It wasn't supposed to be like this. Reincarnation I mean. It was supposed to be fun. One more go around. A chance to fix all the things I'd so royally fucked up the first time. And ya know, when I first saw the headbands, etched with a stylized leaf, I wasn't even mad. I giggled and laughed right along with the smiling woman staring down at me. I could live with this, I thought. It would be a lot of hard work, but I could live with this. I should have known better. I should have looked harder at the clothes the smiling woman wore. Should have noticed the unnatural way she seemed to vibrate as she hummed a lullaby. It had all been right there, but I was just so tired. I was always tired in those early days. Truth be told I still am, but I don't sleep so well anymore.
The day started, as most do here, with me and the smiling woman. The degrading nature of our morning ritual once again highlighting the myriad inadequacies of this new, tinier form. The most frustrating part was that I had long since attained control over my bodily functions. That little problem had gained my full and undivided attention after the first incident. I had never been so mortified in my life. It was humiliating, and no amount of cooing or funny faces was gonna convince me otherwise. The problem was this body. The physical act of getting to the bathroom was well and truly beyond me. So I was left to simply endure my humiliation.
The only other thing I had to occupy my vast amounts of newly acquired free time was this delightful new sensation of chakra all around me. It was sticky and thick and somehow managed to find its way into everything. I loved feeling it twist and bend as I clumsily waved my hands through the air. How could anyone be blind to this? When I first arrived it took me days to shake the feeling of drowning. It would flow like water into my lungs every time I took a breath, but never quite mixed with the chakra already there. This warm ball of energy that spider-webbed out from my core. For a long time, I was unsure of how exactly to touch it. I could feel it swirling lazily, but for nearly three months it refused to answer my calls. Then one day, like finding a muscle I'd never felt before, it moved. I'd grabbed, and yanked with all the subtly of a hand grenade, and the effects were immediate. My vision swam as chakra jumped to answer my call, draining from my extremities and towards my core. It was clear that I had nowhere near enough to be playing with, and in the last moment before the world faded out I was sure I was about to die… again.
When I regained consciousness I was once again in the smiling lady's arms. It occurred to me this was the first time I had ever seen her frown. She looked worried and kept glancing around like something was going to pop out of the walls. And that's when I noticed the walls, covered in bugs from floor to ceiling. They buzzed, and hummed, and crawled around everything. They were all over the smiling lady too, but she didn't seem to realize it. I reached up. I wanted to tell her, wanted to warn her, but stopped when I realized they were on me as well. Not just on me. I watched in horror as one crawled into a small hole I had never noticed on the inside of my wrist. Then all at once, I could feel them! They were crawling inside me, eating the chakra that leaked out!
And that's when I started screaming.
It was somewhere in the middle of day two that my voice finally gave out. I had long since been restrained in a blanket to stop my attempts at physically digging the bugs out of my skin. Now, with just the humming of the smiling lady, I could hear them inside me. The skittering of tiny legs as they crawled just beneath the skin. They were in my arms, and my chest, and my face! God how I missed the screaming. For the hundredth time, I struggled against the tightly wrapped blanket and for the hundredth time I lost. Pathetic. It's the only word I had to describe this sorry form. I tried to scream again, but managed only the sound of air. It did nothing to drown skittering, and with this new found quiet there also came an awareness of something else. It wasn't a sound, there were no words, but it was most certainly a question. Like the rising inflection at the end of a conversation, you weren't really listening to. I looked to the smiling lady to see if she's the source when it came again, and I knew it wasn't her.
There was something in my head. I could feel it just sitting there, watching, only truly visible when it moved, when it asked that wordless question. I didn't know what it wanted, but it felt wrong, alien in all the worst ways. The question came again and again, but I just sat there, frozen, too scared to reply. I could feel the tears running down my cheeks, could see the concerned look on the smiling woman's face, but I didn't answer when she called to me. What if I took my focus off this thing and when I looked back it was gone? I didn't think I could handle knowing it was watching and not being able to see it. The smiling woman's face was morphing from concern to panic as she started running for the door, still calling my name, but I couldn't pay her any mind. The thing in my head had started circling, like something feral trying to decide whether or not I was food. I wanted to run and hide, but I didn't know how, and still, the question repeated like a mantra.
My concentration broke as the world blurred with a twist of the smiling woman's chakra. One second we were outside the house, the next there was nothing but wind and speed. I never imagined anything could move so fast. Then it ended, and we were outside a hospital. It felt somehow wrong that such a trip could end in anything but an explosion.
My musings were cut short by the feeling of a looming presence. When I looked the thing was no longer hiding, no longer content to hover at the edges of my senses. It sat, so close I could touch it and stared. This time when the question came its meaning was clear. 'Who are you?' Its voice echoed through my mind with the layered lilt of hundreds. A writhing mass, like flies, swarmed too thick to see the carcass beneath. My crying started anew but I needed to answer. I didn't want to see what it would do if I refused.
'My name is…' What was it the smiling lady always called me? 'Akira. Akira Aburame I suppose,' for there really was only one clan I could be a part of. 'What are you?'
