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Post by Danna on Oct 21, 2009 23:37:16 GMT -5
"Then, tell me your side of things, Aya-tan." He replied patiently, unmoving. As much as he hated that it had come to this, he knew that he had to keep himself steeled. Something was certainly amiss. But speaking to her like this was draining. If only it hadn't had to come this far...
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Post by Jackstraw on Oct 22, 2009 2:37:15 GMT -5
"Hm..."
Her fingers tensed against his chest for a moment before pulling away entirely, leaving him there as she took a seat on the edge of the desk; she sat there for a long moment, looking thoughtful and fiddling with her hair some. After a long moment, she began to speak slowly, recounting the escalation into war, her brother's plan and her extermination of it, her relationship with her teacher and how he met his end, up to the final battle that crowned her Hokage. She grew quiet after that, looking troubled.
"....you--or rather, Isamu--were correct in that I had sealed myself; my memories, experiences... I don't quite remember when exactly now. My mind's still foggy after so long being under..." She pursed her lips, brow furrowing some as she thought harder on it. "But "...I remember... what happened to the previous Kazekage. I'd become the sole candidate for Hokage at that point, the Council already consulted me on such matters already; I authorized their plan with so little thought..."
Her facial expression twitched somewhat, eyes widening a little, staring harder at the floor.
"My god, things shouldn't have turned out like that. Even then the Council.... I don't think they trusted me entirely. I... wasn't a very good person..." She fidgeted suddenly, hand diving into the pouch strapped to her side and drawing out one of her infamous jelly straws that hadn't made an appearance in several months time. "I'm not a very good person, a-am I?
"No, not very...
"It was.... hard. With Onii-sama gone..." She shook her head some, blinking at the candy clutched in her hands for a moment before her eyes narrowed and she set it aside on the desk. "I've done less than honorable things in my life, and many lives have been lost to my hand and under my watch.... I hold myself accountable. Maybe... maybe the seal was some half-assed attempt at redeeming myself for all I've done." She looked up at him, just staring for the longest moment before bowing her head to hide her face in her hands, making a rather pathetic noise. "N-no. I just wanted to s-stop seeing those faces at night... I-I couldn't wait for Isamu like that, I had to make it stop m-myself. I.... I had to stop myself..."
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Post by Danna on Oct 26, 2009 15:30:51 GMT -5
Kokoro spent a long moment in silence, his stomach churning at the thought. So, it had been her all along. Of all people...
He closed his eyes, taking a slow breath, feebly attempting to straighten out his thoughts. What a cruel act they'd been forced to act in. How many would cheer the conclusion to their pathetic drama, he wondered.
"You've only hidden yourself away from the problem. Where you could've used your position in order to make things right, you've used it as a shield to separate yourself from reality."
He opened his eyes finally, strained and sorrowful.
"Those faces are still waiting for you, Aya-tan. They won't go away simply because you're afraid to face them. Every night, every waking hour, their pain still haunts me." He clenched his fist, feeling the shock of pain he had felt all those years ago, the moment he watched his brother shut himself away into certain death.
"How...dare you think you can just walk away from the pain you inflicted on us for so long." It was all he could do to keep from crying, the sounds of his own childhood screams echoing in his ears...
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Post by Jackstraw on Oct 26, 2009 23:54:56 GMT -5
She flinched at his voice, sniffling lightly.
"I-I-I'm..... I'm not sorry." Aya lifted her head slightly, wet eyes peering over her fingertips with a queer look; they were smiling for her through the tears accumulated on her lashes. "I'm not sorry. Why should I be? Your village has been nothing but a festering wound on the shinobi world, requiring constant attention, more funds, more help; you live off of other villages, sapping them of their resources since you have none of your own, like some sort of parasite. Why, this place hasn't had an honest leader since the Sandaime Kazekage, and even then he was struck down by one of your own, was he not...?"
She sat up fully now, leaning back with a coy grin. Seeing him so hurt like that was rather exciting; perhaps soon he'd fully feel what she'd felt when he'd exposed himself as the mastermind behind everything. A mistake, he'd soon discover; after all, the master puppeteer should remain hidden, should he not?
