Author's notes: /slaps the roof of the plot/ I can fit so much angst and humor into this baby!
The desert was the most contradictory mistress that Sasori has ever known. Not that he had any real-life mistresses, given that any somewhat-functioning society discouraged the notion of twelve year old boys from taking a mistress. It was more of a poetic comparison, really, as Uncle Ebizo liked to make them. And since Ebizo loved to read Sasori poetry as bedtime tales (as compared to the more bloodthirsty oral histories of the many ancient and current nomadic Wind Tribes his grandmother regaled him with, giving him grandiose ideas of vengeance and glory when he eventually crossed paths with his parents' killer), Sasori had cultivated a soft spot for good poetry.
The desert was harsh and cruel, blood boiling hot during the day, only to turn hair-curling cold once the sun set. Barren of visible forms of life ten months out of the year, but oh, life did flourish in subtle, invisible ways, as deceiving as the deceptive mirages that lured the unsuspecting travelers and tourists further and further into the arms of Lady Death. When the Monsoon Season would strike, that which was most precious in the desert – water – was deadly. Deep ravines flooded and poured through Wind's sparse towns; water reservoirs overpoured their walls and underground aquifers abruptly opened sink holes; shifting sands turned into murky quagmires that trapped and smothered like quicksand deathtraps. And when the rains receded, the desert shed her cloak of lifeless thirst and proudly wore her multihued cloak of green, decorated with the many different blooms of the desert succulents, shrubs, cacti, and short-lived grasses. Wildlife flourished, prey and predator alike feasting and fucking, determined to briefly thrive despite the fleeting inevitability of their own mortality.
And as spring turned into summer, the moisture retreated to the carefully guarded reservoirs, wells, and the precious oases, the plants shed their seeds to await future torrential downpours, the predators fled, the prey killed, and fields of green dried into husks of brown that shredded and blew away with the wind and the sand.
The desert, Sasori thought, though his thoughts were sluggish and tunneled, carelessly burrowing through the darkness of his dying mind, was both generous and stingy. She was Lady Death, courting always with life, luring it out before slaughtering it ruthlessly. He had always thought he would die in a blaze of glory, fighting against Suna's enemies the way his parents did, if he couldn't manage to eventually escape the smothering isolation of Suna.
Instead, death masqueraded as life, and snuck upon him like a mirage that he had so often castigated others for falling. And thus he lay dying, surrounded by the bloating corpses of his team. The flies still tormented him, but he had lost feeling a few hours ago as the arsenic wreaked havoc on his nervous system. It had been all that he could do to redirect the arsenic away from his cardiovascular system, but his kidneys were already starting to shut down, and he didn't have the strength to finish himself off with the dignity he deserved. Instead, it was a waiting game of humility and pain. Was this how Komushi felt as he lay, trapped, in Sasori's workshop?
"This one is still alive, here. Won't be for much longer, though."
Death, Sasori thought with a painful blink of his eyes, loomed over him like a fat, anthropomorphic hedgehog, claw-tipped fingers pressing against his carotid artery.
"I'm not fat!"
He had just enough strength to lift a shaking hand, and poked the fat with fingers that lost any sense of feeling as the sun had risen higher in the sky. The fat poked back.
"Just how far out of it are you, kid? Sheesh, you're nearly dead from dehydration." Death had a low growl to her voice. He had thought death would sound more lyrical, like the whistling wind that blew across the sand dunes, or the arching call of the desert wolf's lonely howl.
A canteen pressed against his lips – delightful moisture, tepid from the leftover daytime heat, splashed his mouth. He knocked the canteen away with a strength he didn't realize he had, swearing while he tried to push himself away from the Fat Hedgehog of Death.
"Oh for—! I'm not fat, you're just rude! And the water is from the Land of River. It ain't poisoned like the oasis."
Another voice, this one without the growl. "I noticed you aren't denying the hedgehog bit, Tsume."
"Eh, family's been calling me hedgehog hair as long as I can remember, so it's an old, tired insult. Come on, kiddo, let's try this again. I promise it ain't poisoned."
In the end, Sasori decided it didn't matter if the offered water was poisoned or not. He was already dying – at least he could die with a moist mouth, instead of a swollen tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, lips cracked and stinging. He choked with the water – oh, they're trying to drown me, how many people get to say they drowned in a desert? – and a hand, glowing softly green, pressed against his throat and helped ease the water down his weakened, inflamed esophagus. Four sips, four washes of green, and he finally managed to loosen his tongue.
"Don't give him too much, Tsume," said a third voice. All the voices sound young, like women or adolescent teenaged boys who hadn't yet gone through the changes of puberty yet. Well, one of the trio had to be a woman. He didn't know of any pregnant adolescent teenaged boys. "His kidneys are likely shot."
