[1019] Thus closes Act I
That, of course, heavily implies that there are acts besides Act I. Who knows if that will happen? I feel that this, at least, is a semi-satisfying conclusion. Or is it?
Unbeta'd, as all my zombie pieces are. It also marks my very first foray into the mind of Lee. Huzzah? Comments, constructive criticism, etc., are always welcome.
Original drabble by askerian
Act IAct II
Scene I, Sasuke
Scene I, Naruto
Scene II, Shikamaru
Scene II, Sasuke
Scene III, Neji
Scene III, Tenten
Scene IV, Tenten
Scene IV, Sakura
Scene V, Lee
Helplessness wasn’t a feeling that Lee was familiar with. He had been disappointed, worried, frightened, and even discouraged, but helplessness, that was foreign. Until this afternoon. Helplessness was a pernicious, creeping thing, something that seeped in past your lips and down your throat, clogged your lungs, stole the strength from your muscles, smothered the fire in your heart.
It was watching your mentor get his head beaten in by an underclassman. It was swearing to protect a fragile boy and then killing him without hesitation when there was no other choice. It was being trapped on top of an SUV while your best friends tried to save you.
And failed.
Neji was still stuck inside his ruined car, and Tenten--
She stood over the corpse of the thing that had bitten down on her left food, her crowbar dangling from her fingertips. Her face was pale, her eyes wide and unseeing. Four of the monsters were pulling or stumbling their way toward her, but she didn’t move, didn’t react.
He screamed her name and swung wildly at a mangled hand that reached for Shikamaru’s ankle. His vision blurred with tears, but he knew he had connected by the way the impact shuddered its way up the bat. When he blinked again to clear his vision and looked back toward her, Tenten had moved.
She was too practical, too self-controlled to scream like he had when he had tried to save Raidon. There was just the quiet determination that he had always admired--there was a job to do, and she knew how to do it. She ran for the next closest creature, using all of her speed, power, and momentum to clothesline it across the neck. It dropped, and without a moment’s delay, she shifted her grip on the crowbar and brought it down hard.
Lee could not afford to just watch her move, not when he had his own job. She was counting on him to keep Shikamaru safe. She had told him to stay where he was, and he was going to, no matter what.
He wouldn’t fail her. Or Shikamaru, or Neji. He was going to be who, and what, they needed him to be.
“How--” Lee cleared his throat and tried again, willing his voice to steady. “How much time do you think she has?” He took a step out of another creature’s grasping fingers. He swung the bat, trying again to make contact with its skull, but his bat didn’t have a long enough reach. The SUV’s height made it a great place to stay safe, but it also meant the things they wanted to kill were mostly safe from them.
Shikamaru gave a small grunt of pain, shifting slightly to readjust his balance. He had been crouched like that for nearly twenty minutes, and between his knee and his cramping muscles, sweat was darkening his shirt between the shoulder blades. “A few minutes, probably.” His voice was flat, tense, and Lee could see him turn his head slightly to catch a glimpse of the nearby wreckage.
By the time Neji managed to extract himself from his car, Tenten had finished off all the things that he had run down. She was limping slightly, favoring the foot that had been bitten, and the brief moments Lee allowed himself to check on her had just barely kept his last bit of hope alive. She hadn’t been lost yet.
“Now what?” Tenten called out. Her voice was strong and clear, her eyes darting back and forth between people. “Neji, stay away from me.”
Neji stopped about ten feet away from her, wiping oozing blood off his face with one sleeve, his other gripping his baseball bat. “We’re better together.” He still looked a little unsteady, and Lee wondered how badly he had hit his head.
“I was bitten, idiot.” Her voice cracked on that last word. “I don’t know how long--”
“Tenten--”
Before the argument could really begin, Shikamaru interrupted. “We don’t have time for this, if Tenten is right about being bitten. We have to use her before she turns on us.”
The phrase turns on us made Lee feel sick, horribly so. Could he do it again? When he had killed Raidon, it had been in the middle of a fight for his life, he had smashed in the boy’s face without time for deliberation. It had been cold and automatic, the final conclusion in a horrible logic game.
It was only after the boy had stopped moving that the tears had started. Could he do the same thing again, to one of his best friends? Could he look her in the face as he beat her skull into a bloody pulp? He forced himself to not start gagging, even as he felt the horribly determination settle into his heart.
