Categories > Anime/Manga > Naruto > Break Down
Well, this was the section that you knew was coming. Warning: A man is about to make some very bad life choices, the result of which will cause everyone's favorite miniature green beast to end up half dead in the hospital in about eleven years.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
... Break Down ...
... by IWCT ...
... Part Four: Sand ...
It’s been a bad day. A sandstorm rages around Suna’s walls. He came back from the daimyo yesterday. He looks out the window with his dim vision. Until you can make one shinobi that does the work of forty we cannot do business.
Now is the time. He exits the building, his hands easily forming the seals he needs, and his chakra redirecting the wind around him. Only a fool would try to stop a sandstorm. Chakra can only bend the laws of nature so much, but a true wind master can move the wind along paths that it might have gone down anyway, and thus save himself from being flayed alive. His guards fall in behind him, apprehensive. The Kazekage rarely throws around chakra like this. It doesn’t matter. It’s time. He’s going to visit Chiyo-sama.
…
One favor. That’s all he gets. He yells the promise at her through the door that is slammed in his face as soon as the word “jinchuuryki” is mentioned. The door slides open again, slowly.
He may come in, he is told, but his lackeys may enjoy the hospitality of the door step. Chiyo-sama, whose habitual switching of light-hearted humor and deep bitterness has gotten more unpredictable since Sasori fled Sand in a sickeningly twisted body that used to belong to Hiruko, is deadly serious now.
He comes in, and her older brother looks up from a table set for tea. At a gesture from Chiyo, the elderly man is sent packing with the tea service. If the question whether years from now Temari might act so presumptuously with Kankurou flashes through his mind, it does so in his hind brain. His children don’t matter right now. This is about Suna. And saving Suna from total ruin.
This is what he wants his favor to be? Chiyo-sama asks, glaring up at him. But with his unfocus-able holes of eyes he will win any glaring contest. Does he really know what he’s asking for?
A weapon, he replies. That’s all she ever offered him. Heal another shinobi for him to use, or use herself as a weapon. Those were her original extremes. He has decided that he wants her to make a weapon.
What possible mission could he need this weapon for? she scoffs. The byuuki are a weapon for those without hope. People who will die anyway.
Suna is without hope, he replies quietly. Unless they start training their ninja to do the work of forty they will get no more than D-Rank missions. Ninja will drift away. Trade will dry up. And Suna will be another hole in the ground to be riddled by Shukaku’s Breath.
She doesn’t believe it.
The courier bearing the standard military contract offer is already on his way to Konoha from the daimyo of Wind, he replies, knowing what the news will do to the old woman, but he needs this edge. Suna doesn’t have the legends of the great geniuses any more. And since the daimyo foresees peace with the Fire Country, he can look outside his borders.
Chiyo-sama’s face works in abject rage, and she lifts the table to smash it into the wall. She screams, attacks him (but he was expecting this, and has had years of practice dodging the matriarch’s attacks), and rants so loudly that he sees birds flying away from the window. Useless boy, why hasn’t he grown a spine and ordered the courier killed?! She winds down by poking him in the chest.
Because he could do that. And kill the next courier sent. And the next. And destroy the villages of the Wind Country. And lay siege to the daimyo. And then become the ruler of the entire Wind Country through fear. But he was brought up to believe that there was something dirty about killing civilians. He will do it if it’s the only option, but it isn’t. If they made a working jinchuuryki it would be possible to not only complete missions with few casualties, but to crush Konoha, and its bunch of geniuses. Once they do that, well, he is a good ninja, who sees the merit in having the rulers come to him on their knees, rather than going to them, and forcing them to bow.
Chiyo-sama digests this piece of information.
He’s willing to doom a child? she inquires at last, sounding tired. The first host of Shukaku psychologically rejected the demon, making him into a mental cripple that nearly ripped himself apart physically each time he tried to manifest. Useless. At twenty-one the boy was too old, too set in his ways to properly bond with the foreign chakra. And the same thing happened to the second jinchuuryki, at thirteen, unable to both bond, and emerge as the controller of the bond. Only a child so young that they have not been weaned from their mother’s milk could possibly, possibly, contain Shukaku and stay sane. Possibly.
Then it will be an experiment to test that theory, he replies evenly.
