It was while he was making his way back to the hotel room he had in Sand from the bar he frequented in Soon's Haven that Makoto felt the phoenix stirring in his mind again.
That was more than a full day longer than it had said it would take, but it was still a relief to know it wouldn't be years this time. He waited while it mentally stretched before greeting it. Good morning.
Makoto? When is it now?
Same day, late night...or early morning, not sure which by now. I'm on the way back to Sand.
Ah. I'm glad to hear that. The sensation of wings being stretched, its surface thoughts flooding into his mind as it reached full consciousness. Has anything happened while I've been out?
Not much. The usual. Looking forward to sleep. It was still difficult to convey a shrug mentally, but he managed. ...Missing home a little, I guess.
Ah. That is not surprising. A customary pause while it rummaged through his mind for the relevant information. You aren't very fond of traveling.
Mostly for climate reasons, but yes. Sand is better than most of the alternatives I could think of, if I had to go to a ninja village. Cloud was too cold, and he didn't know much about the political situation in Leaf other than that it was rather volatile at times.
And you like the people, which helps when you miss your family. It wasn't pushing, not quite, but there was a hint of gentle remonstration in there.
I...suppose. He still wasn't comfortable admitting to such things. My family isn't that close.
There is family, and then there is family, the phoenix said patiently, and it didn't need to explain the difference for him to understand. Emotions are not weakness. Ignoring them creates it. We've been through this.
Shrugging off over twenty years of 'emotions are weakness' is not easy.
I suppose. To you, that's most of your lifetime. It paused, followed by a hint of wariness clear in it regarding the next subject. I imagine that's the issue with your brother, too.
Makoto tried not to immediately get his hackles up and failed. He knew which brother it meant, and what it meant, but still had to ask, what?
You felt it when you were an empath--how his emotions do not match his outward calm. It paused, then added with a good deal of care, that is not entirely healthy. Especially since he cannot have expected anything dangerous from you. Even if you are shielding your emotions from your enemies, you should not from your friends and family.
We are not having this conversation. He put as much finality into the thought as he could.
Ah. Subdued. Perhaps you would rather have it with him, later?
I would rather have it never.
There was a wave of 'you're being ridiculous' (or, as the phoenix itself would say, 'this is not healthy and we are discussing this later') but this shifted abruptly to alarm. Danger ahead.
Don't be ridiculous. We're almost at Sand. He rethought this immediately. Wait, you didn't manage to warn me about the sandworm ahead of time. What kind of danger is this that you can sense?
My senses have expanded since we properly merged. I would have detected an undead sandworm. All I can tell you is it is dangerous, and dark. He could almost see, in his mind's eye, the phoenix standing with its wings outstretched in alarm. Demonic, even.
There were demons in Moon, probably, so it wasn't surprising there were demons in Sand. Especially since there were all manner of other things he'd both heard whispers and seen evidence of; nothing and no one normal could have animated the Storm God.
"All right," he said out loud quietly, taking out his parasol. "I would have liked some practice time before we had to fight like this, but it doesn't seem like we'll get it. I don't hear signs of a fight, though, so we might be interrupting someone who is attempting something unseen."
No words, just a sense of readiness. This pocket form of empathy, focused on a single not-overly-emotional person and only when they both wanted it to be, was actually kind of handy.
He crested the hill, listening intently for the sounds of...anything, really. There weren't any. Instead, when he cleared the rise, he spotted...
Sheimi. Standing there on the sand, a dozen or so kilometers out from Sand's boundaries, tapping her foot impatiently.
He blinked, then blinked again. The image remained Sheimi--persistently not a mirage, an illusion, or covered in a demonic cloud. Just...her.
"Where the hell have you been?" Sheimi demanded, stalking up to him. "You keep pulling this damn vanishing act of yours, almost every single day! And a while back you were gone for nearly a week! Leaving me alone with that jackass!"
Sure enough, when she got closer the demonic energy seemed to intensify. She didn't seem to notice it herself.
(Makoto didn't feel the need to point out that it was because of Tatsuya and her interactions with him that he so frequently found a reason to make himself scarce, but he did revise his fault assessment on the lack of unit cohesion to nudge his own blame a little higher.)
"I've...been busy," he said evasively. Not that he thought it would work; one of her specialties was interrogations. But it only needed to work until he figured out why exactly she was radiating demonic energy.
"The hell you have! You've just been skipping off to do random crap!" she shouted. He leaned back, but she was intent on getting in his face. "I bet you found a bar or something, didn't you?"
Yes. "No," he lied, drawing the syllable out. "I've been...scouting. Public opinion. In the other cities."
Not that that was...strictly necessary. There seemed to be people with every concievable opinion on the whole Sand vs Wind affair, from believing one side to believing the other was wronged to thinking everyone involved sounded rotten to a man who had sworn up and down with two nodding adherents that the country was really secretly run by shapeshifting sandworms who disguised themselves as influential people. And he had said such with a straight face, while sober.
No country was immune to crackpots, it seemed.
But the point was, it wasn't difficult to figure out, and in fact if that had been what he was doing he would have been done in a single day.
Hypothesis: Sheimi is radiating demonic energy because she...has a demon with her, somehow. Not that I see one, but.
...And she does not see me.
"Fuck," he said, then realized it had been out loud, which was not helping ward off the anger of the hundred and twenty-five pounds of punk-ass attitude glaring at him. "Um. I mean."
I recognize that demonic energy, Makoto.
"The next words out of your mouth had better be the truth," she snapped.
"Um," he said eloquently, hating himself for it. Usually he was better than this, but two people were talking at him at once, and neither one was giving him physical or mental breathing room.