He could do it. He would do it. Because it had to be done, and because he wouldn’t force anyone else to make such a choice. Tenten deserved nothing less from him.
“There are nine left.” Shikamaru continued, though exhaustion and pain were starting to leak into his voice. “These things seem to fixate when they have prey in their sights. If you can be quiet enough, you should be able to sneak up on them, at least in the initial moments.”
He had to stop again, groaning softly as he tried to straighten out his back. Lee reached out briefly to rest a hand on his shoulder and steady him. Shikamaru muttered a thanks. “Tenten, circle around to the front. You’re going to act as bait. Hit a few of them, and see if you can lead them away from the SUV. Try to get them as close to the wall of the school as possible.”
“Got it.”
Neji scowled, but he didn’t protest when Tenten began moving around in a wide arc toward the side that had been cleared.
“Lee, Neji, if she can get a few to follow her, back her up and take them down. Use the school to box them in. Keep doing that, until only a couple are left. Don’t let the ones on the other two sides see you, because if they all go for you at once, you’ll be overwhelmed.”
“What are you going to do?” Lee asked as his friends started moving.
To his surprise, Shikamaru twisted around and planted both hands on the roof of the car. He started to push himself upright, swearing under his breath from the pain.
Lee made a few quick jabs with his baseball bat to keep stray hands away from the younger boy. After a few seconds, Shikamaru was upright, leaning heavily on his baseball bat like it was a short cane. He tried to smile, but grimaced instead, sweat running down his face. “I’m going to look as delicious as possible.”
The first part of the plan went flawlessly. Tenten was able to entice the three creatures away from the hood of the SUV. Lee slid down the empty side behind them, and between the two of them and Neji, they were able to make short and bloody work of dispatching them. Shikamaru did his own part, hobbling toward the tail of the vehicle, waving his free hand around and getting perilously close to their broken hands, making sure the rest of them were wholly focused on him.
Lee wiped some gore off his neck with the back of his hand once the third thing lay still. Tenten was still pale, and she didn’t return his fledgling smile of accomplishment. Instead, she edged away from him, and Neji.
The movement made Neji scowl. “Tenten--”
“Don’t start with me,” she snapped back at him. “If I’m not s-sick, then it doesn’t matter.” Her breath hitched, and she tried to cover it by turning her back on them and marching back toward the SUV. “And if I am bitten, then I’d rather spend my last minutes bashing these bastards’ heads in than terrified one of you is going to sneak up behind me and bash my head in.”
Raidon’s face flashed before his eyes, how the boy’s expression had been a nauseating mixture of horror and despair as Lee brought down the baseball bat. Lee watched Tenten stride away, her shoulders square despite the weight of the crowbar slung across one of them, and vowed that if it came to that, she would not see him coming.
It was then that Shikamaru’s tense voice rang out. “Get out of here.”
Lee glanced up from Tenten’s back and to the boy on top of the SUV. He shuffled backward a step or two, baseball bat screeching across the metal roof. Lee glanced around quickly, but he couldn’t see anything, no movements unaccounted for.
“What’s wrong?” Neji called back.
Shikamaru glanced back at them briefly, his lips stretched in a resigned grin. And then he pointed off toward the distance. “There are more.”
Lee’s heart began to pound, something in the way Shikamaru said it sending dread throughout the whole of him. The SUV was blocking his line of sight, and so Lee took a few running steps to the right, clearing the way. For a moment, nothing looked out of place, just the baseball diamond with its late spring grass, restless stalks of corn butting up against the chain link fence, and cutting through the fields and hills the winding gray of an old country road.
But the gray of that road wasn’t still. When Lee squinted and shielded his eyes from the early evening sun, the formless gray changed, just enough to make out other colors: blues and greens and pinks and whites and purples and browns and blacks.
Clothes, and the people wearing them. Moving silently, without cars or motorcycles or bikes, without the crying and the shouting and the talking of frantic refugees. Shambling, aimless, except for the need to find something living.
Lee had lived his whole life in Fairfield. A town so small it wasn’t even officially a town, just a handful of streets and a corner store that sold bread and milk and beer to people who couldn’t spare the gas to drive to a real grocery store until after the next paycheck came.
