Naruto didn't know what to think about the blue-haired woman beside him. He was initially on guard when she found him; he had learned to be on guard with everyone. Very few people ever spared him the time of day in his 8 years of life, and those that did generally had malicious intentions. Just about every passing glance he received in Konoha was either dismissive or outright hateful, so he was understandably taken aback when the first person he encountered after getting kicked off the merchant caravan that left Konoha didn't look at him the same way.
She didn't look at him with any malice at all, really. In fact, when he peered over at her when strips of paper started to wrap around him and the giant scroll in his arms, there was a brief flicker of pain in her amber gaze before an almost forced blankness took hold. Never let it be said that Naruto was incapable of reading people, but he had no idea why this woman he had never met before would be pained upon seeing him. Sure, he was dirty, malnourished, and laying rather pathetically on the muddy ground in the pouring rain, but that wasn't her problem. She could've just kept walking and left him to die; a faint whisper in the back of his mind expressed that she should've just left him to die, but he quickly squashed that down.
No, he could figure the woman out later. She had rescued him from dying out in the elements and brought him to a dry shelter to rest up, and that was what he should have been appreciating. She even gave him food (insofar as the gross block she called a ration bar could be considered food), so she was at least on a comparable level to Ichiraku-
No, it wouldn't help to think about them right now. He left the village, and that was for the better. No use thinking about ramen or the warm, safe haven that was the ramen stand anymore. He had to move on.
"Something is troubling you," he heard the woman say, and he looked up from the ration bar to see the blue-haired woman staring down at him from her spot beside him.
Naruto did not respond right away. He pensively stared down at the ration bar in his hands and shuffled his feet until he finally worked up the nerve to speak. "Why did you help me?"
It was the woman's turn to silently mull over the other's words. She fixed her gaze at him, and Naruto could see even more emotions swimming in her eyes. The pain was still there, but it was accompanied by a sort of fondness for some reason. There was something else there that Naruto didn't recognize, though, and it felt like she was seeing someone else when she looked at him.
"I'm paying it forward," was all she said, and Naruto scrunched his face in confusion. He waited for any further explanation, but none came.
"But…" he began to press, furiously gathering his thoughts to formulate exactly what he wanted to say, but he could only settle on one word: "Why?"
The woman looked at him for a considerable length of time, and Naruto could tell that she was assessing him. The frown that came over her made Naruto tense, as he was unsure if he had upset her by questioning her act of kindness, but she quickly assuaged his worries by lightly ruffling his hair. Naruto froze at the contact, and he found himself whining internally when she pulled her hand away.
"Common decency should be an expectation rather than a fortunate occurrence, but that is not the world we live in, unfortunately," she finally answered. Naruto couldn't disagree with that, but his lamenting was interrupted when she spoke much more quietly. "We're trying to change that, though."
"Can I help?" Naruto asked, visibly surprising her. Her amber eyes bored down at him in confusion, so he reiterated. "Can I help you change the world?"
He tried not to fidget under the woman's gaze; he really did. He didn't really know how long she stared at him, but he could see more of that entirely unfamiliar look in her eyes. It didn't quite unsettle him because it wasn't pointed or negative in any way. He did catch her mutter something about a "Yahiko," though.
"Would you like to come with me?" she finally asked with a small smile.
That simple question struck Naruto like a stray kunai. He had been fully prepared to die in the rain earlier that day as even death was preferable to perpetual invisibility. This woman had found him, fed him, and was now offering him a way out of his personal hell. He almost thought it was much too good to be true.
Almost.
"Yes, please," he vigorously nodded, desperately fighting back the tears that were slowly creeping out.
The woman merely nodded with a light chuckle. She pulled out a small scroll and unrolled it flat on the ground, then she hefted the massive scroll he absconded from Konoha and placed it onto the smaller one. Naruto was confused about what she was doing until the giant scroll vanished in a puff of smoke, and she rolled the smaller scroll back up.
He was positively transfixed at what he had just seen. What sort of sorcery was this? Where the hell did the scroll go? Had she just fit a giant scroll into a small one? Was that even possible? He needed to learn more about this.
Once the scroll was sealed away, she stepped outside of the hut and back into the rain, beckoning him to follow her. The woman's lower body then began to disintegrate into strips of paper, much to the blonde's continued wonder. Pretty soon, large wings made of paper were protruding from her back, and she was hovering almost angelically above him before beckoning him to step forward. When he did, he found himself wrapped in paper once again, and the paper lifted him into her arms before she sped away from the hut.
