Author's Notes: Um... you know those stories of endless angst, where you wonder why the hell the author wrote the story unless their sole goal was to depress people? Yeah... this is one of those. The plot idea seemed like a good one at the time, I swear.

After two hours of searching, she found him on the roof smoking a cigarette and watching as the sun went down. He wasn't clothed in anything but his habitual headband, a pair of pants, and the bandages wrapped around his torso where the Leaf taijutsu user had landed most of his blows, resulting in ruptured organs and broken skin that had mottled him purple and various shades of yellow. The weather in Sound grew cold as the night approached, but despite this he didn't shiver in the wind.

She hadn't expected to find him here. Of course, she hadn't expected to find him anywhere except in bed, recovering from a battle he had nearly lost for absolutely no reason Tayuya could see. He wasn't supposed to be up and about for another couple of days, but Kidoumaru always had made a routine of defying expectations. Even now, when there was no longer anyone around to appreciate it. Tayuya sure didn't; all it did was piss her off.

She didn't like not knowing things. She didn't like being surprised. She wouldn't be as angry as she was, if the sight of her dark-skinned comrade holding a cigarette between his fingers hadn't caught her so off guard. She hadn't known that Kidoumaru smoked, and by the casual way he brought the cigarette to his lips and sucked in a lungful of the acrid smoke, it wasn't a recent habit.

Tayuya didn't like knowing things. Especially when it concerned the only person left that she felt she could trust.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

Kidoumaru let out a puff of smoke, seemingly not surprised at all by her presence. He didn't look away from the setting sun. "Smoking. Enjoying the scenery. Wondering if there is anything left from dinner that I can bum off one of the cooks." He tapped the cigarette, and some of the ash dropped off the tip, touching down on the roof briefly before being swept away by the evening wind. "You know, what I usually do after I lose a fight and feel like shit."

Tayuya scowled. The diagonal knife scar that ran across her left eyebrow and temple before disappearing beneath her hairline- something she had received as a farewell gift from a bearded Leaf jounin she'd killed three years ago- pulled slightly, as if always did whenever her face shifted to any expression besides neutral. It was painful; the wound hadn't healed cleanly, as it had been hours after the battle that a medic had finally been available to treat it, but she ignored the sting. After three years, this was something she knew well how to do. "I don't know, jackass. If you smoke, it's news to me. Besides, you haven't lost a fight in years. Not since…"

She trailed off. It wasn't to spare Kidoumaru's feelings. She had never tried to do so and had no intention of starting now. But the memory of the mission where everything had started to go wrong made her stomach clench.

It wasn't just the failure of falling in battle to supposedly weaker opponents. That was something Tayuya could have lived with. She had survived after all, and so had everyone else, even if for several of them it had been touch and go for a while. Kimimaro's death a few days later didn't count, really; he had been on death's door anyway. It had only been a matter of time before the reaper finally got off his fat ass and answered the doorbell's ring.

No, it wasn't the broken legs and concussion the Sand bitch's attack had left her with that made Tayuya grit her teeth at the memory. It wasn't the failure. It was the fact that they hadn't failed. That if she was given one chance to go back in time and fix things, she would chose the moment when she and her teammates had approached Uchiha Sasuke with the offer to accompany them back to Sound. She would look the arrogant bastard in the eye, seeing the desperation and the seeds of madness his brother and her master had planted there. Then she would slit the little fuck's throat and watch the blood drain out of him until he stopped breathing.

Back then, there wasn't anything she feared more than Orochimaru-sama's displeasure. Now, she knew there were worse things to fear. Much worse things.

It was only after she paused mid-sentence that Kidoumaru turned to look at her. All flippancy was gone from his face. Even the half smile that quirked his mouth couldn't be described as anything but grimly humorous. "Since the fight with the talented Hyuuga." It wasn't a clan that was spoken of much anymore, and only then when Kidoumaru and Tayuya weren't in the room. Their subordinates had that much sense, at least.

There weren't enough Hyuuga left to really matter. Their best and brightest were five years dead, but what they had accomplished before their deaths had almost turned the tide in Konoha's favor. An entire base slaughtered. Twenty percent of Sound's military dead in one sneak attack. Plus one.