That is the energy of the demon I was fighting, shortly before we first met.
I'll ask her then, but first I have to calm her down.
No. That demon cannot be trusted.
H-hey! That's my brother's girlfriend! More importantly, she can kick my ass, don't--!
Silver light was rising off him. Sheimi's expression shifted rapidly, from anger to realization. She snapped the red scarf off her neck and flicked it out to its sword form in a single smooth motion.
He wouldn't have done it himself had he had full control of his chakra just then, but he didn't, so it caught him too off guard to stop when a wave of scorching heat rolled off his skin and slammed into Sheimi.
An instant later, he felt rather than saw the silver wings sprout from his shoulders, radiant light spilling off them and scattering white feathers with it. Another moment after that and a ripple of greenery passed over Sheimi, her shadow shifting into that of a...deer?
"Showy," Sheimi sneered, except no, that wasn't her, was it? That was...whatever demon or spirit was with her, she was like him, must have been all this time. Except their spirits were opposed. (Did Kanashimi know she was carrying a demon?) "That's just so typical of your kind! But I thought I won last time."
The voice that came out of Makoto's mouth was more noticeably not his, since he was fairly sure his own voice was not ambiguously-gendered and backed by chimes. "And I should have known that you would seek another to corrupt. How long have you been bothering that girl?"
The demon sounded almost insulted. Now he was listening for it, its (her?) voice was much more clear and piping than Sheimi's lower tones. "I don't bother her! She likes me. We have fun. But what have you been doing to that boy? My host is fond of him, you know--like a little brother."
"I would not harm a human who has done no wrong," the phoenix said firmly, flaring its wings in indignation. "But you--I cannot allow you to continue like this."
"Fine!" the reindeer demon snapped. Makoto supposed Sheimi had a similar lack of control to him at the moment. It was very frustrating, but the two spirits seemed to possess a grudge with one another that superceded any requests their hosts might prefer. "Might as well finish the job, anyway!"
Cut it out! he snapped, but the phoenix wasn't listening.
A wave of silver met a wave of green.
~
Contrary to what his teammates may have thought, Tatsuya was well-aware that he was the one that was considered most at fault for the schism in the team. Which, as far as he was concerned, was a bit odd. He was the only member of the team without some sort of secret, a fact that had been dismissed by both of the others whenever he brought it up.
Annoyingly, this also meant he was limited as far as prying went, lest one of the other two explode on him. He was quite confident on his ability to take on one or the other, but if one of them went off at him in a full fight, the other would probably jump in and assist--such was their dislike of them.
And pretty much all of that was due to the still-unexplained-for-the-most-part dislike his new cousin had for him.
Subtle canvassing, as well as an assessment of the man's own words, had indicated that Kanashimi was not in fact jealous that Tatsuya would be the one taking the reins of the clan. Leading their family would apparently have made him uncomfortable in the first place. Unfortunately, that left the list of reasons it could actually be rather short.
He hadn't harmed either of Kanashimi's siblings, as much as the younger of the two was testing him on that now, and the twin had while they were in Moon. Hadn't made any threatening overtures to the rest of his family, or his girlfriend. Hadn't even threatened or been violent toward anyone in Moon. And he hadn't met Sheimi until the mission, not to mention that she wanted as little as possible to do with him, so it wasn't as if he'd slept with his cousin's girlfriend or anything.
If it really was as simple as Kanashimi had claimed--and he was drawing a blank if it wasn't--then it was his aura that was at fault. The problem was, he couldn't exactly do much about that. Maybe his cousins had been raised in the highly spiritual Moon, where the otherworldly powers they were aware of were all relatively easy to suppress or hide from prying eyes, but this was certainly not one of those powers.
They really ought to have known, too, that if he could tamp it down, he would. It didn't exactly do good things for his reputation or his interactions with people. But he had tried before, to no avail, and tried a number of ways, to boot.
(He would have asked for ideas or a fresh perspective, if he had thought either of his traveling companions would genuinely help. But even though his youngest cousin had thawed a bit toward him, it still didn't seem advisable.)
Earlier, Sheimi had snapped at him, out of an apparent concern for her future brother-in-law. Tatsuya did not think Makoto actually needed help running around Wind Country, as 1) he had been there before and 2) he was a highly competent person in his own right. Not to mention that the idea of someone whose alleged specialty was tracking getting lost was absurd.
But the fact that he apparently felt uncomfortable enough around the pair of them at once to repeatedly ditch them without even bothering to ask Sheimi, whom he got along with, along with him was a little...concerning. Which made Tatsuya wonder if the secret he was hiding had something to do with Wind Country itself, perhaps someone or something he was sworn to.
It was...probably not anything that had them going against orders. Makoto had seemed as fond of the Sand nin in general as he did of anyone, and he had been at that massive fight outside the gates with that giant undead sandworm, so it seemed unlikely that he was siding with the other side of this little weird quasi-civil war. (Wind Country's politics were, however, less strange than Moon's; it was simple enough to remember that Sand was Sand, an entity unto itself, and that it and Wind's governments Did Not Get Along. It was just odd to Tatsuya in general that they were so separate, so different from how things had been in Water.) He'd gone up to the surface and seen the creature's decaying corpse, and admitted to himself clinically that it was not a fight that he would enter himself without considering it seriously.
As for what, exactly, Sheimi's secret was...well, he had a few theories on that, too. The idea of her being opposed to his family seemed highly unlikely at best, and she had way too many easy, unconscious tells to hide that at any rate. So she wasn't a traitor or anything. That didn't change the fact that something was up with her, too. But despite the fact she didn't seem to have the ability to lie, this one secret of hers evaded him.
