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

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

Where: Konoha with a detour out of town.
When: January 4th, ridiculous early in the morning to late evening.
Notes: Sasuke had a simple mission. Then he went and complicated it all to hell on his way home. Time to fix it.

Obito hadn't actually made it all the way to the office yet when Sasuke tracked him down. Or ran into him, he still wasn't entirely clear if it had been intentional. Still, it was obvious something was up and since his place was closer, and the teen looked rather on edge, he decided to just drag him right back to his apartment, sitting him down on his couch as he took the chair across from him.

"Alright, what's got you spooked?" He paused a beat. "Is it something I need to activate a privacy seal for?"

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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.

"I thought as much." It was almost a sigh, and he reached out, touching the back of Sasuke's shoulder. "I want you to come see me when you feel yourself slipping and need to finally speak about this, first. Second, will you be able to compose yourself by the time we get home to a level where it won't be so clear something is wrong?"

It didn't make him tense further, not completely, but the touch did make Sasuke's focused gaze ahead flicker once into something less outwardly collected. Slipping, Obito said, as if he hadn't slipped by allowing this much to happen. As if he hadn't been slipping for longer than he cared to remember, and this wasn't simply the inevitable capstone to a year of failure.

Composing himself was the minimum reparation he could make. Taking a deep breath -- and then another, until he'd first unsynced and then resynced his lungs to his moving feet -- he concentrated on remembering the lesson on the way here: focus on the minutiae.

"I can," he said. "I have to."

He'd recovered from his failures each time, ultimately, whatever the damage in the doing so. Mission successes, every one, and this one too on a purely technical sense. What had happened at the house now blazing smoke for anyone in a hundred-mile radius to see had just been a side-note, to be kept from the official record. The sun was bright at the edge of the lake when Sasuke slowed, glancing back to see if they were planning to round the lake or simply go across.

"I regret this had to be done." He let out a soft sigh, and there was a... thoughtfulness to his words. "A part of me is relieved you didn't stay behind in the village. Another part, however, wishes I could apologize for not making you."

"It was my responsibility, sensei," Sasuke answered, paying attention to the tension in his shoulders. They were very nearly always tense as it was, but whether that showed more or less than usual was a strange exercise in trying to remember what usual was, when it was normally unconscious.

"I couldn't have stayed, even if you had ordered me to."

"You could have, but f you would have is another matter entirely." He came to a halt, looking at him intently. "Do you know why I'm relieved?"

Sasuke stopped when Obito did, uncertainty filtering into the expression he was still trying to keep studiously normal, whatever normal was for his face.

"Why?"

"Because now you understand this without my having to send you on a mission of this nature myself. I dread the day that Naruto or Hinata face this, and I fear it's likely to be on my hands when they do." He shook hs head slightly, sighing and reaching out to squeeze his shoulder.

"You three are my students, the people I have poured my heart into, to help them grow and learn and become the amazing shinobi that you are now." He shook hs head once, slowly. "No Sensei wishes to be the cause of the suffering that comes with the life of a shinobi in their students. I'm proud that you've handled this so well, even though you must hurt very deeply because of this, but I am relieved, even if that, at least, is nothing to take pride in itself."

It slipped out before he'd thought it through -- "Are there many missions like these?"

The rest sounded through a weird haze, Sasuke trying to imagine Naruto or Hinata in a situation like this -- Hinata, quiet sure hands stained with innocent blood; Naruto, bright and broken under the weight of cold-blooded murder -- he'd seen a genjutsu not unlike it, not too long ago, in the very worst of his fears pulled to the surface. If there were other missions (and if he thought about it, the look on Obito's face when he'd realised what had happened, of course there were, of course there were), and if there were many --

And if there were many shinobi leaving the village gates with Konoha bright in the mind's eye and returning with nothing more than blood seeping into skin -- "I can't," he tried, and couldn't phrase it well: "I don't want them to have to -- I don't want this to happen to them."

"Neither do I." His tone was very soft, almost a sigh. "If it bad to be one of you... I'm glad it was you. You've always seen a different side of things than those two. I think... even though it hurts, you'll be able to make this into something, to not be broken by this. I'm not sure that Naruto could do that, and Hinata... With her family, I wouldn't wish more darkness in her life."

He went silent for a breath, finally answering the question. "But yes. There are more missions like this than I care for there to be, but it's part of what my ANBU do. I try to keep it away from the hands of my man force shinobi as much as possible, but there are limits, so I try to tailor things to the individual and what I know they can handle personally. It's exhausting at times, and there's no way to account for missions gone wrong and the like, no matter how prepared my people are."

Not be broken? Sasuke had been trained in field medicine, and he'd seen and learned to heal a great many broken things, but in all of those cases there had been something to break. He wasn't even sure if -- he had no reference point for what had happened tonight. He hadn't even thought about it; nothing like it had existed for him.

But he'd seen that before, too, if he really thought about it. Shinobi gritting their teeth through surgery too urgent for anaesthesia, laughing afterward that they hadn't even know that they had muscles there to strain.

Laughing after this didn't seem possible. But for Hinata and Naruto ...

"If it had to be one of us, I'm glad it was me," he said, low. "If they -- would ANBU take care of it, if something like this happened to one of them?"

"Sometimes. And sometimes it has to be handled immediately. Usually it's something taken care of before anyone leaves the site of the situation to make sure nothing is missed." He shook his head slightly, looking for words as they came to a halt at the water side.

"This sort of thing is assigned to ANBU from start to finish. It's something else when someone comes stumbling in."

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