Kidoumaru breathed in more smoke, the cigarette dangling loosely from his lips as he rubs his hands together, the chill finally getting to him, before moving the tightly wrapped tobacco stick back between his fingers and shifting the conversation onto slightly lighter fare. "Funny, isn't it. I lose two fights in ten years, and both of them were to taijutsu fighters taught by the same guy. On the same genin team, even."

Tayuya didn't question why Kidoumaru knew this; the teaching abilities of Maito Gai, a Leaf jounin who regularly turned out the best taijutsu users Konoha had to offer, were legendary, even in Sound. Especially in Sound. The talents of his prized student were almost as well-known. At least, they had been. Tayuya doubted anyone would still be singing the praises of Rock Lee, the Blue Lotus, after this. These days, no one had any time to waste thoughts on the dead. Seven years of continuous war, with no end in sight until very recently, and not even a single temporary treaty to provide a breather for either side, no one had a spare minute to stand by the graves of the deceased or MIA and pay their respects. Not when everyone was doing everything they could just to keep from joining them six feet under.

The last battle, which had been one of the full-scale offenses that only came around every couple of years, had actually gone in Sound's favor, and Tayuya knew for a fact that besides the Blue Lotus, Sound's forces had managed to take out at least one other key player on Leaf's side, their top Inuzuka berserker with a dog the size of a small house. Cost Sound three ANBU squads to do so, but it had been worth it. After seven years, they were finally winning. Not that the thought was very comforting. The war would likely last another year or two at least, and Tayuya was too used to fighting to wrap her mind around the idea of peace.

Kidoumaru rambled on, oblivious to his comrade's distraction. "Guess that's why the bowl cut fought so hard; wanted to get some back at the Sound-nin who killed his teammate." He critically examined one of his hands that wasn't encumbered by the cigarette, his eyes narrowed as he stared at his palm, one scar almost eight years old faintly visible against his dark skin. "I was lucky not to have my chakra lines disrupted. Bowl cut wasn't as accurate as the Hyuuga, but he hit a hell of a lot harder." A faint grin. "Surprised he didn't get some chakra points as well as practically making me vent my spleen."

"You held back."

At this, the spider-nin startled, as he hadn't when Tayuya had first approached him. His hand fell back to his side. "… what are you talking about, Tayuya?" His eyes shifted away from her as he spoke, though his voice didn't waver. At this, Tayuya's suspicions were confirmed. Kidoumaru never had learned how to tell a decent lie.

"You held back against the Blue Lotus. If you'd wanted to, you could've taken Rock down in minutes, even with six of his gates blasted open. But you didn't. What the fuck were you thinking?"

Kidoumaru snorted, though his supposed derision didn't reach his eyes. He ground out the cigarette against the tiled roof, though even as he did so, one of his opposite hands fumbled for the cigarette pack Tayuya was just now noticing stuck in his waistband. The lighter was brought out almost as quickly from a pocket, and in moments his second cigarette was lit, the caustic smell wafting towards Tayuya and making her eyes water.

She wanted to yell at him, to tell him to toss the cigarettes over the side, or maybe she just wanted to snatch the pack from him and throw them off the building herself. But Tayuya knew Kidoumaru. She knew how casually, how easily he distracted people, lay traps so insidious most people didn't recognize them even after they'd fallen in. He knew by her body language that the cigarettes bothered her. Getting her to argue with him about them would sidetrack their real conversation. The conversation that she had sought him out for to begin with.

So she ignored the cigarette, despite how it made her want to grind her teeth to dust. She kept her eyes on Kidoumaru, and she asked again. "What were you thinking?"

