"Remembering is only a new form of suffering."
— Charles Baudelaire
Saku-nii has taken to growing his hair out long. It…suits him, in a weird way, the bangs that frame his face and the low tail still a tad more bushy than my hair seems to get, even though mine's short enough to cowlick obviously when I forget to attempt taming it.
Long hair suits him as it never suited me.
Well, it might've suited me once upon a time, but we don't speak of that time, or that era, or that life that threatens to pull me back every time I think about it. Missing it won't bring it back.
I'd filled out paperwork to start learning new languages at the Tower.
Shinku had looked at me a bit while that happened, muttered a "you're crazy, Hatake" but hadn't really debated the point.
Guess I know what his opinion of foreign languages are nowadays.
It isn't even like we have tensions with the Land of Iron, so my application to learn Cantonese literally meant nothing.
Well, not nothing, if only because of who I'm the child of, so all eyes are on me, but it isn't like I wanted to learn what they spoke up in Iwa, which might require a clearance higher than the one I've got.
So I'll "learn" how to speak what they call Kanton-go, and wonder if there'd be a day I'd discover where English came from in this hell of a world so I could fill out an application to "learn" that too. And then I can be properly trilingual, like I'd never been in my last life.
I trudge my way up the porch steps, listening to them creak, gray boards weathered by the sun and rain, turn the key on the door — turning the key in the already unlocked door — that's new.
It might be Mom, but I knew Mom a little too well to believe it's Mom.
She's been around the block at least a couple times by the way she walks, and Hatake Ume walks like she's striding down the blade of a knife she's daring to cut her.
Carefully, I turn the knob, noting the disarmed kunai and wire trap messily laid down by the edge of the doorframe, and sweep my eyes across the empty foyer. Sunlight falls in a square all around me, setting sun bleeding with the muggy heat of late August.
Another year gone, and I am no closer to anything, but Konoha gears for war, her granaries and warehouses filled to bursting, scroll upon scroll of supplies, in case the city is beset like it was during the last war.
How many people had starved in the Great War when supply lines in the north had been cut was unclear, but it numbered in the hundreds, and they say that if you stand in the square, you can still hear the ghosts of children wailing.
All is quiet.
Still.
And even though I know in theory, that there's unlikely to be anyone hiding in the house ready to kill off the White Wolf's children just because this is central Konoha, and they'd have gotten killed a long time ago, I move slowly, quietly down the hall.
Nothing.
Still nothing.
I hear it though, the slide of fabric against a hard surface, the sound of...retching.
I round the corner to the kitchen to find Saku-nii leaning over the sink as he heaves. Nothing comes up, but by the stench of the kitchen, that's because he's already emptied the contents of his stomach into the sink.
My steps are loud as I make my way across the tiled kitchen floor, tapping obnoxiously across the fake stonework. Whatever had happened to him, it's no good to sneak up on a chunin who's already feeling like shit.
And I didn't feel like duking it out with Saku-nii while he's in a state.
"Niisan?"
He turns to look at me with bloodshot eyes, hands still clenched against the sides of the sink.
He mumbles something, it might've been "Goose" or "Tsuta" or "sister," but I didn't really care. He looks wrecked, bags under his eyes heavier than anything I've seen in this life, a hollow shell of the boy he is normally.
There's still vomit on his face.
I grab a towel on my way past the oven, wet it with running water from the sink, trying to neither look at the innards of the sink or smell it, though both were a bit difficult.
It has chunks. It's somewhat greenish yellow. That's all the detail I really want to think about regarding it at the moment.
Deeming the towel sufficiently wetted, I wipe his face with it, pulling his hair back and away as he heaves again, the sore odor of stomach bile hitting the back of my throat.
I fight it back. The back of Kobayashi's shop smells worse on butchering day.
The last man I killed shat himself, and that smelled worse.
But there's something about just hearing retching that makes me want to gag. It's followed me across two lives, and I doubt it's going to just go away.
"What happened?" I ask, at the risk of opening a can of worms I'm not prepared to hear.
