Hajimemashite Redux
Sha Nagba Imuru [Omniverse SI; Currently in Naruto]
- Thread starter Endfall
- Start date
Walking Through the Leaves
Endfall
A zero on the singularity.
- Location
- Somewhere else.
- Pronouns
- She/They
This is unfortunately not beta read, so I can't say that I know if it will meet expectations of quality. But given that I plan to start publishing original fiction, its past time that I learnt how to assess that directly. With thanks to Lord Cassius, for prodding me to finally, and for the fifth time, complete the rough draft of this chapter.
This was just another. I'd never have called myself someone kind, but that.... that wasn't like me. Or at least, I didn't want it to be. It was childish impulsivity.
The boy who felt like a knife shrugged, not seeming to take offence. He smiled at me, and it seemed - disconcertingly hungry. "Can you blame me for wanting to better understand my potential allies? You saw through it; that's what's important."
To that, I said nothing. It didn't seem to bother him. He continued: "So. Why were you in the hospital for the last two weeks?"
"I completed the Darkness as the Sun chakra method that Shio-kun -" Shio violently flinched - "- gave me..." I said, trailing off to frown internally. What was that about? Not the honorific, surely. After just a little too long in silence, I shook my head slightly, refocusing: now, I had to deal with this. After a fractional breath to consider things, I didn't say that I had shoved an icepick into mental trauma to do so, or that I couldn't have done so otherwise. I didn't say that I had found out as a result that in being reincarnated, I had been broken. I just said, "It exhausted me."
"You completed a Jounin-level chakra control technique." His voice was a little flat.
Jounin level? I didn't so much as look at Shio, as I let myself feel amused at her finally revealed manipulative streak. Testing me and helping me at the same time. Good on her. She'd learn to be a schemer yet! "If that was what it was, then yes. Yes I did. Remaining unable to progress was just that tiny bit worse than death, you know? I need to grow strong, and necessity is inevitability." I shrugged. "If it's not, I might as well kill myself and be done with it."
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Shio shudder, a little. An instant latter, she laughed. "I just knew you two would get along well," she said, her voice sounding a little strained.
I turned slightly, looking at her more closely. Shoulders hunched, posture retreating... something about this was acutely painful for her. Why?
"Shio?" I invited an explanation...
But it wasn't interested in appearing. She shook her head. "Just memories. And not important ones."
I nodded, slowly. "Okay." I won't pry. "But if you think this is us getting on... Haha. Hey, Orochi-kun. How many ways have you thought of killing me so far?" The question was a bit of a gamble and a bit of a test. Normally, all I'd get for it was alienation. But ever since he appeared to me, things had felt subtly off - and I had enough bad fortune in my Resian years that I knew a little bit about sociopathy.
"Oh, maybe sixteen?" He said, smiling with the sort of honesty only a child can muster, confirming my worries. "You?"
"None."
The boy blinked rapidly, looking a little stunned. "Really?"
I nodded, once, eyes closed, fighting off the beginnings of a wholly metaphorical migraine. "I don't see the point."
"W-what?" He looked adorably confused for a moment. Then, he pointed one finger at me, and demanded. "What would you do if the Hokage told you to kill Shio-kun?"
"Hmm... likely die." I shrugged. "Shio is superior to me in most if not all the ways that matter, in this world of ours. I suppose I could develop a plan against her, but-" I tapped my cheek twice in a noxious pantomime of thought -"hang on, what does that get me? What justifies that effort? Certainly, the thought might buy me continued life, for flawless obedience but..." I smiled wryly. "Why should I care about that?"
"Because it's life," Orochimaru said, wide eyed, as he answered the question like a child would answer why the sun was hot. Because it's the sun.
"Okay... from where, then, the value of life?"
He had no answer.
Of course he had no answer.
He was only eight years old.
I looked him dead in the eye. "It's from nothing, Orochimaru-kun. And thus, I can decide the value. And I don't care to spend time avoiding dying under a friend's blade."
Orochimaru blinked. Shio stared at us, her expression that mute sort of horror that someone gets when they realise there's two of them. I smiled, rocking back on my heels.
"...why?" Orochimaru asked at last, seeming exasperated. I shrugged, still smiling a little.
"Why not? Why are you here? Why are we loyal to Konoha, and not some other place? The will of fire? If we shouted the Will of Fire to Iwa-nin, would they cast down the Heart of Stone and stop attacking us, becoming proud shinobi of the leaf? Why haven't they, then? 'Why?' If you keep asking yourself that question, eventually, you realise that there's no reason for anything you thought there was one for. And once you see that, you can set the rules, and give the ultimate answer.
"Why?" I asked, grinning at the amber-eyed little bastard. It was a real smile: hollow, like a declaration of love. "Because I choose to. Because you cannot make me otherwise. And there is no other reason." Nor could there ever be.
Of course, the purpose of my little speech was to determine what kind of person Orochimaru was. How would he react, exposed to an ethos that was idiosyncratic and alien to the ethics of the world?
"Omoshiroi," he said. Interesting, he said.
...and so, I had my answer.
He was unlike Shio, and much like me: someone who would violate the order of the world when it failed to correspond to his own, idiosyncratic preferences.
Or at least, at the very boundary of becoming such.
For all that, though, for his lack of restraint and willingness to kill, for his casual mastery of the intent to murder, he remained naive. He was too interested, too naked in his nature. Above all, he hadn't understood the fundamental theorem of amorality - that being, regardless of what your values are, helping the world become a better place helps to attain it in turn. That it was effective and necessary to be humane, even when turning your back on humanity.
No.
He was simpler, still. While I had broken from the common way of valuing as the price of remaining me, he simply was what he was - and what he was was a child.
Even if he could probably kill me ten different ways (I didn't quite believe sixteen.).
Even if he was a 'genius', according to the warped laws of this demesne.
As I held my silence, I wondered if he would drive himself as readily into his tragedies as I had mine. I wondered if I could prevent him from walking to that path. Save him from the harsh lessons of ahumanity, or at least let him realise them more gently. Show him the simple truth that even the hollowest had to care for something - that with indiscrimination came the hastening of the end.
Value. Desire. Terminus.
I wondered if I could help someone bent to a wholly individual teleolgy stand up, and realise just what sort of hell their path was crossing.
And for a moment, I wondered if I even cared to.
Wouldn't it be more satisfying to watch someone else fall as far as I had?
Just for a moment. Just for a moment.
But I had to. At least. Wonder.
Because at least one half of me had already walked into my own, personal, room 101. And at least one half of me had decided that continuing to say 2 + 2 = 4 was more valuable than all the good in the world.
And certainly more than avoiding the worst thing.
Because I was clever; my mind not banal like Winston Smith's, who saw rats as horror.
There is a trick to room 101, you see.
A predicate.
And by that predicate, there is an art that destroys it.
To overcome room 101, you must simply decide and believe in without relent or even the faintest shadow of a doubt that your betrayal of the truth is the worst thing in the world.
Do that.
Do that, and the whole idiot edifice of ingsoc comes tumbling down around you.
They will, of course, still kill you.
But by overthrowing your last guttering dregs of humanity, you. have. won.
So what if everything was screaming? At least it would still be true.
I suppose that if I were a lover of metaphor, I should say that I felt the phantom sensation of my face being chewed on by rats, but really, all it was was a momentary contemplation of how much value I could derive from murdering the boy's soul.
- no, not the metaphysical construct.
