Characters: Chiyo, Karura
Summary: Chiyo has never apologized for anything in her life.
Pairings: None
Author's Note: Chiyo meeting up with Karura after death could make for a very interesting conversation.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

"So I guess I was just another expendable puppet to you, or something."

Chiyo squeezes her eyes tightly shut and wonders how one long dead can still make her feel so guilty. She had thought that there was no one left who could bleed guilt out of her, but Karura's even voice pricks like knives now.

So death is a desert. Chiyo finds that oddly fitting, that the barrenness of death should be reflected in infertile sand and sterile wind. It stretches on forever in every direction; Chiyo has not ventured far, but she knows this to be true.

Karura sits on a rock with her legs dangling above Chiyo's head, and talks. All the anger seems to have drained out of her.

"Did you hear me, Chiyo-sama?"

Chiyo stokes at the fire—it is not night, but she's started one up early for when night comes—and doesn't look at her former student. "Yes, Karura, I heard you. And you're wrong," she adds more quietly.

"Really?" With a light grace that any kunoichi would be proud to possess, Karura slides down from the rock and comes to sit across from Chiyo, eyes above the flames and piercing into the old woman's flesh. She tilts her head to one side, with negligent curiosity. "Then why?"

Wind whispers above them, and Chiyo can't quite bring herself to meet Karura's tanned face or her dark green eyes. "Your husband ordered me—"

"No, he didn't." A sharp snap of anger cracks out of Karura's voice, flaring in her eyes. "Don't lie to me, Chiyo-sama. You didn't have to do this, and no one would have been foolhardy enough to try to force you to do something you didn't want to do. They wouldn't have lived long after the mistake."

Silence puts up walls, glassy and clear but still hard and making them feel as though they are shouting across miles of dunes. Nothing has been learned.

Suddenly, Chiyo feels weary and far older than even she has a right to. "What do you want me to say, Karura? That I willingly agreed with the Yondaime to seal the Ichibi no Tanuki within the body of your unborn child? That I participated in an action that gave Sunagakure an invaluable weapon, even at the cost of that child's happiness?" Her dark brown eyes bear into the face of a woman who remains unbearably even, and Chiyo's voice is tired and slow as she gives her final justification. "That I did what I did for the sake of our village?"

Karura leans back and starts to twist the hem of her sleeve in her small fingers. She sounds as though hashing out a financial settlement, drained and detached. "Your actions… My death in torment, being ripped in two by a demon of the sand. My soul offered up as payment for the sealing, with you ripping it out of my body, making me an empty shell that still breathed.

"Temari and Kankuro. You took them from me, took me from them. None of my children will ever know their mother.

"You drove my brother mad. He lost his mind and blamed Gaara when he should have blamed you.

"You bonded my youngest child to a pitiless demon, made his life hell."

Karura shakes her head, a strange sadness stealing over her skin. Her eyes crinkle up in pain. "All I want you to say is that you're sorry."

It won't come. Chiyo has never apologized for anything in her life.