#kishimoto pulled this kind of twist a lot of times

[ankh-morporkianpostalworker]

Pain - One of the Greatest Fantasy Villains I've Ever Seen

Masashi Kishimoto's villains have a habit of all being (functionally) the same - they're all Naruto with a twist (that twist being that they're evil). Most of the time, this comes off as being hackneyed and frustrating, but the one time it works is with Pain.

Pain is a version of Naruto who's seen how truly nasty the world of Naruto can be - the survivor of a series of proxy wars persecuted by the Leaf Village and its enemies, he has a good reason to hate everything the Leaf stands for and to desire to burn it all to the ground. He's the only villain for whom talk no jutsu (the name by which most of the Naruto fandom refers to the series habit of having its titular protagonist exposit his backstory to villains to solve conflicts) truly does not work, and Pain almost manages to pull it off himself. Being a student of the same teacher (Jiraiya), he's familiar with the philosophy Naruto buys into, one of eradicating evil with understanding.

He's also a truly terrifying presence. Apocalyptically powerful, he razes the Hidden Leaf Village (usually presented as safe) to the ground in a single blow, easily dispatches beloved characters like Kakashi and Tsunade, and eventually defeats Naruto himself. He plans on using a similar power (the power of the Tailed Beasts, magical entities of extreme power, which Naruto plays host to part of - the Nine-Tailed Fox) to act as a deterrent to violence. His argument for this (a veiled reference to the use of atomic weapons in the Cold War and the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction) makes a lot of sense, and he nearly sways Naruto, which only fails because Pain then kills Naruto's kind-of girlfriend, Hinata, causing Naruto to lose control and nearly let the Nine-Tailed Fox loose, more so than it ever has thusfar.

Pain and Naruto's conversation following Pain's defeat is similarly interesting. The pair hash out their differences and, eventually, Naruto convinces Pain to undo the damage he's caused (or, at least, the deaths) in a very convincing way, more convincing than any other time Naruto manages to pull off talk no jutsu. They're even on rather friendly terms when they reunite following Pain's resurrection as a zombie, with Pain walking Naruto through how to counter all of his moves.

In summary, it's clear that Masashi Kishimoto put more thought and care into Pain than any other villain, and that care resulted in a villain that was terrifying, fascinating, and deeply human.

[whetstonefires]

Reverse Unpopular Opinion: Naruto

Hm! Only Positivity huh? I still don’t know why this is defined as Reverse Unpopular; some of my least popular opinions are already Thing Good.

Okay I actually really liked how Naruto (the manga, which I followed week to week for most of high school lol, hurrah for scanlators and rip mangafox) carried off the Big Twist about Itachi. The followthrough could have been better, as is the case with basically every element of the story, but the basic sell of Itachi’s real motives just landed really successfully, in my eyes.

There are a few reasons for that--mostly that it was the endpoint of quite a lot of direct buildup, of weird choices by Itachi that seemed just like his weird personality at a glance but which added together made foreshadowing, plus actual foreshadowing, followed by his absolutely bananas behavior during the climactic fraternal battle and the panel comp for his last words. Which really got me in the heart before I even had context.

But also that it snapped into place with a lot of the story’s strongest existing themes and tied them together in what looked at the time like the potential for a strong wicker sort of framework.

About the harm their society did its people and especially its children by molding them for war, and how seductively meaningful that shape could feel, going back to Haku. About cut-throat intra-clan bullshit going back to Neji.

About the weird emphasis placed on the concept of genius and its enforced advancement, going back to either the early Chuunin exam arc with Lee or earlier with Sasuke’s basic characterization. And about the fuckery that isolation wreaks on the psyche and how easy it is for authority figures to take advantage of vulnerable children, going back to literally the first chapter.

A lot of the time these twist-reveals that some baddie was Actually A Victim All Along are really unsatisfying, because they tend to diminish the horror of their crimes and even argue they were Justified.

With Itachi, the true story of the Uchiha Massacre was worse. Konoha’s government or a subset thereof (it was never clarified who was complicit) actively coercing a thirteen-year-old child into helping to kill his entire family and taking all the blame so they (that is Danzou) could avoid the potential repercussions of a civil war in the worst way possible while eliminating the Uchiha as internal political rivals is so much more deeply horrifying than a genius just snapping. Systemic rot is so, so much worse than individual violence.