The next day saw the spar that Tsunade requested from Naruto, and everyone stood on the sidelines with varying degrees of curiosity in a clearing just outside of Tanzaku. None were more curious about the matchup than Tenten, who was admittedly having a crisis. On one hand, the volume of idolization she held for the legendary medic meant that she wasn't entirely convinced that the boy only a little older than herself would stand a chance against the Tsunade of the Sannin. It's freaking Tsunade, arguably the greatest kunoichi to ever exist (at least by her esteemed estimation). The woman would make light work of someone as young and inexperienced as her without breaking a sweat.
On the other hand, this Naruto character, while being as young as her, was certainly nowhere near as inexperienced if him apparently having fought off one of the Seven Swordsmen and the guy who slaughtered an entire clan in the span of an episode of All My Shuriken was any indication. She couldn't just overlook that; she didn't even know if Guy-sensei could do that!
As such, this was a perfect opportunity to not only see her idol fight in person but to also get a showcase of what the enigmatic blonde that had wormed his way into her thoughts for several reasons the previous night was capable of. She could probably learn quite a bit from the spar should it go well.
The spar had, in fact, not gone well.
Tenten could vividly remember the sequence in which it all went wrong. Tsunade had gone airborne to avoid the chains (Tenten didn't know what the hell that technique was but she absolutely needed to learn it) of a clone that had been tunneling underground, and she came back down to earth and cratered the ground with an axe kick where the real Naruto had been standing. Naruto fired off another chain, and Tsunade grabbed it with both hands, presumably to snatch the boy back to her position, but she froze. Naruto capitalized by performing a Great Breakthrough and sending the woman tumbling backward in a heap, but he paused when he noticed that she wasn't getting up.
Confused, Naruto slowly approached to see what was wrong, but he was bowled over by Shizune, who had apparently realized what had happened to her master long before anyone else. Tsunade was catatonic and staring wide-eyed at her hands, and Shizune was immediately by her side and tending to her with Jiraiya not too far behind. Tenten had no idea what was going on, and a look over to the new redheaded girl that she was told was named "Karin" informed her that she wasn't alone in her confusion. Karin walked over to Naruto's side and asked him something that Tenten couldn't ascertain, so she got a little closer to catch whatever the two were talking about and try to get whatever information she could.
"…I coated the chain in wind chakra since I knew she'd grab it," Naruto said with a confused shrug. "It was supposed to be a momentary distraction so I could hit her with the Great Breakthrough, but neither were intended to be especially damaging."
"She looks catatonic," Karin observed before her eyes widened, and she casted a worried glance to Naruto. "Is she hemophobic?"
"The world's premier medic-nin having hemophobia would be among the most ridiculously counterintuitive things to exist in our world," Naruto seemingly dismissed the thought, but then he nodded. "I believe it. Nothing in the ninja world makes sense, after all."
…Seriously?
Tenten wasn't sure what she was more disappointed with, the fact that she didn't get the showcase of the enigmatic blonde's abilities that she wanted, or that the greatest medic to walk the planet was… scared of blood? The thought was so ludicrous, so ass-backward, so…
In a fit of frustration, she pulled out a kunai and threw it at the back of Naruto's head. She just needed to see how the blonde would react, if he would even react at all. It was attached to ninja wire, so she could pull it back at the last moment if he really wasn't as good as she was imagining him to be.
She didn't even need to, as Naruto vanished from his spot beside Karin, snatching the kunai out of the air along the way, and before Tenten could lift a finger, an arm draped around her shoulder and the kunai was handed back to her. She looked up at the taller boy casually leaning against her and not looking troubled in the slightest. The speed…
"You dropped something," he joked as she numbly took the kunai back. "You were probably just curious about what I could do since the spar was cut short. There are better ways to go about that, though."
His completely unbothered disposition mildly annoyed her. It was as if he knew she didn't pose a threat to him and didn't feel any reason to indulge otherwise by being upset. What made it worse was that she couldn't exactly blame him. That simple show of speed (combined with the fact that he went toe to toe with Lady Tsunade for however briefly it was) already put him leagues above Neji and into the same breath as her sensei, pretty much confirming what she had thought but didn't really want to believe after his apparent battle with the two missing-nin.
