Chapter 4
"We got off on the wrong foot yesterday," Satsuki said.
She'd found Uzumaki and informed him of their meeting spot last evening, before the storm. They were in training ground four. There was a lake at the centre. Broken boughs littered the wet grass, snaked across the lake, left in their wake a trail of leaves and splinters. Twigs, like shattered antlers, perforated the earth, needled water. Moss mottled boulders like crookéd elbows here and there jutted. The storm had dug some up, leaving in their place a sprinkling of cavities, shallow graves newly created. These, at each gust, exhaled dust, emitted an earthen ooze. Late spring, revivified by the storm, spread around them its verdurous braid, wreathed the world in green gloss, fern and moss, a floral sea.
"You don't say."
"So allow me to rectify it," she said. "I'm Uchiha Satsuki. I made Chunin at nine, Jonin at eleven, and have worked with the ANBU for two years. I'm a ninjutsu and kenjutsu expert. We'll see which of my specialties suits you best. It may not be easy, but I have faith in my ability to tailor a programme to your strengths. I'm the best Shinobi this village's recently produced. I boast a hundred percent mission completion record. This may sound immodest, but as a matter of fact there is no better instructor you could be allotted. I've seen it all, done it all, worked with everyone in Leaf worth a ryu, and successfully lived through eight S rank missions. I'll be coaching you for the foreseeable future, and I expect excellence."
Her student regarded her with a studious look. Maybe he wouldn't be that difficult, after all. Maybe she could even befriend the boy eventually, as the Hokage desi-
"Yeah, whatever. Ya always this full o' yourself?"
Her eye twitched.
To Hell with the Hokage.
"Listen here, you…" she caught herself in time and put on a sickly sweet smirk, "...you delightful little boy. I'm your sensei. I'm here to hand hold you, since the Hokage apparently thinks you cannot even urinate without assistance. That's fine by me. What isn't, however, is your tone. You will address me with deference. And I expect unquestioning obedience. If I say run, you run. If I say jump, you ask, how high? And if I say play dead, you play dead, tongue lolling out, like the tantrum throwing little runt you are. Is that clear?"
There was prolonged silence.
"I think," Uzumaki announced, his face grave but his eyes shining, "I'm gonna like you."
And that's when she knew her day was only going to get worse.
She cleared her throat.
"Back to more important—"
"You're right, you know," he burst out, his face alight with sudden mischief. "We kinda did get off on the wrong foot. So let's spend the day gettin' to know each other."
"We are going to train."
"Oh, come on, sensei." He added a sing song lilt to the last word. "There's days and days ahead to train. You can tell me tomorrow just how much I suck, and how I'll never be a good Shinobi. Let's not do that today, eh?"
She hesitated.
A day was indeed nothing in the larger scheme of things. And she could see the possibilities. He'd made a voluntary offer to furnish her with information.
He might not make another if I shoot this down.
But was his offer of conditional trust just an excuse to loaf about (highly likely), and was it worth the authority sacrificed?
She sighed.
"Fine," she said. "Just for today, though."
"Fantastic." His smile was all teeth, and she didn't like the look of it. "My treat. I know just the place."
In all honesty, she'd expected far worse than a ramen shop. The setting was spartan but spick and span, and the food was decent. The service was not all that bad either.
" 'nother bowl, old man."
She eyed the bowl heap in Uzumaki's vicinity warily. She'd never seen one man eat so much.
"I'm grateful for this, ya know," he said to her between slurps. "Didn't think you'd agree."
"The Hokage thinks you are a flight risk."
It was a calculated gamble. She'd hoped to incite a reaction. Him knowing or not knowing was irrelevant, for he had no hope of outwitting or outrunning her anyway. Whether it inspired an escape attempt out of sheer desperation, or thwarted it for fear, she did not care.
She was disappointed. Bar a slight stiffening of his shoulders and a slight lull in the slurping, there was no other response.
