Vurt Ninjas 14
Note: What Ino was referring to in her conversation with Sasuke is the fact that shadowgirls/boys were originally created when people drugged up on Fecundity10 had sex with corpses. Don't ask me how the gestation and birthing process went, Mr. Noon conveniently skipped over that part.
In which Ino is really not kidding about that threat.
As they had both gone through the side effects of getting Vurt in their blood, Naruto and Sasuke knew that it was going to affect Sakura eventually too. Naruto kept the four Konohas he'd bought from Kabuto hidden in a box full of old manga beneath the bed, waiting until the inevitable passed.
Sasuke had yet to start looking for a new job since the evening Itachi had told him that if he really wanted his help, he needed to prove it, and Sasuke had consequently left the phone on and hidden in his pocket so Itachi could hear the limbic splitter run down and the club manager tell him loudly to get the fuck out and not come back. This left him with a lot of free time, and meant his sleeping schedule was still rather erratic.
Despite that, he was awake when the phone rang early Tuesday afternoon.
"What," he finally answered, when the person on the other end had called back for the third time.
"Are you Sasuke?"
"Who's asking."
"It's Ino," she replied tersely. "You need to come get Sakura."
He exhaled quietly. "What happened?"
"We were out shopping, and then she just . . . got weird. When we came up to this hairdresser, she went in and said she wanted her hair cut and dyed pink. And she's not listening to me--I called as soon as she went into the back."
Sasuke closed his eyes. "You should call Naruto. He's better at deal--"
"She's calling me 'Ino-chan,' asshole," Ino interrupted. "I know about that damn game. So you need to come down here and tell her to--I don't know, but fix it!"
It took Sasuke a few moments to relax his shoulders enough to start looking for a scrap of paper. "Where are you?"
He hung up as soon as Ino gave him the address, and then speed-dialed Jiraiya's office from his cell as he went to get his jacket.
"Get a damn cell phone already," was the first thing he said when Naruto picked up.
He took the bus, because it was faster than waiting to try and catch a taxi.
Ino looked up from the magazine she'd been glaring at when the bell over the door rang, and then tossed it aside and stood as Sasuke stepped inside.
"Took you long enough!" she snapped, folding her arms. "She's practically done."
"It's just hair," he replied in a voice a few registers higher than natural, looking over the partition. He could see Sakura in one of the seats in the middle, but she was sitting with her back to him, listening to a woman explain something.
"You don't think it's going to hurt her, to look like that?" Ino replied, and this time a little of the aggressiveness in her voice had faded to genuine concern.
Sasuke shrugged a shoulder tiredly. "She's not stupid. It'll wear off."
"Getting infected with Vurt doesn't just 'wear--'"
"Sasuke-kun!"
"Fuck," Sasuke muttered, and looked over again. Sakura had pushed herself out of the seat and was trotting over.
"How do I look?" she asked, with a nervous, slightly pleading expression that disturbed Sasuke more than he let show. That expression would have been fine in a context of wood buildings with cables jerry-rigged haphazardly along them and the remains of old leaves underfoot no matter what the season, but in a small store that smelled of chemicals with the noise of the cars racing along the street barely muted by the glass, it was wrong.
"Fine," Sasuke replied, dropping both the pitch and volume of his voice and hoping that no one else was close enough to overhear. He nodded at the door. "Let's go."
"Okay! Just let me get out of this--" she gestured vaguely to the smock she'd been wearing, to keep the dye off her skin and clothes "--and pay, and I'll be right there!"
He nodded once again, and turned towards the door. "I'll wait outside."
"Right." She grabbed Ino's arm abruptly and started pulling her past the partition, to the small restroom in the back. "C'mon, Ino-chan, don't bug him."
"Excuse me?" Ino retorted, and then made an 'urk' noise when Sakura just pulled harder.
