Suteta - (Akatsuki fanfic)

Part 5

The toddler heard something and paused. “Wha’s that soun’?”

                “What sound?”

                She tilted her head. Wasn’t he hearing it? Turning her head to the side for a moment so she could find where the sound was coming from, the girl sat up and pointed toward a flat shape behind Zetsu. “Over there.” It was distant and she thought it sounded like several people talking. But she wasn’t sure. The throbbing in the back of her head muffled some of the noise.

                Zetsu was quiet for longer than the girl would have liked. When he talked he drowned out that creepy whirring from whatever machine she was hearing. “That’s just the other morons that live here.”

                “Huh?” Wha’s “moron” mean?

                “People.”

                “Oh.” The toddler continued listening to the voices as she saw Zetsu’s shape stand up and leave the room. She wanted to ask where he was going, but he spoke before she did and told her to stay put. The door creaked as it opened and shut. Now only the girl was in the room. She just sat on her knees for a few minutes, looking around curiously at all the blurry shapes and colors. It looked like a huge room. On one side there was a bright patch of white. Was that a window?

                Her mind started working like a picture book. Window…Outside…White. Snow is white. It was snowing outside. The girl sighed. There was something she wasn’t remembering right away about the snow. She tried harder to get the picture, but it only made her head hurt more. Being still wasn’t helping, but making her headache worse. Especially as hot as it was in here. The heat made her eyes watery. Maybe….She wasn’t sure how to complete the thought. She felt for the edge of the bed. When she found it the toddler lied on her stomach and stretched her arm down the side of the mattress. “Aw…” she whined disappointedly. She couldn’t even feel the bottom edge of the bed. “Too high…” How could she get down without getting hurt? Looking around again, she spotted a big red shape at the head of the bed and crawled over to it. Feeling a wave of exhaustion she let herself collapse into the shape. She smiled and giggled into the pillow. Puffy! That gave her an idea.

                After resting until her heartbeat slowed down a bit, she took the corner of the pillow in a fist and went back toward the edge. She lowered it over the bed and as soon as it touched the floor she let go and watched the shape flop over. Yay! That should do it. Still, the toddler was cautious as she slid off the bed and onto the pillow. However, she slipped and wound up pulling half the sheets and blankets down on top of her.

                Scrambling to burrow out from under the dark mess, she dug through the blankets until her fingers felt the coarse fibers of the carpet. Fuzzy floor, she thought throwing the blanket off. Strands of her hair stuck out in all directions from the static. Rubbing her eyes and blinking, she noticed her vision was clearing slightly. The mess she made looked even worse than when it was super blurry. Not only were the blankets and sheets everywhere, but so was the other pillow and some gray object that sounded like metal when it hit the floor. “Oops…”

                Hearing the voices again, she promptly forgot about the blankets and glanced around for the shape of the door. The girl squinted to see if it would help her see better. Nope. She still saw a bunch of shapes she couldn’t even guess what they were or how to equate them to anything she had seen before. There! The door was between two of the shapes that looked exactly alike. It looked a lot taller than it did before though. Oh well.

                Determined to get out of the room, the girl hurried toward the door. Her bare feet dragged on the carpet when she stumbled once or twice and she had to stop and catch her breath, but other than that she thought she was alright. Now to get out the door. Easy enough. But there was one problem. Zetsu said to stay here. He would get mad if she didn’t do as he said, right? And she didn’t like how angry he was earlier.

                The girl wasn’t sure what she wanted more: to stop her head from hurting or to not make Zetsu mad. She could knock on the door until someone came to get her. Then again, if dragon-lady or stitch-face came back they might yell at her. No, no, no, no, no! She pressed her fists against her head and whimpered. She didn’t know what to do now and the pain was getting even worse.

                It was only another second before she couldn’t take it anymore. She latched onto the handle and pulled the door open. Immediately the cooler air took effect and the pain slowly relented as she stepped into the hall. The toddler leaned against the wall and took several deep breaths. She thought about sitting down, and then she remembered she would have to listen to the creepy machine for who-knows-how-long. Yeah right! In trouble or not, she wasn’t putting up with that!

                “One…two…free…four…” She quietly counted the different sounds she heard as she walked down the hallway. “Four” was as high as she could count, so when she ran out of numbers she started over. She didn’t know how to describe the noises other than “new”. Every so often the floor creaked under her step and she froze, thinking someone might notice, then continued when no one showed.

                Her vision was quickly clearing. The more she saw, the more amazed the girl was. All this space was phenomenal. Every several feet a light lit a section of the hallway and there were two doors on each side. Something was written on each door, but since she couldn’t read she ignored it. Far more interesting was a series of flowery scents coming from a second hall. The turn wasn’t lit, and neither was the rest of the hall.

                Wha’s down there? the toddler thought. She didn’t like the dark, so she didn’t venture further than a step. It smells pretty…

                “What are you doing here?”

                The toddler shrieked in surprise and lost her balance. Scared, she turned to run but smacked into someone behind her. Ow! She fell back and rubbed her head. The person fell too and grunted as he hit the floor. Uh-oh!  Scrambling to her feet the girl took off running. Whoever she bumped into was already chasing and yelling after her.

                She turned into a walkway and promptly tripped on a loose tile on a linoleum floor. Desperate to get away she got up to run again, but she wasn’t fast enough.