I own nothing.
Later, they'll tell her that the trouble is that she was too old when they found her.
-0-0-0-
Yasuko is ten years old. She was born in the region that, in eleven years' time will become known as Kusa no Kuni, the Land of Grass. For now, it is the southern frontier of Tsuchi no Kuni, and it is a troubled land. A burning land. A famine has engulfed the once-fertile center of the continent, and Hi no Kuni is stretching its influence out, further north and further west, looking to annex arable farmland.
Her home has been burned by raiders from the south; she's lying in a bit of wreckage, half-hidden by a fallen beam, staring out at a night sky marred by a miasma of smoke. In the past few hours, Konoha and Iwa nin have fought here, and in all honesty, though it was the foreigners who did the burning, the Iwa nin did far more damage than the invaders they (unsuccessfully, at this town) were attempting to repel. It is the Iwa nin Yasuko has to thank for the sheer scale of the destruction, for the fact that the town has been leveled. It is the Iwa nin she has to thank for the blood down her front and the extent of the horror she's been subjected to this day.
Yasuko does not know what has become of her parents. The last time she saw her father, a blacksmith, he was swinging his hammer at a Leaf nin. The last time she laid eyes on her mother, the waxen-faced woman was going down into the cellar of her now-ruined home. They are, she probably supposes, dead, but that does not seem so important at the moment. There is smoke in her lungs, making her cough heavily, and keeping her heavy eyes open is a burden so great that it erases all other thought.
As though from a great distance, she can hear voices. The victorious survivors, the Konoha nin, are sifting through the wreckage, searching for survivors. Yasuko is too tired to fear death at the hands of her town's conquerors, enough so that it doesn't occur to her to play dead. Surely she won't have to play at it soon enough…
Then, a shadow blocks out her view of the stars. There's a man standing over her, staring down upon her with keen dark eyes. "Do you want to live?" he asks her, speaking not in the language used by the nations for diplomatic purposes, nor even in the native language of Hi no Kuni that Yasuko's sometimes heard foreign merchants use, when they come to her town, but in her own tongue. This man speaks to her in her own tongue, though he does so with a thick accent. This, more than anything, spurs Yasuko to respond.
She nods, wracked by another long bout of coughing. He reaches down to pull her out of the debris, hands sliding over her ribs. Yasuko's small arms latch around his neck, and then, she knows no more, swallowed up by blackness.
-0-0-0-
It was the coughing he heard, leading him to see a head of light blonde hair bobbing in the darkness. A little girl was curled up in the midst of the smoldering ruins of a house, covered in soot and grime, glasses sliding off her nose and pale blue eyes half-shut.
Danzo hefts the child in his arms and looks around the town, barely able to repress an irritated sigh. There are still small fires burning throughout the town, the myriad hordes of insects of Kusa no Kuni clustering around them. Smoke rises into the night sky. The smell of death permeates the air. This venture has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.
The first fire, he's told, was set on accident. A shinobi of his village (not from ROOT, Danzo mentally notes; no member of ROOT would have done something so foolish as what this one decided to do) ended up chasing an Iwa nin into his house, where that same shinobi proceeded to use a Fire jutsu in the attempt to kill his opponent.
All of the buildings in this village are made of wood, and it's high summer. In short terms: the village is dry as a tinderbox. Or rather, it was. The fire ravaged the village, engulfing every building in flames in less than an hour.
This village was meant to become an outpost for Konohagakure, meant to be the launching point of a more widespread annexation of Tsuchi territory. Now all that can be done is round up the survivors, send them packing further into Tsuchi territory, and raze what's left of the place to the ground. Maybe they'll be able to use it for farmland.
Well, maybe there's another use.
"Mao." A masked ROOT member looks up from his foraging among the wreckage. Danzo hands the nameless girl, now unconscious, over to him. "Bring this girl to Taya for treatment." Taya is a ROOT medic whose discretion can be trusted. "We'll be taking her back with us."
