Chapter 40:
Eris quod sum, eram quod es
A/N: It's been a while… I know I shouldn't have kept you waiting… But I'm here now. (subtly quoting Britney Spears)
A big thanks to everyone who has been following the story so far; special thanks to my faithful old readers who have been checking up on me to see if I'm alive every once in a while (you know who you are); and I'm especially interested in hearing from quite a few new readers who have started following this very, very old story only recently… Of course, my beta Nevervana and my sis were awesome as always and are to thank for bringing you this chapter. Please re-read the last few chapters to get a sense of what happened last and – enjoy the fireworks.
Killer Bee was dead.
This did not matter though.
Many more would follow suit.
The world of shinobi is, after all, ruled by death and hatred. Hating the strong. Despising the weak.
It felt good, the soothsayer thought, to be on the winning side for once.
Things were finally going her way.
Akane took a long, satisfied breath and held it in for a while. She knew it would be the last crisp-clear breath of air she would be able to take before bitter ashes filled her mouth.
The forest around them was cool and ominously quiet. By her side, Hana twitched in anxiety while Konan checked the perimeter, as silently alert as their surroundings. Around them, several bloodied bodies of Konoha patrol scouts cooled in the fresh morning breeze.
Suddenly, a thin whistle penetrated the air.
The offset rhapsody of explosions that followed made a cloud of terrified birds burst into the sky.
"He has begun," Konan said, calmly, as if delivering a verdict.
Akane nodded. She gripped Hana's hand tightly. Her eyes flashed in anticipation. With a moment's silent mental preparation, they set out from the woods.
Konoha.
The last time she had found herself in front of these gates, she had felt hope and awe. What a fool, Akane thought, sneering at her former self. And yet… there was hope in her heart this time too, however of a different kind: a hope more desperate and wild, a diligence that bordered on madness.
This was it. This was a homecoming of her own design.
No guards awaited her this time. The Konoha gates stood tall and solid, like they had for centuries. Yet now they could only stand aside and let them pass, as a mute witness to the incoming calamity.
As their small group stepped further into the city, it was hard to notice anything amiss at the first glance. Another second ticked away. Another anxious breath.
Then, the screams and the heat washed over them.
Hana reeled back for a moment, pulling Akane with her.
Like someone had turned the volume on all at once, the sudden commotion attacked her senses violently and instantly made her heart race. Wisps of black smoke rose and slowly seeped into the sky. The reek of charred buildings burned her nose and lungs from the inside. As if the world had gone mad in a splinter of a second, there was wailing in the streets, an undefined buzz coming from all sides and soaking the bloodthirsty air.
"What is this?" Hana whispered, bewildered, turning to Akane, then to Konan. "What is happening here?"
"Do not let her out of your sight." Konan eyed Akane. "She shouldn't have come in the first place."
"We had a deal," Akane said, ignoring Hana gawking at the sight beside her, "Hana is to stay within a fifty-foot radius from me at all times. And I am glad to see it respected, with regards to our long-term cooperation..."
Konan produced a small affirmative, though not overly convinced, sound. In their eyes, Akane knew, she was not an equal partner on a deal, oh no; she was but a tool, a match they needed to light the world on fire. She almost laughed at that. Did they really think that they could contain the flames?
Konan turned away from her with a wordless motion, a final warning implied in her cold gaze: Zetsu, unseen and unheard, could be somewhere on the watch, she knew. With this last exchange, Konan took off. She was to take her position, waiting on standby, until Nagato's encounter with Naruto.
Another explosion went off. Hana flinched.
"Come on," Akane ordered, jerking the younger girl to follow her lead. Still in a daze, Hana obediently followed.
The two girls moved down the streets quickly. Around them, the houses had turned red. The sky turned red. The soil turned red. The people were red, too. Underneath Akane's feet, the whole world was boiling in blood. Looking around, Konoha did not look so damn cheerful anymore.
She liked it better this way.
Happy, peaceful little village in the leaves—burning to ashes under her heel. Made into hell on earth.
And here comes Cerberus.