This was fucking ridiculous. Seriously, how the fuck can someone so close to her age be so far ahead of her?? Just what the hell was he?
And Karin? She wore the same cloak as him, so they're either teammates or affiliated with the same group. Naturally, she'd be comparably capable, right? It only made sense, which just meant two people close in age to her that far exceeded her own abilities.
Or maybe Karin was like her, the weak link holding her team bac-
No, that wasn't fair. She shouldn't be projecting her own insecurities onto others. If she wanted to get stronger, she needed to continue training herself into the ground. She still had a jutsu to master and incorporate into her arsenal.
With that resolute thought, she darted into the forest to continue her training.
Naruto, meanwhile, stared at the retreating girl utterly perplexed. Her face had gone through a series of emotions ranging from surprise to indignation to self-loathing, and then it finally settled on fierce determination before she ran away. Naruto looked over at the equally confused Karin who could only offer him a shrug. When Jiraiya stepped up beside him, he turned his attention to the Toad Sage.
"Is she always like that?" Naruto asked and pointed to the trees where Tenten had disappeared.
"That kid's a little weird," Jiraiya exhaled. "Given who her jonin sensei is, I'm not all that surprised. She's a good kid, though. Ton of potential."
With that, the man strolled into the woods after her to see what kind of training she would get up to. A glance back to the battlefield showed Shizune leading Tsunade back into town.
"So, now what?" Karin asked Naruto, and he smirked.
"Pain gave us a new mission," Naruto answered, and Karin's eyes widened in surprise. "You and I are gonna make a snake trap."
It had been a few days since Nagato's last communication with Naruto. He stood on a balcony overlooking the sprawling city through the eyes of his Deva Path, acknowledging the presences he felt entering the tower. A paper butterfly flapped in the rain beside him and landed on his finger, signaling to him that they were awaiting his arrival. Exiting the rain and reentering the tower, he made his way to his office where he knew they would be waiting.
The office used to belong to Hanzo, but he was much too dead to use it now, and there was no point in letting it go to waste.
Upon his arrival, he was greeted by the sight of three other Akatsuki cloaks. Two of the figures nodded in deference to their leader as he took his spot behind his desk to face them, and the third figure, Konan, took her place beside him.
He pointedly ignored the glare she was sending him for having neglected the stack of paperwork to his left. Not even gods could escape the scourge to kages the world over.
"It is good to see you both back in good health," Pain began. "I hope the attempt at negotiation with Iwa went well."
"It went about as well as we were all expecting," one of the figures, a massive man whose red armor was peaking out of his cloak, said with a sigh.
"That is to say, 'not very'," said the other figure, a woman with green hair up in a bun with two bangs that faded into orange framing her face.
"The news of my involvement in Yagura's defeat was not pleasing to him," the larger man continued. "The old fence-sitter figured that if I could help bring down one Kage, I could potentially help bring him down, too. It doesn't help that being a rogue jinchuriki gives me a motive to do so."
"I mean, is he wrong about that last point?" the woman joked.
"Irrelevant," he swiftly replied, neither confirming nor denying the point.
"I imagined this would be the case," Pain commented. "It appears that Iwa lives up to its reputation of being wary and uncooperative at the best of times."
"Well, that was just during the meeting," the woman muttered somewhat darkly.
Pain's Rinnegan narrowed. "Explain."
"There were a few squads of Iwa shinobi waiting to ambush us after we left the village," the larger man spat. "'Were' being the operative word. They no longer exist."
"Ohnoki figured that if he couldn't have his jinchuriki back, he'd just take the Gobi back, as it was 'property of Iwagakure'," the woman continued with air quotes around the last bit. "He also figured he could eliminate Pakura of the Scorch Release before I became an even bigger danger to them than I already am."
Pain was silent, and Konan casted him a wary glance. He turned around and stepped towards the window overlooking the rainy city he led. Ame was still regaining its footing after decades of strife from the countless wars waged by the Great Nations and the end of Hanzo's reign. They were on a path to finally achieving peace by eliminating the world's bad actors and slowly bringing the nations together. If Ohnoki wished to pose a threat to that, then there could easily be one less Ohnoki in the world.