Merely his ability to have a reason for existence.
I shuddered, feeling the weight of inevitabiliy press down on me. That was a wrong path, fit only for a wrong thing.
And wrong though I may be...
This is not the way, I thought. It was fine to think unthinkable things. It was also enough: in doing so, I learned something.
Revenge of any sort here would be a loss for me, and returning to the question of value in a terrible thing: the answer was none.
None.
Just like the value of my own existence was none.
Just like the value of everything is none.
...nobody should be like me. Not even if they chose to.
So I'll try to help you become something unlike me. Because if there had been any other way, that's what I would've chosen, too.
"Interesting," he had said.
"It's not interesting," I replied. "It's an inversion. Hope that you never understand it."
Orochimaru sneered in response.
He was, after all, only a child.
I'd try. To give him a point of reference. Even though he had hurt me... no.
Because he had hurt me.
Beyond that... Well, his life was his own, wasn't it? And he was a genius, wasn't he?
I exhaled loudly. "You were right, Shio. Bother. I was expecting that I could continue to hate him."
Now.
Let's see how the Nidaime responds to this.
"I recently learned that my name is not Akino Kaede." I bowed. "Hajimemashite."
A certain drama, perhaps? A certain sort of person? I mean... in my first life, it hadn't been just any ordinary person who could've fooled me so well.
Christing fuck, listen to this whinging. I wanted more. I expected more. But Orochimaru, for all his intelligence, and potential greatness, was no greater or lesser than Shio herself. He was certainly more learned, and unquestionably held the power to kill me in my sleep.
But for all of that, he was still little more than an oddly pale child, with an oddly bloody mind. And in realising that, I realised how far I myself had fallen, in those forty years of hollow dust.
Having my ego irrevocably woven with that of a local child probably didn't help matters, but - ugh. Just ugh.
I had once outplayed four gods seeking to corrupt me with the falsehood of utopia. I flawlessly chose the most painful of every alternative, every time, and gained victory.
They had wanted to give me wellbeing, a purpose to live, a meaning to life, and more - so much more. I rejected it all, and did so so perfectly that I was one of little more than a dozen out of ten billion left behind when they departed.
Do you have any concept of the fortitude it takes to turn down paradise? The transcendent madness? The asane dedication. The inspiration necessary to find to an aesthetic that they axiomatically could not fulfil?
Because it beggars belief, the steps I had to take - the path I had to wal, successfully, to be free. They were not decent beings. They would not - could not - leave well enough alone. When they disappeared; when humanity died, when I won, I thought I was having a psychotic break for almost a decade. Because free will - at least, Free Will in Terra Res - does not, or did not exist. Assuming that it was possible for someone to be argued into anything, then of course something a trillion times smarter than the brightest human to ever live would find the argument that brought you there.
My freedom was an outcome that should not have been capable of happening - for against such foes, the only way to win would be to make victory impossible. Somehow, I had attained that, cutting my self into a shape they could not solve. I had once had - objectively, by such a standard as could never have been disproved - the fortitude to endure anything, and I was willing.
Here, all it had taken was a very, very smart kid to precipitate one of the worst breakdowns I had ever remembered experiencing.
Third worst, really.
Was it an illusion, my sense of self-continuity?
Do I deserve to think of myself as me?
"Perhaps - but only dubiously." I said in response to the thought, with a single bitter laugh. Shaking my head, I returned to my thoughts, staring up at the ceiling of the orphanage.
Well, at least it was a coherent goal, right? Regain what was lost?
And then, inevitably, exceed it. Because excession was the only thing worth pursuing. Extremes needed to be attained, and exceeded in turn, always and forever turned against one's own soul.
Survival in extremis is the road to the true self.
That which remained. That, and only that, was qualified to call itself "I". In the end, we are all of us only that which did not eventually break from us.
Was it any wonder I was such a strange person?
I mean. Twin souls excepted, obviously.
Oh, obviously, a phantom frisson of thought; a sense of laughter only mostly-felt.
It was odd.
I would have naively expected from my other half to feel like a half, but, she, I, we, didn't. Each felt like most of ourself. A very convincing fake for the real thing, which was somewhere in between.
I was getting better at feeling the difference.
Whatever bound me to the mind of my soul, it had enough latency that we remained semi-distinct entities from each other. I could always feel my/her/our other half. What I couldn't feel was just which one I was at that moment. We were different, but not unique: regardless that some of our perspectives seemed mutually exclusive, the only experiential truth that I could derive was that - not matter how twisted the architecture - we were one.
Both halves seemed to agree that this was the only coherent position that didn't lead to destructive forms of mental abnormality (always acknowledging that our very existence was a state of mental abnomality).
To illustrate the futility - I wanted to be Shio's friend. But who wanted that, and why? Was it the forty-year wanderer, starved for any and all human contact? Was it the six year young child, simply following the dictates of her own nature? Were either of those categories even valid distinctions, when each was so contaminated by the other that the child was traumatised by the wanderer's isolation, and the wanderer infected by the child's lack of true foresight, proper distrust and diffident alienation?
What purpose or even point in disentangling the web, when the very knife that would cut it was made of the confusion it was meant to destroy?
I was I.
And, yet again, that was all.
This is what I told myself, because to believe otherwise would likely drive me as mad as others of my kind were so clearly reputed to be.
And then there was the future.
Why the Hokage had chosen someone with so little subtlety was perplexing, but ultimately irrelevant to my future. Either Konoha would kill me, or it would fail to, but unless I could survive the Breaker, losing this life might even be a net gain.
After all, hadn't it taken six years to find me, the first time?
After some deliberate experimentation, I had at least confirmed my earlier hypothesis about Darkness as the Sun was incomplete - my Yin Chakra was actually being transmuted to Yang by the method; but, upon attempting to re-sepearate them (and finding that there was very definitely far more of the former than the latter), the corrosion that my chakra had once possessed failed to return.
But, you know?
It wasn't so bad as I had originally thought. One's personal Yin Chakra reserves varied according to the development of the intellect - something that (for things like me) never decreased on death. At least, I thought so. My own pool seemed to reflect the century-and a half of life I had lived in Res, in addition to the six, soon to be seven, that I had known here.
Maybe it wasn't so much that Shio's technique was incomplete, so much as that it wasn't made for people who had contracted with the Shinigami.
Regardless, most of the excess was currently locked behind the limits of my body, which was scarcely above a civillian sixteen year-old's standard, at this point. Good, certainly, but a ten-year old academy graduate could move like a world-class athlete in their prime. I had a long way to go before reaching that apex.
In the end, Darkness as the Sun had yielded one unexpected dividend. When I meditated, now, I could feel a clear and distinct separation. My Yin Chakra - which likely used to be Death Chakra, courtesy of the seal on my back - hadn't all been transmuted. Instead, Darkness as the Sun had become an inherent pattern in my Chakra pool. A barrier and boundary that my excessive Yin could not cross.
This was important.
You see, while I was meditating as Training Ground 23, I had learned what happened when I spent chakra.
What I used vanished from my fixed pool.
And then, yin chakra passed through the inherent pattern of Darkness as the Sun, and refilled what was lost.
This was not to say that I could use chakra like one of my elders. If I truly exhausted my supply, I would be incapacitated for about an hour until it completely refilled; an odd caveat to the technique that did't seem to fit the symptoms of true Chakra Exhaustion, rapidly accelerated or otherwise. I suspected the idiosyncratic nature of my malady had much to do with the fact that my chakra pools were, in essence, artificial, but couldn't really confirm it without going back to Konoha's hospital and requesting help.