Shukaku is the beginning and the end of a jinchuuryki, Chiyo-sama points out. They have to extract the demon (an easy enough task as long as Sand has Shukaku’s teapot) in order to make certain that Shukaku survives. If the child dies, Shukaku, and whatever twisted hope they have in it, dies too. So, once the purpose has been served, they must extract the demon, and that always has a fatal result for the jinchuuryki.
Weapons break, is his response.
And there is the question of the sacrifice. Shukaku’s sealing demands that a heart stop beating, Chiyo comments. It needs to be a very special heart. Connected to the container somehow.
It’s for Suna, he says.
Chiyo gives him a long look. She has lived her entire life for Suna. They will talk more later, she says, and shows him out.
…
He contemplates the choice of vessel as he works on his other papers. A conclusion is bubbling in the back of his mind, sandy and ugly. If he is going to ruin a child’s life, he, as Kazekage, must choose his own children. He can’t sacrifice someone else’s child. And Kankurou is the only child of the right age in Sand at the moment (depressing as this fact is). He thinks that he should be glad it isn’t Temari, and then thinks he should be ashamed of that thought. He feels neither emotion. In the face of annihilation of Suna (all that he really cares about), his children are insignificant.
A knock on his office door is heard, and he tells the civilian (he can tell from here that the person hasn’t worked their chakra coils) to enter. His wife does, bringing him his lunch. His smile freezes for a moment, as he stares at her semi-bloated abdomen. Even Kankurou might be too old. He might have to choose another candidate.
…
It’s a sunny afternoon, and the Kazekage has a meeting in the market with a merchant. He meets up with his wife by accident, and she is strolling with Kankurou and Temari. They stop at a vendor selling strips of grilled goat meat. He buys enough for everyone (except for Kankurou, who still eats soft rice balls and cut peaches from a dish pre-packed by his mother).
The children play at their feet, Temari kicking sand in Kankurou’s face, and the two-year old shrieking angrily. They run from the parents, or Temari runs, Kankurou stumbling doggedly after her on pudgy legs. His wife looks concerned. He doesn’t understand why. A loud wail rips the air, and she runs for Kankurou, who has tripped, and is sprawling on the ground, screaming like a child.
He watches with a blank face, as his wife picks Kankurou up, wiping away the tears. Temari watches from an equal distance, at first looking scared and concerned, and then teal eyes skate over to her father, and she copies his crossed arm pose, and the blank, uncomprehending, unsympathetic expression perfectly.
…
Why couldn’t Kankurou have picked himself up? the Yondaime asks that night. Isn’t she just spoiling him?
The look she gives him is very old, and suggests he needs to go back to his childhood and rethink his life. Kankurou is only two. Yes, he can pick himself up, but he needs to know his mother is there for him.
Why? the Kazekage is frustrated by the conundrum. On missions to protect merchants he won’t have his mother to pick him up.
He isn’t on a mission to protect merchants! his wife snaps. Kankurou is only two, and not a genin. She knows her husband was made genin freakishly young because of the war, but there is no more war, and even his mother must have held him.
His recollections of his mother are hazy, and he replies that he doesn’t remember her ever holding him. She would -- he stretches his memory to the time before his second chuunin mission, the one where he discovered the ambush that had killed his mother and her genin protégés, so dim and far away from now -- sing.
See, his mother sang to him to comfort him, his wife retorts smugly.
No, no. She would sing, he corrects. Not to him. Not to anyone. She would just sing. That’s all he really remembers of his mother. And that her hair was brown. She sang herself away into her own world, dancing on Shukaku’s stars, when she wasn’t dealing with village business.
His wife rolls her teal eyes, and purses her lips, before groaning and putting her hand over her belly. Is his child trying to kill her? she asks jokingly. She’s sick of her insides being used as taijutsu practice.
Three more months, he replies, trying not to think about it. And why are the children only his when they’re doing something wrong?
…
She SCREAMS in pain.
She won’t do it, she tells him adamantly. Does he even know what he’s suggesting? Is he listening to himself? He just told her he was planning on turning their newest child into a demon. Is he crazy?!
She doesn’t have a choice in the matter, he tells her evenly. Her feelings of personal revulsion don’t matter to him more than the lives he looses every week on missions. A jinchuuryki is just one of many things that will help keep the death rate down, and they’ve run out of options.