The fact that he's letting me do this for him — rubbing circles between his shoulder blades, holding his hair, look at him with obvious concern — when he is fifteen and about to earn a jounin promotion… that doesn't bode well.
Because wartime.
It's always about wartime these days.
"Her head," he mutters, still staring at nothing. "They split her head open." Well, that didn't really tell me much of anything.
"Brains are gray," he adds, almost as an afterthought.
And then he throws up again.
I wrestle Niisan down the hall and into his room, his eyes still bloodshot and hollow, his skin kind of clammy and gray tinged, and manage to tug his shoes and socks off, the mesh shirt over his head, careful to not get it snagged on his hair, and tuck him in bed, a light sheet pulled up to his chin.
Might be a bitch for him to get his hair sorted in the morning, but for the moment, I don't really know if he'd be okay with me braiding it.
He's always been really proud of it, touchy in a way that he didn't often get with things.
Softly, I smooth down his hair and try not to think too much.
"This green island is like a boat / floating in the moonlight / My darling, you too / are floating in the sea of my heart." Long ago, in a time before time, someone had sang this to me, alto voice tender in their love. But there is no mercy in heaven, so we will not meet again. "This green island night is so calm and serene / my darling, why are you silent, saying nothing?"
He drifts to sleep like this, holding my hand, even though it is a small thing that cannot shield him from anything.
When I'm sure he won't wake up again until at least a few hours later, I rise and head towards the kitchen to clean up the sink and throw the towels into the washer.
And if I don't mention what happened at dinner, it's no one's fault but my own.
The news of Uzushio's king taking ill comes back in through the grapevine in whispers, carried on the wind. No one really wants to bring ire upon themselves, but news this big can't stay hidden.
They say, across the water, on the Seven Islands, Clan Uzumaki is once again locked in a deadly dance. Once a generation, the House of the King descends into a game of succession where out of any number of candidates, only one would end up sitting on the throne.
The man who rules across water with sword and scepter has to be as ruthless as the sea.
I wonder how the dying man feels about this. Not yet even in his grave, still breathing, still warm, but already, his sons and brothers jockey for position, brother against brother, children planning for when their father dies.
But then, he also did the same to climb onto the throne, so maybe he feels as though this is the natural order of things.
These thoughts are only brought back to mind as I stand in the Ling Weapons Shop testing a coil of wire because there's a flash of red, and the man with blood red hair and ornate braids that I'd met in the tower swaggers in. "I'm looking for kunai," he says, tapping his fingers restlessly on the counter.
Being uninterested in his existence, I go back to testing the coil of wire.
And yet, this particular Uzumaki takes up space. Broad shoulders, feet set wide apart, the obnoxious swagger of a man who had power and knew it.
"Hey, I'm talking to you." He snaps his fingers in my face, and I resist the urge to attempt biting his fingers off. They say fingers are as easy to bite off as baby carrots, and as tempting as it was to test the hypothesis…
I doubt anyone would like it if I bit his fingers off, if only because then I'd have another strike on my "has too much attitude, can't work with others" rap sheet.
Another chiding from Mom would be on the books if I tried it out on this bully of a princeling.
Slowly, I turn my face up to him, lips set into a dreadful scowl. "I don't work here."
He has not the grace to look abashed, instead shrugging airly, setting cascades of blue brocade stitched in fishscale with gold thread all aflutter. "Still talking to you."
My glare intensifies. "Well I'm not talking to you." I turn back around, snapping up one of the more expensive coils of wire, known for the pliability and strength as well as its ability to garrote a man, and plonk it down on the counter before slapping the bell at the front, wishing for once that Suyo-san would hurry it up.
She only has one leg now, the other having been recently amputated mid skirmish, so she liked to sit down in the back instead of hanging out in the front, but her weapons shop still carried the good stuff.
Normally, I don't mind waiting, but with the Brat Princeling breathing down my neck, all I want to be is gone.
I do not get my wish.
By the time I get home, Mom and Dad are in another one of their rare moments when they are both at home at the same time.
Rare and unusual.
The last time I was home for this was maybe a year ago.
What isn't unusual is that there is shouting involved — this time about Saku-nii's feelings.
