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Itachi had to die.
Sasuke’s brother had to die, yet instead of accomplishing that, he was wasting more time in this squalid wayside town, looking for one of the subordinates he stole from Orochimaru.
It was just like Suigetsu to wander off somewhere right when they needed to be moving on. Sasuke kicked at an offending stick in his path as he turned through another alley by the empty marketplace.
Sasuke didn't even need Suigetsu that much, compared to the other two. Since Kisame was in the mix, a Mist-trained sword fighter felt like a good idea, but otherwise nothing about Suigetsu specifically was terribly necessary.
Sasuke very firmly did not think about last night at the inn, or the last several nights before that. Or that he'd been looking forward to tonight. This was all irrelevant, since they were only sharing a room since otherwise Karin would be annoying about it and anything else was coincidental.
It wasn't because he’d been looking forward to tonight that he was wasting time in the back streets of this dusty little town. He just needed to make sure Suigetsu had just gotten lost when he said he was ‘taking a walk’, and not run off on him or anything.
Not that he would care either way. Sasuke was used to people turning on him, after all.
Sasuke stumbled over something that rolled out from under his foot and nearly fell. He quickly glanced around to make sure nobody had seen him activate the Sharingan to recover from tripping, then looked down.
At one of Suigetsu's water bottles.
This changed things. Suigetsu would never normally leave one behind, so if he had taken himself off somewhere it hadn't been planned.
Sasuke picked it up and bounced it in his hand. There was about a quarter of the liquid left, which made it even stranger. If he’d ended up having to fight, Suigetsu would have drained it before dropping it.
He swirled it thoughtfully for a moment, feeling the little shift of weight as the water spun, then shrugged, flicked the cap open, and took a quick sip.
Instantly, his tongue started to go numb. Sasuke spat out the small mouthful and followed it with a rush of fire to wipe out any traces left of the drugs.
Whatever it was worked powerfully and fast—even after knowing what was likely coming and that he'd have to react as quickly as he did, Sasuke's vision still went double for a moment. He braced himself against one wall of the alley until it slid back together again.
Suigetsu tended to drink quickly and without paying much attention, so he wouldn't have noticed the odd sensation until it was too late to resist.
Now they were in territory he knew something about.
Almost all of the larger clans had kidnapping protocols. Especially those whose bloodline abilities were contained in something transplantable, like eyes.
Suigetsu’s family apparently had not covered this sufficiently. Likely because being made of water was harder to transfer, as Orochimaru had discovered to his annoyance. What else would anyone want Suigetsu for? Maybe a mercenary squad hoped to brainwash him with genjutsu, but why Suigetsu specifically? He wasn’t a known quantity like Sasuke.
The Uchiha kidnapping protocol was, in general, ‘don't get kidnapped’, something that Sasuke had technically failed spectacularly, even if he'd volunteered for it. But of course that had all been strategic planning so it didn't count.
Failing that, the rest of the protocol was to start killing everything in sight, or wait for someone to come do it for you. That, Sasuke could manage. He just needed to find where Suigetsu had been taken first.
Now that Sasuke knew what he was looking for, he could see that Suigetsu hadn't gone down easily. He wasn't carrying the sword when he went out, but Sasuke could see signs of a scuffle in the dirt, and a scrap of bloody fabric edged with jagged teeth marks was caught between two posts of the alley wall.
That was very Suigetsu, Sasuke thought, with what he told himself firmly was annoyance.
He could waste another several hours prowling the town, but this risked Suigetsu being taken further away. He could go back to the inn and argue Karin into being helpful, but somehow he didn't like the idea of bringing anyone else into this. (‘Involve as few witnesses as possible’ was another part of the protocols.)
Or, he could climb up onto the nearest roof, look for the closest large walled estate with armed guards, and hope he guessed right.
The estate was on the outskirts of the town, separated from the main districts by a small stream. The nearest section of houses was mainly deserted, and the temple next door was closed for the night. Sasuke curled around behind the houses so he could jump to the temple roof from an angle where he couldn’t be seen from the estate.
It had armed guards, but they weren't very good at their job. They technically had enough chakra to be considered ninjas, but none of them seemed to have been trained in how to use it. Sasuke bypassed the four guards entirely, and there wasn’t so much as an upward glance when he jumped from the roof of the temple and vaulted to the wide branch of a tree in the courtyard.
The two guards by the door of the main house seemed a little better trained, but no more alert. The shirts under their leather armor vests were the same color as the scrap of fabric Sasuke found in the alley. One of them was missing a strip of fabric near his wrist, and surveying the damage with a disgusted look on his face.
“Shit, I bet I’m going to need shots or something. Can’t believe he fucking bit me.”
“There’s people that are into that,” the other guard said with a shrug and an unkind laugh. He waved vaguely towards the house, and Sasuke noticed movement behind one of the lit-up windows on the fourth floor.
Movement and what looked like a flash of white hair.
Apparently he guessed right.
Though why anyone would drag Suigetsu into what looked like a luxury bedroom was—
“What the fuck?” a familiar voice exclaimed from the upstairs room. “Get your hands off me!”
Not actually a mystery.
Sasuke remembered the other reason everyone had kidnapping protocols just as the bitten guard spoke again.
“Seriously, anyone putting their dick near that is out of their damn—”
Sasuke decided he had heard enough.
Probably, he thought a moment later, he didn’t have to cut the bodies into that many pieces. But it had seemed like the fastest way to shut them up.
He watched blood soak into the sand of the courtyard for a few seconds, taking deep breaths. Then he reached up to swipe some more blood off his face with the least blood-splattered part of his sleeve he could find and went to take care of the gate guards before they could raise an alarm.
By the time he finished that and returned to the inner courtyard, Kusanagi was dripping blood up to the hilt and there was a commotion inside the house. Though not inside the upper room; whatever client or gang boss was up there, his underlings were probably too scared to bother him. It was still lit, and he could still see motion behind the curtains, but Suigetsu had gone quiet.
Sasuke considered vaulting straight up to the window, but the main house seemed to have some barrier seals, so it would be faster to start when the guards opened the front door and work his way up.
Of course they would be idiots to open the door, but considering that they’d kidnapped Suigetsu, he was already clearly dealing with idiots. No matter that he was currently splashed in blood and holding a sword he’d killed half a dozen people with in the last five minutes; they’d just see one teenaged boy standing in the courtyard and decide they could take him.
They didn’t actually open the door, so they were slightly less stupid than he’d given them credit for. But one of them did unseal a downstairs window to open it and fire a crossbow at him, which was good enough.
Once he burst through the window, showering glass across what looked like a banquet room, things got slightly more difficult, since there were more guards and less room for sword swings. There weren’t going to be witnesses, anyway, so Sasuke blinked and saw everything.
It felt like the world went slow-motion. Sasuke still knew that nothing was a higher priority than killing his brother, but he couldn’t help enjoying the dawning panic as the guards saw what they’d brought down on themselves.
The room was a wreck by the time it was all over, but nobody would be needing it again anyway. A maid peeked out of the kitchen then slammed the door with a terrified squeak. He pretended he hadn’t seen her and headed for the stairs.
Somehow, the alarm still hadn’t reached the fourth floor. Maybe whoever was up there had ordered that he wasn’t to be disturbed. The place was deserted now, so that must have been the rest of the guards, at least that felt like trying anything. The servants probably had their own staircase, and Sasuke didn’t see any reason to look for it.
Itachi probably would have killed the servants too. Just to be sure. Sasuke wasn’t letting them go, exactly, he just wanted to finish this as quickly as possible.
As he reached the third-floor landing, Sasuke could hear some indistinct snarling and scuffling. He ran up the last flight of stairs and kicked the door open.
With the Sharingan it only took a split-second to take in everything; the absurdly gaudy bedroom, the man in the brocade robe with one knee on the bed, Suigetsu pinned down underneath him.
Almost before Sasuke had finished seeing what was going on, he swung Kusanagi cleanly through the man’s neck. The head rolled towards a corner and the body fell silently to the rug.
“Whoa,” said Suigetsu. He rolled over slowly and sat up—he looked unhurt so far, Sasuke noticed in the part of his mind that was not occupied by the fact that he was also currently wearing almost nothing besides a filmy ruffled silver robe and a collar chained to the end of the bed. “Sasuke? That was. So hot.”
Sasuke froze in the middle of swinging blood off Kusanagi. “...What?”
“That.” Suigetsu waved a hand at him vaguely. His eyes weren’t entirely focused, so the drugs must still be doing a lot. “All covered in blood and stuff. It’s so hot.” He made a little growling sound in the back of his throat and smirked.
“Be that as it may,” Sasuke said, suddenly feeling weirdly stiff. He then tried to think of what should come after that, since this wasn’t part of the kidnapping protocols at all.
Suigetsu looked...different. Or maybe Sasuke was suddenly seeing him differently.
He'd seen Suigetsu naked before, a lot. Just barely not naked shouldn't be so much of a shock, but somehow it was.
Maybe it was the gleaming metal of the chakra-loaded collar, or the almost completely transparent robe accentuating his exposed pale skin. His aggravatingly perfect skin, since as long as he had enough water Suigetsu never had scars last for more than a few minutes.
“I could watch you kill people all day,” Suigetsu added with a disconcerting level of cheer. He was never like this normally. Even Karin didn’t say this kind of thing to Sasuke’s face.
Situation aside, he didn’t entirely hate it. Which was dangerous, since Itachi wasn’t dead yet.
He decided to focus on the important things. Important things which did not include staring at Suigetsu's long pale legs sliding against the bloody sheets.
Not for more than a few seconds, in any case.
Sasuke sheathed Kusanagi and stepped over the corpse to get to the bed. “Stop getting kidnapped!” he snapped, jabbing a finger towards Suigetsu and stopping just before he would have touched his bare chest. “I have better things to do!”
Suigetsu gave his hand a look like he was considering biting it. Probably he had been doing that to most people who reached for him in the last few hours. Then he looked back up to Sasuke’s face. His eyes slowly focused, though they still looked unusually bright.
“Sasuke.” Suigetsu crawled closer to the edge of the bed, smiling sharp under the blood flung across his pale face and hair. “Are you jealous?”
Sasuke blinked. “What? What would I be jealous of?”
He had noticed they were being stared at when they arrived at the inn. And he had assumed it was him everyone was looking at. But that didn't mean anything.
Suigetsu burst out laughing as he draped himself over the heap of pillows at the head of the bed. It made the filmy robe fall even further open, not that Sasuke was looking. “Fuck, you are! You're jealous that when we got to this town nobody even recognized you! I was the one they decided to grab!”
“As if I’d ever settle for anything but the best,” Sasuke said scornfully, to show he definitely wasn’t jealous, at all. He grabbed the chain hanging from Suigetsu’s collar and pulled on it for emphasis. He wasn’t expecting Suigetsu to follow through with the pull and fall against his chest.
“Wow,” Suigetsu said, dragging out the sound. One of his hands slid slowly up Sasuke's chest to his open collar. “You are so not jealous. I see that.”
“Good.” Sasuke grabbed a handful of Suigetsu's white hair, watching the blood on his hand stain it.
Suigetsu tugged at the edge of the robe with his other hand until it fell completely off one shoulder, making a sharp line cutting through the blood splatters. “You like the outfit?”
They didn't kiss, generally. It made it feel too close to something that mattered, when the only thing that did, or could, matter was that Itachi still breathed. Sasuke couldn’t afford to care, but looking at Suigetsu's sharp smile under the blood he’d just spilled across his face pulled at something within him.
Sasuke scoffed. “I don’t care,” he said as he bent closer.
Suigetsu put his arms around his neck. “Of course you don’t.”