Chapter 7
Roushi goes to the mindspace to tell Naruto and Fuu about the two who attacked them. With their borrowed bingo book they find that they are are Hoshigaki Kisame (another one of the Seven Swordsmen of Kiri) and Sasori of the Red Sand. Gaara wonders about Sasori, who has a name Gaara has earned. He thinks he heard his brother talking about Sasori, the famous puppeteer, at one point, although Kankurou almost never talked to Gaara. Roushi wonders about the apparently very high defection rate of the Seven Swordsmen.
And Gaara thinks about Utakata, who suffered some very bad treatment at the hands of his master in Kiri. He always refused to talk about it, and now he’s dead or imprisoned. Gaara wants to see him again so much that his chest aches a little bit. It took Utakata almost a year of occasionally meeting up with Gaara to show him a true smile, reserved and paranoid as he is. That makes his smiles even more precious.
By the time the sun rises, Gaara finds Roushi watching the sky to the northwest, and asks him why. “Son says he can smell Saiken,” Roushi admits. He probably doesn’t want to investigate it, because it means getting closer to Akatsuki.
“We should look for them,” Gaara says. “If we can rescue Utakata before they pull Saiken out of him, we have to try.”
“You don’t know that’s what they’re planning,” says Roushi, but there’s not much else a criminal organization might want from jinchuuriki and he knows it. “Fine. Instead of a safehouse, we’re heading toward the most dangerous possible house. This is fine.”
They make good time as the head northwest into Tea Country, and Roushi reports that Saiken’s smell is continuing to get stronger. They’re nearly at the coast when Roushi tells Gaara to set them down.
“It smells very…” Roushi trails off, frowning deeply. “Son says it smells like fear, or old things that shouldn’t be. Very helpful, Son. Anyway, we should be careful. Mask your chakra signature.”
“I can scout with my Third Eye,” says Gaara. “The chakra signature should be faint enough that they won’t detect it unless they’re looking for it.” Roushi nods, and Gaara covers one eye to form another from sand. “Half a kilometer ahead there is a giant pit, probably an old quarry. A large skeleton is at the bottom. There are entrances in the cliffs around the hole…” He chooses one at random and directs his eye inside. “This isn’t going to be very useful if I have to search a system of caves without chakra sensing capabilities.”
“See what you can find anyway,” says Roushi. “But be quiet, you can tell me about it later. I’ll keep watch.”
Gaara’s eye drifts deeper into the earth until it reaches a dead end. He turns it back and enters another passage. This one is empty too. The next leads to a large cavern, much too large for the single bed and chair placed far away from each other. The wall behind the chair is made entirely of wood; at its base there is a pile of cocoons that look horribly human-sized. And Gaara thinks he can see a face formed from the knots in the wood. Shukaku, he says. Can you feel the same thing Son could? Old things that shouldn’t be? I think I found them.
I dunno. This place gives me the creeps but they might just be normal creeps. What’d you find?
A wall made of wood and what looks like humans in cocoons. The wall… I think it has a face.
He gets the impression that Shukaku has recoiled. The World Tree? he snarls. What the fuck is that doing here?
What’s the World Tree? Gaara asks as he sends his eye down a side-passage.
The corpse and the mother of the ten-tails. Before we were born, all the raw chakra in the world was in that thing. Eugh. If they’re trying to put us back in there I’ll fucking slaughter them!
Not that you wouldn’t anyway, says Gaara.
Not that I w—hah. Right. Find your friends and get out of there. That thing’s bad fucking news.
A long way down the side passage his eye finds them. There are eight cells along the passage just before it ends, and in the last two are Han and Utakata, lying bound on the dirt floor with seals running over their faces like lines of ants. He watches for a long time before he can determine that they’re breathing.
“Roushi,” he whispers. “I found them. How much do you know about sealing?”
“Not much,” mutters Roushi. “That’s Utakata’s area, isn’t it? So they’re sealed to keep them from trying to escape. That’s fine, if we can break them out we can get them to a seal master. Jiraiya’s not half bad, from what he says. Though that might just be him bragging. I’d say he’s our best bet if we can find him again.”
“Are sealing masters rare?” Gaara lets his Third Eye dissolve and looks around at Roushi.
“They weren’t until about thirty years ago, when Uzushiogakure fell. I was just a kid when it happened, I’d just barely deserted Iwa so I didn’t get anywhere near that whole mess. It was supposed to be a massacre, though. The Uzumaki were too good at sealing.” He notes Gaara’s wide eyes and nods. “Yeah, Naruto is probably the last one with the name. Everyone else with any sense is trying to pretend they had nothing to do with that clan. I met his mom a couple times, the nine-tails jinchuuriki. Her bloodline ability was sealing without seals. She could probably take down a bijuu all by herself. Terrifying woman. Iwa is lucky she hated front-line fighting. Uh, anyway, she was probably the last one who really understood sealing, so Jiraiya is our second best option.”
“But first we have to get them out of there without being caught. I didn’t see anyone inside, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t come back at any time.”
“What are we waiting for, then? Fly us over there!”