The creatures that were trickling this way were coming from Fairfield.
What he and Shikamaru had been fighting in the parking lot weren’t stragglers, unlucky creatures taken by chance, abnormal things in a normal world.
They were merely the things that had been closest.
“Get out of here,” Shikamaru repeated without looking at them again. He shifted his weight onto his uninjured leg so he could free up his bat to swipe weakly at a nearby hand. “Run. You guys should be able to stay ahead of them. Find somewhere to hole up. You can’t make a stand here, not against that many.”
“No.” It came out without thinking. Lee didn’t need to think about it. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
“Yeah, you are. I’d just slow you down.” The younger boy’s voice was flat, empty of everything except for a tiny bit of tension.
“I’m not!”
“Lee--”
He tried to shrug Neji’s hand off his shoulder. “I’m not going to let him die, too!” He could imagine Raidon’s screams, remembered what it was like to feel the skull give way beneath his hands.
“I’m not going to put you three in danger.”
“He’s right. I know you don’t like hearing it, but--”
“I can save you!”
“If you keep yelling, you’ll just bring them all after you. That’s my job.”
“--we don’t have much choice, Lee.”
“I can’t--” Something white came flying at his face, and Lee ducked, barely in time. He and Neji sprang apart, and the missile--a well-worn running sneaker--clattered to the pavement behind him.
Tenten stood there, left foot bare, looking for all the world as if she wanted nothing more than to smack his and Neji’s skulls together with her crowbar. “That’s enough, you morons.”
Lee looked down at her naked foot. Even from this far away he could see how her skin was darker in a little semicircle, where teeth had clamped down on her foot. The bruising had already started.
But there was no blood.
Relief staggered him, and Lee tore his gaze from her foot to her face.
Tenten grinned, wolfish. “I’ve gotten my miracle. Now it’s the underclassman’s turn. Give me back my shoe.”
They moved quickly, necessity speeding their actions. Tenten had made a quick stop at Neji’s ruined car where she quietly broke the passenger’s side window and retrieved her jacket. It hung around her hips now, the sleeves knotted tightly around her waist. Lee gave his bat to Neji before creeping up to the long empty side of the SUV. Shikamaru was still up top, but he was only halfheartedly swinging at the tireless hands. Neji and Tenten circled behind the creatures, silently and out of their line of sight.
“Are you ready?” Shikamaru asked. When they all agreed, he backed away from the crowded edge and toward Lee.
He heard the sound of two sets of running feet. When Shikamaru tossed down his baseball bat, Lee caught it and set it down, leaning it against the driver’s side door.
As Shikamaru awkwardly got down onto his hands and good knee, there were the first sounds of metal hitting flesh. The injured boy tried to move faster, hissed a curse, but finally managed to twist about so he was sitting on the edge, his legs dangling right in front of Lee.
He reached up; Shikamaru reached down. Their hands met and gripped each other, the sophomore leaning over nearly bent double. “Gotcha,” Lee said under the cover of snapping bones. “On three. One. Two.”
Tenten yelled a warning to Neji.
“Three.”
Shikamaru half slid, half fell down the side of the SUV. Lee slowed his fall as best he could, and between them they kept the younger boy upright upon impact with the ground. “You okay?”
“Fine.” Shikamaru freed one of his hands so he could snatch up his baseball bat from its resting place. “Got it.”
On the other side of the SUV there were the sounds of calm violence.
Lee turned around, hunching over, his back to Shikamaru’s front. After a few awkward seconds, Shikamaru was on his back, legs clamped around his hips, free arm gripping him across his upper chest. Lee adjusted his hold under Shikamaru’s thighs, grateful now more than ever for the hellish weight training his mentor had put him through.
He took a test step, and Shikamaru’s grip tightened on him in response. “You okay?” Shikamaru asked.
“Yeah.” He raised his voice and his sprits with it. “Let’s go!”
“Okay!”
He started at a jog, away from the SUV and the town of Fairfield, away from their immediate danger. By the time he hit the road, Tenten and Neji were by his sides, keeping watch behind them while he and Shikamaru scanned the fields ahead.
They were nearly a mile away from the high school when a car came racing down the road. It slowed, and a blond head popped out of the passenger window.
