AN: This went... too far gone. Those who read the manga know how this will end (Obito appears, tragedy, but there's a sort-of happy ending, for supporters of the Moon's Eye Plan).
01 | Conversations with Ghosts
It was only last week that it was official – Obito Uchiha was declared dead in absentia. The body was never seen. The area where he died was scoured clean by an explosion that destroyed everything and left no rocks or boulders or crushed bodies, all blazed to nothing, leaving only a miles-long crater filled to the brim with ash. Iwagakure has launched a high-powered detonation in another skirmish with Suna.
The memorial service was short, a blessing and a prayer uttered to the new names carved in the black marble of the memorial stone, for the departed without their cadavers taken home. Minato and his two remaining students stand vigil along with others, those left by the dead. In front of the stone were their mementos: Obito's orange-glassed goggles, someone else's black glove, a framed family picture. That grey afternoon, bouquets and burning incense filled the air with the heady combined smell of smoke and fresh flowers.
The night after the ceremony, Rin couldn't sleep. She sat in bed until the clock said 1:36 AM, and did nothing except stare at the frames on her wall: their team picture, her graduation photo, her certificate of promotion to chuunin, a poster Obito gave her a year ago. It was a simple quote from a play in stylized font that said,
"Goodbye to clocks ticking and mother's sunflowers. And food and coffee.
And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up.
Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
Every, every minute?"
Such a simple passage to remind her that life is short, to make the most of time, but now the innocent message seemed to be a belated premonition – a clue she didn't recognize.
She had the sudden urge to go to Obito, talk to him, and speak to him even if he wasn't there to listen. She went out her window, and ran silent through the dark and empty village roads with only the streetlights to guide her way. She climbs and leaps lithe down the locked wrought-iron gates of the graveyard and walked the path to where the memorial stone is.
Someone else is there.
"Kakashi," she called, but Kakashi was sitting in front of the stone, his forehead pressed on it, whispering incoherent things Rin couldn't decipher. She noticed blood from his palm pressed to the marble, a stream of red gleaming on the surface. She knelt beside him and holds his left hand. A deep, straight wound bled from the middle of his palm. She pulsed curing chakra to her fingers and healed it, and wiped the blood clean with the hem of her shirt. Kakashi now turned to look at her, new right eye still pressed on the stone, his own drab grey eye looking at her. She let go of his hand, and he didn't move from where he was.
She noticed something on the floor, and her eyes widened shocked at the sight.
Kakashi had drawn a meter-wide circle of blood, that explained the wound, and inside it another diamond was drawn from black sealing ink. On each edge of the shape were objects she recognized as Obito's. On one quadrant was a scuffed kunai. On another was a roll of bandages once white but now looked stiff, rusted black from dried blood left too long. Another had a navy handkerchief embroidered with the Uchiha clan insignia and the last held a forehead protector. In the middle of the strange diagram was another branched triskelion symbol drawn from the dark maroon lacquer of mixed ink and blood – a circle with three elaborate stemmed spirals growing from it, each curling around three dead things.
A dead crow with wings spread wide on the concrete. A dead yellow snake as thick as her arm coiled to eat its own tail, a horizontal 8, a symbol for eternity. A dead young sevengill shark as large as a human infant, nose meeting tail in a circle. Each had a senbon through its body, positioned to pierce each creature's heart.
It was a circle within a diamond inset in a larger circle. The dead creatures arrested her attention that she noticed last the bland wreath of white flowers in the middle of the inmost circle.
"What's this? What are you trying to do?" Rin asked, and this was the last thing she would expect from Kakashi, it seemed like an obscene forbidden jutsu he shouldn't dabble on.
"Take one from the sky, take one from the earth, take one from the sea. I followed everything, but I couldn't call him. It can mean that he's alive, Rin, when he isn't in the underworld he's here and he's waiting we must figure out something search again there must be other ways than sensing maybe they overlooked something..." Kakashi rambled through his mask. He was attempting a séance, and the ghost he wants wouldn't appear.
Rin didn't know what to say.
"Help me clean this up," he said, and she gathered Obito's possessions while Kakashi wiped the blood and sealing ink off the floor with a dirty cloth. The dead animals' bodies he placed inside a canvas sack. "I'll bury them later. It's possible that he's alive, and I won't stop looking."