(That’s why we as a society are encouraged to view crime as an individual thing, after all, and the prototypical criminal mind as the serial killer driven by nothing but deranged psychosexual needs.)

The fact that everything Itachi put Sasuke through was out of love and a desperate need to keep him alive, because Sasuke was who he loved most and the only thing he loved that he was allowed to save, that is so much more awful than it being out of hate. That that very love was cynically used to corral this child into leaving the corner he’d been backed into at an angle useful to others.

It’s obscene, but it pulls so many elements of the setting and characterization together.

And even though Itachi’s scheme technically went off exactly as planned, the narrative does not embrace it as in any way a good plan that reflected good judgment or even sanity. Which was nice.

The new version of What Really Happened is worse and it adds dimension to the past events being retconned rather than flattening them, which is cool and honestly difficult to pull off.

Also I love the premise of Itachi being, by nature, a very gentle person. Because that hasn’t stopped him from being a mass murdering serial killer, when the correct pressures were applied. He hates violence. He hates people being hurt.

No one ever cared what he wanted. And his family pressured him into a particularly violent and traumatic version of their murder career extra young for the prestige. And that was why, when more pressure came from different angles, he was already someone who could shut down his personal volition and kill whoever he was supposed to kill, no matter how much it hurt him.

They made him into a knife and he was turned against them. I go wild for that. It wasn’t right or fair and so many people died who weren’t directly at fault, but it is a closed circle. Which I find narratively satisfying.

-

Itachi also played interestingly against Gaara, the series’ previous benchmark for its recurring theme of Utterly Broken Boy, because he was walked a steady path down from Being At All Okay by the demands of the adults in his life, then took a really big hit, then just kept getting worse and worse without ever really snapping completely, but also without anybody ever even coming close to saving him.

While Gaara was betrayed by his family much harder and faster and in many ways more comprehensively, went completely insane when the big hit came, and then with Naruto’s help pulled himself together and ascended to a position of power, and began making things better and having positive sibling relationships.

Another thing that always struck me about the Real Itachi Backstory is that, because the breaking of him was conducted so much within the system--without kidnapping or sand demons talking in his head or social collapse or abandonment or even overt abuse or torture, unsanctioned wetworks divisions and insane cousins impersonating insane great-grandfathers notwithstanding--he makes it much easier to see the parallels between the way the ninja world eats its brightest stars alive very young, and the abusive expectations the real, contemporary school system tends to lay on high performers.

Fugaku’s abuse of Itachi is in some ways understated for fiction but also utterly deranged, in terms of the kind of gore and horror he pushed his genius child into confronting at such a young age. But it’s still sufficiently normalized within his society that it looks enough like a normal dad demanding outstanding academic achievement at all times to be really...the opposite of trippy. Strangely grounded for a relationship whose core  element is ‘refused to let son choose not to be a child soldier.’

I’m torn about the level of intentionality there.

Of course, salt incoming lol I can’t hold it back, praising this kind of thing in Naruto just brings attention to how the resolution of the story was unsatisfying, because it ultimately disengaged from all its major themes other than self-sacrifice and friendship being A Big Deal in order to bring a big finish and a firm conclusion.

Which...man looks like an even stupider decision in hindsight considering it now has a sequel. Hah.

[wolf08]

SasuSaku Month 2017 - Day 11 (Shelter from the Rain)

Title: Weathering the Storm

READ ON FANFICTION.NET

Summary:  Mid-mission, Sasuke and Sakura are trapped in a torrential downpour. But they choose the wrong spot to hide and instead Sasuke finds himself facing a storm within. Genin SasuSaku. Genre: Adventure / Romance  Rated: T(Teen) Words: 3835 A/N: So I initially set out to write something cute and fluffy as a light break from the craziness of writing A Twist in Time… and then this happened instead. :’) I hope you enjoy!  Disclaimer: All characters belong to the great Masashi Kishimoto. 

“In here, Sasuke-kun! Come on!”

