Author's Note: To those about to read I offer the fair warning that this is a side fic of "Minato Namikaze and the Destroyer of Worlds", and, more than that involves one of the characters from the original "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" universe. So, if you're unfamiliar with Rabbit you might be a bit confused, I'll offer the explanation that Rabbit is a being from the outerpath with the power to devour things from existence... Like Scotland. He's also very mysterious, so there's that.
Also, because of Rabbit, I suppose you can take this fic as you will as either canon or not canon, as it is Rabbit involved and... Well, who's to say what he devours from existence when.
The sound of plucked guitar strings, an American southern voice, out of place, time, and dimension was what woke Lee up on a day that should have been like any other but somehow wasn't.
"Everybody's talking at me, I don't hear a word they're saying, only the echoes of my mind."
Only, it wasn't quite out loud, echoing through the air, but more of a feeling of lyrics she vaguely remembered hearing but never quite listened to. A faint echo of a quarter of a childhood she'd rather leave shoved back in the depths of her brain and thoroughly forgotten.
"People stopping, staring, I can't see their faces, only the shadows of their eyes."
Except, when she managed to drag herself from sleep into the land of the living, it stopped like it hadn't really been there in the first place. Not quite as worrisome as a hallucination but stronger than the remnants of a dream or memory.
"Note to self, Lee, whatever you ate or did yesterday…" Lee trailed off, not quite sure what she ate or did yesterday that would warrant morning… half remembered songs that she was pretty damn sure she'd never actually listened to.
Uncle Vernon had been more patriotic in his taste, of course not patriotic in the sense of liking the Beatles or else Led Zeppelin, but he would usually play something vaguely British if completely lacking in counter culture. Aunt Petunia, when Uncle Vernon was out, had more of a fondness for Tom Jones and sometimes even Frank Sinatra but this… She didn't know where she would have heard this from.
Stretching, then rolling forward and standing, Lee made her way into the kitchen to make herself some green tea and get ready for the day. Minato was already there, staring out of the window with a distant musing expression, not turning at the sound of her entrance or even really acknowledging her.
Of course, it was early, and he was probably tired, Lee herself was pretty tired in spite of actually getting a good amount of sleep.
So instead of bothering him about it she just went and put a kettle on, staring at it with a dull expression, and then noted, "I'm having weird England flashbacks, Minato. Is that a sign of something?"
There was a vague 'hm' of agreement, or at least acknowledgement, which Lee took as a sign that she could continue explaining, "I think it's a sign of something. Maybe the impending doom of the universe, or something. Of course, every other thing that happens is probably a sign of the impending doom of the universe. Tora's existence is a sign of our certain and inescapable destruction."
At this point Minato would usually disagree that it wasn't a sign of the impending doom of the universe. Minato was a big supporter of the view that the world wasn't coming to a sudden end and usually became very uncomfortable when Lee tried to explain that it really was.
Not that it was anything they should really worry about. It'd probably take billions of years or something and if it happened then it happened. It wasn't anything that anyone should be actively concerned over just… maybe perhaps a little bit prepared.
But Minato didn't interrupt, just gave another vague 'hm' of agreement.
Lee looked over at him, or the back of his head at least, as he still continued to stare out the window.
"Nothing? You finally agree?" Lee asked, suddenly feeling thrown a little off balance, off center, and again that feeling of the morning came back to her in full force. That out of place, out of time, out of dimension feeling and the haunting music.
"I'm going where the sun keeps shining, through the pouring rain. Going where the weather suits my clothes. Banking off of the northeast wind, sitting on summer breeze, skipping over the ocean like a stone."
"Well, uh, that's good!" Lee shook herself out of it, a grin plastered on her face, "You can finally admit that I, Eru Lee, was completely and utterly right this entire time. So, yes, eat that, Minato."
Minato finally turned his head, slowly, only one pale blue eye visible but nothing inside of it. For a moment, a single instant, he barely looked human at all. Instead he was something wearing a human shell, but poorly, then a small curved smile and, "Perhaps."
