There was screaming in the dark, people with mouths cracked open and wide eyes, but there was no sound coming out of their lungs. There was only blood. It rained down on her face as she looked down—down at her hands tainted with them.
Warm.
They were really warm.
Where was this blood coming from?
"W-What—What have you done?" a woman gasped, tears streaking down her horrid pale face, her grey eyes wide with fear as the spectator looked at her. "You murderer! You t-trai—!"
The woman choked.
A crack.
It began at her mouth and then slowly it spread down her body like a deadly disease. It painted her blue and purple down her throat as she turned gasping at the pain that suddenly burned her from the inside. Then it came, her scream, as she clawed at the pain until her nails were red, pink, and flesh.
The woman screamed for mercy as blood poured from her mouth, her eyes, her ears. But something coiled around the spectator... no, her murderer, something so very cold and dark.
Kill her.
And yet as the murderer stood there, she all but took it all in. Because the murderer feared it too, when the cold gripped her unkindly. Her body trembled and she wanted to scream too, but her voice was caged in her mouth.
She felt sick that she grappled at the sudden warmth that came for her, until it took her in its arms, overwhelming warmth that the cold curled its claws around her, refusing to let go.
And it screeched, the cold did. But the warmth is a beckon, a mumble of reassurance, a bright light. And the light has gentle hands and pretty obsidian eyes.
She convinces herself it's a sliver of hope, so she clings onto it. She clings desperately.
"Kakuzu... Kakuzu..." she sobs into his chest soaked wet in cold, trembling in fear of what could have had her, but he just holds her—holds her until there is only tiredness with her.
She can only think of his gentle hands. He isn't Kakuzu, but he is enough to lull her to sleep...
When she opens her eyes again, she is extremely tired, but she feels relieved somehow by lying beside the familiar mess of books. And even though the lack of light brought unpleasant memories of that place, she's grown fond of the dull light emitting from the candle on Kakuzu's table regardless.
The man sits quietly with his back to her, but she has observed him long enough to know without even looking at his face that his eyebrows are scrunched again because of some bounty. Because, what else could have made him look so disturbed?
"Go back to sleep," Kakuzu tells her as if he's sensed her staring at him for a while now, but she only grabs at his cloak and curls onto it. Even just the slightest of thought about the masked man makes her feel frightened and vulnerable.
Was it a nightmare?
No.
Her fear felt too real.
Clinging onto him, her feet tangle in the messed up futon. And even though he is right there, the way Kakuzu feels so far away frightens her.
To her, abandonment and betrayal isn't a stranger in her short life. She had once trusted too much only for that trust to be trampled on, and yet she still runs blindly to people who only use her as if she's desperately trying to fill the void inside of her.
"I'm sorry," she says, her voice overwhelmingly small. "I'm sorry... I'm sorry..."
So please don't abandon me.
But Kakuzu can only clench his fist. He refuses to look at her, but in the end he can't completely ignore her.
He shouldn't have left her when he sensed a hint of danger when they were last together. He wants to get mad, but he can only find fault in himself when he didn't know what happened before Itachi brought her back soaked down through her clothes, when it was Itachi who was with her and not him.
He feels the urge to ease her, but just as he's about to caress her hair, he is reminded again.
"She is not yours to keep."
And he stops himself, his hand pulling back away from her just as Zetsu emerges from the darkness. And he reminds himself too—that she isn't his to keep.
"Leader requests your presence again," the creature says before its eyes swivel towards the child, but Kakuzu pulls back quickly as if to shield her from him this time. Those yellow eyes return back towards the green-eyed man again, and as if he knows, Zetsu pauses in thought for a while before turning away. "Then... I'll let him know you're on your way..."
And without another word, the creature disappears again.
Kakuzu feels like laughing then. Even though he thought he's already forgotten how to feel anything else than just physical pain, his chest feels tight and he doesn't understand it.
Why does the way the child clings onto him affect him this much? The way she stares at him now with those eyes, it makes him falter a little.
Without even the need to say anything... When has she so easily controlled him like this?
"I'll be back," he forces himself to say, looking away because he can't let her grow on him anymore that she already has. "Go back to sleep, Kigura..."
And he doesn't look back at her anymore when he leaves the room, as if afraid that if he sees her eyes again, he will cave in just like Leader knew he would. And yet, even when he has drifted so far away, he can't shake off the image of her looking at him with those eyes.
Why is she making it so difficult for him?
