Some people woke up from nightmares screaming, sweating, gasping for breath, but Sora never had. Even when she had been a little girl, she’d always woken up from her nightmares by simply opening her eyes. She wouldn’t move, she wouldn’t make a sound. She would just lay on her bed, eyes open and quietly breathe.
Even after almost 18 years, over two thirds of her life, she wasn’t able to block it out.
She finally got tired of just lying there trying to go back to sleep. She slowly got out of her futon and crept towards the door, trying not to disturb Hinata who was sleeping a few feet away. Yasu and Nori only had one spare room, so she and Hinata were bunking together while Naruto crashed on the living room floor.
She crept into the bathroom where she splashed water onto her face. She stared at her eyes in the mirror. There were bags under them, making them seem even lighter than normal. She used to try to convince herself that they were really light blue, but she had to confess that they were violet. She wished they were any other color.
Thank god she was the last.
She played with the braids around her face, still all black from when Naruto had put the dye into her shampoo. She decided that her hair was making it worse. The darkness of her hair was playing up the lightness of her eyes.
Looking under the sink, she started rummaging through the bottles of dye and permanent that she had left here over the years.
It was time for a change.
Miki reached up to pull one of Sora’s curls and then giggled when it bounced back into place. Her hair was freshly permed into large looping ringlets and bleached out blond with selected ringlets dyed red.
“Well you made it over a year with the braids. I think that’s a record,” Yasu said, setting breakfast on the table.
Sora lifted Miki above her head to set the little girl on her shoulders. Miki happily dug her fingers into Sora’s hair, continuing to play with the springs. “What can I say? I got bored.”
“As you always do. I just wish you didn’t leave such a mess inside the bathroom.”
Sora rolled her eyes. “You know I’ll clean it up.”
“Eh? What did you do to your hair?” Naruto asked from the doorway.
She reached up to fluff it but found she couldn’t with a child on her shoulders. “I dyed it.”
“Hmm,” said Nori from behind Naruto. “Looks kinda like the hair you have in the picture with the dress.”
“It does not! I had sausage curls then, these are spiral curls.”
Yasu continued to put dishes on the table. “Plus then her hair was red and black, now it’s red and blond. She looks sort of like a stained candy cane.”
Miki giggled and started yelling “Candy cane!” at the top of her lungs.
Hinata peaked her head inside the door. Her eyes widened in surprise when she saw Sora. “You changed your hair.”
Sora gritted her teeth. Why did people insist on stating the obvious? “Yes.”
Hinata smiled. “I like it.”
“There, now you see, this is why I like Hinata as opposed to ex-partners, annoying in-laws and bratty little brothers.”
Miki leaned over Sora’s head to look her in the face. “You like me, don’t you Aun’ Sowa?”
She smiled. “Of course I do, Miki-chan. And are we going to have so much fun today! We’re going to bake cookies and we’re going to sing and then we’ll watch movies.”
Miki pointed to the corgi jumping around Yasu’s feet trying to get to the food. “Can Dango play with us?”
“Well, I would hesitate to include him in the cookie making, but he can definitely sing and watch movies with us.”
Naruto grinned as he watched the scene in front of him. He hadn’t had a family his whole life. And then all of a sudden he had acquired a big sister and now he had a something like an extended family. His grin widened as he watched Nori duck a wad of rice that Miki had thrown. Sora and Yasu were trying to figure out why Hinata was having strange results when she tries to use the Pattern Scan no jutsu.
He thought back over everything that had
happened during the past four months. He couldn’t remember being
so happy. Everyone knew, even Miki- chan, and nobody cared. And
it had been far simpler than he ever would have thought
possible.
“So, in order to keep the Kyubi from destroying the village, the Fourth and Nanashi sealed it inside your bellybutton,” Nori said, leaning back in his chair.
“Hai.” They had just gone through the whole explanation: who he was, who his parents had been. He had told them about the times the Kyubi had flared and what had happened to him.
“And you are able to pull his chakra.”
“Yep.”
“But it’s not like he takes control of you.”
Sora interrupted. “It would appear that when Naruto gets very angry and starts pulling chakra, the seal weakens and Kyubi comes closer to the surface. He has tremendous amounts of chakra coursing through him.”
