Chapter Seven: Bridge to Canaan
The King in Red
~*~
A cage of red and gilt; ignorance-forged, bars of white chitin drip with spit and fluid amber. The vines of madness twine about the pillars as he walks in between.
"And here I am, and here I go, onward and back, never and ever and remember again!" the man sings, and feathers fall from his face, veiled in the down of owls. His hair though, bright like sunlight, cannot be forgotten; it forces its way through to shine.
"Hello, Niki!" the man cries, and before him the cage shakes, and the flower in the corpse says hello.
~*~
Naruto can't appreciate gardening.
He knows that it is an art, but it is not his art; too long a vessel for death and destruction, he has no choice but to let his fingers be guided. Too easily does he snip through the tender stems; his hands were not meant to nurture. Naruto clacks his fingers together and looks down at them, the bone-like phalanges like jointed canines. He will never play music again, or form the seals of a jutsu, or write his name.
Slowly, he knows though, that those things don't matter; he doesn't need the names and lines and classifications of the normal people again. In the garden, among the blood-dried sunflower stakes and wire, he is all he will ever need to be.
The last driblets of sanity leak out of his skull and he is gorged on wonder.
~*~
The walls are slick with salt and tears, like seawater all overflowing, but there is no tide to control this current; it writhes in the deep, unseeing, drowning in the sargasso that covers the floors.
Amid the cries of seagulls that never end, their hoarse throats screaming out to freedom, there he sinks in the sargasso sea. Handless, armless, legless. Helpless.
The water floods into his lungs and his hopeless smile rips wide as it forces out all the air in him and suffocates his brain in drowning salt, drying his insides out like a rotting cucumber.
And yet he does not die.
~*~
There were things in Konoha now; things no one could explain. The world had tilted upside down, dangled from a string, and the string was spinning, spinning. Nothing was the same.
And even as the ninja of Konogakure prepared to defend themselves against the coming invasion, they knew: there was something else in their home. There was pestilence in their corner. And like any good ninja, they used it against their enemies well, even as it infected them.
But finally a Leaf nin was taken, and steps had to be taken.
~*~
Hayate Gekko had meant to be the examiner of the second exam, but had been lost in the labyrinthine tunnels of the ANBU T & I department. Even though he had been part of the Black Ops for near three years, his sense of direction there was shot; former landmarks and hidden etchings had been filled in or covered by the winding undergrowth, the vines that never seemed to end.
He wasn't much concerned. His katana came from its sheathe and cleaved through the plants, which whined thinly before retreating to the edges of the passage. Once he saw something . . . strange; like an opened orange, but it was red and hidden in a wall, behind a particular patch of green he cut through. Then it fled, and Hayate snorted and moved on.
It took him another hour, but he finally made it through and wound up back outside. Irritating, but the blonde would probably have things in hand; he had never shown the slightest hint of incompetence before, although reliability or reasonability didn't exist there in any appreciable manner.
Finally deciding that if Naruto wanted his help, he would have told him the way through the vines, Hayate went home for the day, to the apartment he kept mostly to himself, with Yuugao as an occasional visitor.
He set his blade to the side within easy reach; his handkerchief, which he always kept on hand; and his pills, beside his bed, on the rough wooden stand there. He took two of the pills, swallowed them dry, and ignored the scraping, red-hot sensation as they passed by the blockage in his throat and esophagus.
Then he went to sleep.
~*~
It was in his dreams that it first showed; the gentle brushing of something against his skin, as the ache in his throat slowed and vanished, leaving him chill, and yet, strangely content.
He woke up, and went on with his life for the few weeks he had remaining.
~*~
At first unimportant, the flock of crows and ravens grew until, abruptly, they all disappeared. There was no warning to it; evidently, a ninja team had been dispatched to trim the population, and had gotten a little overzealous. The relief from the constant cawing and crowing was palpable, so no one minded.
Then the doves and thrushes came, in cooing symphony. There were so many that they clogged the streets, dying easily when anyone stepped on them or kicked them out of the way. The hollow bones that held them together snapped with ease, and soon enough anyone who had anywhere to go had gotten used to crushing a path out of the flocking birds. A grand total of a week passed before a merchant citizen grew exhausted of the birds and paid for a B-Rank mission, this one open and blunt. The birds vanished again, leaving only various amounts of discolored stains and piles of crumpled feathers in corners and on rooftops.
And then, four days later, owls came. They soared silently out of the sky and surrounded the town, encamped on its walls and roofs and wires, making a city above the human city; a city of birds and air. Their heads swiveled on loose, hollow necks, and followed the passage of those below with a wide-bored gaze. For eight hours, every citizen of Konoha had ten thousand spectators; then the Hokage put his foot down, and every bird in town died. Even pets. Sarutobi and his village had taken enough from the benighted creatures.
No more birds came. The town was silent again, filled with stray feathers and the stains of avian blood over concrete and asphalt. The breeze that had carried the birds to Fire Country never stopped, curiously. Konoha got used to the southward wind soon enough.
