Tinta Scours For Recruitments

Tinta got very stiff at the sudden change. She looked at him with worry.

"You need...?" she asked, slipping off her sentence just as he had. "What do you need, love? Are you sick or something?"

"Oh." She looked down at her arm. "Orochimaru drank my blood sometimes. I mean, he did it for... uncessary reasons." She blushed. "But you can have some of mine if you want." She turned back to him and smiled.

Tinta moaned softly when he bit into her neck, and then bit down on her lower lip. She pictured Orochimaru as he did it, and her heart felt heavy again. And then she couldn't keep herself from saying what she did. The words came out before she could think about it and stop herself.

"I love you, Orochimaru..." she breathed.

Her eyes went wide when she realized what she had said. She brought her hand to her mouth.

"I'm so sorry, Zentsu. I can't imagine how awkward me saying that must have been. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it..."

"Oh..." She turned to him with an odd look. "It arouses people, huh? Why, you must have a lot of girls on you." She giggled again.

She looked at him oddly. "Really?" she asked, tilting her head once again. "Why me, then? Because you have some strange fondness for me, or just because you happened to be starving while I was around?"

She turned to Sanyu, who was hissing something at her. She then laughed, but she did not tell Zentsu what the snake had said. Again, it was something too complex for anyone not fluent in the language of serpents.

Tinta watched as he removed his shirt and remembered all the scars she had seen on Orochimaru. And Leon. She hissed, but she didn't hiss actual words. She just did it for the sake of doing it, as thoughts of Leon again flashed through her mind. She didn't understand why he kept popping up all the sudden. After all, it had been a couple years since she had a single thought of him. Realizing she was no longer focused on her new partner, she shook her head.

"How'd you get all those?" she asked softly, feeling rude for asking.

Tinta went wide-eyed as soon as he said that. She had quite a few self-inflicted scars, too, but not ones that she had given to herself willingly. She turned to the red crystal hanging loosely around her neck. The black chakra swirled around inside, its color that way because of the light reflected in the crystal. Black Swan. That's what her mother and father always called it. She didn't know why or how it got its name, but she liked it. It sounded so much nicer than it actually was.

"Self-inflicted?" she asked, breaking out of her personal trance and turning to him in curiosity.

"How queer," Tinta whispered. "How come you're the only ninja I've ever seen get scars from that? I've seen a lot of fire users, but they don't usually get scars."

She thought of her father when she said that, who was a fire user himself. She had never seen him actually get burned. And then she realized that the fact her mother was an earth-user and her father was a fire-user was weird. She shook her head. Useless information now. She always had to remind herself of that. That would always be useless information, and nothing was going to change that.

"That sounds incredibly painful," she noted, laughing nervously. "How can you stand that?"

She turned to Sanyu, who was again making her way to Zentsu. This time, she seemed to be entranced by the flames. She crawled up to Zentsu's stomach, and then stopped. She was apparently afraid that he would catch her on fire. She decided to instead go up to his shoulders and coil around his neck. She was afraid to even be on his shoulders.

Tinta shrunk back at the sight of his smile and hard eyes. She wasn't fooled for a second. She had done the same thing for so long, it wasn't hard to tell when people were faking.

"Are you okay, Zentsu?" she asked. "You look about ready to cry."

"No, you aren't," she hastily replied. "You're awful at lying. Or, at least, I'm good at telling when people are lying. I've had a shell for most of my life. And you're doing the same thing right now. You can't full me, sir."

She couldn't help it. She called all men sir and all women ma'am.

Sanyu hissed violently before slithering off and hastily back over to Tinta. Tinta allowed her to crawl beneath her cloak, and then she turned to him in confusion.

"Are you okay, sir? You seem... different all the sudden."

Tinta just stared at him silently, confused by his sudden change. "You remind me of Leon," she said. "Perfectly stable and allruing one moment, and then god-awful the next. I mean, I don't know why that happened to him, but there's obviously a more prominent issue with you." She then shook her hands. "I mean, not an issue. That was rude. A more prominent... problem. Yeah, that sounds better, I think. Oh, I need to shut up..." She turned to the grass and stared at it hard.