Kakuzu clenches his fist and he punches the wall. But as if he brought the warmth with him, the child who is left in his room in Pain's Tower curls to herself as the cold sensation settles in again. And she knew long before she smelt it, when he messes up her senses just like the first time.
The masked man is full of darkness and he seeps into her lungs. It clogs inside of her that it feels like she can't breathe in his presence.
He sits on one of the piles of books behind her, but she refuses to look at him. He couldn't have been real, could he? So she shuts her eyes like he will disappear just as easily like that, because it doesn't matter who he is or where he came from.
This fear... she doesn't want to confront it.
Kakuzu...
"Where are you going?" His voice follows her as she drags herself out of the room in an attempt to get away from him. But her vision trembles, a cloud of grayness that disrupts her from even walking straight. What is happening to her? She can barely make it out into the hallway without falling apart, but she looks so desperate.
Before Kakuzu took her out of Koori, she wished she would die in that dark place to repent at least for what she is, for what she had done. But after all this time, would it be fine to be selfish just this once?
To live without the pains of her past...
To live not as that man's daughter.
"Kaku..." Her voice breaks as she tries to sense out his presence, but every ragged breath feels like an inch deeper into being swallowed by the darkness that's crawling beneath her clothes. "Kakuzu!"
She breaks out in cold sweat until she caves in—until she walks out of the building and staggers outside, to the loud roar of the clouds.
She has hardly heard the rain until she feels it soaking through her clothes. She staggers forth and she falls to the flooded cement as her hands swarm over the outpour.
Everything has become a static of rain and darkness then, flickering into her eyes like two opposing images until she can barely breathe, until she can feel it, its long crooked fingers coiling around her throat like her breath belongs to it.
"Child of the black-haired traitor—"
"Kakuzu..." she almost pleads, shutting her eyes close and breaking into a sob. And in her clouded vision, she can barely make out the black clad man watching her.
And yet he looks so strange, like he can't quite swallow such vulnerability before him, can't quite belly such ugliness in the form of a harmless child. But as he crouches down in front of her, he touches her face with such gentleness she almost stops crying.
"If you had made the waters your grave, it wouldn't have been painful for both of us."
His touch, it's almost like the times when Kakuzu would comfort her in his own way. But that look he carries seems so out of place—that pain, that deep-seated anger that told her of a story he's been holding onto for so many years.
"I should have finished you the moment I first saw you."
And then suddenly, his hand is around her throat.
"Then it wouldn't have lasted this long."
He speaks with such hatred, and yet even then, why does he look at her like that?
Like she's betrayed him somehow.
Under his choking grip, her skin begins to crystallize itself and she claws onto his arms. But just like poison, ice weaves out of her on its own and crawls to his hand. It drags across his skin to his arm in a way that would be enough to spill his blood, but he is so lost in his anger that he only grips tighter.
He looks at her like he is seeing someone else, and maybe that's why he looks so broken.
His arm is shaking in pain but it's the way he chokes that finally stops him, when he finally tastes the blood in his mouth before he throws her to the ground. And he wants to scream as his hands shoot to his head. This rage, it's eating him alive.
That wench.
If she had wanted to disappear, that should have been the end of it. And yet, she is everywhere—in strangers, in those monsters she had tried to protect, and in this child whose ice is just like hers. Ice that crystallizes over her body from the impact of the ground, even though what could hurt her is farther than just skin deep.
With disoriented eyes, the child watches the stranger stand in the rain with a shadow of a past behind him. And below his feet, darkness seeps like ink dropped into water. It flickers in and out of her reality together with the static of noise that deafened her. But this time she has grown tired to even run away.
"She was foolish," he tells her. "She wanted to protect children like you and yet I... I..."
"I don't understand..." she says weakly. Not this. Not at how, despite everything, she's somehow drawn to him. Not to anything. But to hear her speak, his gaze grows instantly cold.
"You don't have to understand..." he says, "because it doesn't matter anymore."
And beneath all that hatred, his gaze, his ever so dark gaze, is slowly burning so very bright.
And then red.
It is so, so red. Like that man's, a semblance of the traitor they used to always speak of.
"You are a splitting image of that man..."
She can barely take him in, from his black hair to the red staring down at her in such cold blood—that she finally begins to break.
"If I make you disappear..."
Would it hurt less then...?
He speaks just as her eyes begin to ink too—ink to mirror the same red in his, the same ability. And he stares right into them, seemingly not expecting such. But by then, their eyes would have opposed each other, until something about them, so vividly so... begins to open an ugly memory.