"It appears that Iwagakure wishes to make an enemy out of Akatsuki," Pain finally spoke. "That is their prerogative, but if they choose to stand in the way of our goals…"
His voice took on a much darker edge, "They shall know pain."
His tone made the two reporting members of Akatsuki shudder. There were two unspoken rules that Akatsuki members quickly picked up on: don't ever enrage Pain, and don't, under any circumstances, pose a threat to Naruto in Konan's presence.
Craters where small villages once stood have been created for less.
"Thank you for the information," he spoke once again, turning back to face the two. "Han, you may do as you please. I will contact you through your ring if I require anything else of you. Pakura, Konan and I have another assignment for you."
With the briefing concluded, Han bowed and left the room, leaving Pakura to stick around to hear what her leader and comrade needed of her.
"Naruto has completed his task of eliminating Raiga Kurosuki and collecting the Kiba to return to Kiri," he informed, and Pakura nodded. "He is currently in Hi no Kuni, and I have given him the task of eliminating Orochimaru. You will head to Tanzaku and assist him in this mission."
"Understood," Pakura nodded, and once Pain dismissed her, she flickered out of the room to book it to Naruto's location.
When she was gone, Konan looked toward Pain once again, her usual stoniness bleeding into mild concern. "Will that be enough?"
"You needn't worry about Naruto, Konan," Pain calmly replied. "The combined might of Pakura and Naruto will be more than sufficient to rid the world of the snake, and he has Jiraiya-sensei with him, as well. Even if the odds were not completely stacked in his favor, you must have faith in him. We trained him well."
"I do have faith," Konan replied, and then she paused. "However, he's at that age…"
"The age that we lost Yahiko," Pain finished for her while closing his eyes. "I think about it, as well."
His eyes opened once more. "Naruto is substantially more powerful and capable than any of us were at that age. We saw to that ourselves. In a few years, provided he continues developing at the rate he has been, he may even be more powerful than I."
That took Konan aback. "Do you really believe so?"
"I do. The rate at which he develops is, quite frankly, frightening. I may possess the eyes of The Sage, but a sage, I am not. The Salamanders do have the capacity for senjutsu, should he wish to learn it. Combine that with his vast arsenal and the full might of the Kyubi given the strides he's made with becoming comrades with his tenant, and he will become a force unseen since the days of Hashirama Senju and the real Madara Uchiha."
The mention of Madara made Konan frown, and Pain solemnly nodded. "He must also be ready for when the imposter strikes again. We were lucky the last time; neither he nor Zetsu were expecting my real body to have been healed, nor were they expecting a trap consisting of billions of paper bombs. The fact that they survived is but an unfortunate miracle."
Pain returned to his previous spot at the window and gazed out at the village once more. "We will not have the element of surprise next time, and there will be a next time. We cannot find them to kill them ourselves, so we're left to wait for them to come to us. It is only a matter of time."
"And Naruto must be strong enough to defend himself in the event that we can't," Konan surmised.
"Naruto must be strong enough to defend himself whether or not we can," Pain corrected.
Naruto slid into the stool beside the pensive-looking Tsunade. He had masked his presence in the corner of the bar unbeknownst to her and Jiraiya to listen in on their conversation, and it was around the moment that Jiraiya face-planted onto the counter and into unconsciousness that Naruto decided it was time to make his move. He slid into the stool beside the pensive woman and ordered himself a drink, much to her surprise.
"You know, you never really struck me as a date rapist," Naruto quipped while the woman gathered herself after his surprise appearance.
"How much did you hear?" she asked with her eyes narrowing dangerously.
"Enough," was all Naruto said in reply, shrugging off the glare he was receiving. When his drink came, he took a sip of it before turning to the other blonde.
"You're not going to heal Orochimaru's arms," he said. It was a statement rather than a question, as if he had already known what she was thinking.
She didn't take it as a threat, and she merely sighed. "No, I'm not."
"But you are going to meet him."
"Yeah."
Naruto hummed in acceptance before taking another sip. He didn't really like alcohol that much, but drinking alongside someone that did often put the other person at ease during negotiation.
"You going alone?" he finally asked.
"That was the plan," she hesitantly answered. "Why?"
"Well, not anymore," he replied with a smirk.
"I can take care of myself," she swiftly declined.
"Not with a fear of blood," Naruto rebuked, losing the joviality in his tone.
Tsunade stiffened, but she stood firm. "I can take care of myself, brat."