“And his state of mind.”
“The first time it happened, he thought-”
“Oi, oi I can speak for myself. When I thought that Sasuke was dead, I think I sort of lost control and broke out of Haku’s jutsu. I don’t remember much about it. The second time was when some guy named Orochimaru attacked us during the chuunin exam. After that, Ero-sennin taught me how to pull the chakra intentionally by demanding it from the fox. I used it once in my test with Neji and once fighting Gaara when he was attacking Sasuke and Sakura.”
Sora forced herself to stop rubbing the back of her neck. “But he didn’t go all funky foxy with either of those. Plus when he realized that I had been keeping his parentage a secret, he started to go all foxy but calmed himself down enough to sit and talk.”
Nori and Yasu looked at each other and then back at Naruto. “So what this really means to you is that you have lots of chakra and might have problems if you get too angry.”
“Yep.”
“But all the times you’ve gotten too mad, with the exception of the photo thing, have been you defending your friends.”
“Umm, hai.”
“And because of this your village has decided to hate you?”
“Hai.”
Yasu’s blue eyes went icy cold, sending shivers down Naruto and Hinata’s spines. She sat up in her chair perfectly strait and her face completely wiped free of all emotion. Suddenly they realized how she had gotten the nickname Ice Queen.
“Idiotic assholes,” she bit out.
Nori reached up to rub Yasu’s shoulder. “Come on, sweetheart, calm down.”
She glared at her husband. A lesser man would have cringed and scurried away, but Nori just looked slightly amused. “Do you realized what could have happened?” she asked. “Do you know how many of the people Sora and I fought had stories just like that?”
“Yasu, we sort of specialized in taking out maniacs,” Sora pointed out.
“Exactly,” she said, turning back to Sora. “How many of those people wouldn’t have ended up maniacs if they had only had a better upbringing?”
“Huh? What are you talking about?” Naruto asked.
Sora shrugged. “I told you Yasu and me were mercenaries, right? Well, our so called specialty was getting rid of ‘unstable elements.’ Basically we would go into places where the target was unpredictable, where his values were so skewed that he was hard to manipulate. A lot of them were literally madmen.”
“The klesha” Nori said, scowling.
“The what?”
Nori looked at Naruto with a somber face. “Klesha. It’s a poison of the mind, although in the west it became synonymous with people who have gone dangerously mad. It happens more often than you might think. The west is a world ruled by violence. Sometimes the things you see or the way you are treated can overwhelm you.”
“And they go mad?” Hinata whispered, horrified.
“Not the way you might think of it. But they aren’t really human anymore. From what you described to us, Gaara is probably a klesha.”
Natuto swallowed. “Haku?”
Nori shook his head. “Probably more of a potential klesha. Had he felt betrayed by his master, that he had nothing else to believe in or if Zabuza had been killed and he was left alive, it would have been easy for him to slip into kelsha.”
“Naruto,” Sora said. Her voice was very quiet and very serious. “Remember this for when you become Hokage. We live in times with extraordinary people. Times where people are born with the ability to do things that almost seem inhuman. But no matter what they are able to do, they are still human. And you cannot turn a human into nothing but a weapon.”
“Most of the klesha we fought were people who had these extra abilities, but they were either shunned for them or trained to be nothing more than living weapons. They’re dangerous and unpredictable.”
“And this is what you’re worried I will become?”
Yasu shook her head. “No. Sora and I were the dGra Klesha, those who took care of those who had gone mad. I know what klesha are and you aren’t one of them. But the fact that you’re not, despite what you have been through, is almost more extraordinary to me than the demon inside you.”
Sora grinned. “Boy’s got good genes.”
Naruto stared at Yasu and Nori. “So you’re cool with me staying here? Despite the Kyubi?”
Yasu looked at Nori. “I don’t see a problem.”
Nori shook his head. “I don’t see a problem either.” He looked at Naruto. “Do you foresee a problem with you staying here?”
Naruto continued to stare at them. Then he felt Hinata reach over and squeeze his hand. He looked over at her and she gave him a small smile. He grinned and turned back to his hosts. “No problem at all.”
