"What?" Orochimaru demanded.
Kakashi shrugged. "It's a matter of semantics. A ghost is a soul untethered to its body. This so-called ghost is not a complete soul, and has the very faint remains of a tether. For practical purposes, you can still call it a ghost. But something very different from ordinary death has happened to it."
Orochimaru looked back in the direction of the library. "What kind of tether? To where? And how much of a soul does it have?"
Kakashi shivered. "Not much of one." He looked sad as he shook his head. "I can't tell what it looked like before, or what its name was, or even what gender it was. There's very little left. It's lost things over time, forgotten itself.
"The same is true of the rest. Just enough of a tether that it probably feels as if it should be somewhere, but not nearly enough for me or it to follow. I can only be partially sure it's the kind of tether a soul has to its body. It might be something else, like a connection to the cause of this or something. Either way, a ghost is someone who chooses to remain here. This one has no choice because it's still tethered," Kakashi stressed.
"Poltergeists," Orochimaru argued.
"Disembodied souls that have made very poor choices. But still, a choice."
"So talking to it and getting it to 'move on' won't work?" Orochimaru asked.
"Yeah. Maybe there's some kind of ritual holding it. Only something arcane could have separated a soul from its body in the first place without just killing the body, so there's a ritual involved in this somewhere."
Orochimaru crossed his arms. "Very reassuring. I don't have experience with arcane rituals that resulted in anything good, as you don't."
Kakashi stared at him dumbfounded. "Of course not. The existence of a soul in this condition is a bad thing that proves we're talking about a bad ritual. Of course we aren't… How did you even raise the question of if good arcane rituals exist?"
"I mean beyond the immediate victim," Orochimaru replied. "Mysterious rituals often take an immediate victim for some broader purpose. Have you ever heard of a ritual whose broader purpose was good?"
"Of course. Divine ones," Kakashi replied. "This world is a divine offshoot. Divine rituals are a normal part of the operation of the world."
"..." The expression on Orochimaru's face, if photographed, would have sold widely.
"No, there is no chance this is any kind of divine ritual," Kakashi reassured. "A divine ritual can result in pain and/or death, because those are natural, but the forces of nature can't bring about anything unnatural. This is unnatural. It can't be divine."
"I thought you had mysterious knowledge of your own kind and Hell," Orochimaru muttered.
"As well as anything neutral," Kakashi sighed. How many ways was he going to have to explain? "The world is divine-neutral. I may not have come into existence with mysterious knowledge of it, but my senses can perceive what it is and I have the brains to figure out how it works. There's no way I could describe any part of the afterlife, or tell you what happens there, but this world is visible to me."
Orochimaru tilted his head.
"I can tell where the divine is and use basic logic from there." If that didn't make sense, nothing would. It was as short and snappy as Kakashi could make it. He crossed his arms and checked the pack. They were all ready to go, except for the new wrinkle he'd discovered.
"Ah," Orochimaru exclaimed. "So pain and death have a natural flavor to them, and this situation doesn't. I see." He picked up the pack and slung it over his back. "So what do we do now?"
"Figure out why it's here," Kakashi guessed. Why would a ghost have followed them from base to distant base? How could it have traveled that distance? How did it have enough presence of mind to do anything other than wander aimlessly? Did its tether connect to one of them, or did it have just enough presence of mind to ask for their help? How could it ask someone for help when it couldn't even remember its name? To boil all this down to its essence: What was so special about Kakashi and Orochimaru?
Orochimaru groaned. "Damn it."
Kakashi was all ears.
"I've studied all kinds of arcane rituals. It's probably trying to follow the ritual that did this to it, which has good chances of being in my possession. Damn it." Orochimaru unslung the pack and tossed it to the ground somewhere. "I have no memory of seeing anything that could have done this, of course, but it might be in a book that contained information on many different rituals. We're not leaving tonight, are we?"
Kakashi shook his head no. Orochimaru looked very displeased. "We should go through this place's library, then make a plan. If it helps, I'll come with you and see if I can interact with it," Kakashi offered. The strange presence was still nearby, unchanged. See if I can find out what it's doing, Kakashi elaborated to himself.
"That's what you would have done anyway. I'm not approaching a semi-alive spirit I don't know anything about by myself." Orochimaru turned and waved for Kakashi to follow him. Kakashi's tail waved Irritation. He added gratitude to the list of things Orochimaru needed to learn about as he followed the snake out the door.
Orochimaru stopped and waved Kakashi ahead. "After you."
Kakashi allowed irritation to show on his face and in his voice. "At least the illusion of reciprocity would be appreciated, even if I can see through it." He shook his head and reached for the door anyway.
