaching out desperately for their small huddled bodies.
From the highest corner window, he pulls out the survivors while Utsuho runs them back to the ground.
But Shikamaru isn't okay with sitting back and simply watching. He disregards Utsuho's order, meeting his Captain when he reaches the ground. He takes each survivor from Utsuho's arms, carrying them away to safety.
The building gives a dangerous groan, the screams inside doubling in pitch. That's when Shikamaru notices the padlock on the barn door, trapping everyone inside.
"Take over!" He yells above the noise. He runs to the barn door, calling up a knife of shadow. He desperately tries to pick the lock, but the metal won't budge. The heat has melted it just enough that the mechanism is ruined.
Utsuho continues ferrying survivors away from the building. Ruya stays above, fishing endlessly for people with his roots. Trusting them to take it from there, Shikamaru runs around to the back side of the building. There has to be another way in. Getting people out one at a time won't be fast enough-
That's when he sees it. His apple from earlier threatens to come back up in a nasty way.
It's…like someone has taken an assortment of bodies and littered the pieces everywhere. A cold flash hits Shikamaru that has nothing to do with winter. He remembers a cryptic warning sent to him by Tsunade just weeks ago.
He spins to warn his convoy team. Something is very wrong-
A low pitched whistle cuts through the screams, splitting the world into noise and music. The melody is something from a nightmare. From his nightmares years ago. The song is familiar, but not the same. And yet… he would know it anywhere.
Licked by the light of a burning barn, Shikamaru does what the others are too busy to do.
He listens to the chill on the back of his neck, to the way every hair on his body stands on end. It's the feeling you get when you wake up in the night and know there is a stranger standing in your room. He turns left, then right, but there is no one. He does the thing he dreads.
He turns around.
"Long time no see, Shikamaru." A hooded figure in a tattered cloak, their face concealed in shadows.
But Shikamaru doesn't need to guess who this is. He just needs to confirm.
A whistle drifts out from beneath the hood, a haunting melody at once quiet and loud. Shikamaru reacts by launches himself backwards, his hands forming familiar seals. He snares the figure in his shadow clutch, but they make no move to resist.
Something is very, very wrong-
Because his jutsu's hold on their body should be absolute, yet it feels like he's grappling with something monstrous. The figure doesn't resist when Shikamaru lifts his hands, emulating removing the hood of a cloak. Their arms respond in mirror, likewise sweeping up.
But when the fabric of the cloak unfolds, the hands that lift are gnarled and misshapen, heavily wrapped in rusty linen bandages. Their knuckles bulge swollen and bruised, like they've been broken again and again.
Their fingers don't respond when he tries to flex them with his jutsu, but Shikamaru can't turn back now. He lifts their arms, maneuvering the hood until it falls back from his attackers face.
Shikamaru stares into the eyes of a ghost. He takes in the black shirt under a tattered tunic he never thought he'd see again.
'Impossible.'
"What a treat this is." Tayuya says, her voice the strained rasp of seven years lost time.
"You're suppose to be dead." It takes everything Shikamaru has to clamp down his shock. He'd seen her die.
"You know, everybody keeps telling me that."
"Temari killed you." He reassures himself.
The ghost before him just cocks her head. "Was that her name? They never told me who that sand bitch was. No matter. Now I know who to hunt down after I'm done here with you…But I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I."
Tayuya. Tayuya. The same nin he'd faced alone in a deadly forrest at 13.
And yet, this Tayuya is a different beast. She is something else entirely. Something is missing from her eyes…the bits that had made her somewhat human, even if she'd been a shitty one.
Despite his shadow clutch, she's able to take a single step forward and put the sole of her foot on a severed forearm. She rolls the body part in the dirt from toe to heel. Shikamaru's stomach roils as a child sized wrist flops unnaturally back and forth.
"You're not going anywhere." Shikamaru says, slipping his hands behind his back. His knuckle knives slide out of their holster, settling home within his palms. Asuma always has his back, even here and now.
"Maybe not." Tayuya's eyes are a wicked madness. "…But he is."
And here, she looks up.