And that had been that.
It felt strange, but wonderful to have everything out in the open for the first time. Everyone in the house knew and no one seemed to care. It wasn’t that they didn’t talk about it. Yasu had immediately started looking at the form of the seal, trying to figure out exactly what Nanashi and the Forth had done, while Nori went through all the techniques he would be able to teach someone with so much chakra and Sora teased him about how all the girls were going to LOVE such a foxy man (grrrrowl!).
And Hina-chan was simply Hina-chan. Once everything was out in the open, he had realized that he had more things he needed to get off his chest. The floodgate had been opened and everything came spilling out of him. How he had found out about the Kyubi, the whispers he used to hear from adults when he would walk by. Things that he had never told anyone, things that he had tried to dismiss as unimportant, suddenly seemed crucial thing that he needed to tell her.
They ended up spending hours, side by side, sitting on the fence looking over the rice patties or inside by the fire. She had slowly started to open up more to him as well, telling him about the day Kurenai had come to explain what it meant for her to be on a gennin team and her father had said she was worthless as a Hyuuga. She had started crying again and he held her until the tears stopped.
He had wanted to keep on holding her. There were times he felt like he never wanted to let her go.
And he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
Yasu frowned. “I don’t get it. You’re doing everything right. Your bloodlimit should make this easier than normal. Where is the problem?”
Hinata looked at the ground. They had been trying to teach her Pattern Scan no Jutsu for weeks now. She was supposed to be able to see the patterns of chakra within jutsu’s themselves. Her bloodlimit already allowed her to see the flow of chakra within a human, so being able to see the structure of a jutsu should be no problem. But instead all she was able to see was a startling and confusing garble of images.
There had to be something going on the Yasu didn’t realize. Logically, everything should be working. Hinata had the seals right, she was manipulating the chakra in the correct way. There had to be another element. And the only thing that she didn’t completely understand were Hinata’s eyes.
“Hinata, let me scan your eyes again.”
Hinata scooted over on the front steps to sit closed to Yasu, who was running through the seals to start the jutsu again. Eyes lined with silver, Yasu studied Hinata’s face. “I just can’t figure out what’s going on. Your bloodlimit should make this easier, not impossible.” Yasu sighed and ended the jutsu. “Explain to me again what you see.”
Hinata ran through the seals and turned on the jutsu. Instantly, her eyes were his with a multitude of color and light. “It’s almost like pen scribbles, there’s so many lines. They’re all over the house, the yard, you.”
“What about Nori and Naruto?”
Hinata turned to look at where the two men were practicing. They were practicing sweeps, each spinning around and trying to knock the others feet out from under him. To make matters harder, Nori was making Naruto keep a Rasengan spinning in one palm the whole time. He had just mastered doing it one handed a few weeks before.
“They’re both covered in small lines although the Rasengan in Naruto’s hand in like a solid ball of light.”
Yasu shook her head. Hinata should be able to see the individual swirls of chakra as they rotated in Naruto’s hand. It was almost like the lines were blurring.
“I think it leaves a trail too,” Hinata said.
Yasu looked up sharply. “What?”
“Everywhere that Naruto’s Rasengan goes, it leaves a trail. It’s confusing because he’s moving so much, but I think I can see where he’s been.”
Yasu’s breath caught in her throat. “Hinata look at me. Are there more lines around my eyes then the rest of my body?”
Hinata nodded. “There’s also a lot around your
hands.” She looked up with questions in her eyes. “Why? What
does it mean?”
Naruto swung his leg out over the ground trying to knock Nori over. Unfortunately the man seemed to ripple over the foot. He had broken down the motion to Naruto, but he had yet to master the smooth motion of the jump. Soon.
“Good, not try to switch hands on the Rasengan,” Nori said, sending his foot flying towards Naruto’s head. Naruto ducked and seamlessly transferred the ball of spiraling chakra from one hand to another. Nori had been drilling him endlessly on what he called the three Fs. Be fast, be fluid and follow through.
Nori swept his leg under Naruto one last time and then grinned as the boy smoothly avoided it. “All right, that’s enough.” Naruto collapsed on the ground panting. Turning his head he could see his water sitting fifteen or so feet away. He wondered if it was worth the effort to get up and grab it.