The presence inside vanished. Kakashi's hand paused in the air. Is it afraid of me? He opened the door and looked inside. There was nothing.
Kakashi turned back, still occupying the doorway. "Besides, I seem to be scaring it," he added. "If you want to find out anything more about it, you're going to have to stop hiding behind a human shield." He turned decisively and went inside to stand in a corner.
Orochimaru entered and stood in the middle of the room with his arms crossed.. "Alright, alright," he muttered. It sounded genuine. "Easy, Puppy. Your soul is more durable than mine."
That was true. Kakashi realized he was acting foolish. Was this the right thing to be chiding Orochimaru over? He certainly shouldn't be sulking in a corner. He wagged Embarrassment as he joined Orochimaru, sitting on the single small desk that the small room had space for. "Mah, I'd still appreciate some distinction between coming with you because I have to and volunteering for it."
"Well, you're here now," Orochimaru said with a shrug. "Let's get started."
He uncrossed his arms and reached out to the shelves. A single hand, poised for grabbing a selected target, hovered centimeters from the dust-bound backs of creepy-looking texts. It skittered sideways, gliding soundlessly over a variety of scripts. "Not this shelf," Orochimaru whispered. "I would normally reacquaint myself with the activities of my hideout before beginning anything. It helps me to locate this hideout in my memories. Ah, what did I read in those files?" He made small sounds to himself.
He turned to his left. "Right, that was it. All parts of a dynamic system must be kept in mind at once, or it all becomes incomprehensible." Tongue tracing his left fang as he hissed softly, Orochimaru approached the two shelves that formed the left corner. "It's good I haven't had more time with you, Puppy. Look what you're already doing to me."
Kakashi crossed his arms and felt decidedly surly. He tried to keep in mind what his companion probably meant by that, not what he heard in it. It was good that he'd already managed to take some of Orochimaru's attention off his former studies, wasn't it? And Orochimaru was technically right, the best kind of right. Now that the formerly dynamic system of hideouts had ground to a halt, perhaps Kakashi could learn more of it and free Orochimaru's memory. That was an idea. He sat up straighter and looked around. If he looked closer, he could discern what a whole shelf contained with a glance.
"Here," and Orochimaru's ready hand plucked a thin book from its shelf and tossed it into Kakashi's lap. The books on that shelf were older than the rest and, Kakashi suspected, had been harder to find. He opened the book he had been given and searched through it, looking for a trace of a tether. Nothing.
Two more books came his way, also without traces of a tether. "That's all for this one," Orochimaru sighed as he sat down next to Kakashi on the small table. "This place was rather specialized. Only a few books on curses, I believe, had any relevance."
"Yeah, these are full of curses," Kakashi confirmed. "None of them feel like the ghost or have any tether, though, assuming that you were right and that something that old would have recognizable traces left."
"Sounds like a damn good thing you're here," Orochimaru remarked.
Kakashi nodded. He kept the books piled in his lap, just in case the second of those assumptions turned out to be incorrect and deeper analysis was warranted. He'd decide what kind of deeper analysis would be best as soon as they knew more about the situation. "Speaking of…"
Orochimaru turned his head slightly. "Any ideas?"
"No," Kakashi sighed peacefully, "just more questions." It was starting to be really fun to ask endless questions. Kakashi was sure he'd need answers at some point, but for now he could understand Orochimaru's fascination with the endless mysterious stars. "About you, me, and everything."
"Cut the crap," Orochimaru snapped. Kakashi snickered. It was way too easy to get under the snake's skin, no matter how scaly it might be.
"First of all, that's going to be a problem," he murmured. "If I scare the spirit, yet I'm the only one with the perception to glean answers, that hampers our investigation. There's an obvious question there: Why do I scare it? If I can change something to stop scaring it, that would be helpful."
Orochimaru turned more. "Your darkness destroyed souls," he remembered. "And now you wear it all over you. Even a touch could be deadly to it."
"It barely remembers anything about itself, and it's too diffuse to touch," Kakashi replied. "That first encounter, I walked into the library with it. I felt some subtle change in the atmosphere when it left, which was all. It couldn't have been collected enough to touch; I couldn't even have seen it, I think."
"Try not wearing your darkness anyway," Orochimaru replied. "You could borrow a spare uniform," he added hastily a couple seconds later.
Kakashi grinned behind his mask. "You'd prefer it if I didn't."
"True," Orochimaru slyly admitted. "The vest does something for your shoulders, but the uniforms are rather shapeless. If you have to be not wearing your regular clothes…"
"I have an idea." Kakashi offered his compromise. "I'll keep a watch out tonight, and see if I can approach without scaring it while you're sleeping."
