Chapter two: Simplicity
Great people are built on the backs of tragedy, the unlucky. It is in the great that we find those who have suffered the greatest. They knew this well enough, all the different epithets and sayings that accompanied it. They also knew that, in the end, the only difference between a tragedy and a comedy was the in the frame they are placed in.
Whether to laugh or cry, perception and intention, it was more a choice than anything else they had. It was theirs and theirs alone when not even their lives were theirs anymore.
It was of their nature, they found, to be so questioning and weary. It is no surprise then that when they were taught of the nature of the world, of the elements that laid trapped under their skin, that they deemed it lacking. There they found the bite of stone, the strength of a mountain slowly being worn away by the howling wind they would rather be. Dust to dust, to the earth they would return and in their blood the earth would rest. They were trapped, bound to the ground knee deep in mud.
It was disgusting, it was deplorable, it was poetic.
A polish stone on a string was dangled over Ro's face, the wide excited eyes of Ku coming into her focus.
"What is this?"
"A present, I made it from the limestone next to our bed." The stone gleamed for a moment before Ku grew impatient and threw it over her sisters head, the string catching awkwardly on her ears and in her hair. They never gave presents.
"Why am I the frog?"
"I like the Scorpion best." They knew the real reason.
"That's fine, I like the Frog best as well." She ran her fingers over the carved frog, the protective layer between her and the rock shockingly smooth.
"And look, it's like us." Ku continued, pressing close to her sister and taking the stone from her hand to place the two halves together, "a part of the same whole."
They were quiet, watching the stone absently as they spoke without words again and again. An entire lifetime was lived in those space, in the silences they could speak in the span of seconds.
"Thank you." It was all she could say, it was all there was to say. It was rather fitting really, for the Frog to carry the Scorpion, and the Scorpion to covet the Frog.
Time passed differently under the leaves, they knew this only from when they were above. They disliked how much faster everything was there, in the trees and through the fields the ever-present feeling of lives brushing their own.
It was annoying, it was paralyzing, it was everything they wish they could stand to be.
Sometimes Ku would tell Ro stories about how they could have been. Of farm girls, of travelers, of medics and shrine maidens, of anything but what they were. Ku liked to hold her sister's hands and rest her forehead against the other's, her black eyes gleaming strangely as she whispered these stories like prayers. She liked to dream of something more, something all their own.
Ro sometimes hated Ku for the fantasies she would bring to life with only her sister and the stars above as witnesses. It was nothing even remotely possible after all, these stories, these irretrievable dreams, this acrid burn on their tongues.
They knew, of course they knew.
Bitter, they continued.
Finally, it came to a point that they were to learn their own trade, something to make them stand out from the other agents cultivated like bacteria in the dark. In the privacy of their own minds they thought it was rather like biological warfare.
Poison and precision, Ro flourished in the dark an army all her own of blank smiles and senbon lined hems. The thing that went bump at night, the shadow in the moonlight, she was obscurity. Her specialty was in assassination, in wearing a new face at every turn, an unnoticed attrition against a populace barely watching. She always found it easy, becoming someone else that is. Ro wasn't real, Ro had so very little to let go so she could convince herself of the lie she told. That was the key, the trick. How could you lie to anyone if you couldn't lie to yourself?
She lied to Ku often.
"Are you afraid?" Ku asked, the shredded remains of a fallen leaf drifted from her hands and into the auburn hair of her crouched sister.
"Of what?" Ro responded unmoving as she adjusted the chakra she was feeding into her jutsu.
"You know how all of this will end." A twig was knotted into Ro's hair next, angled awkwardly against her scalp.
"Well we will erase this camp soon, there is nothing really to be afraid of."
"Don't be coy."
"It still remains, what is there to be afraid of Ku?" Ro finally dropped her hands and glanced up at the sky to check the time, they had to finish this before tonight.
"I don't know."
All the best surprises happened in the daylight after all.
If Ro was finely powered batrachotoxin on the wind, made to kill, then Ku was ninja wire, 0.1 grade, thin as a strand of hair and stronger than a kunai.
Ku was best at laying out traps, at hiding trip wires angled with consequences under dead leaves and loose dirt. She was never very good with words, never one to dance around pretending to be something she wasn't. Where her sister was about misdirection and deception she found that she excelled in more direct methods of war. She learned to pool her earth elemental chakra into her legs and up her spine, to be unbreakable, unmovable. She could weather the worst of any attack and end it with a deafening crunch.
It wasn't enough, it was never enough.
