Chronicles of the Crimson Poppy
Book 2: Blind Poppy
By A Clockwork Pumelo
I do not own any of the characters from the Naruto manga who make brief appearances here. Massashi Kishimoto does. This is a fan-based story about an original character. Please support the official release.
Taping my pen between my fingers and grabbing up the porcelain mask with my other hand, I lean back into the leather and cushion abyss of my office chair. Today, I will write still more about my life before becoming Koorikage, Shadow of the Village Hidden in the Snow. Initiating the recall technique, I close my eyes and feel the floodgates of my subconscious open as my hand begins to write what my mind normally cannot articulate.
Memories…
My twelfth birthday is today. I study the porcelain mask in my hands, which are sheathed from knuckles to wrists in black leather and crimson blood. This mask is not an animal, as is the tradition of the Black Ops, but an abstract, jagged design. The porcelain holds a strange luminosity before me in the first rays of the sun as I wipe a solitary fleck of red from the rim of an eye hole. I rise from my fighter's crouch and lift the mask to my face, making a hand sign to dispel the illusion my initiation had taken place in. Spatters of blood on my clothes fade and vanish, and the jungle around me melts back into a barren hilltop. The bodies strewn across the ground do not disappear, and I gag a bit as the smell of fresh blood sours back to the stench of decaying flesh.
"Congratulations, Keshi-san, you are now a Black Ops Captain. You will be assigned your first A-rank mission tomorrow." My sensei's hand rests heavily on my shoulder as the air displaced from his sudden appearance blows strands of sweat-soaked hair out of my face.
"Hai, Sir." I nod curtly, turn and walk away. I am too exhausted to body-flicker, and I try to hide my limp until I am out of sight. My leg will only take a few hours to heal, but as the crows always told me, any weakness is bound to invite exploitation.
The world fades in and out of focus, hurtling through a few years and dozens of murders. Time lurches, slows, and I am once again in the moment…
My best friend's heart slows and stops under my fingers as his eyes glaze over and his life-blood pools at our feet. Far away I hear his young wife open the door and draw breath to scream. Whirling, my blade soars across the space between us and finds its mark in her throat, pinning her to the door, dead. It is my job to kill these friends. Somewhere far away in my body a solitary pang of guilt winds its way into my chest. I push it away. People like me are not allowed to feel such emotions. That is what being in the Black Ops is all about. I retrieve my blade from the woman's throat, neatly avoiding the body as it crumples to the floor. I fling the used knife aside in disgust and it sinks deep into the spreading red stain on the tatami mats as I turn on the spot and melt into darkness.
A mile away in the woods, I appear in a swirl of displaced air on a high branch and take out my mission booklet. I flip to the page with their faces, fumbling for a pen. The nib hovers over the paper poised to strike them from my life forever, and comes down in a thick swath of crimson ink, a spatter of fresh blood crossing out the existence of an innocent life. Another red x follows, obliterating the man's spouse as surely as the knife I threw not five minutes ago. What a pity. She was the one who taught me to throw like that. I remove my stuffy mask, letting the chill breeze wash over me as I whisper into the darkness.
"Why did you wait? I told you to run for the border... you idiot." It is not my fault that he stayed, ignored me, and died at my hand. Guilt is for those who don't want to survive, the cackle of my crow-mother's voice grates in my mind. Guilt is for the weak, the voice of my sensei replies. I stand stock still for a second before I regain detachment and tuck the booklet back into my weapons pouch. Wiping the moisture on my forehead off on my sleeve, I replace my mask and flicker back to headquarters to debrief.
Darkness closes in around me as I continue to write, knowing what is next to come when time slows yet again. I watch myself now as a ghost, invisible witness to my own naïveté…
"The target has been eliminated... Sir." She says to the rough stone floor, a fifteen-year-old killer kneeling in the Black Ops Captain's office, reporting last night's events like they were some sort of story told for the sadistic pleasure of the tall, hawk-masked man before her. The silence from her commander makes her look up into the porcelain eyeholes, waiting for a response. After a few seconds of fidgeting, she breaks the silence.