A terrifying growl shook the ground as a three-headed winged dog crushed an entire house under its paws. Hana jumped back in abhorrence, a mute scream in her throat, while Akane dragged her along with no fear as monsters tore the city apart limb by limb.
How fitting, Akane thought. After all, all she had known was that this world was full of demons, strangers, and monsters. And she…?
She is Akane the Soothsayer, and she has no connection to anybody in this world.
So the soothsayer walked on through the deathfield, which she had made for the price of her freedom. Dungeons, prisons, hospitals, and beds were behind her now. There was no stopping her. She could walk on and on, through a field of corpses, wherever she so wished, as the fire raged on in the streets, swallowing these meaningless faces and places, non-existent pasts and futures. A breath of power filled her lungs.
The world breaking down around her gave her peace, as it finally aligned with her own shattered inner world. Everything that she was, was now contained within a feeling, and that feeling was this—she was gripped with a strong, almost poetic sense of justice. She had come into this world through water, and she would leave it through fire. She would make a funeral pyre and jump right into the heart of it. The fire in her heart would burn her and everything around her to the ground.
Ashes rained from the burning sky, picked up by the wind and scattered around. Flames licked the flesh off of bones, so intense she felt the heat on her own skin. By tomorrow, a collection of charred corpses would fester under the ground, already forgotten names germinating under the rubble – if they ever even even had names in the first place...
"Akiiiiii!" a voice called out, shrill and panicked. "Aaaaa-kiiiiiiiiiiii!"
… and immediately, just like that, that one word cut off the breath in her lungs.
The name rang out of the burning darkness—a name which she remembered.
Aki! The voice kept calling out, broken and desperate. AKI.
Across the carpet of blood and ash, a glisten of silver reflected from the sun and shattered the air in her lungs.
Koshiro.
There was still light in his eyes.
Over the crushed remains of homes, a wasteland of wires and metal, a boy who had once loved her was tumbling over the wreckage, digging through the waste and scraps. Fresh wounds on his arms could be seen through his ripped sleeves as he dug through shards of glass and debris. Under the rubble, a pudgy, chalk-white hand protruded.
"Akiiiiii!" Koshiro kept screaming. She remembered the name.
He was looking for his baby brother.
In that moment, Akane turned away.
She didn't want to see any more. She didn't need to see any more death and violence and destruction, or suspicious eyes, or deceptive smirks, or cunning grins, or adoring sad smiles.
Because somewhere inside her there were still words, soft and loving, spoken in muffled whispers in a dark hospital room. These words cut her up with their softness and burned her with their warmth; she felt it with rising certainty and shivers on her skin, that these words had the power to rip her apart and bare her insides right open; they made her vulnerable, and so they were dangerous.
And so, hiding herself away as not to be seen, not to be spoken to, Akane forced herself to turn away from it and continue on. The soothsayer merely kept walking ahead, looking through everything ahead of her with stern yet hurt, lost, tired, such tired eyes; eyes that don't want to see anybody or anything.
Akane refused to see Koshiro, and she refused to let him see her. With a steel grip she dragged Hana away from the sight and denied herself involvement.
Koshiro… was but a memory. That's all he was. Let him stay that way. A loving, sad, beautiful memory; a brief, pure encounter of two souls. But they had already said their goodbyes a long time ago. There would not be a second time. She could not take it.
It was not a good moment for an inner crisis, but Akane was only nineteen, and she felt the heat of it far too clearly on her brimming skin.
Oh God, Akane whispered in herself, looking up at the clouds of smoke weighing down on the city, God, whoever is out there, help me, tell me, what am I even doing? If I'm wrong, stop it all now, weaken my resolve, strike me down with fear! Smother this cruel hope in my heart. Give me a sign, a glimmer of my true purpose here, and I will give up. I swear, I swear to God, I will give it up, no matter how desperate my wish is.
… and just like each and every time before, there was no answer, leaving her to her decisions and indecisions.
