sunshineverse | [Closed] This handbasket is a little more hellish than anticipated.

As easy as that. Sealed as they were, they wouldn't have felt much pain to begin with, but Obito's movements were as efficient as they could be even as blood began to soak into the packed earth, a deep burnt black in the dirty cellar light. Sasuke had been drilled in anatomy; he know how to kill to hurt as much as he know how to kill painlessly, and when he looked down to draw his sword --

If he breathed in and thought about anatomy exercises, the location of arteries, if he didn't think about the look on this man's face when he'd walked in, if he didn't think about the purpose of Obito's smooth, steady movements --

If he didn't think --

The artery in the throat, a second's cut with a well-honed blade. Blood beneath his feet, the silent passing from life to death. And the next, no face, just a point to strike, a slice of red over a white throat deep enough to ensure bleedout in seconds. Here, he could picture on an anatomy chart: here was another carotid, easily accessible, his many years of habitual sword maintenance telling in how the edge purred through flesh like shears through silk. Cut and step over to the next, just a progression of test sheets. Just blood under his feet. Just blood on his hands.

Here, a neck obscured by the tilt of a head bent awkwardly to one side; Sasuke turned the flat of the blade to pull the skull into alignment and --

Froze, the point of his sword locked just before the cut. The boy he'd sealed first was lying in front of him, face still twisted in devastation under the seals, and behind hi were -- bodies and before him was -- this and --

Obito had been moving quickly himself, and that meant that he finished the others in time, silent. Still, when Sasuke froze, he came to his side, gently taking his hands from the boy and using hs body to nudge him away. He didn't speak, instead nudging gently to turn him away from this one, because this one was real to Sasuke.

He didn't stumble, not really; shinobi was as much in the marrow as built through training in some ways, and Sasuke only stepped back. The packed earth beneath his shoe gave, soaked through with blood already, and the yellow light traced out features with a strange, soft glow. The boy had looked Sasuke straight in the eye, in the moment when Sasuke had still been figuring out what had happened, and --

His hand was on his teacher's wrist without thinking about it, Sasuke looking up at him with a desperate plea written in his face, uncontrollable:

"Please," he said, and wasn't sure what he was asking for -- "There must be -- sensei, please."

"Can you tell me with no doubt in your heart that this child will not seek vengeance for his pain if left alive Sasuke, after hours of torture?" His tone was soft, level, and he met his eyes, held them. "Do you think that can be afforded, that lives of people in Konoha who are just as innocent won't suffer?"

"But --" Sasuke tried, words starting and then stopping without releasing his hold on Obito's wrist. "What if it were just -- he can come after me, it was my fault -- I can take responsibility for it and it doesn't have to come down on the village --"

As if he hadn't been wearing a Konoha leaf, as if he weren't fully aware that a ninja was just part of the body of the village, as if it weren't -- as if there were options. There had to be, whatever he'd seen before and come to know; there had to be something (something other than the boy's entire household bleeding out into the foundations of his home, something other).

He gave him such a sad smile then. "We're shinobi Sasuke. Close your eyes."

He was steady, even, waiting and being that rock for Sasuke to lean on and rail against. As he knew he must be, on some level.

We're shinobi, Obito said, but this wasn't what they'd been taught as children, wasn't what they'd entered and exited the Academy to know. The curriculum had covered every fatal point on the human body and had failed to cover this, and Sasuke wanted to say --

Wanted to shout, protest; this isn't what I was told I was going to do, this isn't what I believed this would be --

And instead all that came out, voice an unsteady crack: "Is that what it means to be a shinobi, sensei? This?"

"To be a shinobi is to be the thing that's frightening in the shadows." He waited though, and shifted back. "In Konoha we're known to be soft, even now with the treaty, maybe especially. But we're also known to be strong, to have the best weapons, the best bloodlines, the strongest warriors." He paused, letting out a soft sigh. "Even I cannot change the world of shinobi in my lifetime and this? This still happens."

He leaned in, holding his gaze intently. "You or me Sasuke, choose who will do this. You haven't touched the children, and I intended to keep you from it."

It had been a point of pride for as long as Sasuke could remember what pride was, Konoha-the-strongest, Konoha filled with bloodlines other villages could only hope to steal, the village with the Hokage monument rising tall over the trees. Konoha was hidden in name, only, and Sasuke had thought it strength.