Sasuke’s head jerks up at the sound of his teammate’s voice from somewhere around the bend and follows it, his sandals sinking an inch into the mud with each sloshing step he takes. He’s as desperate as she for some refuge from the torrential downpour they have the misfortune of being stranded in.

But what led them to this predicament in the first place? Well…

Team Seven was tasked with capturing the bandits presumed to be stealing food and livestock from a poor, no-named village on the Western outskirts of Yugakure. They figured it would be a piece of cake, considering the hell the trio had been through in recent months (namely, the Chūnin Exams and the shitstorm that followed them). But while they searched Yuga’s Western forests, where the bandits had been spotted last, Sasuke detected a chilling disturbance – one that sent familiar waves of pain up his neck.

“We need to move!” Sasuke yelled, just as white spots began to cloud his vision and a pair of gentle hands helped him stand upright.

“The curse mark?” he heard Sakura whisper from somewhere beside him, but he never got around to answering her because then there was an explosion.

“What the-?” Naruto gasped, and leaping into a neighbouring tree as the ground below him crumbled to pieces. But then the tree split down the middle with a resounding crack and Naruto disappeared from view.

Sasuke was thrown backwards and it just about knocked the wind out of him. What the hell is going on? he thought while clambering to his feet and sensing Sakura do the same somewhere to his right. What kind of bandits use explosives?

Unless…

“Sasuke! Sakura! Find Naruto and get out of here!”

Kakashi sprang into view through the rubble and smoke, his Sharingan whirling to life. “Kakashi-sensei!” Sakura cried, and drawing nearer. “What about–?”

“I have a plan to hold them off! Get moving and I’ll catch up!” And then he was gone.

Sasuke and Sakura exchanged wide-eyed looks and nodded. As much as Sasuke hated being pushed out of the heat of battle, it made a whole lot more sense to listen to his sensei than to run into this fight completely blind. Also, they were already quite exhausted after two straight days of travel and that pang he felt in his neck indicated that, perhaps, they were up against tougher enemies than they bargained for.

“Let’s go!” he said, while grabbing Sakura’s arm and pulling her along with him, in the direction of the fallen tree he’d just spotted Naruto in.

But when they arrived, their teammate was no where in sight. And that was when the first of the raindrops began to fall.

“Shoot,” Sakura cursed while climbing through the debris and pushing aside fallen tree branches. “I don’t think he’s around here.”

“You’re right,” Sasuke agreed, his own Sharingan-lit eyes scanning the area for any trace of a familiar chakra presence, but to no avail. He neared his female teammate after casting an apprehensive glance towards the sky. The rain was coming down harder and thunder claps rumbled somewhere in the distance.

She straightened up and bit her lip. “Maybe he went back?” she offered, but her wide, emerald eyes held traces of disbelief.

Sasuke looked back to where he presumed their sensei was still awaiting battle, unless it had already begun. Could Naruto have returned there? Well, if he did, he’s with Kakashi now, and safer than being out on his own… But there was a nagging doubt at the back of his mind that he couldn’t quite place…

“But if he didn’t we have to find him,” Sakura continued and gesturing towards the expanse of wilderness ahead. It was clear that Sakura was skeptical about the situation too. Naruto, being the loud and flashy guy he was, was relatively unlikely to disappear from his teammates’ radars of his own free will.

Sasuke agreed and that was how their trek into the forest began.

And from there, a dreadful storm ensues, with ear-splitting thunder claps, sheets of water obscuring their vision, and howling winds that might have knocked them down if their feet weren’t lodged in the muddy ground. A shift occurred in their search, from being a hunt for a missing teammate to a scramble for temporary shelter.

“Shit,” Sasuke hisses when he climbs into the cramped, rocky alcove Sakura spotted nearby. If, for whatever reason, Naruto vanished because he’s in danger, the longer it takes to find him, the lower his odds are of being found unscathed.

Sakura seems to share the same frustrated sentiments, but unlike Sasuke, has a knack for holding her head up in desperate situations. “I’m sure he’s okay,” she says determinedly as she pushes soaked strands of her short, pink hair away from her eyes. “We can use this opportunity to strategize.”