"Yeah, smells like it. But he's managed to survive this long. He'll make it." Fat Hedgehog sounded so sure of herself.
"Rejecting me already?" Sasori asked, trying to see more of the Fat Hedgehog. When the darkened blob next to the Fat Hedgehog raised a glowing golden hand that lit up their surroundings, Sasori realized that he hadn't lost his vision yet due to the poison, but because it was nightfall and simply too dark to see. He was propped up against the trunk of a palm tree, the surrounding fronds and reeds thick enough to have disguised him from most passersby. He saw three young women – Fat Hedgehog, one with red hair even more brilliantly crimson than his own, and the third whose hair was the deep purple of moon shadows on water, seated on the ground against a large hairy lump with her legs crassly splayed out. And four – no, five very large very hairy wolves. Wearing harnesses and knapsacks. He hadn't thought anyone had managed to domesticate the wild desert wolves.
"We," said the smallest of the five giant wolves, "are ninken."
Sasori wanted to grit his teeth in irritation with his own sluggish thoughts. Was this how life was like for the morons he was constantly surrounded by?
"You get used to it," said Moonlight Shadows regally.
"We're Konoha kunoichi," said Glowing Fist of Crimson. "We were sent to deliver the medicinal provisions that Chiyo-sama requested. What happened here?" She looked at his dead companions, splayed out on the green oasis grass and reeds, stinking of shit and vomit, corpses bloated from dying almost twenty-four hours ago, unprotected from the harsh desert heat that even the shading palm trees couldn't protect and the ravages of the necrotizing poison. Sasori hadn't lost his sense of smell yet, and he had wished, halfway through the day, that it would just give up the ghost the way the sensation of touch had.
"Poison," said the Fat Hedgehog. She tapped her nose. "Arsenic."
Sasori didn't have the saliva to blow a raspberry at her. "Idiot. Arsenic is odorless." But she wasn't wrong about the poison's identity. It was tasteless, odorless, and deadly even in small doses. His greedy, guzzling companions had consumed more water than Sasori. Despite forcing himself to throw up the half-canteen of water once he understood the sheer volume of dead birds, many hidden in the oasis greenery, his body had still managed to absorb enough arsenic – hastened by the stomach acid-induced burns in his esophagus, bloody tissues greedily absorbing the arsenic directly into his bloodstream – that his death was brutally slow. His teammates' deaths had been brutal, but swift. He barely managed to internalize the arsenic away from his cardiovascular system, but it attacked his other body tissues relentlessly.
"Look, kid, I can smell the pink salt from your Salt Flats from here. Arsenic has an odor to someone with my olfaction."
He focused on her face, instead of her ridiculous hair, because the Suna Salt Flats were almost a thousand kilometers away. Crimson triangles, the calling card of the Inuzuka Alpha, were painted lopsided on her cheeks. "Don't call me kid."
"Well, I can't call you Red, since that might get confusing with Kushina-chan here."
"Please don't," said Glowing Fist of Crimson.
"I…" He hesitated, mind speeding up slightly at the thought of being surrounded by Konoha nin. Suna had a (very reluctant) truce with Konoha, one that had been forced on them after their defeat during the Second Shinobi War. It was lopsided to favor Konoha and punish Suna, and therefore relationships were incredibly strained. Nonetheless, Grandmother Chiyo and the Kazekage had used the truce to force Konoha to provide aid by way of badly-needed medicinal supplies (which could also be used to create poisons), and Sasori and his team had been sent three days ago to obtain the provisions. It had been Sasori's intent to slay his teammates and the Konoha nin, and then disappear from Wind with the supplies in his pocket, finally turning his back on that horrible old woman and her web of suffocating lies, and his desolate, dying Village.
Sasori had thought the dead desert wolves and the dead vultures (poisoned from eating poisoned desert wolves, in retrospect) that he and his team had come across eight kilometers away from the oasis had been a sign from the Universe that he needed to go rogue now, instead of waiting another few years. Turns out, it had been the inevitable sign of his own impending doom. Ultimately, it didn't matter if the Leaf-nin were going to kill him. He was just a dead man walking (sitting?). "I am Sasori."
Fat Hedgehog brightened. "Just the guy we were looking for! How lucky!"
Moonlight Shadows snorted. "Just because we've met up with the team like we were supposed to doesn't mean we've successfully completed it. We can't leave the supplies with the kid. He's about to drop dead, and the supplies are supposed to be delivered to Suna. Do you girls realize what a political powder keg this situation is? Team Sakumo is at a sacred oasis, sabotaged in violation of a thousand years of tradition and international treaties, surrounded by Chiyo-sama's about-to-be-dead grandson and his currently-very-dead teammates. This is going to blow up in our faces!"