When they came out, Sasuke was leaning against the small portion of brick wall between the display windows of the hairdresser's and the clothing store beside it, slightly hunched over. The weather had turned during the last week, but he deliberately kept wearing a jacket too light for the chill, to have an excuse for keeping his hood low on his face. Sakura immediately slipped her hand through one of his arms and held on, shifting in the process so that she was between him and Ino.
Sasuke noted that Sakura didn't seem fazed by the cars or the mostly metal and stone buildings, and didn't bother trying to distangle her arm. Instead, he straightened away from the wall and looked over at Ino. "Where'd you park?"
"Around the back . . ." she replied, turning slightly and pointing to the corner of the block.
"Are you ready to go home?" he asked, and looked at Sakura's face as he added: "Naruto's waiting for us."
The expression on Sakura's face shifted at that, moving to something between the Vurt and the real, and Sasuke figured that was the best he could hope for at the moment.
He nodded faintly at Ino, and then began to follow her as she led the way to the car. Sakura walked next to him, arm still linked through his but not leaning on him like she had been before.
They made it to the parking lot before Sakura pulled her arm away. Sasuke stopped as she rubbed a hand against her eyes; Ino noticed and paused a moment after, turning partly to face them.
Sakura kept the hand over her eyes for another moment, and then pressed both of her hands over her ears, curling in on herself as she did.
"Sakura?" Ino asked worriedly, stepping closer. "Are you okay?"
"Sasuke," she said softly, eyes still squeezed shut, "can you knock me out again?"
Ino made a 'what?' face. Sasuke spoke louder than usual, so Sakura would be able to hear him. "Naruto'll kill me."
"I'm going crazy."
Sasuke exhaled, and then reached out and tugged one of Sakura's hands away from her ear, to have the room to set his own against her neck.
"Hey!" Ino said sharply, and then moved to help him catch Sakura when she slumped. "Asshole!"
"You heard her ask," he said with irritation. "Are you going to drive us home or should I just get a damn cab?"
Ino glared at him for five full seconds. When Sasuke remained nonplussed, she wrenched her keys out of her purse and stomped towards the car.
She unlocked the passenger side door before moving to the driver's side; Sasuke opened it just long enough to unlock the back door and then closed it again. Ino's annoyed expression became slightly more annoyed, but all she did was lean over and relock it.
It took Sasuke some effort to get Sakura into the backseat and buckled up, because Ino's car had different belts than he was used to. He managed after about a minute, however. Ino started the car after he'd slid in via the opposite door and shifted so that he was sitting in the middle, next to Sakura. He made an irritated noise when she started backing out of the parking spot before he'd gotten his seatbelt on.
Ino was silent until they were several streets away; and when she spoke, what she said was: "Were you an original?"
Sasuke gave her a disgusted look.
"What?" she asked flippantly, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. "If you aren't, that just means the corpse is further back in your ancestors."
"It's none of your fucking business," he snapped.
"I am," Ino replied, focusing on the road again. "I ran away from home when I learned about it."
He shifted in his seat.
"Never went back," Ino continued, making a left. "Sakura hid me in her room for a few days, and helped me pick enough pockets at the mall to pay for a cheap room near the outskirts."
In spite of everything, Sasuke couldn't help raising an eyebrow at that.
"She kept making me go to school, too," Ino added. "And this was despite the fact that her parents didn't like me, because I was a shadowgirl--did you know they cut her off after she insisted on being my roommate after we graduated high school?"
"No," he replied, after Ino had waited expectantly for several seconds. "She doesn't talk about them."
Ino snorted. And then she looked at him in the rearview again.
"Sakura's my best friend," she said seriously. "If you or Naruto have fucked her up with this game, I'll kill you."
". . . You'll be caught," Sasuke pointed out. "Even if you use your shadow to head trip us and make us kill ourselves, it'll still leave traces."
"Once Shikamaru gets off his ass and passes bar, he could free someone who assassinated the Emperor with witnesses," Ino replied with only a little exaggeration. "I can wait."
