Interlude: Coincidence
'Coincidence' is a human word.
It is a human word in the sense that 'wind' is a human word. It describes a phenomenon that has an impact on humans and therefore the word is useful. It is also so milquetoast as to be essentially pointless.
The cool summer breeze, soft as a kiss, pleasant and cool on the overworked peasant's sweating brow as he strips the bulbs from the rice plants before the creatures reach adulthood.
The menacing and mercurial sirocco, bearer of choking dust or life-giving rain depending on its whim.
The howling rage of the tornado tearing through a peasant family's dwelling and carrying their screaming bodies into the sky, adults and infants alike.
'Wind' is a pauper's word, and so is 'coincidence'.
The coincidence here was tiny and distant. Or proximate, depending on what you counted. That was the essence of coincidence, after all: it didn't exist. Everything had a cause tracing back to the universe's first shuddering gasp of creation. Still, if one were to choose an arbitrary point in the chain of events to consider 'the beginning', one might choose Jitsuko's cow's flatulence. It was, perhaps, a strange thing to choose as the first cause of a thousand legends and at least one literal saving of humanity, yet it is as good as any other.
At the time, of course, the cow belonged to Jitsuko's husband, Chōei. Chōei had owned the cow for a dozen years and knew its habits perfectly well. He knew better than to pass behind the beast while it was eating, yet for whatever reason he did. It was at that exact moment that the cow unleashed a long and triumphant
thhhhhhhhhwwaaaat of intestinal relief. The assault was enough to make Chōei gag and stumble, one hand going out for balance and catching the cow on its backside. That was enough to frighten the cow into lashing out with its rearmost hooves, and
that was enough to crush Chōei's chest like a dropped dumpling.
If one were honest, Chōei's death caused Jitsuko nearly as much relief as sadness. On the one hand, he had stuck by her and fled from civilization to conceal her secret. On the other, no more enduring under sweaty grunting, no more waiting for her own bath until the water was half-cooled and dirty, no more enduring the prandial scratching of the man-eggs, no more splitting the already scant food the tax man left. (For it was certainty that no matter how far one fled the cloying grasp of humanity, the tax man would find you!)
Had Chōei not died he would have been the one to re-thatch the roof instead of Jitsuko. For all his (many!) faults, Chōei had been an excellent thatcher. Jitsuko had never done the job before, but there was no one else. In her first-timer clumsiness she went up while the roof was still wet from the rain that had caused the leak that had alerted her to the need for re-thatching. Had she her husband's experience she would have known to wait until the roof had fully dried the next day before climbing up it. She put a foot wrong on the slippery sodden stalks, her feet went out from under her, and she flailed backwards off the roof.
It could be argued that it was another chain of coincidence that had caused the knobbly rock to be in its exact position. It was a castoff from the bones of the earth that had growled upwards in geologic haste, one plate towering higher and higher in a show of dominance against another to determine which would bow down and slide below its master. Cold and heat and wind (that useless word again!) had broken the rock from its source and water had carried it thousands of miles to land in this precise spot so that it would be here at this precise moment for Jitsuko's head to split open upon. Her death was as nearly instant as it is possible to be.
It is essentially inarguable that the passage of the ninja in the thorned-spiral headband was a separate chain of 'coincidence'. After all, surely his steps were not directly influenced by the flatulence of one particular cow? Regardless, he happened to pass by within hours of Jitsuko's zeugmoidal passing.
Had he passed by a few hours earlier, she would have been alive and boring and they would never have met. She likely would have been frightened by the almost-encounter, perhaps even distracted enough that she delayed climbing the ladder just long enough for the roof to dry. Had he passed by a few hours later then the animals would have already smelled her corpse and dined, dragging her body around until her skull was dislodged from its invader. No, the ninja's shadow slipped across her tiny patch of earth while her lifeless body was still impaled on the upthrust knob of the rock.
It was not a coincidence that the ninja paused when he saw her body. Most would not have, for Jitsuko was a peasant and therefore unworthy of notice—well, perhaps a moment's curiosity at the unlikelihood of a single peasant dwelling so far out in the woods, the neatly-thatched cottage standing alone and unafraid instead of crouching for shelter in a sea of fearful hovels. Another ninja would not have spent the time or investigative energy to discover why the farm was so misanthropic, why the young couple had pushed far away from their compatriots, moving beyond the encircling arms of human company so that none would discover the secret of the seemingly-young wife and her husband. A husband who, for all his faults in the bedchamber and his annoying habit of scratching his testicles during meals, loved his wife so much that he chose to cleave to her instead of denounce her to the village headman when he discovered her nature.