And he had a feeling that if he didn't work out what both his teammates were hiding, things could blow up and then none of them would be sociable with either of the others. So even if they both hated his guts, he had to work it out so they didn't end up comnig to blows with each other, at least.
Contrary to what his cousins thought, he was not actually that much of an asshole. And he was also pretty sure he wasn't just trying to justify his curiosity.
So when Sheimi had stormed off in a huff to go and wait for Makoto to get back from wherever it was he went to all the time, Tatsuya had given her a ten minute lead before slowly heading after her. It was not long before his cousin usually got back, so he would give them a few minutes to hash it out before he showed up. Just in case.
Louise, when asked, did not want to come along, so he left her coiled up on his pillow so she could take a nap. The local climate quite agreed with her sensibilities, so he didn't even have to leave anything more than a water bowl for her.
As it turned out, it was a good thing he wasn't that far away from his teammates.
"Now that's interesting," he murmured at the colourful display of Ninjutsu. Correction, of no-handseals Ninjutsu, flung by things that were clearly not human.
That's their secret, hm? The same one, at that. And of course it had to go and blow up.
There were a number of ways Tatsuya could have interceded here, from trying to talk them down (unlikely, and he didn't even know the personalities behind these spirits) to siding with one (unwise) to simply letting them fight it out (beyond stupid).
But there was another thing that only he could really do. And that seemed like the only intelligent option.
He took off at a run, wrapping the void around himself as a cloak as he did so. Normally, the first level of this only allowed him to hide from the notice of others. However, this was something a bit...more. He'd only had cause to do it a few times before, but it had always proved quite effective then. The void had no issues at all swallowing any amount of Ninjutsu power.
So he pulled the second layer tightly around himself, took a leap over Sheimi's head, and landed in between their second round of attacks right before they would have clashed.
(For anyone else, this would have fallen into the 'beyond stupid' category. Getting in the middle of a pair of angry Jinchuuriki was just not something you should do. For him, however, it was literally the best option.)
Both attacks fell through his void cloak, non-elemental from one side and a strangely equally earth-and-water one from the other. Both fighters stopped immediately after, since nothing had exploded.
Tatsuya stood up from his crouch and shed the internal layer of the cloak, the one to hide him from sight. The air around him was still oddly warped, but he was visible to them now. The fact they had both stopped and were eying him warily meant he could observe them both.
Makoto, or whatever spirit was possessing him, seemed to favour silver strongly. The wings that arced up over his head were silver, and the colour dripped off of them in molten gobs that turned to snow white feathers and then dissolved on the ground. His eyes were gold rather than their normal pale blue, and seemed backlit to some degree, almost glowing. There was a faint silver aura around him as well. Definitely possessed then--Tatsuya knew for a fact that Makoto's own chakra was blue-green.
Sheimi, by contrast, was glowing a bright, leafy green. Rather than possessing any massive wings or indication of a spirit on her person, her shadow had shifted into one that closely resembled some kind of deer. A reindeer? He vaguely recalled that was one of the kinds that the females retained their antlers all year. Her eyes were naturally green, so the difference there was harder to discern, but they seemed to be swirling with green and brown energy as opposed to their normal solid, bright, bottle green. Possessed too, then.
"This is ridiculous," he said, when neither of them were willing to stop posturing. "I sincerely doubt the people whose bodies you're borrowing actually want to fight each other."
"I am trying to cleanse that woman of the demon," the voice from Makoto's mouth said and wow, that was definitely not his cousin's voice--or for that matter, any human's. "I would thank you not to interfere."
"Just because I'm a demon and you're not that means you're not doing any harm!" the high voice from Sheimi's mouth snapped. "How ridiculous is that!"
Before the spirit-thing could retort again and get them into another escalating argument, Tatsuya let go of his suppression of the void power that swirled around him and raised his voice. "Enough."
They both fell silent, apparently impacted by the fear aura--or simply realizing it would be unwise to attack someone they would have severe difficulty touching at all.
"How long have either of you been with your humans?" he asked, hoping it would give him a good way to drive the conversation.
Silence, and then the one in Makoto, "Nineteen years."
"Yeah. Same." Pause. "So?"
"And clearly, both hosts are fine?" Tatsuya wasn't sure about mental states, since he personally thought they were both different kinds of totally nuts, but that was par for the course with ninja and thus irrelevant. Neither seemed inclined to run halfway around the world on a whim or prone to taking gigantic risks that would never pay off, so they were at least more sane than his past friends and close family, at any rate.
Another, extended silence.
The voice that broke it, however, was recognizably Makoto's, that smooth, even voice that Misora would love to get in a duet with her at some point. "Yes. I'm fine. Sheimi is clearly fine. This is just a stupid grudge the two of them have for no reason either of them were willing to enlighten us with--they fought once before, is all, and this is ridiculous."
"Likewise," Sheimi said tersely. The shifting colour in her eyes was back to normal, he noted, much like Makoto's were blue again when he checked. The wings and the shadow remained, however. "And I told her not to go grabbing control like that unless I said it was okay!"
"So did I." The wings had started fading from view, rather than folding in like normal bird wings. Judging by his cousin's expression, some kind of bird spirit in his head was getting quite the telling-off. "Told it not to do that, rather. Ugh. Not the way I wanted to test those skills."
Tatsuya opened his mouth to question that, but Sheimi beat him to it. "Test? You said you'd had it for nineteen years! Or, well, it said it was nineteen years..."
"It's...complicated." Makoto looked away. "It's only been active the last few. And we only synced up enough to do this recently. There's been a few difficulties."
