Weathered -invite only-

[Souku|Raidon|Tao]

OoC; Ha. Posted!

And of course I forgive
I've seen how you live
Like a phoenix you rise from the ashes
...
And of course I forgive
You've seen how I live
I've got darkness and fears to appease

The desert was no place for an Ugashi.

The sun had come to lean in the west, taking up a position just an hour after noon if one were reading it as a clock. It was a rather unfortunate time of the day for anyone not native to the Wind Country because the afternoon’s heat was still settled over the area and there wasn’t much of anything to absorb it. It only added to the heat accumulated from when the sun had been directly overhead. Even the earth did not want to take it all in and only reflected it into imaginary waves that were visible, but not altogether tangible. The sun made obvious every feature of the area with shadows and brilliant colouring of the sand. Every natural feature, every dune and dip in the topography, every tiny sign of what had once been life that had not yet been covered up by the sand. And also, every sign of interlopers; the footprints they left, the short, mobile shadows that mimicked their contrasting movements and subtle feeling of tension they left in their wake. But their marks were never visible for too long. The moment the wind picked up again, their trail was covered along with the intangible sense of urgency and foreboding they had brought with them.
Tao, who was by nature against all things that disregarded practicality and reason and logical common sense, was beginning to find reason to doubt his new comrade. And the more intolerant she became to these things by finding ways around those principle concepts Tao had come to love by dragging him through the most difficult terrain the desert had to offer, the more incompetent she seemed to become. She seemed to have adopted a twisting, jerky, and irregular path that seemed impossible to keep up with or even attempt to do so. Especially to someone like Tao, who had only been on missions to the Wind Country three times in his ninja career, all of which had ended badly for him. He was too unaccustomed to the sand and uneasy feel of the earth constantly shifting under his feet to be able to follow closely behind her even on flat ground. And after four day of near constant travel, he was wearing down. When she had led him into the dunes, he had fallen behind her even further until he remained a steady twelve paces behind her by the end of the third day. Everything was a shaky hill that he could not get a grip on, no matter how much chakra he tried to use to grip the stuff. The moment he thought he had a solid foot under him, he would slip and have to balance himself precariously by getting his hand and feet buried in sand. It frustrated him and ebbed away at his usually patient nature until he was snarling at something or another every time his feet sunk into the earth. It was like walking in very dry, very gritty mud. The heat also did little to help him. After spending his life in Konoha, where the weather was well known for being as mellow and easy going as most of the people there (which Tao could never figure out), the heat of the desert was about as close to the pits of hell as he had ever been. The three days it took for him to get to Konoha to Suna, where his missions normally took him, was bad enough. The two extra days she had kept him out were three times as brutal. The sun hung over him like a noose and sucked the moisture from his very bones so that he sweat uncomfortably. But instead of cooling him any, the wetness that stuck to his brow and neck and face only succeeded in making sand stick to him every time the wind lashed out at him with a spray of stinging sand that bit into his flesh and made it burn just enough to get his attention and just long enough to made it nearly intolerable. And his clothing only became clammy and stuck to him in all kinds of uncomfortable places. Though the clamminess paled to the terrible feel of sand in every bit of his clothing. It was in his clothes, his hair, his eyes, his nose, even his ears were burning at the sensation.
But even with the sand and the bad footing and the impractical path Leiko was taking and the heat that was making an embarrassing pink colour tint the upper most parts of his cheeks just under his eyes and the bridge of his nose where an almost unnoticeable sunburn was gracing his face, they paled in comparison to the sheer size of the desert.