No, for this particular ninja, spending a few moments to investigate a dead body was a natural choice. Bodies were fascinating; capable of such marvels of life and recuperation, yet simultaneously fragile and incapable of retaining a firm grip on their
elan vitesse. Of course, fascination required a degree of uncertainty. If the man to your left caused a body to explode with one touch of whirling primal energy, that was unsurprising and dull. If the woman to your right broke a body in half with her foot, that was positively banal. The cause of the death was obvious and uninteresting. If, however, you found a woman dead in a patch of garden loam, resting surprisingly peacefully with death-filmed eyes upraised to the sky? That was surprising. Why, at first glance she looked less 'dead' and more 'choosing an entirely inappropriate location for a midday nap.'
It was only when the wind shifted and laid the scent of blood at his feet like a helpful dog fetching a stick, only when his eye was caught by the sanguine sogginess below her head, that his interest was sufficiently piqued to divert his course.
He knelt beside her, making his initial examination without touching her body.
"What might your name have been?" he wondered softly, arms folded on his unraised knee as he studied her. One more corpse of the hundreds that he had studied in this way. In each of them he looked for traces of his own features. It was a gaping maw of horror at the bottom of his mind, the idea that one day someone would stare down at him the same way he stared down at this woman. He wouldn't have minded that if the corpse they stared down upon had fallen in battle, serving his Kage with his final breath and taking a tithe of the enemy beforehand. No, the fear was that he might
not fall in battle, that he might instead wither from day to day and year to year. His joints would swell until he couldn't hold chopsticks, much less shape chakra. His supple body would become stiff and pained, his steps doddering and balance uncertain. Worst of all, his mind. The streams of analytical thought would be broken by rocks of forgetfulness, knowledge and life experiences turning to bilious muck between his fingers and leaving him in a permanent haze of confusion.
He had never disclosed this maw to anyone, for fear that he would be labeled a coward. The mocking would have been irritating and the potential for being permanently removed from field work would have been maddening. A lifetime of paperwork and training snot-nosed brats from the next generation would have meant no chance of a clean death at the hands of a more skillful or luckier ninja. It would have guaranteed the doddering senescence that was the essence of horror to him.
And thus came his fascination with the youthful dead, with those who had escaped the mortal coil before facing the grinding hollows of age.
"What's up with the blood?" he asked himself softly. The soil was loose and rich, something that would have softened a fall. He got his fingers under the body's shoulder and rolled her over. Her head clung desperately to the murderous rock for as long as it could before releasing with a regretful and affectionate
schlorp.
He studied the wound with interest. The knob of the rock had pierced the back of her skull immediately above the spine and jammed itself more than a knuckle into her brain. Death must have been instant, no time for gratitude that she had escaped the horror of age. He bent close, combing her midnight hair out of the way with delicate fingers so that he could see more clearly and wishing that he hadn't used the last of the braggart's so-convenient light sources. It was hard to angle his head and hers such that he could see into her quiescent brain.
The shadows of her wound were dispelled by an angry blue spark.
He shifted back in surprise, fine-lined eyebrows jolting upwards. He watched in fascination as more of the sparks danced and flickered in the depths of her wound, as the blood that had soaked the earth around her flowed upwards and back whence it had come, as the crushed fragments of bone that had been jammed backwards into her grey matter drifted to the surface and reassembled themselves, as she coughed and gasped and choked her way back to full awareness.
Jitsuko gagged, scrubbing fingers across her tongue to get the death-taste out. She rubbed at her eyes; she hadn't managed to close them before dying and they were burning from exposure to the air. It would be a few seconds before the cloudiness faded and she was able to see again.
"My, my," said a quiet voice from just beside her.
She forced her eyes open in horror, fear kicking her recovery into high gear. The mist drained rapidly from her vision, leaving her looking up at a pale-skinned ninja with a thorn-spiraled headband and a look of fascination. He was younger than Jitsuko appeared, late teens or early twenties at the most but there was a chilling, slithering feeling around him that belonged to nothing human. Her heart pounded in her chest and stomach clenched in horror. Drowning, impalement, rock to brain...those were not enough for finality but there undoubtedly was a limit, and this man seemed like he might be able to find it.
"You will be coming with me," he said, his face doing something that was not a smile in any sense she knew. "I feel certain that you have a great deal to teach me, once I get you on my table."
Voting remains closed. The plan that was voted in for Sunday is going to require a lot of work, hence why you're getting this interlude. We'll figure out what to do and publish it, probably for the Thursday update.