The bandages she was holding, was the same as those she wrapped around a wound on Obito's hand, long ago. It didn't make sense to still keep it, so she left it on the floor to throw later. The kunai, hitae-ate, and Uchiha handkerchief she placed inside Kakashi's black sling bag. Rin took the wreath last, and saw that it was a crown of thorns made of dried rose stems, woven with white star blossoms of asphodel – flowers said to grow on meadows and fields of the underworld. This she placed atop the stone, it still smelled fresh.
"Obito used to take me ghost-hunting here when we went home this late, but he was the one who always scared himself," Rin said, smiled at the memory of those brief wanderings around the empty cemetery.
Kakashi laughed, a sound so uncharacteristic coming from him. Oddly, it sounds so much like Obito's laughter. Then, the tears came just as sudden, surprising even her. It's the second time she sees Kakashi cry. Obito's death was the first time. He sobs loudly, making a pitched noise like a weak howl of an injured dog. He blows snot on the cloth of his mask and tears wet his face.
This is how a boy who didn't cry since his first day of school in the academy cries. Rin knew he wasn't only crying for Obito, but for his dead father, his dead mother, all the dead everything he killed and emotions he did not allow himself to feel to become what he once believed was the ideal, stoic cold ninja. Rin doesn't comfort him, she had her own fair share of crying. Rin felt empty even if Kakashi had his mask off only because it is dirty and to blow snot properly into his towel – and this is the first time she sees his face, looking much younger than she thought when he had the mask on. She remembers that both of them were only thirteen, going on fourteen, forced to grow up early and forced by War to fight as equals with other shinobi years, decades older than them.
"Crybaby," Rin said, a perfect imitation of how Kakashi used to say the word to Obito. She took the wreath of flowers and placed it on Kakashi's head instead. Kakashi looked up, stopped crying, and said, "I look like a fairy." He blew snot to his towel again.
"You look so pretty," she said.
"Oi, Kakashi! We're you crying?" said Gai's voice. Hayate and Shizune were also there, dusty from travel and packs still slung over shoulders. That meant a recent mission.
Kakashi didn't face them, he made a show of drinking a bottle of water, swallowing it loud. He put his mask on again and answered, "I was drinking!"
"Yeah, he's drinking a bottle of his own tears," Hayate said.
"Thought we'd visit," Shizune said, and they all sat in a circle. If they could, most of them would meet and talk about their recently-dead classmates. Year after year, there were less of them. It was an acknowledgment and remembrance of the dead, this small tradition.
The boys brought up memories when Obito said something funny or did something dumb. Shizune recalled having to punch Obito in the face because he wouldn't let Shizune tend to his wounds because he wanted Rin, who was gone at that time, to do it and it would get worse if not treated. It was good for Rin and Kakashi to hear these things, that they weren't the only ones who missed Obito's presence. They stayed there and talked until sunrise.
.oOo.
They will both learn later, that the séance Kakashi attempted was only a hoax, more urban legend than actual forbidden jutsu. Kakashi was browsing the bookstore for the new volume of a book series he was reading, and Rin looking for new medical texts to study. Flipping through the heavy black-bound tome of Modern Occult Encyclopedia, she saw an illustration similar to that blood diagram. The caption read:
The ritual required the blood of the summoner, sealing ink, possessions of the deceased, a dead crow, a dead snake, and a dead shark. However, the rapt audience was fooled by an unseen medium hiding backstage speaking in the voice of the dead, when the actors already knew a great deal about the dead's life. The cult involved was soon exposed as a fraud…
She showed the line to Kakashi, and his eyes betrayed sadness. Kakashi had found the instructions for the false ritual from an incomplete document in the more protected Hokage's archives. Yes, he still tried to search for Obito after that. All the effort only confirmed his death. Kakashi soon accepted it all, and stopped trying strange rituals to contact the dead, and contented himself with visits to the graveyard.
.oOo.
It was every girl's dream that the boy you fancy loves you back. Young girls are way too melodramatic, romanticizing the notion of unrequited love. Rin once belonged to them, thought like them before Obito died. She was shinobi. There were lives to save by healing and lives to end by killing, and her schedule is crammed, who has the time for fantasies of love?
Observing how Kakashi copes with grief after Obito's death, Rin thinks that she is watching the boy she once thought she loved fall so hard for someone else. Someone dead. He had attempted a séance to contact Obito, but the line to the underworld was dead. Each time they visit the memorial stone together and talk to Obito as if he were there, Kakashi will ask her, please tell me everything he ever told you.