Tao had not been very sympathetic when Leiko had told him that the forests of Konoha had made her uneasy. He wasn’t even very sympathetic now. But he should have been. Because he had never realized how accustomed to the feeling of safety the massive trees and green foliage of the Leaf had given him, nor had he ever taken into consideration that he had always depended on it, as a long range fighter, for good hiding spots and evasive maneuvers. But the Wind Country had none of that; no trees to shield them from enemies, no branches to take to in case of traps, to bushes of twigs to make noise to keep them from being caught unaware of approaching attackers. There was nothing! Nothing but a dead, sandy wasteland where he was open to attack from all sides and was left vulnerable to surprises and other shinobi waiting to murder them. And that terrified him. It turned his claustrophobia around on him so that he was suddenly agoraphobic. The nights were the worst though, at least during the day, he could focus on directing his energy to keeping up with the Sumiyaka princess. But during the night, whenever they did finally stop to rest (though, to Tao’s delight, they seldom did) he was horrified to hear that they might have to go to sleep. He never slept well, if at all. Instead, for the first few times they stopped, he excused his behaviour by offering to keep watch; which he did. He sat up the entire time with his gaze jerking to everything that made any sort of motion or noise. He paced around her in a small, methodical pattern, refusing to sit down for fear of being caught unaware. And to make matters worse, he alerted her at every sign of danger; from the coyote twenty paces away that looked like an insane ninja, to the wind that could have been a dangerous Fuuton jutsu. When he wasn’t alerting her to danger, he was trying desperately to talk with her about nothing and everything all at once in an attempt to make up for the absolute silence the desert had during the night and the lack of leaves there were to rustle over his head in a soothing manner. When he did rest or sleep – or when she wouldn’t talk to him – he would not separate from her but a few inches, too uneasy about being left in the open and vulnerable.
So by the fifth day of travel, Tao was in no mood to put up her paranoid behaviour. As far as was concerned, she was being ridiculously incompetent and her insistence on traveling through the dunes instead of the flatter, easier areas of land was making his temper flare.
“Damn..bitch”, he panted through gritted teeth, pushing himself up from the side of a particularly difficult hill. He squeezed his eyes shut stubbornly; not caring if she was leaving him behind anymore and guessing that it might be for the better anyway. But he retracted the thought in an instant. Because no matter how angry or frustrated he got over her antics, no matter how stupid they were, he could not bring himself to threaten to leave. His eyes opened slowly and he frowned at the collecting thoughts bothering him in his head.
But she hasn’t even told me where the fuck we’re going..beyond that her safe place is in the Wind Country…
He lost his footing again and his knees buckled unwillingly with an inaudibly snap. Yelping he jerked his other hand out to slap his palm against the hill to brace himself as he slide down further into the valley between the dunes. Channeling chakra toward his feet instinctively, he dug into the sand with the ball of his foot and the base of his palms. “Shit..” he growled stubbornly. Against his efforts, he slid from his foothold, falling onto his belly and sliding down a short distance until his determination withered under the pressures of exhaustion and his own temperamental frustration so that when he pulled himself up into a kneeling position, he refused to get to his feet. He shot a cold glare on her direction that molded into a look of scorn and accusation as the mindset kept the train of thought rolling.
This is stupid! We’ve been going for five days through these damn dunes and there’s been no sign of anything! There’s no reason for it.. Suspicion gripped him and slowly, he pulled to his feet with some effort and his lips pulled into a thin frown.
Enough of this bullshit.
“Sumiyaka!” he called to her gruffly, his voice made coarse by the dryness in his throat. His temper flared in his throat at a thought but he gritted his teeth against it before stepping forward in a weak trot before giving up and standing firmly a few feet from where he had fallen. When he ground his molars together and nothing came of it but a bad crackling, grinding sound, he screamed at her.
“Do you even know here the fuck we are going?” he couldn’t even tell if she had come to his call but he continued his rant, a burst of new found passion over taking him suddenly.
“We’ve been wandering around this lousy, goddamn wasteland for five days! You told me we would be going to a safe ground, but all we’ve done is move in and out of the damn dunes! It doesn’t even take this long to get to Suna!”

