« In the beginning I was nothing ... In the beginning it was good...
Be nothing only is possible in a manichean realm. However, the Manichean does not tolerate the nough. The manichean persists in the good and the bad constrasted in a clear-cut axe-blowed opinion. Could we define the naught ? If yes, how ?
Black, blue, red, wellow, white … I don't know ... surely : nothing.
In the water or the clay ? I do not feel any air ... Hot or cold ? Was my body heavy or light ? Dying or living ? Not fully the first yet but no more the second one neither. Full of ecstasy or full of agony ? None of them... Just nothing.
Then, I realise that I already had this feeling before... Yes ... Slightly before everything go wrong, I felt this great naught, have had the feeling to merge in it. Panic, fear, qualm, worry, or curiosity ?
I regain what seems consciousness …I feel ... I don't know what, but I feel. Yet, I feel too much to be nothing. Gradually, the absolute torpidity leaves space for the most total gravity.
I remember now ... Progressively ... Colors ... shapes ... images, abstracts ... Some memories of sensations, smells, peoples, places and facts. My village... My failure ... Konoha ... The errand …Orochimaru ... Edo tensei ...
My village !
Tree years that I have not seen it, but limpids reflections conceives themselves without my eyes. Without my eyes : because if I was opening them right now the picture of those air and water landscapes, timbered smells, until in the paddy fields where the wet and the soil meets and are made one, would disappear.
Inescapably, without thinking about, it disappears to leave space to a shapeless bulk of various wavelengths ; when my eyes seeks the very hazardous venture to decrypt the area, sensing a living being nearby ...
A voice with a winter aura, wicked but playful, arise in the meadow and bites my ear-drums like an icy wind :
« Huh, so, what do we have here ? Surprisingly, the weakest of the tree pawns had survived that lethal skill.
Has Orochimaru-sama hidden things about you to me ? I understand a bit better why he asked me to brought him your 'corpse' now... »
I recognize this voice... Orochimaru's assistant... Kabuto.
I hear spirits round whose are delighted to welcome me in their kingdom whilst the man with white hair and whose the smell is colloquially distasteful approach... He raises and puts me on his shoulder as if I was a rice bag.
No ! I don't want to go back there!
I would like to wrestle. My limbs don't match: are so heavy, so numb… I don't feel them.
I try to talk : nothing. I try to move : nothing. I try to breathe : nothing… ? Then, suddenly, a choc.
I cough and breathe in to the point to make my ribcage explode. Everything seems to get up and running, to begin with the pain feeling. A stupor's roaring due to nefarious throes chokes in my throat wich give way to grisly gargles.
My eyes moisten without my knowledge.
Finally, I am struggling.
His glasses fall in the undergrowth.
He stops and « thee » me, leering with a murderous eye my diminished perspective. He lets himself lands from branches and drops me carelessly on the ground. Obviously not quite concerned that I could be able to run away in my appalling state. And, if need be, wouldn't have any harm to catch me back.
I am crawling with difficulty. I try to stand up time to time. When I leave the benignant support of the three that had helped me to regain the standing position, my legs seems to liquefy under my weight. I persist, for his greatest entertainment, in my awful pang. After a while, he comes back to me. He should have found his glasses.
There is no one well-meaning soul in that forest to lend me gracefully its strength. Only ones ghosts present there are enemies victims from Konoha and are rather bitter to have lost their life. To help someone is the last of their desires –on contrary, they are jeering at me and enjoying my setbacks– and I am too weak to subject them to this fancy.
The Shinigami yet has given grant to let me live –thanks to shamanics links I sustain with the afterlife– but, I obviously have to let him the hardly total amount of my vital energy in exchange of that wish* …
Leaving me thus on the brink of death and in more than precarious conditions...
I am feeling like a wounded fledgling battling against a feline. The heart thumping so hard that it is threatening to stop due to the fear and its crazy crackle seems to consume the thin chakra layer that keeps me alive… But I can't afford the luxury to pretend to be dead. They wants me… even dead…
I feel him growing closer and at the moment, my vain attempt to avoid him, do not entertain him more than a bit… Like a cat, tired to play with its prey after few hours in the course of wich he weaken it, letting it think it could flee if it pushing on.
Just as his hands will grabs me again a kunai cuts through the air in his direction. He dodge it with one feline's spring, wich force him to move away from me. I analyse the shot's trajectory to establish its precise provenance and find the fleeting individual.
Who has been able to go unnoticed from sharp senses of that dreaded character?