Blood Moon
i. Bounty
Kaito hated getting blood on everything. He didn't like the attention, didn't like the stares. He may have been wearing a half mask, goggles, and hood, but the stares followed him. Henges could obviate the issue, but he had scraped all the way down to the bottom of the barrel making his way here, had only subsisted on the Kyuubi’s for years, and now without the support it was getting harder to regenerate his chakra, bring it back up to any decent level without stopping use of it entirely. More than two clones wasn't really manageable for him at this point.
He walks into the bounty office of Yugagakure. Dumps the large black duffel that the contents of which had actually once owned on the desk.
He unzips the duffel, the smell of gore permeating the small space, retrieves Hidan’s head. It's still screaming through the- now cloth- gag.
The poor man behind the counter doesn't seem to know how to handle this development. Kaito narrows his eyes, then pulls out his tanto. He slices vertically up through his vocal chords, tucks the end of the cloth into the slit to keep it from healing. The head is no longer screaming, but the man looks even more traumatized. Kaito has run out of energy to care, the clerk would thank him for it if he knew how loud that thing could be.
He scribbles an account number on a sheet of paper, passes it to the sweating, shaking man, and leaves.
It’s not his problem now.
ii. Nostalgia
The Konoha nights have started to bite, a little. They’re no longer the balmy, nostalgic oil paintings of fireflies and city lights. Just blue shaded trees and loud bugs and louder birds. He had moved on to hiding out in the forests surrounding Konoha, high up in the forest’s canopy, where Anko wouldn’t be looking for him.
The nights were the worst. It had nothing to do with the weather; frankly, if he wasn’t going hypothermic, he could care less. There were just too many shadows, too many memories weighing on his shoulders, too many noises that made him jump. Everything in this world seems like too much.
He can’t actually sleep up here, not until he drops of exhaustion or relents to eating the seeds he’d collected in 44. They’ll knock him out for a couple of hours. He feels too exposed, is too aware of everything below him, within a one mile radius, to sleep. There are so many ways he could be attacked up here, so many ways he could be spotted.
He can’t rent an apartment, not yet. Too many people to talk to, too many questions to answer. He’d need a paper trail too large to be worth making up, nor is it worth it having to track him by. He’s a ghost in the system. Off of all records- the fact that no one but Anko has come looking for him means that she hadn’t reported the strange man in the forest. It was sort of endearing, in a way. He wonders why she hadn’t.
The moon shines bright, a full pale disk, a branch of leaves silhouetted against it. The sky juxtaposes a clear, dark, raven black against it. The stars twinkle dutifully, spread across it like flickering lamp lights.
He ponders on the impossibility of what he's achieved. He pinned down the exact moment in the millennium where he could tie the astral movements into something more, use the energy of the stars to rip a hole in spacetime. It should have killed him. The stars, the pretty little dots in the distance, twinkle innocently at him.
It was peaceful. It was home. Kaito started to relax into himself, breathing slowing. He was not here, he was in the old apartment. Sakura was yelling about the filth of it, Sasuke was grouching by the window. It was the sunlight was warm, the yellow making even his squalid quarters look inviting. The plants everywhere, the only decoration of note, tangled together and climbed up wires strung haphazardly.
Something cracked, below- far below- and the illusionary floor fell away to the forest. Kaito scrambled , searching for the threat, looked up to see a crimson moon,
Something cracks below him, and he jerks- swinging around inefficiently to try and determine the source.
He looks up to see the moon blood red, leafy silhouettes molding into tomoe, and suddenly he’s back in Konoha, burning. Sasuke stands so close to him, his face eclipsing most of Naruto’s field of view. He’s burning, alive, they both are, but black flames clawing up Sasuke’s legs and he isn’t moving.
“Goodbye,” he says. Then at the same moment, Sasuke kisses him and presses a hand against his neck. Suddenly-
-he is in the top of a tree, just outside the skirts of Konoha.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Naruto, Kaito, whatever the fuck he cared to be, does not think of what he is supposed to be, how he is supposed to act, about how he is trying to hide himself.
He curls into himself, heaving sobs that wrack his still too-thin form. This is the pain that threatens to tear him apart, to pull him under until he drowns.
He weeps until he can’t anymore.
This is not his home.
He stands, drops out of the tree while using wind chakra to control his fall. He's not going to get any sleep tonight. He eyes the tree, its monolithic trunk, complete lack of branches until far, far up. Thinks of his weak, bony body too weak to handle any of his old fights. He once was a kage and here he is hallucinating in trees and general being a self pitying mess.
He pulls out kunai from his pockets, a couple of new acquisitions. He jumps up, careful not to use any chakra but disappointed in its lack of height, and slams them into the tree.
His shoulders jolt as his bodyweight drops onto them. He breathes. He pulls up with his left arm, out with his right before embedding the blade in the bark a foot up.
He can do this.
iii. Interlude
He was back in the forest. Anko fucking knew he was back in that goddamn forest. He was taunting her. He left little fire pits around, in a different place each night. Every now and then, she'd catch a glance of red. Bright, vivid, “I’m a target” crimson.
And then he was gone.
That asshole.
iv. Change
Kaito visits the market fairly frequently, now- under a different henge each time. He buys heavy, starch-packed foods and pre-cooked meat, what he couldn't stomach making himself. He needs to try and desensitize himself, he knows. This glaring a weakness is going to bite him in the ass. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Sakura screams.
He goes to Tenten’s father shop and buy the silk-wrapped tanto he'd mooned over before. Tenten is off in the Academy, now. The store feels quaint and empty without her. Ryouta smiles and undercharges him. Kaito asks what his interest would be in selling custom designed seals- mostly explosive tags and storage scrolls. He knew the answer- he'd made a pretty penny in his side business before it all went to hell.
