“Can I ask you to do something for me?” 

         He’d showered after his mission, but there was still specks of blood at his neck and cheek. There was a distant look to his expression. His eyes were foggy. Any sign of his ANBU gear was gone, leaving him only in his vest. Saburo doubted she knew his name (JACKRABBIT), but he knew who she was. He’d seen her at a distance, tailing his team once or twice. Something about their jobs felt similar in an odd way. She a cleaner and he a messenger. These jobs of liminal existence. Even if it wasn’t all he did, it was all that his clan was ever known for. That was the image he tried to put forth now. 

The crows watch the girl approach their house with black-button eyes. Rarely does their girl get visitors who do not come in masks or bearing scrolls - this one must have wandered too far from home, they decide.

A single bird flutters down from mossy roof to land on the weathered wood of the porch. “Girl,” he calls. “Are you lost, Girl?”

     The two sides stare at each other - Ryū mostly in confused curiosity. Eyes naturally follow the movement, and she startles as they speak! She’s heard of crows and ravens mimicking, but...this sounds like full speech!

     “...uh...n-no...?” Her reply sounds more akin to another question. Her burdened arm lifts her basket. “I...I was getting herbs for my training. I didn’t know there was a house out this far, so I thought I’d see if...if anyone lived here. Is it...your house?” Ryū’s not sure why birds would need a person-sized house, but...well, it’s not her place to say what is proper.

 From the peak of the cliff, the world was his.

 It stretched out before him, boundless: The flat, hard-baked earth; the tufts of scraggly, dehydrated shrubs; the mountainous pyramids eroded by wind and storm over millennia. It teemed with life and with death and he was its king. With the flick of a finger he could flood the parched oases with sands from dunes a horizon over. With a whisper he could crush the skulls of the thousand rodents tunneling beneath his feet in a two-kilometer radius. The moon was three days waning and his eyes were clear and bright as the north star, and Sabaku no Gaara had never felt so alive.

 He crouched over the valley. It was a narrow path flanked on either side by jutting formations of rock, as though a child had once built some great sandcastle then chopped it down the middle. The barely-broken dawn cast broad strokes of faded orange-gold across the earth, down to the blood caked on the soles of his sandals, down to woman tending to the corpses he had slaughtered mere hours ago. Her procedure was methodical and efficient. It was identical to the previous four times she had trailed him, removing the bodies that had once been shinobi on each occasion until the only evidence of his rampage was the crimson stain seeping into the dirt and the lingering presence of something formidable and mortally forbidden.

 The previous four times he had merely watched. Today, he moved. As silent as a python through grass he descended from the top of the cliff until he stood on a small plateau of rock a meter above the floor of the valley, within earshot, but angled just out of her line of sight.

   Konohagakure was a place she hardly visited due to circumstances relating to either conflicts, or simply not being in the right place to be there due to village policies.

   So it’s no wonder that Yoshiko is completely enamored with the place when she’s finally able to see it herself. It’s vastly different from Takigakure, which was to be expected as she knows all villages would differ from one another.

   But to visit a village from one of the great nations with one of the Five Kages is something else entirely and she would make the best of it.

   Even if that involved her not watching where she was going, resulting in her colliding with some poor inhabitant of the Leaf Village.

continued from here [x] @thecorpsecarrier

“Don’t mention it.” A casual shrug and a friendly smile dismiss her gratitude; he hasn’t done anything particularly extraordinary. She is soaked and muddy - and he is, too, now - but that is a state of being in the land of rain. It wouldn’t have made a difference had he helped her out of the puddle, or simply stood by and watched, and he wipes the dirt from his palm onto his coat as if it has little consequence.

“Can you walk?” he asks, pulling one arm across his shoulders to help her up onto her feet again. “You picked the wrong day for a mission. It’s pretty nasty out here today.” His observation rings with a laugh and a knowing nod toward her leaf symbol, yet he’s scarcely bothered by the rivulets running from his hair into his eyes and down his cheeks. Others might have met a foreign shinobi with hostility - or perhaps would have simple left her to flounder in the mud - but Yahiko, as his fellow Rain shinobi like to remark, lacks the common sense that makes an effective ninja.

The woman had been, not too long ago, in complete hysterics. She had been the first to be informed that Gekkou Hayate had been found dead in Konoha. Dead.

Her knees buckled and she fell to the floor, fingers trembling over Hayate’s face as she surveyed the damage that he had taken. Blood splashed across every visible part of him, chuunin flak jacket and and other apparel cut to ribbons.

Sword wounds.

How could a sword master like Hayate lose against a weapon that he knew so well? She did not want to think about it. She did not want to believe it. And yet, here was the reality, right in front of her very eyes.

The slashes across his chest- deep enough to cut through his chuunin vest, his ribs… his very heart… was that what had killed him? The fatal wound… or just so many wounds that he could not close them with chakra in time? Yugao made a choking sound in the back of her throat. He had been left on the rooftops of Konoha to be found- either by carrion or by corpse carriers. Same difference.

But Jun had been… kind enough to let Yugao know.

“Please… be gentle with him,” Yugao whispered unnecessarily, her fingers caressing his face. It did not matter if they were gentle, he could no longer feel anything. But Yugao could. Every part of her ached where he had been wounded and she ached still, when he was lifted by the corpse carriers.

Her hand was still holding Hayate’s.

“It’s time to let go now.”

Yugao nodded, pressing trembling lips to Hayate’s knuckles, watching him for what she thought was the last time.

“Whoever did this, they won’t get away with it,” she vowed, sliding her mask back over her face.