"He was faster than I am. He got to me before I was able to analyze his fighting strategy-"

"Don't try and dick with me, you freak. Everyone and their fucking dog knows how the Blue Lotus fights. He goes at you fast and hard and hits you until you're dead. All you had to do was activate the Curse Seal. With your third eye, you could have nailed him with one of your arrows minutes before he reached you. You knew he was coming. You knew that he was the spearhead of that strike force. But you waited until he was less than a hundred fucking yards from you before you even bothered to aim. If it wasn't for your shield, you'd be a pile of pummeled guts and flesh right now rotting out in the woods somewhere." Tayuya could feel her fury rising. She welcomed it. It had been years since she had felt such righteous anger. Ever since Jiroubou… ever since he had- Tayuya felt her rage slipping away from her, felt it being replaced by something much more dark and unwelcome, but she held onto the fragments of her temper with the stubbornness that only desperation could bring to light. "All you had to do was activate your fucking Seal-"

The grim humor had returned to Kidoumaru's face as he listened to his teammate rant, though this time it was tinged by the same darkness that was threatening to take over Tayuya in place of her anger, deepening the lines under his eyes. "Activate my Curse Seal? All I had to do? When was the last time you activated your Seal, Tayuya?"

Tayuya was thrown off by the shift from questioner to the one being questioned. "What the hell does that have to do with-"

But Kidoumaru plowed right through her, his brief stint as an interrogator before being moved back to his position as lead tactician showing for the first time since that ill-fated occupation change. "One year? Two? I'm betting it's closer to three, when you fought that Leaf jounin with the knuckle knives. He was stronger than you were, but you still didn't activate your Seal until he was close enough for you to spit on him. Hell, I bet you waited until he landed a hit and gave you that scar to bring it out, didn't you? You didn't use to wait like that. I remember back when Orochimaru-sama first gave us the Curse Seals, you activated it at the drop of a-"

"So did you, you fucker!"

Kidoumaru's sadistic grin, one he had always possessed but had only reached its full potential after he learned how make battle-hardened jounin sob and beg for death without leaving a single mark, one that Tayuya had never before seen turned in her direction until now, faded from his face. "Yeah. I did, didn't I?" The cigarette turned slowly to dust in Kidoumaru's hand. Neither of them noticed. "I used to use it all the time. Loved to use it. The rush of power was… addicting. Still is. But you know, Tayuya… it wasn't worth it. You know that, even if you won't admit it. That's why you don't use it anymore, either."

Tayuya couldn't deny this. She knew. Of course she knew. She hated thinking about the past, but it still guided her every action. But… "Better to activate the Curse Seal than die, idiot. If I hadn't shown up to save your sorry ass…" It had been close. Another ten seconds and Rock would have broken through the remnants of Kidoumaru's shield. A taijutsu master fighting with six Lotus Gates open could punch a hole through a steel wall. A human didn't present much resistance.

She had been told that having her summons continue to suck out the Blue Lotus's chakra for four minutes after his heart had stopped was unnecessary overkill. If anyone else had been the one reprimanding her, she would have told them to stuff it up their ass with a rusty kunai. But even though she had been furious, still running high on adrenaline and the soul-rending realization that if she had been moments slower, she would have arrived to find a corpse, she still hadn't been stupid enough to argue with Uchiha Sasuke. She didn't fear his eyes as many did, but the Uchiha had inherited Orochimaru's power over the Curse Seals along with the snake sannin's repertoire of techniques after the unexpected (by Tayuya, at least, if not by Uchiha and his pet four-eyed traitor) death of Sound Village's founder, and of that, she was terrified. Even if she admitted it to no one but herself, the Uchiha still knew. So she had said nothing, though she had bit her lip until blood dripped down her chin.

Even as she remembered how close it had been, Kidoumaru was shaking his head. "Not for me." The cigarette finally burned down to reach the spider-nin's fingers. Kidoumaru looked down almost curiously as the ashes fell onto his upturned hand, hot enough to burn. There must have been some pain, but none of it showed on the dark-skinned Sound-nin's face. After some seconds of indifferent study, Kidoumaru let the remains of the cigarette drop down onto the roof's tiles. This time, he didn't reach for another one. "The last time I activated the Curse Seal was a few months after you did." Tayuya felt herself go cold. She knew which battle Kidoumaru was talking about. She wanted him to stop. But for the first time in her life, her voice failed her. "I was up against three Leaf jounin. One of them was that scarred guy we had to take down ten years ago. Didn't recognize the other two. They got in close without me noticing. Think one of them was a stealth expert. I didn't have time to plan. So I used it."