The tea kettle began to whistle, Lee hastily poured it out into her cup, making her way over to the table with far less grace than she usually managed, "Perhaps? What's perhaps supposed to mean?"
"Perhaps." Minato repeated, that small cheerful smile remaining on his face, and for a moment he just looked at her (rather unnervingly) then returned his attention to the view outside of the window.
"Right, perhaps… Well, not perhaps, because I'm right on this." Lee insisted, pounding her fist on the table. He didn't even flinch.
They sat in uncomfortable, tense, silence for a few minutes. Minato not looking at her while she stared directly at him. And again she had the feeling of being out of place again, or almost out of place, and the unnerving feeling that…
She stood from the table and looked out the window, blocking Minato's view, "Right, so, what are you looking at anyways?"
As far as Lee could tell it was the same old Konohagakure she looked at every morning. And true, perhaps the sky was exceptionally blue, the trees a little greener in the light than usual, but surely nothing that…
"Schrödinger's Cat." Minato said, calmly, as if he had said any normal thing.
In the short time she had left the table he had stolen her tea from her, sipping it delicately, with the poise of a geisha rather than a twelve-year-old boy. And again, that small, polite, but empty smile.
Warily she took her seat back at the table, snatching her tea wordlessly from him, he offered no complaint but his smile grew slightly wider.
"Schrödinger's Cat…" she repeated dully, her mind out of focus, searching back and back in her memory, "Where do I know that from?"
Resting his chin in his hands he watched as she drank and slowly explained, "They say that there is a cat in a box and it is given food that is half poisoned and half not. They then close the box and doing so there is a fifty percent chance that the cat is alive and a fifty percent chance that it is not. However, the box is closed, and in that time the cat is all of its possible states, alive and dead. Until the box is opened and it is observed, catalogued, its fate is undecided. It can be either alive or dead, yin or yang, truth or fiction."
Lee blinked, tried to process that, and managed, "That was a really weird story, Minato. But I have no idea what it has to do with our stunning view of the hokage memorial."
"Oh?" Minato asked, his head tilted to the side, but if he meant anything more than that he didn't expand on it. Just… smiled again.
"Right…" Lee said, trailing off and downing the rest of her tea, wondering if it was just her or if Minato wasn't a little (more than a little) out of it as well. Lost in her own thoughts she didn't notice when he placed one of his hands on her face.
She froze, still clutching her tea cup, eyes darting to his face. His eyes, they were his, she knew they were his but they seemed… Not shallower, in some ways deeper, but like an empty depth; like the light on the edge of a black hole, something fleeting and on the edge of existence itself.
"Uh, Minato, what are you doing?"
He didn't answer, just offered that little smile (she was really starting to hate that smile), and stroked her cheek with a calloused thumb then, without hesitation, removed his hand and returned it to his side of the table.
Lee's morning had officially gone from slightly bizarre to slightly unnerving.
For lack of better options, and to have an excuse to turn her head away from Minato's frankly alarming blank stare, she looked out the window again and found her eyes tracing the scenery. The streets looked more or less normal, as did the trees, the skies, the mountain range…
She paused, her eyes drawn back to the mountain range, and found herself staring at one unfamiliar added face to the mountain. There, almost unnoticeable for some strange reason (as if shielded from sight despite being perfectly noticeable), was a fourth head.
"Sensei, this may sound like a very strange thing to say first thing in the morning but… Did you know that there's now a fourth head on the mountain?"
Lee looked from Jiraiya, to Dead Last, to Minato, none of whom seemed concerned over the fact that a fourth head had been added. And after rushing out of the apartment to reach the training field, Minato in tow, she'd noticed that it wasn't just the monument but other things as well.