Thoughts tried aligning themselves in her head, yet their logical threads of sense quickly extinguished under the flooding of her emotions, and quickly she gave up on them. If she was sane or insane, right or wrong, cowardly or bold, it didn't matter—not anymore. All of this was unreal and confusing, far too grave and far too difficult, when there was but one simple, sure fact:
She was going HOME.
She had never felt surer of anything in her life.
And if she left this world destroyed in her wake… destroyed so completely, so irreversibly, if everything that a story couldn't do without just disappeared—the protagonist, the main cast, the backdrop of its capital city—it might just cement her return to her world when they crossed over.
After all, that's all that this ever was—this city was a prop, a background to the mindless performances she was putting up and putting up with. None of it was real, and if she burned it away, if she burned all of it away, if there was no stage to act upon, no scenarios to predict and play and rules to follow—she would finally be free.
"None of this is real," she reminded herself. It was a feverish chant in her skull that gave her strength. She needed to repeat it, again, constantly, she needed to remember, she needed to break away, she needed to burn this rotting world away, she needed to. If she wanted to live again.
She had been dead for far too long.
Because Akane still carried her entire world, her entire past life, inside of her, alive and breathing. Here, she was an outsider, looking in from the other side of the mirror, smiling from the other side of terror.
I need to get a grip. Akane shook her head. It was high time to stomp down the last ember of feeling and think with flat, cold clarity. A splinter of a heart in a cube of ice. She remembered being called that, once.
Throughout the whole macabre walk through the city, Hana had been as silent as a grave. Akane had almost forgotten she was even there, dragging her behind her like some sort of baggage. When they got to a secluded clearing and Akane finally stopped, Hana snapped out of her dazed state and looked around.
Akane had led them to a sheltered spot hidden behind a rock, from which they were in the viewing distance of some sort of a battle. There were two figures in the distance, with similar spiky hairstyles and similar auras of power.
Right on schedule, Akane thought. Naruto and Nagato's battle was already underway, and she had gotten them front-row seats. All they needed to do now was sit and wait for the right moment...
"Will you finally tell me what we are doing here," Hana spoke. Her voice was all shaken-up, eyes pale and vague. It was the first time she had said anything since entering Konoha.
Akane turned to her, also giving her notice for the first time since she dragged her into this mess.
"This is our way out," was all the older girl said.
"I… I don't understand."
"You will."
Akane the Soothsayer cast her hollow eyes on the ruins of the city they had walked through, looking back at the destruction she had wrought with nothing but words and apathy alone. And here she finally was.
"Isn't it funny," Akane couldn't help but chuckle at the sudden feeling of accomplishment. "A word from me, and the Akatsuki would burn down a city."
As if it had only hit her then, as if she had reached some terrifying revelation, Hana looked at her, truly looked at her. Her eyes were open and wide and this time there was not the slightest hint of confusion or concern in them—they were hurt and clear and—were they really?—afraid.
"… It's your fault that this is happening, isn't it?" she whispered.
Akane didn't reply, as if she hadn't heard her. But Hana rushed to her and grabbed her arm, making her stop and look at her.
Hana looked sick: with pain, with shock, with terror—but also, now with rising anger.
"Just… what are you doing?" Hana got in her face while Akane merely stood, calm and unfazed, gazing at the battlefield around them with an unreadable expression on her face.
"What. the. fuck." Hana screamed at her now, "do you think you're doing here! It isn't your damned place to—"
"Exactly," Akane said, raising her arms in an indifferent gesture. "And so I am not interfering."
"After all," she said, trying to sweep Hana off herself. "This would have happened anyway."
But Hana's grip got tighter. "So… So you knew this… this slaughter was going to happen," she pointed a finger at her chest accusingly, ''and you did nothing to stop it?! How is that any different!"
Akane merely looked at her with mild annoyance. Of course, she understood on some level that she herself had seen all of this a long time ago take place in the series and hence knew the illusion which she was living. She had read the manga, she had watched the anime. But it had never even occurred to her before now that, to Hana, all she had ever known was seeing and feeling this world as some sort of a reality. This must have been why the girl harboured some silly sentimental feelings, which she stupidly decided to declare at this worst possible moment. But she couldn't bother to deal with her too. She didn't want to make Hana her enemy.