"Yes, sir."
-0-0-0-
Yasuko is brought back to Konohagakure with the shinobi who came to her village. The man who found her, whose name, she learns, is Shimura Danzo, places her with an organization he runs, known as ROOT.
They call her Nonou here. In later years, they'll give her the appellation 'Yakushi' for her prowess with medical ninjutsu, as all ROOT medics are, her chosen field of study. Nonou is taught the art of warfare, how to kill, how to heal, how to be a weapon in both name and truth. She is taught language and accents, and mathematics and literature and science. She is taught other things as well. Like why they tattooed her tongue the day she was brought here, and what she is to become, as a member of ROOT.
"You were brought here as a refugee from another land," Taya tells her tonelessly. No one here, in the ROOT headquarters, ever injects inflection in to their speech. Even Danzo, the organization's head, only becomes even remotely emotional under the most dire of circumstances. Though she has been trained to speak the same way for more than a month now, Nonou finds the flatness of her companion's voice just a touch disturbing. "Danzo-sama did not have to extend that mercy to you. As such, you should be grateful to him. You ought to thank his mercy by expending all effort to excel here."
She is taught… Well, she is not taught, so much as others work on her. Her tutors, Taya and Eito and Chie and others, they work on her to eradicate joy and rage, suffering and grief, sadness and petulance and everything else. In the place of all her emotions, she will be filled up and reconstituted with obedience, duty and skill. Always be loyal to Konohagakure. Your kin in that other land abandoned you. This is all you have left now.
Over time, she comes to believe that. They tell her so over and over again, and eventually, Nonou decides that her parents must have abandoned her. Why, she reasons, would they have left her in the wreckage of their house if they had had any intention of saving her? Nonou has no pictures of her parents here, and she learns to forget them, forget the grief of separation and homesickness. She is ROOT. She is Konoha. There is nothing but obedience, duty and skill.
Nonou learns to smile in a different way. Instead of her small, shy smile she smiles wide, her pink lips stretching up and out. Her jaw hurts at first, but over time, Nonou gets used to it, and this smile becomes second nature to her.
Time passes (a day, a week, a month, a year? She can never tell; time does not pass here the way it passes out in the world), and Nonou learns. They try to teach her to be the ideal ROOT agent: intelligent, observant, deadly, and utterly without emotion. She is indeed intelligent, and she notices much and excels at ninjutsu. Even in that time before, Nonou was eager to please, always eager to please, and that fuels her learning.
But as for the eradication of emotion…
Nonou clutches the kunai in her hand for a brief moment before sending it flying towards the target. Then the next. Then the next.
She comes to a stop among the moist dead leaves and soft loam of Konohagakure's sweet-smelling soil, looking about at the various targets, positioned on the ground in the trees. Each target has a kunai embedded in it, and each in the very middle, the bull's eye.
"Very good." Nonou turns to the sight of Danzo nodding, any pleasure at her success detached but still obviously present.
Exhilarated at this rare moment of praise, Nonou grins and giggles as she bobs a bow and says "Thank you."
Danzo sighs, and the grin fades from her face.
-0-0-0-
At first, Nonou wonders if it's a punishment when she's sent away, sent to distant villages to spy on Konoha's enemies. Perhaps this is her punishment for not being able to stamp out every ounce of emotion within her. She's not the ideal ROOT agent (made up only of obedience, duty and skill), so Danzo has sent her away to a place where she can't be an embarrassment to her group.
Soon, though, Nonou learns better. Her supervisor in infiltration impresses upon her every day the importance of their work. "The future of Konoha depends on what we uncover here. You are still very new to this, so you will not be given an over-demanding workload. However, I expect you to perform as well as any of our fellows; do you understand?"
Indeed, she does understand.