Judging there weren't going to be any more attacks any time soon, Tatsuya dropped the second extra layer of void aura. He could always bring it back up again if he needed to.
"So, uh," he said after a moment, when no one else spoke, "am I completely misunderstanding things, or did you two have no reason whatsoever to keep this issue a secret? I imagine that Jinchuuriki in Moon would be rather welcomed."
"Well that's the problem, isn't it," Sheimi snapped irritably. "The Shrine would love to get their hands on one of us, especially if it had been when we were children. That wouldn't be good for either of us at all."
"Kanashimi strongly implied that if I had been outed as carrying a spirit as a child, the Shrine would have put significant resources into kidnapping me and attempting to raise me as one of theirs--and our family would have practically gone to war over it." Makoto shrugged, looking awkward. "So yes, you are misunderstanding things."
Ridiculous politics, but most politics were ridiculous. And from what Tatsuya knew of Moon's government, entirely plausible. "All right. So, what was keeping you two from telling each other?"
More awkward silence.
"...Habit?" Makoto said after a minute. "I don't think I have anything better than that, sorry. I wanted as few people to know as possible."
"Yeahhhh..." Sheimi sighed, then dropped down to sit on the sand. She gestured them both over--or at least, gestured Makoto over and didn't shoo Tatsuya away when he came too. "See, here's the thing. She is a demon. But not a bad one. But when you say 'demon' people kind of...assume. So I didn't want to tell anyone."
"Did you tell Kanashimi?" Makoto asked, primarily sounding curious but with an edge to his voice that seemed to crop up in the entire family when one of their own was threatened. Tatsuya sprawled out a few feet away from the two of them watching.
"He knows I'm possessed, and that the spirit isn't hurting me. I haven't said right out she's a demon, but they've met." She shrugged. "He didn't let slip about you. Assuming he knows?"
"Yes." Quiet, thoughtful. "And I doubt he knew--well, when it comes down to it, I haven't ever actually said much to anyone about how it came to me in the first place, so he wouldn't know enough to know there even could be a problem."
Tatsuya suppressed a probably-unwelcome chuckle, but mentally high-fived Kanashimi. He still had no idea what an attractive, intelligent, amazingly tough woman like Sheimi saw in someone who seemed to think emotions were a liability, but however they'd gotten together, she was a real catch. "All right. Now that's everything out in the open, and no one's going to attack anyone else, right?"
They exchanged looks with each other, and then appeared to be querying their inner spirits. "...Yeah," Makoto said after a minute. "I mean, they'll have to hash this out with words later, but. Yeah."
"Same." Sheimi flicked a lock of hair out of her face. "Guess we're good, unless Mister Posterboy over there has something secret of his own while we're sharing."
"I've told you before, I really don't," he said mildly. Which was for the most part true; he didn't have anything he was really hiding. "Not really a secret anyway, that I can't tamp down on my aura."
Fishing, maybe, but whatever.
Sheimi snorted in derision, but Makoto had acquired a thoughtful expression again. "Your phrasing--are you trying to smother it, as if it were a flame you should deny fuel?"
"Yes." How else was he supposed to do it? But it occurred to Tatsuya a second later that his cousin had his own aura that would make people nervous if he kept it up all the time. Which accounted for some of Kanashimi's dislike of him--if his youngest brother could manage to master repressing his aura, why couldn't Tatsuya, who had years on him?
He'd thought himself that it was a difference in the source and nature of auras, but what if it wasn't?
"There's your problem." Makoto stood and stretched, casually activating a faint flare of blue-green chakra that knocked all the sand off him in an instant. Sheimi rolled her eyes as she stood and brushed herself off the normal way. "You don't damp it. You have to fold it in on itself. It even makes it easier to rapidly snap it out and focus it on the right targets when you need to."
"What." How could he fold something that was, basically, nothing? "How do you even fold an aura?"
"Metaphorically, of course," Makoto answered. "The important part is that you have to focus it, sharpen it, and then manipulate it so it collapses on itself. Folding is simply the easiest way to put it."
"...If this doesn't work, I doubt anything else will." He sighed, then closed his eyes and focused.
No one else would be able to find the edges of his aura, but he could. They didn't like being repressed, of course, so he had stopped trying, but there they were. But he did as he was told and focused on them, sharpening his awareness of the power. It was counterintuitive when he was trying to shut it down, but abruptly, the world took a step to the left and a single poke made the entire thing collapse back into him.
He opened his eyes again, meeting a grinning Sheimi and a smug Makoto.
"...In fairness," he said carefully, "I've only been at this level of power in my void skills for a few years now."
"It took me three days to work out how to subdue my pressure aura," Makoto said mildly as Sheimi covered her mouth to badly hide a snorting fit.
Tatsuya nearly groaned aloud. "No wonder your brother hates me and thinks I wasn't really trying."
"Well, I guess when we get back you can tell him I'm just smarter than you are," Makoto said brightly, and Sheimi gave up the unequal battle against laughter. Tatsuya considered thumping him, but didn't want to start another fight that would almost assuredly be a two versus one not in his favour. "Now, how about we all get back to Sand, remember what we're not supposed to talk about, and get some sleep?"
Sleep sounded fantastic right about then. "Sure."
"That reminds me," Sheimi said as her giggles subsided and they were heading back in to the city. "Where did you go that time you were gone a week? You never answered."
"Ah, well," Makoto seemed uncomfortable. "It's nothing important...maybe later, okay?"
Odds were good he'd found a girlfriend or something, then. At least they'd cleared the air of all the damaging secrets.