Shikamaru follows her line of sight to the top right corner of the burning building. His heart stops when he see's Ruya trying to pull one last child from the fire. The boy's long limbs flail wildly, struggling against Ruya like a trapped animal.
"Come with me and I'll spare your team. Or, you can say goodbye to them all for good."
"Fuck you." Shikamaru bites out. He's not going to be her play thing this time.
But Tayuya has expected this. "Fair enough." She says, hollow smile not reaching her eyes. "I was lying anyway."
Shikamaru thinks she's about to form seals, but her arms remain limp at her sides.
Instead, she purses her cracked lips together and whistles a high pitched cry. The reverberating noise is two tones at once, hitting high in his ears and low in his chest. He looks back to his unsuspecting friend, terrified of what he knows will come-
The gates of hell break open in Ruya's arms.
Dark billowing smoke explodes from the child's mouth, strangling Ruya by the neck. Even still, he refuses to drop the child, fighting for some semblance of control. But Shikamaru knows these ghosts. They strip the chakra from your very being, chakra Ruya is using to afix himself to the side of the building.
He and the child writhe together right before they fall.
Their flailing limbs bounce down the structure, once. Twice. Shikamaru acts without thinking. He drops his shadow clutch and sprints to the corner, arms outstretched to catch his friend.
"Ruya!" Kiwa's too busy to run. She's still trying to keep the building from collapsing.
He just has to move. He's almost there-
Ruya hits the pavement with a sickening crack, like a watermelon breaking open.
Somewhere in the distance, Utsuho screams.
Shikamaru's body is a stone that god himself could not move. The two bodies before him are a tangle of limbs. The child would have landed face down if Ruya hadn't broke his fall. But like a mercy, Ruya's body begins to shift.
'Alive!' Shikamaru thinks-
The smoke demon is gone until it isn't.
The sound of tiny crunching bones is a nightmare crawling across his eardrums. The child's head folds all the way back, his neck a riddle of compound fractures. His limbs bend out at odd angles, a tiny hand reaching for Ruya's side. Ruya is alive but paralyzed by pain, unable to defend himself.
To Shikamaru's left, Utsuho is having a convulsion. He claws at his mouth to the foreign thing inside him.
Shikamaru needs to move. His hands form seals as he runs, reaching for the child and Utsuho together with his mind. His shadow splits across the cobbled ground, racing towards both their marks.
"Not good enough." Tayuya says.
Shikamaru rushes forward. Tayuya blows a whistled harmony. The child's hands activate the seal of a bomb tag hanging from Ruya's hip. He's three steps from Ruya's body when the explosion detonates.
He feels the blast before he hears it, and then he hears nothing at all.
First he is weightless, then he is tumbling. His body drops as the sky hits reverse. Shikamaru doesn't fall to the ground, someone hits him with a planet. The side of his face is sticky and wet. Gravity has no orientation. It spins him like a centrifuge, his limbs too heavy to lift.
And then…everything is alright. Something gentle is cradling his head. When he opens his eyes, Kiwa is holding his body, trying to lift him from the ground.
"Don't look." Kiwa tells him, voice shaky. He can only hear her from the dry side of his face. "Don't look, Shikamaru."
But she's trembling, and he can't help it. He looks across the cobblestones. He looks to the place where Kiwa's eyes can't.
There's only scattered limbs where Ruya's body should be. It's just raw meat and bone chips like horror show confetti. He opens his mouth but makes no noise. He feels the scream in his throat but does not hear it. His vision spins out and back.
Scrambling out of Kiwa's grasp, he crawls on all fours towards the crater that use to be his friend.
"We need to run." Kiwa tells him. She's in shock, or maybe he is. "We need to make it back to the bridge-"
Her words are cut by the sound of a blade being unsheathed and re-sheathed into something wet. Shikamaru turns. He and Kiwa lock eyes.
Shock. This is shock.
They both look down. He can't process what he sees. There is a blade protruding from Kiwa's ribs. This doesn't make sense because blades don't belong there. Utsuho's seizure wracked body stands beside her, his hand convulsing on the pommel of his Katana. Utsuho's dark eyes stare past them, gaze unseeing.