"What's my bonus?" From this angle, I can see the tension between the two people in the room, the way my left hand moves as I pick at a hangnail. It was wrong, asking for the money, but at the time I deserved it for the job, dead best friend or no, and it wasn't like being an officer paid well. Passing through the oaken desk and his tattooed shoulder, I see for the first time why his hands were behind him. Ram, snake, tiger; the hand signs for a clone. A small bell next to the office door rings, and my younger self turns to look as I see the mask of the real commander dip beneath the table and the clone materializes in his place.
The gravity of the situation, the fact that this was the turning point that sent me spinning to where I am now hits me as, far away, my hand cramps. But I keep writing.
"You don't get a bonus." was his reply, muffled from behind the protuberant beak of his mask. In retrospect, it is a thing of beauty, the curved beak savagely reminiscent of a real bird of prey, as it gleams in the torchlight. A suitable guise for such a predator as this man. I had been his chick for nearly a decade since he snatched me, first from the fate of my fugitive parents and then from the loving nest of the crows in my mob-family. I watch myself tune out into memory land, hearing the words and seeing the signals that I really should have paid attention to the first time. Ram, boar, ox, dog…
"You failed to follow instructions, both in letter and in spirit. Keshi? You're not even listening, damnit. Pay attention!" My past self looked up as the clone threw a shuriken that missed her left shoulder by a centimeter, surprised but not nearly as wary as she should have been. I should have known something was horribly amiss, noticed the lack of a breeze as the shuriken sailed by, and how it made no sound as it struck the door behind me. But all I had been thinking of at the time was money.
"I did my mission, the guy's dead. Where's my paycheck?" she said flatly, rummaging in her pocket and tossing the mission booklet onto the polished surface of the desk. Beneath the desk, I see the real Commander's hands flash together in the last hand sign of the replacement technique: Snake. The clone at his desk vanished in a cloud of water vapor, and the real Commander lifted her body up and onto his desk, pinning her beneath him as he snarled at her.
"It's not about the mission, damnit. It's about you doing exactly what you're told." I circle around, closing in on the pair and passing right through a few strands of her hair that wavered away from her head as he yelled at her. I can see his amber eyes through the slits of his mask and the way the pupils flare open, then shrink to tiny dots. Hawk eyes, all the better to bring his prey into sharp focus as his voice drops to a deadly low pitch.
"Your file said you were a virgin... That's why I gave you this mission, Keshi. It was a lesson, one that you don't seem to want to learn on your own." The amber eyes widened as his body pressed closer to her, silently asking permission and not getting it.
"But why? Let me go!" She struggles hopelessly against a body twice her size and fails, insolence giving way to panic. I want to wrench him away from her, to save myself from what I know he is going to do, what he did to me. I want to reach out and vaporize him, pour out the hate I feel into his veins and poison him, but I can do nothing. Because this is the past. Because I do not exist as I am yet.
"Because innocence… is weakness." His laugh turned bitter as he spat the last words. The mad grin spreads under the hawk mask, and I continue to write.
Time blips in and out now, only a confused, painful night passing by…
"You know you wanted it. You have to get used to it." He withdrew, watching my eyes flick toward the door, and chuckled maniacally and daring my younger self to try something stupid. Only he knew how many locks were on that door. I had counted six at the time, but that meant nothing. Upon a closer, more ghostly inspection, I found at least ten. I should have done something, anything to get away last night. But he was the hawk, and I was his prey. My stomach churns as his hand lands hard on her cheek and he shoves her back down onto the dirty tatami mats, crouching over her and lifting her chin with a blood-spattered hand.
"Fuck you, bastard." She snarls at him, droplets of fresh blood flying from between broken teeth.
"Oh, but I was so gentle..." Liar, she glares at him through yesterday's black eye that is almost healed. I don't want to be around for this part; I still have nightmares about these encounters.
I will myself to wake up, to skip over these memories as time races and crawls, and I am back in my younger body, reliving everything…
The feeling of a rough hand ripping strands of hair out of my scalp as I clamp my jaws down on the knotted part of my headband that has been shoved into my mouth.
Pain, as the rough stone floor scrapes hard against my naked back and iron fingers wrap around my neck, tight enough to kill. I wish I had died then. Unfortunately, I am very, very hard to kill.
Starbursts of white-hot agony in front of my eyes as a sickening pop in my shoulders heralds the descent of a foot upon my back, ripping my arms from their sockets. I can hear my own screams ripping my vocal chords, and the pathetic flopping sound my body makes as I fall to the floor.