She tells him, what she can remember until she runs out of stories and memories, until she doesn't know what's true and what she's making up. Kakashi looks at her, listening, rapt. Rin knew it wasn't about her. She was only a story-teller, of tales both true and false.
Kakashi never gave her the time of day before, not for useless things that didn't involve training or missions. She had always wished this kind of attention from him, before, but all her notions of love were replaced by pity for him, and grief for Obito, and they haven't gotten over that yet (will they ever?).
Obito has become an entity. If not for him, they would fall into an abyss with no direction, if not for the memory of his sacrifice keeping them both in orbit.
02 | Last Good Day of my Life
In one of the rare days of temporary ceasefires and negotiations for fragile truces, they went to a rural town near the sea, only to find their supposed mission aborted. So they stayed on the beach, only the three of them there, the sea calm in low tide. Kakashi walked along the beach and skipped the rocks that lined the shore. Minato and Rin sat on driftwood logs, back to back. They had found a forgotten guitar on the white sand, and Minato placed it on his lap. He twisted and adjusted the tuners, strummed the strings.
Rin has heard him whistling or humming a tune sometimes, but she had never heard him sing. This would be the first time.
"Long afloat on shipless oceans, I did all my best to smile, until your singing eyes and fingers drew me loving to your isle," he began, a slow and haunting song.
Rin closed her eyes and pressed her temple against Minato's back. She could feel the reverberations of his lungs as he breathed in air, the subtle changes of breath as he sang words and notes. On her right ear she could hear the slow rhythm of waves on shore, the soft howl of cold air that made the music more enchanting. It was a song about the sorrow of a sailor in love with a siren.
"Hear me sing, swim to me, swim to me let me enfold you, here I am, here I am waiting to hold you," he sang the last line, and Rin felt his deep intake of breath after the song. It calmed her.
"You sing real nice, sensei, you should do it more," Rin said, now opening her eyes. She could see Kakashi sitting on a rock and dangling his naked feet at the water. "A beautiful song. A song for my funeral."
"You really wouldn't want that as a song for your funeral. Song to the Siren has a ghost story behind it. It was inspired by an unknown girl. The singer killed himself at thirty. Another girl sang it, then the singer's son fell in love with her, but he also drowned at thirty."
"Oh."
"It seemed to have a mysterious curse, that song, which never was lost no matter how many people sing it. Though I'm not superstitious, I'm afraid I sang to summon a siren's ghost to you... Nah. I'm not even sure if that story is true," he said, and smiled.
Minato sang other songs, those not about ghosts. They spent the morning watching the sea, strolling on the black rocks on shore. The waves broke against boulders, splashing them in sea water. Rin and Kakashi gathered shells and beach glass.
All went fine until both of them focused on watching the waves, and their bastard of a teacher pushed them off the rocks to the water while laughing. Soon, Rin and Kakashi, still slopping wet in their clothes, would also surprise him by snatching the guitar while he was sitting and pushed him to the water. All three of them ended up swimming for half an hour, still in their clothes.
They walked out of the water, three of them looking back at the sea, as if waiting for someone else to follow them home. Then, they looked at each other and realized there were only three of them, not four. Obito's death wasn't something that they got used to.
They went home to Konoha, three of them with clothes still dripping wet, to Kushina's surprise and laughter.
(Team 7 is officially disbanded. They would not go to any missions again).
03 | Cities under the Sea
Rin has killed, but it was never her fault, never directly. The lives she has ended were mostly of older, experienced shinobi way too injured and drowned in pain that death would be a mercy – she has done so for both allies and enemies. She was the expert in euthanasia, her known service was delivering a swift and painless death. Many of the souls she has helped sever from the mortal coil are actually relieved to hear the elder medic's explanation, asking for their consent. Then, Rin would be called to do the deed. They smile, and if they could speak, all of their last words say the same thing:
"I don't want to die."
But it's not like there's any other choice. They say they don't want to die, though their faces show acceptance of the inevitable. It would have been better, if they had said something more meaningful, but their simple words hurt in its clarity. Obito didn't want to die. I don't want to die, too.
People's faces change when they die. They look better, more peaceful. It always seemed as if something has left them. A burden. Now they know something you don't. Their suffering is over. (Obito smiled when he died as well, even as she shouted his name when the rocks went down.)