There were people she'd never seen before, people she really should have noticed, like this loud green man shouting about the springtime of youth followed by a smaller green clone, or a pirate version of Hatake Sakumo whose head seemed stuck in an orange book that had been supposedly written by Jiraiya, or even the orange whiskered loud genin who looked almost like Minato shouting about believing things and one day being hokage.
"I mean, this is a pretty large concerning sign." Lee pointed out, again receiving no looks of concern in response.
Finally, after sharing a glance with Dead Last, Jiraiya said, "That's just Beta-Konoha, Lee-chan, nothing to worry about."
"Beta-Konoha?" Lee asked, almost feeling the need to tear her hair out, "What the hell is Beta-Konoha?"
"Well, you know, Konoha… sort of. It's an almost future version of our world, or well, a terrible future version of our world." Jiraiya grimaced slightly and waved his hand, "Try not to think about it too much, Lee-chan."
Lee just stared, stared and stuck her hands into her pockets, and then asked what she felt was a perfectly reasonable question, "And was it here yesterday?"
"Sure, been here for a while… Like I said try not to think about it." Jiraiya said with a shrug before clapping and attempting to start them on training, "So, squirts, today we're going to work on…"
"Why shouldn't I think about it?"
He paused, looked at her, and there was something in his eyes, something deep and dark and filled with pain, "Lee, I've seen that other world… Trust me, there's nothing for it to offer us."
Then they continued training as normal. Dead Last being Dead Last, Lee pushing and being pushed ahead, Minato doing his more or less Minato thing (but she could feel his eyes on the back of her head). Like this really wasn't anything that was any different than Tora, shinobi in England, or anything else she had ever pointed out before.
Like it was all perfectly normal.
"Maybe it is just me, Minato." She said later, after they had finished for the morning and had relocated to Ichiraku's, "After all, it's not any different than anything else."
Minato offered that vague 'hm' of agreement that he'd been offering her all morning.
"I'm looking for a little more than a 'hm', Minato." Lee said with a sigh as she dug through her noodles, "I mean, it's not… Well, I'm not really sure how I feel about it. Why did Jiraiya say it's worse?"
How could one reality, after all, be conclusively worse than another. Surely it wasn't that simple, if that's what this somehow was and wasn't… Well, she didn't even know what.
Minato spared her a glance, and again she caught herself staring back, searching for something familiar and failing to find it, "There is a haunting lack of existence in this land that eats at the souls of the living. They have forgotten their gods and the blood of the tree of life which sustains them. They have made a habit of, instead, devouring each other."
She stared at him, "…Minato, that was useless and rather morbid."
Minato didn't seem all too concerned, just offered a musing, "Oh?"
She glared at him, but at least he was talking to her about it. Jiraiya acted like he wanted to pretend that this other Konoha didn't even exist. Everyone was pretending that this other Konoha, this Beta-Konoha, didn't really exist. And as far as she could tell the Beta-Konoha was doing its best to pretend that hers, that Alpha-Konoha didn't exist either.
Like there was this acknowledged invisible wall between the two that no one dared to cross.
"It can't be all terrible." Lee finally announced to Minato, "What about that green springtime youth guy, he's pretty cool. We should have one of those! I think it'd be a great addition to… Alpha-Konoha."
Minato said nothing, just continued to eat his ramen, which Lee interpreted as a challenge to her rather brilliant idea.
"Minato, you're lacking vision! We need a Springtime Youth Lee! It's absolutely vital to the fabric of our society to be continually reminded of the springtime of our youth… and neon green!" Lee announced, and in her passion for the idea ended up standing on top of the counter where Minato just blinked up at her, eating his ramen with uncommon delicacy.
And before he could say anything to stop her (he made no move to stop her) a brightly clad, neon green, Springtime Youth Lee had appeared next to her on the counter and then leapt off into the streets to spread visions of rainbows and sandy beaches with her joyous tears.
Lee watched her go, bounding off into the distance, then realized she was standing on the counter and before anyone could say anything sat back down to finish her ramen. "Anyways, like I was saying… This has been a really weird day."
