Categories > Anime/Manga > Naruto > If Only

Taste

by IWCT 0 reviews

Zetsu centric shortie. Possibly AU.

Category: Naruto - Rating: R - Genres: Horror - Warnings: [V] [R] [?] - Published: 2008-01-12 - Updated: 2008-01-12 - 2042 words

1Moving
Author's Note: Not certain if I should go all the way with this one. There's a few more paragraphs of disturbing Zetsu hobbies in my head, but I thought the story was explicit enough. If not, then in they go.

Basically, this is a response to all the Deidara/OC/cannon character fics out there. You don't get into Akatsuki by being a nice guy. Also, I felt Zetsu was under loved by fan writers. The only person who gets less fic time is Kisame (being Itatchi's sidekick does not count as fic time).

...

He always was a creepy kid. She could remember clearly despairing on discovering that he was going to be in her cell with Ganpau and Verin-sensei. Zetsu Black, or Zetsu White, either way he had always worried her when they were children, playing around the houses of Grass. He just wasn’t normal, even back then. There were rumors that he was an experiment. That he’d been grown from a pot of soil watered with blood. And that was before he developed that symbiotic relationship with that weird plant. She had never known the truth, although she’d often watched him, as if the truth could be discerned from some flaw in his skin, or the way he kept his hair. Only there were no flaws in his skin (ignoring the obviously weird body pigmentation), and his hair was much the same as his skin.

Ganpau had his own ticks. They had all passed the graduation review of their teacher, after all, all declared to be Grass genin. Which really meant that they’d been able to survive alone in a massive jungle with Rain Ninja hunting for them to expel them from the River Country, lethally. Verin-sensei had merely commented, on seeing all three bleeding, starving kids, that they were lucky they hadn’t been born in Mist. From the way she had watched Zetsu lick his own wounds with a resigned expression, Verin-sensei must have known something the other two did not. Ganpau had crossed his arms, and said he still didn’t think that was a normal thing for adults to subject kids to (One of Ganpau’s ticks was acting like he was older than everyone else, and using long words). Verin-sensei replied normal kids didn’t become shinobi. He should know that, having smeared all his team’s weapons in poisons that she knew he personally made.

So, there was Zetsu, at that time only a stealth genius, with a taste for his own blood. Then there was Ganpau, a poison inventor (he insisted that he was a chemist) at age seven. And to round out their little team, there was her, a trap creator since she was three, and making dead falls for her pets to trigger. She had never thought that they’d be a fighting team. They had been well balanced toward assassination and retrieval (thievery). But nothing was ever that simple for a shinobi. Maybe there had been something behind it, but the C-Rank missions they got tended to lead them into trouble they had to fight their way out of, as if they were chakra power-houses, or crazy taijutsu users. And Zetsu always ended up being the one saving them. Verin-sensei helped, of course. But it was Zetsu who usually got them out of the range of attack, and then went back to help trigger the trap, help Verin-sensei, administer the poison, or however they were killing the new menace.

So, she stopped looking for the truth behind the fucked up skin and the halfway split in his personality (which was, she couldn’t help noticing, growing worse over time). She just looked at him with thanks. Occasionally awe, when he came out of massive explosions without a scratch. Eventually, while he still was creepy, he was manageably creepy. She was actually coming to like Zetsu White. He was a nice soft boy, who tried to smile at her, and appear to be normal. She also had to like Zetsu Black, because he was the one who was pulling her ass out of the fire. He was vicious and creepy, but White helped keep him occupied with other things.

They were fifteen when they took the Chuunin Exams in their home village. Of course they passed. They weren’t from one of the great villages, but they were the geniuses of their generation. And suddenly the B-Rank missions they were going on seemed to involve a lot more blood and bodies than the debacles of their C-Rank missions. And there’d been this guy from Rock, a really grizzly old dude with way too many friends, who practically challenged her to a trap contest. At least when he’d thrown that bomb at her and then kidnapped Verin-sensei, and nearly decapitated Ganpau with a trip wire strung between a pair of rocks, she’d taken it as a challenge. Because it was Verin-sensei, a woman who had quickly become her idol in the male dominated shinobi world, she’d been intent on staging a rescue. And Zetsu picked up Ganpau, cocking his head as he tried to sort out the conflicting messages his minds were sending him, before agreeing.

And they’d spent three weeks in the high water of the reed land, setting and disarming traps. Leading groups of enemy shinobi into her mazes of torture, until the waters were a diluted pink, and the copper tang of blood hung in the air constantly, and Zetsu was getting weirder and weirder, fingering the grass stems, and muttering that the grass liked flesh fertilizer. She’d ignored it. They had to complete the rescue. Verin-sensei was important.