[Leiko-hime]

Leiko could be sure of only one thing at that juncture, and that was the fact that her entire body was stressed to it's limits. She was pushing at the very edges of her abilities and had been since they'd fled Konoha. She'd probably been pushing since before then, actually. The adrenaline never really seemed to fade away keeping her riding a heady buzz like the best drug. She'd long abandoned her footwear, having pulled them off and hidden them in the overlarge folds of her tops, and instead bound her feet with bandaging for protection from the heat of the sands. It was easier to move that way, and got rid of the need to find her sandals every time she lost them. The hot breeze blew restlessly to cover their tracks, erasing their trail before they'd even left it behind. It gave her some amount of peace, but not enough. Never enough. The breeze made her hair shift slightly, but not much as the rest was plastered to her forehead in a sweaty matting of grimy brown strands. Her face was rich with smudges of earth, and the color brought on by the heat. Her eyes, however, were dark and hawk like in their watchfulness beneath lazily slanted eyelids. Leiko's mouth was set in a mulish line.

She'd paused even before the Ugashi had begun his tirade, having stopped several paces ahead of him on the slight rise of another dune. Currently Leiko was squatting down, her feet tucked closed together as she balanced rather easily, watching the shifting sand dunes playing along the horizon. One hand was held in front of her letting granules of the desert slid from her fingers, puffs of it being caught in the breeze and tossed while the rest fell back to the ground.

In truth things were bad, and she damned well knew it. The desert was a harsh place and it took everything you had to survive in. She'd grown up learning to respect this terrifying place, and she knew well that it could kill her if it so desired.

Leiko's head shifted slightly as she heard the sharp barking curses from her current companion. She watched him over her shoulder listening to his complaints and hearing them for what they were. Frustration at the desert, and she suspected, his own lack of aptitude in this area. To him, perhaps, what she was doing seemed unreasonable but in reality it was everything. In truth they probably should have been dead already...

The heat of the desert in the day, and the frigid temperatures of night were hell on a human being, not to mention the lack of water. Which brought her to another point, plucking her canteen from her side she sloshed it around to hear the low level of liquid inside as the man continued to rant. She ignored him effortlessly. She'd gotten a lot of practice in that lately. If Leiko was completely honest with herself she was sort of enjoying this.

Turning around she slid down the slope of the dune she'd been on and walked silently back toward Tao, then stopped and held out water to the man, “Here.” She turned away after that looking back along her path. “It's good that you're angry, it means you're alive. Don't let Mother Desert steal that fire or you'll end up bleaching in the sun.”

Considering the view she'd seen in her mind's eye she gave a slight nod to herself and began to pick her way back forward again. She'd spotted a cluster of rocks that would make a good resting spot until the worst heat of the day burned away to the cooler times of evening, “Come on, we can rest soon until evening then we'll move again until the cold starts to gnaw at our bones.”

Reaching up Leiko pressed the fingers of one hand into her dry eyes, rubbing at her forehead and the headache that was a constant throb there, “I never said we were going to Suna, Ugashi. I know you're aware of my status as a nukenin from that village. It's just hard to pinpoint a moving target.”

That was the juncture of things. Leiko was tracking something in this 'cursed wasteland' as well as doing her damnedest to keep them out of any captors reach. If she was right that little rocky area she'd spotted should have a small spring hidden among it's out cropping, and even a little desert greenery.

If she was wrong...

Well she'd die first since she'd just given him the last of her water. She was desert born, though, she could probably take it more than he could.

[Souku|Raidon|Tao]