"Perhaps." Minato contributed, much to Lee's own irritation.
"Perhaps," Lee parroted dully, "Well, perhaps we should explore this brave new Konoha we've found. Maybe see why Jiraiya's so…"
Devestated, he had looked devastated when she'd asked him about it. Like he'd prefer if this other Konoha hadn't existed in the first place. Like it was… The world that never should have been.
"Anyways, we should see for ourselves!" She announced, dragging Minato from the counter and slapping down a few bills to pay for the meals. And he didn't protest, just looked her in the eye again, a dark but barren knowledge resting inside his gaze, and that small almost apologetic smile.
Lee tried not to think about it.
Almost immediately she began to understand what Jiraiya had been alluding to. It was nothing immediately obvious such as bodies lining the streets or gutters overflowing with blood but more… people who should have been there were missing.
This other Konoha appeared to be only a few decades into their own future, she'd caught sight of a grown Lazy (and now alcoholic) Nara as well as other familiar (if aged) faces. However, there were many familiar faces she wasn't seeing. The first two hokages were missing, safely in Alpha-Konoha's borders but nowhere on the other side. Also missing were Uzumaki Kushina, Hatake Sakumo, Orochimaru, Jiraiya, Senju Tsunade, every single Uchiha Lee had ever seen, and… and the other older Minato and Lee herself.
More, when she caught up with the strange orange mixture of Minato and Uzumaki she noticed something of herself in him as well. Not necessarily his loud shouts of becoming hokage one day, and believing this statement, but there was a shadow of herself in his forced grin and the image of doors slammed into his face burned into his retinas.
And sometimes, when he forgot to grin blindingly for a moment, it was so easy to replace him with the young Eleanor Lily Potter sitting gloomily inside of her cupboard, wondering if this was all that there was to vaunted existence.
Perhaps there was an explanation for all of this, as well as the fox lodged in the boy's stomach, but whatever it was Lee wasn't entirely certain that she cared. She just…
Everything had seemed off all morning.
"Alright, points to Jiraiya, this place is… unnerving." Lee admitted finally after inspecting the memorial stone and finding far too many names carved into it.
Next to them was the young pirate Hatake, presumably Hatake Kakashi. He'd been staring at the stone morosely for longer than Lee had been there and, so far, seemed perfectly content to act as if Lee and Minato didn't exist. And there was something so dead inside of him, in his lone eye, that Lee couldn't help but shudder just by sitting in his shadow.
Minato for his own part didn't answer, just leaned against a tree, watching her and Hatake with a cool and unreadable gaze.
(This place reeked of unseen and unacknowledged death.)
"But I swear to god, this was not here yesterday." Lee said, before adding, "Or if it was then nobody was talking about it. I mean, this is one of those goddamn instances where the universe is clearly malfunctioning but everyone has this terrible explanation of it."
"Hm."
Lee didn't even add to her commentary, bringing up her point that this was far from the first time, and just turned to look at him critically. Although, just staring at him didn't seem to really affect him at all, he was thoroughly unflappable at the moment.
"Minato, have you turned into an Uchiha when I wasn't looking? Isn't that their word? I'm pretty sure they'd kill you if they knew you were using their most sacred word." Lee finally bit out, and to his credit Minato didn't 'hm' again but he did give her a somewhat appraising look.
She sighed, found herself looking up at Hatake the pirate, and noting that so far she hadn't even tried to talk to any of these Beta citizens of Konoha. Perhaps she felt it too, that wrongness Jiraiya had seemed to note, that invisible divide between us and them but…
But surely she should talk to them before she condemned them to one side of Konoha or the other.
(Although, what was a world without Namikaze Minato inside of it…)
"We should observe more! Interact with the local population!" Lee announced, in a similar manner to her announcement that they needed a Springtime Youth Lee and that they were going to get a Springtime Youth Lee. Minato, strangely or perhaps in character given how he'd been acting all day, didn't seem all that alarmed.
