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Double updates in a week? O: Why yes, yes it is.
Interlude : Perception
/ pəˈsɛpʃ(ə)n / · noun
the way in which something is regarded, understood, or interpreted.
The first time Kara met Uchiha Obito as his younger self, she was surprised.
In his classic onyx eyes and his loose posture, she saw no trace of the man that he would become. He was warm like a summer's wind in the chilly spring, the heat that danced across her skin like the sun's rays which signified the beginning of dawn. He was almost painfully bright to look at when he beamed, completely unarmed against her, so trusting that her fingers tremble whenever she tried to reach for a weapon.
The jinchūriki could not, even as an experienced killer, end someone so devastating intemerate with such tainted hands. She cannot bring herself to kill his innocence even though Uchiha Obito and Tobi were the same man.
It hurts her to see the happiness that exuded from the boy who was loud in nature, larger than life, his actions wide and proud with the careless smiles he adorned. He was untainted and diaphanous – everything she used to be – and she wondered how he was reduced to a man that sought for his old happiness that could only be achieved in delusions.
The time-traveller then turns to look at the girl who stands next to him like a dutiful friend and she sees the daylight. She apprised the kind eyes coloured in warm wood and shaped by mellow features, her short brown hair that flutters in the breeze and content in nature. She glimpses the compassion she weaves within her glowing hands as her humbled smile draws her lips into a gracious arc and she relaxes in the mezzo decibels that she speaks. It reprimands but never condescends, always nurturing and filled with heartfelt care. Nohara Rin was gentle beauty in all it encompassed, truly fitting for a family that was famed for its kindness.
And it was then the girl understands how well and hard Uchiha Obito fell.
She does not miss the flush of his cheeks when she compliments him and his eyes that shift back and forth from the ground to her visage. She sees him shake for reasons that differ from hers and the growing devotion that he tries to bury in his heart. His humour mixes with her sweetness like fine wine as they fall into natural steps with one another, but the subconscious distance she places between sours. Nohara Rin holds his liquid love in the wells of her hands and it slips between her fingers in translucent reds as she sought for the affections of another man.
Her kindness makes rejection mild and harmless when it was meant to be a sharp knife that cuts threads, and it was ineffective in purging the emotions that the boy cannot suppress. It blossoms from a mundane crush that starts off small, before evolving into something bigger and unstoppable as she waters the false hope that she unintentionally implants within him as she shows the gentleness that she extends to all. It was saddening to see that he refuses to admit to the unrequited love that he sees and she doesn't know how to think about when she has never experienced love of that sort.
(And yet, something pounds dully in the back of her head, trying to arouse a narrative she doesn't grant.)
But in Uchiha Obito, she also finds herself. She finds her old persona that she could not fully replicate and her old foolish dreams that she discarded like refuse. Present Uchiha Obito was everything she was not and she yearned to go back to, wanting to possess the innocence and ignorance she finds in his brightness, traits that fled her a long time ago. She accepts the fact they will never return; like how she acknowledges that it will still be his hands that break the things he tries to fix.
When he shouts about his ambitions, she thinks about the man who no longer dreamed and was only driven by the will to reunite a team that was broken by deaths. She links it to her own laconism where she will never utter the same words, for her outdated ambitions no longer belonged to her person. She lost the right to say them when they were sullied by her failures and she cannot speak of them through bitten lips. She brushes off those faded dreams as if she was some wanderlust child, but the only place she ambled were the acres of burnt fields.
When he arrives late, her memories were flooded with a certain scarecrow and it despairs her because she has never asked for the reason of his chronic tardiness. She took it as his life choice or his means to thwart expectations, never realizing that it was so much more. Uzumaki-Namikaze Naruto sees bits of Uchiha Obito scattered in her teacher – his imperceptible influence suddenly choking – and she finds that the copycat-nin might have wished for the same things as well, repeating his outrageous excuses as if to relive the past.
She was caught in the odylic force of his naivety – like a moth drawn to a flame – but the bitterness that accumulates in her gut in anything but tender. She becomes intimate with her green monster when it reared its ugly head, her jealousy so wretched and wrong that she feels ashamed. She should not yearn for something that was never hers and she cannot lose what she never has, and the spot in Team Minato was exactly that.