Sasuke mops some of the perspiration off his face with the inside of his collar then turns to look at his teammate properly. She’s shivering all over, water droplets are falling from the tip of her nose, and mud is splattered up her calves. And his initial instinct is to tell her to sit tight and try to warm herself up, but lately, Sasuke has been realizing that this girl deserves more credit than he previously thought.

“What do you have in mind?” he asks and somehow, his words appear to fill her up with some determination. She sits a little taller and her face flushes.

“Well,” she says while reaching into her weapon pouch and fishing out a scroll. “Maybe the scripture we found at the site of the latest robbery is more important than we thought. Oh! It’s still dry, thank the gods!” She rolls the paper open

Sasuke stares at his teammate for a few extra seconds before he shifts closer to her and peers over her shoulder. Why was it that he had been so insistent on not listening to Sakura before? She was getting smarter and stronger and fast and wasn’t exactly the weak link she used to be.

“I only grabbed this because it had the bandits’ fingerprints on it, and at first I thought they just picked it up by accident because it doesn’t make any sense, but what if it belonged to the bandits – or, whatever they are – and these are clues to finding them?” she speculates, and Sasuke just shrugs because maybe she’s right. He glances towards the mouth of the alcove to find it somehow raining even harder than it was before.

Well, it looks like they have a few minutes to spare either way.

And so, without any protest from her teammate, Sakura proceeds to re-read the scroll. Meanwhile Sasuke, who isn’t quite as good with deciphering puzzling texts, scans the forest ahead of them with his Sharingan activated for any sign of movement or chakra flares. He stays put though, with his arm stretched behind Sakura because, even though he’d never admit it, she’s warm and sitting close to her isn’t all that unpleasant.

Not long after, Sakura gasps and Sasuke jumps.

“What?” he asks, his hand hovering over his weapon pouch. God his teammates are expressive sometimes.

She doesn’t respond, but instead, looks to the rocky ground between them and starts running her hands along the surface, like she’s searching for something she dropped. The least he can do is move aside while she crawls about, patting the slick ground.

Sasuke opens his mouth to question her peculiar behaviour, but Sakura speaks first. “I am departed in at night… shake as if I’m angry, but never will I bite… Of course!” she mumbles, seeming to forget Sasuke is there at all.

She’s solving a riddle, that much I can tell, Sasuke thinks and raising his eyebrows.

“Aha! Look at this!” she finally exclaims and motioning to roll aside a boulder near the back of the cave. Sasuke still hasn’t got a clue what she’s doing but he crawls over and helps by giving the boulder a push.

There is a trapdoor beneath it.

Sasuke freezes and gapes down at his teammate’s discovery. “The scriptures had a series of riddles about passageways into enemy hideouts,” she breathes. “There was supposed to be one hidden in the ground at these general coordinates. And I… I think this is it.” She gulps and edges her way behind Sasuke. “Should we check it out?”

He feels his pulse racing. What a strange coincidence that they would take shelter in the opening of the enemy’s hideout. But that being said, if Naruto was captured… “Maybe this will give us a lead,” he says, though it’s probably quite unwise to explore enemy territory with their teammate missing and their sensei engaged in combat. “But how about we just –”

“—look but not go inside?” Sakura finishes and catching his eye. Sasuke nods and is relieved that they seem to be on the same wavelength.

They devise a plan where Sasuke will pull open the trapdoor with his Sharingan activated and ready to blast a fireball down the hole if they are attacked, with Sakura standing above him with weapons poised.

They assume their positions and Sasuke wrenches open the door with a loud creeeak… and…

Nothing happens.

“Oh good,” Sakura sighs and dropping to her knees beside him, without lowering her kunai. It appears the trapdoor is concealing a tunnel that leads deep into the ground. Aside from the metal rings that mark the top of a ladder, it’s pitch black with no way of gauging how far down the tunnel goes.

“Well, I guess this is the passageway described by the riddle,” Sakura muses while poking her head over the edge and squinting her eyes. “I guess now we should wait until we find… are you all right?”

Sasuke pulls his eyes from the tunnel and meets Sakura’s concerned ones. Am I…? Oh. He’s clutching the curse mark at his neck again. When had his hand moved up to do that?