She’s so warm, hot. There must be a fire consuming her from within as she thrashes within the seal, trying desperately to break free.
He and Yashamaru escort her, forcefully, bodily towards the cave when the contractions begin, ignoring the harsh sting of the winter rain that pounds Suna, screaming with her. Both are grim. Both know what is going to happen, but both secretly hope that reality will bend, just for her. Of course, Yashamaru thinks, it has to. She can’t leave anything unfinished, and she is going to have a lot to yell at them about after this.
She can feel the demon of the desert filling her, laughing crazily, ripping her body up from the inside as her child is born.
She stares at her husband, and for the first time sees the distant, focused Wind Rider that rips men apart with the air they breathe. His grip, always so gentle with her before, is unbreakable, despite her struggle as Chiyo calmly paints the designs on her body.
Her head swings to Yashamaru, pleading for someone to listen to her. He can’t meet her eyes the way her husband can. He just stands like a stone, looking past her at his Kazekage. Tears fly down her cheeks as she realizes that his love of her has been swallowed by his love for her husband.
The death god is silent, observing everything, and she can see it, waiting. Shukaku’s high, drunken laugh echoes in her head. She attempts to scrabble away as memories of blood and murder pour into her.
The teapot becomes visible, covered in blue markings and black seals. The ground around both her and the teapot has been prepared with painted spirals and flames that she doesn’t know the meaning of. But that doesn’t matter, since the pot, that damned piece of crockery, begins to laugh at the woman struggling both with her husband, holding her there, and her son, who so desperately wants to come into the world right now.
The pain is unimaginable. Worse than with Temari, and Kankurou combined. This will kill her. Is this what her husband wants? No. He is like a child himself, who doesn’t understand the consequences of what he is doing. He’s just doing it for Suna. And her pain screws itself up into anger. Anger at the village. Anger at the war. Anger at the entire fucked up shinobi world for doing this to her family.
Where is the jounin who looked at her with topaz clear eyes that warmed for the few instants of seeing her? Where is he, why isn’t he laughing in a hospital bed, his right arm covered in bandages? Why isn’t he stroking her hair, telling her horrible fairy stories of devils and murder?
Is this what Suna needs? To take a kind person, and turn them into a focused weapon? This is what the Hidden Village needs, a Kazekage willing to force this pain on the person he said he would love ever after. The Hidden Village hasn’t done anything to deserve his loyalty. His love. It should have been hers!
She screams, Shukaku echoing behind her words, because until her little Gaara fully leaves her body she too is a jinchuuryki. She shrieks: her child will be her revenge. This demon will DESTROY the village as the village has destroyed her.
Sand fountains, blood pools, and the child screams, his father’s crystal blue eyes already open, and requiring no thin lines of kohl. Under the Kazekage’s grip, his wife’s body goes slack, and he find himself looking at her face, relaxed, almost peaceful after all that struggle.
Why is he shaking?
…
It seems unfair that the rains ended yesterday, and today, as they stand under the blue sky, the flowers are blooming across the desert.
She’s dead.
He had known this would happen, but had he really held her down as Shukaku entered her, even while the vessel was coming out of her? Had it really been him? No. It couldn’t have. He would be feeling guilt if it had been. He would be feeling something.
She is dead.
The funeral is long, as befits the wife of the Kazekage. It’s the last thing he can give her. Really, the only thing he ever has given her, he thinks. The proper funeral that he is paying no attention too. No tears.
She has died.
Temari is standing next to him in a little black robe, holding her teddy bear. She has no idea what’s going on. She just stands there, her thick blond hair lying straight, and carefully brushed by Yashamaru. Kankurou sits on the ground (sandy ground), playing with a straw doll Tsusho passed over to keep the two-year old quiet.
She died.
At home Yashamaru, too broken to come observe the mourning, watches a baby that morphs and wriggles unpleasantly as it sleeps. Shukaku is still taking over, although even byuuki can’t do much in an infant’s body. The child will be a nightmare by the time it is Temari’s age, but the body just doesn’t have the motor control for Shukaku to use it right now.
She had died.
There are no tears. His mind is circling high in the sky, imagining the carpet of spring flowers. It really is unfair that the sky won’t mourn for him. If it can rain he will know that some part of him feels something about all of this. It doesn’t rain. Flowers for the birth of a son blossom beautifully all around Suna.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
... Break Down ...