"And if Orochimaru uses one of his bum arms to slap some blood on your face and you freeze up like you did in our spar?" Naruto pressed.
Tsunade remained silent, and she glared a hole through her sake dish. She knew he was right; she was at his mercy at the sight of blood on her hands, and Orochimaru wouldn't have the same inclination to not kill her that Naruto did.
"Look atcha, all defeated and shit. What would the debt collectors think?" Naruto quipped, some of the humor returning to his tone upon seeing the developing dejection on her face. The twitching of her eye in response told him he succeeded in somewhat lightening the mood.
"Fuckin' brat," she muttered before downing her sake. "What do you propose?"
"Karin and I have been working on a trap to keep him from escaping. From what I hear, the dude's like a roach. Going by your KO'd teammate, I'm assuming that you're meeting him tomorrow morning."
When she nodded, he continued. "Then he will be dead by tomorrow afternoon. We will make sure of that. Before that can happen, though, I need you to do something for me."
Before she could question what he wanted, he whipped a kunai out of his cloak and cut a line across the palm of his hand, and he held his bleeding hand out to her. She, predictably, became incredibly apprehensive at the sight of his palm, immediately looking away and trying to fight off the shaking.
"Tsunade, this is necessary," Naruto said seriously.
Tsunade tried to look at his hand, but the blood dripping off of the cut and pooling onto the counter was inundating her with horrible flashbacks. All she could see was the bloody body of Dan in her arms as she failed to save his life. She just couldn't do it.
Naruto sighed, and he started channeling Kurama's chakra to speed up the healing process so that he could try again on the other hand without passing out. However, as he was doing so, he noticed a faint glow from the necklace Tsunade was wearing. Curious, he channeled Kurama's chakra to his right index finger and reached for the necklace, completely oblivious to the optics of him reaching into Tsunade's chest just as she was oblivious to the bartender being wrapped up in chains when he came to raise a fuss about the blood.
When he inevitably poked into her cleavage to touch the necklace, she snapped out of her stupor and smacked his hand away. "The hell is wrong with you?!"
"Your necklace is reacting to the fox's chakra," he answered.
She looked down at the glowing crystal in equal wonder. "It was my grandfather's. Maybe it's his chakra reacting with a biju's…"
Naruto went forward with the experiment by channeling more of Kurama's chakra, and the necklace glowed even brighter, filling Tsunade with a sort of warmth that she hadn't felt in nearly half a century. Her shaking had ceased completely, and she felt much more at ease despite the blood still being present.
Deciding to test a theory, Naruto cut the healing wound and reopened a bit of it, spilling new blood to the scene. Tsunade, emboldened by the ease that Hashirama's chakra was putting her in, took a deep breath and reached for the offered hand. She forced herself to stare directly at the blood as she closed the open wound and healed his palm.
"See, that's the world's greatest medic!" Naruto cheered.
Tsunade blinked. She blinked again. She stared at the unmarred palm in disbelief before it finally sank in that she had actually done it. Assisted or not, she had gotten past her aversion to blood! Baby steps, but still-
"Alright, ya old lady, time to plan your teammate's murder."
Just like that, the moment was ruined, and she was back down to Earth with the chortling little shit beside her. She lowly growled while he laughed at her expense, but she couldn't keep the smile from forming for too long.
'This little fuckhead is way too much like Nawaki.'
Jiraiya groggily peeled himself off of the counter with a groan. His head was pounding, and his chakra was all sorts of haywire. He looked around the empty bar, and with the sunlight creeping into the establishment, he concluded that it must have been morning already. He struggled to think about the last thing he remembered before blacking out, and all he could gather was talking to Tsunade and warning her against going to Orochimaru. He took another drink, and then there was nothing.
It didn't take long for him to put together what happened.
"Damnit, she slipped me a Mickey," Jiraiya cursed before he clumsily rose to his feet and stumbled his way out of the bar in the direction of Tsunade and Shizune's inn to make sure his fears weren't coming true. He needed to rendezvous with Tenten and potentially find Naruto if he could. If Tsunade truly did something stupid, he'd need all the help he could get in his current state.
Orochimaru thought himself to be a reasonable man. He may have done his fair share of morally reprehensible things, but it was always in the pursuit of knowledge. Science should never be bound by such paltry concepts as morality; it only hindered efficiency. You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette, and that's just something his dearly departed sensei could never understand… unless, of course, he was the one cracking the eggs himself, the hypocritical bastard.