I didn't have much interest in Onyo Philosophers poking around my body at present.
That left me with just two bits of knowledge. Firstly, I couldn't cast from beyond the strict limits of my pool. Second, my Yang pool was shite.
Still, that just meant that I'd have to work on it.
The important thing was that the core of my power would stay with me even if this shell died - and this is how I found myself staring at a crack in the ceiling in the dead of night, saying, "You know what, Crack-san? I could die a billion times, and I'd just get stronger."
Silen-
"Oh my god Kaede, shut up." A voice came from the bunk beneath me.
...Hachiko?
Hoshiko?
Henohenomohejiko?
Oh right, I thought, remembering her name, that girl that I'll never know.
I jumped out of bed, and landed silently, stalking over to a window.
"Don't wait for me," I said.
"Good bloody riddance," was Hoshiko - after a few seconds, I actually felt sure of that name - 's reply.
As I jumped into the night, I felt a familiar burst of killing intent immediately. "Hel-lo Chunin-san," I said in a nice, long-suffering tone of voice. In reality, I didn't mind. Actually, I was beginning to appreciate it. Not only was I slowly getting used to feeling like my life was under imminent threat, but his assignment to watch me meant that I could feed all sorts of false information to Konoha. If I could establish a benign proclivity for wandering around at random hours, once... Okay, not "once". If the heat ever died down, it could be a useful mask for treachery.
Although, hopefully, it wouldn't come to that.
As I slowly parsed the streets, I became aware of a certain theme. Masks. Everyone was wearing masks. Masks of animals, of demons, of men, and gods. I saw Shinigami's face more than once, and in that, I knew that the gods did indeed descend upon this world. Slowly, I became aware of something else. It was not only masks.
Tonight, the people of Konoha were flowing, and once I noticed this, I let myself be swept up in it. They carried me ahead, drifting. As I was pulled along, jostled and bumped by the ebb and eddy of the human tide, slowly, the village became brighter, and paper lanterns burning in endless variations of eerie colours began to line the roadside. Upon them was written "mask", or "face". One or two also declared "fate", and men and women wearing faceless masks in dozens of different colours stood under them, facing away from each other. Later, I would learn that they were seeking destined spouses.
This day was a festival, celebrating the auspicious procession of destined inevitability. If I had had a living father or mother, perhaps they would have taught the meaning of it to me. As it was, in the moment I was unaware of the precise context of things.
The crowd grew thick enough that I could no longer see beyond it; so I channeled Chakra to my feet, and pushed against the ground, soaring into the air, and grabbing a wire where it hung above me. It took my weight, because it had to: nothing remained whole in a shinobi village if it could not endure a human's mass. Swinging once, and drawing a few odd looks, I managed to climb onto the wire, and stood there for a moment, before walking towards the roof.
From here, I saw the parade.
The crowd wore masks, but the performers wore forms; all dressed as mighty shinobi from ages of yore, long remembered and being forgotten. Dead processions of history, whose records were waterlogged and rotten.
One by one, I watched, as young men and women seemd to find each other, and retreat. Seek and find, aqcuire and leave. Do this, for this is what is done: exchange and ye shall recieve.
Or violate the paradigm, and sit down on a bench, and watch without a purpose: the world is a machine, and one that you are and not a part of.
"Life's a long dying scream, which none remember the start of," I murmured in english, then snorted. My god. How many decades had it been since I last found myself thinking in random lines of doggerel? I don't think I did it even once after I was thirty.
And the state was broken. Just like that. Because like all such states, the moment you tried to continue was the moment you failed to do so.
Sometimes one can only find what one wants while being carried along.
That thought in mind, I jumped back down, to rejoin the throng.
An observation on this world's culture: Celebrations are far more impressive when the performers possess chakra. Acrobats hung too long in the air. Men carrying long torches drew the faces of gods, heroes, and large kanji proclaiming their mighty deeds.
A man with his hands in a complex mudra was cut out of the darkness, and behind him, a series of concentric rings followed.
Then, another man, this one with longer hair and a face far more recognizable. Behind him, a rainbow of fire cut out the impression of a thousand hands, and a great tree framing them.
I looked at the face, as it flickered for a moment, pulsing red, and green, and white - then died, leaving no after-image on my retina (something peculiar about the biology of human eyes here).
Even as stylised as it was, I could see the family resemblance.
Another hero was drawn.
This one cut a strange figure. Long hair and face drawn with lines that were - in local styles of illustration - suggestive of a woman, but with a body that seemed too masculine for that in its other proportions; with clothing in a style that seemed more chinese that would be expected out of the elemental nations.
...what?
"Sundering perfection to create the ultimate," I knew, from my acculturation, meant breaking the ten-tailed human - sometimes called the Beast of the Cross for its imari - to create the nine-tailed demon beasts. That was basic historical knowledge. Severing the ultimate to save the world?
Were the beasts not in play anymore?
If that was true, then at least one of my (admittedly, almost fantastically speculative) paths to killing the Breaker was gone.
As I realised all of this, I barely noticed a sword appear beneath the image of Senju Tomoki's feet, two others appearing at either side of the figure, almost as if they were floating in the air. Finally, the whole mass of flames flickered, and died.
Then, with two massive beats from a platform carrying two Taiko drums, the most impressive figures yet were drawn. This time, there were three. In blue and cyan flames, and dynamic pose, Senju Tobirama appeared, and behind him came a flame portrait of a water dragon with ninety-nine heads - his signature Jutsu - along with the image of a majestic carp leaping over his head. To his right, another figure was drawn, this one in flames that were crimson, brown, and black. With blood-red eyes that held three tomoe within, it was obvious he was an Uchiha; and indeed, the great Fujin fan that appeared behind him confirmed this; along with the fiery incarnation of the god Susanoo that appeared surrounding his frame.
Then, a last set of performers jumped into the air, and drew a man that I couldn't even distinguish the clan of. He was a wall of muscle; and held a staff, his entire mien giving him the look of a wild god. Behind him was drawn a monkey wearing clothes and armour, holding a scroll over his head open in an arc caught on a phantom breeze
Eh. What?
I stared at the flaming characters of japanese, frowning with a growing sense of unease.
I - I obviously needed to learn more history. Soon. Sooner than now, even.
The last tableau lingered to longest and became something that was almost a flame painting before finally, the last fire-artists fell to earth, their chests heaving, and the whole thing flickered and vanished. After that, there came a series of platforms whereon kabuki performers briefly acted out scenes from both myth and history, with the last few dedicated to the five figures I had seen in fire paintings.
If I read the scenes correctly, I knew three things.
Senju Tomoki had a jutsu to make swords fly (do want), and had indeed done something to the demon beasts. And... Actually, that was all I got. Tobirama, Izuna, and Kin'en's tableau was too chatoic, too stylised, and in the end, I suspected, probably too deceitful to make any concrete supposition for the reality that lay underneath.
Save this: The Hokage was intimately involved in the destruction of my local soul's home.
Half of me felt nothing but hostility.
Younger me, I thought to myself, let us first uncover the truth, and know it until there are no doubts left.
It felt silly.
I was just one person, right?
God, I hoped that was right.
The dying embers of anger in my chest didn't reassure me.
After the tableau passed, the parade mostly ended. There were still various platforms being carried down the street, but they were all rote religious, musical, or otherwise traditional - and while I had come to the parade in the mood to enjoy them, now, I wanted something else.