"So go on and keep thinking that you're justified in your actions and anger; you're not." Her hand found the little candy she'd left on the desk and she popped it into her mouth idly, smile now sickly sweet. "But in the end, does it really matter? You've connived all the wrong people, taken your revenge out in all the wrong places, and killed innocent people who had little to do with this. The Council may have been money-hungry, yes, but overall were rather innocent. They saw things as they were and knew how to keep both you and I in our places; had you not killed them, they probably would have told you the truth about my involvement. Ah..." She touched her lips in pseudo-surprise, eyes widening mockingly. "I let slip my little lie. Oops. But I'm sure you could've figured it out on your own; you profess to being a genius after all."
She crossed her legs, leaning back again with a high-and-mighty air that could have rivaled her brother's, head cocked slightly and smile gone now. Her eyes were harder, locked onto him with a stare that could make blood run cold.
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Post by Danna on Nov 1, 2009 18:54:16 GMT -5
Kokoro's stomach knotted further at the uncaring display of the woman. He clenched his fist, glaring at her with renewed pain and anger. "You...shut your mouth!" He growled, his voice low and shaken. Having caused all of this pain for himself and his village...she had no right to speak about them in such a way.
"Get out of my village, and never come back. This will be the last time we can meet like this." He shook his head, returning her glare with a lifetime of pain and anger swirling in a sand colored storm.
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Post by Jackstraw on Nov 1, 2009 22:08:19 GMT -5
"Oh, please." The woman was on her feet and crossing the room toward him before one could even blink, closing the gap between them with a sweet, concerned expression that twisted any significance it could have held before. "Don't be so unkind, Kokoro. We're adults," she pressed her hands to either side of his face softly, leaning up so that her breath tickled his lips with a sly, toying grin. "I'm sure we could handle it as such if you stop being so unreasonable. I'd love nothing more than to keep you by my side; you know how I feel about you."
Her last statement was little more than a strained whisper against his lips, smile growing in a mockingly sinister way.
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Post by Danna on Nov 2, 2009 0:37:21 GMT -5
Kokoro's eyes widened, a wave of sheer rage pulsating from him, stifling the air in the room.
"Lover's lies spoken from the lips of an actor's shadow. You gloat in your atrocities and think you can still pull the strings of my heart with your blood drenched tongue?" Through the sheer rage and gut wrenching pain, every bit of attachment for this woman seemed to have been shoved deep into the bowls of his being, hidden away to haunt him in some other life. "Leave here now. Next we meet, I promise to snap the strings of your lips that play with my emotions, and replace them with my own. They'll dance to the sounds of anguish you could never imagine til the flesh of my fingers can move no longer."
His body remained unmoving, locked in a tense state of foreboding, so inhumanly still that it seemed a single twitch would be the final stroke before all hell would break loose upon them.
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Post by Jackstraw on Nov 2, 2009 1:42:17 GMT -5
Aya stared at him a moment more, eyes wide and studious behind her glasses before dropping; she stay there a moment longer before her touch dropped away as well. She inhaled, biting her lower lip idly, visibly turning his words over in her head with an unreadable expression for a long moment.
".....I.... seem to have miscalculated again; humanity is and shall probably forever be a complete mystery to me. My Achilles heel, I suppose." She turned away, fidgeting with her glasses as she made her way back to the desk in the stifling silence of the room; she paused a moment, studying the book she'd left the for a short second before picking it up with deft fingers. "I have been nothing short of honest and full with you, and I'm aware that my words probably mean very little to your ears at this point because of it, but...." She fidgeted with the small book again, looking around demurely, moving slowly in the vicious air of the room, "What I do now is not out of revenge, however petty or noble, nor out of any means of gain for myself. It's for the betterment of people like ourselves, so that we may return to a state where there will be no revenge or lies or blind politics on the part of the shinobi world; No other people who must suffer as we have due to the damned hand we've been dealt by people who have no interest in our well-being or state of mind. I would have expected you to perhaps understand that sacrifice of some life is necessary for for something so grand to be put into motion, and it's.... so very.... depressing... that we do not see eye to eye on this.... But if I must, I will fight another war for the sake of this."
She sighed, seeming to have lost any malice she'd held before. Her heels punctuated the silence as she slowly made her way across the room, her stature seeming to deflate every so slightly with each step, until only a very sad and quiet woman was left.