“Sasuke-kun?” she asks and reaching for his arm to comfort him, but that is when Sasuke sees it.

There is a hand emerged from the tunnel, gripping onto its edge – pale, with spiraling black marks snaking along it…

“Sakura! No!” Sasuke yells, but the words are barely out of his mouth when, as quick as a flash, the hand takes hold of her ankle and yanks her in.

Sakura screams and flings her arms out towards Sasuke in her panic, and he manages to catch her hand, but with the combined slickness of their skin, which hadn’t quite dried from the downpour, he can’t hold on for long.

“No!” he shouts again as Sakura is pulled out of his reach and disappears into the dark tunnel below, his stomach flipping and his heart racing. He is in utter disbelief that he literally let Sakura slip away between his fingers…

Before he knows quite what he’s doing, Sasuke is leaping down the tunnel, bounding from wall to wall using chakra to anchor his feet and arms, and supporting a small flashlight between his teeth to make sure he doesn’t jump straight into an enemy.

If something happens to her…

His heart is thudding harder than he would ever admit.

This is my fault. I shouldn’t have opened that door… I should have taken her far away from here…

The descent is unsettlingly long and Sasuke can only pray to the gods that Sakura hadn’t free-fallen any of this distance…

Sasuke touches ground and shocks rocket through his ankles. It takes a moment for him to gain his bearings. He finds himself in an underground cavern with high ceilings, tunnels branching from it, and torches lining the walls that emit an eerie, green light.

He sends another pulse of chakra to his eyes in attempt to sharpen his Sharingan’s view of his surroundings. Where is…?

He spies a body just a little further ahead, splayed out on the dark, concrete floor.

Sasuke is barreling towards it a fraction of a second later, hoping beyond hope that it isn’t Sakura and if it is, to please let her be…

But as it gets closer, it becomes apparent that it isn’t Sakura, though that didn’t calm him any because it’s Naruto.

We were right. He was kidnapped, Sasuke thinks while crouching beside his friend and checking his vitals. And much to his relief, there is a heartbeat, and, all in all, Naruto seems to be in decent shape – just knocked unconscious.

But… who did this to him?

Sasuke gets his answer a little sooner than he anticipates.

He hears Sakura’s scream echo through the cavern.

Then his body goes on autopilot.

Sasuke sprints through the cavern with Naruto hoisted on his back, towards where he just came from, past the tunnel leading into the alcove, and into a small clearing lined with gigantic, black doors that look like vaults. And in the center of the clearing are two figures – a large, burly one with grotesque marks spiraling along his body, and a petite one with her arm bent at an awkward angle. They appear to be mid-fight and are facing each other, though it’s apparent that it won’t last much longer for…

“Sakura!” Sasuke yells instinctively while dropping Naruto and racing towards the center of the clearing to meet her.

“Sas-,” she starts, her eyes flitting in his direction, and all Sasuke can process are the cuts and bruises lining her limbs and her visibly broken arm, but then Sakura’s opponent snatches her by the throat.

And it’s hard to tell it if it’s the sound of her straggled scream, Sasuke’s relatively low reserves of chakra, or the fact that Sakura’s opponent reeks of Orochimaru, but that is when it’s like his Sharingan inverse – Sasuke’s world is stained red.

With a rush of dark, vengeful energy, Sasuke finds himself in the air and firing weapons encased in balls of fire towards the enemy, and it’s enough to throw him off course and fling Sakura aside. Then, with a burst of speed that Sasuke himself can’t comprehend, he also manages to catch Sakura before she hits the ground.

“Sasuke-kun! Oh – not this again!” comes her distant, hazy gasp.

What’s wrong? he thinks while leaning down to look at the girl in his arms, but that’s when he catches sight of the black marks creeping up his arm and the raging purple chakra surrounding them.

Ah yes. This again.

Sasuke stands and examines his hand and how each mark leaves angry red smears across his skin. The sensation is burning and all-consuming and…

…intoxicating.

“You!”

The enemy is crouching in preparation to pounce, his teeth bared and beady eyes locked on Sasuke’s. And that’s when it finally occurs to Sasuke just what those marks on the man’s skin are. I’m not the only one, it seems, he thinks while cracking his knuckles and feeling a wicked smirk grace his lips.