As my unconcious mind slowly chewed on the new information that had been given to it, I focused my actual attention on the people surrounding me. As I had noted before, most everyone was wearing masks, but more than that, garments were obviously veering towards traditional dress. The shinobi wore multipiece armour that had fallen out of common use. The civilians wore what I could only assume were their best kimono, as opposed to the shirts and pants that had been gaining popularity since before I was born.
Taking myself down a side street, I watched the people, inferred a general direction, and began following it. There was no why, because needing a why for everything was a sign of excessive purpose. I followed the crowd because I was following the crowd, and in so doing embodied the crowd's reason for going as it did like a hollow footprint embodies the reason of the feet that made it.
It took time, but eventually, I felt at peace, even as Middle Endure Three sent a few more random surges of will-to-death my way. It was like a cricket chirping, and I was like emptiness listening to the chirp - the sound itself, resounding, rebounding, and -
- echoing.
A shadow above me stumbled momentarily, before fading back into the night, and I smiled, faintly. "Thank you for the instruction, sensei," I murmured, then let my intentionality dissolve once again, being the absence of me.
It was the closest thing, to not hurting.
Time passed, and I became aware of being on a brightly lit street. Small stands erected by local businesses were on either side, in the very image of a Japanese fair. Looking around, my awareness intensified, and I read a few of the signs. Mm. It really was like a japanese fair. Except, more wood than I had ever seen at one - which made sense, given the war. Metal for Kunai and shuriken, not for civillians.
The only real difference was that some of the games, like goldfish catching had additional rules. Basically; if you were a academy student or higher, you were allowed to win once every x tries, and only after trying x times - or paying for it.
I snorted. Well, that's one way to protect the profit margins. Not vbery patriotic, though. Should I be surprised?
Slowly, I meandered through the stalls and almost began to project a certain purpose of movement before I shook my head and corrected myself. I was living in a society where children were expendable assets. Nobody was likely to care if I walked about without direction.
So, I did so, and was proved mostly right.
Once or twice, a few children tried to pull me into their games. I declined, and felt an odd echo of disappointment.
I'm sorry, I thought. I just...
Hey. Some people forget how to be children. Some remember. Some never learn. Which do you think I am?
Suddenly filled with energy, I launched into a run, dodging and weaving through the crowd, until, suddenly.
Snake mask.
And I was on the ground. A child had walked deliberately into my path. We collided and both went down, but the kid with the snake mask was - obviously - prepared. After a moment of disorientation, I saw his hand, offered to me.
"Kaede," Orochimaru said. Without any honorific.
Yeah, let's just pretend I actually cared about that, eh?
"O... rochimaru-kun," I said, stressing the last bit, as if I did. Because I didn't, but I should've, according to the mores at play. "Was that really necessary?"
"The first two times I tried to catch your attention, you vanished. Weren't you avoiding me?"
...no?
I repeated the thought out loud, then added: "I was meditating. Intermittently, I guess, but, still."
"Meditating," Orochimaru said, in a tone without any particular judgement. "While walking in a crowd?"
"It takes practice."
"I suppose it does." He frowned. "Have you thought of any holes in the plan?"
"Not any that can be mitigated with resources on hand. Honestly, I'd prefer genjutsu to money, but unless you have any...?"
Orochimaru shook his head. "No. Reverse-engineering the Shunshin was only possible because it's a degredation of the Kawarimi. To actually construct techniques, I need better material."
"Right. Then, everything else I've thought of is like that, too."
"Tell me anyway," he said flexing the ever-present edge of killing intent he carried with him in a way I was beginning to think was wholly unconscious.
"Fine, then."
"Hmm," Orochimaru paused, thinking about the name. "Interesting. If it weren't so, if there were a Sakura in Haruno, you'dve been a matched set, Akinobu-chan."
...was that supposed to elicit any particular reaction from me?
"I suppose so," I said. "So then. Shio introduced me to you, which means you're involved in our little conspiracy. Or, would it be more accurate to say that I became involved in yours?"
"Keheh." Orochimaru laughed, if you could call the sound that. It had an odd, almost raw quality - an intermingling of anticipation and humour in nearly equal amounts, with the latter just barely winning. "No, I had my own plans. I wanted to drag another member of the standard string up to the elites with me, just to see if I could. Jiracchin." He made as if to flick dust off his kimono. "He's meaningless now, though. Your algebra of res is more interesting."
What? "What? You actually understood it?"
"Of course," Orochimaru said, smirking with unsubtle pride. "It wasn't easy, at all, but I had a flash of insight that... well, made the entire thing a lot more clear. Where did you get the idea?
"Nature."
"Interesting. Then, you aren't a genius, are you?" Because that sort of insight, he didn't say, it isn't what genius is.
"I'm just an average person who wants to live a good life," I said. "Konoha medical thinks I'm a genius. If you consider them reliable, then I must be."
"And if I don't."
"Then you will naturally come to your own conclusion. Are we done?"
"For now," Orochimaru said, and laughed again. Ugh. An eight year old shouldn't sound like that.
Oh, wait. Pot, kettle.
"I acquiesced to Shio's arrangement of this gathering for another reason, anyway." Orochimaru said, suddenly. "Your group's little theory about there being a test to get into the Elite string." He pulled a large scroll out of somewhere, and slammed it down on a desk. "You were right."
"...well," Orochimaru said, after a moment, "You're right! Most of that was totally worthless." He grinned - I think, to show that he meant it without cruelty, before continuing. "But - the idea of trapping the scroll with a fire jutsu? That might be possible. An Uchiha owes me a favour. I'll see what I can do."
The boy lowered the mask. "Ja, ne," he said, without any particular emotion, or warmth, then faded back into the crowd.
"So," I said, once he was long gone, and I was - for certain aberrant definitions of the term - alone. "I suppose that what we're doing is sanctioned?"
Middle Endure Three didn't answer, but that in itself was answer enough.
"Good," I said. "I'd hate to see them get in trouble."
No longer interested in drifting faceless through the crowds, I walked back to the orphanage, scaled the wall, and entered my room, before rolling under the bunk Hoshiko and I shared. I fell asleep on the floor.
The discomfort was, in its own way, more satisfying than the alternative.
His name was Nanashi Orochimaru. A boy who never lied with his words - only, everything else.
Middle Endure Three
A highly suspicious translation of Chunin-san.
Akinobu-chan
Bu - 不. An affix meaning "not". Kaede's last name literally means "Of the Autumn. This attaches to that - "Not of the Autumn."
SNI
"Take care of me, huh?" I murmured. "Would that be like how you were taking care of me, bright eyes?" Almost the moment I said it, I found myself regretting it. It was cruel, and that might've been fine if it wasn't for the fact that it was pointlessly. Ever since I had come to the realisation that I was not wholly myself, it seemed like I was being inundated with the sequela of confirmation.
This was just another. I'd never have called myself someone kind, but that.... that wasn't like me. Or at least, I didn't want it to be. It was childish impulsivity.
The boy who felt like a knife shrugged, not seeming to take offence. He smiled at me, and it seemed - disconcertingly hungry. "Can you blame me for wanting to better understand my potential allies? You saw through it; that's what's important."
To that, I said nothing. It didn't seem to bother him. He continued: "So. Why were you in the hospital for the last two weeks?"