The tacit offer seems to shock the storekeeper. After a very brief round of negotiations- including an example in the form of a hastily made, rose scented smoke bomb, so as not to offput the customers- Kaito asks for an advance in the form of ink and paper. A lot of it. Kage bunshin were a very useful resource.
Naruto remembers the days when he'd rely on that jutsu and his obscene luck to get him out alive. It was the perfect technique for him- utilizing his ridiculous chakra stores and covering his unskilled, badly-trained ass. This was a long time ago. Before fighting became skill and endurance and especially stealth. Before the world had gone to hell in a handbasket. Before he became Hokage, and definitely after he’d stopped.
He kind of misses it.
Armed and now officially employed, Kaito quickly raises a new henge once outside. With brown hair, brown eyes, and paler skin, he became a very unobtrusive civilian. A civvie, he supposed, smiling slightly.
He sent a few clones off with the paper and ink to start making seals and started wandering. Thinking. Planning. It wasn't too long before his feet lead him to his old apartment- a ramshackle little building that hadn't technically been located in the slums when he was moved there. Over time, that changed.
Kaito remembered his childhood, remembered boards over his windows when someone threw a rock through it. Remembered giving up scrubbing away the graffiti some left. Remembered how ignored he was. How alone.
Maybe this time he could change that.
v. Weak
He regrets renting the apartment, even as he does it. Matarou Takehiko gets a very good price on it- it had remained unoccupied for years and she couldn’t evict the reason for it. This Takehiko person was the first to both approach Kita Miyu and the only one to stay after learning of her unfortunate resident. He wasn’t surprised.
The agreement itself is very simple. He makes sure his landlady gets her money once a month and the apartment remains undamaged, and she doesn’t kick him out and toss up a fuss in the legal system. He’d almost forgotten how lax the certain parts of Konoha were- he’d grown used to official business, paperwork. The slums were simple: you have cash, you get what you need.
He was settling. Attaching himself to a place, attaching himself to people. It was a risky business. It was a stupid business. He had better things to do, he had people to kill to save this village, this country, this world, from ruin. And here he was, making a nice little nest for himself with money he’d pulled from someone who was barely a player.
Weak.
He inspects his new apartment- it’s, in a word, dingy. Saleable, but barely. It’s grimy in the way that even if you washed it top to bottom and repainted it and refurbished it, it would still feel like a dump. He won’t try. He’s not here to settle, he’s here for a base. He’s here for privacy, for a place to leave his working clones and maybe for a place to run into Naruto.
He has two clones in the corner running through blank tags like air, making neat little stack of various sorts of explosives. Flashbangs, firebombs, smoke tags, higher powered, so on and so forth. Around four he’d have one run down to Ryouta with a delivery. He adds a clock to the small mental list of possible conveniences. It includes a bed and a decent lamp. The bare necessities comprise of food, weapons, ink, paper, and clothes.
He deliberates on who to take out next. Deidara, while an opportune target, was both the most likely to draw attention and to deal out obscene amounts of collateral damage, so he decides to wait on him. Kakuzu was generally too tough for Kaito to take out in this sorry state- he needed someone who could go down fast. No one would believe his twelve year old self if he said one day stealth would be his greatest advantage, he mused. Not even young Naruto. Sasori too couldn’t be counted on to drop. Kisame though, was more human, even if he was also more shark. Flesh and blood he could do- strange teleporting plants? Less so.
He hates to think of the limitations he bears, how behind he’s fallen even now that he’s so far ahead of everyone else that it makes his head spin.
vi. Silence
He trains night and day, sealing lesser used training grounds to hell until not a wisp of chakra signature leaves and no one comes within two miles without him knowing. It’s not uncommon for him to be interrupted and he shuts everything down and flees the scene, deploying a few clones to remove the seals as he either relocates or takes it as his cue to return to the apartment and feed himself, maybe catch some sleep.
He gets stronger.
It’s slow a slow business, especially at first, when basic drills leave him panting and if he’s not careful he winds up lying on the ground, too exhausted to move. Even so, he has never been short on determination. A routine like his, even carried out more by sheer willpower than strength, pushes his body beyond its limits and then further. He begins to put on weight again. Pure muscle, of course, though he has to very consciously stuff himself to do so. Food is an ambivalent presence in his life, too large of one at that, and frankly it irritates him. The necessity to feed his body, and so frequently, combined with his ridiculous phobia of the scent of meat and the lingering discomfort in his stomach ails him. It all tastes like cardboard anyway. He does not try to cook, relying on fresh produce, bread, and a lot of nuts. Nuts, he’s found, are very good. Dense, rich in protein, and very clearly not meat- they’re something. They’re good. They’re portable, which is important.
Still, despite everything, he’s frustrated by his achingly slow chakra regeneration. The pool within him quavers and makes as if it will finally refill properly, but never does. There’s a distinct lack of the Kyuubi’s chakra circulating through his coils, only the occasional whisper of it to prove that Kurama’s still there. He makes a habit of meditating, drawing in nature chakra to supplement his reserves, and hopefully help heal whatever it is that’s fucking it up. It does help, some, and the extra chakra in his coils helps set him at ease.
As if he was ever at ease.
Sakura’s voice echoes in the back of his head, explaining the psychology behind shellshock and trauma. Hypervigilance is an almost paranoid state of increased awareness and perceptive behaviors to avoid threats, frequently found in veteran shinobi. It is frequently accompanied by a litany of symptoms including flashbacks, hallucinations, insomnia, depre-
He ground his teeth, and punched the tree in front of him so hard he heard a crack. What he’d once dubbed inane Yamanaka babble silenced.
He punches the tree again, same hand. Blood stains the bark black.
It’s silent.