However, Hinata and Sora were also in his line of vision and he quickly became distracted watching them. Hinata was leaning back slightly as Yasu seemed to bombard her with questions.
“Oi, Nori!” he yelled. He jerked his chin towards the women. “What do you think is going on?”
Nori shrugged, sitting a few feet away. “Probably some new jutsu she’s just figured out. That always sends her through the roof and she hasn’t had much reason to make new ones since we stopped being mercs.”
“Wait, you were a mercenary too?”
“Yeah, all three of us. Course, I didn’t come in until the very end. We did exactly one job together before Yasu and I got married. After that, we never pulled another one.”
“Really? You left it all behind, just like that?”
“Well, we had just pulled one hell of a spectacular job. Triple assassination on one of the most powerful clans in the East, practically a whole army between the three of us and the leaders. Plus they had this weird conducive technique they were using that allowed all of them to know instinctively where all other members of their team were. Made them practically invincible.” He laughed and shook his head. “I’ll never forget the look on Yasu’s face when she figured out how to break it. We were all excited, but she was bouncing off the roof and babbling on in technical jargen that no one but her understood. I love her, but I never figure out the kick she gets out creating new jutsu.”
“In any case, once that jutsu had been broken, the guards all fought like kids. We got in, killed the leader and his two cronies. The leader had this huge signature ring with a huge opal in it. I grabbed it and asked Yasu to marry me. I walked out of there with a fiancée and enough money in jewels to buy the farm.”
Naruto’s jaw dropped and he gaped at Nori. “You’re joking!”
“It’s one hundred percent true.”
“But she doesn’t wear a ring like that!”
“Kinda conspicuous for a farmer’s wife. It’s on a chain under her kimono. Sorta like a reminder of where we came from. “
Narto continued to stare at him. “You just walked out of there and became farmers?”
He shrugged. “This is what I wanted. I have my wife, I have my daughter. If I was trying to be a merc too, I couldn’t have either of those.”
“But people in the Leaf are shinobi and have families all the time!”
“Bet they’re not taking nearly as dangerous missions as they used to in the past.”
Naruto clenched his teeth. “The shinobi of the Leaf protect their families. They fight because they love those who are in the village. We don’t grieve when someone falls because we know they were protecting those they loved.”
Nori raised an eyebrow. “Do you really not grieve, Naruto?”
Naruto looked away.
Nori gave a sad smile. “It’s not the same out here as it is where you come from. Back in Leaf, something happens to you and you know that you’re family will be taken care of. There’ll be others who know what they’re going through. Out here, on your own as a merc, you don’t have any of that. Besides, I was ready to stop. I was over thirty when I met Yasu and I had been fighting since I was old enough to walk. I was more than ready to give it up.”
“I’m never going to give it up.”
“Well, there are parts of it you can’t. I’ll never really forget what I’m able to do, even if I don’t actually do it. Besides, once you’re a warrior, you are always a warrior. Doesn’t matter if what you’re doing, part of you stays the same.” He elbowed Naruto in the ribs. “And don’t think that just because I’m not a merc anymore I can’t protect my family. No one is ever going to hurt Yasu or Miki, no matter how much time I spend in the rice patties.”
Naruto looked out over the horizon. He didn’t understand how anyone who was a good as Nori could give up being a ninja to become a farmer. “You don’t regret it?”
“Well there are a few things I wish I had done. I wish I’d had the change to fight alongside Yasu more. We both lived the same life, but we lived it seperatly. She can only tell me about some things, but Sora always just knows them already. I simply wasn’t there. They can’t explain to me what it was like the first time they went after a Klesha. I wasn’t there to see what it was like for Yasu to build up an enormous arsenal of new jutsu. And I’ll never quite understand what it was like when Sora started using her bloodlimit again. They can explain it to me, but I just wasn’t there.”
“It makes that much of a difference?”
“Just you wait. You and Hinata will probably be friends forever, no matter what happens to each of you after this.”
Naruto looked over at the girl sitting on the front steps. He liked the sound of that.
