Chapter Text
Tobirama stood solemn, exhausted vigil as the pyre burned, hat doffed in respect for the deceased, the smell of burning oil, elm, and flesh acrid in his nose and mouth. Thick smoke trailed off into the early evening air in greasy spirals, forming the occasional malevolent faces.
“Is that it then?” Old Tazuna asked, leaning wearily on his shovel, the lines of grief and exhaustion carved deep in his face. He clutched a near-empty flask in his shaking hand, having been drinking near constantly since Tobirama met him.
Tobirama nodded curtly, “Yes. I apologize for your loss. I know it’s never easy when it’s one of your own.” The most fraught cases were always the ones that hit far too close to home. It made people hesitate. Hesitation inevitably got them killed.
“Inari will be heartbroken to know his father was a monster.” Tazuna sighed sadly, slugging back the last of his flask.
Tobirama grasped Tazuna’s shoulder firmly, not a naturally comforting man but trying nonetheless. “He wasn’t,” he insisted, countenance made fierce with conviction. “The man he knew, the man who raised him, he wasn’t a monster. He was a good man. The monstrous thing that stole his body in death? That wasn’t Inari’s father, I promise you.”
The man, Kaiza, was by all accounts an honorable man who deserved as honorable a funeral as Tobirama could give him under the circumstances. It wasn’t the man’s fault a demon had lurked under his soul since birth, waiting for his death to emerge and terrorize his neighbors and kin. Such was the fate of the two-souled striga.
Tazuna cleared his throat uncomfortably under the sudden onslaught of sincerity, making noises about getting the caskets for the remains, Tobirama tactfully backed off. He busied himself with the large tome he carried everywhere instead, thumbing through to find a blank page and digging a lead pencil out of the pocket on the strap the tome hung from. By the light of the pyre, he sat and meticulously recorded the events of the hunt.
He’d arrived in this town at dawn, a habit of his to always enter a human establishment during the daytime, and sought the small chapel and its priest first thing, having run low on holy water. The priest, recognizing him by the stag and hound insignia embroidered on his breast, had requested his services as a Hunter as payment.
For the last three nights someone would be found in the woods, dead, gutted, and drained of blood, very obviously not the work of animals. Initial suspicion had been a vampire; the initial suspect, a traveler who’d arrived the night before the first body was found and slept the sleep of the dead all the next day.
A one Madara Uchiha; irritant extraordinaire, and reluctant partner in this instance.
Even being locked up in the one cell the town had to offer didn’t exonerate him when more bodies were found unnaturally, grislily dead.
Having gotten to know him over the course of the night, Tobirama could say for certain he suspected him of being something inhuman. What that was, he didn’t much care, then or now. His main concern had been the obvious signs of a striga wandering about, and making delicate inquiries as to who might have suffered a near death experience or survived a seeming death blow with no obvious injury within the last week.
Some tales say a striga will remain dormant after the death of their human soul until they’d been buried. In Tobirama’s experience, this was only the case when the body was obviously injured beyond a human’s ability to recover. More often, someone would get very sick, or take a tumble, or hit their head somehow, or wander about in bad weather, and the time between their death and the demon taking over would be blink and you miss it.
Kaiza had fallen off the roof trying to fix the shingles. His wife, Tsunami, swore up and down she could hear the crunch of his neck hitting the ground from inside the house, and marveled at the time that he only had bruises to show for it.
Now she marveled at still being alive after sharing a bed with a demon for half a week.
Tobirama added a notation under that, further speculation on how much the demon shared the human soul’s opinions on certain people. The demon certainly remembered everything the human knew after all, but there was very little lore on what else the demon absorbed from them. Once discovered, striga weren’t the most cooperative or chatty. Quiet the opposite, really.
He turned to a clean page and sketched a picture of Kaiza, before and after discovery, to the best of his ability.
A soft sound of boots on dirt alerted him to someone trying to get close enough to peer over his shoulder, and he hurriedly snapped the book shut and strapped it closed. He looked up to give Madara a vicious glare for being nosy. Again. Bastard couldn’t seem to leave well enough alone when it came to his book.
This journal was his life, his catalogue, all the knowledge of the supernatural he’s encountered on his travels, all the corrections he’s made to lore. It even held within it instructions of various charms, rituals, blessings, herblore, and curses, great and terrible things alike; exactly the kind of things you did not want to be showing people willy-nilly unless you wanted to leave a body count.
“Can’t blame a man for being curious.” Madara shrugged carelessly under Tobirama’s affront.
Tobirama rose to his feet and pointedly turned away. “Careful,” he warned. “Can blame a man for many things that curiosity leads to. You might just be the next entry.”
Strangely, Madara grinned at that, teeth carefully tucked behind his lips as usual. “I’ve done nothing worth being hunted for,” he said with all confidence.
“That I know of,” Tobirama retorted.
“That you know of,” Madara agreed with a nod, still grinning under his wide-brimmed floppy hat. “And may I just say once again how fortuitous it is that you stopped by before the townsfolk took matters into their own hands any further? I haven’t seen sunlight in days thanks to them.”
“Quite taxing on you, I’m sure,” Tobirama said dryly. “If you’ll excuse me, the pyre is dying down and the ashes need to be divied up.”
“Of course, of course, don’t let me keep you.” Madara held up his hands and backed away, magnanimous to the point of mocking. “I ought to be on the way myself. I’ve been terribly delayed from a family meeting, thank goodness, and I’m sure they’re running around like headless chickens by now.”
“Safe journey,” Tobirama muttered, already turned to the task of sifting through the pyre with the aid of a long stick. He probably, definitely, shouldn’t be letting someone as suspicious as Madara go on his way like this, but he’d built his life on being smart around beings who could rip humans apart with their bare hands and pursuing Madara at this moment really wouldn’t be smart.
What was smart was divvying these ashes into five separate boxes before the cursed remains gathered the wherewithal to regenerate and kill more people, that was his priority, more urgent than a supposed vampire already leaving town.
For now.
Tazuna was coming back, arms full of dull metal caskets. Tobirama’s hand unconsciously drew to the bottle of bloody ink in another pocket of his book strap.
Yes, he definitely had more urgent priorities right now.
Dawn saw him riding out once more, bright and early, vibrant orange still smearing the horizon through the trees.
He left behind him fresh grief, fading horror, and five freshly turned graves guarding a secret.