Granted, they fought more over whether or not I'm sufficiently attitude-less, with Mom being on the side of less attitude and Dad being on the side that I'll one day grow out of having an attitude to begin with.
I don't know which is worse.
That they think my attitude exists, that it's a question of maturity, or the fact that they're now arguing about whose fault it is that neither of them noticed that one of Saku-nii's genin teammates had died and he's now in a state of shock.
Coming home to this makes me wonder if I should've stayed in the weapons shop for longer.
Sure, there was a holier than thou stranger breathing down my neck and I wanted nothing more than to take a chunk out of him, but Brat Princeling had nothing on my parents.
"You never come home." Mom hisses, the two of them circling each other around the kitchen table. "You promised me things would be different after the second child. Things would slow down, you said."
Dad sighs, covering his face with one of his hands. "You know how tense the borders are right now. Lark, I don't mean to—"
"You always mean to." Mom jabs her cup of coffee in Dad's direction, it's almost empty, but some of it still threatens to slosh out, perilously. "Back when I lived in Hot Water, it was also, 'Oh sorry Lark, can't stay long, there's a job waiting for me back home so I gotta run.'" Slowly, they circle the kitchen table again, Mom on the attack, Dad on the retreat. "How long do I gotta be your call girl, Hayashi?"
I would've left the living room by now, but this is the first time I've ever really heard them talk about their past. I don't think they've actually noticed me listening from the doorway of the room across the hall.
I didn't know that Mom used to live in Hot Water Country.
What had ever compelled her to move to Fire if she lived somewhere else?
And how had she and Dad met anyway?
As far as I'm aware, he is a Fire Country Native, and it's not like all missions in one location are assigned to just one person.
"You were never a call girl," Dad takes a step forward. "Good Lord, Ume."
"Twenty-eight years," Mom hisses, taking another step forward so that they are nose to nose. "Twenty-eight years and you cannot for the life of you fucking stay home."
"Darling, please—"
There's a cracked sort of hurt between the two of them, two people who had never managed to figure out what it was that would make them happy in life, a man floating like a kite on cut strings, a woman rooted like a twisted tree.
But they had known each other for twenty-eight years.
Through war, through pain, through famine, through death, and even if staying made no one happy, there's still love there somehow.
I look, and I look, and I cannot understand it.
I take that as my cue to leave, turning around and heading back out again to the garden, Kyogi limping along after me.
Eleven years in this world, and he's no longer as young or energetic as he used to be, white stripe down his snout a little more salt and pepper.
It's just enough to remind me of time passing, things changing.
As much as I remember time passing, the second life seems to slip away faster than the first, days building upon days the way my first go at this never seemed to do.
I'd always wanted to grow up, to get where I was going, to know that I've arrived.
But in this life, I run too fast and not fast enough all at once.
Sometime soon, war stands, like the black hole we are destined to be pulled into.
Sometime soon, I disappear from the lines of a cruel god's pen, taken away before I even have the chance to scream.
Sometime, in the future that I am not a part of, my brother takes his own life, leaving his five year old son alone in the world.
Somehow, we are all unwritten lines of tragedy, inked in for the sake of a plot barely anyone really cares about.
And I could beat my hands bloody on the doors of heaven, but it would do nothing.
It would do nothing.
The god of this world wants to sell copies and will not sell me mercy.
Saku-nii doesn't talk about it, but his own missions likely have been getting worse, if the dark circles under his eyes say anything.
For as long as I've known him — all my life and yet not — he's been jovial.
If Dad is to be believed, Saku-nii was a sweet and gentle child. (I was the hellion; I always was. In another life, I'd screamed and tugged on ears, ran wild in the valley, dug up every square inch of the garden, pinned butterflies to boards, badgered each of our four cats until they started running when they saw me coming.) He never asked for much, fell asleep at night, did what he was told.
He still does as he is told, brilliant as he is.
But then, he's just sixteen and had already spent his life as a soldier. He does as he is told, we all do.
And Konoha pins us to the wheel, round and round until we're all ground down.
Tonight, he and I sit on the porch, me sprawled out over the porch, him with his head in my lap.