But not for long.

He has the man pinned to the ground an instant later.

“You brat!” the man sneers while clawing at Sasuke’s arm with a heavy, taloned hand, but Sasuke is far too high on power to feel any pain. He is also too busy contemplating the best way to end his opponent’s life.

“Perhaps… slow and painful?” he thinks aloud in a voice he hardly recognizes, as he summons tiny, chirping lightening bolts to his fingers and drags them teasingly across the man’s chest. The electricity tears the fabric and skin there, and the man cries out in shock while twisting desperately against Sasuke’s restraints. “No, you don’t like that? Shall I speed things up?” And then there is a complete, throbbing Chidori in the center of Sasuke’s palm, hovering directly over the opponent’s head, ready to descend and crush his skull –

“Sasuke-kun, STOP!”

He feels a tremor in his hands and freezes.

It’s Sakura, from somewhere on his left. She’s sobbing.

“Please… Sasuke-kun… stop!”

Sensation returns to his body and he vaguely notices that his arm is bleeding and that his heart is thudding against his chest.

I’m about to kill a man.

There’s perspiration lining his brow and his body begins to tremble. But this power… It feels so exhilarating. And there is a sickeningly hopeful gleam in his opponent’s eyes now that he notices the flicker of doubt in Sasuke’s former resolve…

Sasuke closes his eyes and lets his lightning blade descend.

It pierces the cursed man’s shoulder, severing the flesh and cracking the bone, and the man screams and withers, but he doesn’t die.

Then Sasuke is dragged away from the man by small, strong hands with vice grips on his sleeves, and he surrenders to the force and stumbles into Sakura.

Her green eyes are brimming with tears, her lip is trembling, and blood trickles from a cut on her cheekbone, and Sasuke feels the curse begin to subside, dragging back to the constraint on his neck like fiery claws.

Sakura appears to release a breath as she brings her hands up to his face to wipe something off his forehead and jaw. And the friction brings him some grounding comfort, reminds him that this is him – here with her, and not… not what he was just now. Not a slave to Orochimaru’s curse mark. Not a killer.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sakura breathes, and she doesn’t have to tell him twice. 

Sasuke collapses to his hands and knees when he stumbles into the cabin, Team Seven’s base camp, trudging mud and water all over the wood floor. Naruto slumps forward against his back and Sasuke carefully manoeuvres him off and then helps Sakura carry him over to the couch.

Fortunately, they made it out of the tunnel before any other curse-riddled cronies of Orochimaru’s got to them, but then they found themselves trapped in the very storm they were striving to get away from (though it didn’t seem quite as catastrophic anymore, at least, compared to what they just experienced).

Yes, so it seems Orochimaru was involved in this mess after all, which, in retrospect, shouldn’t be so surprising because they were awfully close to the Otogakure boarder. And perhaps this explained Naruto’s capturing. Orochimaru always had quite a keen interest in Team Seven and luring them into trouble.  

“There’s a message from Kakashi-sensei,” Sakura says quietly from where she stands by the kitchen table. “Must have been sent by a dog summon. It says he’s okay and will meet us here in an hour, once he’s certain the enemy is off his trail.”

“Good,” is all Sasuke manages to get out in response, just after he deems Naruto to be in good condition. He suspects their teammate will wake anytime now. Then Sasuke approaches Sakura by the table and finds that, by the gods, she’s smiling.

“Well that was a terrible, wasn’t it? Why can’t our team get a normal C-Ranked mission?” she asks with a soft, musical chuckle.

He raises an eyebrow and folds his arms, observing his ever-puzzling teammate. She led them to this cabin, by the way. She knew how to get here all along because she left markers to trace their path (which was so by-the-book and so Sakura). But she hadn’t mentioned it sooner because following the markers entailed backtracking to where Kakashi had previously been fighting. But in their desperation to flee Orochimaru’s experimental cavern, they took the wager and luckily, Kakashi and his opponents appeared to have relocated.

“Are you all right, Sasuke-kun?” she asks and he notices her eyes shift to his neck.

He doesn’t have it in him to lie. “Better,” Sasuke says, not directly answering her question. That’s when he remembers her broken arm. “But you aren’t,” he remarks.