What was the true strength of the village, now? There was what he'd known, growing up in daylight; flashy jutsu and the thrill of speed, the faster blade and the more powerful chakra.

Now there was this, a dark room in a civilian house, a dawn that wouldn't wait and a world that would want answers outside. And answers it would find, one way or another, whether it was in the form of a child allowed to declare vengeance -- and what that would say about Konoha, no matter what version of the truth won out -- or a burned house, an authorless tragedy. If it had been Sasuke's choice alone, his burden alone ... but Obito was here, his cousin and teacher who hadn't taught him to expect this, not really. No one had. Was it even possible to teach this, or was the only option to share the enduring of it?

"I thought I knew what the shadows were," Sasuke said finally, just a whisper. The shadow of the Kage, the shadow of his clan. His brother. "All this time, I've been a child in the sunlight."

He bowed his head and took a long, steadying breath. And then he drew a kunai instead of his sword and knelt: intimacy in proximity, the soft hot spray of blood when he cut the boy's neck. It died down from a gushing flow to a trickle, minutes ticking past, and then a sluggish pulse -- and another -- slowing. Carefully, Sasuke tucked the kunai back into his weapons pouch and gathered chakra to his hands, pressing it to the red-gashed neck.

"I'll close the cuts in case someone calls in forensics," he said, voice as evenly businesslike as he could make it. "Without smoke in their lungs, they'll know the fire didn't kill them, but this will at least help cover our tracks further."

"Them being down here is enough to show they were killed. Be careful of how clean you make it, that's more suspicious than cuts." He made sure hs hands were clear, still even in his tone, watching him as he cleaned off his own kunai and put it away finally. He'd started close in, after all.

It was only fair he give them that much due.

"I admit I've protected all three of you, and I'm hardly the only one. We like to protect the innocent hearts, many of us older ones, who remember the last war."

He made sure his hands were free of blood carefully, rubbing them clean on the darker parts of the material. He'd have to avoid Kakashi until he could bathe. And tell Sasuke to do the same.

"That war was started because someone didn't do this. They put their team first and left witnesses behind. I consider the man a hero true but..." He shook his head. "As a Hokage I cannot afford to indulge my beliefs before the needs of my village. I merely have to try to reconcile the two."

He reached, touching the back of his shoulder. "Now come away. We'll start the fire here."

It made sense, and yet -- Sasuke let the healing chakra dissipate from his hands only after the deep cut had closed, skin showing clean beneath the blood still smeared over the child's neck. Even with the seals faded from his eyes and mouth, this didn't look like sleep. It looked like the murder it was, even if Sasuke checked that the one starting his spine was gone as well, even if he wiped away some of the red with his own hands. Even if --

Even if it might have stopped a war.

Were these the stakes in a Kage's hand, in the end? Something at once cleaner-cut and viscerally deeper than the paper-games that Sasuke had watched Hinata work through with Obito. Lives ended there, too, but at least aboveground, at least with room to mourn.

And here -- carefully, Sasuke folded one cooling hand neatly over the other, lowered his head in a silent prayer: nothing he'd ever done before, even with a decade of being old enough to help at the annual grave-sweeping under his belt. And Uchiha funerals, half fire, half earth. Mikoto had shown him how to light incense and offer a proper greeting to the dead, and here: here Sasuke didn't ask for honour or glory. I'm sorry, he mouthed, I'm so sorry, until he stood with his hands still red.

"What formation for the flames?" He asked, looking out over the cellar. Such an enclosed space, and dirt-bound; they'd need to start a second one upstairs to properly finish the house if that was the plan.

This was the face of a Hokage that could only be learned the hard way, be it through deaths in the open field or accidents that led to crimson hands in the dark. It was the face that Konoha was very careful to keep quiet, but he'd learned, with painstaking care, that without ruthlessness there could be no peace, real or veneered.

"The corners of the room, and I'll start one from the center of the building upstairs before we leave it. Make it appear to have burned upward."

Sasuke nodded, stepping over a few bodies and forming chakra as he went. Fire bloomed easily from his mouth, kindling quickly on the storage crates stacked along one wall and the sacks of root vegetables piled against the other. The ideal solution, from a forensics standpoint, was for the house to collapse inwards, letting the rubble fill the cellar room until it wasn't worth it for anyone to make the effort of digging through the ashes in search of evidence. For that they needed structural failure from the inside first and a clear opening in the centre of the house, a vacuum to be filled with ruin.