His plans to kill everyone and go rogue had been borne when his grandmother told him which Konoha team was supposed to exchange the supplies. The idea of his lying grandmother forcing him to make nice with the child apprentices of his parents' murderer had simply been too much for Sasori to accept. Apparently, he wasn't the only one bothered by the irregularity of the situation.
"I can… Well, I can help him a little," said Glowing Fist of Crimson. "It won't remove the poison, but I can fix some of the damage and get him out of the danger zone. Aunty Mito said to use it for my companions only in the direst of situations, and this is about as dire as it could probably get without one of you two being on death's door."
"Can you remove the poison from your body?" Moonlight Shadows asked Sasori. His thoughts felt too much like molasses. "Tsume, I bet he's got a killer headache. See what you can do about that so he can muster up some working braincells."
Fat Hedgehog clamped two glowing green hands around his head. Sasori didn't realize how much his thinking had been affected by the vicelike grip of pressure and pain until such eased back like the rolling tide of a distant ocean. He smacked his dry lips, tasting iron and lead. After she stopped working the healing chakra through his skull, she raised the canteen to his lips again. This time, he was able to swallow three sips of water without choking.
"Look, Sasori-kun," Moonlight Shadows was at least polite, "you're a poison expert. I know for a fact that most of your poisons piggyback off of arsenic, so you must have some sort of immunity to it, otherwise you'd be as dead as the rest of your companions. The oasis water must be loaded for you to accidentally ingest more than your natural immunity can tolerate, and that's the only reason you're still alive. But no poison master will make a poison that he could accidentally kill himself with – well, not an expert poison master. A lousy one probably would, but I doubt any child or grandchild of Chiyo the Poison Queen would live long enough under her tutelage to make that particular mistake."
Moonlight Shadows had a good point. Which was why Sasori had plans to shed the frustrating vestiges of mortality after escaping the bondage of family and village so that no poison would ever be able to affect him, and therefore he wouldn't need to worry about antidotes. But she didn't need to know that.
His words felt sticky as he spoke. "Can you manually remove arsenic from the body?"
The three kunoichi exchanged looks, unspoken messages passing between the three of them in the way that only a long-familiar team, comfortable and familiar with each other in a way that Sasori had never experienced. "Not us, but I bet you can," said Fat Hedgehog. She pointed at his legs. "I can smell how you shunted most of the arsenic there. If you can keep it there, we can cut off your legs, and then cauterize them."
"You want…" He stared at the Fat Hedgehog like the idiot she clearly was. "You want to cut off my legs."
She hunched down defensively. "You're a puppeteer. You need your hands, your fingers, more than your legs."
"Just let me die, then!" It was both amazing and irritating how energizing anger could be. "I can't be a shinobi without legs, you fat simpleton."
The newly renamed Fat Simpleton hunched down even further, a petulant pout crossing her face. But instead of looking at Sasori, she turned her beady eyes to Moonlight Shadows, whose face was as still as a rock. When Sasori turned the full force of his scattered attention to her, Moonlight Shadows was seated unmoving on the ground, shoulders rounded forward as she leaned haphazardly against one of the crouching ninken. After a long moment of silence, body taut with tension, Moonlight Shadows belly-flopped onto the ground, and then dragged herself forward to his side. On her arms. Her legs dragged limp and useless behind her.
"Oh, do tell me about it," Moonlight Shadow's voice was whispery quiet, very much like he had initially expected Death to sound like. She braced an arm around the trunk of the tree, and then used her upper body strength to pull herself upright so she could look down her nose at him. "Please, Sasori-kun. Kindly regale me with how useless a shinobi you'd be without functioning legs."
Sasori's mind immediately and oh-so-helpfully recalled the details of the Konoha team he was supposed to meet up with.
Team Sakumo; once known as Team Five, an unprecedented all-female genin team. Hatake Sakumo: the White Fang of Konoha responsible for almost singlehandedly wiping out the legendary Suna Puppeteer Brigade during the Second Shinobi War, and rumored instigator of the Third Shinobi War. Inuzuka Tsume: Inuzuka alpha and head of her clan, an extraordinary tracker rivaled only by her supposed lack of fear and her forgetful stupidity. Uzumaki Kushina: the last scion to the legendary Uzumaki Clan and purported heir to Uzumaki Mito. Mitarashi Kokoro: a genin who was paralyzed from the waist below during the Second War who taught herself chakra strings and made chuunin on the back of one of Tsume's ninken, like the ninja-version of a horse-mounted samurai.