"Slippery," Orochimaru marveled. It was neither entirely praise nor entirely curse.
"In the meantime, there's more." Kakashi had a number of other questions to ask. He hadn't bothered counting how many.
They left to catch dinner an hour later. In the meantime, Kakashi had great fun seeing what Orochimaru could make of his questions. The Snake Sannin spent ten minutes on "What kind of ritual is most likely to have done this?" alone, before declaring a tie between a curse gone right and a power-bestowing ritual gone wrong. Demon-summoning gone horribly, horribly right had a good run until Kakashi pointed out that the ghost would have to be very old for them not to have heard of an incident involving a demon running amok. It settled for third place, just ahead of instant-travel ritual gone up and communication ritual gone left.
"I dislike the use of imprecise language," Kakashi detoured, after they finished discussing the likelihood of a demon-summoning ritual being responsible. "Pretty much anything, physical or spiritual or nonexistent, natural or unnatural, can be called a demon as long as it scares people. Wild beasts, sentient chakra constructions, sentient chakra constructions in the shape of wild beasts, you name it." He snorted. "There's surely at least one person that's called a misbehaving poltergeist a demon, for goodness' sake. A line has to be drawn somewhere."
He wagged Happy and Amusement to show he wasn't being overly serious, so Orochimaru only laughed and agreed and asked what his next question was. It was "Depending on what kind of ritual did this, what condition do you think the body's in?" Unspoken agreement that any answer other than "Intact, of course" would be very sad hung in the air, so they moved on quickly. The next question was, "Do you think a spirit in such condition can return to a body?" They postponed answering that until some imaginary future date.
"What I want to know about is my part in this," Orochimaru declared. "We've been followed, and we know it doesn't like you. That leaves me. Even if it somehow does have enough of a mind left to look for the ritual, which I don't believe for a second, that was just the only thing I could think of, I don't believe for a millisecond it has the mind to follow people in the hope they'll help."
He threw his head back and held himself up on his arms, as if he were looking at the stars instead of the ceiling. "That's what it comes down to, Puppy. How much of a mind does it have left, and what parts? Does it barely remember events in its past? Emotions? Pieces of information? What does it know?"
Kakashi shrugged. "I'm sorry. I have no idea. Its soul is like a soup by now, a soup where most of it is completely dissolved and the rest is scattered all over the table. If it was still in order with the noodles on the bottom, the vegetables in the middle, and the fish cakes on top, I could tell what the pieces were from their location. With them all scattered, I'd have to hold a piece still to take a closer look, but they're running around everywhere and the whole thing is afraid of me. I can tell there are some pieces of pieces left, but I can't see what they are. I'm sorry."
Orochimaru sighed. "And I don't have quite the right eyes or ears. Damn."
The most frustrating part of that entire hour settled over them for a good four seconds, until Orochimaru realized something. "Puppy, did you just compare our ghost to soup or ramen?"
"Oh...Sorry, I've gotten more used to Naruto's way of understanding things than I thought, apparently." Kakashi scratched his head sheepishly, Orochimaru laughed and remarked that it was better this way, and the conversation resumed.
Some time later, Kakashi wove a trawling net out of darkness and caught two fish with one net, catching dinner as he flew with Orochimaru over the ocean. Orochimaru looked forward eagerly to the sweet, sweet taste of efficiency. Kakashi swung the net with its two struggling victims over his back and told Orochimaru that that was just too bad. Kakashi didn't have to wait; he would enjoy the sweet, sweet taste of extra flight time right now. He made a 90 degree turn straight up, spun, and executed a spinning loop de loop before Orochimaru could smack him.
Orochimaru had a moment of staircase wit over dinner, which he tried to gloss over by pretending he wasn't late at all. "Time makes all good things sweeter," he reminded Kakashi just before taking a bit of the cooked fish. Kakashi shook his head and did not take a bite of fish, a dead giveaway that he was struggling not to grin and losing.
They brushed the sand off themselves and returned inside after nightfall. Orochimaru had made a habit of looking up at the stars, and Kakashi had to agree that it did feel strange not to be doing that. But they had other things to do this night.
"Plan A: I'll stay up waiting for it to appear tonight," Kakashi started, "at which point I will absorb all my darkness inside my body and go to see it. The odds of this working are low, but you're very stubborn so I'll do it."
"We must go through the proper scientific method," Orochimaru insisted.
"Plan I: If that doesn't work, you have to go meet it next time," Kakashi punctuated with a stare.
"Any good scientist must from time to time," Orochimaru shrugged.