Flames licked up one of the two support beams running within the cellar. The cool moisture of the room made the fire slower, but it would make it more thorough as well, drying the outside and burning straight through the core of each.

He watched the fire, making sure it grew as evenly as it could. The stench of burning hair hit the nose within minutes, sweeter and more acrid than the clean smoke of dry grain and wood.

Obito did the same on the other side of the room, and he was careful not to breathe deeply before he headed for the stairs out. They hadn't started to burn yet. They were wood though. They would. "Come on."

Fire ate inward from the walls like a stalking cat, pausing at puddles of moisture before edging around, seeking the next target to destroy. It sounded almost like one, here and there; heated air escaping from enclosed spaces with angry hisses, kindling bursting alight with little purring crackles. The lightbulb at the center of the room looked dim, now, before the flames finally reached and shorted the circuit and it fizzled out, leaving everything lit from below in waves of heat.

He didn't hear Obito, at first, gaze snagged on the small body about to be swallowed by flames next, feet frozen.

His hand came up, pressing over Sasuke's eyes as he leaned in to murmur in his ear. "Go outside. Go. I will handle the last fire. Check to see if we've drawn attention."

He flinched at the contact, the space between Obito's hand and his skin suddenly cooled, blocked from the heat of the flames. It took a moment for the words to register and another for the shame to hit; he was being sent away from the scene to compose himself. He wasn't fool enough not to recognise it.

And he wasn't strong enough to reject it. Sasuke nodded, a jerk of acknowledgment, and turned for the stairs without trying to force words out. The cooler air outside the cellar door was already beginning to smell like smoke, but when he stepped outside there was still no hint of what had happened in the house.

A clear, cloudless morning had risen, birdsong cacophonous.

Edited 2014-12-27 05:26 (UTC)

He quickly moved up to the ground floor to light the next fire, not wanting to leave Sasuke to his thoughts for long, and blew fire out over the center floor and one of the pieces of furniture. It didn't take more than a moment really, and he made sure that it started catching before he spun to hurry outside, making sure to expand his senses to make sure that there wasn't anyone around.

It was always easiest to do at moments like this when he was in emotional lockdown, but if there was anyone they knew how to hide themselves, or were out of his rather limited range.

"No one?"

Sasuke shook his head in confirmation, turning to glance at Obito, sword still in hand. "Still quiet. This location was chosen for isolation."

The windows of the house were beginning to glow, the fire spreading -- somewhere in the flames all the papers in the study disintegrating, whatever their worth might have been -- and Sasuke's gaze slipped from Obito's face to watch the orange light, expression going very carefully blank.

"Will we stay to make sure it burns down completely?"

"No. Better to be gone before someone comes to investigate." He touched his wrist, then started off away from him. "Come on. We'll talk."

Talk sounded like the last thing Sasuke wanted to do -- punishment, training, flying for twelve hours straight, anything sounded like a better option at the moment. But he followed Obito, the growing heat of the flames at their back.

"Should we get back first?"

"No." He set out at a decent pace, but not enough to wind them, making sure to get them further away from where they'd just been and heading in the direction of the lake they'd flown over. It was far enough off that he wasn't worried they wouldn't have time.

"It needs to be handled now. I know once we get to the village you're probably going to be inaccessible for a while."

That caught his attention, Sasuke keeping pace so he could direct a confused frown in Obito's direction. "Inaccessible? You know where I live."

"And I know it hasn't sunk in yet." He shook his head slightly. "You're probably going to isolate yourself for a couple days and that's normal, but me busting in there will just be suspicious if I do."

He quirked his lips sadly. "You're not five and easy to kidnap anymore."

There was a part of Sasuke that wanted to say: it's sunk in plenty, because it had. There was literal blood on his hands, a fire growing bright in the clearing they'd left, a local counter to the sun over the horizon. If there was more to sink in, he didn't want any part of it.

But at the same time he knew, in a distant, intellectual way, that the growing desire to have the luxury of silence and quiet was itself a sign of -- of something.

That meant that Obito probably needed to discuss the finer details of their cover story now, before it would be suspicious for them to meet more frequently, which meant Sasuke tightened his lips and looked ahead, waiting to hear what the next step would be. Whatever it was. He'd already lost track of his hands and feet more than once in the last twenty-four hours; following orders would be the easier option now.

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