"I don't have ninken," he told Kokoro, who loomed above him with a face as cold as the moon overhead. He didn't have the strength or energy to shrink away from her, even if he wanted to.
"But you have puppets. You even make your own puppets! You know how to make prosthetics to replace your legs. I will never have that option, but did I let that silly little detail stop me? I thought," Kokoro's voice warmed, but in the same manner that a boiling pot warmed on the unsuspecting frog trapped inside, "that the Suna nin were supposed to be tougher and more resourceful than us tree hugging ninja." Ironic, given that she was hugging a tree as she spoke.
Sasori dropped his eyes back to his legs. Below his knees, the skin had already started to turn necrotic, splitting apart from the trapped fluids. His kidneys had started to shut down because he blocked the blood flow from his legs, trying to clumsily reroute the flow of untainted blood, but was ultimately unsuccessful. "Most of the arsenic is trapped in my legs." He turned from the cold deadliness of Kokoro to the Fat Simpleton. Who wasn't really fat – she was just very, very round in her middle. Which was also moving independently, visible beneath the baggy, thigh-length green tunic she wore. "I know you can keep me from bleeding out after removing my legs, but can you reverse kidney failure and peripheral neuropathy in my hands?"
It was Kushina who answered. "I will. It won't fix all the damages, but it will pull you out of the worst of the worst."
"And then what?" To return in such a condition to Suna would still be his death. There was nothing left of their medical supplies, and all their best healers were out of the country, stationed with their forces. You can't just remove someone's limbs and automatically fit a prosthetic to the stump – he had learned that the hard way with Komushi. The lengthy recovery he would need, should he survive it, would be a set back to his plans of defection for close to a decade. And whoever survived the battle front to return to Suna would be killed if they drank the tainted oasis water, as this was the main stop-and-rest point in the desert after leaving the Lands of River and Rain.
"And then we fix the oasis," Tsume declared, as if yanking out deadly amount of arsenic in a permanent oasis was as easy as fetching a ball, "and I haul you off to our hospital in Konoha, where they can fix you up and get you fitted with new legs, and you can put all kinds of deadly doo-dads in your fancy-pants legs. It'll be great! You're in no condition to get the supplies back to Suna on your own, and it's pointless for all of us to take you to Konoha. Kokoro-chan and Kushina-chan can finish the journey to Suna, especially with my ninken to keep them on track since you paranoid suckers destroyed the usual landmarks." After a pause, she added, "I'm under orders to return to Konoha once we met up at the oasis anyway, since I'm nine months pregnant." And then, at the expression of her teammates, "Look, if Grandmother can haul ass across the continent with Madara and Hashirama when she was pregnant, I can do it with a lonely little Suna nin."
Oh. So, she had a valid excuse for being fat.
"Hey!"
"Fine, I'll do it." He didn't have much of a choice, but he also didn't want to die. Sasori had things to do, places to be, Villages to abandon, and people to kill.
Kushina snorted. "He babbles as much as Tsume when she's hurting bad."
Kokoro released the tree trunk and sank down to the ground, leaning heavily against Sasori's body. His shoulder and torso throbbed in agony from the pressure, even if his nerves didn't recognize any actual sensation of contact. "Well, let's get this done, then, before he does die because we wasted too much time chit-chatting." When Sasori opened his mouth to argue (or to demand more details), Kokoro stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth. He managed to shudder at the realization that the handkerchief was probably snot-stained, and then Kokoro wrestled both of his hands into her own, glimmery blue chakra threads knotting them together.
"Mmmhgh?"
"This is going to hurt like a bitch," Kokoro said as Tsume released a gigantic axe from a storage scroll. It was three times larger than the meteorite battle axes Hoshi-nin favored. Sasori tried to pull free as he huffed into the rag, too weak to scream.
Tsume also grabbed a torch from one of the ninken's knapsacks, and lit it on fire. She stuck it in the ground to replace the light that Kushina had been producing, but the fire was dim and flickering, throwing deep, eerie shadows that writhed all around them. Tsume handed the axe over to Kushina, and then yanked Sasori's legs apart. The skin burst beneath her claws, and foul blood, thick and as dark as molasses, leaked around her grip. She dry-heaved. "Holy crap, that's rank!"
Kushina covered her nose with her sleeve as her eyes watered. "Sage's saggy tits, I am so sorry, Tsume!"
"Throw up over there," said Kokoro, less bothered by the horrendous odor as she pointed away from their little huddle. "You can't contaminate open wounds with stomach acid."
"Please don't throw up, Tsume, because then I'll throw up!" Kushina squeezed her eyes shut.
Why were they complaining and apologizing to each other? He was the one rotting on the inside, about to get his legs lopped off. Chakra stuttered at his own fingertips as he weakly attempted to wiggle free of Kokoro's grip.
