"Look inside my heart and find a perilous ravine,
Carved within the beauty,
The darkness in between,
Standing in the balance of complete and incomplete,"
-creature, half•alive
I glanced at a cluster of swamp lilies growing between the roots of a bloated tree. Another cluster looked like it was drowning in the muddy water, making a trail leading back to the beach where Naga planted the first one.
I wondered, if Etsudo's son had lived, if he would've liked them. I wondered, also, if I would think of him every time I saw one.
"Hey, Hidan, what do you know about River country?" Yahiko asked, strained, holding a one-handed handstand in the water, his other hand behind his back.
"Still a shit ninja," Hidan said, sitting on a root as he took another bite of a cooked fish.
"Yeah, yeah, I know." Yahiko lowered himself until his hair touched the water, his teal shirt tucked in his pants and dark with sweat, then pushed himself back up.
Hidan eyed him as he tore off a raw piece and held it over the fire. "The whole country doesn't matter," he finally said. "But Tanigakure has ninja. Weak ones, because they were nothing but another place to occupy during the war. They have gold mines and make weapons for fire country nobles or some shit."
I un-wedged a branch from between two rocks and held it over my shoulder, letting Namekuji have the head, eyes, and mouth of a fish.
"Tsuri is some town on the coast that used to be held by Sunagakure."
Naga laid on a patch of thick moss, and Kuu used Yahiko's cloak as a pillow next to him.
"Any chance they'll leave us alone?" Yahiko asked, spitting out a shirt button.
Hidan threw the piece in his mouth. "Would you leave you alone?"
"Had to ask."
"You should play dead when you fight," I said, peeling meat from the rest of the fish.
Hidan only looked at me.
"Even if you don't like strategy—"
Naga made a sign at us. It was one word, in a sign language that I'd forgotten most of, because I hadn't needed it since Jiraiya left.
Track.
We were being tracked. And if he was using that sign, he didn't think it was Root.
I peeled off another layer of meat. Namekuji climbed higher up on my shoulder. "Nine, to the west," he said. "And give me more of that."
I tore off the tail and gave it to him. Fire country was to the west, and past that, lightning country. I ate more meat.
No one had taught Hidan standard Konohagakure sign, but he seemed to pick up on why Naga sat up, or why Yahiko dropped down.
He stood and stretched his arms above his head. "Praise Lord Jashin, for He has brought me a good sacrifice to honor His name."
Metal glinted through the gaps in the hanging moss.
The campsite cleared in an instant. Kunai were where we'd been as I stood upside-down from a twisted branch, eyeing white vests and the symbol of clouds on headbands.
Namekuji spat an acid ball at the fire and a short sword spun in the way, corroding near instantly as the acid hit and splashed on the roots around it, but the fire didn't go out.
It told me they didn't have a sensor-nin.
Naga slid back as he landed, putting his back to a tree so Kuu could leap from his shoulder and climb up. Three cloud-nin with darker skin surrounded him.
Take out the sensor first.
Yahiko's cloak was where he left it, and the nagamaki's sheathe. He was clashing blades with a cloud-nin. Another cloud-nin with only slightly lighter skin was in the trees above her.
I fed Namekuji the rest of the fish as the dark-skinned cloud-nin who'd let his blade be acidified leapt at me, steely-eyed with a scarred nose.
I threw the stick like a kunai and he jerked his head to the side, never taking his eyes off me as I shoved off the branch.
My leg hit his arm as he protected his face, as he pulled a second short sword from his back and twisted it to stab through me.
"You're fast," I complimented, in the same instant that gravity seemed to turn against him, as he noticed my right hand aimed at him, as he rocketed backwards and hit the ground hard enough to douse the swamp lilies in mud and water.
I watched his blade tumble away from him and stick in the mud as I landed across from him.
"Have either of you heard of the Way of Jashin?" Hidan asked, sauntering towards the two standing defensively, looking warily at his scythe. "No? You will."
The cloud-nin rolled away from my kunai, breathing hard, mud filling the hole where he'd been.
Hidan leapt and hit the ground scythe-first as they dodged, laughing.
The cloud-nin in front of me flicked his gaze to the left, then the right, looking for help.
Namekuji shot a stream of acid to my left. Another cloud-nin jumped in the way, using a water wall to slow the acid before it could hit the cloud-nin facing Yahiko in the back.
The water wall splashed down suddenly and he stumbled, gasping as a wind bullet tore a hole through his side. Namekuji stopped as he fell into the acid water and Naga leapt off the tree he'd been crouched on as the other cloud-nin tried to attack him.
"Was that your partner?" I asked.
