#zanzou

@zanzou | ask meme from forever ago

“i know it hurts, but in time you’ll get used to it.” shisui’s voice is somehow both pragmatic and regretful at once. he stands at attention before kakashi in the wreckage of training field six, watching him with eyes as sharp as a lion.

kakashi grits his teeth and concentrates on blocking out the pain radiating from his eye. his anatomical knowledge is less for medical and more for assassination, but rin had sketched out an explanation kakashi could follow even in his duress. he closes both eyes for a brief respite and breathes through his nose, nostrils flaring beneath the mask as agony draws a line of fire down his ocular chakra pathway to merge with his crown.

they’re training his sharingan again. kakashi’s just acquired his third tomoe in the field, and the advancement means his ocular chakra pathway can’t keep up with the surge in demand quite yet. kakashi blinks, squinting through a haze of fractal-futures, but shisui stands still. potentials spin out from the wind in his hair and the breeze through the trees around them, but that is all. shisui remains as still as a statue for him.

‘it’s like it’s brand new all over again,’ kakashi thinks. he closes his eyes again, but just like the first few months after kannabi bridge, obito’s gift spins and aches and burns in his socket behind his closed lid.

“it feels new again,” he grits out, panting hard through his teeth. his mouth waters with the foretelling of sick. he swallows, refusing to tug his mask down; the back of his neck grows warm with prickling sweat.

“does it feel like rejection?” shisui asks, giving voice to one of kakashi’s deepest fears: he is not uchiha, not born with the exaggerated chakra pathway to his eyes that uchiha and hyuuga alike are born with, and his natural chakra pathways have had to compensate.

          Uchiha Mikoto had managed to coax Kakashi inside for dinner. 

     He’s pretty sure the evening had started there, with her patient smile and her small hand warm in the crook of his elbow as he’d started to turn away. Kakashi and Tenzo had just walked Itachi, Sasuke, and Shisui back to the compound-- the little six year old with his honor guard of four incredibly skilled assassins, and it’s not like him to stay because he doesn’t like to intrude but Tenzo never stays unless he does and the kid has been looking a little lean lately and Mikoto... well, Mikoto looked like she actually hoped he would hang around for a bit. 

     Sasuke had been ecstatic, which was probably her reason for asking in the first place. The food had been warm and filling and it had made him more than a little sleepy-- enough so that he’d let himself get shuffled into the backyard after clean-up, curling up on the porch just before the stairs and watching the rest of them play tag in the woods. Tenzo and Itachi had stumbled out of the branches with their long hair hopelessly tangled, and when Shisui had cleared the treeline with a giggling Sasuke in his arms he’d burst into laughter at the sight of them. He’d set Sasuke down and sent him inside with a whispered word and then pulled the pair of them back toward the house by their hands, coming to a stop in front of Kakashi and pushing them to sit on the ground in front of the stairs and settling behind them just as Sasuke burst from the house, waving a hair brush in his tiny, clumsy fist. 

     Kakashi took a lazy swipe at the boy’s feet as he darted past, and Sasuke had dodged him and fallen right into Shisui’s extended arm, just so the older boy could scoop Sasuke close and kiss his cheeks and coo at him and, most importantly, remove the hairbrush from his sticky hands. Sasuke was promptly deposited into Itachi’s lap, and Kakashi lazily reached up to pick out the solitary twig that had made it into Shisui’s nest of curls, receiving a cheeky grin in return. 

     After that it had just been a matter of settling in again and watching him carefully brush the snarls and leaves and sticks out of first Itachi’s hair, and then Tenzo’s. Itachi and Sasuke had chatted softly and Shisui’s humming was quiet and steady and it had lulled him into half-sleep, his eye barely cracked as he’d watched Shisui’s deft fingers braid their long hair and tie the end and toss it over their shoulders like rope. Their noise faded into the background as a pleasant buzz, and he thinks maybe he saw Shisui tug playfully on the end of Tenzo’s braid until he’d leaned his head and shoulders back against his knees and Tenzo had looked up and him and smiled, right before Kakashi fell into sleep. 