Sasuke stared at her in the rearview mirror for two more streetlights, but Ino didn't deign to look at him. Finally he snorted and looked out the window that Sakura wasn't slouched against.
He'd considered warning her that his brother wouldn't tolerate someone tampering with an extension of his private life, but then decided he didn't owe the woman that big a favor, even for Sakura's sake. And it wasn't like the Vurt version had done anything but annoy him.
Ino insisted on helping him carry Sakura up to the apartment. Naruto had already arrived, and answered the door too quickly to have been doing anything other than pacing in the main room. As Sasuke had predicted, the first thing Naruto did when he saw Sakura--after gaping at her hair--was yell at him.
He hadn't predicted that Ino would back him up that it had been at Sakura's request this time, regardless of how indignantly she went about it. Naruto made irritated growling noises and carried Sakura to the bedroom himself.
"Hey!" Ino said, when Sasuke was about to step into the apartment now that Naruto was no longer blocking the way. She reached out and caught his elbow.
He restrained the now-reflexive urge to attack at unfamiliar contact and glared at her. Ino echoed the expression.
"When she wakes up, call me, okay?" She let go of his coat, and the glare eased slightly. "Even if she's not ready to see me yet. Call me."
"Fine," Sasuke said, and set a hand against the door.
Ino pursed her lips, but finally huffed and turned sharply, tossing her ponytail over her shoulder with a smooth motion of her head as she did. Sasuke shut the door.
When Naruto had finished pulling off Sakura's shoes, tucking a blanket over her, trying to gently shake her awake, and generally fussing, he came back to the main room to find Sasuke lying on the couch with his arms folded over his eyes. Naruto looked at him for a few moments, and then pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat down backwards in it, draping his arms along the back.
". . . Think she'll be okay?" he finally asked.
"How should I know!?" Sasuke snapped, with the anger of someone who's been asked and asked themselves the same question too many times in one day.
Naruto, not knowing these extenuating circumstances, gave him an irritated glare.
He couldn't maintain it for long, though, and dropped his chin to his arms, turning to look at the bedroom door again. "You were weird for a while after, but I thought since she's just a pure human. . . . Do you two have anything in common?" he mused with badly faked casualness, but Sasuke gave him credit for not mentioning the girl thing.
"You were weird too," he pointed out instead. "It just wasn't as obvious because we weren't playing yet."
Naruto frowned and looked back at him. "I was not! How?"
"You didn't bring any of your girls home until after you got bit," Sasuke said. "That was pretty fucking weird."
Naruto made a dramatic motion with his hand. "But, she's Sakura! Of course I--. . . uh, wait. Girls?"
Sasuke let his arms drop to his chest and gave him a Look.
". . . eheh," he mumbled, slouching down and ducking his head behind his arms, until only above his eyes was visible over the back of the chair. ". . . I'm sorry, Sasuke. I. . . ."
Naruto paused, realized that he had no excuse, and therefore didn't try to give one. He slouched down a little further.
"Whatever," Sasuke replied, folding his arms over his eyes again. "It's not like I expected any better from a rutting dog anyway."
". . . Asshole."
If Sasuke had intended to make some biting quip in response to that, it was prevented by the shout from the bedroom.
"Oh my God!"
Naruto straightened up somewhat, looked down the hallway, and then looked at Sasuke.
". . . I brought her home," the other man replied.
There was no arguing with that. Naruto exhaled, and then shoved himself up and away from the chair with the air of a man going to meet his fate. In the meanwhile, Sakura had thrown open the bedroom door and rushed to the bathroom. "What did I do?!"
"Hey," Naruto said, approaching the door, "Sakura, calm down, calm down."
"My hair is hers." Sakura swore. "What was I thinking?!"
". . . I have no idea. Hey, at least you didn't pick a fight with Ino?"
Dead silence followed. He could imagine the look Naruto was getting, regardless of whether he had a point or not.