Verin-sensei was /dead/. They found her body in cut up chunks, floating in the water with the other trash. And that was the instant that marked the little group’s official passage into adulthood, because no one else would ever look after them again. She didn’t take this change in status well. She nearly rushed into several traps in her headlong charge, tears streaming from her face. Only instinct for her environment saved her -- long enough to come up against the Rock nin, and get punched back into an exploding note and tripwire web. Only she never hit it because suddenly Zetsu and Ganpau were just there, catching her, and Zetsu vanished as they touched down on the water.

He rose from the earth like an avenging angel-demon, Black and White in agreement, his golden right circle of an eye burning with excitement he never showed in his attitude. Kunai thudded into an exposed back. The Rock bastard had stumbled forward, but Zetsu was in front of him, slamming a white fist into the unshaven chin. He disappeared again, jumping in the air, and she could only watch as his sandaled feet slammed down into the Rock nin’s shoulders. The crack was audible. The man crumpled. And she watched with wide eyes as Zetsu gripped what hair was left on the balding man’s scalp, and lifted the shinobi’s head upwards to look at Ganpau and his other teammate.

Zetsu’s head clicked several degrees to the side, as personalities reconciled themselves. Then White spoke. “See? You made my teammate cry. I don’t like it when she cries. I’m sorry,” and Black’s guttural tones suddenly cut across White’s soft voice, “/I’m/ gonna rip you apart. And it’ll be /fun/!

His foot slammed down on the crumpled back, and they watched as he pulled. Skin ripped, and suddenly blood was coating everything. And Zetsu’s eyes /glowed/. The monster they had only seen buried in Black looked at the head, and opened his mouth far, far too wide, and bit off the man’s left cheek. She watched with Ganpau in horror as Zetsu consumed the man’s body. Then his head clicked to the left, and White was back. He walked over, and offered her his pale hand. She took it numbly, and they walked home. They never mentioned what they had witnessed Zetsu do. After all, it had been in return for Verin-sensei, so it was justified, right?

They were allowed off active duty for a while, and the three took the opportunity gratefully. It was almost another kind of mission. Try to be normal. Ganpau was able to pass for normal in a good light. Zetsu had never been normal. So he stuck close to her. She was at first scared, but she managed to convince herself that it was just Black. Zetsu, for his part, didn’t want to seem too -- inhuman. Not yet. He noticed that other boys his age had girlfriends. So he asked her out. She said yes. She could be the pretend girlfriend if he would be her pretend boyfriend, and get Ganpau off her back. Besides, she liked White. He made her feel motherly towards him, and that was good, right? They held hands. White, pale skin and real, normal tan. They kissed, sometimes. It never went further, because neither really knew that there was a further, and were happy with the illusion as it was.

Once when Zetsu kissed her, Black took over, and pressed her hard against the bridge support post, sticking his tongue into her unwary mouth. He bit her lower lip, and licked her blood. She had never been more terrified than when he pulled away licking his lips, and telling her she tasted good. White apologized later. She nodded, and he kissed her hand in parting, a courtly gesture copied from some gallant movie, or something. She giggled, only to have the laugh die in her throat as his teeth grazed her knuckles, and Black chuckled.

She was secretly glad when Zetsu was promoted ahead of them. She was relieved when something bad (oh so very bad) happened to Ganpau and about a hundred other villagers, and their bodieshadbeenfoundlater—well it was more like b.i.t.s. of their bodies. Bits and bits and bits and bits and bits and bits. She was so relieved when she was being informed/interrogated by Grass’s ANBU that she broke out laughing. Just couldn’t help it. Because, ohBudha, ZetsuZetsuZetsu ATE people. And she had, oh wow, she could have, man, didn’t they get it? Zetsu didn’t love anyone but himselves, in the end. And no matter the kindness you showed him/them/, the monster was there. She had just been a narcissistic reflection of what Zetsu wanted|detnew usteZ tahw fo noitcelfer citsissicran a neeb tsuj dah ehS.

Years later she was out of the mental hospital, and had made jounin. And then a loud mouth blond boy showed up in Grass with a group of companions, spouting off some nonsense about Rain, and Civil War, and utter crap. And Zetsu was on their tail. She could sense him, still using his old genin tricks. And she set up the most brilliant trap ever, with the boy at the center, the perfect bait.

But the boy himself wouldn’t let himself be used as bait. And half of Grass is destroyed by two men in black cloaks fighting with the boy and his friends (some of whom are, oh Buddha, stupid Grass shinobi. How did the kid manage to get so much loyalty in three days?) all while she and Zetsu watched the trap unfolding like a piece of a puzzle from their safe vantage points. Only hers wasn’t as safe as she thought it was, because at the last minute the boy’s bravery touched something in her stronger than revenge, and she ran in to save him from the exploding note.

She woke up with a white hand stroking her cheek. She couldn’t move, and Zetsu leaned over to kiss her like old times, with his mouth smelling of rotting meat. The venus fly trap closed around her upper body. A black hand grasped hers, and Zetsu put a white finger to her lips. “Shh. Don’t cry. I don’t like it. It doesn’t make you taste as /good/.”

He lifted her hand, and nibbled on her fingers.
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