... by IWCT ...
... Part Four: Sand ...
It’s been a bad day. A sandstorm rages around Suna’s walls. He came back from the daimyo yesterday. He looks out the window with his dim vision. Until you can make one shinobi that does the work of forty we cannot do business.
Now is the time. He exits the building, his hands easily forming the seals he needs, and his chakra redirecting the wind around him. Only a fool would try to stop a sandstorm. Chakra can only bend the laws of nature so much, but a true wind master can move the wind along paths that it might have gone down anyway, and thus save himself from being flayed alive. His guards fall in behind him, apprehensive. The Kazekage rarely throws around chakra like this. It doesn’t matter. It’s time. He’s going to visit Chiyo-sama.
…
One favor. That’s all he gets. He yells the promise at her through the door that is slammed in his face as soon as the word “jinchuuryki” is mentioned. The door slides open again, slowly.
He may come in, he is told, but his lackeys may enjoy the hospitality of the door step. Chiyo-sama, whose habitual switching of light-hearted humor and deep bitterness has gotten more unpredictable since Sasori fled Sand in a sickeningly twisted body that used to belong to Hiruko, is deadly serious now.
He comes in, and her older brother looks up from a table set for tea. At a gesture from Chiyo, the elderly man is sent packing with the tea service. If the question whether years from now Temari might act so presumptuously with Kankurou flashes through his mind, it does so in his hind brain. His children don’t matter right now. This is about Suna. And saving Suna from total ruin.
This is what he wants his favor to be? Chiyo-sama asks, glaring up at him. But with his unfocus-able holes of eyes he will win any glaring contest. Does he really know what he’s asking for?
A weapon, he replies. That’s all she ever offered him. Heal another shinobi for him to use, or use herself as a weapon. Those were her original extremes. He has decided that he wants her to make a weapon.
What possible mission could he need this weapon for? she scoffs. The byuuki are a weapon for those without hope. People who will die anyway.
Suna is without hope, he replies quietly. Unless they start training their ninja to do the work of forty they will get no more than D-Rank missions. Ninja will drift away. Trade will dry up. And Suna will be another hole in the ground to be riddled by Shukaku’s Breath.
She doesn’t believe it.
The courier bearing the standard military contract offer is already on his way to Konoha from the daimyo of Wind, he replies, knowing what the news will do to the old woman, but he needs this edge. Suna doesn’t have the legends of the great geniuses any more. And since the daimyo foresees peace with the Fire Country, he can look outside his borders.
Chiyo-sama’s face works in abject rage, and she lifts the table to smash it into the wall. She screams, attacks him (but he was expecting this, and has had years of practice dodging the matriarch’s attacks), and rants so loudly that he sees birds flying away from the window. Useless boy, why hasn’t he grown a spine and ordered the courier killed?! She winds down by poking him in the chest.
Because he could do that. And kill the next courier sent. And the next. And destroy the villages of the Wind Country. And lay siege to the daimyo. And then become the ruler of the entire Wind Country through fear. But he was brought up to believe that there was something dirty about killing civilians. He will do it if it’s the only option, but it isn’t. If they made a working jinchuuryki it would be possible to not only complete missions with few casualties, but to crush Konoha, and its bunch of geniuses. Once they do that, well, he is a good ninja, who sees the merit in having the rulers come to him on their knees, rather than going to them, and forcing them to bow.
Chiyo-sama digests this piece of information.
He’s willing to doom a child? she inquires at last, sounding tired. The first host of Shukaku psychologically rejected the demon, making him into a mental cripple that nearly ripped himself apart physically each time he tried to manifest. Useless. At twenty-one the boy was too old, too set in his ways to properly bond with the foreign chakra. And the same thing happened to the second jinchuuryki, at thirteen, unable to both bond, and emerge as the controller of the bond. Only a child so young that they have not been weaned from their mother’s milk could possibly, possibly, contain Shukaku and stay sane. Possibly.
Then it will be an experiment to test that theory, he replies evenly.