Tao tensed as she backtracked toward him, half expecting her to answer his challenge. And though just a light shove would have been enough to have him down and out, years of reacting to people like Souku and Dani and several of his former classmates and comrades had left his ready for unnecessary challenges that tended to grow out of angry and smother only under the supervision of someone else. So when she was only a few feet away, he stiffened defensively in spite of her silence and his exhaustion. But she remained passive, to his surprise, and presented him with her canteen and his resolve fell apart. His shoulders slumped a bit, though the change was only slight, and he blinked. His expression softened almost immediately into a look of confusion and silent curiosity. It took a moment for him to take it, and even when he did, he didn’t seem interested in actually drinking it and instead only listened passively to her as she spoke, finding the sound of her voice comforting after the miles of silence he had just barely endured. “Mother? Heh, are you always so poetic Hime” he scoffed under his breath, keeping the insult from her under the cover of silence. He didn’t understand the connection between a mother and the desert at all though he said nothing on the matter and instead, tried to keep a bit of his dignity by remaining where he was, though he crinkled his nose apologetically as his temper was reduced by enough to keep him from screaming at her anymore; for the time being, at least. But he still wasn’t ready to throw in his own fight.
“We’ll end up that way anyway if you don’t stop leading us around aimlessly.” His voice was clipped and held a childish tone of arrogance and imaginary confidence. Because in truth, he had none, especially right now and his facial expressions and body language betrayed that well enough.
He kept quiet for a while, contemplating the situation and rolling the outcomes in his head. Somehow, none of them seemed to come out well. And it troubled him, even scared him a bit. He eyed the canteen with a hard look coming over him as his frown deepened. Almost gone.. If we don’t do something we’re not… He clicked his dry tongue against the back of his front teeth irritably.
“Dammit. You’re crazy.” He said blankly. After speaking, he closed the thing up again before sticking it at his side, resisting the initial urge to throw it back at her and call her crazy again knowing full well she probably wouldn’t take it.
Her order to keep moving made him jerk his head up to glare at her again and his shoulders slumped even further in discouragement.
“What?” He didn’t move. Instead, he stared blankly as she moved away from him in disbelief. “You’re crazy!” he repeated, “We can’t keep going in this! You’ve already led us through half the damn desert like this, you can’t be serious!”
He tossed his arms up weakly before letting them fall against his sides as she spoke up again.
“You’re going to kill us! I’m not moving anymore!” Tao had half a mind to reach up and grab her collar so he could make her pay attention to him, as if it might help him get his point across. But the moment he thought about moving, thought about darting his hands to close around her throat to try to make her see the impracticality of it all, he remembered his own limits and instead he tried to relay the emotion with a single, cold look. Of course, it dissipated a moment later, as most of his expressions did, and he blinked against the beat of another gust of wind.
“A moving-? What! Is that what you’re running us dead for? Y-you..You’re Crazy!”, he roared at her one more time. For some reason, he could think of nothing else to call her except that one, redundant word; crazy. It didn’t occur to him that he was the one losing his temper, shouting uselessly at her, and succumbing to the affects of dehydration and hunger and heat much faster than he realized, much faster than she ever would. He seethed beside her, his face and ears flushed deep scarlet in boiling rage that was normally much further below the surface of his head where it had crawled through his throat and past his lips in a siege of insults and irrational accusations.
“Y-You’re…”, he couldn’t seem to think of anything. Or rather, he could think of plenty, but none of it seemed to want to form into words. Impractical and indecisive were a few of the things that came to mind, but he relayed none of it. Mostly due to lack of ability to do so, his usually quite nature making him unused to behaving in such a way and constraining him to what he could make sound logical to his ears. Though not necessarily to hers.
“You think being a traitor to your village gives you the right to drag us along with absolutely no direction at all!? Is that is!? You think it’s ok to follow some target that you apparently have no information about while we die of thirst out here in this wasteland you call a home? Is that going to get your clan fixed, Sumiyaka? You..You’ll kill yourself, you dumbass!”
He stood now with his jaw locked with his breath coming out in irregular snorts through his nose and his blood pounding in his ears and colouring his face more than te sunburn already had. His inhibitions were worn away now and the look in his eye made sure she knew that he knew exactly what he was instigating, what he was really, really, trying to and desired to instigate. He wanted her to slug him, to scream at him, to call him out on his sudden burst of insanity and childish temper tantrum that was only brought on because he couldn’t handle the desert like she could. Anything would have been better than wandering in the dune like this with her so indifferent to him, seemingly uncaring. He hated her for being able to act as though it were no big deal that they were going to die. Ah, that thought again. His scornful look was torn from her as he looked away to jerk his head downward to try and avoid it as it banged around in his head like a repetitive, monotonous gong until he confessed it aloud to her in a tone weighed down with stubborn finality, “We’re going to die if we stay here”, he shrugged, his wavering, unstable moods were starting to hurt his head and create a dull ache behind his eyes, “And we’ll die of thirst and dehydration if we keep moving..” He seemed to think about it for a moment before suddenly falling to his knees, clapping his hands to his eyes as he rested his elbows on his knees. Leaning over into his heads, he began rubbing circles into his pained eyes, savouring the first hint of complete darkness he had seen the entire time they had been wandering. The motion made his brow wrinkle and his eyes hurt even worse but he kept it up, only stopping when he could see strange lights blinking behind the lid of even his blinded eye. He remained still for a long time, his legs becoming dead weights under him so that his decision not to move again was made final and unchangeable in his head, unwilling to do anything to try and struggle up again. Still not feeling at all hospitable toward his comrade, he sighed wearily.
“Are you looking for the person killing the heirs?” he asked flatly in a low tone. “Who you still haven’t bothered telling me about”, he reminded her slowly.

[Leiko-hime]

He wasn't following.