She almost announced that they should talk to the man standing next to them, but then paused, looking at the seemingly infinite depth of misery welling from in him and changed her mind.
"Like… We should talk to the orange version of you… and Kushina… and me…" Lee trailed off not entirely sure what Uzumaki Naruto was supposed to be, but then regained her footing, "Because I'll be damned if I don't learn how to use that well-endowed naked woman technique."
She stood from the memorial stone, regained her footing, and triumphantly began to walk in the direction she'd last seen the orange menace. Or, rather, she tried valiantly, but something seemed to slip. The world split into two, one image superimposed onto the next yet clearly separate, and Lee felt herself losing her balance almost falling into one versus the other and then…
Then it righted itself as she stumbled forward.
She stood there, breathing carefully for a few moments, her heart racing at the thought of… She didn't know what had almost happened.
"Are you certain, Lee, that you wish to open the box?"
Lee turned back to find Minato staring at her, some undefinable emotion in his eyes, something she wasn't sure she'd seen before. Something old, dangerous, and far too powerful for a genin to give freely.
"What?"
"Inside of the box Schrödinger's cat is both safely alive and safely dead. Until it is observed in either form, it is both, but when you open the box you confine it to one or the other. If you open the box then you yourself hold responsibility for its state of being, its life. Are you certain you wish to open it?"
Lee didn't know what he was talking about, why he was looking at her like that, but suddenly with a wave of clarity she realized that there was something that was far more wrong and dangerous with this day than the appearance of another alarming Konoha (filled with dead familiar names and faces).
She straightened, turned back to face Minato fully, and said with a calmness she didn't feel, "You're not Namikaze Minato, are you?"
He grinned and Konoha began to slip away, drip from her like paint washed from a canvas, leaving a blank and terrifying emptiness in its place.
They were seated across from each other, kneeling, a table between them with cups of green tea cooling. Minato's face was hidden behind a white fox's mask and Lee herself was dressed in a white kimono befitting Death itself; though neither paid much attention to their change in atmosphere and clothing.
"Who are you and what happened to Namikaze Minato?"
The thing wearing Minato's body, like a beautifully crafted puppet maneuvered by someone almost perfect in his art but not quite, tilted its head as it peered at her through the holes in its mask, "I am not."
"Is that supposed to be an answer?" Lee asked, feeling the few surroundings they had (the table and the tea) sliding about and losing focus under the force of her anger.
"I am everything that is not you, Lee. Therefore, I myself, am not."
If that was supposed to be clever then Lee wasn't having any of it. As it was, it sounded more ominous than it was clever, like something she should remember and acknowledge as beyond alarming.
"Alright, you are not, then," Lee acknowledged, forcing herself to focus again and for the table and the tea to fall back into place, "What about Namikaze Minato?"
Slowly, with that same grace he'd shown all morning, the thing wearing Minato's skin moved the mask away from his face, left it to the side, and Minato's pale blue eyes stared at her with something else hiding behind them, "Out of the depths of despair he cried out to you, oh lord, and you answered his call."
It didn't elaborate on this, before she could ask for clarification he reached out with a hand, twisting it and a light appeared inside of it. He rolled this small light between his fingers, as if it were a marble, and then asked, "But he is simply one mortal, a bright spark of life one standard deviation from the next, nothing to concern a god. What is it in him, what is his spark of life, that you would create a world for him alone?"
"What are you talking about?" She asked, and as she did so the table disappeared, replaced instead by thousands of lit candles, their surroundings grew dark so that the only light was from these candles. It looked, for a moment, as if they were sitting on a plane of stars, a sheet stolen from the heavens themselves.
"This is a false box. There was never meant to be one world or another. But this man cried out to you and you remade him. You stole his wife, his son, and you remade a world in his and your image. And he had only ever been, and only will ever be, one light in the dark." The false Minato caught the light rolling in his hands, inspected it with cool disdain, and then closed his hand over it; extinguishing it.