Shukaku is the beginning and the end of a jinchuuryki, Chiyo-sama points out. They have to extract the demon (an easy enough task as long as Sand has Shukaku’s teapot) in order to make certain that Shukaku survives. If the child dies, Shukaku, and whatever twisted hope they have in it, dies too. So, once the purpose has been served, they must extract the demon, and that always has a fatal result for the jinchuuryki.
Weapons break, is his response.
And there is the question of the sacrifice. Shukaku’s sealing demands that a heart stop beating, Chiyo comments. It needs to be a very special heart. Connected to the container somehow.
It’s for Suna, he says.
Chiyo gives him a long look. She has lived her entire life for Suna. They will talk more later, she says, and shows him out.
…
He contemplates the choice of vessel as he works on his other papers. A conclusion is bubbling in the back of his mind, sandy and ugly. If he is going to ruin a child’s life, he, as Kazekage, must choose his own children. He can’t sacrifice someone else’s child. And Kankurou is the only child of the right age in Sand at the moment (depressing as this fact is). He thinks that he should be glad it isn’t Temari, and then thinks he should be ashamed of that thought. He feels neither emotion. In the face of annihilation of Suna (all that he really cares about), his children are insignificant.
A knock on his office door is heard, and he tells the civilian (he can tell from here that the person hasn’t worked their chakra coils) to enter. His wife does, bringing him his lunch. His smile freezes for a moment, as he stares at her semi-bloated abdomen. Even Kankurou might be too old. He might have to choose another candidate.
…
It’s a sunny afternoon, and the Kazekage has a meeting in the market with a merchant. He meets up with his wife by accident, and she is strolling with Kankurou and Temari. They stop at a vendor selling strips of grilled goat meat. He buys enough for everyone (except for Kankurou, who still eats soft rice balls and cut peaches from a dish pre-packed by his mother).
The children play at their feet, Temari kicking sand in Kankurou’s face, and the two-year old shrieking angrily. They run from the parents, or Temari runs, Kankurou stumbling doggedly after her on pudgy legs. His wife looks concerned. He doesn’t understand why. A loud wail rips the air, and she runs for Kankurou, who has tripped, and is sprawling on the ground, screaming like a child.
He watches with a blank face, as his wife picks Kankurou up, wiping away the tears. Temari watches from an equal distance, at first looking scared and concerned, and then teal eyes skate over to her father, and she copies his crossed arm pose, and the blank, uncomprehending, unsympathetic expression perfectly.
…
Why couldn’t Kankurou have picked himself up? the Yondaime asks that night. Isn’t she just spoiling him?
The look she gives him is very old, and suggests he needs to go back to his childhood and rethink his life. Kankurou is only two. Yes, he can pick himself up, but he needs to know his mother is there for him.
Why? the Kazekage is frustrated by the conundrum. On missions to protect merchants he won’t have his mother to pick him up.
He isn’t on a mission to protect merchants! his wife snaps. Kankurou is only two, and not a genin. She knows her husband was made genin freakishly young because of the war, but there is no more war, and even his mother must have held him.
His recollections of his mother are hazy, and he replies that he doesn’t remember her ever holding him. She would -- he stretches his memory to the time before his second chuunin mission, the one where he discovered the ambush that had killed his mother and her genin protégés, so dim and far away from now -- sing.
See, his mother sang to him to comfort him, his wife retorts smugly.
No, no. She would sing, he corrects. Not to him. Not to anyone. She would just sing. That’s all he really remembers of his mother. And that her hair was brown. She sang herself away into her own world, dancing on Shukaku’s stars, when she wasn’t dealing with village business.
His wife rolls her teal eyes, and purses her lips, before groaning and putting her hand over her belly. Is his child trying to kill her? she asks jokingly. She’s sick of her insides being used as taijutsu practice.
Three more months, he replies, trying not to think about it. And why are the children only his when they’re doing something wrong?
…
She SCREAMS in pain.
She won’t do it, she tells him adamantly. Does he even know what he’s suggesting? Is he listening to himself? He just told her he was planning on turning their newest child into a demon. Is he crazy?!
She doesn’t have a choice in the matter, he tells her evenly. Her feelings of personal revulsion don’t matter to him more than the lives he looses every week on missions. A jinchuuryki is just one of many things that will help keep the death rate down, and they’ve run out of options.
She’s so warm, hot. There must be a fire consuming her from within as she thrashes within the seal, trying desperately to break free.