"And I will lay ruin to whatever stands in my way. Even you; especially you, Kokoro-san." Her voice was hardly a whisper, but she may as well have been yelling for how loud it seemed in the air. She paused as she passed him, looking up at him through the thick and fiery orange of her bangs for a moment before her eyes fell to the book in her hands; Sun Tzu's The Art of War. "I think... no.... I know this will probably be the last great battle for the both of us. And I'm sorry for everything that happens after I leave this room. I...... really did try."
Her voice faltered with her last few words, stumbling over them as though they weren't what she had intended to say. With a small sigh, she looked back ahead toward the door, the book dropping from her fingertips as she took those first few step out toward what would become a battlefield the second she closed that door.
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Post by Danna on Nov 2, 2009 3:26:09 GMT -5
The book hit the floor in careful timing with the click of the closing door. There was no pause, or time to register these events in that pin drop of a moment, only the roar of Hell bursting through the village, the office, and everything in sight. Flames, debris, and destruction tore through the air, crumbling walls, buildings, homes, in unrelenting fury.
There was no time to think, to consider, or plan. It was already upon them. And as swiftly as though he had timed the explosions himself, Kokoro's body had moved, instinct driven and bloodthirstily anguished as it had been that day so long, long ago. Screaming, crying, tearing away at his body and soul with talons of pure hate and regret, he lashed out at the face he had longed to find from lifetimes past. The face of a murderer and a lover alike.
His vengeful eyes could no longer see the difference.
A long volley of kunai had preceded him, hurtling after the woman, while a massive spiked wall of steel erupted from the ground, followed by the form of Tsume, the bear puppet, its towering form reaching out to cut off the lady Hokage's escape. Amidst the destruction, the sounds of combat had already broken out from beyond the building's walls as well.
It seemed that War had already made itself at home...
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Post by Jackstraw on Nov 3, 2009 0:27:09 GMT -5
Aya moved without thinking, veering to the side of the hallway to avoid both the projectiles and the puppet, right into the wall; her hair danced in the air for a moment, and there was a split second where it distorted, looking exactly like the flames that burst forth from another explosion just below, taking out the puppet and a good portion of the floor as the woman seemed to be sucked into a single point, disappearing right through a plain sheet of paper curiously posted on the wall before the flames consumed it entirely.
There wasn't even a moment open to comprehend what had just happened before a roughly fifty pound scroll made contact with Kokoro's head, right from above; the blow had enough forced and weight behind it, what with the combined weight of the weapon and the Lady Hokage on top of it, to send the man straight down through the quickly-crumbling floor; the woman sprang right off and into another wall, straight into and through another of the papers she'd concealed about the area on her way up, leaving the man in the debris strewn floor below, surrounded by more of the papers posted about the walls. There was hardly a second's pause before there was a tiny fluctuation in the surrounding air and hundreds of kunai burst from the tagged walls, assaulting the man from nearly every direction.
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Post by Danna on Nov 3, 2009 1:47:33 GMT -5
The body of the puppeteer twisted on impact, inhumanly compressed as its spiraled around, a flurry of steel wings erupting from its back as it took the form of Zentori, hitting the ground and shielding itself easily. Once the barrage of kunai had passed, it spread its wings, hurtling into the air, bursting through remnants of the building as it moved.
Across the building, It seemed that the other puppets had already begun systematic destruction of the building at their master's command, seeking to remove the teleportation tags that the woman seemed to have rigged, looking to seclude her possible appearance points to a limited area. It seemed she had prepared for this quite well, after all. Getting the evacuation in order had been time consuming enough that Kokoro hadn't been able to look into her traps.
But it wouldn't matter; he had his own traps that she could deal with...
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Post by Jackstraw on Nov 3, 2009 3:32:09 GMT -5
Oh, but he'd have one helluva time ensnaring her at this point; once the infamous "Librarian Kunoichi" had the story's setting to her liking, there was nothing to stop her from directing the climax with the slightest flick of her finger. After all, this whole Hell-incarnate of a village was now her playing field, for her to do with what she saw fit. Kokoro had ensured that the moment he'd denied her...
She closed her eyes, observing the various areas of entrance and exit now being demolished with the rest of the town. Well, he didn't hold much value in the historical architecture of this village, now did he? A shame. Ah well, her gain; she hadn't expected him to treat his puppets so menially as to send them out for such a small task as destroying tags that were easily replaceable; she doubted his tools were as disposable.
