For Nobara

Chapter 3: Little Gods

The drums of the festival vibrate through the ground, eyes of people watching in fascination the bodies of dancing masked women clad in flower kimonos. The fire lanterns glisten a warm light around the village, but then there is the bounty target desperate to keep his life.

He pushes himself past the crowd and wanders into an alleyway after catching a glimpse of his pursuant. But as he turns to look back at the light, Kakuzu has already caught his throat and slams his back against the wall.

He hasn't noticed it before, but he's wandered to the isolated part of the village where the noise has dulled in the distance.

If he screams, nobody will hear him.

And Kakuzu isn't so kind. He throws down the bounty target and disorients the man enough to be groveling on the ground. The target has been on the run for so long and now he feels like this is the last time he'll be running.

"The last archive," Kakuzu begins as he steps on the man's hand. "Where is it?"

His voice hitches, but as if he's finally accepted his fate, his weak voice gradually turns into a throaty laughter even with the shortness of his breath. Regardless if he says where it is or not, he'll die anyway.

Is it because he's seen the war in its pages? Is that why he's going to die today just like his comrades before him?

Perhaps the secret he carries is far too heavy after all that it costed them their lives.

"They were little gods..." the man says weakly, daring to look at the Akatsuki in the eyes. He knows he won't live long after involving himself anyways, after touching the archives and learning them. "Horned children of Koori... That child with you, that thing—"

The bounty lifts his chin uneasily as tendrils choke him to the wall, but the man smiles pitifully nonetheless as he looks up at Kakuzu.

"And what of the child?"

His time is truly numbered...

"Half-bloods are dangerous things, Akatsuki," the bounty man chokes weakly. "Beasts, uncontrollable rage, and unspeakable power. They weaponized these monsters and raised them in cages but... who would have known that the great Kira would fear such children too..."

They were white and shades of gray, a clan in its purest form of Koori blood and yet they were far redder than their refined bloodline.

Kira.

They were painted in their violence—painted red until they were black, as black as their ashes. The nobility have written them in the form of books and he has felt the blood in all the archives' pages when they were once together. Now, he holds the last one after the Akatsuki have destroyed them as if to erase the last of its written history.

"I've already sent one of my men for her. You're foolish to have left her alone..." he says weakly. "You shouldn't have taken her out of Koori... that monster with red eyes the last archive so speaks, child of the black-haired traitor—"

But before the bounty can even finish, his beady eyes already dilate, then they meet greens and a hand plunged right into his chest. Fingers clench against his heart, beating and beating, pulsating in fear, until blood pours from his mouth as Kakuzu rips it out of him.