Naruto grinned at them. “Need a ride?”
And we begin Act II with Naruto
Unbeta'd, as all my zombie pieces are. It also marks my very first foray into the mind of Lee. Huzzah? Comments, constructive criticism, etc., are always welcome.
Original drabble by askerian
Act IAct II
Scene I, Sasuke
Scene I, Naruto
Scene II, Shikamaru
Scene II, Sasuke
Scene III, Neji
Scene III, Tenten
Scene IV, Tenten
Scene IV, Sakura
Scene V, Lee
Helplessness wasn’t a feeling that Lee was familiar with. He had been disappointed, worried, frightened, and even discouraged, but helplessness, that was foreign. Until this afternoon. Helplessness was a pernicious, creeping thing, something that seeped in past your lips and down your throat, clogged your lungs, stole the strength from your muscles, smothered the fire in your heart.
It was watching your mentor get his head beaten in by an underclassman. It was swearing to protect a fragile boy and then killing him without hesitation when there was no other choice. It was being trapped on top of an SUV while your best friends tried to save you.
And failed.
Neji was still stuck inside his ruined car, and Tenten--
She stood over the corpse of the thing that had bitten down on her left food, her crowbar dangling from her fingertips. Her face was pale, her eyes wide and unseeing. Four of the monsters were pulling or stumbling their way toward her, but she didn’t move, didn’t react.
He screamed her name and swung wildly at a mangled hand that reached for Shikamaru’s ankle. His vision blurred with tears, but he knew he had connected by the way the impact shuddered its way up the bat. When he blinked again to clear his vision and looked back toward her, Tenten had moved.
She was too practical, too self-controlled to scream like he had when he had tried to save Raidon. There was just the quiet determination that he had always admired--there was a job to do, and she knew how to do it. She ran for the next closest creature, using all of her speed, power, and momentum to clothesline it across the neck. It dropped, and without a moment’s delay, she shifted her grip on the crowbar and brought it down hard.
Lee could not afford to just watch her move, not when he had his own job. She was counting on him to keep Shikamaru safe. She had told him to stay where he was, and he was going to, no matter what.
He wouldn’t fail her. Or Shikamaru, or Neji. He was going to be who, and what, they needed him to be.
“How--” Lee cleared his throat and tried again, willing his voice to steady. “How much time do you think she has?” He took a step out of another creature’s grasping fingers. He swung the bat, trying again to make contact with its skull, but his bat didn’t have a long enough reach. The SUV’s height made it a great place to stay safe, but it also meant the things they wanted to kill were mostly safe from them.
Shikamaru gave a small grunt of pain, shifting slightly to readjust his balance. He had been crouched like that for nearly twenty minutes, and between his knee and his cramping muscles, sweat was darkening his shirt between the shoulder blades. “A few minutes, probably.” His voice was flat, tense, and Lee could see him turn his head slightly to catch a glimpse of the nearby wreckage.
By the time Neji managed to extract himself from his car, Tenten had finished off all the things that he had run down. She was limping slightly, favoring the foot that had been bitten, and the brief moments Lee allowed himself to check on her had just barely kept his last bit of hope alive. She hadn’t been lost yet.
“Now what?” Tenten called out. Her voice was strong and clear, her eyes darting back and forth between people. “Neji, stay away from me.”
Neji stopped about ten feet away from her, wiping oozing blood off his face with one sleeve, his other gripping his baseball bat. “We’re better together.” He still looked a little unsteady, and Lee wondered how badly he had hit his head.
“I was bitten, idiot.” Her voice cracked on that last word. “I don’t know how long--”
“Tenten--”
Before the argument could really begin, Shikamaru interrupted. “We don’t have time for this, if Tenten is right about being bitten. We have to use her before she turns on us.”
The phrase turns on us made Lee feel sick, horribly so. Could he do it again? When he had killed Raidon, it had been in the middle of a fight for his life, he had smashed in the boy’s face without time for deliberation. It had been cold and automatic, the final conclusion in a horrible logic game.
It was only after the boy had stopped moving that the tears had started. Could he do the same thing again, to one of his best friends? Could he look her in the face as he beat her skull into a bloody pulp? He forced himself to not start gagging, even as he felt the horribly determination settle into his heart.