"Does he, now?" Uzumaki said, offering her a beatific smile. "That's why he sicced you on me?"
"Maybe."
"Tis mission over, then. I'm not a flight risk. Tell him that, and we can all go home, kick up our legs, and share a nice lil' cigar."
"You expect me to believe that?"
He waved his chopsticks about and shook his head.
"Nah, nah, not that. Or me." he shrugged. "Just the circumstances."
"Meaning?"
"I wanna run," he said, between slurps, as though he were discussing the weather, and not confessing to treason. "I've wanted to run since I was eight. Got to the gate once, then turned back." He tapped his head. "It's common sense, you see. They won't let me go. I got this bastard fox in my gut." He grinned ferally at her sudden discomfort. "They'll chase me through the Shinobi nations for it. There's nowhere I can hide. They'll find me. And they'll make me serve. If not you and your lot, then someone else will. The world is crawling with your kind, after all."
"Then…"
"Yeah, yeah. I'd rather be here than strapped to an extraction table in Kumo or Iwa. Here at least there's familiarity. And the old man did love me once. Besides, I'm dead. Here, there, I'm just a dead man walking. What does it matter?"
Something about that did not sit right with her.
"It is my job to see to your survival. And Naruto, you are one of us."
This was greeted with laughter.
"My dear girl." The creases around his eyes were drawn out in mirth. "I'll never be one of you."
There was a short pause.
"So that's it, then?" She asked, taking a dainty bite from the bowl before her. "You spend your days moping around and bemoaning fate? Feeling sorry for yourself?"
For the first time there was an edge to his voice.
"Yeah," he said. "So what if I do? If I don't feel sorry for myself, then who will? You? My dear dead father? You're all cut from the same cloth, man. What's wrong with not wanting to be like...like you? Is wanting to be left alone now a crime? Not everyone has to be a Shinobi, you know. Not everyone's gotta like it either."
"But there is glory in service. And that is something a lot of us aspire to."
"Yes. A lot of you. But not me. Never wanted it. And no one asked me if I did. No, sir." He made a swishing motion with his hand. "Just thrust it on me, like so. And I can't even fucking run. Oye, old man, one more!"
She hummed. Suckled at a few strands. Admired the texture and the aroma. This really was good.
"Then what do you want? What is it that you dream about?"
"My dream? I dunno. Start a shop next to this, maybe. Live off it. Just live, really. Drift about. Stay unknown. Die unknown. Be buried with the commons. If there's any talk of burying me with Shinobi, I'd rather just be burnt. Scatter the ashes in the old man's office."
"That," she said, pointing at him with a chopstick, "that's the loser in you talking, with all the accompanying cowardice."
"You Shinobi, man. Loser this, coward that." He cleaned out his bowl and put it down. The count was at eleven. "Self aware losers get to see another day. Cowards have lived longer, happier lives than all your Kage combined. What's screaming like a nutter when I see the enemy, or being stoic in the face of overwhelming odds, gonna get me? Martyrdom? A memorial? Thanks, but I'm good. Ya can keep em both. Earn em, rather, with your bravery. There's no cure for that, or for stupidity."
He stood.
"Gotta use the loo," he said. "Will be right back."
He disappeared from sight, and she was left to her thoughts. What an enlightening conversation. He was craven, his attitude was shit, he sounded like a bleeding pacifist, and he was more likely to die to an insect than kill a man. She had a job and a half on her hands.
Thus she remained, lost in her thoughts, wondering how the boy had ended up being what he was, and despite herself feeling a grudging admiration towards how he stood up to her. Not many did that. Not these days.
She looked up from her empty bowl. It'd been ten minutes. He was still nowhere in sight.
Only the shop owner dithered about, looking sympathetic and compassionate.
The first stirrings of unease took hold.
"Where is he?"
"He…" the owner avoided her eyes, "he told me to leave you the bill."
The man slipped a small white sheet to her.
Penned on it was an obscene amount.
"..."
"And also this."
Another white sheet. This had words on it.