"I completed the Darkness as the Sun chakra method that Shio-kun -" Shio violently flinched - "- gave me..." I said, trailing off to frown internally. What was that about? Not the honorific, surely. After just a little too long in silence, I shook my head slightly, refocusing: now, I had to deal with this. After a fractional breath to consider things, I didn't say that I had shoved an icepick into mental trauma to do so, or that I couldn't have done so otherwise. I didn't say that I had found out as a result that in being reincarnated, I had been broken. I just said, "It exhausted me."
"You completed a Jounin-level chakra control technique." His voice was a little flat.
Jounin level? I didn't so much as look at Shio, as I let myself feel amused at her finally revealed manipulative streak. Testing me and helping me at the same time. Good on her. She'd learn to be a schemer yet! "If that was what it was, then yes. Yes I did. Remaining unable to progress was just that tiny bit worse than death, you know? I need to grow strong, and necessity is inevitability." I shrugged. "If it's not, I might as well kill myself and be done with it."
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Shio shudder, a little. An instant latter, she laughed. "I just knew you two would get along well," she said, her voice sounding a little strained.
I turned slightly, looking at her more closely. Shoulders hunched, posture retreating... something about this was acutely painful for her. Why?
"Shio?" I invited an explanation...
But it wasn't interested in appearing. She shook her head. "Just memories. And not important ones."
I nodded, slowly. "Okay." I won't pry. "But if you think this is us getting on... Haha. Hey, Orochi-kun. How many ways have you thought of killing me so far?" The question was a bit of a gamble and a bit of a test. Normally, all I'd get for it was alienation. But ever since he appeared to me, things had felt subtly off - and I had enough bad fortune in my Resian years that I knew a little bit about sociopathy.
"Oh, maybe sixteen?" He said, smiling with the sort of honesty only a child can muster, confirming my worries. "You?"
"None."
The boy blinked rapidly, looking a little stunned. "Really?"
I nodded, once, eyes closed, fighting off the beginnings of a wholly metaphorical migraine. "I don't see the point."
"W-what?" He looked adorably confused for a moment. Then, he pointed one finger at me, and demanded. "What would you do if the Hokage told you to kill Shio-kun?"
"Hmm... likely die." I shrugged. "Shio is superior to me in most if not all the ways that matter, in this world of ours. I suppose I could develop a plan against her, but-" I tapped my cheek twice in a noxious pantomime of thought -"hang on, what does that get me? What justifies that effort? Certainly, the thought might buy me continued life, for flawless obedience but..." I smiled wryly. "Why should I care about that?"
"Because it's life," Orochimaru said, wide eyed, as he answered the question like a child would answer why the sun was hot. Because it's the sun.
"Okay... from where, then, the value of life?"
He had no answer.
Of course he had no answer.
He was only eight years old.
I looked him dead in the eye. "It's from nothing, Orochimaru-kun. And thus, I can decide the value. And I don't care to spend time avoiding dying under a friend's blade."
Orochimaru blinked. Shio stared at us, her expression that mute sort of horror that someone gets when they realise there's two of them. I smiled, rocking back on my heels.
"...why?" Orochimaru asked at last, seeming exasperated. I shrugged, still smiling a little.
"Why not? Why are you here? Why are we loyal to Konoha, and not some other place? The will of fire? If we shouted the Will of Fire to Iwa-nin, would they cast down the Heart of Stone and stop attacking us, becoming proud shinobi of the leaf? Why haven't they, then? 'Why?' If you keep asking yourself that question, eventually, you realise that there's no reason for anything you thought there was one for. And once you see that, you can set the rules, and give the ultimate answer.
"Why?" I asked, grinning at the amber-eyed little bastard. It was a real smile: hollow, like a declaration of love. "Because I choose to. Because you cannot make me otherwise. And there is no other reason." Nor could there ever be.
Of course, the purpose of my little speech was to determine what kind of person Orochimaru was. How would he react, exposed to an ethos that was idiosyncratic and alien to the ethics of the world?
"Omoshiroi," he said. Interesting, he said.
...and so, I had my answer.
He was unlike Shio, and much like me: someone who would violate the order of the world when it failed to correspond to his own, idiosyncratic preferences.
Or at least, at the very boundary of becoming such.
For all that, though, for his lack of restraint and willingness to kill, for his casual mastery of the intent to murder, he remained naive. He was too interested, too naked in his nature. Above all, he hadn't understood the fundamental theorem of amorality - that being, regardless of what your values are, helping the world become a better place helps to attain it in turn. That it was effective and necessary to be humane, even when turning your back on humanity.
No.
He was simpler, still. While I had broken from the common way of valuing as the price of remaining me, he simply was what he was - and what he was was a child.
Even if he could probably kill me ten different ways (I didn't quite believe sixteen.).
Even if he was a 'genius', according to the warped laws of this demesne.
As I held my silence, I wondered if he would drive himself as readily into his tragedies as I had mine. I wondered if I could prevent him from walking to that path. Save him from the harsh lessons of ahumanity, or at least let him realise them more gently. Show him the simple truth that even the hollowest had to care for something - that with indiscrimination came the hastening of the end.
Value. Desire. Terminus.
I wondered if I could help someone bent to a wholly individual teleolgy stand up, and realise just what sort of hell their path was crossing.
And for a moment, I wondered if I even cared to.
Wouldn't it be more satisfying to watch someone else fall as far as I had?
Just for a moment. Just for a moment.
But I had to. At least. Wonder.
Because at least one half of me had already walked into my own, personal, room 101. And at least one half of me had decided that continuing to say 2 + 2 = 4 was more valuable than all the good in the world.
And certainly more than avoiding the worst thing.
Because I was clever; my mind not banal like Winston Smith's, who saw rats as horror.
There is a trick to room 101, you see.
A predicate.
And by that predicate, there is an art that destroys it.
To overcome room 101, you must simply decide and believe in without relent or even the faintest shadow of a doubt that your betrayal of the truth is the worst thing in the world.
Do that.
Do that, and the whole idiot edifice of ingsoc comes tumbling down around you.
They will, of course, still kill you.
But by overthrowing your last guttering dregs of humanity, you. have. won.
So what if everything was screaming? At least it would still be true.
I suppose that if I were a lover of metaphor, I should say that I felt the phantom sensation of my face being chewed on by rats, but really, all it was was a momentary contemplation of how much value I could derive from murdering the boy's soul.
- no, not the metaphysical construct.
Merely his ability to have a reason for existence.
I shuddered, feeling the weight of inevitabiliy press down on me. That was a wrong path, fit only for a wrong thing.
And wrong though I may be...
This is not the way, I thought. It was fine to think unthinkable things. It was also enough: in doing so, I learned something.
Revenge of any sort here would be a loss for me, and returning to the question of value in a terrible thing: the answer was none.
None.
Just like the value of my own existence was none.
Just like the value of everything is none.
...nobody should be like me. Not even if they chose to.
So I'll try to help you become something unlike me. Because if there had been any other way, that's what I would've chosen, too.
"Interesting," he had said.
"It's not interesting," I replied. "It's an inversion. Hope that you never understand it."
Orochimaru sneered in response.
He was, after all, only a child.
I'd try. To give him a point of reference. Even though he had hurt me... no.
Because he had hurt me.
Beyond that... Well, his life was his own, wasn't it? And he was a genius, wasn't he?
I exhaled loudly. "You were right, Shio. Bother. I was expecting that I could continue to hate him."
Now.
Let's see how the Nidaime responds to this.