     He couldn’t have been asleep long though, because it still wasn’t even dark when he woke to the sensation of a small hand touching the fabric of his mask just over his jaw, and when he cracked open an eye Sasuke was peering down at him curiously. His shoulders relaxed, and before Sasuke could ask the question burning in his mouth and eyes Tenzo had lifted him up under the arms and bodily tossed him back to Itachi, and they took off into the woods once more in the fading evening light with their twin braids bouncing down their backs. He didn’t bother sitting up when Shisui shifted so he was sitting on the top step with him, his thigh just a few inches from the top of his head. The younger boy had sighed, and Kakashi had rasped, “you know they’re just gonna ruin your hard work, right?” 

     The laugh that fell out of Shisui then was quieter than what he’d been doing all night, but no less bright. “Then I’ll just have to do it again, won’t I?” he’d asked, and when Kakashi had snorted in response he’d leaned over to peer down at him curiously. “Can I brush yours?” 

     A long pause had lingered, and Kakashi had blinked up at him for a moment like he was unsure if the teen was joking or not. But the look on his face was earnest, so he’d nodded. Shisui had beamed at him and then carefully taken the brush to his hair, running his fingers through the strands afterwards with something almost like wonder in his face.  At Kakashi’s raised brow he’d just mumbled something about it being softer than he expected, and once he’d run the brush through a couple of times without hitting any tangles he’d started braiding little strands of it. Unbraiding, braiding, unbraiding it again. 

          Kakashi wondered if maybe Shisui had somehow learned about Hatake braids, and then pushed the thought from his mind. 

     More likely he’d just needed something to do with his hands to stay awake-- he was looking a little wan himself. Shadows smudged under his eyes and just the slightest slump to his shoulders, like if he let himself stop he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to get back up again. Kakashi knew the feeling, and as he felt sleep creep back up on him once more he wanted to say that it was okay. He wanted to say it was okay to be tired and it was okay for Shisui to rest, because when he needed to get up he’d have Tenzo, and Kakashi, and Itachi and Genma to drag him back to his feet and dust him off and push him along until he was okay on his own again. He wanted to say that, he did; but he fell asleep too fast to the feeling of Shisui’s deft fingers still pulling gently on his hair. 

Evan Parker ‎

- 残像 Zanzou

1983

prompt: after shisui’s suspicious death, haku demands to see him again so he can say goodbye to the first person to ever show him kindness. grandmother tsukimono obliges. (  a weird short snippet-thing uchiha adoption au thing for @zanzou i guess ? ) cw: body horror, eye stuff, scarification, sadism?, masochism?, haku's fucked up family history and his even more fucked up evil grandma, and uh, kinda worms,,,

“ It shall not be the real him, ” tsukimono repeats, warning hissing against the gravel of her voice like arctic waters. shards of muddy blue chakra flicker and lance against the obsidian cave walls, the same frostbitten blue of her lips, tongue, eyelids, the web of chakra suspending her several feet up the wall as she stares down at the boy from the mirror with dead eyes. he is smaller than the last time he dragged himself from the frozen waters of her ice mirror, a boy in body as well as spirit. less hungry, more bitter. skinnier, dirtier, angrier.

she likes this haku better already. maybe.

woven chakra snaps from the web, snatching the boy’s ankles and yanking him toward the oracle and dangling him upside down before his ancestress.  she can smell the uncertainty pouring off him, her cursed blood coursing through his veins, the bittersweet tang of lingering sorrows, but. not fear. he is not afraid of her. that much she sees in his failure to flinch, the way he does not resist the chakra strands slowly cocooning him. ah, the false bravado of youth. she doesn’t miss it.

tsukimono rights him, then leans closer, unabashedly scratching a talon over the curve of tendon in the child’s heel, smiling at the cord’s tense and jump beneath her fingers, missing, for a moment, the days when her body could still disobey her and when her legs could twitch and jump and run without the aid of chakra puppetry.  “Nor shall it be free.”

“I don't care. I want to see him. I want to see Shisui-san one last time.” the boy repeats, voice more flint than river water. 

“The world cares not what you want, child, and I even less." the witch cackles, the sound tangled with the mash of juniper berry and smashed ginger between her red-stained teeth, wet and harsh, bone grating against stone, folding her great, spindling torso to rest both thumbs against the grooves between his eyes and nose, cracked nails hovering over the wicks of his eye, jagged tips pressing into sensitive, weak, oh so easily punctured flesh. already her chakra is worming over him, thin and sharp, winding and nuzzling into his psyche like fingertips testing the skin of an apple: looking for where the flesh gives. “ What shall you give me, I wonder, to lay eyes upon the dead and blind? Your body? Your soul? It is no small thing, to cheat death, even for a glimpse beyond the veil.” 