The cloud-nin in front of me tch'ed. He forced himself up, tested his leg, and disappeared. He appeared in a flicker next to his blade and it vanished with him. He didn't make a sound.
I dropped down as it sliced over my head. "I take it back. You're not fast at all."
He hastily switched places with the only thing in his line of sight, his partner's body, as Namekuji doused his blade in acid, avoiding the splash.
I started to stand and stopped, staring at the white-blue current surging through the water around my feet. Lightning chakra felt like I thought a thunderstorm might look like.
Patternless and chaotic and splitting into smaller branches throughout my pathways, surging all the way up to my head. It felt like static.
The cloud-nin was on one knee, struggling to hold himself up. He'd substituted to save himself, then landed in the acid water anyway.
"You would've died faster if you hadn't substituted," I mentioned. His partner's body sizzled behind me.
White-blue light brightened the sky as a jutsu was thrown at Naga.
"How are you...? You know... lightning-style?"
His hands slid in the muddy, bloody water before I could answer and he collapsed.
I heard an explosion, a horrified yell, and the echo of Hidan's wild laugh. "Now what'd you go and do that for? I pray some shit god has mercy on her because you didn't!" he was shouting.
"Stop! All of you rain-nin, stop!"
I looked to the right and my eyes widened at the cloud-nin with her arm inside a water sphere with Yahiko suspended in it. His eyes were closed, but his eyebrows were pulled together.
"Ten," Namekuji corrected.
The head of the cloud-nin he'd been fighting was in the mud beside her body. Another was crouched next to the water prison, holding his shoulder.
"How'd you miss her?" I asked.
"They knows us," was all Namekuji said.
They knew what Naga would focus on if distracted, to stay out of his and Namekuji's range until they were paying attention to something else.
They were one of the spies Sasori was talking about.
Her eyes flicked to me. "We're going to do an exchange. The rest of my squad for your companion."
I hummed, the water still flickering blue under my feet. "And why would I do that?"
The other cloud-nin pointed his kunai at the water prison. "Because if you don't, he dies."
I thought about that. "No, you wont.
Because if you don't have him, what's stopping me from killing you?"
He looked at the other cloud-nin. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn't answer.
"You're desperate," Naga acknowledged, somewhere above me. "Your mission had to be to kill the three of us at once, and you thought it'd be easy because you had numbers and you knew where to ambush us. Doing this is the only way you can get back to Kumogakure so whoever wants us dead can make a new plan."
Yahiko breathed out a stream of bubbles out through his nose.
I glanced at the two cloud-nin on the branches below him. The trees around them were scorched. The third cloud-nin had been impaled on a branch and left to die.
"If you had killed us and you covered up signs of lightning-style, Amegakure would blame Konohagakure. If Kumogakure's been in the village for a long time, you must know that the only real truth is what people want to believe. So I have to ask, what would Kumogakure get from a war between Amegakure and Konohagakure?"
The water slowly started to boil around Yahiko. He breathed out more heat and bubbles, and I said nothing as Naga distracted them.
"Kumogakure has to know that if he left one of us alive, especially Oka, she'd head straight for Kumogakure," Naga continued.
"You rain brats don't know anything!" the cloud-nin shouted at him, grimacing.
Yahiko's fingers closed around the nagamaki, suspended next to him.
I took a step towards them.
"Keep your distance, rain-nin," she said quickly, full of empty threats. "Or I'll—"
"You'll what?"
She swiped sweat off her forehead and froze, her eyes jerking to the water prison as it started to lose its shape. Water splattered the mud.
Yahiko shouted heat at her.
"How—?"
The nagamaki cleaved a steaming line through her neck. Her hands dropped limply to her sides and her knees hit the mud.
The other cloud-nin turned to confront him, then stopped, turning back to me. "Shit."
Yahiko fell to his hands and knees, steam wafting from his body. "Thanks for the distraction," he panted.
The cloud-nin crouched, listening to Naga go back to fighting his squadmates, hand clenched so tight around his kunai that blood dripped through his fingers.
He knew he was about to die.
.
.
.
"I'm surprised you didn't leave me with mint breath. Again," Namekuji griped.
I passed a ritual circle on the moss and a puddle of splattered blood that used to be a person. The roots around it were burned, on fire, or splintered into fragments.
"Isn't Enyo with Joji all the time now?"
"Still," he grumbled.
Hidan was at the end of the trail of bloody water, dragging himself towards his scythe, his left arm limp and his left leg missing above the knee.
A cloud-nin was on his knees ahead of him, clutching the hole at his shoulder where his arm should've been. He turned fast to stare at me with wide, terrified eyes.
"How'd you let this happen?" I asked.