Nori stood up and grinned. “Remember the electricity jutsus I was showing you last week?” Naruto nodded. “Well we’re going to do a quick run-through and see how much you remember.” He poked Naruto with his shoe. “Come on get up.”
“Nori!” came a high pitched squeal, as Yasu bolted across the yard. She grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and looked up at him with eyes full of childlike excitement. He staggered back a bit before finding his footing and dropping his hands to her hips.
“She can see the echoes!” she yelled, obviously intending it to stun everyone.
“Nani, nani?” said Naruto, sitting up.
“The echoes, she can see the echoes! Do you understand what this means?”
Nori shook his head. “No.”
She pulled down on his shirt to bring his face close to hers. “Nori, people have been hypothesizing about the existence of chakra echoes for years and have even gone so far as to find enough data to support the theory that it is a generally accepted phenomenon. However no one has ever been able to successfully see them. Until now.”
Naruto scratched his head. “I still don’t get the echo part.”
Yasu released Nori in order to grab Narutos arms. “Echoes are the remains of a chakra pattern that exists after used chakra passes through and area. For example, when you use the Rasengan, you constantly have to keep adding more chakra as some bits of it fly off. These bits stay where they are in the air until they gradually fade away. Understand?”
Naruto wrinkled his brow. “I think so.” He turned to Hinata as Yasu went back to celebrating and jumping on her husband. “What does it look like?”
She shrugged weakly. “Like nothing makes sense. There’s all sorts of crazy colors and lines. It’s kinda...overwhelming.”
He casually slung his arm over her shoulder. “Eh, don’t worry Hinata, you’ll get the hang of it.”
“Sure she will!” Yasu cried out with glee. “Now that I know what’s going on, we’re going to fine tune it and put filters on it and try to figure out how much we can do with this thing.”
She froze. “I’m going to need to head up to Sora’s. I’m going to need more references.” Turning, she started to run towards the house. “Sora! I need to get into your library...”
Nori shook his head. “There are some things I
will never get about her.” .
Naruto walked into the kitchen to find Sora and Miki cleaning up after dinner and singing to the radio. Electric guitar rose and fell as Sora whipped her curls around belted out the song at the top of her lungs. Miki sat on the counter giggling and clapping her hands.
Her mother was at the long rectangular kitchen table. She was muttering to herself and drawing diagrams into a notebook. She was surrounded by an odd assortment of books and scrolls, many dog eared or unrolled across the table. At the other end of the table was a stack of maps of the West.
“What are these for?” Naruto asked, headed towards the ramen cabinet.
“The maps? Well, none of the training is going to be much good if I don’t give ya’ll any opportunity to practice.”
He looked up from filling the kettle with water. “You’re thinking of taking us into the West?”
“Well, we can’t really hand out in the east: we’d be too easily spotted. Itachi is probably out there looking for you all over the east. However, the problem we run into in the west is people recognizing me.”
“Recognizing you?”
She shrugged. “The dGra Klesha weren’t exactly an inconspicuous pair. If we get in too close to some of the bigger cities, we’ll end up trouble on our hand because people will spot me.”
“Can’t you just use an illusion genjutsu?”
Walking over to shut off the radio, she nodded. “We’ll probably use an illusion a lot of the time. However, the chances that we’ll never run into anyone who’ll be able to strip it away or that we’ll never run into a situation where I need to use reputation is slim. If that’s the case, I would rather be somewhere where the probability is low that I will run into someone whose toes I’ve stepped on.”
“You just don’t want to run into any of your ex-boyfriends,” Yasu said, not looking up from her reading.
Sora nodded. “True, true. But in any case, I’m trying to figure out where we can go that won’t run us into too many old acquaintances.”
Naruto started stuffing ramen into his mouth as Sora lifted Miki off the counter. The little girl yawned and blinked her eyes. Sora smiled. “I think someone’s sleepy.”
Miki pouted and shook her head. “Uh uh. I’m not sleepy. Wanna stay up with Mama.”
“Allright, baby,” Yasu said reaching out to take Miki form Sora and pull her into her lap. “You just sit here with me, okay?”
Miki nodded and slumped against her mother. Yasu smiled and kept reading, one arm wrapped around her daughter.
