Hello everyone! A big welcome back to everyone who's here from my old account, and a warm welcome to any and all newcomers. This is a revamp of a fic I had started a very long time ago. So here it is, Breathe Again version 2.0
I feel like this title is more thematically appropriate now.
Oh my god it's been such a long time, I'm so nervous! The Doc Manager keeps eating my scene breaks. I think I've got it fixed but it's possible they'll start disappearing on my again like they did last time. It probably wants me to use the horizontal lines but I find those really jarring. Anyway!
Thank you all so much, and I hope you enjoy it.
She knows better than to ask, but has maybe been a little less than subtle about her interest in the little stall set up in the street. So, when her father offered to buy her one of the delicious-looking fish-shaped-cake-things she so coveted if she successfully beat her time swimming the distance between the pier and the nearest island, she had redoubled her efforts.
Now, exhausted and pigtails still dripping, the five year old stands on her tiptoes to peer over the edge of the cart as her father tosses a few coins to the street vendor and he in turn passes the treat into her hands. Even in the summer the Water Country can be cold, and little tendrils of steam rise with the mouth-watering scent.
It's too warm to eat right away, so she eyes it anxiously as they continue home, so much so that she doesn't notice the other child running towards her until he's already snatched it from her hands and darted away.
The girl pursues.
She's much faster than he had expected. She catches up to the thief, knocks his feet out from beneath him and she pounces. He's smaller than she is, thinner, clothes dirty and worn, and she can see now that they're about the same age. His eyes are dark, like his skin and like his hair, and he's staring at her, not scared, just surprised.
There's a sharp whistle from behind her and she turns her head, her father standing where she'd left him, face hard and unreadable but certainly not pleased. "That's enough. Get back here now."
She does as she's told, scrambling off the other child. He sits up enough to brush the gravel off of her prize, and crams it into his mouth while he has the chance. She doesn't understand why, but she doesn't mind terribly, anymore, if he has it and trots obediently back to her father's side.
"Can I," she looks up at him hopefully, taking his hand and hurrying to match his stride. "Can I get another one?"
Her father glances down at her.
"That taiyaki was a reward for progress in your training, and you let that street boy sneak up on you," he says. "What do you think?"
Thoughtfully, she digs a sharp little eye-tooth into her lip. "No?"
"No."
She knows better than to argue. Glancing over her shoulder, just for a moment before they're swallowed up by the crowd, she can catch the other child watching her intently.
"Come on," her father says, brushing her hand away, "time to go home."
/
He sees them again a month later.
She's easy to recognize (same dark pigtails, same pale eyes, same pale skin), and he recalls the man as well, tall and snowy-haired. The gash bisecting his neck, however, is new.
The girl sits beside his corpse on the damp cobblestones, picking shards of broken glass from his skin. From the imprint of the wire frames still visible in the ashy flesh, it's apparent that someone had smashed his eyeglasses into his face.
Off and on again, a light shower of rain had been falling over the city, so the two men fussing over the massive pile of damp wood in the square are getting impatient as the pyre refuses to light. There are other bodies laid out, waiting, but she ignores them. She doesn't seem to notice him, either, and just sits, vacantly, watching the body, awaiting instruction that will never come.
It's not until he's drifted close enough for his shadow to fall over her that she jumps. He can tell by the way she tenses that she recognizes him, ready for some form of retaliation, but he doesn't move and she returns to her pointless vigil.
She doesn't say anything and after a long silence he finally turns to leave.
"Please don't—!"
When he looks back again she's twisted to face him, one hand braced against the ground, the other clasped hastily over her mouth.
"I mean," she says between her fingers, voice small and uncertain, before hesitantly letting her hand rest in her lap. "Please don't go. I'm just— I'm not supposed to talk to other kids, ever, really, so..."
He takes another step closer, and she swivels around to sit facing him. "Why not?"
"I'm not sure," she admits, shrugging a little. "He just said not to; that it was really important, but…" her brow furrows slightly. "But I think he meant when I started at the academy soon… I don't think he meant you, so… So I guess it's okay. "
The boy raises his eyebrows skeptically. "You always do whatever people tell you, for no good reason?"
"I was going to be a ninja, like dad was," she answers, blinking at him. "That's what being a ninja means. You don't ask questions, you just do what the person in charge says."