~*~
Hayate never really considered the past, always too consumed with the present to care; slowly dying does that to a body. But the Monday he walked towards the Hokage Tower along the abandoned T & I facility, he found it again.
It came in a gust of feathers, stirred up by the ever-present wind. They twirled past, and Hayate considered them just long enough to catch a flash of something in between the feathers.
Being Hayate, he forgot about it and went on to the tower.
~*~
Next Tuesday he sat in bed, one-twenty on the clock beside him on the shelf, and thought about the dancing feathers. What was it he saw? Like a . . . face?
~*~
He managed to draw it out eventually on his wall, scrawling it into the old yellow wallpaper with a fork he had conveniently found under his dresser. Almost fondly he remembered having shoved it under there with his foot as Yuugao knocked at the door. She was a fastidious woman, and he wasn't about to let her find out he was so careless with his eating utensils.
It was lucky he had a fork, it echoed it perfectly; the odd triple-drawn way the . . . face had looked, rough and unhewn and forgotten, he couldn't exactly remember . . . what had it looked like? He chewed on it like a old bone, adding scratch marks to the fork. Then he spat it out. Damn thing tasted really bad. He supposed he should go wash his mouth out.
About four hours later, he did, and stole some of his shampoo from the shower so he could add a little color to the face on the wall. It had been blue, right?
~*~
Hayate looked curiously at the letter someone had shoved under his door. He supposed his vacation time might have ticked off a few heads in Administration, but he had never really used any of it to his knowledge. They could wait a bit, he deserved some time to think.
He looked at the sender, noted absently it was some Hiruzen person, and then tossed it into the trash. He didn't take letters from people he didn't know. Standard shinobi protocol, right?
~*~
Two days later he stood in front of the Third Hokage and bowed his head, apologizing for misunderstanding the letter. Forgiving man that he was, the head ninja let it go with a faint look of disappointment on his face.
Funny, Hayate had never realized the Hokage had the name Hiruzen. It was one of those irrelevant pieces of trivia he had never bothered to learn. People's names bothered him, he never could remember them.
"Yes, Hokage-san." he said bowing, hopefully covering up his confusion at not remembering this man's name either. He'd thought such an important name, at least, would be memorized. Ah well.
Absent-mindedly, he made a mental note to pick up some silver paint from the construction depot on his way home, to add some depth. He managed to do so at seven o'clock sharp, and patted himself on the back for his timeliness.
~*~
He sat outside and watched the swirls of feathers, now almost continuous around his apartment, and especially focused on the places where they were thickest; where there was the highest chance of catching a glimpse of his subject again. His memory of it was razor-sharp, he could almost feel the lines under his hands . . .
There it was! He snapped around and it was gone.
Hayate rubbed his forehead in frustration. He had almost seen it, a . . . shape? In the twining of the feathers?
~*~
Sarutobi sat in his office, reclined in his long chair, watching the play of the wind outside. He blew a ring of smoke from out of his pipe, the aged smoke agreeing pleasantly with his equally old throat.
He closed his eyes, and let the oldest of his memories play over his mind; of his teachers, and everything he had left behind.
Nostalgia.
~*~
Hayate smiled proudly at his wall, the figure now complete along it, standing out in blue shampoo and silver paint, yellow wallpaper and the deep brown scratches of the wooden wall behind it.
It was most of an eye, and the corner of his mouth. The rest of it was crude, roughly drawn feathers, looking more like crude leaves than real feathers. It was enough, though. He had never gotten a straight look at it anyway. It was so . . . much that it had taken his breath away to even glimpse at it.
He sat down, smiled, and exhaled, leaning back and thinking of things. Mostly just things. He couldn't remember what they were about.
~*~
Lighthouse-shy
Just off of shore
Traveler of corners
Maybe pretend
Stay with me here
Friend
~*~
Senselessly, Naruto danced in the garden, body shaking from exhaustion and dirt caked on his feet, but he kept on dancing, kept on moving. There was no rhythm or beat or organization; he moved. Flailed. Swung about. Thrashed in the air like dying salmon, as they leapt upstream to give seed and die, like the fat fertilizer they were. It was the purpose of life; the next generation. Move onward. Upward. Outward. Grow out and become magnificient. Sprout new things to grow.
And as Niki-Jiki smiled, the petals moving in a circle on his sunflower head, Naruto turned his head away from the sunflower man in the dance, and smiled too. His eyelids slid open and revealed nothing, the empty, gaping sockets revealing that once again the blonde had felt the need to relieve himself of his eyes and his sight.
But then something burned in the back, a hunger and furor so deep it tanned the back of his eyelids; a flash of piercing red. The red in the white of a dying man's eyes, the red of the blood that spills out of his heart when it's pierced. Dead red. Crazy red. The red of dying worlds.
Naruto smiled, and Niki-Jiki smiled, and the boy began to laugh as he went on dancing, his sweat steaming off of his skin and filling the air with the scent of fresh-mixed kerosene.
~*~
Are you and I, are we and he, is he and I, to thee and me?
And are we not so much the same?
Friend of mine?