"Utsu?" Kiwa asks. She looks up into the face of her Captain. She does not recognize who she sees.
When she drops, her body takes the blade with her.
There is nothing in Shikamaru's head, only Tayuya's bi-tonal whistle drawing closer. She walks unhurried through the trees, footsteps crunching through bone and leaves.
She examines the side of Shikamaru's face. She judges it the way an artists judges artwork they despise. Shikamaru's body is a shellshocked earthquake kneeling in the dirt. He watches the steady trickle of Kiwa's blood pooling all around him.
Then…Tayuya passes. She moves to where the echo of Ruya's body stains the ground. She bends towards the earth, reaching like she's lifting a serpent from a pit. Shikamaru watches with unblinking eyes as she sings a smoke demon into existence. It condenses from nothing, twining around her frozen, bandaged fingers.
Gas becoming liquid, then something else. One moment, there is only smoke. The next, there are dark little mouths lapping contently at the residual chakra in the air. Tayuya's demon coils up her arm like the docile pet she pretends it to be.
She turns to Shikamaru now. No… She turns to his right.
He wonders why Utsuho is just standing frozen over him. He realizes belatedly he's activated his shadow clutch in shock, unconsciously holding onto the bind. When he looks up, the floor dropped out from under him. A trembling blade is inches from his swollen eye, wavering in Utsuho's grip. Shikamaru's shadow clutch is the only thing keeping his Captain from slicing off his head.
A twig snaps under Tayuya's bare feet. She whistles a new melody.
He flinches when Utsuho's bloodshot gaze rolls strait up and back. The veins in his Captains rope like neck bulge from the strain of resisting Shikamaru's jutsu.
All at once, the shock is gone. Shikamaru springs back to life because otherwise he's going to die here. His knives are in his hands again, even as he staggers away. He splits his shadow to bind Tayuya by the throat-
She drops her whistle to a mid sonic waver. Utsuho's scream is bloodcurdling. His body hits the ground, writing in agony.
"One more step and I kill your friend. Or, we can have our little chat. Your choice, Shikamaru."
He eyes Utsuho warily. His captains scream fades to a grinding moan that drags on and on, unrelenting. His mind accepts what his heart can not. Utsuho is Tayuya's puppet now, both a hostage and a threat. Even in the throws of pain, Shikamaru can feel Utsuho fighting against his restraints.
Tayuya uses his distraction to elaborate her leverage further. She lifts up her smoke demon so it nuzzles around her neck. "They are difficult creatures to control, you know. So temperamental when they're hungry. If I loosen my grip for even a second, my demon will eat it's way through your friends heart. It isn't pretty to watch. Trust me."
Shikamaru binds Utsuho's shadow even harder, gritting from the strain. He's calculating the absolute zero fucking chance he has of turning this situation in his favor. He tries to detach enough to clinically assess the situation.
Ruya gone. Kiwa dead. Building on fire. Utsuho in danger. Himself, alone.
And the psychopath who helped murder the Third Hokage, looking at him like his fear is the most delicious thing she's seen in years.
"What do you want?" He finally asks. His voice feels separate from his body. He feels warm blood dripping down his neck.
"What every great musician want. An audience."
Absolutely psychotic.
"How are you alive?" He asks.
"How is not nearly as interesting a question as why." She says. He knows from her smile that she's toying with him.
"Why then?" He doesn't care about her answer, he only needs to stall for time.
The smoke from the burning barn will have alerted people in every direction. Sooner or later, others will come. Others….
But there are no others. He is only here because Hitoshi was short staffed. The others are at the Hadakambo festival, miles away and unaware. Team Utsuho isn't due back until dark. Shikamaru is alone.
It doesn't matter. Time doesn't matter. He can turn time into advantage, patience into opportunity. He just needs to trust that reinforcements will arrive. Until then, keeping Utsuho alive is his only priority.
He's vowing on his life to free his Captain, just as Tayuya smiles wide. Her teeth are yellow with neglect. She sees his horror and smiles wider.
"I'm alive because of you, Shikamaru. Because of you."