"Hurry up!" Kokoro yelled, leaning more heavily against Sasori and blocking his gaze.
With another gag, Tsume repositioned her hands – one on his ankle, the other pressing against his kneecap – Kushina swiped her eyes, and then slung the axe overhead. Sasori saw the flash of its edge, and heard the solid THWAK. He screamed in his throat, more from surprise than anything else, and knew that he was in even worse shape than he had realized because there was no pain. He smelled burned flesh as Tsume kicked his limb away. Right into the oasis water.
"Oops, shouldn't have done that!"
"Stop hesitating!" Kushina's voice made his ears ring. "He's bleeding out!"
"That's the point! I'm trying to let more poison drain away!"
"You gotta stop the bleeding before he goes into hypovolemic shock!"
"All right! All right!" The stench of burnt flesh as Tsume cauterized the flesh (how?) added a whole new layer of foul horror to the stench.
Kushina hefted the axe overhead, again. "One more time, girls!"
THWAK.
After Tsume cauterized the other leg, she turned away and vomited in the reeds. Kushina dropped the axe and pulled Kokoro away from Sasori, fighting back her own gag reflex. He caught a glimpse of what was left of his legs – one was slightly longer than the other, because of course these morons couldn't be expected to strike equally, the flesh of his stumps a burnt black and red with blackened purplish streaks twirling up his knees and disappearing into the fabric of his shorts like arching bolts of lightning – and then his vision was blocked by a forearm as the entire world swam and a hazy white fog leached through everything he could see.
"Bite into me. Draw blood."
Sasori's thoughts were trickling down through a long white tunnel. Death was coming for him. He knew that for certain, felt it deep within the remains of his legs. Should've kept his feet, at least he'd have his dignity…
"Bite down, come on!" The forearm pressed more urgently against his mouth. He didn't even have the will to obey. His eyes fluttered shut. He just wanted to slip into the dark, quiet embrace of senseless nothing.
Chakra strings attached to his jaw and the muscles of his mouth. He felt it pried open, flesh pushed past his teeth, and then the strings forced him to chomp down with a strength he lacked.
Golden light filled him as the cloying copper of blood tickled his tastebuds, sweet and warm like fresh agave juice, warming his belly, bringing tingles to his fingertips, a sprightly lightness to his thoughts, and it washed away the pain, the burning, the stench, and the coldness of death looming over his soul. He felt rooted and free, bathed in the warmth of a gentle morning sun.
When the forearm was freed from his bloody teeth, Tsume was rinsing her mouth with loud gargles. Kushina immediately applied a patchwork bandage to her bleeding forearm. Kokoro released his hands. "Now, you need to extract the rest of the arsenic, or it'll just damage your body all over again."
Sasori felt oddly energized and alert. "That was…" That had been the legendary Uzumaki chakra, the one that gave their clan their infamous vigor, long lives, and golden chains. The same chakra that had, ultimately, doomed the clan after they were scattered with the fall of Uzushio, hunted to near extinction as other Hidden Villages and nomadic ninja clans descended on the refugees like rabid wolves upon a wounded desert gazelle.
Kushina raised her chin in bold challenge. "Better pull the poison out. That's the only freebie you're getting from me."
"I need a sharp blade. A clean, sharp blade," Sasori added, eyeing the gory axe that lay on the ground. Tsume immediately handed him a relatively clean kunai. Kokoro and Kushina eyed Tsume for her disregard of any danger in handing a reluctant, wounded ally a weapon. "Thank you." He studied the burned stumps of his legs – Tsume had overapplied the healing chakra. It had effectively cauterized the open wounds, but the healing chakra from Kushina hadn't been enough to reverse the damage. Or regrow his legs. Stingy.
"I need quiet to concentrate, and obedience in succeeding." Without waiting for them to confirm their understanding, Sasori carved deep x's across both kneecaps. He ignored the sharp pain now that the peripheral neuropathy had been reversed. He dropped the kunai, and pulled his awareness back, forming a single hand seal (ox, his brain distantly supplied), and concentrated on threading his chakra internally. Thousands of microscopic threads slid through his body tissue, plucking arsenic molecules from nervous, muscle, nephrotic, cardiac, pulmonary, lymphatic, and adipose tissues. Sweat dribbled down his forehead as he bundled the molecules tight and dragged these bundles through his cardiovascular system to the open bleeding lacerations on his knees. The blood spurted like a fountain from the lacerations, bright red at first, before darkening as perforated red blood cells, black and clustered tight with arsenic, was pushed out of his body. Kokoro swept it up with her snot-stained handkerchief to prevent contamination of the surrounding soil. When the blackened ichor glimmered blue from the internal chakra threads, he gasped for breath and dropped his hands.