Speaking of Hiruzen, the old fuck had done quite the number on his arms with the help of the Shinigami, and he swore that he'd one day break into the Uzumaki shrine and use the Shinigami mask to bring Hiruzen back so he could beat his ass a second time for his little parting gift, but that could come later. He was a reasonable man, after all.
He was so reasonable, in fact, that when he requested help from his dear old teammate, he offered to reunite her with her dead loved ones that still dominated every waking moment of her life because that was just the kind of reasonable guy he was. Of course, he never actually specified how he would do it; he could cast Edo Tensei and physically bring them back since he had their DNA, or he could also just kill Tsunade after she healed him and reunite her with them that way. It didn't really matter to him either way so long as she healed his arms.
And that was the main thing, wasn't it? Getting his arms healed was the only reason he had sought Tsunade out, and healing his arms was exactly what she wasn't currently doing. In fact, she was doing quite the opposite by fighting his righthand man, Kabuto. First, she actively tried to kill him with something that only resembled medical ninjutsu, but Kabuto was luckily around to put a stop to it before she could. Then, she led them to a clearing outside of Tanzaku so she could go all out without destroying the town, and now, she was trying to liquify his most valuable subordinate's internal organs.
Nothing about this was reasonable.
To make matters worse, Orochimaru had the faintest sense that they were not alone in the clearing. He couldn't see or truly discern where the interloper might have actually been, but his gut was telling him that she specifically led them to this area to spring a trap, and that unnerved him. If it was Jiraiya lying in wait, he would have shown himself already and gone into another tired spiel. He didn't like not knowing what was to come and potentially being vulnerable to it.
He continued viewing the fight with an ever-growing frown and raising sense of dread, and that dread only increased when Kabuto tried to get an edge over her by slicing his hand with his kunai and spraying her with blood. There was something wrong about the scene, though. She momentarily froze at the contact with the blood, but her catatonia thereafter felt much too manufactured from his vantage point. When Kabuto swung his kunai at her to slit her throat amidst his taunting, Orochimaru saw the edges of Tsunade's lips curve upward ever so slightly, and the alarm bells rang even louder.
"Kabuto, move!" he shouted, but Tsunade's hand struck out to catch Kabuto's wrist in an iron grip before the younger man could escape. Kabuto was a deer in headlights, and Orochimaru's suspicions were confirmed. At some point since their last meeting, she had gotten over her hemophobia, and now Kabuto was trapped in her grasp and at her mercy. If she landed a punch at her full strength, Kabuto may not exist after today.
That would not do.
Orochimaru sprang into action, coughing up the Kusanagi and leaping for his former teammate in order to save Kabuto's life, but he was caught even further off guard when a wall of chains shot out of the ground and blocked the Kusanagi's path. The sword cut through the chains, but it slowed his advance and kept him away from the two just long enough for Tsunade to punch Kabuto in the chest. The punch could be heard throughout the entire clearing, making the snake summoner wince as he saw his subordinate fly backwards and smash into a boulder. He couldn't be sure if Kabuto had survived, but he was afforded no time to think about it before he was forced to dodge even more chains from below.
The emergence of chains threw him for the biggest loop in years, but he received his answer when spiky, blonde hair rose from the ground. The instinctual rage he felt at the reminder of Minato was muted when he saw the black cloak with red clouds accompanying it. Standing before him was a teenage boy he had never seen before but somehow looked entirely too familiar, cloak notwithstanding.
He knew of the cloak in that he knew what that pattern meant. Akatsuki had been making waves in the ninja world recently with their propensity to meddle in the affairs of other nations for a fee. Of course, he had heard about the three jinchuriki that bullied the Yondaime Mizukage and his army of loyalists until he was facedown in a puddle of lava courtesy of the now Godaime Mizukage, and he heard that they were all wearing that very same cloak, but he didn't have much else information on them that he thought to be reliable.
Still, what the hell could this upstart pissant want with him?
"Orochimaru," the teen began with a smile that the snake summoner decided he absolutely hated. "We haven't formally met, but I'm not a huge fan, so I'm here to kill you."
…Well, fuck.
Cherish your loved ones while you still have them.
Thanks for reading.