Baby Sannin...Something.

[moonsheen]

Summer on the battlefields smelled like nothing but death. It lingered like a disease in the air, rotting, cloying. It wasn’t the first time any of them had seen stretches like this--ground turned up and scattered with weapons and blood, and sometimes scorch marks—it was just the first time they got there before anyone had cleared away the bodies.

"Just keep going," Sarutobi-sensei told them, grimly. But of course they all looked. Jiraiya took one glance at one of the closer corpses and swore violently under his breath, green for what would be easily be the next few hours. It was a shinobi bent into a crater, pinned into the dirt by a snapped blade through the neck. Still wearing a forehead protector but it was Tsunade who noticed that the front of it had been melted off. Later she would remember that she /had/ seen the barest traces of the Leaf sigil, at the one corner that hadn’t been eaten away by acid—or maybe fire. Later, after the mission, which was very simple actually, deliver the message and return to the village, no actual combat involved. At the time, she shook her head, and turned back to the path.

'I don’t want to die like that,' she thought. She didn’t realize she’d said it out loud until she felt cool fingers wrap around her wrist, hard, and looked up to find Orochimaru, his gaze fixed on the dead man. Eyes wider than she’d ever seen them.

"Neither do I," he whispered. He didn’t look away.

Comments

GEH.

[moonsheen.livejournal.com]

ng's. As in livejournal user: ng. Proof that I should not muck around with tags in the morning, right there. Gyah.