They parallel to her old team like carbon copies with different faces, and sometimes she almost mistakes their identity and almost calls out for unborn names. She catches herself before the last syllable slips but the damage is done and her tongue bleeds. They were their own person but some characteristics coincide: like the prodigy, the medic and the fool. They bear the ironic seven like a tilted half-completed tomb, their fragile resonance petering out into the tragic, betwixt and reformed. Some roles tend to swap and blur but the gist of it remains; and she swears if she closes off her hearing with them in view, she could almost hear similar banter of varied voices fill her ears like sweet noise.
It was painful to wish upon herself the past, but it is all she has when she misses them so much.
She constantly sees onyx eyes in greys and green in browns, the confusing disparate colours staining optic with flecks that blurs and she cannot detach them. She cries and laughs in an empty space alone when she sees them together for the first time because she can only observe misery in the loop of events that always seemed to befall on the luckiest number, as if to mock their fortune for being able to strike the maleficent. But the scourge of details matter little to her when all she wishes was for them to gather under the thrice-damned banner of aggregate again, powerful and proud, and not just deluded apparitions that lie next to her in the dead of the night.
She was not selfless like the Nohara. If anything, she was so selfish. Her returning sometimes felt like the pursuit of her own happiness rather than the peace of the world like a grieving, spoilt child that could not accept the consequences of the world that she left behind. She supposes a part of it was true since she awakens to the same desperation and pale faces almost every day, her body leaden as she struggles to breathe through choked gasps. Her own sanctuary is a small apartment where she can be herself but it was almost always barren of personal effects.
She could never compare to the team that was glorious like gleaming stars, and her place was beneath their illumination and in the dark shadows where no light will ever reach. They aren't plagued with demons like she was and she wants it to stay that way.
I do not belong, she reiterates time and time again.
(But inside her, it begs another story.)
Kara ignores the paradox that light cannot exist without darkness and plasters a smile on her face, feigning the ignorance that kills her faster than she can comprehend.
Deep inside, she wishes that they would hate her.
But they don't and it makes her so happy and depressed at the same time. They welcome her with open arms, no signs of forcefulness and an abundance of zest. They smile and introduce themselves and extend invitations to her (except one) and it was overwhelming for the traitorous heart she tries to kill.
She can't return the hug that Nohara Rin envelops her whenever they meet after a mission. She can't bring her arms to wrap around her living warmth and not think about how she will die incomplete, where her mercy will come in the form of a crossfire and a hand. Naruto wants to cover the medic-nin's ears from the sound of chirping birds and shield her eyes from the blinding crackle – but she cannot, just as she was never meant to reveal the future that she knows.
She cannot tell Obito about how he will be crushed, rocks pressing down on one side but that will not be his end and how he might think his last moments come with sound of tumbling earth; so loud that it shakes the ground he lies on and then there will be silence. But that silence only grants impermanence and then madness – she was condemned to witness her death and watch this beautiful team break under the glare of accursed crimson eyes that bleed tears, condemned to watch as purple marks turn into bruises under the sick pale tone of skin.
For the many things she was condemned for, she thinks she deserves it because she was not a good person nor was she altruistic. She deserves to break just as they fall from their united glory, but unlike their shattering, hers would be another noise in the void. She would be the bystander as the pieces fall into place, broken pawns by broken kings, and only when her side of the board was set, she will play.
What is more important: your part of the play or the play itself?
The Kyuubi no Kitsune once asked, in the dim room where his words of wisdom rang through the mindscape. His experiences span across infinity and he was patient, waiting for the response she must give. His fur glows in reddish-gold hues, his lying posture a majesty as his nine tails sway languidly behind him. She finds herself replying simply in contradictory tones in both heart and mind, her cerulean fixated on vermillion eyes.
The play.
(The actors.)
He does not refute her answer even though both of them knew that one was often sacrificed for the other. He grasps at her motives delicately with his claws and he knows that she will commit to the same path. His host understood the need for sacrifices – she was the epitome of one that lived through dozens – but he does wonder if she can stay at hand.
Perhaps, he then muses, it is only in contradictions that she can be truthful.
The ancient knows that she seeks happiness but it was not something she could find in remembrance. But memory was all she has – the vestiges she desperately clung onto – to give validation to the destroyed timeline that made her the person she was to seek such a lucrative happiness. She brands their atrophy of life as her biggest failures and grips onto it so tightly that it hurts her but it is the same pain that keeps her from stagnating.
In her own small body, she was the only beholder of the strength that her precious people grew to have in the war, fighting against their own monsters in their small ways. She was the only proof that they existed, that they were true and it gave meaning to the reason why she lived. The jinchūriki was made up of fragments of personalities and styles that she picked up; for the way she thought, fought and acted was all that she learnt from each of them, and without it, she would be quite lost.
