Three of fifteen chimneys had smoke coming out of them, and Sukuna counted them twice to be sure. A healthy village that size, in rain this heavy, would've had every hearth going. Three chimneys meant the illness had gotten worse than anyone expected.
The convoy had been grinding through mud since dawn – four wagons of medical supplies and six volunteer medics who took turns walking and riding depending on whether the road was bad or truly awful. The Land of Rain had earned its name a dozen times over in the weeks since they'd joined the Akatsuki, and the country had a way of making you forget what dry clothing felt like, or that dry clothing had ever been a thing that existed. Sukuna's cloak hung heavy with water and his sandals made a sucking sound every time he pulled them free of the muck, and Nagato walked beside him, sure-footed in that way of someone who'd just grown up in it.
Wasuke was in the second wagon with two of the medics, sorting supply manifests and talking through distribution priorities in a voice that carried from under the canvas cover. His brother had taken to the logistics work like he'd been waiting his whole life for something to organize that wasn't a battlefield, and even Konan had said something approving about his efficiency.
They pulled into the village's central clearing where a timber pavilion offered the only ground that wasn't underwater. The headwoman came out to meet them – thin and exhausted and maybe fifty years old – and she grabbed Nagato's hands and thanked him three times before she managed to get around to telling him how bad things actually were.
Thirty-seven people were sick and four had died in the past week, two of them children under five. The village healer had caught the illness herself and was stuck in bed. The crops were rotting in the fields because the healthy adults spent their days caring for the sick instead of working the land, and the food stores were running out, and the river was rising, and the rain wasn't helping. Nagato listened to all of it and held her hands and spoke to her, and when she started crying he didn't move and he didn't hurry her along. He just stood there and let her finish.
The medics went to work. Wasuke went with them, hauling a crate of rehydration supplies on one shoulder and directing traffic with the manifest in his other hand, stopping at each house to talk to whoever answered and crouching down to look at sick children carefully. Sukuna spent the afternoon carrying crates and clearing out blocked drainage ditches and doing the heavy lifting that needed doing. By evening the settlement had stabilized enough that the headwoman could sit at the pavilion table and eat a bowl of rice without her hands shaking.
The light faded behind the clouds. Sukuna sat on the edge of the pavilion with his legs hanging over the side and his katana across his thighs and his cloak drying on the railing beside him.
Nagato sat down next to him and handed him a cup of tea without asking whether he wanted one. They sat together and drank and didn't talk, and the quiet felt earned after a full day of work done side by side.
"How old were you when you started taking care of Wasuke?" Nagato asked.
Sukuna turned the cup between his hands. "We're twins. There wasn't ever a time when I wasn't."
Nagato nodded and set his own cup on the planking beside his knee.
"Yahiko and Konan and I grew up together too. We lost our parents during the Second War, all three of us at different times. Our sensei found us afterward." He paused and pushed a strand of wet red hair out of his face. "I was maybe six when we all came together. But I remember my parents.”
He looked at Sukuna. "Do you remember yours?"
Wasuke's footsteps came squelching through the mud from the left. He climbed the steps to the pavilion and sat down on Sukuna's other side and groaned as his calves unclenched. His hands were red and ink-stained from the manifests, and he leaned the yari against the railing and poured himself tea from the pot near the edge.
"What are we talking about?" Wasuke asked.
"Parents," Nagato said. "Whether Sukuna remembers yours."
Wasuke's hands slowed on the teapot. He set it down and wrapped both palms around his cup and stared into the steam.
"I don't," Wasuke said, quiet. "I've tried. Spent whole nights trying to pull up anything at all – some image or sound or feeling, anything. But the earliest thing I've got is sitting in a field somewhere when I was maybe two or three, with Sukuna next to me, and honestly that might just be something I made up because I wanted it to be real."
He looked up from the tea. "They died right after we were born. That's all Sukuna ever told me. Our mother died in childbirth and our father died fighting. That's everything."
Nagato looked at Sukuna, and the question was right there in his face.