Tsume dropped her own hands, one covering each kneecap, and was far more gentle when she applied what was apparently a bastardized version of the Mystic Palm.
Really bastardized, Sasori thought grumpily as the self-inflicted lacerations closed into thick knots of raised scar tissue. "You are really bad at this," he told her.
She flushed red. "Oh come on, this isn't my forte!"
"The only reason she can do what she can do," said Kokoro, "is because she inherited a smidgeon of the Uzumaki chakra from her great-grandmother."
"Why haven't you procured actual training?" Sasori asked, delighted to focus on someone else's flaws instead of his own. Even a smidgeon of talent should be milked for all its worth.
Tsume's face was still flushed red as she dropped her chin, as if she was trying to crawl downwards and hide in her oversized tunic. There was something vulnerable and childish hidden within her body language. "Can't memorize anatomy and physiology."
Sasori had managed to memorize volumes of human and animal anatomy and physiology, cellular biology, and chemistry just fine before his eighth birthday. A person needed chakra control greater than the 80th percentile to successfully manifest chakra strings, which was the same level of chakra control a medic needed to successfully master the Mystic Palm. The same knowledge to build the skills of a poison master was the same for a good medic, except he never used his skills to save lives and therefore had never practiced the Mystic Palm. Theoretically, he could do heal… and he would no doubt do a much better job at it than the Pregnant Simpleton. He turned his gaze to Kokoro, who had wordlessly borrowed Tsume's canteen to rinse Sasori's blackened ichor from her hands. "Your teammate is a moron, so what's your excuse?" She could manifest chakra strings, and had done so without the formal training that puppeteer apprentices received.
"I am not a moron! I just have an awful memory!"
"I prefer to take bodies apart," Kokoro replied with a bone-chilling smile that twisted in the deepened shadows, "not put them back together."
He could respect that.
"So, you can do that," Kokoro pointed at his kneecaps, "with that, right?" She pointed at the oasis. The surface was still and as clear as a mirror, reflecting the moonlight overhead and the color of their dwindling torch. Sasori felt his jaw tense as he clamped his teeth.
He wanted to say no. He wanted other Suna nin to die the same swift, horrific deaths that his comrades had experienced. He wanted to spit at the notion of helping other desert dwellers. His bitterness waged with the weight of a thousand years of tradition – water was life, water was sacred. The oases that dotted Wind were as much ancestorial open-air shrines of worship to the nomadic tribes of Wind as the colossal stone temples that existed within Fire, Earth, and Lightning Countries.
"Tomorrow," he said, the frank outrage of how someone would sabotage the heart of Wind finally winning out over his bitterness and hatred towards his countrymen. "Tomorrow, when I can see, after I've rested." His hands were sweaty, and that was a good sign – his sweat glands and hormone regulation had been restored by the Uzumaki chakra, but his personal levels of chakra were low, especially after thoroughly raking through his insides with microscopic chakra threads.
"Fine. We need to rest, too."
Tsume shook her head. "The ninken and I will take care of the," she eyed the rotten lower leg and foot that hadn't been kicked into the oasis, "the rot. Kushina, can you set up camp? I packed extra ration bars and some of the Akamichi nutrient pills."
"Sasori will need them," Kushina said. She unloaded a knapsack from one of the ninken. Tsume cleaned the head of her axe and stored it away as Kokoro pushed herself back from Sasori. Sasori felt tired now, bereft of the galvanizing energy that had cured most of his ailments (he ignored the throb of his stumps), but still alert. There was also an infernal, persistent itch in his left big toe, which was utter bullshit, because he had no left big toe to scratch. He forced himself to focus on the Konoha kunoichi and ignored the itching sensation.
The women didn't argue over how camp chores would be divvied up. They moved in sync with each other, three separate (eight? The ninken appeared to have their own chores) bodies with one unifying mind. Sasori carefully and slowly rehydrated himself with a canteen of stale water from the Land of River as he watched.
Aided by the special black storage scrolls that kept corpses in stasis, Tsume and two ninken gingerly rolled the bodies over to store away and deliver to Suna, before they decided they needed to gather the dead wildlife affected by the arsenic. Another ninken assisted Kokoro in unpacking and setting up two tents. Kushina, her golden chakra coalescing into chains, fished Sasori's leg out of the oasis and dropped it on Tsume's pile of corpses. A fourth ninken began digging a fire pit. The fifth ninken watched Sasori with a canine curiosity, tail slowly tiktoking against the flattened reeds.
"What do you want?" he asked the ninken.
"I can give you some cuddles if you need them."