"That's stupid," he says, puzzled and maybe a little annoyed when it doesn't elicit any real kind of reaction. "You going to go do that now?"
"I can't." She gestures to the two men at the other end of the street, who have finally just gotten the fire to catch. "I asked them already. They said they don't take new students until November, and I'd have to stay somewhere else until then."
"Do you have anywhere else to go?"
Her pigtails sway as she shakes her head. "Some adults broke our door down. They said they were…" she pauses, eyes screwed shut. "'Re-appropriating village assets,'" she recites, carefully picking through each syllable of the unfamiliar words, "and that I had to leave. They said I could find my father here, so I did. And now…" She lets out a deep breath, slowly, head canted thoughtfully to one side, "now I don't know what to do."
She rubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. They had started loading bodies onto the pyre and the damp air was filling with smoke and the acrid, familiar smell of burning hair and whatever material made up those reinforced jackets. They're always burning bodies here, so he's used to it, knows to keep from facing downwind. He also knows they'll be over here in a moment to chase her away from the body, and he approached her for a reason.
"I had a head start, but you caught up to me like it was nothing, then knocked me flat on my face," he starts carefully. He knew not to steal from the ones with those jackets, or the metal plates, but he'd never expected that kind of trouble from her. "You learned that from him, right?" She nods, glancing back towards her father, and apparently deciding to pass the pile of broken glass down, carefully, into one of his loosely clenched hands— there are still shards embedded deep into his blank, staring, eyes, but she hasn't dared tug on them. She continues to digs out the rest, if only to keep busy.
The girl is still well-fed and strong. He knows that won't last and he knows things that will keep her alive when her ribs start to show through her sides and the temperature drops. He knows where to hide from the cold, where to scavenge for food, but not how to keep people bigger, and stronger from taking them from him, and he's lasted this long but isn't sure how much longer. The gnawing of his empty stomach's become a persistent ache. There's a buzzing in his head and a new weakness in his limbs that's steadily worsening. "If you teach it to me, I'll show you some good places to sleep tonight," he offers, trying to sound casual but holding in a breath as he waits, loathing his own desperation.
"Yeah?" Slowly, she looks back at him and pushes herself to her feet. She looks uncertain but maybe almost smiles a little. "I would like that, I think."
When he offers his hand, she takes it, and with a final thoughtful glance at the dead ninja's corpse, follows him into the street.
/
He points out a few places as they pass them, little nooks and crannies and outcroppings that are out of the wind and rain. He's found dozens, he tells her, all over the village, because they aren't the only people living out there, and he can never be sure if any one of those places would be occupied, by someone bigger than he was, on any given night.
She watches, carefully, struggling to make note of their location and any landmarks nearby. She knows the way from her house to the nearest lake and she'd even been out of the village and deep into the woods once, but besides the limited routes she'd taken with her father, Kirigakure is strange to her. They're all old, moss-grown, stone buildings and apartments, dominated by what she knows to be the Mizukage's headquarters in the center of the city. It all looks the same to her, and quietly she says as much.
"It gets worse when the fog rolls in," her new companion tells her. "You get used to it."
Between the huge cylindrical towers are smaller houses, and shops, and green spaces and uneven rocky escarpments where nothing could be built. She asks him to find her somewhere soft and grassy, because he's impatient to start training and you can't learn to fight until you can fall properly. She remembers tackling him, and she remembers him going down like a sack of potatoes, exactly the way her father had warned her not to. They arrive in a little park he's found for her. It's really just an overgrown and forgotten corner of the village where someone had tied up some old tires and planks for swings, and the ground's wet and cold, but there's enough plush grass between the trees for her purposes. She spends the better part of the day pushing him over, and it's just when he begins to wonder out loud if she doesn't just enjoy shoving him that he starts to get it. By the time the sky dims and they call it a day, she's taught him how to break his fall without breaking his wrists. Cold, wet, and exhausted, he starts back towards the village streets, the other child trailing after him.
He squeezes himself into the tight recess into a store wall where the service door was located. He stops her when she moves to join him. "This is mine," he tells her, scowling. "I showed you tons of places. Go sleep somewhere else."
She doesn't retreat, just blinks at him. "It'll be warmer if we both stay here."
There's just enough room for her if he presses all the way against the wall, and he glares at her, considering his options, before reluctantly shuffling over.