Sasuke let his arms drop to his chest again and stared up at the ceiling, only half-listening while Sakura and Naruto went on talking.
In which Ino is really not kidding about that threat.
As they had both gone through the side effects of getting Vurt in their blood, Naruto and Sasuke knew that it was going to affect Sakura eventually too. Naruto kept the four Konohas he'd bought from Kabuto hidden in a box full of old manga beneath the bed, waiting until the inevitable passed.
Sasuke had yet to start looking for a new job since the evening Itachi had told him that if he really wanted his help, he needed to prove it, and Sasuke had consequently left the phone on and hidden in his pocket so Itachi could hear the limbic splitter run down and the club manager tell him loudly to get the fuck out and not come back. This left him with a lot of free time, and meant his sleeping schedule was still rather erratic.
Despite that, he was awake when the phone rang early Tuesday afternoon.
"What," he finally answered, when the person on the other end had called back for the third time.
"Are you Sasuke?"
"Who's asking."
"It's Ino," she replied tersely. "You need to come get Sakura."
He exhaled quietly. "What happened?"
"We were out shopping, and then she just . . . got weird. When we came up to this hairdresser, she went in and said she wanted her hair cut and dyed pink. And she's not listening to me--I called as soon as she went into the back."
Sasuke closed his eyes. "You should call Naruto. He's better at deal--"
"She's calling me 'Ino-chan,' asshole," Ino interrupted. "I know about that damn game. So you need to come down here and tell her to--I don't know, but fix it!"
It took Sasuke a few moments to relax his shoulders enough to start looking for a scrap of paper. "Where are you?"
He hung up as soon as Ino gave him the address, and then speed-dialed Jiraiya's office from his cell as he went to get his jacket.
"Get a damn cell phone already," was the first thing he said when Naruto picked up.
He took the bus, because it was faster than waiting to try and catch a taxi.
Ino looked up from the magazine she'd been glaring at when the bell over the door rang, and then tossed it aside and stood as Sasuke stepped inside.
"Took you long enough!" she snapped, folding her arms. "She's practically done."
"It's just hair," he replied in a voice a few registers higher than natural, looking over the partition. He could see Sakura in one of the seats in the middle, but she was sitting with her back to him, listening to a woman explain something.
"You don't think it's going to hurt her, to look like that?" Ino replied, and this time a little of the aggressiveness in her voice had faded to genuine concern.
Sasuke shrugged a shoulder tiredly. "She's not stupid. It'll wear off."
"Getting infected with Vurt doesn't just 'wear--'"
"Sasuke-kun!"
"Fuck," Sasuke muttered, and looked over again. Sakura had pushed herself out of the seat and was trotting over.
"How do I look?" she asked, with a nervous, slightly pleading expression that disturbed Sasuke more than he let show. That expression would have been fine in a context of wood buildings with cables jerry-rigged haphazardly along them and the remains of old leaves underfoot no matter what the season, but in a small store that smelled of chemicals with the noise of the cars racing along the street barely muted by the glass, it was wrong.
"Fine," Sasuke replied, dropping both the pitch and volume of his voice and hoping that no one else was close enough to overhear. He nodded at the door. "Let's go."
"Okay! Just let me get out of this--" she gestured vaguely to the smock she'd been wearing, to keep the dye off her skin and clothes "--and pay, and I'll be right there!"
He nodded once again, and turned towards the door. "I'll wait outside."
"Right." She grabbed Ino's arm abruptly and started pulling her past the partition, to the small restroom in the back. "C'mon, Ino-chan, don't bug him."
"Excuse me?" Ino retorted, and then made an 'urk' noise when Sakura just pulled harder.
When they came out, Sasuke was leaning against the small portion of brick wall between the display windows of the hairdresser's and the clothing store beside it, slightly hunched over. The weather had turned during the last week, but he deliberately kept wearing a jacket too light for the chill, to have an excuse for keeping his hood low on his face. Sakura immediately slipped her hand through one of his arms and held on, shifting in the process so that she was between him and Ino.