That thought alone caused Leiko to press her lips together in a thin line of annoyance. Her nerves were twanging like a shamisen's strings that were wound to tightly. She was terrified that they would break and she would shatter into countless pieces. Until now she'd managed to keep her cool, keep control, holding on tightly with her fists clenched.

The desert was a terrible terrible mistress that ate away at a person's sanity and corroded them to their most base and often ugly cores. Loosing you're mind was the surest way to die, and Leiko wasn't allowed that luxury. She couldn't because she had someone else relying on her. Turning back around she listen to him rail, watched him falter and fall and felt the tight pinched heat of her baking skin. Something in her squirmed uncomfortably as he went from anger to something that sounded like despair.

He reminded her of Seiichi and it made her heart bleed.

Stumbling back toward him despite the fact that she knew it was foolish. It was much to hot to be moving about right now, and then needed to dig in and lay low like the other desert dwellers at this junction. Any sane person would have left him behind at this point and chosen their own survival over this strangers.

Leiko had never claimed she was sane. She refused to let another person die under her guard.

Stopping in front of him, there wasn't even a foot of space between the Ugashi's kneeling form and her own Leiko allowed herself to sink to the sandy ground, the grains of baked earth seared along her bare legs and stuck to them with the sweat that beaded her skin. It wouldn't be long before it dried and cracked as her body put a stop to sweating to preserve hydration. Leaning forward she reached to his side where he'd placed the canteen she'd given him and pulled it free, thrusting it almost forcefully in his face she frowned tightly at him, “Drink, you silly fool.” She rasped, her voice tight and dry with her own thirst.

Glaring at him from eyes that stung with sand and dryness, eyes that were glazed and fever bright from their time in the desert and almost seemed to harbor a sort of madness: It wasn't a malignant madness but that of a fierce determination that would not yield. There was iron will in her eyes.

“You're right. I'm probably crazy.” She said, and a hollow laugh left her throat. It was a dry bitter sound that seemed more appropriate for the already dead than the living. She had felt hopeless for a long time. “But I will not die yet.”

Lifting a finger she shoved it under his nose and wiggled the grime covered digit at him pointedly, leaning in closer she gave him a fierce glare, “I will not die, because without me you most certainly will. I've failed...” Leiko's breath hitched slightly, and it almost seemed to had she been capable she might've cried just then, even if it was only a few tears. “I've failed enough people already, and I will not add the guilt of you're life to my tally.”

She stared at him grimly then looked away, the oversized collar of her kosode slid down off the hunched curved of her shoulder, nearly falling off but for it catching in the crook of her elbow, “My people will survive with or without me, my life isn't that important.”

She didn't care whether she lived or died. It didn't matter, but she wasn't ready to die yet.... Not yet...

Leiko seemed to struggle almost physically, swallowing hard past the sand that lined her trachea, “I'm not hunting them... Not right now.” Looking back at him she once more stared at him from fierce brown eyes. “I'm trying to find the nomads. The desert people. My people.”

They would be safe with them, as they did not answer to the leaders of Suna. The nomads answered only to the Desert, but they also revered her. She was their desert princess.

Forcing herself back to her feet Leiko held her hand out to him meeting his gaze with her own, “Now are you going to give up and die, or will you be a man; be a shinobi, and fight to the end. We can talk once we're out of the direct sun.”

Now was probably the best time to get it out anyway, if they died now he'd carry the knowledge to the afterlife, if they lived he could use it for a real purpose.

Leiko had confidence in her desert know-how, now if only she could get this silly forest dweller to trust it as well. If her hunch about the water was right, maybe he'd brighten up a bit more but they had to get there first.

[Souku|Raidon|Tao]

i. He wouldn’t look at her though he could hear the scuffling sounds of her motions against the sand, motions that served only to irritate and agitate him further. He had known this was going to happen, he told himself. He had just known that the woman had meant trouble. Why hadn’t he listened to his father like always had? He supposed, in hind sight, the momentary rebellion hadn’t really been worth his life. He could have simply left her; left her to rot in jail where she would have been kept from him. Or would she have come after him for revenge. Well, he considered bitterly, you would have been able to kill her at home at least. With friends, comrades at his side; all of Konoha’s defenses at his disposal. And what would she have had? a desert. He wanted to tell her now that had he only had a little more sense, been a little less reckless and eager to rebel, he could have really bogged her: let her sit and decay in the jail cell and gone about his life.
“I could have stayed.. If I had never helped you.” He muttered to himself, below the range of audibility. But he hadn’t listened to Kaji and the thought broke him down further until it seemed to become almost palpable so that it weighed his chest down. Now he was stuck here, with her and she offered only the desert, the aching, blistering, killing dryness of the damned desert. This is why Kai doesn’t look after desert dwellers. I should have listened to Tres more when he was blubbering with stories.