She was lucky enough to have been wearing a sweater when the strange ninja had chased her from her home, and she unzips it, peels it off, curls close against his side, and drapes it over them for warmth. It's a bit damp, but it still keeps the heat in, more than either one of them would generate alone.
"I'm Kotone," she offers as an afterthought, head resting on his shoulder.
He glances over to find her watching him expectantly.
"Zabuza," he admits finally. "It's Momochi Zabuza."
/
He jumps when he wakes up and finds her curled against him, but slowly the previous day comes back to him and the boy relaxes in spite of the unfamiliar invasion of his space. Zabuza edges away from her and peels himself out from under the damp sweater. He's still chilled and aching from hours on the cold, hard pavement but he's warmer than he would usually be, and that makes pulling himself to his feet is easier than it has been for a long while. The movement had woken her, and the girl blinks, yawns, looks up at him, bleary-eyed.
"Morning," she says as she climbs stiffly to her feet. The air's damp and her sweater is dewy on the outside. The inside's a bit drier, so she deems it worth wearing and she shakes it off before pulling it back on.
And then she does something strange, laying her hands flat against the brick wall and pushing forward like she thinks she can move it. "I'm stretching," she explains when she catches him eyeing her skeptically. "Try it, you'll feel better."
She shows him several, and he hesitantly follows along, feeling ridiculous but it's hard to see more than a few feet in front of himself this morning, and it's not like anyone passing by pays attention to him anyway. They just look down, walk faster, suddenly become interested in the time.
He struggles with it, joints stiff and muscles tense, the movements causing an uncomfortable pull. The point, as she explains it, seems to be to almost hurt yourself now so you don't really hurt yourself later. And besides, she tells him, that's a good feeling. He's not sure they're feeling the same thing, because she seems like she could probably tie herself into a knot if she wanted to.
"You'll get better," she promises. "I've been doing this for…" she pauses thoughtfully, "…as long as I can remember. Same with fighting."
He sighs, unclasps his fingers, lets his arms drop back to his sides. There's a familiar hollow ache in his stomach. "Come on, let's get something to eat. There are a few good places to steal things."
"Stealing is bad," she says quietly.
He raises an eyebrow at her.
"It's illegal. That means it's bad. You can't do things that are illegal."
"Well I," he tells her, narrowing his eyes and starting into the road, "plan on eating today. You stay here and starve if you want." He hears her take a few hesitant steps before jogging to catch up to him, and she falls into step, eyebrows still furrowed, gaze disapproving. "If you don't eat, you'll die, and there's no other way to get food. You want to live, right?" Kotone doesn't say anything. "You… you do want to live don't you?"
"I don't know."
"Well, do you want to die then?" he says a bit more sharply, watching as she contemplates this for a moment, pale eyes thoughtful.
"No," she replies finally.
"Then you want to live," Zabuza asserts, "because those are your only options. If you don't want to die, you want to live."
"I guess," she shrugs, and then she's staring at him as they walk. Just sort of studying him for far too long and he can just feel her taking in his scrawny frame and dirty hair. He's about to snap at her to say whatever it is she's going to when she does, unprompted. "So…" the girl starts, still watching him curiously, "do you want to live, then?"
"What kind of stupid question is that?" He looks at her incredulously. "Of course I do." And she's still waiting, like this warrants an explanation, like the will to survive isn't etched into the deepest parts of all living things, all people.
Well, he thinks, something constricting in his chest— not everyone.
"Living is hard," he concedes, risking a glance over at her still-unsettling gaze. "You have to fight, and claw, and use everything you have to take anything you can get. Some—" he looks back over at her, makes sure she hasn't heard the waver in his voice, steels himself, continues, "some people can't do that and those people die. I don't want to be one of those people." He stops, ducks into an alleyway because they've arrived in the market. It's still too early to be quite bustling, and he can't get a good look at any but the nearest stalls, but if he can't see them, then they can't see him and that can only help. "That's why it doesn't matter if it's illegal to steal," he tells her when she creeps into their hiding place behind him. "Living's more important than anyone's stupid rules. It's more important than anything."
She just shakes her head, slowly, her now-disordered pigtails swaying with the motion. "I don't think that's true. I mean, that isn't what…" She just shakes her head more resolutely. "I'm going to be a ninja. That means I have to follow the rules no matter what."