"Myaku." The flutter of pages was audible throughout the town, echoing through the tags as though purposefully drawing attention to some sort of attack. A scroll slipped out of one of her sleeves and she unfurled it as a trio of papers marked with large kanji warped distortedly into existence from the tag on the packed dirt ground at her feet. More rustling filled the air. "Suppai."
Three papers flew out of one of the Hokage's hidden warp tags, assaulting one of the puppets working to thwart her; they plastered themselves to the alligator-like thing's body, releasing a visible blue charge that disrupted any control Kokoro had over the puppet. Before anything could be done about the hindrance, a web of wire shot from the same tag, tangling itself around the thing's body and yanking it back into nothingness. There was a moment where there was complete silence aside from the roar of the flames pervading the battlefield, the rustling of pages having finally ceased; the remaining tags all throughout the area the Kazekage's puppets were concentrated in sputtered out clouds of dust, debris, some sort of coagulating liquid that sizzled on the ground as it landed, and the still-disintegrating head of the Rindou puppet that landed at the feet of the little girl puppet, it's eyes staring up at here before the acid slowly ate that away as well...
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Post by Danna on Nov 3, 2009 23:56:52 GMT -5
RINDOU!!! His heart ached, wrenching itself further into the abyss than it already had. He had drastically underestimated her, but that wouldn't happen again. If she wanted a war, she could feel the full fury of Suna crash down upon her...
The other puppets retreated swiftly, gathering as the building and the surrounding area began to collapse further, slowly crumbling until it had seemingly melted away into a massive wasteland of sand, swelling and swirling together, consuming the puppets and temporarily shielding them from the world. All may have seemed quiet, but Kokoro had already located the woman from the chakra she had emitted during her technique. After all, he had "eyes" everywhere in the village now.
Columns of sand erupted around the woman, wrapping around and then crashing down on her with terrible force. It seemed a large portion of the village was moving now, as though the sand were a living, breathing entity of its own...
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Post by Jackstraw on Nov 4, 2009 0:27:43 GMT -5
"Is that the best you can do, Kokoro? Attacking stand-ins and illusions? Am I going to have to take another of those dolls to prove that I want you to give it to me harder? Legion. " There was a flutter of paper--wings--as thousands of small birds burst into flight, erupting from tags both underneath the sand and in the open air and filling the desert sky in a torrent so grand it seemed like a large twister was now assaulting the village. Their thousands of wings kicked up the wind, sending sand flying and letting loose the papers they held in their beaks; countless more warp tags plastered themselves to the remaining buildings, ground, and any other exposed surface, leaving more paper than natural ground.
"Katsu."
There was a sudden blooming of more white as every surface of the village suddenly birthed hundred more sheets of paper and ink, only visible for a split second before every single one exploded into activity. Over half the village suddenly became nothing more than a giant pit in the ground, burning with an intensity unrivaled by the toying little assault from earlier. The small gray owls continued to circle overhead, ringing the large column of smoke with shrill calls that ripped through the air over the roar of the flame.
"A little birdie's told me where you've hidden your citizen's, Kokoro-san. Shall I let them taste the sting of my pen, or will you come out here and sate this hunger you've left me with...?"
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Post by Danna on Nov 4, 2009 0:55:04 GMT -5
"This destruction means nothing. This village's secret has always been that it is its own weapon. This technique hasn't been used since the very first Shinobi war, when Suna was founded..." His voice echoed over the air, through the explosions and the roar of shifting sand, growing and swirling, a good half of the village now engulfed in a steadily growing tower of sand. The Kazekage manor, and various other building pieces protruded from the flow of glittering gold, carefully spreading itself across the pillar of sand, until it began to look something akin to armor...
The massive sand pile had begun growing limbs as well, its more minute details expanding with each passing second until it seemed a gargantuan desert god, casting shade upon a village that faced the sun's brunt for as long as most could remember. The ancient Buddha statue had been engulfed as well, now emerging at the top of the guardian, its gaze bearing down stoically.
A mere speck, high atop of the creature, seemed to be Kokoro, staring down with an unreadable expression. Slowly, he began to sink into the sand being, lengths of vivid red material seeping from it and wrapping about it like a robe as he disappeared.
"Buddha's Hand: One Grain, Infinite Promise."
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