Sukuna drank his tea and set it down and looked at the mud beneath the pavilion.
"I remember," he said.
Wasuke's head turned. His eyes went wide and his hands tightened on the cup.
"What do you mean you remember?"
"I remember everything," Sukuna said. He kept his voice flat and his eyes on the ground. "I was conscious in the womb. I could feel my body forming and I could feel yours next to mine, and I could hear her heartbeat above us, and I knew what was happening before either of us ever took a breath."
The rain hit the roof above them and the mud below. Nobody spoke for a while.
"Our father," Sukuna said, and he picked the cup back up and turned it slowly in his fingers. "I don't know anything about him except what she said to herself when she thought no one could hear. He was a soldier of some kind. She never mentioned a village or a side. She said his name once, toward the end, and it didn't mean anything to me then and doesn't mean anything now."
Wasuke had put his tea down. His hands were in his lap with the fingers locked together and his knuckles white.
"She was a prostitute," Sukuna said. "She worked in a town I never saw from the outside. I know the sound of boots on floorboards and conversations through walls and a bed frame creaking at strange hours. She was young. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. She cried a lot."
"The man who got her pregnant wouldn't marry her," Sukuna continued. "She asked him to take responsibility and he said no, and she begged, and he told her that what she did for a living made her unfit to be anyone's wife, and then she stopped begging."
"She wanted to die," Sukuna said. "And she wanted us to die with her."
He stopped turning the cup and held it still against his knee.
"She had a knife. She pressed it against her abdomen. I could feel the point through the wall of her body, pushing inward toward where Wasuke and I were curled up together. She was going to cut us out and then open her wrists, or maybe the other way around. The order didn't really matter. She’d die, either way."
Nagato's hand moved from his knee to the planking between them and his fingers pressed flat against the wet wood.
"I killed her," Sukuna said.
The rain kept hitting the roof and the mud and the village around them. Somewhere nearby a baby was crying.
“From the inside,” He continued.
Wasuke made a sound that got caught somewhere between his chest and his throat. His shoulders pulled in and his head dropped and his hands were shaking in his lap.
"Then I clawed us out," Sukuna said. "Through her body, through the muscle and the skin."
Nagato sat there with his hand flat on the planking and his ringed eyes fixed on something past the edge of the pavilion.
Wasuke raised his head. His eyes were red and wet and his face held a look Sukuna had only seen on his brother a handful of times – horror and grief and anger, all tangled up too tight to pull apart.
"You never told me," Wasuke said, and his voice cracked.
Sukuna looked at his brother and his expression didn't change. His shoulders went up and came back down in a shrug that held about as much feeling as adjusting a strap on his pack.
"Well," Sukuna said, "you didn't ask."
Wasuke's hands fell from his face and he stared at Sukuna with his mouth open and his eyes wide and the tears still running through the dirt on his cheeks, and for a few seconds he looked like he was trying to decide between screaming and laughing and putting his fist through something, and the indecision just held him there on the edge of the pavilion with the rain coming down behind him.
"That is," Wasuke said, "the most insane thing you have ever said to me. And you have said some genuinely insane things over the course of our lives."
Sukuna put the empty cup down and rested his arms on his knees and looked at the rain. Wasuke needed time, and the rain was, quite frankly, an endless supply of the stuff. “Yeah, I do say a lot of stuff.”
When Nagato spoke again his voice cut through the quiet the way it always did – arriving before you were quite ready for it.
"Well, that was horrifying," Nagato said. He was looking at Sukuna, and something in those ringed eyes had gone past the horror and past the sadness into something that looked a lot like recognition. "But I get it. It was either all three of you or just her."
Wasuke sighed and leaned back. “Yeah, I guess so.”
He turned to Sukuna. “I”m sorry you had to be the one to do that, Sukuna. It couldn’t have been easy.”
“Killing her and digging us out was the only difficult part of that ordeal,” Sukuna shrugged. “I had no more affection for her than she did for us.”
Yahiko walked up to them. "Is your whole life just one big horror story?"
Sukuna huffed. "Pretty much."