It is in the art of infiltration and espionage that Nonou truly finds her niche in ROOT. Her heart pounds and her blood races at the thought of exposure and capture, fear filling her with every sudden movement from those she eavesdrops on, but this fear is tuppence compared to the satisfaction of success, when she comes back with information and is congratulated on a job well done. And fear, Nonou has always been told, is just another emotion that needs to be stamped out if she ever wants to be a proper, efficient ROOT operative.
The years pass. She grows from child to young woman, often out in the field, posing as a shinobi, an apothecary, or more often as a wandering miko, dressed in her habit and coif. With one hand, she preaches, leads prayer and performs divination. With the other, she records every word and movement of those who come to her for guidance.
No one ever suspects her; to Nonou, it seems like the failure of the ROOT indoctrination to fully take might be an advantage. Those who think they know Nonou often comment that "her friends are a bit off", but never say the same of her. No one ever suspects Nonou to be anything but what she claims.
When his intelligence agents come home from the field with their notes and findings, Danzo prefers to go over their notes personally. It's more efficient this way, he claims; better to cut out the middle-man. However, the intelligence agent themselves remains on hand at his side throughout the briefing, to provide the proper context.
His hand presses down on Nonou's shoulder and she smiles at him, pleased to her toes for any contact, especially from him, since she knows it's not manufactured. Hard won affection of this sort always pleases her.
-0-0-0-
As she grows older, however, from young woman to full adult, Nonou feels less and less comfortable in her own skin as what she has become.
The shinobi world is ever engulfed in war and Hi no Kuni, thanks to its central location on the map of the shinobi lands, is ever in the middle of it. Hi starts wars, fights wars, wins wars and loses wars. And hovering in the shadows, just out of sight, pulling all the strings, is her leader, Shimura Danzo.
He'll do anything for Konoha, she's realized. Danzo's never made any secret of that, not to her. In fact, part of ROOT conditioning is the willingness to do anything to bolster the security and position of Konohagakure. But she's there when he makes the decisions, and the wanton loss of life incurred by those decisions… It… It amazes Nonou, that Danzo can order the deaths of countless lives based simply on the qualifier that they do not live in Hi no Kuni. That he loves his country so much, but that he has absolutely no regard for anyone living anywhere else. Their lives mean nothing to Shimura Danzo.
It bothers her. Nonou has been trained, as a medical shinobi, to value all life (No one ever seems to notice the contradiction there). She is supposed to render aid to all those in trouble, whether they're citizens of Hi no Kuni or not. How is she supposed to justify, in her guise as a ROOT agent, killing the same the same people her duty as a med nin tells her to help? But if Nonou is told that she's too emotional, she's also told she's too soft-hearted. She never shares her misgivings with others.
And as for these others, Nonou marvels at their unthinking obedience to Danzo. She herself is also obedient to him, but she does think about all those orders he gives them. Even if she never questions him to his face, she does question Danzo about those orders in the safe confines of her own head.
The others, they don't even seem to do that. If Danzo told them to set themselves ablaze, at most they'd ask what accelerant he'd prefer they use. Not once do any of them ever think twice about his orders.
Nonou looks forward to her intelligence-gathering assignments—she's the best in the field, or so she's told; Danzo is constantly sending her out to gather information. But lately, she's come to look at them with relief as well.
-0-0-0-
Today, Nonou is smiling into the dingy bathroom mirror of the hotel room where she's staying.
There is no joy in her heart and she feels more numb than anything else, numb and curious. Does this really look unreal?
Earlier today, Nonou had something of a close call. She was talking with Aneirin, one of the residents of the Tsuchi border town where she's staying, only for him to tell her that her smiles always look false. He'd done so with his eyes, pale blue like hers, narrowed intently. Nonou had laughed, a high-pitched, tremulous laugh, and told him that she had no idea what he meant. Aneirin had frowned at her for what seemed an eternity, but eventually he let the matter drop, and Nonou breathed a silent sigh of relief.
Do my smiles really look false?
