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In which a man finds a shattered mirror…
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The first year was incidentally the most difficult and by far the easiest.
He hadn't recovered enough sanity to worry overmuch and what lucidity he had extended only far enough to plan his next step. The first year he took up a plain-faced mask and proceeded to hunt down the bounties of missing-nins.
(wind and flight. silver swift and impersonal crimson)
Lives ended under his hands and red hissed on hard-packed earth.
He did not care.
He hunted and followed and caught and always made sure to never see Konoha. That was no longer his home.
(save me save me save me—didn't you know? no one has ever heard you)
Eventually a little more sanity crawled into his head, hesitant and well convinced of the futility of it all but willing to live in the shattered mirror of his mind all the same.
The first year was abstract in design. He hunted and collected money and eventually bought his first property.
(child child child. take one step and then another—never sane and never lost—this is the way)
The compound—because something that extensive could only be a compound—was once a clan house. Of course that was before civil war after civil war painted Kirigakure in decadent red and clan bloodlines became synonymous with the worst offence one could be born with.
In the end it always came down to blood.
(even akatsuki had only ever seen red.
red is blood.
red is power.
red is legacy.)
In the never-ending flux of political struggle among the leaders of Kirigakure it was simple to acquire the deeds of a compound not even the homeless wanted. A permit to open an orphanage was surprisingly easy and issued without a thought. After all, who wanted to risk taking the damaged by-product of a land bleeding itself?
(don't look. don't look.
sorry. so sorry.
turn away child, can't you see?
the Mist is bleeding as it is)
Never once did he think he could not do what he wanted. It was not arrogance that gave him the certainty that he alone stood above every hell imaginable. That he had the power to take his every desire (even if he knew he no longer was sane enough to care).
It rumbled within.
(red fire and endless chasms: the world lived on and he knew the axis of calamity)
In the midst of dust-coated halls and stained walls of what would become his home Naruto utilized his most familiar jutsu. Bushins of every nature—mizu, shadow, earth, cloud, sand—were summoned with enough hands to repair the compound. Their nature and diversity was such that though it was obvious he was not from Mizu it could not be said with any certainty from just where he did originate from.
The first year was the easiest.
He knew once he finally opened the compound to the orphans of Mizu—snow-soft Haku had always been alone—his headhunting days would end. He—an orphan himself—knew many ways to stretch a coin but eventually even that would end. He needed a way to funnel a steady income to the orphanage—he'd already seen two so-called orphanages in Mizu with reed-thin children and bellies too unused to food to know the difference. The Mizukage had neither the funds nor the interest to worry about dying children with no use but to cry on the earth.
(save me save me save me save me)
This was also remarkably easy too compensate for.
Men made their fortune making/growing/selling what someone else wanted. But men also spend lifetimes learning all they needed to succeed. In this he was different. He had a thousand hands, a thousand minds, a thousand hours to learn all he needed in the span of a day. And when he knew what he wanted he had a thousand helpers to give rise to a thousand projects.
His children—and even if he did not know them yet or they him they were already his—would know refuge.
Haku would have smiled.
(save me save me)
And when the doors opened and his hands stretched across the alleyways of Mizu he knew he would have found Haku given the chance.
The first year was the hardest in many ways.
Too many children bitter and weary enough to know no stranger offered anything without a price. Children too scared to believe and too weak to live in anywhere but shadows. In some ways they were more broken than he and perhaps they knew that as well—like having recognized like—when they followed him home.
(save me, still they cried)
The first year was the easiest.
His hands were soft and silent as his mind stretched across Mizu and found the scarred children of the bloodline clans that had been turned away from every door. This was his promise to Haku. It was not to say he concentrated solely on these children but it was by far easier to find them.
He did not know what he was, having discarded what he had been, only that he simply was. His power was such that none could hide from him, least of all those given power of their own. It made those of a chakra-latent birthright easier to find in the shadows of Mizu.
The first year was the easiest.
(save me, they hoped in the darkest of shadows.
still here and not yet gone)
This was the time before politics and attention, when he was just another idealist who didn't understand not all lives were meant to be saved. A fool that thought he could control wild needy children. An employer whose staff inquiries were turned away before they could be uttered—after all who would willingly take up the compound of one of the most infamous bloodline clans? The rumored shinobi clan who served as the hands of one of the former Mizukages and credited for instigating the first in a series of civil wars.
It was no surprise no one had contested his acquisition of the compound.
The first year was the hardest.
(save me, they raged.
not here but not yet gone)
He'd been broken too recently to ever consider being whole once more. He knew he was mostly made of shards from a broken world. That is who he was. But it was also true he'd never been stingy with what was his, even if he knew he could scarcely afford to give away anymore of himself. What did it matter anyway? It wasn't like he'd ever be whole again.
He was still foolish.
He gave himself away. It was perhaps because love was not something gutter children had ever been gifted freely that they understood the true value of what he gave them.
Naruto loved them.
(save me!)
It was also not to say his love was the end to their torment. This they taught them: there were millions of ways one could break. And because of this some of his rage left him.