[Topic Entered/Left S-Rank 30 Min; w/NPC = B-Rank 2 hrs]
That was more than a full day longer than it had said it would take, but it was still a relief to know it wouldn't be years this time. He waited while it mentally stretched before greeting it. Good morning.
Makoto? When is it now?
Same day, late night...or early morning, not sure which by now. I'm on the way back to Sand.
Ah. I'm glad to hear that. The sensation of wings being stretched, its surface thoughts flooding into his mind as it reached full consciousness. Has anything happened while I've been out?
Not much. The usual. Looking forward to sleep. It was still difficult to convey a shrug mentally, but he managed. ...Missing home a little, I guess.
Ah. That is not surprising. A customary pause while it rummaged through his mind for the relevant information. You aren't very fond of traveling.
Mostly for climate reasons, but yes. Sand is better than most of the alternatives I could think of, if I had to go to a ninja village. Cloud was too cold, and he didn't know much about the political situation in Leaf other than that it was rather volatile at times.
And you like the people, which helps when you miss your family. It wasn't pushing, not quite, but there was a hint of gentle remonstration in there.
I...suppose. He still wasn't comfortable admitting to such things. My family isn't that close.
There is family, and then there is family, the phoenix said patiently, and it didn't need to explain the difference for him to understand. Emotions are not weakness. Ignoring them creates it. We've been through this.
Shrugging off over twenty years of 'emotions are weakness' is not easy.
I suppose. To you, that's most of your lifetime. It paused, followed by a hint of wariness clear in it regarding the next subject. I imagine that's the issue with your brother, too.
Makoto tried not to immediately get his hackles up and failed. He knew which brother it meant, and what it meant, but still had to ask, what?
You felt it when you were an empath--how his emotions do not match his outward calm. It paused, then added with a good deal of care, that is not entirely healthy. Especially since he cannot have expected anything dangerous from you. Even if you are shielding your emotions from your enemies, you should not from your friends and family.
We are not having this conversation. He put as much finality into the thought as he could.
Ah. Subdued. Perhaps you would rather have it with him, later?
I would rather have it never.
There was a wave of 'you're being ridiculous' (or, as the phoenix itself would say, 'this is not healthy and we are discussing this later') but this shifted abruptly to alarm. Danger ahead.
Don't be ridiculous. We're almost at Sand. He rethought this immediately. Wait, you didn't manage to warn me about the sandworm ahead of time. What kind of danger is this that you can sense?
My senses have expanded since we properly merged. I would have detected an undead sandworm. All I can tell you is it is dangerous, and dark. He could almost see, in his mind's eye, the phoenix standing with its wings outstretched in alarm. Demonic, even.
There were demons in Moon, probably, so it wasn't surprising there were demons in Sand. Especially since there were all manner of other things he'd both heard whispers and seen evidence of; nothing and no one normal could have animated the Storm God.
"All right," he said out loud quietly, taking out his parasol. "I would have liked some practice time before we had to fight like this, but it doesn't seem like we'll get it. I don't hear signs of a fight, though, so we might be interrupting someone who is attempting something unseen."
No words, just a sense of readiness. This pocket form of empathy, focused on a single not-overly-emotional person and only when they both wanted it to be, was actually kind of handy.
He crested the hill, listening intently for the sounds of...anything, really. There weren't any. Instead, when he cleared the rise, he spotted...
Sheimi. Standing there on the sand, a dozen or so kilometers out from Sand's boundaries, tapping her foot impatiently.
He blinked, then blinked again. The image remained Sheimi--persistently not a mirage, an illusion, or covered in a demonic cloud. Just...her.
"Where the hell have you been?" Sheimi demanded, stalking up to him. "You keep pulling this damn vanishing act of yours, almost every single day! And a while back you were gone for nearly a week! Leaving me alone with that jackass!"
Sure enough, when she got closer the demonic energy seemed to intensify. She didn't seem to notice it herself.
(Makoto didn't feel the need to point out that it was because of Tatsuya and her interactions with him that he so frequently found a reason to make himself scarce, but he did revise his fault assessment on the lack of unit cohesion to nudge his own blame a little higher.)
"I've...been busy," he said evasively. Not that he thought it would work; one of her specialties was interrogations. But it only needed to work until he figured out why exactly she was radiating demonic energy.
"The hell you have! You've just been skipping off to do random crap!" she shouted. He leaned back, but she was intent on getting in his face. "I bet you found a bar or something, didn't you?"
Yes. "No," he lied, drawing the syllable out. "I've been...scouting. Public opinion. In the other cities."
Not that that was...strictly necessary. There seemed to be people with every concievable opinion on the whole Sand vs Wind affair, from believing one side to believing the other was wronged to thinking everyone involved sounded rotten to a man who had sworn up and down with two nodding adherents that the country was really secretly run by shapeshifting sandworms who disguised themselves as influential people. And he had said such with a straight face, while sober.
No country was immune to crackpots, it seemed.
But the point was, it wasn't difficult to figure out, and in fact if that had been what he was doing he would have been done in a single day.
Hypothesis: Sheimi is radiating demonic energy because she...has a demon with her, somehow. Not that I see one, but.
...And she does not see me.
"Fuck," he said, then realized it had been out loud, which was not helping ward off the anger of the hundred and twenty-five pounds of punk-ass attitude glaring at him. "Um. I mean."
I recognize that demonic energy, Makoto.
"The next words out of your mouth had better be the truth," she snapped.
"Um," he said eloquently, hating himself for it. Usually he was better than this, but two people were talking at him at once, and neither one was giving him physical or mental breathing room.
That is the energy of the demon I was fighting, shortly before we first met.