Below them, beneath the candles, images scattered themselves over the floor. Images of Uzumaki Kushina and Namikaze Minato, of him looking down at her and the hopeful expression with which she stared up at him, of them together eating ramen, staring into each other's eyes… And then more, of the boy she had seen earlier, Naruto, orange and grinning and filled with endless potential.
"I… What are you talking about?" Lee asked, almost desperate at this point, and his eyebrows raised at her almost derisively.
"You remember, Lee, don't act as if you do not wish to."
(A fox, a man, a bargain made in desperation and overwhelming fury and sacrifice… Everything of humanity, everything wonderful and cathartic, she'd seen everything in that moment.)
She closed her eyes, pushing out memories that weren't memories, that didn't belong to her or at the very least shouldn't.
"That doesn't explain what you've done with him."
The being blinked, and then it was grinning at her, laughing, "Oh, but Lee, I was not the one who devoured him."
She stood, knocking over several candles as she did so, and began to shout, "I never…"
"You took everything he had ever been, his title, his family, his hopes, his dreams. What is that except annihilation, Eru Lee?"
"And what of it?!"
Her voice echoed in the dark, reverberating off of walls she couldn't see, couldn't even sense and the fox (his painted fox's mask and its overwhelming shadow) was everywhere inside of the place.
"That world is filled with blood and death, I don't want that world, he didn't want that world!" She motioned to all of the candles, to the memories pooling beneath them, of the dishonored Hatake Sakumo, Jiraiya's failed students, Uzumaki Kushina, Namikaze Minato, and his desperately lonely son with the world on his shoulders.
"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long – and he burned so very, very brightly, Lee." The thing chided, in an almost sing-song manner, like it was a rhyme he had memorized only to spit it back at her.
"No, that's not the rule!" She said, then stared down at him, gathering half-forgotten power into herself in this strange empty realm, "I make the rules and I can change them if I want to. This is my Konohagakure, his Konohagakure… And if I have to rewrite the other one with everything in it, then I won't hesitate to do it!"
She approached the boy, placed her hands on either side of his face, loomed over him, and said without feeling or mercy or anything human left in her, "Now, you will give him back and crawl back to whatever realm of non-existence you came out of."
There was nothing in him, not really, just the pale imitation of a boy who would one day be a great man. However, as she stared into him, through him, he reached back with tentative borrowed hands, and cupped her cheek as he had that morning.
A soft, sad, borrowed smile, "Ah, this must be love."
Slowly, carefully, he leaned forward and his lips brushed hers, and in his breath she could taste that single, bright, too brightly burning light that must be Namikaze Minato. Then, he leaned back, his eyes draining of light and his skin of color and…
And then he was gone, and she was gone, like they'd never met in the first place.
A bright, perhaps too bright, sunny morning in Minato and Lee's kitchen.
"I'm having weird England flashbacks, Minato. Is that a sign of something?"
Minato looked exhaustedly away from the window, sighing, rubbing his face and then said, "Probably not, don't you normally have… England, flashbacks?"
Lee smiled, perhaps too brightly and with too much relief, then expanded, "Well, I also made a Springtime Youth Lee in a day that apparently never happened."
"What?" Minato asked, practically spitting out his tea, "What's… springtime youth?"
(Something that should exist, that could have existed, but didn't.)
"I have absolutely no idea, but it's very green." Lee commented, but not really bothering to think about that, instead about the rightness she felt inside the small kitchen and the view outside the window that contained only three heads on the mountain.
Author's Note: It's strange how much character development Rabbit is getting outside of his main fic... Oh well, can't be helped I suppose. Anyways, written for the 900th prompt of "Minato Namikaze and the Destroyer of Worlds" by SergeantMeow who asked for a fic where Rabbit eats something or someone important in Konoha, hence the name of the fic.
Thanks for reading, reviews would be greatly appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or Harry Potter