One evening, when she was travelling alone from one temporary medical station to another along Konoha's borders, a warning from Intel blared through her mind. The Yamanaka's voice announced: Two Kiri genin spies are about to arrive in Konoha, a girl and a boy. If you hear this message, you are located in their route and may see them anytime. The boy has the potential power to destroy all our current defences. KILL ON SIGHT.
A fast blur like a glass shard passed through the corner of her vision. Kunai ready, she let instinct take over and ran through the forest floor to where it was going. The blur changed direction, it was going to where Rin knows will lead to the sea. She ran to the edge of the forest, to open plain that will take her to shore. She can see them now; the two figures looked back at her and they ran faster. Soon, Rin has reached the sea in the chase.
The race reached the sharp rocks that line the shore. They ran the threshold between sand and water. It was darker here, the sky black without moonlight and stars, and Rin couldn't see them well. They were deeper shadows upon shadows, but she can see their faint outlines against the sea's water-glow. The waves are roiling, and some breaking waves slapped her with heavy tides while she leaped from one large rock to another. She was near, nearer, to the moving shadows until they were an arms-reach away.
She tried to sense where the foreign chakra was concentrated and stabbed with all the force she could muster.
Bulls-eye.
She didn't expect it to hit, but it did, right on target. She had hit the boy's back, knife right between the ribs through the heart. He had vomited so much blood, and Rin's sandals got soaked from it. A wave's wet and foaming edge caressed their feet, then washed blood and sand back to the water. It was as if the sea inhaled a breath. Then, after what seemed like a stretched second of silence, the waves went back to its rhythm. Her eyes have adjusted, she can see better, but the dark made everything look grey-scale.
Then, Rin felt that hitch of breath that stopped, and the dead boy had fallen face down to the ground. Rin knelt on the wet sand and gently turned the corpse in her arms. The boy's eyes were still wide in shock. His hair is dark and long, his face is plain. He is her first deliberate kill.
Devirginized isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to her mind.
She closed her eyes, and delivered the message through Konoha's thought network. Threat eliminated. This is Rin Nohara.
When she opened her eyes, there was another girl staring at her and the corpse she was cradling. The other genin on the mission. Rin saw that the girl's face and the dead boy's face were the same. Twins, she realized.
"I'm sorry," was what Rin said. She expected her to fight, but the girl didn't show any intention to. She simply stood there, gazing at her dead brother.
"You did what you had to do. We learn to live in the world we're given. I always wanted to die in the sea," the girl said instead, sounding resigned. She started to step to the ocean.
"No! You can still go," Rin said to her, because killing her wasn't in the orders, and it seemed that the girl intended to kill herself in the sea.
"We are no longer important to the village. It is my duty, and my last mission. We've already been given poison. Failed or not, we're still going to die today. I was here to make sure he succeeds," the nameless girl said at last.
Rin watched. The girl continued on walking deeper, the water now reaching her waist. Wave after heavy wave assailed her, but she didn't bow down or falter, she walked heron-straight. Then a larger wave seemed to explode against the dark starless sky, and the girl spread her arms wide in acceptance and supplication as it hit her. Then, Rin didn't see her or her shadow anymore.
We learn to live in the world we're given, the girl said in her last words. She said that as if worlds were a ration given at the beginning of the universe and sentient beings were sprinkled randomly at all possible worlds, that there was another better place where this wasn't happening. Maybe the girl simply walked to the ocean to cities under the sea, with different rules than that of earth, and she won't ever go back here.
The corpse was heavy in her arms. The boy wasn't any older than her, not any older than Obito. Seafoam washed the blood off the child, and the water returned to sea, blood curlicues disappearing to the vastness of the ocean, blood molecules scattering to send to the seven seas. She couldn't bear to close his eyes, still staring at her.
(It makes her remember, how she fought back tears as she gouged Obito's eye out. She used chakra, shaped it to simply cup the eyeball out of its socket, making it quick and painless as possible. How she operated on Kakashi's eye was more painstaking and slower, and all the time Obito was there, speaking to reassure her, his voice hoarse from his half-crushed throat. Kakashi was trembling. When the operation was complete, he cried and cried streams of saline tears and blood, until their last promise to Obito – Kakashi, protect Rin. Rin, please watch out for yourself. Take care of Kakashi for me, too. He was blind, but he still smiled even half his mouth was gone. Then the rocks caved in and they had no choice but to leave him.