“I’m fine,” she lies while taking a nervous step back and motioning to conceal her awkwardly-bent arm behind her back. But she doesn’t get around to it because, despite her gasp of protest, Sasuke scoops her up and sits her on a kitchen chair. He snatches one of the moth-bitten blankets from the armchair behind him, drapes it around her shoulders, then rummages through the cupboards for first aid supplies. He knows enough of the basics to set her arm, which should tide things over until Kakashi returns or they find a proper medic.

Sakura holds out her arm when she realizes Sasuke’s intentions. “Thank you,” she mutters through chattering teeth. Sasuke’s hands are trembling slightly throughout the procedure, and he suspects not only from the cold. She whimpers softly but doesn’t cry as he sets her small limb back in place, but his gut still twists painfully.

When it’s done, Sasuke kneels in front of her and rests a hand on her knee. “I’m sorry,” he says abruptly and he’s not entirely sure what he’s saying it for – for the painful procedure, for letting her get hurt in the first place, for losing control and frightening her…

And honestly, if it weren’t for Sakura’s sharp analytical skills, they might have been goners. She found Naruto. She discovered Orochimaru’s involvement in the mysterious robberies. She led them back here, to safety.

Now, if it had been Naruto to save the day, Sasuke would have felt jealous, but with Sakura?

He felt something like pride with a bit of guilt mixed in.

“Sasuke-kun,” she says and it startles him. He realizes that both of his arms are resting on her lap, hugging her legs, and his hands are squeezing her knees. But as he motions to move away, Sakura holds his hand in place.

Sasuke freezes and meets her gaze.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she says and smiling that same bewildering, watery smile. “We’re safe and we’re together and soon we’ll get to the bottom of this and stop that Orochimaru guy once and for all.”

It’s a grand statement coming from a ninja of her stature and rank, but there’s something comforting in knowing that someone with this kind of optimism even exists at the time like this.

Sasuke stares at her, for a second too long maybe, to examine the strange light in her eyes and the way her wet hair clings to her face. She blinks at him and her face colours.

“Annoying,” he mumbles while leaning forward to burry his face in his arms and conceal the colour tinting his own cheeks. And he imagines Sakura pouting at him with confusion, but she doesn’t voice her thoughts. Instead, he feels the delicate fingers of her uninjured arm reach out to stoke his hair.

Sakura massages careful, gentle patterns along his temples and the base of his head, sending pleasing chills up and down his spine and despite how cold and exhausted he is, something about the sensation warms him up.

He gives her knee another squeeze and thinks about how, and not for the first time, he would never, ever let this girl slip between his fingers again.  

[hiruma-musouka]

so i was going through your blog(and blackkat's) and saw that villain!hashirama au and an ask blackkat got about indra's-reincarnation!naruto. so would a indra!hashirama make sense in your au, or even work for that matter

I’m not actually writing this au myself since I have successfully inflicted the villain!Hashirama plot on @elenathehun who is doing a magnificent job in her fic “Blighted”.

As for the reincarantion aspect of Naruto’s canon, I highly doubt I or Elena will use that detail in our fics. It was really so last minute by Kishimoto and kind of an ass-pull that it doesn’t make a lot of sense and it continues that generation Xerox thing. I will generally forgo dealing with it myself unless I can think of some fresh twist to it. After all, straight forward reincarnation (as it is commonly perceived in western pop culture at least) doesn’t really fit the canon characters. We don’t know a LOT about the mythic generation of Indra and Ashura, but Madara & Sasuke and Hashirama & Naruto don’t feel similar enough in personality to be incarnations to me.

Also, writing villain!Hashirama with Indra’s whatever would sort of feel like… handwaving culpability maybe? Like having a past life as a villain explains the current life’s actions? I don’t much like the idea of “one life a bad guy, always a bad guy”. I prefer “these are his choices and this is why he made them” for villain!Hashirama.  Hashirama’s already living legend in his time and MASSIVELY overpowered - it would take something away from him as a character to make his drive something involuntary rather than him turning all his ludicrous strengths towards pursuing his dream.

(It’s just that this time his dream is a bad thing for other people.)