"Plan U: After it murders you painfully, I'll dump your corpse into the ocean, water one of those mint plants you love so much with my tears, and follow you down," Kakashi rattled off. He did not make writing motions as he said this, like he had before for Plans A and I.
"Occupational hazard," Orochimaru shrugged again.
Kakashi resumed making writing motions with his hand, though they were sitting across from each other at a low table in the guard's room with nothing but bare wood on its surface. "Plan U: We're going to be taking these three books with us, since we can and it would be annoying to come all the way back out here if we need them. While I keep watch for it, you look through the books and mark off any rituals that seem like good candidates.
"Plan E: We go around to all your bases and search their libraries. All books of interest shall be stashed in your largest base.
"Plan O: If we find nothing after going to all this effort, I do a deep analysis of the books. Depending on the previous results of Plans A and I, either I or you will bring each book to the ghost and see if it gets excited. I'll do a deep analysis of each individual ritual described, if I must."
He fell silent. Orochimaru raised a brow. Kakashi sighed and slowly, reluctantly, made some more writing motions with his hand.
"Plan Ka: If we exhaust all our options…" He remembered Naruto. He smiled through his mask and shot Orochimaru with a flaming arrow of a stare. "We sit right back down, invite the ghost in, and think up some more options."
Orochimaru smirked. "The student teaching the teacher?"
Kakashi held up a hand. "Mah, mah, nothing like that. He does it to everybody."
Plans A through Ka were accepted. Kakashi rolled up an imaginary scroll, Orochimaru grabbed a pen and sat on the couch with the three books, and Kakashi lay back on the foot of the couch staring at the ceiling mostly, at Orochimaru sometimes, and always trying not to fall asleep.
Orochimaru caught his eye on one of the sometimes. "See anything you like?" Okay, the snake had to be acting like this deliberately. He had to be.
"Your eyes glitter," Kakashi replied. "Why do animal's eyes do that? Human eyes look soft and deep, like a pool of water, but animal's eyes seem to glow like they have gem dust in them."
A small smile rejuvenated Orochimaru's face, before it twisted into a smirk. "Some predators do have a reflective layer in their eyes for enhanced night vision." His yellow serpent's eyes pierced Kakashi's the whole time. They could probably see what the wolf ninja was thinking. He felt hypnotized. No wonder Orochimaru had commanded his own village.
Kakashi managed to break the hypnosis enough to whisper, "Not true." He rested an arm on the back of the couch and turned fully onto his side. "They do it more when you're inspired. I think the stars left pieces of themselves in there."
Did Orochimaru blush? He turned his head a little, but Kakashi was sure that yes, he had. "Stop, Puppy. You know I don't appreciate flattery. I told you so, didn't I?" He had. But it was different. They'd been different back then. Orochimaru's eyes had been cold then, where now they held shining bioluminescence. It was still cold light, but it was firm instead of hard. Kakashi would have liked to rest against that firmness and wait for it to soften and warm.
His better knowledge of human nature told him to turn away. He closed his eyes and resumed his former position, not looking into anything. "They do, nonetheless." He opened his eyes when the sound of paper folding and pen scratching resumed. From then on, Kakashi looked at the ceiling only.
He was starting to approach the point where he would have to try not to fall asleep, when a familiar presence took shape on the edge of his awareness. Kakashi raised a hand. "It's coming back." All sound stopped as he held his hand there, waiting for it to condense further. It did, but very little. Kakashi compared it to his memories of that first encounter where he had seen nothing, and found substantial reason to doubt he would see anything now. But he had promised, and maybe physical proximity could help somehow.
He rose swiftly off the couch and went to the door. Before he went through it, Kakashi had a great idea. He turned back to the couch and chuckled evilly. Instantly, his darkness turned to dark vapor. Orochimaru choked and started to utter an appreciative curse. Kakashi was gone before he said it.
Worth it? Kakashi was only really asking his own forgiveness, since he was the only one who could have a problem with it. It was a useless question because he'd already done it, so clearly he had already had permission. Definitely worth it.
The air felt interesting in direct contact with his skin like this, especially as the portion of his soul beneath his clothes had not adjusted as much to the chakra-infused atmosphere, so that feeling came back to him. Kakashi felt again the generic Good I Want! of a baby. Thank goodness, he'd partially adjusted. When the feeling was at this level, he thought he could enjoy it. With no one around but someone he could easily grow to trust with seeing him naked, Kakashi pondered the idea of doing this more often for sensation's sake.
He wondered if the ghost could hear him. Just in case it could, he projected messages of harmless and want to meet from his soul. There was no change. He took the handle of the library door in his hand. He pulled the door open. He stuck his head in. There was nothing to see, as Kakashi had expected. He edged his way in slowly, carefully.