Kakashi held her hand as they ran as fast as they could, tears streaming across their faces from their velocity. When they arrived in Konoha, she felt the bones of her hands nearly broken from his grip. They didn't need to tell Minato-sensei. He could read them well, and there were no questions, since Obito's absence and Kakashi's sharingan eye tells the story.)
04 | Monster in the Creek
The boy was warm, burning hot as fever. She checked his pulse again, and noticed something, a sort of seal on the strip of bare skin exposed on his stomach. Before she could check what it was, she heard footsteps behind her, and the lavender smell of sweet poison overwhelmed her before she could even look back.
.oOo.
She wakes sitting, in cold and dark. There is a cold sensation almost freezing on the skin on her stomach, below her ribs. She waited for her eyes to adjust to darkness, but the complete black stayed the same. It didn't matter if she opened or closed her eyes, nothing changed. She imagined herself to be inside an enclosed space, a metal box where one girl could fit. A grave. Her legs were too weak to stand, and she had no way of knowing if it was night or day outside. So she stayed, and willed herself to sleep again, and try to figure a way out later, when she is much stronger to think clearly.
.oOo.
She wakes again and the lights are on. She was in an old bathroom which looked unused for a long time. Tiles once white are yellow. It had three things: an empty ceramic bathtub grey from dust, a grimed toilet bowl, and a broken mirror hung on the wall.
She checked the skin on her stomach, lifted her shirt and saw it: A symbol she recognized as a kind of seal. It looked haphazard, like a purposely vandalized version of proper seals; the lines looked more like welts from a whiplash drawing violent black and red lines over her ribs. It was a circle, within it was three horizontal lines, kanji for the number three.
She tested the walls, see if she can punch through with concentrated chakra, but she found that she cannot summon enough. Her last memory had been killing a boy, and a girl walking to her death to the sea. It must have led to this inexplicable capture. She can hear the murmurs and footsteps of people outside. She tries to knock on the locked iron door, and a faint voice answered, said "Tomorrow." She didn't hear anything after that.
She turned on the tub faucet but no water came out. She curled herself in the empty bathtub, and tried to sleep again, thinking that something will happen tomorrow. Something like a fog, a mist, was making her eyes heavy.
.oOo.
Sometime in the middle of the night, when the water supply of wherever she was went back, she didn't feel the water fill the tub. She dreamed of a swamp, of floating in the sea. Only when the water reached past her nose did she lash out in fear of drowning.
She raised herself on hands and knees, but she was no longer in the bathroom, but kneeling upon the dark waters of a shallow concrete pool. She raised her head, and looked upon rusted prison bars that reached so high, a prison gate stretching eternal from right to left, her eyes couldn't see its edges. She can see the darker outline of something colossal imprisoned inside. She looked at the unmoving creature. She saw the outline of a great tortoise, a head and a shell lined with numerous spikes. The shadows of three large scaled tails swayed beyond.
Then a single yellow eye opened slowly, a crescent waxing to full, as large as the rising of a distant moon. Rin saw it was looking at her. She didn't realize until then how near it was. She could reach between the bars and touch it. The dream-place began to be filled with fog, then a silent voice began to speak. It was silent, but it was surely speaking – though she could hear it through her skin, it was a voice made of mist. It said,
I want the ocean, the real one, not this shallow illusion. You are my prison. Save me.
Kill yourself.
You will not die. Your death will be birth as I will change you, turn you into a new creature, I will give you nacre skin and rainbow fins, eyes that see forbidden colors, and you will be a the first of your kind. You will no longer breathe like a girl. You will cease to remember your name as you don't need one. You will see as I see, the depths, you will be one with creatures unnamed shining with bioluminescent skin as stars in space in the deepest trenches, it will be paradise. I have cities under the sea, cathedrals made of domed ribs of whales, pillars of winding coral, an altar of the shell of the great tortoise. Angler fish, narwhals, kraken would pass by and welcome you with hymns, and you will sing as they do. You will have new ears to hear them, their songs too wonderful for human ears to ever hear.
The creature showed her images flashing through her mind, like quick shimmers of water on the back of her eyelids. Glimpses and visions only hinted at, never fully shown. Yes, her closed eyes brimmed with tears as she saw them, beautiful as they were even if incomplete, that she's afraid her eyes might be inadequate to comprehend them.
What is your life, the limitations of your biology, come close to this?
I will give you what you cannot even imagine. I will make you siren, seahorse, crayfish, urchins, flounders, sea snakes, lampreys, lampetra, pacifastacus leniusculus, physeter catodon, prionace glauca, acipenser transmontanus, linckia laevigata, vibrio cholerae.