He and Yashamaru escort her, forcefully, bodily towards the cave when the contractions begin, ignoring the harsh sting of the winter rain that pounds Suna, screaming with her. Both are grim. Both know what is going to happen, but both secretly hope that reality will bend, just for her. Of course, Yashamaru thinks, it has to. She can’t leave anything unfinished, and she is going to have a lot to yell at them about after this.
She can feel the demon of the desert filling her, laughing crazily, ripping her body up from the inside as her child is born.
She stares at her husband, and for the first time sees the distant, focused Wind Rider that rips men apart with the air they breathe. His grip, always so gentle with her before, is unbreakable, despite her struggle as Chiyo calmly paints the designs on her body.
Her head swings to Yashamaru, pleading for someone to listen to her. He can’t meet her eyes the way her husband can. He just stands like a stone, looking past her at his Kazekage. Tears fly down her cheeks as she realizes that his love of her has been swallowed by his love for her husband.
The death god is silent, observing everything, and she can see it, waiting. Shukaku’s high, drunken laugh echoes in her head. She attempts to scrabble away as memories of blood and murder pour into her.
The teapot becomes visible, covered in blue markings and black seals. The ground around both her and the teapot has been prepared with painted spirals and flames that she doesn’t know the meaning of. But that doesn’t matter, since the pot, that damned piece of crockery, begins to laugh at the woman struggling both with her husband, holding her there, and her son, who so desperately wants to come into the world right now.
The pain is unimaginable. Worse than with Temari, and Kankurou combined. This will kill her. Is this what her husband wants? No. He is like a child himself, who doesn’t understand the consequences of what he is doing. He’s just doing it for Suna. And her pain screws itself up into anger. Anger at the village. Anger at the war. Anger at the entire fucked up shinobi world for doing this to her family.
Where is the jounin who looked at her with topaz clear eyes that warmed for the few instants of seeing her? Where is he, why isn’t he laughing in a hospital bed, his right arm covered in bandages? Why isn’t he stroking her hair, telling her horrible fairy stories of devils and murder?
Is this what Suna needs? To take a kind person, and turn them into a focused weapon? This is what the Hidden Village needs, a Kazekage willing to force this pain on the person he said he would love ever after. The Hidden Village hasn’t done anything to deserve his loyalty. His love. It should have been hers!
She screams, Shukaku echoing behind her words, because until her little Gaara fully leaves her body she too is a jinchuuryki. She shrieks: her child will be her revenge. This demon will DESTROY the village as the village has destroyed her.
Sand fountains, blood pools, and the child screams, his father’s crystal blue eyes already open, and requiring no thin lines of kohl. Under the Kazekage’s grip, his wife’s body goes slack, and he find himself looking at her face, relaxed, almost peaceful after all that struggle.
Why is he shaking?
…
It seems unfair that the rains ended yesterday, and today, as they stand under the blue sky, the flowers are blooming across the desert.
She’s dead.
He had known this would happen, but had he really held her down as Shukaku entered her, even while the vessel was coming out of her? Had it really been him? No. It couldn’t have. He would be feeling guilt if it had been. He would be feeling something.
She is dead.
The funeral is long, as befits the wife of the Kazekage. It’s the last thing he can give her. Really, the only thing he ever has given her, he thinks. The proper funeral that he is paying no attention too. No tears.
She has died.
Temari is standing next to him in a little black robe, holding her teddy bear. She has no idea what’s going on. She just stands there, her thick blond hair lying straight, and carefully brushed by Yashamaru. Kankurou sits on the ground (sandy ground), playing with a straw doll Tsusho passed over to keep the two-year old quiet.
She died.
At home Yashamaru, too broken to come observe the mourning, watches a baby that morphs and wriggles unpleasantly as it sleeps. Shukaku is still taking over, although even byuuki can’t do much in an infant’s body. The child will be a nightmare by the time it is Temari’s age, but the body just doesn’t have the motor control for Shukaku to use it right now.
She had died.
There are no tears. His mind is circling high in the sky, imagining the carpet of spring flowers. It really is unfair that the sky won’t mourn for him. If it can rain he will know that some part of him feels something about all of this. It doesn’t rain. Flowers for the birth of a son blossom beautifully all around Suna.
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