Sora stretched and then shook her new curls. “I’m headed for bed. Miki is the best workout I’ve ever met.”
“Night, Nee-chan.”
“Night, Naruto. Tell Hinata to stop reading and go to bed for me, will ya? The girl’s going to run herself into the ground.”
He waved his hand and stuffed his empty ramen cup into the garbage. “All right, see you tomorrow.”
He left Yasu and her books in the kitchen and headed towards Hinata and her books in the living room.
Naruto looked at Hinata and smiled. They had gone into the living room to study hours ago, bringing large stacks of books and scrolls to read. He had been sitting on the floor but she had decided to sit in the large overstuffed chair. Apparently it hadn’t been a good choice; she was fast asleep.
He succumbed to the urge to kneel down in front of her chair and look at her. To his secret relief, she hadn’t decided to cut her hair once she had come down from the mountain. After fourteen months away from Leaf, eight on the mountain, four at the farm, Hinata’s hair had grown to just below her shoulder blades. She had taken to pulling it back into a low ponytail, except when she was training; then she twisted it up into a bun at the nape of her neck.
He smirked softly as he thought about Sakura who had always kept her hair long for Sasuke. He wondered what had made her cut it off in the middle of the chunnin exam. While at the time her explanation made sense, looking back he was fairly sure that it was more then simply time for a change. Sasuke had acted strange afterwards as well, disappearing for the full month after the first round of fights. And then there had been the thing with Itachi...
Naruto shook his head. If Itachi hadn’t come after him... He didn’t want to think about that now.
Instead, he continued to stare at Hinata’s face. She always made him feel calmer. There was something about her that made him feel at home and accepted. Of course, that could have to do with the fact that she had simply accepted him and the Kyubi. As for home, it had long stopped being the little bachelors flat he had back in Leaf and had instead turned into Sora and Yasu’s house.
He heard laughter coming from down the hall and he turned and saw Yasu and Nori standing at the foot of the steps, across from the kitchen. Nori was talking quietly to his wife while she laughed softly and shook her head, holding a sleeping Miki in her arms. He smiled and wrapped the two of them up in his arms, turning his head so that he could kiss Yasu on the temple, rocking them gently back and forth. She closed her eyes and smiled. Then he grinned and swept her off her feet as she shrieked softly and clutched Miki to her chest. She reached around to slap him on the back of the head, but he just laughed and stared to carry her up the stairs.
Naruto turned back to Hinata and as he stared at her, things started to align themselves in his brain. He always wanted to talk to her, he wanted to be near her, he never wanted to let her go. He wanted to do just what Nori always seemed to do to Yasu: make her smile, make her laugh, make her cling to him.
He didn’t feel the same way about her that he felt about Sakura or even Sora. He wanted both of them to be happy, but he wanted to be the one to make Hinata happy. He wanted to personally destroy anything that made her sad and then prod her into laughter.
He didn’t just want her to be his best friend or his fighting partner. He knew what that meant now and he knew that he wanted more. He wanted her to be his partner in everything. He wanted...
He brushed a bang back from her face and his breath caught in his throat. She was gorgeous. If you asked him earlier about what he thought of her looks, he would have just sort of stared blankly and then said she was pretty. He never really thought much about her looks.
But now, lying curled up in the chair, firelight playing across her face, he realized that she was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. Her dark eyelashes brushed against her pale cheek and her black hair fell in a ponytail over her shoulder. There was actually very little color in her face, yet somehow, even in still sleeping, she projected warmth.
Suddenly he had the urge to do exactly what Nori had done: to kiss her temple, look at her smile, swing her up into his arms and carry her upstairs.
And that was when the full weight of his line of thoughts hit him. His eyes widened and he pulled back slightly.
Dear gods.
He was in love with her. .
“Itachi how do you explain that it has been well over a year since the boy left Hidden Leaf and yet you do not know where he is?”
“Other than the first original report of their appearance, no one has seen or heard of them. She probably has them hidden away from civilization somewhere. Rumors have it that she has some sort of hideaway somewhere.”
“Rumors?”
“She’s better known than we originally anticipated. She’s Nanashi’s apprentice and when you combine it with a few more odd facts about her; she makes an mysterious and intriguing figure.”