"I recently learned that my name is not Akino Kaede." I bowed. "Hajimemashite."
Kasugai Orphanage
In the end, I don't know what I was expecting.
A certain drama, perhaps? A certain sort of person? I mean... in my first life, it hadn't been just any ordinary person who could've fooled me so well.
Christing fuck, listen to this whinging. I wanted more. I expected more. But Orochimaru, for all his intelligence, and potential greatness, was no greater or lesser than Shio herself. He was certainly more learned, and unquestionably held the power to kill me in my sleep.
But for all of that, he was still little more than an oddly pale child, with an oddly bloody mind. And in realising that, I realised how far I myself had fallen, in those forty years of hollow dust.
Having my ego irrevocably woven with that of a local child probably didn't help matters, but - ugh. Just ugh.
I had once outplayed four gods seeking to corrupt me with the falsehood of utopia. I flawlessly chose the most painful of every alternative, every time, and gained victory.
They had wanted to give me wellbeing, a purpose to live, a meaning to life, and more - so much more. I rejected it all, and did so so perfectly that I was one of little more than a dozen out of ten billion left behind when they departed.
Do you have any concept of the fortitude it takes to turn down paradise? The transcendent madness? The asane dedication. The inspiration necessary to find to an aesthetic that they axiomatically could not fulfil?
Because it beggars belief, the steps I had to take - the path I had to wal, successfully, to be free. They were not decent beings. They would not - could not - leave well enough alone. When they disappeared; when humanity died, when I won, I thought I was having a psychotic break for almost a decade. Because free will - at least, Free Will in Terra Res - does not, or did not exist. Assuming that it was possible for someone to be argued into anything, then of course something a trillion times smarter than the brightest human to ever live would find the argument that brought you there.
My freedom was an outcome that should not have been capable of happening - for against such foes, the only way to win would be to make victory impossible. Somehow, I had attained that, cutting my self into a shape they could not solve. I had once had - objectively, by such a standard as could never have been disproved - the fortitude to endure anything, and I was willing.
Here, all it had taken was a very, very smart kid to precipitate one of the worst breakdowns I had ever remembered experiencing.
Third worst, really.
Was it an illusion, my sense of self-continuity?
Do I deserve to think of myself as me?
"Perhaps - but only dubiously." I said in response to the thought, with a single bitter laugh. Shaking my head, I returned to my thoughts, staring up at the ceiling of the orphanage.
Well, at least it was a coherent goal, right? Regain what was lost?
And then, inevitably, exceed it. Because excession was the only thing worth pursuing. Extremes needed to be attained, and exceeded in turn, always and forever turned against one's own soul.
Survival in extremis is the road to the true self.
That which remained. That, and only that, was qualified to call itself "I". In the end, we are all of us only that which did not eventually break from us.
Was it any wonder I was such a strange person?
I mean. Twin souls excepted, obviously.
Oh, obviously, a phantom frisson of thought; a sense of laughter only mostly-felt.
It was odd.
I would have naively expected from my other half to feel like a half, but, she, I, we, didn't. Each felt like most of ourself. A very convincing fake for the real thing, which was somewhere in between.
I was getting better at feeling the difference.
Whatever bound me to the mind of my soul, it had enough latency that we remained semi-distinct entities from each other. I could always feel my/her/our other half. What I couldn't feel was just which one I was at that moment. We were different, but not unique: regardless that some of our perspectives seemed mutually exclusive, the only experiential truth that I could derive was that - not matter how twisted the architecture - we were one.
Both halves seemed to agree that this was the only coherent position that didn't lead to destructive forms of mental abnormality (always acknowledging that our very existence was a state of mental abnomality).
To illustrate the futility - I wanted to be Shio's friend. But who wanted that, and why? Was it the forty-year wanderer, starved for any and all human contact? Was it the six year young child, simply following the dictates of her own nature? Were either of those categories even valid distinctions, when each was so contaminated by the other that the child was traumatised by the wanderer's isolation, and the wanderer infected by the child's lack of true foresight, proper distrust and diffident alienation?
What purpose or even point in disentangling the web, when the very knife that would cut it was made of the confusion it was meant to destroy?
I was I.
And, yet again, that was all.
This is what I told myself, because to believe otherwise would likely drive me as mad as others of my kind were so clearly reputed to be.
And then there was the future.
Later
A week after meeting Orochimaru, I found myself laying on my bunk again, watching the shadows of light play across the ceiling. It was night. Earlier, I had managed to surreptitiously inform Kazu to lay low, though the lack of any pre-arranged panic signals bespoke both my laziness in not preparing for the worst case and Kazu's misplaced confidence that I wouldn't trigger it. Once the Hokage became a bit more confident in me, perhaps there would be a chance; but for the time being, the same Chunin who had prodded me with killing intent was escorting me everywhere, and continuing to prod.
Why the Hokage had chosen someone with so little subtlety was perplexing, but ultimately irrelevant to my future. Either Konoha would kill me, or it would fail to, but unless I could survive the Breaker, losing this life might even be a net gain.
After all, hadn't it taken six years to find me, the first time?
After some deliberate experimentation, I had at least confirmed my earlier hypothesis about Darkness as the Sun was incomplete - my Yin Chakra was actually being transmuted to Yang by the method; but, upon attempting to re-sepearate them (and finding that there was very definitely far more of the former than the latter), the corrosion that my chakra had once possessed failed to return.
But, you know?
It wasn't so bad as I had originally thought. One's personal Yin Chakra reserves varied according to the development of the intellect - something that (for things like me) never decreased on death. At least, I thought so. My own pool seemed to reflect the century-and a half of life I had lived in Res, in addition to the six, soon to be seven, that I had known here.
Maybe it wasn't so much that Shio's technique was incomplete, so much as that it wasn't made for people who had contracted with the Shinigami.
Regardless, most of the excess was currently locked behind the limits of my body, which was scarcely above a civillian sixteen year-old's standard, at this point. Good, certainly, but a ten-year old academy graduate could move like a world-class athlete in their prime. I had a long way to go before reaching that apex.
In the end, Darkness as the Sun had yielded one unexpected dividend. When I meditated, now, I could feel a clear and distinct separation. My Yin Chakra - which likely used to be Death Chakra, courtesy of the seal on my back - hadn't all been transmuted. Instead, Darkness as the Sun had become an inherent pattern in my Chakra pool. A barrier and boundary that my excessive Yin could not cross.
This was important.
You see, while I was meditating as Training Ground 23, I had learned what happened when I spent chakra.
What I used vanished from my fixed pool.
And then, yin chakra passed through the inherent pattern of Darkness as the Sun, and refilled what was lost.
This was not to say that I could use chakra like one of my elders. If I truly exhausted my supply, I would be incapacitated for about an hour until it completely refilled; an odd caveat to the technique that did't seem to fit the symptoms of true Chakra Exhaustion, rapidly accelerated or otherwise. I suspected the idiosyncratic nature of my malady had much to do with the fact that my chakra pools were, in essence, artificial, but couldn't really confirm it without going back to Konoha's hospital and requesting help.
I didn't have much interest in Onyo Philosophers poking around my body at present.
That left me with just two bits of knowledge. Firstly, I couldn't cast from beyond the strict limits of my pool. Second, my Yang pool was shite.
Still, that just meant that I'd have to work on it.