Payback is a bitch, innit, sensei?
Was all it said.
And somewhere within her, she felt a scream building. She'd rip his head off. She'd rip his fucking head clean off.
That night, she dreamt.
She was unsure what inspired this particular dream. It'd been a while since she had dreamt it, an event unremarkable now, and best left unremembered; but one that on its occasion had produced a profusion of grief, left her a husk.
She did not dream a lot. More often than not, after a strenuous mission, there were pills taken to avoid the possibility. For the Shinobi who dreamed, she had heard, dreamt not of dandelion fields, or fleets victorious, or gutsy escapades unending; it was not the aery aether they winged, triumphant, but the vast abyss, which redounded with the hollow laughter of gusts numerous, as of reeds dissonant, and offered only a malevolent mist. Spouts of exploding magma in a shower of sludge wreathed and weathered the air. The very dreamscape itself, realm of clefts and crags and darkness illimited, on those occasions seemed to melt, was miasmatic, cast up shadows, breathed here and there in vaporous trails the outline of enemies fallen, reincarnating them, rendering them larger than life; till the weary wayfarer, with oar lost and sail rent, found himself night on night wracked by a phosphorus flame that daybreak fanned into the first sparks of madness.
Dreams, therefore, were to be avoided. But more important, was to identify a dream for what it was— and that she could do. And so it was with a familiar distress that she identified the shut door, the shapes in the background that said nothing but watched with intent, the row of lamps indented into the wall, which with reticent glimmers turned the room into a kaleidoscope of shadows. And at the centre was the bandaged man, proctor for the day, awaiting to allow this dance of death.
She closed her eyes, wished the plane would crack, wished a return to reality, knew it was never that easy.
She should've expected it, really. How could it be any other way, after what the Hokage said yesterday about befriending the Jinchuiriki, and doing away with him if need be?
The man knew what test she'd undergone, after all.
There he was. Standing across. Her best friend. The only one she'd allowed herself and the only friend she'd ever have. The boy that she had come to see as an extension of herself. Blade raised. His face without expression. Barely nine, if that.
Her sharingan could see every tremor in his hand.
His fear.
His desperate desire not to die.
Still a child. The promise of the world before him, but the world outside shut now, and soon to be shut forever. All that awaited him, she knew, was the embrace of earth. A bud broken, left to decompose. For he never had been a match for her, the event designed from the beginning to be a slaughter.
A test of her mettle. Of her loyalty. Of her desire to kill for country, even if it be this boy, who for a year had been her crutch. Who had drawn her out of her shell. Who'd brought her laughter and joy.
Her brother in arms.
His lips were resolute, but his eyes begged for life.
It is done already, she said to herself, but thoughts from that day were seeping in: her reluctance to kill, her desire to die instead. How the blood had left her face when she found out what she was to do, how her strength cindered. How a year of conditioning in that moment had failed. How she'd wept, and shaken her head. How tried to run. Leave the facility. How in that moment she hated them, hated them as she now loved them.
Then, the day before the fight, he'd approached her, embraced her, asked her do her best.
To live.
Not just for herself, but for her clan.
For the village.
For him.
To carry within her his memory. She, his urn; in her constituted all the qualities he once possessed.
His art.
His laughter.
His love for life.
And then he'd spoken of his love for the village, which had saved him, clothed him, given him food, made out of him the pinions that would help her soar; for he was a clanless no name, and she, destined for greatness. And in her tale would be interwoven his: he, more than a footnote, her friend, the boy she slew as a testament to national love. Better to die at her hand, he said, than at the enemy's.
It was unravelling now, half memory half dream.
Her hesitance despite the signal.
On his part, none.
The ferocity of his strokes.
Fanaticism, as of a hunted animal, gleamed in his eyes. He derived strength from despair, and despite his words, was so unwilling to die.
The desperation.
The pressure.