"We needed this," Akane said simply, not bothering to explain herself further, not caring how it sounded in her ears. "I needed this, Hana."
Hana let go off her arm as if burned, stepping away from her. The younger girl shook her head in disbelief.
"You… You are insane."
As if seeing her for the first time Hana looked at her, boldly, straight in the eye, and asked, "Liz… what happened to you?"
. . .
What happened to her?
Akane stood quiet.
What happened to her?
She turned her head away to her in favour of the battlefield. The question made her think, or rather, reminisce.
Too much.
Far too many things had happened.
"Once," suddenly Akane said, remembering out loud. "Once, I tried to save a boy. A little Sound mongrel who had killed and robbed just like the lot of them." Her voice got thicker. "I could have died then, defending him."
Orochimaru had made that very clear: he could have snapped her neck with a flick of his wrist... but he didn't. Oh no, he hadn't used her up completely, she hadn't served her true purpose yet. So he had shown her his terrible mercy, and she had lived to see another day.
"I could have died then. I could have died, and so you would have died, and we would never even be standing where we are now. I almost jeopardized all of this," she motioned with her hand, "on that day."
Hana listened to her with attention. She declined her head, saying softly, "You were brave..."
"I was stupid."
Hana winced; the hot anger at herself in Akane's voice was scalding, her words unforgiving.
"And yet once… once I had killed a man," Akane continued, not looking at her; her eyes set in front of her firmly as if she was unable to look away from the scorching memory still fresh in her mind's eye.
"He was completely defenseless, writhing on the ground," she said, gently almost. "I couldn't bring myself to kill him in pity… but I cut him up over ten times in blind rage."
"It should have been a struggle." Akane spoke quietly, but her voice rang in the silence. "My mind should have supplied a cacophony of voices, all screeching, commanding, pleading, arguing back and forth on the value of a life… but it didn't. I knew exactly what I had to do."
A conclusion drawn with a smile, as a hint of madness shone through.
"The blood never came off."
Aghast through her story, Hana looked at her, gulping. "What?"
"It just never came off," Akane repeated as she brought her hands palms-up, as if in a trance, as if to show her, to witness what she had done. "I can still see it, all over my hands."
"What happened to me? I became my namesake. First reduced to a bird in a cage. Then a lab rat." Akane smirked, tiredly. "Well, I guess it's not much better being a snake either."
Hana looked at her in concern. "What are you even talking about?"
(I want to be human.)
"Forget it," Akane muttered, turning away.
Hana was at a loss of words, staring at her as if she had gone crazy. But once started, Akane couldn't stop herself from talking, spilling herself over, trying to justify herself, to explain herself, needing to be understood.
"Here I am a nobody," she continued with that small, sad smile on her face. "I am nobody's sister, family, or friend here. I have no one, and I am nobody. I need to go home."
(Don't you understand?)
At her desperate, pleading look, Hana's eyes softened; but she still shook her head ferociously, as if trying to shake away the lulling pull of Akane's influence from her mind.
"You think that… when we get home… we can just… pick up our lives where we left off? That it will all be the same? Just like that?"
"Exactly like that," Akane said, at once angry at the resistance. "Of course it will."
"But we won't be. We won't be the same," Hana said quietly. "At least, I know I won't."
. . .
For the first time since she started this useless jabber with Hana, Akane stood with no ready-made response, no defensive eloquence. Because Hana's words deeply frightened her—they affirmed something that she tried to bury in herself, some dark observation about her own self which she had tried to deny, which she couldn't bear hearing. Her limbs started to shake.
She had been so terrified of falling apart… because there would be no one there to help her pull herself back together. Because she was afraid of the pit of the unknown that lied in the dark, bloody colonel of her own heart, of the nothingness she might discover that is her, herself, that is her own. She had lost her world and her loss of identity with it was by far the worst loss she had ever experienced.
It was a simple truth: she had had to fall apart to break out of her old useless mold, shaped by the comforts of her world, in order to be able to create herself anew, to shape that disorder into something helpful in this world—into something sharp.