She was too soft, hesitated too often. She knew who she was, who they could be, who they once were. She could see the lines they tread along, see girls who could be them but were not. She drowned in the misfortune of it all, in her dreams and the unlucky nature of their life. Children were never meant to be like this, they were never meant to see war, to feel the blood of their enemies slicking their hands and seeping into their skin.
But they did.
The only difference between Ro and Ku now was simply semantics. In the end it all boiled down the fact that Ro was the one who gave up and it was Ku who never had it in herself to do the same.
"Tell me another story." She was inches from Ro's face this time, her unmarred mask staring, the beams of the morning sun lighting up the edges of her silhouette.
"I don't understand why you insist on me telling you stories at all. There is nothing that I have that you do not already know." Ro sighed, rolling away from Ku to search for their map.
"Tell me one anyways." Ku fell forward where her sister once was laying face first on the ground for a moment as she listened to the other breathe. No one spoke, they took to the trees and the silence filled the spaces they left as they continued North East the forest breaking apart to give way to the plains of Tea country.
"In another time, at another place, there was a Dragon." Ro began pushing her way through the tall grass as silently as she could, "He was a rather young, still learning you see, but even in the wake of his naivety he was still wise and clever. When he was younger still, his mother used to tell him and his nestmates that when they were ready they would have to leave her shadow and find the place that called to their heart. The one who left first was neither the eldest nor the youngest, she was white scaled and wild like the wind. He heard she now rested at the highest mountain top, curled happily around the peak. In her wake, many of his kin followed one after another until he was the only one left.
'Come now child, don't you think it is time? Are you not tired of this nest, of this cave?' His mother called to him, and he waited for days yet before turning and leaving his mother."
"She was kind to let him stay for so long."
"Perhaps she was. He searched and searched for a land that called to him, it took him years before he found where his heart may reside. It was a quaint place, a cave hidden away behind a waterfall with plenty of fish and places for him to explore. And he was happy there, but this would not be worth telling if that was all there was to this Dragon's story. You see the Dragon's home was not far off from a small human village, it was a rather poor village with little traffic and only their own crops to sustain them. One day while the Dragon rested just behind the waterfall there was a man who stumbled upon the Dragons land. He had been looking for food to feed his family and was overjoyed when he came across a place that could offer such a supply. He came back to the Dragon's lake day in and day out unaware of the eyes that watched him curiously from behind the waterfall.
The Dragon knew of humans, knew of the things his Mother had passed down to him from hers and she from hers. They were volatile and short-lived creatures, rather greedy too. More likely to steal your very scales than to ask one of you.
But still he wished to speak to this creature, and so he did.
'Little human,' called the Dragon from behind his veil of water, 'why do you come and fish from my lake every day?'
Startled the human glanced around trying to locate the one who spoke to him. 'I am sorry, I had not realized that men could lay claim to lakes.'
'I know little of your customs, however' the Dragon began as he slides from behind the waterfall and glided in the water at its base his own pale scales blending with it. 'I scarcely think I am a man.' He finally continued as he rested on the rocks near the bank rising to his full height.
Terrified the man ran-"
"Why?" Ku interrupted suddenly as she stopped forcing the other to come to a halt as well.
"Come Ku, we have to reach our location before night fall. If the story is too distracting it can wait." Ro said gravitating closer to her sister, the wild flowers brushing her clothing.
"It doesn't matter," she said, "why did the man run?"
They knew what she was really asking.
"He was afraid."
"Of what?"
"His own mortality, I would think." It was more than that, so much more, they had seen it after all. Used it. Felt it. Been victim of it.
"The Dragon never threatened him."
"And yet he runs back to his village, rallies all the able men and kills the Dragon. What is your point?"
"It's unfair."
"People are rarely fair. Shinobi even less so." It was their reality.
They stood in silence for a moment simply watching each other, their blank masks streaked with mud from the rains of yesterday.
Ro turned on her heel and left her sister standing at the center of a field. She found her there again three days later on her way home sprawled on her back. They knew, oh, they knew what it meant.
Maybe that was the beginning of the end, maybe there was never a beginning to end anyway.
Roku was a unit, a single agent, they could feel the beak of an old war hawk closing in on them. It was in the dark under the Great Tree that everything fell apart. It was there that a part of a whole stood alone and We became I.
It was the worst, it was the best. A comedy and a tragedy, it was freeing and damning all at once.
The lacquer gave way and one half of the bowl was discarded. The other half was taken and shattered, the sharp edge wet with blood as it was changed once again into something else.
She felt so very hollow.
Again, Roku found herself kneeling before the man with skin like dust and tea stained paper, she couldn't ignore the metallic smell clinging to her hair, to her skin, to her soul. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was grief, sorrow, joy.