The sun had set. It was dark out, a night without stars, with only the faint radiance of lanterns through the tint of windows on the lower levels providing light. It was barely enough for Tayuya to make out the planes of Kidoumaru's face as he continued on, either oblivious to the nature of her silence or willfully ignoring it. "I remember standing over their bodies afterward. One of them had nicked me pretty good on one arm, but other than that I got out of it unscathed. Then a messenger came, after it was over and Konoha's forces had retreated for the day. It was then I found out that Jiroubou was dead. That he'd died before my fight with the Leaf jounin even started.

"I waited for it to hit me. I didn't feel anything at first, but I assumed it was just shock. So while I was waiting for it to finally get to me, I organized the forces I had under my command at the time and got everyone back to camp. It took three, four hours. After everyone was settled, I grabbed a cup of tea and sat down by the fire to read some novel one of my subordinates had leant me. I was kind of weirded out by then, because shock usually wears off faster than that for me. I waited another couple of minutes for me to finally understand that Jiroubou was dead, but then I realized that I did understand. That I had processed Jiroubou's death hours ago, and I hadn't felt a thing."

Tayuya remembered that time. She hadn't seen Kidoumaru for days before the battle and for weeks afterward, but she had heard of what happened to Jiroubou, and had spent those weeks getting drunk and punching walls until her hands bled. She hadn't known what to expect when she finally talked with her dark-skinned comrade again, but one thing she hadn't expected was nothing. For the first time in years, she had been afraid. She had feared the worst. Her fears were justified. It had already happened once.

Kidoumaru wasn't even looking at her anymore. Just rubbing his hands up and down his arms in an almost unconscious gesture, instinctually resisting the falling temperatures though it didn't seem to register in his head. "When I first started using the Curse Seal, the emotional cut off only lasted a few minutes, a half an hour at most after I deactivated the Seal. I always thought that it was just me crashing after coming down from the power high, but over the past couple of years, the dead feeling has taken longer and longer to go away. Last time, it took eight months. One morning I woke up and I was crying because Jiroubou was dead. Eight months after it had happened. The crash lasted for a few months the time before I used the Curse Seal, too, but before Jiroubou died, the crash didn't really seem to matter. Wasn't like there were many positive emotions to feel in the middle of a war, after all. But… not feeling anything when I found out Jiroubou was dead scared the shit out of me, when I was able to feel again.

"If I use the Curse Seal again, I don't think the dead feeling will ever leave. And I'd rather die than let that happen. Better to be truly dead. Life isn't worth it if you spend the rest of it feeling nothing."

He met her eyes again, his mouth twisted in a tired smirk. "So, Tayuya. How long did your crash last before you stopped using it?"

Tayuya crossed her arms. She wasn't dressed properly for the night cold much more than Kidoumaru was, but the gesture was made in habit instead of for the purpose of preserving body heat. "Three weeks."

The spider-nin cocked an eyebrow. "That all?"

Tayuya sneered. "Most of us actually notice when we stop feeling crap for weeks on end, dumbass. What, your happy routine so fucking automatic that you don't even need to feel happy anymore to go through your little act? Besides, unlike you playing supreme commander out in the boonies somewhere, I was around during the Hyuuga Offensive five years ago when all the shit went down. I got a close-up look at how exactly the Curse Seal can break your head into a thousand little fucking pieces. All you ever saw was the aftermath," you lucky bastard.

Kidoumaru, who had been grinning in his usual infuriating way while she had been insulting him, abruptly stopped looking amused. "Don't talk about that, Tayuya."