Sasori stared. Partly because he hadn't expected a ninken to talk, and partly because no one, not even his grandmother, would've offered Sasori something as superfluous as a cuddle.
Tsume swiveled around, almost falling sideways from being so off-balanced from her exceptionally large abdomen. "Why does he get cuddles and I don't?"
"Because you still have all your limbs and your teammates. Also, you're eighteen. He's still a pup. And you're going to have your own pup to cuddle in just a few days."
"This kid isn't due until the 20th! I got ten days, and I'm never too old for cuddles!"
Sasori sneered. Damn the double-edged sword that was his baby face. It was an exploitable blessing when enemies underestimated him, but a curse when it came to peers treating him with respect and dignity for his intelligence and experience. "I don't need cuddles."
"Never mind cuddles." Kokoro thrust a fistful of nutrient pills into Sasori's face. He'd just stab her with the kunai he sliced his kneecaps open with … oh. The ninken offering cuddles had already retrieved it. "Eat these. And these, too." She dropped two ration bars in his lap.
"If we're just eating the ration bars, why do we need a firepit?" asked Kushina as she carelessly dropped Sasori's rotting leg on the piles of human and animal corpses. Tsume's hands flashed through seals, and then they all stored with a single chakra cloud into the scroll.
"How else am I going to make tea?" Tsume declared. "I need mint, or I'm going to start throwing up from the stench again. Also, we have to burn Sasori's clothes." She eyeballed Sasori as she and her two helping ninken gathered more dead birds, foxes, hares, various rodents, and a variety of reptiles, piling them on another open black statis scroll. "I can help you with a bed bath. You stink."
He was acutely aware of the feces, vomit, and blood his clothing was saturated with. "I can bathe myself." He just didn't have any clean clothes to change into.
"I'm the closest fit," said Kokoro as she dug through another knapsack. "I didn't exactly bring a lot of extra changes, but this will work fine for you." She produced a baby blue narrow-sleeved manfu jacket, its hem embroidered with clusters of purple grapes and deep green leaves and vines. It was followed by a tan-colored pair of ninja trousers, perfect for blending into the sand dunes without overheating.
Sasori's fingers, weak but not numb, fumbled with the vomit-tacky zippers and buttons. He felt his face flush with embarrassment as Tsume approached, and then reached out. "Here. Let me help."
"Stop!" A rock, no larger than a robin's egg, bounced off Tsume's head.
"Kokoro!" Tsume whined and rubbed her head. "What was that for?"
"Let him do it! He's already lost his legs, let him keep what little dignity he's got left." Kokoro shielded Sasori with an arm. "Do you have any idea how humiliating it is for someone to help you get cleaned up when you're like this?"
Tsume growled. "I do know. Intimately."
"Yeah, well, you were six years old. That's a big age difference between a small child recovering from a brain injury, and Sasori-kun, here and now."
The growl deepened, shared with the talking ninken "I was also thirteen, Kokoro. Someone had to help me get cleaned up night after night." Something passed between them – an old resentment that simmered beneath the surface of their relationship. Sasori's eyes flickered from one woman to another. Kokoro was half-hunched, fierce and intimately aware of her own vulnerability; Tsume crouched, a tight coil of anger as her claws scratched at the moss-covered rocks. "Furthermore, I'm the only one with experience handling naked male bodies. Torturing prisoners or bathing Kakashi when he was little doesn't count." Another moment passed, broken finally when Kushina cleared her throat.
Tsume straightened, her hair as wild as her disposition as she pointed a stern finger at Sasori. "This isn't weakness. This is a mission, for you. A mission that will make or break you, and it's up to you to decide if you're strong enough to complete it. As far as I am concerned, I am nothing more than a tool you can use to complete your mission. Will you accept this?"
Sasori didn't know why Tsume bothered dressing up his weakness with an undeserved ferocity. And contrary to what Kokoro said, he didn't have any dignity left. He would much rather be clean with reluctant assistance than wallow in filthy pride, at this point. "I accept."
With a snort, Kokoro threaded chakra strings across the oasis to another palm tree, outside the circle of dim light produced by the still-burning torch, and then dragged herself to the palm tree, hidden behind another wall of reeds and fronds. One ninken trotted after her. And then the chakra threads snaked back to Sasori, snatching up the ration bars and nutrient pills.
"You guys." Shaking her head, Kushina released three more water canteens from a storage scroll, and handed them over to Tsume, along with a clean pair of socks. "It's a good thing we loaded up the fluids when we were in River. I'm going to find some brush or wood or something to start a fire." Two more ninken followed her as she stomped off, clearly upset with her teammates' squabble.