ii. In his musings, he had failed to notice that she had closed the distance between them though if it startled him in any way, he wasn’t quick to show it. And when she slid down into the shifting, baking sand in front of him he almost laughed at her. What a fool she was, taking so much of her time to tend to him when he wanted nothing more than to leap at her in retaliation. It was, he felt, her fault for their predicament though in reality it was probably as much his own as it was hers. But the temporary spell of madness that had taken him had burnt the usual coolness of poise that he had tried so hard to keep for so long. So while he made no move to instigate any physical brutality (a decision brought about in part by his subtle fear of that gauntlet of hers coming down to crack his skull open and shatter him where he sat or perhaps the blade of her kodachi tearing his belly open and leaving him for some tod to find; now he had to stop his mind from wandering in the briefest of moments to fantasize about how her killing him would have been preferable to baking in the sun) he did scoff plainly at her action and continued his tirade of denigration and attempts at least bringing some sort of misery (though it was clear she was no happier about the whole situation that he) some sort of reaction at least from her flawless thread of patience.

iii. “If I had let you rot in jail, I could have stayed with my fath-“
Drink, you silly fool!
The gritty sound of her voice almost made his eyes water and he blinked, cocking his head backward on the vertebrae of his neck as she snatched the canteen from a loop n his belt and then thrust in into his face again. And for a moment his dulled (or ignored) senses came alive again and he could catch just the barest scent of the dirty, lukewarm liquid inside. And for just a second, his dry lips parted and with livid blue eyes he eyes the cap longingly before he could squash the desire. But her voice had him catching himself and fixing his expressive face into a stern frown that lasted only for the briefest of moments before he made the mistake of making eye contact with her hardened brown eyes.

iv. It was only a subconscious reaction that had him catching her words and jumbling some semblance of a meaning in with them; it was her tone that drew him from his madness, a remedy that he had not known had existed. No, he had known it but at the moment he couldn’t remember who she reminded him of. But his focus was undivided as she spoke to him, her voice full of a fire that he himself lacked and suddenly longed for. He rejected it at first, remembering his fathers domain over him and then found something different in it. It squeezed him and gripped him in his chest so that he coughed and shifted away from her in a moment of hesitation and uncertainty. Had Tao had perhaps some more time to sort the twisted feeling out, he would have known it as a pride he had not ever had himself. A sort of determination not acquired by being ruled by someone but by ruling others and an irrepressible sense of fearlessness brought about by hardship and carelessness. Yes, she must have been careless! he considered, and a new span of vocabulary opened to him as he watched her with a great sense of sudden admiration, though his expression revealed no such thing and instead remained hardened with only the barest hint of a sort of confusion showcased in the knit of his brow. Ah, what a mazer she was! A true shinobi, regardless of her gender and baring similarities to a person who knew death not because they had inflicted it, but because they had truly known it, seen it, felt it as those more feral than even Souku did and had; respected it as an everlasting presence that could reach out and take her at a moments notice. Reckless and powerful, true and noble for no one’s causes but her own; how jealous he suddenly was. Wild was she on the dunes of sand, in the land of the lost there is no cost for she with nothing to loose and now, young Ugashi chief-to-be, you must choose. Such was the forlorn lullaby the shifting winds sang to him in low whispers and hisses that he wasn’t actually hearing but believed he was simply because of the marvelous epiphany coupled with the insanity brought about by the desert heat and fear of death. Yet he gave no indication of his admiration and remained still under her fierce gaze that had shut him up for good, humbled him and calmed him only because he knew she was a leader he needed because, though the thought didn’t cross him just yet (he was not actually thinking any of these thoughts out in his head with words, but rather feeling them through emotions alone, he could not have described them to anyone at the moment even if he had thought to try) he could no longer rely on his father to tell him what to do. And that was, in truth, what he boiled down to. It was why he had tried to take his frustration and fear out on her and at the same time, why he had not once truly considered turning back though he knew as well as anyone that he could have lied to his father. And even if he hadn’t, Kaji would have gotten him some pardon because Kaji could justify anything and turn black into white when he really had to. Tao would have looked like a hero. But Leiko offered so much more. She was, frankly, a sort of salvation for him; the embodiment of what he wanted in himself and had always been unable to grasp. This, he thought, was why Souku must have run off and gotten himself killed. For that one, singular touch of grace; freedom.