The feel of my upper body sliding in short, jarring strokes along the floor, slicked in my own blood as I watch my ankles loll in and out of my quickly dwindling vision.
Serrated waves of pain welling up through my abdomen, and the unforgettable, visceral violation of a knife stabbing and cutting where a knife has absolutely no right to be.
Somewhere, somewhen far away, I finish a sheet of paper and start on another…
If I ever tell anyone about this, they will probably ask me why I did not tell anyone, why I did not get help. The short answer is that I could not. Death, injury, and abuse are part of life for a Shinobi. And even if someone had cared, what could I do? The bruises, cuts, and broken bones never lasted for more than a few hours, curse my natural healing. I had no casts, no bandages or splints to betray me to the world. I had no evidence to prove a moot point.
"Get dressed. And put the mask back on too, I don't want to see you. You have another solo mission tomorrow. Some rogue officer." I got up, pulled on my tattered pants and scurried out of the room to clean up at my apartment. I made my decision that night, the choice to run for it and never look back.
Again, I follow myself through my own memories, this time to a small cottage on the edge of the Land of Waves…
"But why would you do such a thing? You know that this makes you a criminal." the middle-aged woman said. The moonlight deepened the wrinkles around my would-be victim's eyes as she peered through her cataracts, a sign of the premature aging common among those of our profession.
"Just get the hell out of the country." I said. I locked gazes with her cloudy old eyes, telling her everything and nothing of what I had been through. I think she understood, perhaps all too well because she gave me a small box with a few sweets left in it, patted my gloved hand, and told me she had been a black operative too when she was young. I ate a few of the candies and thought about what she had said as she changed into her old gear, complete with a chipped porcelain rabbit mask.
I escorted her to the border before the retrieval squad caught up with us, losing everything I had except a few knives, my mask, and some food pills in the ensuing flight. I float high above myself as time melts and stretches, making weeks seem like minutes. I wandered, making ghostly trails across land I did not know. All I knew or cared about was that I was not in Wave country. An enemy from the Sand country could have found and killed me, and I would have been glad. I thought I would wander until I died, and be eaten by the wolves.
Madness and the burning heat of the desert engulf me as I fall down, into my weak, dehydrated, starved body…
It is not a wild animal who finds me when I collapse under a scrubby overhang jutting out from the scorching ground. Cool water splashes through the eye holes of my mask, and a pair of strikingly sea-green eyes swim into focus, framed by white hair. He motions to his partner, a girl with bristling ginger hair and fierce hazel eyes reminiscent of a large cat, to come forward. They debate, oblivious to my listening, whether they should take me back to their master. I clear my throat and they look at me.
"I don't care who your leader is. Take me to him, and I'll be your ally. I swear it on my life." It seems a suitable proposition. They stare at me for a few seconds, look at each other, and nod.
"Can you walk? Or do we have to carry your sorry ass?" The ginger snorts, picking up one of my arms by the mangled, dirty sleeve. She releases it to flop limply back into the dust, betraying me. In a dizzying blur, I find myself draped like an ermine collar over the white haired guy's shoulders, supported by a semicircular shelf of white, hard bone. As my head rolls back onto his chest, I smell sandalwood and camellias, and feel the rumble of his voice.
"Like my bones? They're quite unique, a kekkei genkai in fact... My master thinks they will be very useful when I become his vessel, whatever that means..." After that, his chatter stretches and blurs as he talks to the redhead, and their conversation mingles sometimes with the sweet, high notes of a flute. After a few meals, I recover enough to talk to them. They will not tell me their names, so I refer to them as White-Hair and Redhead. Where they are taking me I do not know; only time will tell.
The memory release technique is wearing off, and I fall through the blackness behind my eyes and back into the present…
Watery sunlight is streaming in through the window, making vertical stripes out of the scars that cross over my eyelids. I open my eyes, one black, one white, and with my left hand I stroke the surface of the mask held to my chest, porcelain still cool under my fingertips. In some places it is smooth and unmarred, in others the scratches and nicks of battle catch at my calluses. I hold it up to the light, marveling in the translucent delicacy of the thing before setting it on the desk. Now I remove the tape that holds the pen between my fingers. The paper before me is filled with cramped handwriting and sloppy doodles. Reading the page, I decide to put it on top of the pile marked "memoirs", and move on to the other, much larger and more boring piles of papers that wait for my attention.