You will the first of your kind.
Set me free. Kill yourself.
The single eye and disembodied voice spoke of sorrows as old as thirteen hundred years, and all her life at thirteen years was nothing compared to the creature's eons and eras of imprisonment. It carried the memory when the world was but one great sea, when it was called Ocean instead of Earth, when it was a lone unmarred sapphire sphere in black space.
She wiped her tears. When her hands left her eyes, she found herself sitting inside a tub overflowing with water. Her clothes are soaked. It was a dream, at the same time it was real.
.oOo.
She recognized it. It was the three-tailed beast, the Sanbi she has only heard about from legend. She has become its prison – she was now jinchuuriki. Who did this to her, and what purpose, she can only guess. She realized that she had killed the boy who held this beast. They were on the way to Konoha. They could have been sent to unleash it there.
Jinchuuriki and tailed beasts were used as weapons. Yes, she realized that she was going to be used for something. She felt changed, that hereafter nothing was going to be the same.
.oOo.
Come morning, two masked men take her out of her prison, and made her eat. It was only when she smelled freshly-cooked food that she realized her hunger. She had no way to count how long she has been inside. The spell drawn over her made her weak. Everything has been a blur, a haze, it didn't cross her mind to escape. They made her sit and eat on a small table.
"Eat," one of them whispers to her, placing a plate of steaming meat under her nose, and the smell was like morning. She took the cutlery and ate mouthfuls of rice and ground meat in red tomato-syrup sprinkled with chili and peppercorns, chewing and savoring the warm food in her mouth. She ate plates of sizzling steaks lathered in rum gravy and candied onion rings. There was a dish of meat as soft as flan, her spoon slicing a perfect semi-sphere on the pinkish surface. It was some sort of skin and meat, a silk honeyed pudding glazed in thick white buttercream.
"It's delicious, right? Can't help but make a hungry girl eat," the other masked man says. "You are lucky to be our guest. Partake our choicest meat. That delicacy is expensive, and you might only taste it this once in your life," he said with a smile in his voice, glad to share their food. They both sat in front of her and watched, seeming fascinated with a hungry girl wolfing down mouthfuls of food.
"How does it taste?" they asked.
"Perfect," Rin answered between bites. "What meat is this? I haven't tasted anything like it before."
"The virgin womb of a girl your age, the other one was meat and steak cut from her thigh," he replies, and she sits straight and looks up for the first time and sees dead girls on the long countertop, all still fresh and cut in half. They are lying down, their heads propped along the wall, all of them are smiling. She can see it clearly from here, the clean insides of rib cages empty of hearts and lungs. The girls' identical long hair was wet, drawing wavy patterns across and between small pre-pubescent breasts, their skin clean and perfect in its pallor. Chopped girls laid next to chopped fish remains of sharks and bluefin tuna, and the half-girls placed beside the half-tails made the combined corpses look like bisected mermaids.
There were also reverse-mermaids, large fish-heads lined beside chopped human legs, young genitalia covered in crushed ice.
"Spoils of war. There is famine, and we can't afford wasted meat, can we?" the man said. She didn't puke it out like they expected or like she expected, but swallowed it all down. They tasted perfect, and a hungry starved girl couldn't resist any food. Then, she felt afraid, that she might be next to be slaughtered. They read her mind, laughed at her sudden shift in her chair, like a scared animal about to run away.
"You're special. We won't sell you for meat," the butcher said. "Eat. You will need all the energy to run away." She did. She ate it all, and she ate to sate the beast growling hungry and feeding on her insides, her heart, her mind, her sanity.
.oOo.
They had kept her somewhere in the fish port, the nin doubling as barkers and sellers. They had hidden her in storage among dead fish and dead children to be delivered to buyers. They thrust her through the door of the restroom after she ate her breakfast. "Wait here. Prince Charming will come to save you," he said.
A sudden glimpse of her reflection on the cracked mirror shocked her – at first she didn't recognize it as herself. Maybe a transformation brought about by her recent meal.
Her eyes are yellow, the purple marks on her face turned to violet gashes of malformed gills. Rows of shark-teeth protruded from inside her mouth, fine as toothpicks, stretching her lips in the wrong places. Iridescent aquamarine scales reflected the harsh orange light to appear golden upon her shoulders, and spiked fins lined her spine. On her hands, a thin mossy membrane webbed between clawed fingers.