Sasori was silent as Tsume, brisk and impersonal, skipped over the zippers and buttons and instead swiped the kunai from the talking ninken and casually sliced his filthy clothes away from his body. They were beyond salvage. He felt scrawny and inadequate as Tsume wet one of the socks with the canteen and held it out to him. Up close, he could see old scars that traced her left arm from elbow to wrist. A different set of lacerated scars stretched from elbow to shoulder. "I'm not entirely helpless," he said, reluctantly accepting the soaking wet sock.
"Never said you were." Tsume paused long enough to stuff mint tea leaves up her nostrils, and then resumed cutting away his crusted pants and underwear. She piled them up next to the firepit as he scrubbed his face, then his arms.
She dumped half a canteen of water on his head, scrubbing the dried vomit out of his hair, and then scrubbed his back and neck with the other sock. "Why are you helping me?"
"Why not?"
"I wouldn't do the same for you." If Sasori had happened upon one surviving member of Team Sakumo, languishing from arsenic poisoning, he would've finished them off, supplies or treaty be damned.
"I figured as much. Don't care." She had to use another canteen of water to wash the feces from his buttocks and thighs, and then dragged him away from the puddle of filthy water before he could clean his pelvis. "Because Kuromaru is right, really. You're still just a pup."
The humidity and green belt surrounding the oasis kept the night temperatures from dropping as low as they would in the desert dunes, but he still shivered from being wet and naked. Hand trembling with exhaustion, he finished scrubbing himself raw, and Tsume rinsed him off with the third canteen, and then hauled his dripping carcass out of that puddle and onto some damp moss. "What did you mean by being thirteen and cleaned up night after night?"
Tsume paused in working the tan-colored trousers over his stumps. She held his gaze for a moment, and then pointed at the scars that ran up and down the length of her left arm. "My grandmother, may her bitter soul languish forever in hellfire, shredded my arm, here." She pointed at the upper arm. The scars were thick and raised, dotted with the hashmarks of stitches. "Ichi's teeth did this, trying to protect me." She pointed out the scars, not quite as thick or raised, that ribboned her forearm, and then indicated the largest of the ninken, the nonverbal canine warrior that trailed the verbal ninken. "Here, this hand, there are no scars." She rotated her right arm and wrist. The skin was smooth and clear. "And that's because broken bones don't leave visible scars, just invisible aches when there's a passing weather front. At the same time my left arm got shredded, my right hand was broken. All twenty-seven bones, I was told. Got stuck in the world's clunkiest cast. Couldn't do diddly-squat with it, and the muscles had been just as shredded as the skin in my left arm.
"Kushina had to help me clean up every time I went potty, and since I was so slow, Mooncalf had to haul my butt around. I hated every moment of it, but I didn't resent what everyone did for me. They knew I needed the help, and even better – they didn't make me feel bad for needing it." Tsume was hardly gentle as she yanked the trousers up his legs, and then up and over his hips. His tailbone jarred with every twisting yank. She did allow Sasori to tuck himself away and zip up the fly without assistance. Although the way she forced the manfu jacket down around his head almost seemed like a half-hearted attempt at smothering him.
"Knock it off!" He snarled as he battered her hands away. "If you just wanted me dead, you could've let me keep my feet."
She grinned, bright-eyed and sharp-toothed. "There you are, kid, I knew there was a fire in you."
"If you sprout your damned Will of Fire at me, I will drown you in the oasis."
Tsume waited until his arms were trapped, sliding into the sleeves, to pull him into a noogie. His scalp burned under her knuckles as he thrashed in her laughing grip, and then she yelped and released him when he bit her.
Inherited a smidgeon of that famed Uzumaki chakra, indeed. He didn't manage to suck any chakra away from Tsume.
Still, it was oddly comforting to receive assistance from someone who was so rough around the edges. She manhandled him like he wasn't a fine crystal vase that required a deft, gentle touch to prevent any damage. Too brisk to give him time to consider what was going on, she herded him through the undressing, scrubbing, and redressing without leaving any room for Sasori to dwell on his vulnerable weakness. And once her task was complete, Tsume snapped her fingers at the talking ninken. "Kuromaru, keep him warm while I help Kushina with the fire. Ichi, you keep watch just in case he decided to off us when our backs are turned."
Tail wagging cheerfully, Kuromaru draped himself across Sasori's lap. Ichi remained seated upright, body tense and poised for a quick lunge.
"You may scratch my ears," Kuromaru declared, as if he was presenting a rare gift to Sasori.
Hmmm. The ears were pretty soft.
Addendum: look, all I got to say is that with all the research I did on arsenic poisoning (acute and chronic) for the beginning of this story, my husband had better not drop dead of suspicious circumstances in the next year or so, or am I am going to get into so much trouble with the FBI when they comb through my computer's search history….