I'll ask her then, but first I have to calm her down.
No. That demon cannot be trusted.
H-hey! That's my brother's girlfriend! More importantly, she can kick my ass, don't--!
Silver light was rising off him. Sheimi's expression shifted rapidly, from anger to realization. She snapped the red scarf off her neck and flicked it out to its sword form in a single smooth motion.
He wouldn't have done it himself had he had full control of his chakra just then, but he didn't, so it caught him too off guard to stop when a wave of scorching heat rolled off his skin and slammed into Sheimi.
An instant later, he felt rather than saw the silver wings sprout from his shoulders, radiant light spilling off them and scattering white feathers with it. Another moment after that and a ripple of greenery passed over Sheimi, her shadow shifting into that of a...deer?
"Showy," Sheimi sneered, except no, that wasn't her, was it? That was...whatever demon or spirit was with her, she was like him, must have been all this time. Except their spirits were opposed. (Did Kanashimi know she was carrying a demon?) "That's just so typical of your kind! But I thought I won last time."
The voice that came out of Makoto's mouth was more noticeably not his, since he was fairly sure his own voice was not ambiguously-gendered and backed by chimes. "And I should have known that you would seek another to corrupt. How long have you been bothering that girl?"
The demon sounded almost insulted. Now he was listening for it, its (her?) voice was much more clear and piping than Sheimi's lower tones. "I don't bother her! She likes me. We have fun. But what have you been doing to that boy? My host is fond of him, you know--like a little brother."
"I would not harm a human who has done no wrong," the phoenix said firmly, flaring its wings in indignation. "But you--I cannot allow you to continue like this."
"Fine!" the reindeer demon snapped. Makoto supposed Sheimi had a similar lack of control to him at the moment. It was very frustrating, but the two spirits seemed to possess a grudge with one another that superceded any requests their hosts might prefer. "Might as well finish the job, anyway!"
Cut it out! he snapped, but the phoenix wasn't listening.
A wave of silver met a wave of green.
~
Contrary to what his teammates may have thought, Tatsuya was well-aware that he was the one that was considered most at fault for the schism in the team. Which, as far as he was concerned, was a bit odd. He was the only member of the team without some sort of secret, a fact that had been dismissed by both of the others whenever he brought it up.
Annoyingly, this also meant he was limited as far as prying went, lest one of the other two explode on him. He was quite confident on his ability to take on one or the other, but if one of them went off at him in a full fight, the other would probably jump in and assist--such was their dislike of them.
And pretty much all of that was due to the still-unexplained-for-the-most-part dislike his new cousin had for him.
Subtle canvassing, as well as an assessment of the man's own words, had indicated that Kanashimi was not in fact jealous that Tatsuya would be the one taking the reins of the clan. Leading their family would apparently have made him uncomfortable in the first place. Unfortunately, that left the list of reasons it could actually be rather short.
He hadn't harmed either of Kanashimi's siblings, as much as the younger of the two was testing him on that now, and the twin had while they were in Moon. Hadn't made any threatening overtures to the rest of his family, or his girlfriend. Hadn't even threatened or been violent toward anyone in Moon. And he hadn't met Sheimi until the mission, not to mention that she wanted as little as possible to do with him, so it wasn't as if he'd slept with his cousin's girlfriend or anything.
If it really was as simple as Kanashimi had claimed--and he was drawing a blank if it wasn't--then it was his aura that was at fault. The problem was, he couldn't exactly do much about that. Maybe his cousins had been raised in the highly spiritual Moon, where the otherworldly powers they were aware of were all relatively easy to suppress or hide from prying eyes, but this was certainly not one of those powers.
They really ought to have known, too, that if he could tamp it down, he would. It didn't exactly do good things for his reputation or his interactions with people. But he had tried before, to no avail, and tried a number of ways, to boot.
(He would have asked for ideas or a fresh perspective, if he had thought either of his traveling companions would genuinely help. But even though his youngest cousin had thawed a bit toward him, it still didn't seem advisable.)
Earlier, Sheimi had snapped at him, out of an apparent concern for her future brother-in-law. Tatsuya did not think Makoto actually needed help running around Wind Country, as 1) he had been there before and 2) he was a highly competent person in his own right. Not to mention that the idea of someone whose alleged specialty was tracking getting lost was absurd.
But the fact that he apparently felt uncomfortable enough around the pair of them at once to repeatedly ditch them without even bothering to ask Sheimi, whom he got along with, along with him was a little...concerning. Which made Tatsuya wonder if the secret he was hiding had something to do with Wind Country itself, perhaps someone or something he was sworn to.
It was...probably not anything that had them going against orders. Makoto had seemed as fond of the Sand nin in general as he did of anyone, and he had been at that massive fight outside the gates with that giant undead sandworm, so it seemed unlikely that he was siding with the other side of this little weird quasi-civil war. (Wind Country's politics were, however, less strange than Moon's; it was simple enough to remember that Sand was Sand, an entity unto itself, and that it and Wind's governments Did Not Get Along. It was just odd to Tatsuya in general that they were so separate, so different from how things had been in Water.) He'd gone up to the surface and seen the creature's decaying corpse, and admitted to himself clinically that it was not a fight that he would enter himself without considering it seriously.
As for what, exactly, Sheimi's secret was...well, he had a few theories on that, too. The idea of her being opposed to his family seemed highly unlikely at best, and she had way too many easy, unconscious tells to hide that at any rate. So she wasn't a traitor or anything. That didn't change the fact that something was up with her, too. But despite the fact she didn't seem to have the ability to lie, this one secret of hers evaded him.