Her sneer deepened. The line of fire running along the left side of her face seemed to spike in temperature. It felt like the only part of her body that was somewhere above freezing. The sunset was now only a memory, and the true cold of an autumn night had descended upon Otogakure. Their breath misted in the air. But Tayuya had finally hit a nerve, something she often had to struggle for with her short temper and complete lack of interrogation training. She wasn't going to let the weather drive her back inside. She had endured worse for much longer. Much, much longer. "You never did see Ukon's corpse, did you, freak? It had been long burned to ashes by the time you got back. Funny how the Hyuugas' attacks don't leave any marks. You would've thought that he was just taking another one of his impromptu naps that he was so fucking fond of, if his neck hadn't snapped from falling four hundred feet." Tayuya had thought that building one of their bases on a cliff had been a bad idea. Easier to defend, but a hell of a lot harder to retreat from, too, if everything went to shit, as it did so often.

She hadn't been the one to find the body. She wished she had been.

If building a base on a cliff had been a bad idea, separating the twins had been a horrible one. Horrible enough that she'd actually told Uchiha so, though she had refrained from outright swearing at him. He hadn't listened. However, he had, in a fit of uncharacteristic good humor, given her good, solid reasons for assigning Sakon and Ukon separate commands. They had been trained to operate separately. They both had an excellent grasp of tactics, but the same tactics, so they didn't supplement each other's strategies. Sound was low on good high-ranked officers, and couldn't afford to keep two of them at the same base when Sound's forces were so scattered. Good, solid reasons all, that didn't hold up worth shit in practice.

Sakon had been assigned to lead a strike squad against a small camp on the Sound/Leaf border. The squad given to him was insufficient for the task, but that was the usual protocol when one of the Five was in command. Ukon, in consideration of his complete disinterest in doing absolutely anything that required more than minimum effort, was left in charge of the cliff base. Tayuya's brigade operated in the general area, but they had been held up during the Hyuuga's attack. Sakon got to the cliffs an hour before Tayuya did.

Before the Hyuuga Offensive, all of the Five had been aware of the longer-lasting effects of the Curse Seal. They just hadn't cared. Maybe they had even been grateful. They were in a war, after all. Emotions had no place on the battlefield. The Hyuuga Offensive had changed everything, though only Tayuya at the time had taken the lesson to heart.

When she finally made it to the cliffs, leaving her brigade behind with orders to her XO to regroup and recover the bodies for a mass funeral pyre, the base still stood, but the silence was oppressive. It was surrounded by bodies, with not a living soul in sight. A complete massacre for both sides.

It was when she walked to the edge of the cliffs that she sensed a chakra signature, hundreds of feet below. Sakon, drenched in blood that wasn't his own, he kneeled on the ground, examining the corpse of his elder brother. A few feet away lay the body of the Hyuuga Ukon had dragged off the cliff with him. Hiashi. Of course. Who else but the Hyuuga patriarch could hope to take out one of the Five, even at the expense of his own life.

Sakon's expression was thoughtful as he raised Ukon's head and ran his fingers along his brother's spine, feeling where the neck had broken cleanly from the fall. He raised his eyes from the corpse as Tayuya dropped from her perch on the cliff side and landed beside him. "Hello, Tayuya."

Tayuya was the last one the spare someone's feelings, no matter who they were or what the circumstances. But for once, hesitation crept into her voice as she replied, "Sakon… are you…"

Sakon shook his head. His eyes remained flat, bereft of the soul-tearing grief Tayuya had expected to find. "I'm fine." He laid Ukon's head back onto the ground with no particular care and pushed himself to his feet. "Our strike against the Leaf camp succeeded. I lost two chuunin and a jounin, but we demolished their forces and took their supplies. Burned their buildings down to the ground for good measure so they couldn't just move back in. Too bad about this base, but at least we don't have to worry much about the Hyuuga anymore-"

Unbelieving stupefaction could only keep Tayuya quiet for so long. "You retarded faggot, Ukon's been snuffed like a candle and you're talking about your mission? Fuck your mission, your brother's dead!"

Sakon looked back at her calmly. No, it wasn't calm. It was nothing. "I know Ukon's dead. I just…" For the first time, something entered his eyes. A flicker of panic. "I just… can't feel it. Yet."

As the truth dawned on her, Tayuya felt herself grow cold. "You used the Curse Seal for your strike against the camp, didn't you."