He skittered across the turf, and his sword sang with an artistry worthy the pictures he drew. He smote, and smote, and smote again, and she parried, redirected, tried placing between them a safe distance; tried gathering herself; shut out every memory of their time together— sunlit excursions, crumbs of confidences shared, awkward training sessions, as though puppeteered; the innocent embraces of children who in each other replaced all they lost; hushed conferences; hopes, fears and dreams whispered each to each in a dimly lit room. She shut out the future and its promises, which were the anadem that begirt life's lustrous locks, the architrave emblazoned into the doorways of days to come. She shut out the future—their future—that she or he must now in one stroke hew.
There were animals.
Ink constructs.
Arisen from the lapses she afforded him.
Tigers sprang forth with emergent claws, attempting to sunder.
When that failed, ravens. Crowding. Besieging. Attempting to misdirect or to buy time.
She tore through their canopy.
And then it was just the two of them; him tiring, flagging, starting to slow, and her, still the same.
I can't do this.
Time stopped.
And then in her dream the ground split, and limb by limb, as though spat from Leaf's earth, there emerged her clansmen. Father. Mother. Playmates, tutors, uncles; the aged and the young; shinobi and civilian; all the life that Itachi had ended, flaking and cracking the earth, springing forth silently, emerging inhuman—transparent wraiths that still bore beneath their blooded habiliments the gashes which like a waterfall wept ichor, blessed with it the land. In their ruined visages, as in paper lamps, were imprisoned the final flickers of a greatness which once moved Heaven and Earth, now diminished, yet still too great for ghastly vessels to hold.
They embraced her.
Scattered into mist even as they did.
In the end, it was not her that did it, but them.
Their dissolving hands moved her arm.
They spurted chidori into life.
It was they that stamped out her surroundings, and imposed upon her breast a sedateness which dispersed all inconstancy.
They were her armour; they, her sword.
And it was at their behest she covered the twenty metres separating her and her best friend in a millisecond. Tore through his heart. Stood there, unmoved, as his eyes widened, his mouth bubbled red. A final plea was there formed and snuffed. Blood in a fine spray gilded all.
Only, as she watched, the face, now forgotten, concretized: the hair wasn't dusk, but gold, and the eyes azure instead of coal black.
The face, whiskered, stared at her in shock.
Even in death, the lips were pulled into that feral grin.
The realm of unreality ruptured, shattered like porcelain flung against a wall.
She was awake again.
Rays of sun like tears unfrozen streamed into her room through the slatted windows. Her body delivered its daily parcel of phantom aches and pains.
She was a broken winged fly trapped in torment's mesh.
She grit her teeth. The pain would fade. It always did.
But there was something else on her mind, too.
She winced, tucked her fingers under the collar of her night dress, touched her shoulder, ran her thumb against the scar that he in death had made.
Sai's last gift to her.
The first scar of many.
I'm sorry. I really am.
She sighed. Got out of bed. Went straight to her bookshelf and fetched a sheet, a brush, and her palette of colours. Moved away. Pulled open the door.
Dawn, draped in a mantle of red, greeted her. The night stars, nebulous pin pricks, still winked, as though in drowse.
The streets in her clan compound were empty.
But in the distance, a chirp of birds, the first pangs of conversation. Day sundering the husk of night, thus emerging with sunlit limbs and a crown of gold, thus reborn.
Her lips curved into a smile. She took a seat on her porch and began to paint.
A/N: No detailed notes this time, because my hotspot broke, and I ended up writing and posting this on phone.
Canon deviation with ROOT and Sai. Shin dies early, Sai is paired with Satsuki. ROOT at this point in canon was discovered and abolished (or so Hiruzen thought). Not so here. Hiruzen knows here, and turns his nose up at it, but understands it as a necessary evil. Before anyone says OOC, I point to Ame, Uzushiogakure, and the Uchiha massacre, all of which he presided over. Repeat after me: not a kind, grandfatherly man with a live and let live attitude.
Reviews are much appreciated. Broke my back trying to get this out early (not literally, but you get the idea).