Uzumaki-Namikaze Naruto loved the actors so much that she willingly became vengeance's creature, descending from the point where she was once empathy's acme. She was trodden down and beaten up in plights one too many for a woman of twenty-two autumns, becoming maddeningly invested in changing things.
But for all the cruelty that she has to commit, the Kyuubi no Kitsune sees the strength that keeps her back straightened in the face of adversity and the benevolence that she attempts to bury. She tries to shut out her optimism that still grapples for duration and her need to connect with someone burns strong. Her capacity to love was still boundless despite her tragedies, even extending to a demon as detestable as he. Even though she was more reluctant, she always made space, always willing to help and willing to break.
He witnesses her determination as she takes up a weapon but he admires the kindness that makes her fingers tremble and drop the kunai back into its pouch. He glimpses her old empathy when she eventually brings her arms up to wrap around the Nohara descendent and the way she relates herself to the Uchiha with numerous parallels. He knows the facts she hides and some that she has given away but more than anyone, he sees the strength that burns within her soul, no matter how small the flame; blue and orange fire flickering and growing.
She was broken just as she was valiant, and his red eyes train on her figure, giving her leeway to her own honesty – and Kurama sees the things that Naruto doesn't. Or perhaps they were emotions that she had to deny to keep herself from falling off the brink.
So he asks:
What is a play with an empty stage?
His question catches her momentarily by surprise and she seemed conflicted as she grabbed a fistful of fabric like it was her heart. She knows her own insanity for the actors as well but she chooses to direct his query another way.
And what is a stage, if there is no play?
They stand in perpetual silence.
(Nothing was the answer to both.)
…
He was proclaimed a prodigy by many and dysfunctional by lesser men, but sometimes he wishes the latter was true if it could give reason to things he could not comprehend.
But Hatake Kakashi scarcely cares for the former statement; they were mostly empty words picked out from the grapevine, ballooning simple facts into its own animal through the distortion of traveling sentences and the human tendency of exaggeration. He was what he thinks he was; a valuable lesson he learns after an unfortunate run-in with suicide that makes him a pitiful orphan. (He laughs miserably.) It was an impression that stays with him when they decided that a child was to blame for their parent's mistakes and it is one he will never forget after too many scorching remarks and crocodile tears.
(He doesn't outwardly show it – Ninja were never supposed to – but his heart undeniably grieves for his father, a man he dearly respected, and his anger is well directed at who had exploited his blind loyalty. He suspects that the emotions will never fade (and he was right) but sometimes he doesn't realize how much that one decision affects him.)
He does not think he is a prodigy.
Presumptuous and loosely used nominations mean little to him when he stands beside a true genius, one who he reveres for his artistry in creation and intelligence. Kakashi does not think he was overshadowed by his teacher when he tries to make the Jōnin's genius his own, and he hopes that he can reach the same zenith that he climbs towards.
Namikaze Minato was incomprehensible; understandably for a prodigy who was bound to have their own unique quirks to make up for their brilliant minds – and they come in fascinating albeit terrifying forms. The boy swears he has never seen someone as fanatical or obsessed as him when it comes to Fūinjutsu (– sans one redhead, but he tries to ignore her as she was more incomprehensible and infuriatingly warm and it scares him). The man can spend tireless hours on one end to complete a single jutsu – his greatest invention – working without sleep or food to painstakingly create his own sealing language and dimensions to ensure its success. It takes him a long time but he gets there, and the Elemental Nations tremble before his moniker and his distinct kunai that cuts faster than one can blink. It was mesmerizing to see fear etched on faces as he flashes in and out of the battlefield like God's thunder, and he wonders how ancient scriptures imbued on parchment, ink compacted into a tag, could bring forth such terror.
It gives reason to the intensity of his curiousness, for there were materials – scrolls, techniques and kekkei genkai alike – that he has yet to discover and learn, and it often leaves him frustrated at his limited knowledge. Minato tells him that he was young and he should take his time but he can only muster more scepticism than acceptance at the given explanation. The average life expectancy was a Shinobi during war was common knowledge and devastatingly short – bright flames that burn out quickly – and his age, even at ten autumns, meant that he had lived out nearly half of it. He was mortal and it dictated that his time was finite, facts that wrap around his throat like bruising fingers when he witnesses his comrades fall. The accumulating names on the memorial don't change and while he dances with death whenever duty calls, he has no intention to be its constant, willing partner.