(twisted and torn.
caricatures of children and imitations of humanity. never quite real.)
These children were shadow and glass, harsh and bright and loud and desperate. In a way—Kami being the only one that could have predicted it—he had been made for them to hold.
And because they were broken and he loved them, he gave them what he could of himself. He became what they needed and in his own foolish, fumbling way he was the shade that let their shadows live in the world.
He loved them. So he became what they needed. He was the hated figure with firm hands to bitter children, the protector to the weak, the mother to babes in his arms, the father that held them through nightmares, the charm that banished tormentors, the master to those who only knew how to obey, the grandfather that should have been there when parents died, the priest that forgave sins of desperation, the brother who laughed along with stupid plots, the sister that took a yard of cloth and made the clothes beautiful enough to be able to return to school with pride, the squawking aunt that held down squirming shoulders as years of dirt were scrubbed off, the mischievous savior who would unexpectatively stuff a cookie in silent months just when childish minds began to fear it was a dream. He was this and much more.
(save me? here and here.
take a step and then another)
In the first year he found many broken children. More often than naught he brought bloodline children, many knowing and many more clueless to their heritage, and welcomed them. They were children—and not all had bright eyes—who were all that remained of the genetic manipulation of the human genome (his mind whispered to him). So many were already broken.
(every face he saw himself, every pair of hateful eyes he found his twin.
all that he was: made again and again in child's eyes)
So many would only ever be able to function as ninja, he realized, shattered spirits made for a shattered lifestyle.
(this is rage.)
Genji bit his arm the first time he brought him to the compound, half-wild and silver-sheened pupil marking his legacy. A malnourished boy already having lost an eye and two fingers in the name of blind justice and a rage that had never healed. In three years, soap and time will finally reveal the brilliant blond hair of a boy—gennin, he cried—who pounded foreign chunnin hopeful—and the clear favorite—in a match to become a Chunnin of Mizu.
(this is silence.)
Aiko is two when he finds her in a bin, four days abandoned and nearly gone. She is weak and terrified for a very long time afterwards even when the memories have long since been forgotten. Her chubby hand will always be found in his—either the original or a bushin (it's a long time before they realize how strange it is for him to be always there when they need him). Her hand remains in his long after the chubbiness fades and the elegant bones of a woman emerge. He is there when he teaches her how to cut patterns in cloth and sow perfectly tiny stitches.
(this is fear)
Mai is thirteen—nearly fourteen she yells sometime in the three hours of their acquaintance—and bleeding as no child should. She is afraid and she is brave and even if she cries she thinks it can be forgiven this one time. Mai is thirteen and bleeding and a mother for all of 12 minutes before she dies.
Mai is not fourteen and not a child and she only wishes she was also not jealous of the haven she saw in her own child's future.
(this is what it means to be forgotten)
Dai doesn't know how old he is, doesn't know his family name, doesn't know the last time he ate, and only wishes he didn't know what his elder brother's back looked like when he finally became a mouth that could not be fed.
It takes him sixteen months to stop hording food under his bed and another twelve to finally believe his last meal wont be the last.
(this is what it means for harsh reality to bed a childhood)
Yuriko is a happy child, bright in the shadow of her two elder siblings. She doesn't remember a mother or father and only knows abstractly what it means when periodic flu epidemics sweep through Mizu. She doesn't remember the epidemic that took her parents nor two other siblings. She does remember the next epidemic to sweep the village and the weak coughs of her sister.
She remembers feverish brows and blurry eyes and most importantly sure hands and speckled blue and violet eyes that fed her sister water and poultices. She remembers fearful days spend in flux and the bright clarity of waking to see her sister smiling down at her. She remembers asking the blue eyes to teach her.
(this is defiance)
Kisho is proud. Proud of surviving, of taking, of being stronger. He is rebellious and destructive and selfish. He fights Naruto of the Blue Eyes and runs away five times in the four months. He is sick and shivering and spitting blood and so happy when Naruto finds him each time and brings him back.
(this is what it means to be alone)
Mutsumaru has spent a lifetime looking. Looking through forbidding windows, looking at faces, looking at hands, looking at children satchels, looking at bored old men sipping tea, looking at giggling men with orange novels in hand. He has spend a lifetime looking and looking and can't contain his joy the first time Blue Eyes sits him down and shows him the characters of his name. His looking will never end but at least this time he can finally look and understand that secret code—language, Blue Eyes murmurs, kanji—that hides everything from him.
(this is what it means to be branded)
Yutaka is more broken than most. Gills at the neck and faintly blue skin mark him more obvious than most. The fact that he survived long enough for Naruto of the Blue Eyes to find him is a miracle. But he is brilliant as only child weapons are prophesized to be so Naruto takes care to spend as much time as possible with him because he has learned from a lifetime of ending brilliant shinobi. Brilliance is nothing without a reflection to give to the world.
These are the lives that are reborn, remade, recreated. They are heavy and tangled and dark with a past that will live in each of them. But they are his.
Naruto has found his children.
And he has come Home.
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