Sakon hesitated. Then he nodded. "Had to. We would've lost, otherwise."

She knew what the Curse Seal did, how it cut off emotion after use. They all did. But for some reason, it had never occurred to her or any of the others that it might run this deep. No one minded not losing their temper for several weeks or feeling the crushing depression after a failed attack, but for Sakon to feel nothing at all after Ukon's death… how could the Curse Seal do that? It just didn't deaden emotion… it ripped it out entirely. It didn't just make them look inhuman. It made them less than human. Something that shouldn't even be alive.

They left the cliffs. There were too many bodies to burn after Ukon's and all the Hyuuga's had their clan's seal so no secrets could be gleaned from their bodies, so in the end they left all the corpses for the seagulls to eat. Two weeks later in Otogakure, Sakon woke up screaming. He didn't stop until Uchiha walked into his room and forcibly activated his Curse Seal. After Uchiha left, the words Sakon said to Tayuya, and her alone, as Jiroubou and Kidoumaru were still out in the field- his Curse Seal still activated, making him look like he was infested by leeches- were what finally made her vow to never use the Curse Seal again unless the other option was to die. "I felt his death, Tayuya. I felt him die, over and over and over again. I couldn't deal with it. I still can't. So I'm not going to."

It took four more uses of his Curse Seal. It had been almost four years since Sakon had last used it, but his eyes remained empty.

She didn't tell Kidoumaru this, as their breath misted in the air and they shivered in the dark. He already knew most of it, and the rest she couldn't bring herself to speak about. He hadn't been there, had only seen what Sakon had become, and not why. In some ways, for him it was harder. He had been closer to the twins than she. Kidoumaru had been the one to try and talk Sakon out of his plan, but by then the cut off was already in place, and Sakon ignored him. The bond that had developed between them after over a decade of camaraderie had effectively dissolved, and nothing had risen up to take its place. After a couple of months, Kidoumaru stopped trying. Tayuya could have told him from the start that it was a wasted effort. She had seen the pain in Sakon's eyes the few minutes in which he had felt his brother's death. She knew that absolutely nothing could convince him that emotions were worth feeling that again.

Even as Tayuya watched Kidoumaru curse under his breath and pull out another cigarette- the faint glow on the tip the greatest source of light, now that most of the lanterns had been put out- she knew, intellectually, that Sakon was still alive, was just a few hundred feet away, most likely asleep in his room. But the real Sakon, the irritating, snarky bastard who baited her at the slightest opportunity and was usually the one to finish off the cereal, had died with his brother. A puppet of Uchiha was all that remained.

Tayuya avoided talking to him when she could. She knew Kidoumaru did so as well.

"I don't like thinking about that time, Tayuya."

Kidoumaru's eyes were distant. He looked down at the roof tiles, twirling the lit cigarette in his hands before bringing it again to his lips. He looked tired. Mostly, he looked like he should still be in bed. But Tayuya still had one more question to ask. "Why did you take up smoking, Kidoumaru?"

Kidoumaru smiled. The glow of the cigarette illuminated his mouth. "Better than the alternative, don't you think?" He reached again for the cigarette pack, and Tayuya was soon staring at yet another roll of tobacco. This time, it was being held out to her. "Fancy a smoke, Tayuya?"

Tayuya remembered her own sleepless nights after her decision to stop using the Curse Seal. Drinking, for most of them, except when she had finally decided that that kind of dreamless sleep invited too much weakness. Mostly just insomnia, and the urge to bite at her knuckles until they bled.

There were things she sometimes thought of telling Kidoumaru. Especially tonight. That they only positive feelings she felt anymore were because of him. For him. That if he had died, she would have no reason not to break her vow, and activate her Curse Seal so she would never have to feel anything again. But she didn't, and she wouldn't. Kidoumaru was the only person left who she cared about. But some words were too personal to exist anywhere except the recesses of her mind.

So instead, she walked over to where her dark-haired comrade stood, and plucked the cigarette from his outstretched fingers. "Sure. Why not?"

Their breath misted in the numbing cold. But neither of them went back inside until morning.

END