The presence disappeared. Kakashi groaned and smacked the nearest shelf. He'd expected this and it was still disappointing. How could that be? The ghost just didn't want to be near him, and probably he would never find ou-
Kakashi heard it. From nowhere, a soul was saying something. He replayed the feeling of hearing it, not having understood the first time. Kakashi discovered that his lack of comprehension was not due to being surprised, nor to confusion over the signal's source. The source of the signal was diffuse, coming from almost every angle and nowhere in particular, but that wasn't why he had trouble understanding. No, the signal itself was diffuse. Kakashi's heart leaped. That had to be the spirit he had hoped to meet! Here it was, somehow mustering the coherency to meet him.
Or not.
Condensation. More and more, the spirit condensed down to a form so definite it shouldn't have been within the spirit's abilities. Kakashi stood paralyzed with horror as it assumed not only visibility, but also an actual shape, and perhaps even touch. If not for the horror paralysis, he would have done a lot of things to see what it looked like. He did not see what it looked like because it was not condensing in the library. It was in the guard's room!
Something itched on Kakashi's foot. This itch broke his paralysis, and abruptly he found himself outside the library, in the hallway, with no memory of having moved or reformed his clothes. He was on the move, but why? Why was he moving? Kakashi tilted forward and almost fell from stopping too fast. Heart pounding in his throat, he stared at nothing, silently following what was happening. This was Plan I. What would Orochimaru be able to find out?
Kakashi found reassurance in the little signal, which some part of him had kept remembering. It was puzzling and vague, but if Kakashi didn't let himself think too much about it, he almost understood it. It felt like Good, or maybe Pleasant. It was a positive feeling of low intensity. Orochimaru...positive feeling...Kakashi didn't have time to fully sort out what it meant. He did know that positive feelings prompted cooperation. He pressed himself against the wall, wishing more than ever that he could see what was going on. Some unacknowledged part of him turned over in unease still. Kakashi denied it.
The spirit was as condensed as it was ever going to manage. It felt no feelings that Kakashi could pick up. How is it condensed if it can't even… There was something about it, something that Kakashi could have understood, if only he could see! Orochimaru was… Frightened? Kakashi denied his instincts further. Orochimaru's feeling deepened, spreading and sinking as blood spreads and sinks into the ground, becoming more than fear. Dread. And-
A little candle flame. Kakashi couldn't see it, but that was what it would look like if he could, he knew. It felt like a little flame. It was bright, and wavered, and was so small and delicate. It had a twin in Orochimaru. They glowed together, two soul-lights flickering in harmony. Kakashi's mouth went desert dry. His denial slipped. He moved his hand.
The flame went out, and with it the tenuous connection it had formed. Orochimaru lost consciousness. The ghost reached forward. Kakashi was off. His sandals skidded across the stone, and his chakra gripped for better traction. He flung himself through the doorway.
The room was empty. The spirit had begun to decondense at his first step; it was gone. Orochimaru was flat on his back where he had stood before the ghost. His head must have brushed against the edge of the couch cushions as he fell down. Kakashi went to him and cradled his head. Orochimaru's breathing was shallow. It's not bleeding. He's okay. Kakashi's breathing was shallow. He forced himself to calm down.
Orochimaru's eyes fluttered open shortly. They looked dazed, but otherwise unchanged. Thank the gods. Kakashi hauled the snake to his feet. Before he could say anything, Kakashi told him, "You were right. It's not that intelligent, and it doesn't have a plan. It didn't follow us from base to base for help.
"It followed you."
.
A/N: Sorry about that. I wrote the first bit where Kakashi explains what he means as a continuation of the end of the last chapter. Why did the rest take so long to get out? Because I had two days stolen from my week (vacation days), and I thought I was going to have to rewrite the ending and put it off for a day. My apologies.
On my first write through, I listed the plans as A, B, C, etc. Then I remembered that hello, they live in the Narutoverse, the alphabet doesn't exist. Those letters and Ka are the romanized (written using the alphabet) versions of the first 6 hiragana symbols listed on the hiragana charts I looked up with Google Images. Hiragana is a basic japanese script, more comparable to the alphabet than kanji. Those aren't letters, is my point.
As for Orochimaru's "staircase wit": espirit d' escalier is a French term I heard of that refers to a witty comeback which you think of only after you're already on the stairs to leave the party. It's that annoying affliction that action stars don't suffer from.
BTW, I thought the looks on readers' faces would be funny if I mentioned that, of the options they came up with for "What kind of ritual did this?", none of them were correct. Have fun with that!