"I don't care what you do," he tells her, scowling at the annoying creature still watching him placidly as he eyes the visible carts and stalls, waiting for one of the vendors to drop their guard. "Just don't come crying to me when your stomach starts to eat itself."
"I won't," she promises, almost cheerfully, as he dashes out into the fog after his prey.
To her credit, she doesn't. She's curled, knees drawn tight to her chest, back in the alleyway when he returns, sinking his teeth into the apple he'd just swiped off the latest cart. It's been a successful day for him, the other few small morsels he'd made off with already bolted down. He'd seen her scavenging, digging through waste bins and finding nothing.
She glances up and over as he takes another loud mouthful but doesn't say anything, even as her stomach rumbles pitifully. He sighs, glances down at the shiny red apple, rolling his eyes.
He doesn't care, he insists to himself, but she's no good to him dead or feeble. Besides, he's already shown her several good places to sleep and as she's uninterested in any advice he has on stealing, he's already given up most of his value. It was an uneven exchange and she's sure to notice. And when she realizes he's useless to her, she's bound to leave him, won't she? Sure, he can now fall over and frustrate himself bending like an idiot, but that isn't want he wants to know.
"Here," he drops his hand, offering it to her, nudges her with the unbitten side when she just stares at it. "Come on, take it. Before I change my mind."
She reaches up, uncertain, takes it from his hand like she's waiting for him to snatch it back. When he doesn't, Kotone thanks him quietly before taking a bite, sighing contentedly.
"You keep teaching me to fight and I'll keep you fed. How does that sound?" This is a very, very stupid deal to make because he's barely been able to feed himself but his belly's full and it's making him a bit too confident. He'll manage.
There's a little tug at the corners of her mouth, and he's starting to wonder if that isn't as much of a smile as she can manage. "And we can keep each other warm," she adds. "That's good for both of us." He plunks himself down beside her and waits. Slowly, taking controlled, measured bites and chewing as long as she can to make the apple last, she devours it core and all.
/
"When they take new students at the academy, you should come too," She tells him as she carefully adjusts his outstretched arm. He's led her back to the abandoned green space they'd been using the day before. He understands punching, of course, but she's trying to show him how to get the most out of it, how to do it right, the way her father had taught her. He's untrained, and his technique is sloppy, but he's watching her carefully and remembers every correction she makes and is altogether improving minute by minute. He'd do well at the academy… really well. "It's a place to sleep, and there's food…You'd be out of the cold. They'd be able to teach you way more of this than I can. And really," she continues, remembering everything she'd been taught about duty, and service, "it's an honour to be a ninja and protect the village. There's nothing better a person could do with their life."
He scowls at her, dropping his fighting stance to sit in the damp grass and she folds her legs under herself beside him. "I told you, I don't want to spend my life being bossed around. Who's giving the orders, anyway?"
"Let's see…" Kotone trails off, eyes turned upwards as she tries to recall the chain of command as she'd had it explained to her. "Academy students become genin when they graduate. It must be hard, because not many do," she counts that rank off on her fingers. "Genin eventually get promoted to chunin, but first they get assigned to teams for every mission, overseen by a jonin. Jonin are in charge of chunin, too. "
"Who tells jonin what to do?"
"Other jonin, I think. Some are still higher up than others… some answer directly to the Mizukage himself, but in a kind of a way everyone's orders come from the Mizukage, through other people, when you get right down to it."
"And who does he take orders from?"
"Oh!" she exclaims, thinking for a moment, but no, nothing comes to mind. "The Mizukage's in charge of everything. Nobody gives him orders." He lets out a, low, airy kind of a sound that was halfway to being a laugh.
"Maybe I'll be Mizukage, then."
She just looks at him, mouth quirked to one side, head inclined in thought because what he's saying makes absolutely no sense. "You can't be the Mizukage," Kotone replies, brow furrowed in confusion. "The Mizukage is the Mizukage."
He lets out another long, noisy breath, exasperated. "Anyone ever tell you you're like talking to a wall?"
"No," she shakes her head, not as offended as she thinks he'd like her to be. She doesn't have a word for it, but there's a strange lightness in her now, a sort of energy. Like something heavy's been lifted, and she wants it to continue. "You know," she says as she gets back to her feet, and encourages him to do the same so they can get back to work. "I've never really had anyone to talk to before, so I'm probably not very good at it. I like this, though."
They keep training together until nightfall.