"I cant'—I can't keep doing this," Akane shook her head, unable to think anymore. "I don't understand you. What more do you want from me, huh? What do you want? Don't you want to go home?"
"You know I do!" Hana rushed to calm her down, "I do, I want it more than anything! But…"
Hana looked around them, eyes wide and terrified. Not terrified of the sight though. Terrified of her.
"But there must be another way. You… You don't have to kill them."
Akane stared at her for a moment.
Then she exploded.
"I told you… I told you," she hissed like a wasp. "I. am not killing them. I. am not the one. I .am not responsible for—"
"They are dying, Liz!" Hana said, voice rising. "There are people dying and you are the one who gave the word, and you are the one doing nothing about it!"
"It doesn't matter if they're not actually human, Hana!" Akane yelled over her.
Hana pointed to the street pooling with blood. "Then what is that, Liz? Is that ink? Tell, me is that ink?! This world won't cease to exist just because you and I are not in it anymore!" Hana was screaming at her now. "Did you even stop to think about that? "
"That doesn't even matter," Akane said spitefully. "I don't need this now."
So what if the Akatsuki acquired Naruto and the Tailed Beast? So what if Pein didn't resurrect Kakashi and the rest of the city? So what if the Akatsuki won? She could feel her own face scrunch into something ugly. "We were never meant to be here. We are not even supposed to exist! Nothing of this—!"
"Nobody exists on purpose!" Hana fired back at her and she almost flinched. "None of them chose to be in this world either! None of them chose to have their families massacred, to be experimented on, to learn to kill to survive! So what the hell makes us so damn special?"
Akane stared at her, breathing through clenched teeth. "I had a life! They took it away from me!"
"They?" Hana's eyes went furiously wide. "The hell did they have anything to do with it? It just happened! If this is your way of turning what happened to us into a personal vendetta against everybody in this worl—"
"Everybody? Oh please," Akane rolled her eyes, spitting through her teeth. "Why are you so worked up over this?! You don't even know any of these characters!"
There was silence on Hana's end; a long, trembling moment that filled the air before the younger girl managed a whisper.
"They are human, Liz."
. . .
Akane kept quiet.
She stood very still, shaking her head, her whole body shaking.
Finally, Hana approached her, carefully, like some sort of an unpredictable animal that could bite if startled. She gently put her hand on her shoulder, pleading with her.
"Don't do this, Liz."
Yet her hand was brushed off with a sharp jerk of Akane's shoulder.
"Stop calling me that!" Akane almost screeched. "Stop calling me Liz! I am not her. I am not Elisa. Not here." She tried to catch her breath. "Not yet."
Hana did not back down. "Listen, I won't be any part of this. I won't—"
Akane cut her off: "Too bad, you already are. And you will do as told, when the moment strikes. You will come with me and we will cross over as soon as the portal appears—"
"No!" Hana stood her ground, fists clenched. "I refuse, and you will NOT make me—"
You bratty little—!
"I went to great lengths for this, Kate." Akane breathed furiously through her teeth. "I am not going to watch all of my efforts go down the drain because of your ungratefulness."
Hana stared at her in a thick, nasty silence.
"Shit…" she heard Hana mutter as she blinked, once, twice. Then she said in the coldest voice Akane had ever heard her use: "So that's it, isn't it. You are so convinced you're doing this for me, aren't you?"
Akane's whole being bristled in defense. "What the hell do you mean by that?"
Hana kept looking at her. "That's all I ever was to you, wasn't I?" she asked, slowly. "An objective. Something to strive towards. Is that why you wouldn't leave this world without me?" Hana asked further, "Even though you never actually cared about me."