He could do it. He would do it. Because it had to be done, and because he wouldn’t force anyone else to make such a choice. Tenten deserved nothing less from him.
“There are nine left.” Shikamaru continued, though exhaustion and pain were starting to leak into his voice. “These things seem to fixate when they have prey in their sights. If you can be quiet enough, you should be able to sneak up on them, at least in the initial moments.”
He had to stop again, groaning softly as he tried to straighten out his back. Lee reached out briefly to rest a hand on his shoulder and steady him. Shikamaru muttered a thanks. “Tenten, circle around to the front. You’re going to act as bait. Hit a few of them, and see if you can lead them away from the SUV. Try to get them as close to the wall of the school as possible.”
“Got it.”
Neji scowled, but he didn’t protest when Tenten began moving around in a wide arc toward the side that had been cleared.
“Lee, Neji, if she can get a few to follow her, back her up and take them down. Use the school to box them in. Keep doing that, until only a couple are left. Don’t let the ones on the other two sides see you, because if they all go for you at once, you’ll be overwhelmed.”
“What are you going to do?” Lee asked as his friends started moving.
To his surprise, Shikamaru twisted around and planted both hands on the roof of the car. He started to push himself upright, swearing under his breath from the pain.
Lee made a few quick jabs with his baseball bat to keep stray hands away from the younger boy. After a few seconds, Shikamaru was upright, leaning heavily on his baseball bat like it was a short cane. He tried to smile, but grimaced instead, sweat running down his face. “I’m going to look as delicious as possible.”
The first part of the plan went flawlessly. Tenten was able to entice the three creatures away from the hood of the SUV. Lee slid down the empty side behind them, and between the two of them and Neji, they were able to make short and bloody work of dispatching them. Shikamaru did his own part, hobbling toward the tail of the vehicle, waving his free hand around and getting perilously close to their broken hands, making sure the rest of them were wholly focused on him.
Lee wiped some gore off his neck with the back of his hand once the third thing lay still. Tenten was still pale, and she didn’t return his fledgling smile of accomplishment. Instead, she edged away from him, and Neji.
The movement made Neji scowl. “Tenten--”
“Don’t start with me,” she snapped back at him. “If I’m not s-sick, then it doesn’t matter.” Her breath hitched, and she tried to cover it by turning her back on them and marching back toward the SUV. “And if I am bitten, then I’d rather spend my last minutes bashing these bastards’ heads in than terrified one of you is going to sneak up behind me and bash my head in.”
Raidon’s face flashed before his eyes, how the boy’s expression had been a nauseating mixture of horror and despair as Lee brought down the baseball bat. Lee watched Tenten stride away, her shoulders square despite the weight of the crowbar slung across one of them, and vowed that if it came to that, she would not see him coming.
It was then that Shikamaru’s tense voice rang out. “Get out of here.”
Lee glanced up from Tenten’s back and to the boy on top of the SUV. He shuffled backward a step or two, baseball bat screeching across the metal roof. Lee glanced around quickly, but he couldn’t see anything, no movements unaccounted for.
“What’s wrong?” Neji called back.
Shikamaru glanced back at them briefly, his lips stretched in a resigned grin. And then he pointed off toward the distance. “There are more.”
Lee’s heart began to pound, something in the way Shikamaru said it sending dread throughout the whole of him. The SUV was blocking his line of sight, and so Lee took a few running steps to the right, clearing the way. For a moment, nothing looked out of place, just the baseball diamond with its late spring grass, restless stalks of corn butting up against the chain link fence, and cutting through the fields and hills the winding gray of an old country road.
But the gray of that road wasn’t still. When Lee squinted and shielded his eyes from the early evening sun, the formless gray changed, just enough to make out other colors: blues and greens and pinks and whites and purples and browns and blacks.
Clothes, and the people wearing them. Moving silently, without cars or motorcycles or bikes, without the crying and the shouting and the talking of frantic refugees. Shambling, aimless, except for the need to find something living.
Lee had lived his whole life in Fairfield. A town so small it wasn’t even officially a town, just a handful of streets and a corner store that sold bread and milk and beer to people who couldn’t spare the gas to drive to a real grocery store until after the next paycheck came.
The creatures that were trickling this way were coming from Fairfield.