“Interesting facts such as?”
“As I said she was Nanashi’s apprentice, although her life before that is unknown. She appeared on the doorstop of the Kaze Clan one day and announced that Nanashi was dead and that she was sent there to train. The current head of the clan was a friend of Nanashi’s and agreed to take her in, despite the face that the clan never trains outsiders. When the head family lost power, she disappeared. She reappears three years later at age 16 along with a women named Yasu.”
“Yes, her partner. We were already told all of this.”
Itachi shook his head. “Our... dear college understated what exactly she was. They are the dGra Klesha.”
“The what?”
“DGra Klesha. It’s from an old religious language used in the west. The dGra are avenging spirits. They serve higher powers to stomp out negative karma. Klesha is mental poison, generally listed as grasping, aggression, delusion, arrogance and envy. They are what must be stomped out in order for suffering to end.”
One of the men snorted. “Sounds more like clergy than warriors to me.”
Itachi cast him a disapproving glare. “In the past few decades klesha has come to mean people who have been completely taken over by the five poisons. The dGra Klesha were experts at killing those who were powerful but insane. Furthermore, their chosen path made them controversial figures: they seemed to only kill people who deserved it, but there was always the possibility that they would turn into something ugly. The plain fact is that these two have a legendary quality in the West. They fascinate and are feared by more people than any other women. Period.”
“What do you mean, fascinate?”
“During the years they were most active, everyone knew about them. The women seem to rely highly on contrasting images. Sora was loud and prone to emotional outbursts where as her partner was referred to as the Ice Queen. One was constantly pushing the envelope the other was always the perfect lady. Sora was famous for wearing costumes that were on the fringes of acceptability while Yasu was never seen in anything but a kimono or lehenga.”
“Kimono? So Yasu is from the East.”
Itatchi again, shook his head. He wished these fools would quit guessing. “She is from a gang that got wiped out when she was in her early teens. She killed all the rival gang members one by one and then set out to become a mercenary. She meets Sora somehow and they become partners. Again, rumors say that Sora converted Yasu to their particular calling and after that, everything takes off for both of them. They develop a reputation despite their relative youth and become the dGra Klesha.”
“How old were they?” one man asked.
“Sora was sixteen and Yasu was twenty. Now they are twenty five and twenty nine.”
Another man gave him a cold glare. “As interesting as this is, I fail to see what it has to do with finding the boy.”
“One of the key characteristics that made people fear them was their uncanny ability to completely disappear for months at a time. They could simply vanish, practically into thin air. In fact, while Sora occasionally has popped up on her own, she has not worked nor been seen in over four years. Rumor’s have it that, as Nanashi’s old apprentice, Sora knows the location of her house.”
The man from the west’s eyes narrowed. “The experimental house? I thought that was just a legend.”
“What are you talking about?” one of the other’s inquired.
“The house that Nanashi was supposed to have built was an experiment in a new type of village, one that didn’t depend on aggressive violence for survival.” He sneered. “She was an idealist. Thought she could build a big fancy house and put all sorts of people in it that would help her show the world what life could be like without permanent warriors. But the house was never found and eventually it was presumed to be just a rumor.”
“And that is still where we are at: nothing but rumors!” another man yelled, slamming his fist into the table.
Itachi fixed him with a red glare. “What I am explaining is that there is a distinct possibility that she has him locked away somewhere. We have good enough intelligence in the East to be sure that she isn’t here and it would be difficult for her to travel in the West without being recognized. When you add in the idea that she has access to somewhere suitable to keep him, it becomes one of the few logical options presented to us.”
“So we have three rabbits who might be hiding in a rabbit hole somewhere, but we have no idea where this rabbit whole is, or even if they are there. They have every advantage.”
“Ah but we do have one.”
“Which is?”
“We have no need for the boy, at least for a while yet, since we are still preparing the rest of the plan. So we can wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Wait for the rabbits to come out of the
hole.”
Phew! Glad to get this out.
For anyone who wonders dGra Klesha is
Tibeten. However, my grammer is probably not
correct. If anyone speaks Tibeten out there, please let me
know.
Two Halves
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