"Shut up," Hidan said. "I didn't—" he broke off with a breathy laugh. "Bastard rigged his arm with explosives. Can you believe that shit? I stepped on it after I cut it off and—fuck, this hurts."
I looked at the cloud-nin's intact arm, his legs, and hummed.
Risking everything, even themselves, to try and take down Hidan.
The cloud-nin pulled a kunai wrapped in an explosive tag from his pouch, turned to throw it, and stopped when he saw my raised hand.
My cold gaze dared him to do it.
"Don't touch him," Hidan managed. His hand closed around his scythe's cable and he tugged it close enough to lick the blood off the shortest blade.
The cloud-nin's hand shook. His eyes flicked to Hidan as he flipped over and used his blood to draw in the mud, then the cloud-nin looked back at me. I watched him clench his teeth, scramble up and stumble into a run.
"Heathens always think they can get out of range," Hidan said to no one. He dragged his heel in a half-circle to complete it, pressed a hand over his face, and sighed in relief as Jashin's marks covered his body. "That's better."
I walked closer, watching the cloud-nin. I spun a kunai into my hand, crouched, and stabbed Hidan's leg. The cloud-nin stumbled, but still pushed himself away as Hidan jerked and stared at me with wide eyes.
"What?"
Hidan said nothing. His eyes slid away. He swatted my hand and ignored me as he managed to stand, calling out to the cloud-nin like I wasn't there.
I stood as he went on about the Way of Jashin, the right way, the way not to fear pain in any real way, and saw Naga a safe distance behind me with Yahiko leaning on his shoulder, gesturing wildly at me and Hidan as he talked.
Naga had blood on his sleeves and mud on his pants, but whatever Yahiko said made him laugh.
They only came closer after Hidan stabbed himself in the chest hard enough that he fell back. He tilted his head back as the cloud-nin hit the water.
"May He judge the sacrifice as worthy," he said quietly, reverently.
"How does it stay solid in the water?" I asked.
Hidan blinked, eyes darkening. He leaned forward, pulled the kunai out of his chest, and raised his middle finger at me. Jashin's marks soaked back into his skin.
"Let's keep moving," Naga suggested. Kuu hung over his shoulder. "We should be close to the border. We can fish there, probably."
"That's one way to get the attention of valley-nin—"
Naga elbowed Yahiko hard without looking and he choked. "I don't have time to heal you, Hidan, not if we're going to clean this up before someone comes to see what happened, so I—"
"I'll carry you," Yahiko said over him.
"Fuck no you won't."
Yahiko waved off Naga's glance and said airily, "It's good re-training."
"Fuck you."
"And I'm the only one tall enough," Yahiko added, hands behind his head.
"Not if Naga carries him from the front—"
"Like a human baby," Namekuji happily interrupted me.
"Fuck you," Hidan said incredulously.
"You can agree," I began. "Or you can wake up somewhere in river country."
Hidan dragged his hand down his face. "Fuck off," he spat, but hooked his arm around Yahiko's neck when offered his back. His leg hung down, but Yahiko didn't move to hook it around him.
着用
"Too soft," I muttered to myself, pushing lightly on the bed.
Yahiko rubbed his shoulder as he dropped Hidan on it. "You never realize how heavy a person is until you carry them around for a day and a half."
He stepped around Hidan's attempt at a kick without looking. Hidan's left leg had re-grown up to the shin.
"Only one bed?" I asked.
"Wish we could've saved more by getting a room with no beds," Yahiko lamented. He tossed a pouch into the air and Kuu leapt to snag it in his teeth. It clinked noisily as Kuu worked it into his mouth and swallowed it.
"Could still," I said. "The innkeeper was scared. She'd do anything you asked."
"Don't know about you, but I'd rather not spend the night in a closet."
"Might be a nice closet."
Kuu jumped noiselessly on the bed and looked expectantly at Hidan until he tsked and shifted up to scratch his side.
Yahiko pulled two scrolls from his pouch and sighed dramatically, "I was trying to wait for a good time for this, but there hasn't been one." He tossed one at me, and the other landed next to Hidan.
Hidan eyed it as I unrolled the scroll on the bed, touched the seal in the middle, and stopped when a forehead protector appeared over it.
I looked at it for a second, then turned it over to look at the engraved cloud in the middle, exactly like the ones on our cloaks. It didn't bend when I squeezed it and the cloth tie felt like it wouldn't be easy to rip.
The cloth had frayed off Maho's. He only had the metal left.
Hidan grabbed his by the cloth and held it at eye level, staring at the cloud. He pressed it to his forehead, and I turned away.