What he and Shikamaru had been fighting in the parking lot weren’t stragglers, unlucky creatures taken by chance, abnormal things in a normal world.
They were merely the things that had been closest.
“Get out of here,” Shikamaru repeated without looking at them again. He shifted his weight onto his uninjured leg so he could free up his bat to swipe weakly at a nearby hand. “Run. You guys should be able to stay ahead of them. Find somewhere to hole up. You can’t make a stand here, not against that many.”
“No.” It came out without thinking. Lee didn’t need to think about it. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
“Yeah, you are. I’d just slow you down.” The younger boy’s voice was flat, empty of everything except for a tiny bit of tension.
“I’m not!”
“Lee--”
He tried to shrug Neji’s hand off his shoulder. “I’m not going to let him die, too!” He could imagine Raidon’s screams, remembered what it was like to feel the skull give way beneath his hands.
“I’m not going to put you three in danger.”
“He’s right. I know you don’t like hearing it, but--”
“I can save you!”
“If you keep yelling, you’ll just bring them all after you. That’s my job.”
“--we don’t have much choice, Lee.”
“I can’t--” Something white came flying at his face, and Lee ducked, barely in time. He and Neji sprang apart, and the missile--a well-worn running sneaker--clattered to the pavement behind him.
Tenten stood there, left foot bare, looking for all the world as if she wanted nothing more than to smack his and Neji’s skulls together with her crowbar. “That’s enough, you morons.”
Lee looked down at her naked foot. Even from this far away he could see how her skin was darker in a little semicircle, where teeth had clamped down on her foot. The bruising had already started.
But there was no blood.
Relief staggered him, and Lee tore his gaze from her foot to her face.
Tenten grinned, wolfish. “I’ve gotten my miracle. Now it’s the underclassman’s turn. Give me back my shoe.”
They moved quickly, necessity speeding their actions. Tenten had made a quick stop at Neji’s ruined car where she quietly broke the passenger’s side window and retrieved her jacket. It hung around her hips now, the sleeves knotted tightly around her waist. Lee gave his bat to Neji before creeping up to the long empty side of the SUV. Shikamaru was still up top, but he was only halfheartedly swinging at the tireless hands. Neji and Tenten circled behind the creatures, silently and out of their line of sight.
“Are you ready?” Shikamaru asked. When they all agreed, he backed away from the crowded edge and toward Lee.
He heard the sound of two sets of running feet. When Shikamaru tossed down his baseball bat, Lee caught it and set it down, leaning it against the driver’s side door.
As Shikamaru awkwardly got down onto his hands and good knee, there were the first sounds of metal hitting flesh. The injured boy tried to move faster, hissed a curse, but finally managed to twist about so he was sitting on the edge, his legs dangling right in front of Lee.
He reached up; Shikamaru reached down. Their hands met and gripped each other, the sophomore leaning over nearly bent double. “Gotcha,” Lee said under the cover of snapping bones. “On three. One. Two.”
Tenten yelled a warning to Neji.
“Three.”
Shikamaru half slid, half fell down the side of the SUV. Lee slowed his fall as best he could, and between them they kept the younger boy upright upon impact with the ground. “You okay?”
“Fine.” Shikamaru freed one of his hands so he could snatch up his baseball bat from its resting place. “Got it.”
On the other side of the SUV there were the sounds of calm violence.
Lee turned around, hunching over, his back to Shikamaru’s front. After a few awkward seconds, Shikamaru was on his back, legs clamped around his hips, free arm gripping him across his upper chest. Lee adjusted his hold under Shikamaru’s thighs, grateful now more than ever for the hellish weight training his mentor had put him through.
He took a test step, and Shikamaru’s grip tightened on him in response. “You okay?” Shikamaru asked.
“Yeah.” He raised his voice and his sprits with it. “Let’s go!”
“Okay!”
He started at a jog, away from the SUV and the town of Fairfield, away from their immediate danger. By the time he hit the road, Tenten and Neji were by his sides, keeping watch behind them while he and Shikamaru scanned the fields ahead.
They were nearly a mile away from the high school when a car came racing down the road. It slowed, and a blond head popped out of the passenger window.
Naruto grinned at them. “Need a ride?”
And we begin Act II with Naruto