v. When she spoke of failure, he felt compelled to console her in spite of himself. Much in the same way he had been urged by the heart to comfort Suki in more difficult times. But intuition and the small bits of experience he had with Leiko forbid him from reacting in any similar manner as he might have to Suki. There was something taboo about her, something that told him that physical affection, however innocent and in-the-manner-of-a-companion it might have been, was strictly for those closer to her. Or perhaps no one at all. He wasn’t sure just how many of her fellows she was referring to when she claimed to have failed people. Instead, he sighed deeply to relay inner and outer defeat and muttered some words of, what he hoped were, comfort. Or as close to comfort as Tao would have ever been able to give. In truth, they sounded bitter and crisp with a built in resistance to softness of tongue.
“Regrets are like sand, they may change shape but they are forever. You said that, do you remember?” he asked her quietly, remourcfully, though there was no need for such a feeling. Not for him, or her even, not at the moment when they could have starved or died of thirst and he knew it. The thought helped to relieve some of the stress of coming back to the topic.


vi. She spoke then of nomads. That’s what she had been looking for.
“Nomads?” She explained to him and he then understood and in the moment in which she spoke, he blinked and jerked his head, looking slightly confused as he was freed from his near trance-like state. He reached up dumbly and took the canteen from her though he still had little intention on actually consuming it, as tempting as the idea was. Has she been a man, he might have taken her up on the offer. But Great Kai, she wasn’t! She wasn’t and still she held an iron resolve he seldom found in the men of his clan. Heaven help him if he ever stumbled across her father, her brother, her cousin, or lover – that Haru lad, if his memory served him well. He shook away the thoughts with a single jerk of his head and he met her gaze again with a slightly less malicious look behind the fatigued look on his sunburned face. Turning his attention, with some difficulty given the hollow feeling in the front of his head and the ache in the back of it, back to the task at hand, he watched her with a look that bordered between concern and a strange sort of empathy toward her morose attitude. When she stood, he remained sitting for a moment afterward, even when she extended a hand to him. And he sat watching her for some time with the canteen hanging precariously in his hand; so much so that any slight movement of his fingers might have spilt its contents into the dry sand that was pushed into small, linear piles that formed strange shapes and patterns before him. But he didn’t spill it and instead looked down at it with a look of renewed fervor and livid depression stuck on his face as he observed it for a time as though he meant to follow her command and drink it. But he didn’t, rather, he snapped it back onto the loop at his belt that was too large to actually keep his trousers up efficiently and with a heavy, half-hearted groan he shook his head again before running a bare hand over the back of his red neck, feeling the slick, sticky sweat as he did so. Refusing the hand, he moved his dead, weighted legs into action again. There was a struggle at first but he managed to balance himself, unsteadily at first, on his feet again all the while pouring sand back onto the ground from where it had collected along the lining on his inner thighs and crotch and the end of his shirt. His head was light with the effort, but he was up again, standing next to her and passing a look of mild irritation toward her as he regained balance and stood up straight. Tilting his head up to look past her and try to peer over the top of the dunes in front of them, he nearly groaned.

vii. “How,” he started, squinted into the light and heat waves reflecting off of the bright sand. “how do you expect to find a nomadic clan in a desert? There are tracker nin from Suna looking for people like us, Sumiyaka…” There was a subtle note of trepidation in his voice, though he tried his best to hide it. “We’re going to fry…or be caught.. Die of thirst or have our guts spilled…” He looked back down at the ground toward his left, frowning as though he were considering the choices, weighing his options.
“Which sounds better to you, Leiko?”
He would have rather drowned.




...possible wip?

OoC; I'm SO sorry for the, what, 57832902 day wait...again, but I don't have YIM right now. So..if you happen to see this, I will explain everything over IM when I get it.