"How long have you been out here?" she asks night as they curl into a sheltered place behind a shed for the evening.
"I don't know," he says. "What month is this?"
It's late August. He's been alone since March.
"Huh," he says, voice low, when she tells him. "I think I'm six now."
/
The next morning finds them in the park again, and she shows him how to block, how to knock her fist out of the way as she'd been doing yesterday. He's good and he learns quickly but he's dealing with months of cumulative fatigue and starvation and she inadvertently knocks the wind out of him with a solid blow to the chest. Kotone takes a step back and watches him uneasily as he struggles to breathe, deems it a good time for a break. He's weak now, but he wouldn't be if given the opportunity. She's quickly growing weaker herself.
"Those aren't worth anything, are they?" Zabuza asks when he catches her absently playing with one of her earrings.
Her father had let her get them a few months ago, made her promise she'd take care of them herself and she had, rubbing them with stinging alcohol and never getting an infection. An easy, beginner flesh wound to care for, he'd told her. The last time she'd taken them out she'd noticed the pale pink flaking off the stud where it attached to the post, revealing unnaturally bright glossy white underneath. "No," she tells him, and he sighs. "They're just plastic. My mom had a real pair like this though. I saw them once, and Dad said I could have them when I was older, but…"
There are shiny, deep-pink ribbons in her hair, though, over the elastics keeping her pigtails in place, and he's given her an idea. Later, she lurks by the vendor's carts in the market and is able to trade them to a much younger girl for her paper plate of takoyaki while her parents' backs are turned.
She tears back to where the other child is waiting, sets her prize down between them. He seems genuinely surprised when she offers, and it's her turn to coax him into taking his share.
Someone starts swearing loudly and there's a sweeping sound, a rush of air, as something on one of the carts bursts into flames momentarily. The flare dies as quickly as it's sprung up and the irked vendor quickly nudges whatever it was into the trash. Zabuza's off like a shot towards it and comes back a moment later, passing the scorched, too-hot thing back and forth between his hands.
He lets it fall from his hands as soon as he's close enough, and drops the blackened fish thing into now-empty paper carton.
"Here," he says quirking his mouth to the side and averting his eyes as he nudges it towards her. "I owe you one of these. I'm…" he shakes his head still very deliberately not looking at her. "I'm sorry I stole your thing."
She looks from him to the taiyaki and back again, reaching to tear it in half for them both. It burns, and the filling is steaming when she opens it, her pale palms pink, but she's used to pain and it isn't enough for her to really register. "I'm sorry I tackled you," she tells him, that lightness returning.
She watches his face carefully as he accepts his half of the food, doesn't seem to notice that she's lied to him because she isn't sorry at all.
She's very, very glad that she'd gone after him and can't imagine what would have happened to her if she hadn't.
She tries though, as she turns the tail-side of the fish shaped cake in her hand, nibbling the burnt bits away so she can eat the good parts all together.
She thinks of him, his drive, his visible desire to survive by any means necessary, to keep living if only because he's entitled to it. She can see it, and she can identify it, but can't recognize anything similar within herself. She doesn't want to die, doesn't want to be dead, but if she was there isn't really anything she could do about it so she's sure she wouldn't mind. She plans to go to the academy, of course, become a ninja, but she knows they won't miss her if she doesn't make it, won't even notice.
She's just… here, because she is, and because that's how it worked out, and while she's here she might as well stay and see if she can last long enough to get there.
She knows exactly where she would be if he wasn't here.
Dead, she realizes quietly as she sinks her teeth into the warm filling she had never gotten the opportunity to taste. It's sweet potato. It's delicious.
I would just be dead.
Author's notes: This and the next were originally just one chapter, but it was going on eight thousand words and I thought it would be best to split it up. I'm definitely writing Kotone very differently from the first story, but this is closer to what I think I was originally aiming for. As I developed her character, a lot of things about her didn't make much sense in light of how she was raised. So, I hope that those of you who read the original can still enjoy reading about her and I enjoy exploring the results and potential pitfalls of raising someone like this right from the get-go.
Similarly, since we're not really given any back story for bby!Zabuza save that one thing that eventually goes down, I did have one in mind that came together over the course of the first fic, and that I'm using here. So, those, and a lot of my headcanons about Kirigakure that basically aren't founded in anything, are the assumptions I'm working with :)
Thank you all so much for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it.