His hair spills over, loose and free, and he sighs, an angry sound.
He's rarely angry, my poor sweet brother, born too smart and yet without the temperament to tell Konoha no.
Just like Dad in that way.
A patriot.
If there's such a thing as patriotism in this world, then yes, I, Hatake Tsutako, live in a family of patriots, devout to this war machine that keeps us all bound on the wheel.
Even me.
It's not like I say no when missions come calling.
It's not like I say no to death and war, explosions, fire, knives out in the dark, or a sword across the jugular.
"Goose?" he asks. "Do you think the Diplomat's talks with the Tsuchikage will be able to prevent war?"
The Diplomat, Shimura Danzo, had left in pomp and circumstance, just about a week ago, a long line of bodyguards fanning out behind him, up to the Land of Rain to meet with the Tsuchikage's diplomats.
If there is one thing I know, it is that Shimura Danzo prevents no wars.
But for Saku-nii, only sixteen and yet supposed to be my older brother?
I know he hopes against war.
"Only if they decide it's mutually beneficial not to start another costly fight." I look to the right, the stars coming out now that the sun has set.
My garden's withered, October once again come and gone. I'll deal with it tomorrow maybe.
As far as I'm aware, I'll still be home then.
"I hate it when Mom and Dad treat me like I'm breakable," he says, mostly to himself, this not really a statement that needs an answer from me so much as it needs my listening ears and agreement. "I'm not breakable."
"Mmm," I hum, twisting a strand of his hair around my fingers, still staring at the stars.
They make no constellations that I recognize — a world without the cowherd or the weaving girl, and certainly no milky way dividing them with a river of stars.
They do not meet on seven-seven, and yet the festival continues anyway.
Mad mad world, where did you go wrong?
Is it like me? At conception? Or at birth?
I don't tell him that I know he's more breakable than he realizes. There's a lot out there determined to break him.
I only hope I'll still be around to pick up his pieces in the end.
"It's not like Dad hasn't had teammates die on him."
We don't know that, but we assume it's true.
I'm lucky so far, having yet to experience dead teammates. I run messages alone. Dan's settled into a routine at the hospital, going from hapless volunteer to junior apprentice learning how to kill fish. Shinku's buried himself in the bureaucracy, working himself up from one position sorting paper to another stamping forms before they could be shuttled off to other departments to get filled in.
Neither of them are going to end up getting killed, stuck in the village as they are in support jobs.
It's better that way, even if I don't love them.
Even if I don't love them, I still don't wish for them to die.
Saku-nii's teams are always frontline teams though, meant for war and battle, border guards and foreign recon.
"We don't even know if Dad has teammates."
If he did, he certainly never mentions them.
The White Wolf is a loner, without many friends or acquaintances. Then again, he is an exalted war hero, meant to be a god among men.
Men are not friends with gods.
Saku-nii makes a sound halfway between a grunt and a laugh. "Wish you'd take my side for once, Goose."
"I'm always on your side, Niisan."
And I hope I always am.
I hope I always am.
My Kanton-go tutor is a middle aged woman with iron gray hair who called herself Ri Seishou, which really can't be her real name, because if it were so then she would be a famous poet from Song Dynasty China.
Which, since there is no China here, no Song Dynasty or Li Qingzhao to speak of, it is possible that in some way, her parents named her Ri Seishou, or she took up that name herself.
I can't tell if her hair is supposed to be that color — after all, my own hair is white — or if she'd gone prematurely gray.
Either way would make sense.
The first time I meet her, she turns to me and bursts out laughing. "You've got such coastal hair, miumiu."
"Coastal?" I ask, still unsure what it means.
This is the second time I've heard the word coastal being used to describe me, but which coast? Why do people connect me to the coast when I've never lived on the coast in my life?
"I should've known." She pulls out a chair for me, gestures for me to sit before she comes to sit across from me. "How do you write your name again?"
はたけツタコ.
Hatake Tsutako.
畑蔦子.
Tian Niaozi.
Four ways to write one name.
She slides the card across the table to me. In my life, I'd only ever really seen the first one.
I had more in common with the farmers I'd met a half year ago than I thought.