I will make you a new creature. First of your kind...
Give in to the waves.
She checked the seal. Lines drawing the symbol below her ribs glowed blue, the three lines shining red with chakra not her own, chakra too strong she couldn't hold. It felt like her body was a bomb about to detonate, that it was waiting to explode in a hairsbreadth of a second always delayed. She knew, she is the least suitable to hold this kind of power. Perfectly incompatible. But she still tried to will herself back to normal.
She washed herself, and observed the scales slowly turn to the normal flesh of a girl, to her relief.
.oOo.
The next time she arrives at that netherworld, the dream-illusion inside her where the monster was kept, it didn't look like what it was before.
This is what Rin must have looked like if she had accepted the monster's offer, if she had undergone a century's worth of evolution down under the sea. This is the Sanbi, wearing her skin. Seaweed-brown hair reached its scaled knees, preposterous teeth cutting her mouth from ear to ear - there were no more lips, just torn flesh from shark-teeth. Horns protruded through the forehead, a diadem of coral-bone branching through the base of her skull, her hair. Her eyes are blind, shut from parasitic barnacles preying on its face. Blue skin, aquamarine scales, slashes of moving gills instead of breasts. Her feet are fins.
It turns to her, unrecognizing, gripping the bars of its rusty prison cell, wordlessly pleading to make it get out, set it free. Hands reach out to her, webbed and clawed, grapplers for fingers. It clutched at her clothes, and the cold hands found her face, touching it to recognize. It touches her cheek, gently, caring as a mother. Then, Rin placed her own hands to hold its slimy ones, looking for understanding.
The hands hold her head, and bashed it against prison bars instead. Blood and shattered bone exploded through the hard metal bars, and Rin winced in pain. She did not have the time to run away, the thing was faster, and her head was beaten against metal again. The sound of anvils crashed and resonated in her brain.
Outside, in the reality of her actual prison and outside of this prison inside her, it only looked like she was bashing her own head on the wall instead of metal, that it was tile and cement broken along with pieces of her skull.
She managed to crawl away.
The creature was insensate. It would not remember her or all those false promises, the pretty lies about being a new creature.
The iron door slammed the wall as it was opened.
"Shit, she's trying to kill herself!" one of them shouted, as she felt the blood from her face wiped off, healing chakra cursing through her broken head and open wounds.
"If she dies, she won't be useful in destroying Konoha," said a woman's voice. Rin had her eyes closed, from the pain and all the blood, and didn't see any of them while they restrained her with shackles and chains.
"The Hatake kid is on the way. She's already a dead girl. That monster will kill her. The seal drawn on her guarantees death from the Sanbi's power," the man standing over her said.
That was when Rin understood what she was kept for.
.oOo.
She is chained, when she wakes again. It feels like the monster inside her is taking her sanity bit by bit, and in random times the power surges on inexplicably, and Rin cannot control it. She hears herself scream, a scream that cannot be done by any human throat. She is changing. She has heard it. They will use her to destroy Konoha. The realization comes with nausea: she may have to kill herself before she causes the destruction of her village. She's already dead. Like how that nameless drowning girl killed herself.
She needs something quick, a thing so fast it would be over before you notice it. A weapon with the preciseness of Kakashi's raikiri.
Kakashi's raikiri.
Because I am not sure if I am strong enough to do it myself. Someone else has to help me.
She knows Kakashi will honor the promise. Kakashi will surely come looking for her, and she knows without a doubt that he will come through the door anytime.
Rin assigned herself the last mission of her life.
05 | Moonstruck
Dried blood drew brown lines on the skin of her thighs. She was healed from the skull fracture, but blood kept flowing down her legs from an unseen wound. She cleaned it, and realized it was blood from her first menses.
Then despair hit her. She had accepted the fact of noble sacrifice without question, now here it is, she is washing off her skin the reminder that she will die and there are children she will never bear.
"What can I do? Failed or not, I will still die today. They have written death on me, a sealed time bomb, the monster in my womb will kill me. Is my life worth sacrificing for my village? Can Kakashi's vow, the one he swore to Obito, protect me? I have chosen him as the weapon, the raikiri will be the knife I will use to slit my own throat, or my own heart. Will I make a mistake? Will I make Kakashi fail that vow? My own promise to Kakashi, to Obito, to protect myself?" Rin asked no one.