She didn't know, she didn't know.
He told her to smile, so she did.
He told her of a mission, of a man she needed to watch, and so she would. It was all she could do, it was all she knew after all, to do as she was told.
"Do you understand?" His voice was quiet, it was so quiet without the steady breathing of the other. It was an existence held separate from all others, full of whispers and shadows muffled by the earth above, as if afraid maybe the sun might hear if they were not careful.
It was rather like eating chalk.
"Of course, Danzō-sama."
"Your name from this moment forward is Kyoko."
How very ironic.
It hurt.
Batrachotoxin and homobatrachotoxin; extracted from the oils produced by the skin of a frogs procured in the forests outside of Ame. It was difficult to catch, difficult to make.
Ricin; from the oils of a red leaved plant found in a wasteland near Suna. They were rare, often forgotten by those not in the sand.
Strychnine; pulled from the leaves of a climbing shrub in their own backyard, two miles from Konoha's west walls.
"What happens if you poison yourself Ro?"
"I die."
True Immunity, like immortality, is a lie after all.
It was a work of art how they spun her a life. She was now an orphan child who has lived in Konoha for the past 6 years, her parents were Career Chūnin who died out on the field. Her files were carefully doctored and aged, placed in all the correct places with all the right people. Kyoko was to live in the Orphanage until she began the Academy, she was not to report to Him until she had been living her life long enough to avoid suspicion.
It wasn't her first time pretending, she was a running root that stretches far and wide prickled with thorns. She was far more useful to the shadows, no matter what that meant, and found the colors of the village jarring. She felt so very wrong, the skin on her face too tight. Sunlight felt strange on her skin, her smile was frozen, the orphanage's matriarch stared.
It was all so very strange.
She supposed she was the strange one here.
For days she watched and listened, she forced herself to remember her lessons, what it meant to walk and talk like a child with eyes wide and searching. She tried to ignore the blood she knew was not there on her skin and held the hands of strangers. She built Kyoko, painting her there on the blank canvas that was her very self. She made herself into a shy girl with wide eyes, an average innocent, someone people never looked twice at. She favored bitter foods over sweets, liked frozen treats, flowers, and paper dolls.
She could never quite pull it off, that to others Kyoko was a strange girl who felt so very off. To stiff, to quiet, to still. Those in the market thought that perhaps she was a little touched, they passed her small tokens to appease their own guilt at the sight of a child with such misfortune. Those who could remember the time of the warring clans whispered to one another of children barely able to totter their way onto the battle field with sharp blank eyes and teeth red with blood.
Her words were too rehearsed, her eyes too flat. Above all else everyone could see how she paused as if waiting for someone else, how she moved as if there was another by her side a space now empty and vast.
She had been used to danger, used to living among the dead day in and day out, used to an ever-present warmth at her back.
She was so very cold.
The noise was rather deafening at first, sleeping with so many other girls so close she swore sometimes she could hear their heartbeats. What was the strangest was seeing the vast complexity in each of the other children, how they wore their emotions so proudly like it was something natural. Like it was something they didn't have to think about.
And maybe they didn't.
Out of all the children she now lived with her favorite to watch were little Daichi and Hiroyuki, two boys born only weeks apart placed in the Orphanage on the same day. They were thought by the matriarch to be the best behaved of the children in the Orphanage, but their peers knew of their true nature. The two nine-year-olds had been going to the academy for the past two years, something they like to lord over the younger children, something they rather liked to demonstrate when bullying them as well.
Kyoko was also one of their favorites, she was different and they liked to crush oddities. They noticed on some level how she couldn't quite keep up with the steps everyone else already seemed to know, how her eyes cast out and watched before she reacted. It was funny, it was sad. Untimely she found them rather sub par in everything but their ability to intimidate others with so little actual skill. She meant little to them, they meant even less to her.
She knew every little crack in their visage, every unfilled blemish and how she could grind them to dust with but a few words. But Kyoko didn't much care for such conflict.
She remembered someone saying once that children were cruel, she found age had very little to do with it.
She entered the Academy for the first official time as she turned seven, that is where she was to meet a boy with twice damned eyes and a girl destined to die.
Notes:
Yikes.
I feel like this chapter is a little flat but I needed Roku to move on to Kyoko. Next chapter, or maybe the next two depending on how it goes, will be about the Academy and how Kyoko actually sucks at the whole being a kid thing. Let me know what you think, the reviews make my day better every time I see them. If you catch any mistakes please let me know. Thank you for reading!