Sasuke noted that Sakura didn't seem fazed by the cars or the mostly metal and stone buildings, and didn't bother trying to distangle her arm. Instead, he straightened away from the wall and looked over at Ino. "Where'd you park?"
"Around the back . . ." she replied, turning slightly and pointing to the corner of the block.
"Are you ready to go home?" he asked, and looked at Sakura's face as he added: "Naruto's waiting for us."
The expression on Sakura's face shifted at that, moving to something between the Vurt and the real, and Sasuke figured that was the best he could hope for at the moment.
He nodded faintly at Ino, and then began to follow her as she led the way to the car. Sakura walked next to him, arm still linked through his but not leaning on him like she had been before.
They made it to the parking lot before Sakura pulled her arm away. Sasuke stopped as she rubbed a hand against her eyes; Ino noticed and paused a moment after, turning partly to face them.
Sakura kept the hand over her eyes for another moment, and then pressed both of her hands over her ears, curling in on herself as she did.
"Sakura?" Ino asked worriedly, stepping closer. "Are you okay?"
"Sasuke," she said softly, eyes still squeezed shut, "can you knock me out again?"
Ino made a 'what?' face. Sasuke spoke louder than usual, so Sakura would be able to hear him. "Naruto'll kill me."
"I'm going crazy."
Sasuke exhaled, and then reached out and tugged one of Sakura's hands away from her ear, to have the room to set his own against her neck.
"Hey!" Ino said sharply, and then moved to help him catch Sakura when she slumped. "Asshole!"
"You heard her ask," he said with irritation. "Are you going to drive us home or should I just get a damn cab?"
Ino glared at him for five full seconds. When Sasuke remained nonplussed, she wrenched her keys out of her purse and stomped towards the car.
She unlocked the passenger side door before moving to the driver's side; Sasuke opened it just long enough to unlock the back door and then closed it again. Ino's annoyed expression became slightly more annoyed, but all she did was lean over and relock it.
It took Sasuke some effort to get Sakura into the backseat and buckled up, because Ino's car had different belts than he was used to. He managed after about a minute, however. Ino started the car after he'd slid in via the opposite door and shifted so that he was sitting in the middle, next to Sakura. He made an irritated noise when she started backing out of the parking spot before he'd gotten his seatbelt on.
Ino was silent until they were several streets away; and when she spoke, what she said was: "Were you an original?"
Sasuke gave her a disgusted look.
"What?" she asked flippantly, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. "If you aren't, that just means the corpse is further back in your ancestors."
"It's none of your fucking business," he snapped.
"I am," Ino replied, focusing on the road again. "I ran away from home when I learned about it."
He shifted in his seat.
"Never went back," Ino continued, making a left. "Sakura hid me in her room for a few days, and helped me pick enough pockets at the mall to pay for a cheap room near the outskirts."
In spite of everything, Sasuke couldn't help raising an eyebrow at that.
"She kept making me go to school, too," Ino added. "And this was despite the fact that her parents didn't like me, because I was a shadowgirl--did you know they cut her off after she insisted on being my roommate after we graduated high school?"
"No," he replied, after Ino had waited expectantly for several seconds. "She doesn't talk about them."
Ino snorted. And then she looked at him in the rearview again.
"Sakura's my best friend," she said seriously. "If you or Naruto have fucked her up with this game, I'll kill you."
". . . You'll be caught," Sasuke pointed out. "Even if you use your shadow to head trip us and make us kill ourselves, it'll still leave traces."
"Once Shikamaru gets off his ass and passes bar, he could free someone who assassinated the Emperor with witnesses," Ino replied with only a little exaggeration. "I can wait."
Sasuke stared at her in the rearview mirror for two more streetlights, but Ino didn't deign to look at him. Finally he snorted and looked out the window that Sakura wasn't slouched against.