"I meant to give them out before we left, but then, well, a lot happened," Yahiko explained, hands behind his head.
I blinked as water splashed down onto the back of my hand and noticed the dark circles on the cloth. I touched my chin and looked at the wetness on my fingers.
I could never tell when I was crying.
Yahiko grinned. He didn't look at either of us as he talked about convincing Yuta to meet Etsudo, of needing to play mediator because they were both stubborn and used to working alone, just filling the silence.
I moved my hair to tie it around my neck, discreetly glancing at Hidan.
He'd disappeared the scroll and gone back to scratching Kuu like nothing happened.
.
.
.
I watched the orange, flickering glow from a candle behind me as Naga held my hair against the middle of my back and cut long strands under his fingers with a kunai.
Hidan was on the bed and Yahiko was on the floor with Namekuji.
"You should've asked me before we left," Naga said quietly. I barely heard him.
I hummed.
There was dirt under his nails. He'd washed in a river and scrubbed the blood out of his robe-shirt after he'd dragged the cloud-nin into a pile so I could bury them in the swamp, but his nails had stayed a murky brown.
Maybe that was why I'd asked. To give him something to do with his hands.
He moved onto another section of unruly hair and, when I didn't speak, just as quietly asked, "Do you want me to braid it?"
"No."
I watched Hidan swat at Kuu in his sleep and mutter as he rolled over and pulled the only pillow over his face.
"It's weird, missing someone, isn't it?" I asked. "You think you stopped, tell yourself you did, and then you do something they used to do, and you miss them again."
Like having someone cut my hair.
"Yeah," Naga said, even quieter.
Had we ever talked about Konan? I'd talked to Yahiko around Konan. About how he felt, after. I'd talked around Kota. About how I felt, after. Talks about after for weeks, months, a year or two or three.
But had we talked about before since?
I hummed.
Or had I been stuck in the after like that was all there ever was?
"Konan tied my hands to the pipe under the sink once," I said to the air. "I kept trying to bite her, I think."
Naga paused, then sawed off more hair. "She scolded me a few times for that, like I had anything to do with why you used to bite."
Had we talked about anything but pain?
"Yahiko is awake," I said, watching his back stiffen. "Doing a bad job of pretending to sleep, too."
Yahiko sat up and leaned back against the wall, scratching his hair. "You know, she scolded me for that too, until once I—"
He stopped, his hand freezing.
"—kissed her," he finished, like there was never a pause. "She went so red she shoved me into a puddle when I laughed at her."
"It was always easy to make her go red," Naga said dryly.
"Was that the week she avoided you?" I asked.
"One of them," Yahiko said. "There were so many it's hard to pick one out."
I smiled a little and asked, "Kota covered herself in mud once when she came back with Konan, didn't she?"
"Konan tried to cut her hair," Naga murmured. "She thought because Kota had warmed up to us that—that she would let her—" he broke off, shaking with laughter.
"She was almost as much of a terror as you were," Yahiko said idly.
The room became silent again.
"Could you teach me to lockpick?" I eventually asked.
Yahiko leaned his chin on his hand as Namekuji crawled up his back and muttered about moving heaters. "Doesn't really seem your style."
"It's something to learn that you're both good at," I mused. Something other than killing.
"I'll teach you," Naga said easily.
"And pickpocketing."
Yahiko shook his head and said, "I don't think I like the things you're implying about us, little sister."
粘土
"What rank would you say the chakra you sensed when we got here was?" Yahiko asked.
Hidan begrudgingly held onto him. He still didn't have toes.
"Around jonin," Naga said, leading us down a dirt path. Namekuji was asleep on his shoulder.
It was almost morning.
Old buildings were built everywhere around the hills in tight rows and bunched up in a line at the edge of the water across from wooden docks. We followed a narrow path between them.
Small boats gently bobbed in the water, one tied to a post at each dock.
I stopped to look down at a boat with rolled up nets and empty cages covered in green moss. Another had a bucket of hooks between the seats and spears tied to the sides.
I hummed.
"A fishing village," I said, almost to myself, looking at the reflection of the sun on the water. "But no one is fishing."
"So what?" Hidan asked.
Yahiko smiled when I glanced at him, wondering what he was thinking.
"It's quiet, don't you think?" he asked airily. "And not the quiet of Hyozan. A lazy, peaceful kind of quiet. It's nice."
Hidan glanced at me, at him, and looked annoyed.
I looked at the boats again. We hadn't seen anyone at the inn except the innkeeper.
A lazy, peaceful kind of quiet.
Hyozan had been smaller than this town, but there'd been people everywhere, even though only people who supposedly didn't know better would visit in that heat during the day
If river country was so weak, why could they be lazy?