His sensibility drives him to want to learn more, to run faster and hit harder, and before he realizes it, his own mild obsession forms. He devours the information he can get his hands on and he starts questioning everything with the intent to understand. Just knowing wasn't enough, for that was the stream of an empty-headed academic, and he desires to decipher each jutsu from the point of release to its formation and change. It lures him into the intricacies of Ninjutsu and he finds himself hooked; making the subject his principle and it builds the path he will later walk.
(This obsession compounds into a habit and it becomes of him. His collective hard work and curiosity pays off and his label as a genius stands, but they denounce his efforts by saying that it was natural since he was his father's son. It leaves him bitter at first, but he remembers there were better opinions to seek. As long as the man thinks he was capable of being the Hokage's sharpest and most devastating sword, he was content.)
But those are just technical things that he will eventually grasp and there were far more complicating things than tardiness and switching of personalities with a snap.
It was not Obito's unfathomable tardiness that can stretch to hours or Kushina-nee's mysterious hair that could float while splitting into nine different sections that confuses him. (He would rather die than admit that there was a point in time where he wondered if she put gravity seals in her hair. He knew his hair defied gravity, but hers was extreme.)
No – the most perplexing person he had ever set his eyes upon was a girl who he fought on their first meeting and one that fell before his kunai.
Yet she was competent and able, smashing any preconceived notions he might have had of any supposed weaknesses into unrecognizable bits. She proved herself to be worthy of her new rank of Chūnin with her speed and skills despite being two years younger, wiping the floor with everyone or at least enough to hold a fight. She held herself with elegance in her style, each movement like flowing water but cutting like a tempest, changing from rigid to soft stances as the situation dictates. It felt like an amalgamation of many styles rather than just one; speaking of different personalities with each transition – brawler, dignified, speed, crazed and grace – utterly mesmerizing as she embodied each one to her core, limbs animated with sole devotion to perform it with finesse.
His teacher once said that he found her fighting style to be 'beautiful' and he concurs, but he would like to add 'brutal', 'lethal' and possibly 'demonic' to the list. If the bruises he was sporting after one spar were anything to go by, her lanky limbs hid deceptive strength and her short stature did not mean she had qualms flipping someone twice her size and using their momentum as her guide. She did not hold back – a quality he respects – and she dishes out pain equally to all. She took pain similarly without complaint, always getting up, and saying 'again'.
However, training ethics and flexible body aside, she was obnoxious. She was loud and bright as day, finding a budding friendship with Obito and reaching his level of annoyance with ease. She found every opportunity to tease the poor Uchiha and spite him concurrently (a feat that he was mildly impressed by) and her only saving grace was that she was capable of being serious (aka shutting up) when necessary and that she was punctual.
But she was more than what met the eye – for a supposedly rambunctious kunoichi she portrayed herself to be, her footsteps were surprisingly silent outside of combat.
When she moved in the clearing outside of practice, the leaves barely crunched beneath her feet. They were undisturbed by her movements as she brushed past and it bore a closer resemblance to Minato's stride rather than Obito's heavy gait. She did not wear even a whiff of perfume while Rin still did on occasion, not caring much for her appearance except the bare minimum. She screamed experience – but from where, he always asks – and he wonders if he will ever get an answer.
Perhaps if he knew the dwellings of her experience, he would stop the fear that still fringes his mind. He cannot shake off the feeling that she knows him: every facet of truth, his dark history, his nightmares and thoughts, every bit of him that spans into the future like a manual already written and one that she has read. She seems to expect things from him – things he does not understand and yet still wants to meet – because she is always staring at him like he was someone else (but not his father, he realizes belatedly), capable of being better and reaching greater heights and she wants him to be that person.
Like she wants his leg to kick faster and meet the arm she already lifts, to twirl the blade a certain way to clash with hers that descends. Unknowingly, she was the one who sets the rhythms in their spars, subconsciously guiding him to leave lesser openings, to hit harder and move faster, to the extent where he feels exhilarated and breathless, a feeling that only she can grant in mock simulation. And at the end of it –
It scares him. Petrifies even.
That she has that hold, that knowledge of his future potential, like she knows everything.
She seemed so sure. She moved with absolute certainty, treading the path that was already paved while his journey felt like a haze with grass, trees, graves and darkness, left alone without a compass or map, where he will find neither friendly faces nor directions.