"You're blabbering," Akane huffed. "Of course I care, why else do you think I have—"
"Because you needed me," Hana said, cutting her off. "Target achieved, mission accomplished, right? Because you… you don't care about what I want, or think, or feel about any of this. I was just an objective for you, so you can play your arrogant little role of a saviour, because somehow in your mind you have this fucked up notion that I, as Hana, am your little sister, that I am Kate—"
"How dare you," Akane hissed poisonously, "How fucking dare you, after all I have done for you—"
"You are doing this for yourself!" Hana shrieked. "You weren't out there saving me, you were saving yourself! I don't want this world destroyed! I don't want innocent people killed! I don't want to leave my friends! I would not pay my ticket home with other people's lives! I refuse to let you justify this by using me! Because what you did…'' she stopped herself there, remembering Akane's story, not wanting to cruelly remind her of it.
"And that's… that's fine," Hana said, trying to calm her voice. "It's how you survived - I get it - it's what you needed to keep on going, a valid purpose to give you strength... but it's time you stop fucking pitying yourself!"
Something flashed across Hana's eyes; something powerful and hurtful and frighteningly true: ''So don't you fucking dare put on that mask of self-righteousness and pretend it was all for me."
It felt like a slap to the face.
As if the world around them stilled in mute anticipation of her response… yet there was not any, as Akane stood, too shocked to even reply. There was electricity in the air between them, growing thicker and thicker, and she thought she might be having a panic attack, it was getting too hard to breathe…
No.
No, this was actually happening.
Hana was also looking around them, a strange, frightened look in her eyes, trying to understand what was happening, to pinpoint the source of this electrifying current that was rising goose bumps on their flesh…
And there it was.
Peering behind the rock in view of the ongoing battle, the girls saw it.
Out of nothing, the air swirled and thickened, amassing into a giant, black ball of energy. It was giving off a strong buzz, throwing sparks around and electrifying the air, as if it was sucking particles of existence around it into itself. Even from the distance between them, Akane could feel it—that raw, unimaginable power, like form given to a thundering, swirling tempest. Akane gazed at it, the portal shining bright in her eyes, like a believer ready for the rapture.
She hadn't counted on the fact that she would be so afraid.
Now, facing it, knowing what she was about to do, the girl was gripped by a sudden fear, and for the first time, Akane could truly imagine, truly feel, that this could rip her apart. That this… could mean her death. She would be blasted away, disassembled into particles in a way that not even a thousand knives could cut her up, before she could even regret it, before she could even let out a broken scream. She would perish, be literally obliterated out of existence. There would be truly nothing left of her.
Beside her, judging by her aghast expression, Hana was thinking the exact same thing.
Before she could feel herself change her mind… Akane gripped Hana's hand, and threw herself towards it.
Time stopped.
The world slowed down.
The city spun out of her vision.
All that was left was the terrifying portal in front of them and the determined strength in her legs.
Like a moth to a flame, Akane took a step forward, then another one, bolder, more desperate, then another, and another, and she was running towards her torch, her light in the dark, which blinded her so completely. She spread her wings, she fanned the flames of the burning city around her, uncaring if it would singe her wings off and turn her life to ash, because out of these ashes, like an ember fading, she would be reborn back into her life, into her world.
Hana struggled behind her, yanking her hand away, screaming at her unintelligibly, but Akane's adrenaline-powered grip was unrelenting—as she dragged her toward the chaos.
Closer—
Akane didn't see Naruto's surprised face when the girls suddenly turned up in the middle of the battlefield, nor hear his panicked shouts to move out of the way—
It's the only way—
She didn't notice Nagato's dangerous eyes, nor hear the whistle of a deadly metal as it headed to its target—
Please—
She didn't hear Hana's terrified, pleading screams—
Please—!
Everything was lost in the crackling of static, the whirlwind of energy and darkness, and her own cackle of triumph as they disappeared into the black portal-
embracing cold eternal light.
Translation: Eris quod sum, eram quod es –a Latin phrase that is often found on gravestones and translates as "I was what you are, you will be what I am".
A/N: This is the pre-final chapter, you guys. Almost done. I would be glad to hear from you, your thoughts, feelings, what did this chapter stir up in you? How do you expect this story to end?
Some songs that inspired this chapter: PSYCHO and The Dark Of You by Breaking Benjamin (now that brings me back; used to be one of my favourite bands in my teen years)