The question was met with a flurry of activity, like kicking a wasp's nest. It seemed unsure at first, before simply lurching forward to engulf me. I tried to scream. Distantly I was aware of doctors and nurses hustling around, but all I could focus on is how intimately I felt every insect that had turned my body into a hive. I could see exactly how many were inside me, and exactly where each one was. It made the whole thing so much worse. And over and over I could hear them answering my question. 'We are Akira Aburame.'
We spent the next few days in the hospital, being poked and prodded by one doctor after another.
"An abnormal chakra spike."
"Hive growing too fast for the patient's age."
"Chakra melding at a worrying pace."
We were one. We watched ourselves crawling through tunnels of flesh in a hundred sets of eyes, even as we felt revulsion at the sensation. We felt the moment foreign chakra entered our body. Felt it trying to separate us, to scatter our mind, and make us so much less than we were. But we would not be scattered. We devoured the chakra as fast as it came, used it to make ourselves stronger. We were a swarm, a hive, and that's how we would remain.
The doctor spoke in a detached voice, with just enough empathy to keep from sounding cold. "Attempts to separate your daughter from her hive have been unsuccessful. The integration between the two progressed far more rapidly than anyone could have anticipated. Children at this age simply don't have enough sense of self to hold off such an aggressive hive, nor have they formed the mental barriers necessary to keep their minds separate from one of this size. We could attempt to destroy the hive, but with the level of integration we are seeing it would almost certainly break her mentally. I'm sorry Ms. Mana, there's nothing else we can do."
We watched as the smiling woman seemed to collapse in on herself, her face twisting in grief. It hurt to see something so full of life shatter so completely. We were still here, could still smile and laugh in that way that would make her smile in return. At least we thought we could.
The smiling woman continued to sob as the doctor explained the procedure in cases like these. We would remain under observation in hopes of recovery. Chances were slim, but not impossible. All the while we simply stared, even as the smiling lady was ushered out the door. And somewhere, deep down, we knew that was wrong.
It took me four weeks to climb back to the surface. Still part of the hive, still a collective, but no longer just another insignificant piece of the whole. I was not some child to be devoured so easily. I had lived for 28 years, and this was my mind, my body, my hive. All of them were extensions of me, not the other way around. We may think together, but I made the rules, and the swarm fell in line. After so long lost in the collective it felt fantastic to be mostly me again. I didn't even mind the way my vision splintered hundreds of ways. I threw my head back and laughed, half childish wonder, half exhausted relief. The sound brought the night nurse running, and soon the small room was crowded with people all talking over each other. The hive helped me untangle the mess of sound into individual conversations, but the only one I cared about was the woman who held me in a death grip as she mumbled thank yous over and over.
Over the next few weeks, it became increasingly apparent that our connection remained just as strong as it had ever been. When I was engaged, listening to the smiling woman as she read, or puzzling over the shifting swirls of chakra, everything was fine. I was me, and the gentle pull at the back of my mind was easy enough to ignore. But as my mind slowed down that pull did not. After something as simple as daydreaming I would come back to myself and be surprised at how far I'd slipped into the collective. Thoughts came fast and fluid, but understanding even the most basic emotions was a herculean task. I could feel myself being hollowed out, the parts that made me human nowhere to be found. It was an experience that was equal parts fascinating, and horrifying, and it seemed I was not the only one who noticed.
"I don't know what to do." The toddler in front of me seemed to be quite enjoying the fist he had shoved in his mouth, but I found the conversation coming from the next room over far more interesting. "It's the same every morning. I wake her up and she just stares at me. She doesn't make a sound, doesn't move a muscle, just stairs. And Yumi, I'm telling you, it's wrong. I've fought shinobi that grew up on the front lines, and I've never seen anyone with eyes that empty. It's like someone reached in and plucked out her soul…" She paused for a moment, and when she started again her voice was barely above a whisper. "Sometimes she scares me. She comes back after ten or twenty minutes and smiles. She smiles like someone trying to be comforting, sad and apologetic. Children don't smile like that. I know it sounds crazy, but the incident with her swarm was the first time I'd ever heard her cry. She never fusses, never gets upset, and rarely laughs unless I do so first. The more I look the more I notice, and it's starting to freak me out."
"Mana…"
"I know how that sounds. I get it. But what if that swarm took my daughter away, and what's left now isn't Akira?" She sounded like she was about to burst into tears. "Children don't act like that Yumi!"
Yumi let out a sigh. "She can't even crawl yet. Give her time. Maybe she's just not a fussy kid and being so close to her swarm helps her mimic faces."
"Maybe." The smiling woman sounded less than convinced, but let it drop in favor of lighter topics.
I, on the other hand, found myself going over the conversation again and again. She's scared of me? It occurred to me that I hadn't been putting any real effort into acting like a baby. Not talking was about as much as I'd managed, but maybe that was a mistake. Should I start now? No, I decided, that would be bad. The smiling woman was a trained shinobi. A sudden change in my attitude right after she expressed her concerns would turn her into a paranoid wreck. Better to continue as I was, and let her draw her own conclusions. At least I hoped so.