“A deal.” the boy exhales slowly, shrewd brown eyes boring into manic, delighted violet. “I don’t know why, but I know you’re trapped here, in time, wherever this is.” his eyes linger on the talismans above the cavern’s exits, the ritual scars cut and keloiding the mouth of her palms. “In return for letting me see Shisui-san again, I will grant you one favor. I will let you see through my eyes.” and then, a shade too polite to be genuine, “It must be hard, to be so nasty your own people sealed you away in the dark, right, onibaba? Surely you’d like something to watch while you wait to starve to death.”

the witch snarls, eyes flashing neon as the darkness bubbles and lashes against stone and earth in her irritation, furious at this boy for seeing the truth of her confinement so easily. perhaps he is not so young and ignorant as she thought. “I should eat you for your insolence!” she sneers, contorting herself over him, baring red-stained teeth and claws in warning, but the boy smiles at her, already caught on to the hopeful, longing look in her eyes. what a sneaky, miserable little child.

“Take me to him.” he says, louder this time, though with blessedly less certainty,  “And my eyes -- my eyes are yours.”

the boy, bless him, curse him, blast him, refuses  to close his eyes or fight as tsukimono’s chakra begins eating into him, not even when the worms dig into the cavities under his jaw and begin to burrow. tsukimono shudders at the first waft of pain’s smoky stink, a rare rush of warm exhiliration arcing across the malicious bridge between their shared chakra systems into her body. she has been so cold and alone for so long, but pain -- pain never fails to make her feel real. 

selfishly she wants him to cry out, to wriggle and squirm, to panic and fight like an insect caught in a web, the animal of her bloodline itching to take it a step further and drive her to ecstasy by watching the light fade from his eyes --- but she needs him. he is her legacy, after all. hers and raijiri’s. he remains useful. and he is not yet ripe enough for her to reap.

“Oh, child of my children, blood of my bone,” the witch jeers, nails sinking slowly into his skin, acursed chakra flooding into his cursed blood, her web pulsing with light and power like stormclouds just before lightning’s strike, “You are already gone.”

               ‘   i’m  always  down  for  a  youthful  spar  !!   ’

@zanzou

          it’s pretty early in the morning, and he’s getting ready to pull a long double shift watching the hokage. he’s got a mug of steaming black tea next to him on the railing of the bridge that he’s slumped hopelessly against. safe to say, he is not a morning person. and, perhaps, he stayed up too late last night. shisui doesn’t startle him, but the casual urgency in his voice is enough to make genma actually lift his head from its woody grave. 

          “well,” he begins thoughtfully, clicking the senbon against his teeth as if he hasn’t a care in the world about the status of shisui’s genitals. “let me see ... i don’t believe i was using a hemotoxin today. you sure you don’t have chlamydia?” he pulls the steel out of his mouth, twirls it thoughtfully and checks the ends. 

@zanzou

          he looks vaguely hunted, sweaty, laying tangled in the sticky sheets. settles on his front, half his face mashed into the pillows so he can watch shisui with one eye, the way the moonlight catches on the planes of his face, the ink-dark fall of his hair on pale sheets, the slow curl of his smile. only he isn’t smiling now. he’s serious, a concerned furrow to his brow. 

          tenzo’s hand freezes against his ribs, its slow trail halted by the words. he. he knows. he knew that, going in, he was always going to play second fiddle. why does shisui feel the need to remind him?

          an ache blooms somewhere in his ribs, but pain is just a message; one tenzo is more than capable of ignoring. “yeah, i know. you two are gonna get married someday and have a white picket fence and two and a half kids.” he sounds sincere, like he knows this to be a fact. and he does. 

          he settles his wandering hand over shisui’s heart. his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, and he bites back the other halves of that sentence. he could say, if you two live that long. he could say, and i’ll still spend the rest of my short, violent life right here like this, if you’d let me. he doesn’t. where would these statements get him, other than kicked out of shisui’s warm bed and his warm gaze. tenzo knows when to keep his goddamn fool mouth shut, contrary to popular belief. shisui still looks a little struck, like he’d been slapped, so he has to say something.