(The scariest thing perhaps was how quickly he comes to trust her despite not wanting to. It was begrudging but she has her ways to worm into his heart and mind, coaxing him to open up to her, to lay his organ in the palm of her hands. Somehow, he feels like she will never abuse it as she holds it so gently and keeps it in a box, fashioned for safe keep.)
But the conjectures were made and he becomes more perceptive to her reactions; like the occasional dim flickers of the quiet calm she conceals in her jovial vermillion, things that were made known to him when she cannot control them.
He realizes how truthful her expression might have been the first time they met and the prospect of it unnerves him even more. It was not the tortured look that confounds him but rather the fact that he has never seen it again; for she was always grinning and seemingly unburdened by the bleakness of war.
But if that was her unguarded and her true self, he hesitates to think, why did she have such a tortured expression in the first place?
He concedes that he knows little about her or her past.
He cannot explain why tortured was the first term that comes to mind, but it was probably the tell-tale reds that she bore within her sockets that gave him the connotation. He doesn't think there was a colour more vivid than her eyes in that instance, for it was akin to the shade of newly spilt blood and intensified by the tears that welled. He was no stranger to the hue; he sees it on his hands when he slits a throat and on the ground where it spreads and dye familiar silver.
(It was etched in his memory that one fateful night, and it thunders in the background while his body goes cold; he still wonders if he wasn't enough for Him to stay and that thought makes him feel extremely insignificant.)
It was an ugly colour that hid corpses and bones with too many deaths and afflictions, one that witnessed so much violence that she was a perennial reflection of it. That gaze was more intense than the veterans of the Second Shinobi War that once lectured them and it didn't make sense because they were adults while she was a child, and a child should never be capable of such a look. (Never ever. No, just no.)
A look of so much guilt, of so much angst unbefitting of an eight year old that he involuntarily admits that he feels sympathy for her. That he would, with a shaky breath, confess that he would never wish it upon anyone, especially if they were younger them him. She gave the sinister impression that she lived through thousands of incidents but it was not possible if time were constant.
The last time he checked, time was.
There was only one war in their time and they were in the midst of it, and it was already something he came to hate with a passion. He cannot erase the monstrosities he has seen and the kills he has made. He cannot remove the imaginary blood he sees on his hands or silence their screams; cannot drown out the image of hundreds of bodies littering the ground beneath the Great Village. Like every other war-weary Shinobi on either sides of the field, he would have to live with it. (He thinks it is ironic that as professionals that make a living off death to be afraid and haunted by death.) The most damaging effect of war was not its death toll or its ending ruin; it was that it turned children into warriors – perfect representations of unquestioning and apathetic soldiers – that dispatched with increasing efficiency as they were exploited to obey. They were the obvious results of war, alienated from the next generation that would never know the losses that they have went through.
(He never wants to picture anyone in the middle of the battlefield, blood-soaked and hands shaking.
But he has an inkling that she was not spared of the scenario.)
And she seemed to reflect those thoughts although she tries not to.
Her ability to hide her own pain astounds him and he was wearing a physical mask. Her figurative was far more impressive than a piece of fabric, for hers like crafted porcelain in the hands of a master: painted smiles on untainted canvas, almost perfected if not for a small smudge.
Even though he sees the imperfections, he scantly cares. He prefers her feigned happiness to her anguish even if it was a lie. He would rather she pretend until she believed in her own act wholeheartedly than ever see her cry. Decidedly, her stupid smiles were more tolerable than her frowns and her tears of laughter were infinitely better than her heart-breaking sobs. He doesn't ever want to see that expression ever again.
He just doesn't want the confident and lively girl she attempts to be ruined by what she hides. It was easier to deal with her cheekiness rather than a girl he cannot console and she was a good sparring partner. She might have a penchant for having secrets (in which she does) and he might never know them but he settles for the fact that she probably will be around for a long time.
He won't be confiding in her any time soon but that was fine.
He doesn't think he will ever understand the enigma that Kara was.
But ever-so-begrudgingly, he will accept her.
(And that, he does.)
Fun fact: You don't know how important dialogue is until you write nearly none.
And Trivia: I really like dramatic irony.
I felt the need to make up for the fact that the previous chapter was kind of crappy. I mean, I went back to read it again and edit, and might I say, I was questioning myself. I did want to wait for the sweet 300 follows, but I decided - meh. I'm just going to upload this, especially since it's been sitting around and letting dust settle on it. So... enjoy :D
And tell me what you think about this writing style. It's pretty new for me.