He'd considered warning her that his brother wouldn't tolerate someone tampering with an extension of his private life, but then decided he didn't owe the woman that big a favor, even for Sakura's sake. And it wasn't like the Vurt version had done anything but annoy him.
Ino insisted on helping him carry Sakura up to the apartment. Naruto had already arrived, and answered the door too quickly to have been doing anything other than pacing in the main room. As Sasuke had predicted, the first thing Naruto did when he saw Sakura--after gaping at her hair--was yell at him.
He hadn't predicted that Ino would back him up that it had been at Sakura's request this time, regardless of how indignantly she went about it. Naruto made irritated growling noises and carried Sakura to the bedroom himself.
"Hey!" Ino said, when Sasuke was about to step into the apartment now that Naruto was no longer blocking the way. She reached out and caught his elbow.
He restrained the now-reflexive urge to attack at unfamiliar contact and glared at her. Ino echoed the expression.
"When she wakes up, call me, okay?" She let go of his coat, and the glare eased slightly. "Even if she's not ready to see me yet. Call me."
"Fine," Sasuke said, and set a hand against the door.
Ino pursed her lips, but finally huffed and turned sharply, tossing her ponytail over her shoulder with a smooth motion of her head as she did. Sasuke shut the door.
When Naruto had finished pulling off Sakura's shoes, tucking a blanket over her, trying to gently shake her awake, and generally fussing, he came back to the main room to find Sasuke lying on the couch with his arms folded over his eyes. Naruto looked at him for a few moments, and then pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat down backwards in it, draping his arms along the back.
". . . Think she'll be okay?" he finally asked.
"How should I know!?" Sasuke snapped, with the anger of someone who's been asked and asked themselves the same question too many times in one day.
Naruto, not knowing these extenuating circumstances, gave him an irritated glare.
He couldn't maintain it for long, though, and dropped his chin to his arms, turning to look at the bedroom door again. "You were weird for a while after, but I thought since she's just a pure human. . . . Do you two have anything in common?" he mused with badly faked casualness, but Sasuke gave him credit for not mentioning the girl thing.
"You were weird too," he pointed out instead. "It just wasn't as obvious because we weren't playing yet."
Naruto frowned and looked back at him. "I was not! How?"
"You didn't bring any of your girls home until after you got bit," Sasuke said. "That was pretty fucking weird."
Naruto made a dramatic motion with his hand. "But, she's Sakura! Of course I--. . . uh, wait. Girls?"
Sasuke let his arms drop to his chest and gave him a Look.
". . . eheh," he mumbled, slouching down and ducking his head behind his arms, until only above his eyes was visible over the back of the chair. ". . . I'm sorry, Sasuke. I. . . ."
Naruto paused, realized that he had no excuse, and therefore didn't try to give one. He slouched down a little further.
"Whatever," Sasuke replied, folding his arms over his eyes again. "It's not like I expected any better from a rutting dog anyway."
". . . Asshole."
If Sasuke had intended to make some biting quip in response to that, it was prevented by the shout from the bedroom.
"Oh my God!"
Naruto straightened up somewhat, looked down the hallway, and then looked at Sasuke.
". . . I brought her home," the other man replied.
There was no arguing with that. Naruto exhaled, and then shoved himself up and away from the chair with the air of a man going to meet his fate. In the meanwhile, Sakura had thrown open the bedroom door and rushed to the bathroom. "What did I do?!"
"Hey," Naruto said, approaching the door, "Sakura, calm down, calm down."
"My hair is hers." Sakura swore. "What was I thinking?!"
". . . I have no idea. Hey, at least you didn't pick a fight with Ino?"
Dead silence followed. He could imagine the look Naruto was getting, regardless of whether he had a point or not.
Sasuke let his arms drop to his chest again and stared up at the ceiling, only half-listening while Sakura and Naruto went on talking.