The important thing was that the core of my power would stay with me even if this shell died - and this is how I found myself staring at a crack in the ceiling in the dead of night, saying, "You know what, Crack-san? I could die a billion times, and I'd just get stronger."
Silen-
"Oh my god Kaede, shut up." A voice came from the bunk beneath me.
...Hachiko?
Hoshiko?
Henohenomohejiko?
Oh right, I thought, remembering her name, that girl that I'll never know.
I jumped out of bed, and landed silently, stalking over to a window.
"Don't wait for me," I said.
"Good bloody riddance," was Hoshiko - after a few seconds, I actually felt sure of that name - 's reply.
As I jumped into the night, I felt a familiar burst of killing intent immediately. "Hel-lo Chunin-san," I said in a nice, long-suffering tone of voice. In reality, I didn't mind. Actually, I was beginning to appreciate it. Not only was I slowly getting used to feeling like my life was under imminent threat, but his assignment to watch me meant that I could feed all sorts of false information to Konoha. If I could establish a benign proclivity for wandering around at random hours, once... Okay, not "once". If the heat ever died down, it could be a useful mask for treachery.
Although, hopefully, it wouldn't come to that.
As I slowly parsed the streets, I became aware of a certain theme. Masks. Everyone was wearing masks. Masks of animals, of demons, of men, and gods. I saw Shinigami's face more than once, and in that, I knew that the gods did indeed descend upon this world. Slowly, I became aware of something else. It was not only masks.
Tonight, the people of Konoha were flowing, and once I noticed this, I let myself be swept up in it. They carried me ahead, drifting. As I was pulled along, jostled and bumped by the ebb and eddy of the human tide, slowly, the village became brighter, and paper lanterns burning in endless variations of eerie colours began to line the roadside. Upon them was written "mask", or "face". One or two also declared "fate", and men and women wearing faceless masks in dozens of different colours stood under them, facing away from each other. Later, I would learn that they were seeking destined spouses.
This day was a festival, celebrating the auspicious procession of destined inevitability. If I had had a living father or mother, perhaps they would have taught the meaning of it to me. As it was, in the moment I was unaware of the precise context of things.
The crowd grew thick enough that I could no longer see beyond it; so I channeled Chakra to my feet, and pushed against the ground, soaring into the air, and grabbing a wire where it hung above me. It took my weight, because it had to: nothing remained whole in a shinobi village if it could not endure a human's mass. Swinging once, and drawing a few odd looks, I managed to climb onto the wire, and stood there for a moment, before walking towards the roof.
From here, I saw the parade.
The crowd wore masks, but the performers wore forms; all dressed as mighty shinobi from ages of yore, long remembered and being forgotten. Dead processions of history, whose records were waterlogged and rotten.
One by one, I watched, as young men and women seemd to find each other, and retreat. Seek and find, aqcuire and leave. Do this, for this is what is done: exchange and ye shall recieve.
Or violate the paradigm, and sit down on a bench, and watch without a purpose: the world is a machine, and one that you are and not a part of.
"Life's a long dying scream, which none remember the start of," I murmured in english, then snorted. My god. How many decades had it been since I last found myself thinking in random lines of doggerel? I don't think I did it even once after I was thirty.
And the state was broken. Just like that. Because like all such states, the moment you tried to continue was the moment you failed to do so.
Sometimes one can only find what one wants while being carried along.
That thought in mind, I jumped back down, to rejoin the throng.
An observation on this world's culture: Celebrations are far more impressive when the performers possess chakra. Acrobats hung too long in the air. Men carrying long torches drew the faces of gods, heroes, and large kanji proclaiming their mighty deeds.
A man with his hands in a complex mudra was cut out of the darkness, and behind him, a series of concentric rings followed.
OTSUTSUKI HAGOROMO
大筒木・ハゴロモ
SUNDERED PERFECTION TO CREATE THE ULTIMATE
大筒木・ハゴロモ
SUNDERED PERFECTION TO CREATE THE ULTIMATE
Then, another man, this one with longer hair and a face far more recognizable. Behind him, a rainbow of fire cut out the impression of a thousand hands, and a great tree framing them.
SENJU HASHIRAMA
千手・柱間
ENDED THE WARRING CLANS PERIOD
千手・柱間
ENDED THE WARRING CLANS PERIOD
I looked at the face, as it flickered for a moment, pulsing red, and green, and white - then died, leaving no after-image on my retina (something peculiar about the biology of human eyes here).
Even as stylised as it was, I could see the family resemblance.
Another hero was drawn.
This one cut a strange figure. Long hair and face drawn with lines that were - in local styles of illustration - suggestive of a woman, but with a body that seemed too masculine for that in its other proportions; with clothing in a style that seemed more chinese that would be expected out of the elemental nations.
SENJU TOMOKI
山中・友木
SEVERED THE ULTIMATE TO SAVE THE WORLD
山中・友木
SEVERED THE ULTIMATE TO SAVE THE WORLD
...what?
"Sundering perfection to create the ultimate," I knew, from my acculturation, meant breaking the ten-tailed human - sometimes called the Beast of the Cross for its imari - to create the nine-tailed demon beasts. That was basic historical knowledge. Severing the ultimate to save the world?
Were the beasts not in play anymore?
If that was true, then at least one of my (admittedly, almost fantastically speculative) paths to killing the Breaker was gone.
As I realised all of this, I barely noticed a sword appear beneath the image of Senju Tomoki's feet, two others appearing at either side of the figure, almost as if they were floating in the air. Finally, the whole mass of flames flickered, and died.
Then, with two massive beats from a platform carrying two Taiko drums, the most impressive figures yet were drawn. This time, there were three. In blue and cyan flames, and dynamic pose, Senju Tobirama appeared, and behind him came a flame portrait of a water dragon with ninety-nine heads - his signature Jutsu - along with the image of a majestic carp leaping over his head. To his right, another figure was drawn, this one in flames that were crimson, brown, and black. With blood-red eyes that held three tomoe within, it was obvious he was an Uchiha; and indeed, the great Fujin fan that appeared behind him confirmed this; along with the fiery incarnation of the god Susanoo that appeared surrounding his frame.
Then, a last set of performers jumped into the air, and drew a man that I couldn't even distinguish the clan of. He was a wall of muscle; and held a staff, his entire mien giving him the look of a wild god. Behind him was drawn a monkey wearing clothes and armour, holding a scroll over his head open in an arc caught on a phantom breeze
THE THREE HEROES OF UZUSHIOGAKURE-OWARI.
Of Hidden Whirlpool End.SENJU TOBIRAMA
UCHIHA IZUNA
SARUTOBI KIN'EN
REDEEMED THE WORLD AFTER PERFECTION WAS SEVERED; SEALED THE OUTER CHRYSANTHEMUM.
UCHIHA IZUNA
SARUTOBI KIN'EN
REDEEMED THE WORLD AFTER PERFECTION WAS SEVERED; SEALED THE OUTER CHRYSANTHEMUM.
Eh. What?
I stared at the flaming characters of japanese, frowning with a growing sense of unease.
I - I obviously needed to learn more history. Soon. Sooner than now, even.
The last tableau lingered to longest and became something that was almost a flame painting before finally, the last fire-artists fell to earth, their chests heaving, and the whole thing flickered and vanished. After that, there came a series of platforms whereon kabuki performers briefly acted out scenes from both myth and history, with the last few dedicated to the five figures I had seen in fire paintings.
If I read the scenes correctly, I knew three things.