"Obito is a dead boy. Yes, it is worth the sacrifice. Don't ponder on possibilities anymore. When you die it will never be a problem. You didn't know your mother and father. They died fighting as well," Rin answered her own question.
"You fear death because you don't know what's on the other side. Now you'll know, how it's like to die, like you've often wondered what your dead patients see, why they look never more at peace when they're dead," Rin whispered, assuring herself, but she still found herself crying.
.oOo.
She didn't have the time to think, as the wall exploded. The sparks flashing hurt her eyes before she could recognize him. It was night, the full moon risen, the first thing she sees from the broken wall. He cut off her restraints, shackles fell. Kakashi had his hand held out to help her stand, and she takes it. Both his eyes are visible, one grey and the other bright red.
They start to run, towards the direction of Konoha. They ran like this when Obito died, on their way home. They ran until they reached the forests.
Her masked captors took on the chase, and she is running out of time explain it to Kakashi. Her seals were already burning her skin, and anytime she would change to that insensate sea monster siren that would destroy everything.
"Kakashi! You have to kill me!" she shouted to him, but his answer was what she expected. Find another way. We have a promise to Obito.
Then, in perfect timing, the nin surrounded them. The raikiri flashed from Kakashi's hand, ready to pierce one of the advancing attackers. The monster surges up inside her, threatening to take over.
Rin managed to jump in front of Kakashi's poised hand – and it surged straight through her heart. A hundred thousand voltages shocked from head to foot.
It all went too fast.
.oOo.
This is how it is like to die: the sky and land itself tells you the truth of the universe without words, the Earth reverberates, as from the dust woman is made and to the dust she is returned. Everything one has ever done flashes in a second; you are everything and nothing at once, you see all of past and all of future. You see everything and nothing all at once, the million vastness of space above and the million minuteness of the ground below. Life would surge out of you, your body will rot, but in death you will give birth to nourishment for the earth, a worlds-worth of microorganisms your body will feed. This is how it is like to die: you will never die, there is no such thing as death or life. You are alive, you are dead, you are both.
Yes, Rin can see him, it is definitely him, she sees him even if her eyes can't see. He is leaping through the high branches of trees towards them. This, this is how it is like to die and see everything and nothing for the last time.
He is lovelier than ever: his hair longer, his body taller and gaunter, his fair skin shades paler. New supporting limbs wind through his cloaked body, the scars weren't flaws that diminished his beauty. He is never more beautiful than when he is looking for her. But it is too late.
This one regret that will never make her death a peace: realizing Obito alive and near while her heart burned to nothing. She tries to say it, "Kakashi –"
Kakashi, turn. You were right. The séance never worked because he is here, in the land of the living. Obito is alive, he is near, for us –
But blood instead of words go out. Then there was nothing.
When Rin dies, her face is not a face of peace, but the visage of a girl drowned in shores of regret.
.oOo.
She will not live to see it anymore, to hear Obito scream murder, when his voice called forth trees of wrath to sprout merciless from the ground and impale her captors. Like gnarled old hands the roots and branches squeezed breath and blood out of them, causing floods of blood-dimmed tides. The wood pierced the sky, like steel fangs opening a maw of hell to devour the full moon. This is how Rin's death was avenged a hundredfold. The world will pay.
She will not live to feel it anymore, a first and final kiss shared between cold lips – boy alive, girl dead.
Slowly, in a whisper, Obito answered her question.
"Yes, a promise, even failed, is enough to protect you. A village, a country, a world, you... are worth far more. I will adjust the orbit of the moon, I will configure the stars and draw new patterns in the constellations, in the very universe, to have you back. The dead will be raised imperishable, and the world will be changed. All of this will only be nothing but a memory destined to be forgotten, this hell," Obito said, locking their fingers in this new vow.
.oOo.
It was only last week that it was official – Rin Nohara was declared dead in absentia.
Kakashi has one more ghost to talk to.
End
AN 2: Quote from Rin's poster is from the play "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder. Minato sang Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" at the beach, and yes that is the summarized, rumored story behind that song. Séance not real, I made it up. I haven't eaten dead girls.
This was the most emotionally harrowing of the few stories I wrote. It was also painful, literally - the worst migraine hit me while writing the last part that I was actually crying. I will write a crack fic next. Also, this was written in a new style, so I would like to know if it worked or if it sucked. Thanks for reading, to those who have reached until here (has someone?). Also, I'm starting two one-shots focusing on Kakashi and Obito after this.