Naga waited ahead, in front of a building with a door that might've been yellow once.
"Where are they?" Yahiko asked.
"Back left corner of the room. There are other people inside, too—"
"Watch your head," Yahiko said lightly as he opened the door.
Hidan's fuck you faded inside as Naga sighed.
"I'm missing something," I mused.
He shook his head and said, "Me too."
It was smaller inside than it looked outside.
People sat on buckets around triangle shaped tables against the walls. The air was hazy with smoke. They talked in low voices, glancing at us as we came in, drinking from bottles or stamping out rolled bits of paper in blackened trays.
"It smells," Namekuji complained.
Yahiko stood at the front, next to a brown-skinned woman slumped over the bar.
"A boat? To the Land of Water?" she asked slowly, pushing herself back to lean against the wall. She blew brown strands out of her mouth as she waved a bottle at him. She had freckles. "Whatever you're drinking, I want some."
"I have good reason to think that you can make it happen," he said, undeterred.
She hiccupped. "Oh yeah? I'm flattered."
"Sometimes, when you get away with something for so long, it makes everyone involved complacent," he told her. "I bet you don't get many foreign-nin coming through here. Why would you? There's nothing past here but the ocean."
She stared at him. And then she laughed. "You sure they didn't slip you something up at the inn?"
"Not a lot of law-abiding people would know how much you can make working with missing-nin," he continued without pause. He waved a hand back towards the door. "I bet taking them where they want to go makes more."
"S-Stop," she gasped, slapping the table. "You're giving me a headache."
"You're either from Tanigakure, or they're helping you pull it off," he said. "The hills have to make farming hard, and you stopped pretending to fish, so they must be giving you supplies in exchange."
"That was a good laugh but I'd really like to drink in peace now," she said, wiping her eyes as she faced the bar again. "Ayumu over there loves talking." She pointed vaguely at an older, gruff looking man sitting on a bucket.
Yahiko nodded and turned around. I saw that Hidan had been bored to sleep.
"I get it," Yahiko drawled, not looking at anyone or anything. "But I wonder how much Konohagakure or Sunagakure would pay to know about a route defectors take to escape—"
The bucket scraped loudly as Ayumu stood. The woman at the bar closed her eyes and tch'ed, shaking her head.
Yahiko smiled.
A smaller, masked figure appeared crouched on the bar, dressed like a civilian, and more buckets rattled as more people stood.
"And that tells me I'm right," Yahiko said happily.
"Valley-nin," the woman spat, throwing the bottle down. It broke at her feet. She said something angrily in another language, then, "I was handling it."
"You weren't. But we would've intervened, regardless, to seek out their identities," the valley-nin on the bar said evenly, muffled by the white mask. "Even if it's playing into his hands, the slightest chance that a third party will be alerted cannot be ignored."
"Gilipollas," she said again, dragging a hand down her face.
"We're taking over this discussion—"
"I refuse," Yahiko said, just as happily.
"This is beyond Tsuri. You have no choice—"
"If it's that easy to rile you up, you wouldn't be the one meeting with them," I told the valley-nin. "She would."
The valley-nin went silent.
"Big talk," Ayumu said, crossing his arms, but standing in the way of the exit.
"My brother is a sensor-nin," I said, half-turning to face him, and he looked suddenly uncertain. His eyes flicked over my head as Naga waved. "He didn't say any of you were ninja. You're only here to look intimidating."
Ayumu didn't speak.
The woman turned around again and sounded annoyed as she asked, "Where in the Land of Water?"
"We'll tell you more when we're closer," Naga answered.
"It's out of the way. Way, way out of the way," she said, then shook her head at herself. "Like these idiots have left me with a choice. It'll take at least a week. A little more if the Land of Water tightened patrols again and we have to go the long way. More importantly, how do I know our secret here will stay asecret when, if, you come back?"
"We came through river country because we were less likely to be attacked than going through Fire," Yahiko answered, shrugging. "It's in our best interest if leaf-nin don't find out we're here either. I was never going to tell them anything."
"Good enough," she said after a slight pause, standing. "Stay here. Gotta pack. Buena suerte, Kiyo."
The valley-nin on the bar, Kiyo, nodded once, and Ayumu sat back down.
A/N: 着用 - Worn, 粘土 - Clay
Caffeine withdrawal is no joke. Neck issues too.
The difference between the leaf and cloud is that the leaf wants to keep rain's power at a manageable level. Cloud wants to cut the head off the snake and hand the knife to someone else.
Here's your bi-yearly reminder that a companion story to this one exists called Tilt. Chapter 13 has recently been rewritten.