Senju Tomoki had a jutsu to make swords fly (do want), and had indeed done something to the demon beasts. And... Actually, that was all I got. Tobirama, Izuna, and Kin'en's tableau was too chatoic, too stylised, and in the end, I suspected, probably too deceitful to make any concrete supposition for the reality that lay underneath.
Save this: The Hokage was intimately involved in the destruction of my local soul's home.
Half of me felt nothing but hostility.
Younger me, I thought to myself, let us first uncover the truth, and know it until there are no doubts left.
It felt silly.
I was just one person, right?
God, I hoped that was right.
The dying embers of anger in my chest didn't reassure me.
After the tableau passed, the parade mostly ended. There were still various platforms being carried down the street, but they were all rote religious, musical, or otherwise traditional - and while I had come to the parade in the mood to enjoy them, now, I wanted something else.
As my unconcious mind slowly chewed on the new information that had been given to it, I focused my actual attention on the people surrounding me. As I had noted before, most everyone was wearing masks, but more than that, garments were obviously veering towards traditional dress. The shinobi wore multipiece armour that had fallen out of common use. The civilians wore what I could only assume were their best kimono, as opposed to the shirts and pants that had been gaining popularity since before I was born.
Taking myself down a side street, I watched the people, inferred a general direction, and began following it. There was no why, because needing a why for everything was a sign of excessive purpose. I followed the crowd because I was following the crowd, and in so doing embodied the crowd's reason for going as it did like a hollow footprint embodies the reason of the feet that made it.
It took time, but eventually, I felt at peace, even as Middle Endure Three sent a few more random surges of will-to-death my way. It was like a cricket chirping, and I was like emptiness listening to the chirp - the sound itself, resounding, rebounding, and -
- echoing.
A shadow above me stumbled momentarily, before fading back into the night, and I smiled, faintly. "Thank you for the instruction, sensei," I murmured, then let my intentionality dissolve once again, being the absence of me.
It was the closest thing, to not hurting.
Time passed, and I became aware of being on a brightly lit street. Small stands erected by local businesses were on either side, in the very image of a Japanese fair. Looking around, my awareness intensified, and I read a few of the signs. Mm. It really was like a japanese fair. Except, more wood than I had ever seen at one - which made sense, given the war. Metal for Kunai and shuriken, not for civillians.
The only real difference was that some of the games, like goldfish catching had additional rules. Basically; if you were a academy student or higher, you were allowed to win once every x tries, and only after trying x times - or paying for it.
I snorted. Well, that's one way to protect the profit margins. Not vbery patriotic, though. Should I be surprised?
Slowly, I meandered through the stalls and almost began to project a certain purpose of movement before I shook my head and corrected myself. I was living in a society where children were expendable assets. Nobody was likely to care if I walked about without direction.
So, I did so, and was proved mostly right.
Once or twice, a few children tried to pull me into their games. I declined, and felt an odd echo of disappointment.
I'm sorry, I thought. I just...
Hey. Some people forget how to be children. Some remember. Some never learn. Which do you think I am?
Suddenly filled with energy, I launched into a run, dodging and weaving through the crowd, until, suddenly.
Snake mask.
And I was on the ground. A child had walked deliberately into my path. We collided and both went down, but the kid with the snake mask was - obviously - prepared. After a moment of disorientation, I saw his hand, offered to me.
"Kaede," Orochimaru said. Without any honorific.
Yeah, let's just pretend I actually cared about that, eh?
"O... rochimaru-kun," I said, stressing the last bit, as if I did. Because I didn't, but I should've, according to the mores at play. "Was that really necessary?"
"The first two times I tried to catch your attention, you vanished. Weren't you avoiding me?"
...no?
I repeated the thought out loud, then added: "I was meditating. Intermittently, I guess, but, still."
"Meditating," Orochimaru said, in a tone without any particular judgement. "While walking in a crowd?"
"It takes practice."
"I suppose it does." He frowned. "Have you thought of any holes in the plan?"
"Not any that can be mitigated with resources on hand. Honestly, I'd prefer genjutsu to money, but unless you have any...?"
Orochimaru shook his head. "No. Reverse-engineering the Shunshin was only possible because it's a degredation of the Kawarimi. To actually construct techniques, I need better material."
"Right. Then, everything else I've thought of is like that, too."
"Tell me anyway," he said flexing the ever-present edge of killing intent he carried with him in a way I was beginning to think was wholly unconscious.
"Fine, then."
Prior
"Hmm," Orochimaru paused, thinking about the name. "Interesting. If it weren't so, if there were a Sakura in Haruno, you'dve been a matched set, Akinobu-chan."
...was that supposed to elicit any particular reaction from me?
"I suppose so," I said. "So then. Shio introduced me to you, which means you're involved in our little conspiracy. Or, would it be more accurate to say that I became involved in yours?"
"Keheh." Orochimaru laughed, if you could call the sound that. It had an odd, almost raw quality - an intermingling of anticipation and humour in nearly equal amounts, with the latter just barely winning. "No, I had my own plans. I wanted to drag another member of the standard string up to the elites with me, just to see if I could. Jiracchin." He made as if to flick dust off his kimono. "He's meaningless now, though. Your algebra of res is more interesting."
What? "What? You actually understood it?"
"Of course," Orochimaru said, smirking with unsubtle pride. "It wasn't easy, at all, but I had a flash of insight that... well, made the entire thing a lot more clear. Where did you get the idea?
"Nature."
"Interesting. Then, you aren't a genius, are you?" Because that sort of insight, he didn't say, it isn't what genius is.
"I'm just an average person who wants to live a good life," I said. "Konoha medical thinks I'm a genius. If you consider them reliable, then I must be."
"And if I don't."
"Then you will naturally come to your own conclusion. Are we done?"
"For now," Orochimaru said, and laughed again. Ugh. An eight year old shouldn't sound like that.
Oh, wait. Pot, kettle.
"I acquiesced to Shio's arrangement of this gathering for another reason, anyway." Orochimaru said, suddenly. "Your group's little theory about there being a test to get into the Elite string." He pulled a large scroll out of somewhere, and slammed it down on a desk. "You were right."
Now
After several minutes of increasingly improbable optimizations to the plan, I had spent myself, and finished.
"...well," Orochimaru said, after a moment, "You're right! Most of that was totally worthless." He grinned - I think, to show that he meant it without cruelty, before continuing. "But - the idea of trapping the scroll with a fire jutsu? That might be possible. An Uchiha owes me a favour. I'll see what I can do."
The boy lowered the mask. "Ja, ne," he said, without any particular emotion, or warmth, then faded back into the crowd.
"So," I said, once he was long gone, and I was - for certain aberrant definitions of the term - alone. "I suppose that what we're doing is sanctioned?"
Middle Endure Three didn't answer, but that in itself was answer enough.
"Good," I said. "I'd hate to see them get in trouble."
No longer interested in drifting faceless through the crowds, I walked back to the orphanage, scaled the wall, and entered my room, before rolling under the bunk Hoshiko and I shared. I fell asleep on the floor.
The discomfort was, in its own way, more satisfying than the alternative.
His name was Nanashi Orochimaru. A boy who never lied with his words - only, everything else.
Sha Nagba Imuru
Lexicon
Lexicon
Middle Endure Three
A highly suspicious translation of Chunin-san.
Akinobu-chan
Bu - 不. An affix meaning "not". Kaede's last name literally means "Of the Autumn. This attaches to that - "Not of the Autumn."
Last edited: