[Fic] It’s Just That Any One of Us Is Half Without Another One Is You – Chapter Ten

[branchandroot]

Cross-post from my archive.

Fandom/Arc: Avalanche, Naruto
Characters/Pairings: Chiyo, Haruno Sakura, Hatake Kakashi, Hyuuga Neji, Kankurou, Maito Gai, Rock Lee, Temari, Tenten, Tsunade, Uchiha Sasuke, Uzumaki Naruto
Summary: In which Gaara is taken by Akatsuki and Kakashi's and Gai's teams are sent to aid Hidden Sand to get him back.
Meta: Drama, Action, Fluff, I-4
Wordcount: 6494

Sasuke gave up on logic, as he so often had to around Naruto and just shook him. "Shut up and listen to me," he said, low and deadly. "I am not letting you run yourself right into ambush. Understand? Not by those bastards and not because you were too unbelievably bullheaded to Stay. With. Your team!" Three more hard shakes punctuated that, and Naruto finally blinked at Sasuke like he knew who was in front of him.

Read: It's Just That Any One of Us Is Half Without Another One Is You - Chapter Ten

Comments

[edenfalling]

Aaaah, tension! *bites nails*

I love all the practical realism you're bringing to a story about, essentially, magical reality-warping ninjas. :-) Like the kids sharing intelligence and picking Kakashi as the person to bring their thoughts to higher authorities. Or the way both Sasuke and Naruto occasionally need someone to yank them back to rationality... and they get that support, because their teammates know their triggers and are ready to provide it. Or Hidden Sand very sensibly sending trackers and a retrieval team of their own after Gaara (which, yeah, seriously, why didn't that happen in the manga?). Chiyo explaining about the extraction procedure, because of course that's how Sand gets Shukaku into the... whatever it is they keep him in. (I want to say a teapot, but that sounds ridiculous. My memory, it is a sieve.)

I can't wait for the cliffhanger to resolve next week.

[branchandroot]

*grins* For some reason, all the Akatsuki confrontations seemed to develop cliffhangers. I admit to chortling evilly over this.

It was a teakettle. Yay for random folkloric moments in high-ninja-tech stories. *wry* But yes! I mean, it's standard in shounen that the fifteen year olds, for some reason, wind up doing all the biggest fighting and saving the world, but we see just enough of the adult politics that I wanted to know more about them. (And, dude, Kishimoto was /seriously/ stretching it when he tried to say that a measly two Akatsuki and one mole sufficiently destroyed Hidden Sand that no one could go after Gaara; so I added another two and figured on tracking teams at the /least/.)

[edenfalling]

Keeping evil entities in household items always sounds dicey to me. I mean, what if someone accidentally tries to brew tea with the demon-in-kettle? Will they pour the evil out along with the water and release havoc among everyone who drinks the resulting tea? Or what if someone uses the evil genie's lamp as, you know, a lamp? Does it produce evil smoke?

But then again, this is folklore; it doesn't have to make sense. *grin*

[branchandroot]

*thoughtful* That's a really good question. I mean, even in the original form, if a tanuki is disguised as a tea-kettle, what happens if someone tries to brew hot water with him?

[edenfalling]

Perhaps that's a way to make a tanuki reveal himself? Of course, then you have an angry, scorched tanuki in your kitchen...

[jennaria]

I think I remember reading a Japanese folktale once, wherein a monk came across what he thought was just a tea-kettle - and when he put it on the fire, it promptly jumped off and hopped around, screaming, "Ow, hot!" I don't remember the tanuki doing anything bad to the monk, though, just mutual surprise.

(And one more vote for you being a cruel fic-tease, in case you wondered.)

[branchandroot]

*laughs* I'm evil, I admit it; I've kind of been looking forward to this chapter.