And he had a feeling that if he didn't work out what both his teammates were hiding, things could blow up and then none of them would be sociable with either of the others. So even if they both hated his guts, he had to work it out so they didn't end up comnig to blows with each other, at least.
Contrary to what his cousins thought, he was not actually that much of an asshole. And he was also pretty sure he wasn't just trying to justify his curiosity.
So when Sheimi had stormed off in a huff to go and wait for Makoto to get back from wherever it was he went to all the time, Tatsuya had given her a ten minute lead before slowly heading after her. It was not long before his cousin usually got back, so he would give them a few minutes to hash it out before he showed up. Just in case.
Louise, when asked, did not want to come along, so he left her coiled up on his pillow so she could take a nap. The local climate quite agreed with her sensibilities, so he didn't even have to leave anything more than a water bowl for her.
As it turned out, it was a good thing he wasn't that far away from his teammates.
"Now that's interesting," he murmured at the colourful display of Ninjutsu. Correction, of no-handseals Ninjutsu, flung by things that were clearly not human.
That's their secret, hm? The same one, at that. And of course it had to go and blow up.
There were a number of ways Tatsuya could have interceded here, from trying to talk them down (unlikely, and he didn't even know the personalities behind these spirits) to siding with one (unwise) to simply letting them fight it out (beyond stupid).
But there was another thing that only he could really do. And that seemed like the only intelligent option.
He took off at a run, wrapping the void around himself as a cloak as he did so. Normally, the first level of this only allowed him to hide from the notice of others. However, this was something a bit...more. He'd only had cause to do it a few times before, but it had always proved quite effective then. The void had no issues at all swallowing any amount of Ninjutsu power.
So he pulled the second layer tightly around himself, took a leap over Sheimi's head, and landed in between their second round of attacks right before they would have clashed.
(For anyone else, this would have fallen into the 'beyond stupid' category. Getting in the middle of a pair of angry Jinchuuriki was just not something you should do. For him, however, it was literally the best option.)
Both attacks fell through his void cloak, non-elemental from one side and a strangely equally earth-and-water one from the other. Both fighters stopped immediately after, since nothing had exploded.
Tatsuya stood up from his crouch and shed the internal layer of the cloak, the one to hide him from sight. The air around him was still oddly warped, but he was visible to them now. The fact they had both stopped and were eying him warily meant he could observe them both.
Makoto, or whatever spirit was possessing him, seemed to favour silver strongly. The wings that arced up over his head were silver, and the colour dripped off of them in molten gobs that turned to snow white feathers and then dissolved on the ground. His eyes were gold rather than their normal pale blue, and seemed backlit to some degree, almost glowing. There was a faint silver aura around him as well. Definitely possessed then--Tatsuya knew for a fact that Makoto's own chakra was blue-green.
Sheimi, by contrast, was glowing a bright, leafy green. Rather than possessing any massive wings or indication of a spirit on her person, her shadow had shifted into one that closely resembled some kind of deer. A reindeer? He vaguely recalled that was one of the kinds that the females retained their antlers all year. Her eyes were naturally green, so the difference there was harder to discern, but they seemed to be swirling with green and brown energy as opposed to their normal solid, bright, bottle green. Possessed too, then.
"This is ridiculous," he said, when neither of them were willing to stop posturing. "I sincerely doubt the people whose bodies you're borrowing actually want to fight each other."
"I am trying to cleanse that woman of the demon," the voice from Makoto's mouth said and wow, that was definitely not his cousin's voice--or for that matter, any human's. "I would thank you not to interfere."
"Just because I'm a demon and you're not that means you're not doing any harm!" the high voice from Sheimi's mouth snapped. "How ridiculous is that!"
Before the spirit-thing could retort again and get them into another escalating argument, Tatsuya let go of his suppression of the void power that swirled around him and raised his voice. "Enough."
They both fell silent, apparently impacted by the fear aura--or simply realizing it would be unwise to attack someone they would have severe difficulty touching at all.
"How long have either of you been with your humans?" he asked, hoping it would give him a good way to drive the conversation.
Silence, and then the one in Makoto, "Nineteen years."
"Yeah. Same." Pause. "So?"
"And clearly, both hosts are fine?" Tatsuya wasn't sure about mental states, since he personally thought they were both different kinds of totally nuts, but that was par for the course with ninja and thus irrelevant. Neither seemed inclined to run halfway around the world on a whim or prone to taking gigantic risks that would never pay off, so they were at least more sane than his past friends and close family, at any rate.
Another, extended silence.
The voice that broke it, however, was recognizably Makoto's, that smooth, even voice that Misora would love to get in a duet with her at some point. "Yes. I'm fine. Sheimi is clearly fine. This is just a stupid grudge the two of them have for no reason either of them were willing to enlighten us with--they fought once before, is all, and this is ridiculous."
"Likewise," Sheimi said tersely. The shifting colour in her eyes was back to normal, he noted, much like Makoto's were blue again when he checked. The wings and the shadow remained, however. "And I told her not to go grabbing control like that unless I said it was okay!"
"So did I." The wings had started fading from view, rather than folding in like normal bird wings. Judging by his cousin's expression, some kind of bird spirit in his head was getting quite the telling-off. "Told it not to do that, rather. Ugh. Not the way I wanted to test those skills."
Tatsuya opened his mouth to question that, but Sheimi beat him to it. "Test? You said you'd had it for nineteen years! Or, well, it said it was nineteen years..."
"It's...complicated." Makoto looked away. "It's only been active the last few. And we only synced up enough to do this recently. There's been a few difficulties."