Nonou stares into the mirror with a half-detached anxiety.
Some of that only half-there anxiety comes about for purely practical reasons. If those about her think there's something artificial about anything in her guise, Nonou's entire work could call apart. It only takes one crack to shatter a porcelain mask.
But there's another reason as well.
Do I really look like I'm lying when I smile? Nonou stares into the mirror, her pale brow furrowed, flaxen hair falling about her face. Her eyes look tired, she notices; there are thin little dark shadows beneath them. Lips curve upwards again, showing teeth only slightly as they normally do. She smiles into the mirror, and wonders what about it is false.
Rather than being able to reassure herself that there's nothing wrong, Nonou starts to see other things wrong with her face.
Her smile is false, she realizes. She never feels any joy when she makes it. There's something wrong with her nose and her skin as well, and her forehead and cheeks. Nonou realizes that she's wearing a mask even when her face is uncovered, a mask made up of skin-colored porcelain. It looks like a human face but it's not really the same, and only her eyes are visible. Only her eyes look like they don't belong to a corpse.
Nonou stares at her face for a moment before the revelation sinks in, at which point she falls back with a quickly stifled shriek.
She avoids the mirror after that, too shaken by her revelation to want to look at her face again.
-0-0-0-
Every trip back home is like a dose of cold water.
What Nonou saw in the mirror in the border town in Tsuchi, she sees reflected in every single ROOT member in Konohagakure. They don't need porcelain masks like members of ANBU; they already have sufficient masks in the form of their faces. Their skin is no longer skin. Their mouths are no longer mouths. And unlike Nonou, their eyes are no longer eyes. They're just components of a flesh mask.
They're not like people anymore. They have no spirit, no life. There's no light shining out of their flat, dull eyes. When Nonou looks into the eyes of her comrades, she looks into the eyes of the living dead.
How did I never notice this before? How did I go so long without noticing what it's like here? It's not Hell, it's not even Limbo, but I'm wandering around the dead. The living dead, the people who are neither alive or dead, for while their hearts still beat, they've long since ceased to live.
How did I ever go so long without noticing that this was the sort of place I lived in?
Danzo's hand presses on her shoulder and Nonou looks up, but she does not smile as she used to. His touch feels cold, she notices, and she no longer feels safe here.
She feels as though she'll be set upon and killed if anyone ever decides that she is too close to the living for their tastes.
-0-0-0-
But Nonou is not truly of the living either.
More people are noticing it now. They comment that she looks pale, listless, apathetic, or that when she's cheerful, it seems forced and false. Though the tones of these people when commenting on her emotional state are always those of concern, Nonou still cringes to hear it. She does everything in her power to keep from being exposed, either as a spy or as a half-living, half-dead creature struggling to make her way in the world.
She never really fit into ROOT. She was too old when they found her, she's told. She was too old for the conditioning meant to strip her of all emotion, or so Nonou is told. As a result, she's still too much like the people of the outside world, and though she's their best intelligence agent, she'll never be the ideal ROOT operative. She's just too emotional.
And for the outside world, Nonou isn't emotional enough. She's too calm when she ought to be upset. Her cheer seems forced. To the outside world of whole, living people, Nonou looks like a paper doll. Superficially, she resembles them. Closer inspection, however, reveals that she is flat, flat indeed. Two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional.
But she doesn't want to be a flat little paper doll, flapping in the wind and never able to smile in honesty.
So Nonou makes a decision.
The day comes during the third world war. She is deep in Kaminari territory when word comes to her that Konoha's government has officially ordered ROOT to disband. Nonou knows that "officially" doesn't mean "in actuality", not for someone like Danzo. ROOT will survive after this day. But for her, it's the impetus she's needed.
Nonou discards her hitai-ate. She throws her kunai, shuriken, identification card, and Bingo book in a trash can. Her flak jacket is pawned off. She sheds all traces of ROOT, and walks away from her old life.