Judging there weren't going to be any more attacks any time soon, Tatsuya dropped the second extra layer of void aura. He could always bring it back up again if he needed to.
"So, uh," he said after a moment, when no one else spoke, "am I completely misunderstanding things, or did you two have no reason whatsoever to keep this issue a secret? I imagine that Jinchuuriki in Moon would be rather welcomed."
"Well that's the problem, isn't it," Sheimi snapped irritably. "The Shrine would love to get their hands on one of us, especially if it had been when we were children. That wouldn't be good for either of us at all."
"Kanashimi strongly implied that if I had been outed as carrying a spirit as a child, the Shrine would have put significant resources into kidnapping me and attempting to raise me as one of theirs--and our family would have practically gone to war over it." Makoto shrugged, looking awkward. "So yes, you are misunderstanding things."
Ridiculous politics, but most politics were ridiculous. And from what Tatsuya knew of Moon's government, entirely plausible. "All right. So, what was keeping you two from telling each other?"
More awkward silence.
"...Habit?" Makoto said after a minute. "I don't think I have anything better than that, sorry. I wanted as few people to know as possible."
"Yeahhhh..." Sheimi sighed, then dropped down to sit on the sand. She gestured them both over--or at least, gestured Makoto over and didn't shoo Tatsuya away when he came too. "See, here's the thing. She is a demon. But not a bad one. But when you say 'demon' people kind of...assume. So I didn't want to tell anyone."
"Did you tell Kanashimi?" Makoto asked, primarily sounding curious but with an edge to his voice that seemed to crop up in the entire family when one of their own was threatened. Tatsuya sprawled out a few feet away from the two of them watching.
"He knows I'm possessed, and that the spirit isn't hurting me. I haven't said right out she's a demon, but they've met." She shrugged. "He didn't let slip about you. Assuming he knows?"
"Yes." Quiet, thoughtful. "And I doubt he knew--well, when it comes down to it, I haven't ever actually said much to anyone about how it came to me in the first place, so he wouldn't know enough to know there even could be a problem."
Tatsuya suppressed a probably-unwelcome chuckle, but mentally high-fived Kanashimi. He still had no idea what an attractive, intelligent, amazingly tough woman like Sheimi saw in someone who seemed to think emotions were a liability, but however they'd gotten together, she was a real catch. "All right. Now that's everything out in the open, and no one's going to attack anyone else, right?"
They exchanged looks with each other, and then appeared to be querying their inner spirits. "...Yeah," Makoto said after a minute. "I mean, they'll have to hash this out with words later, but. Yeah."
"Same." Sheimi flicked a lock of hair out of her face. "Guess we're good, unless Mister Posterboy over there has something secret of his own while we're sharing."
"I've told you before, I really don't," he said mildly. Which was for the most part true; he didn't have anything he was really hiding. "Not really a secret anyway, that I can't tamp down on my aura."
Fishing, maybe, but whatever.
Sheimi snorted in derision, but Makoto had acquired a thoughtful expression again. "Your phrasing--are you trying to smother it, as if it were a flame you should deny fuel?"
"Yes." How else was he supposed to do it? But it occurred to Tatsuya a second later that his cousin had his own aura that would make people nervous if he kept it up all the time. Which accounted for some of Kanashimi's dislike of him--if his youngest brother could manage to master repressing his aura, why couldn't Tatsuya, who had years on him?
He'd thought himself that it was a difference in the source and nature of auras, but what if it wasn't?
"There's your problem." Makoto stood and stretched, casually activating a faint flare of blue-green chakra that knocked all the sand off him in an instant. Sheimi rolled her eyes as she stood and brushed herself off the normal way. "You don't damp it. You have to fold it in on itself. It even makes it easier to rapidly snap it out and focus it on the right targets when you need to."
"What." How could he fold something that was, basically, nothing? "How do you even fold an aura?"
"Metaphorically, of course," Makoto answered. "The important part is that you have to focus it, sharpen it, and then manipulate it so it collapses on itself. Folding is simply the easiest way to put it."
"...If this doesn't work, I doubt anything else will." He sighed, then closed his eyes and focused.
No one else would be able to find the edges of his aura, but he could. They didn't like being repressed, of course, so he had stopped trying, but there they were. But he did as he was told and focused on them, sharpening his awareness of the power. It was counterintuitive when he was trying to shut it down, but abruptly, the world took a step to the left and a single poke made the entire thing collapse back into him.
He opened his eyes again, meeting a grinning Sheimi and a smug Makoto.
"...In fairness," he said carefully, "I've only been at this level of power in my void skills for a few years now."
"It took me three days to work out how to subdue my pressure aura," Makoto said mildly as Sheimi covered her mouth to badly hide a snorting fit.
Tatsuya nearly groaned aloud. "No wonder your brother hates me and thinks I wasn't really trying."
"Well, I guess when we get back you can tell him I'm just smarter than you are," Makoto said brightly, and Sheimi gave up the unequal battle against laughter. Tatsuya considered thumping him, but didn't want to start another fight that would almost assuredly be a two versus one not in his favour. "Now, how about we all get back to Sand, remember what we're not supposed to talk about, and get some sleep?"
Sleep sounded fantastic right about then. "Sure."
"That reminds me," Sheimi said as her giggles subsided and they were heading back in to the city. "Where did you go that time you were gone a week? You never answered."
"Ah, well," Makoto seemed uncomfortable. "It's nothing important...maybe later, okay?"
Odds were good he'd found a girlfriend or something, then. At least they'd cleared the air of all the damaging secrets.
[Topic Entered/Left S-Rank 30 Min; w/NPC = B-Rank 2 hrs]