When he'd been reborn, Harry had been adrift for some time. He'd taken to training his body nonstop so as not to be swallowed whole by the hole left behind by Ron and Hermione. They were his anchors, and now he had none.
Then, as he began to get to know his siblings, he developed two new anchors with Yon and Go. The others hadn't lived long enough for him to care as deeply as he did for his last remaining sisters. Not that he hadn't cared at all. He'd loved his other siblings too. They simply hadn't lived long enough to be noticeable.
He hadn't intended on creating more bonds like those. He certainly hadn't needed to be as close to the other DA members as he was to his two best friends to work well with them. He thought he wouldn't need it this time around either. He'd kept everyone at a healthy length, intending only to be their protector.
Kutsuu had tried to be more and failed. He couldn't keep himself from thinking of her as someone he had to take care of. He hadn't expected for anyone else to make it through where his assigned partner hadn't.
And yet, slowly but surely, he found himself getting more anchors.
Niji was one of them, the most recent one, in fact. It was impossible not to spent enough time with him talking about seals and eventually getting sidetracked and not feel something. And though, much like his sisters, he still felt he was responsible for the red head, he certainly felt closer to him than many of the other kids. He was like a beating heart full of life.
There was also Shirayuki. She had been the one to argue most against him that first day. She still was critical of anything she disagreed with, but had mellowed down a lot and helping with the safe house had cheered her up. It was odd that she'd become one of his anchors and how much he trusted her judgement considering she was still pretty cold to him most of the time. If Niji was the heart, she was the mind, ready to calculate the pros and cons and plan ahead as needed.
Next was Kyoukan. It really shouldn't have been a surprise for him to realize that He'd made it this far. He could sense Harry's emotions after all. He always knew when to sit by his side, talk to him or just give him space and Harry was beyond grateful for it. He'd been a balm for his bruised soul. He was his sanity taken form, always keeping him together.
Shinku could have been one, but they were as determined on keeping everyone away as Harry was, so they'd never connected with each other on a deeper level. Yet they both still sensed there was a chance for more, hiding right around the corner.
Lastly but not least there was Tori.
Tori had weird tastes, liked to try and tinker with computer programing if given the chance, but wasn't really any good at it, used a hammer as a weapon and had a crazy strong wind affinity. He could be a bit of a jerk sometimes but he was so earnest in his every interaction that no one minded and he was great with kids.
Sometimes, Harry remembered the twins a bit by watching him, though they weren't similar to each other. He liked pranks too, so it was easy to imagine how he'd act with them. It didn't matter now, anyway. There no longer were twins. Fred had gone ahead and it was unlikely they would be born together again any time soon.
Be that as it was, Tori was his sunlight. Heck he was everyone's sunlight.
So it was with great shock that he found out his sunlight was gone.
Tori's assigned partner was a now 6-year-old girl codenamed Hai. She had her cheeks and the bridge of her nose dotted with freckles, gray-ish blue eyes adorned with yellow around them looking like a stylistic eyeshadow and voluminous teal hair in a bob.
Hai was taken because Root had noticed how her singing voice had weird effects on chakra around her, making people feel relaxed to a very small extent, but mostly affecting the plants and rocks around her. With her training she'd developed a barrier-type jutsu that enveloped her body in a cube of stone to protect her. The Root trainer wanted her to be able to protect herself and sing at the same time, but she was unable to do both at once so far.
She too was very pacifistic, still sad about her mother, though she hardly had any recollection of her anymore so, of course, She was immediately put on the list to the pedo fights.
Tori was unaware of those fights up until then. He was actually the last to know of the older kids. No one wanted to tell him. No one wanted to see his smile disappear. While he'd been the one to better handle the situation of their kidnapping and imprisonment so far, there was no telling what he would do if he found out that not only were a lot of the younger kids being put through such awful things, but that his partner, the one he was closest to, was going to be one of them soon.
Harry himself had just barely found out as well, still struggling to attract the attention to himself while Danzou denied requests left and right for anyone interest in him and assigned them to the vulnerable kids.
Hai hadn't been aware of that unspoken rule. She'd asked the other kids what exactly she'd been assigned to and was horrified about it. And while she hadn't explicitly told him everything she knew about what would happen to her, only that people she would fight would do very nasty things to her, it had peaked his curiosity enough that he decided to investigate it all himself.
Her fight was the first scheduled that day, so he didn't get to spy on the previous ones to see what the whole thing was about. Instead, he used the cape he'd created to float up to the ceiling and used his genjutsu that made him look like he'd turned into wind to hide.
He managed to stay his hand for most of the fight. He was already in the 'live prey' fights, so he knew the sort of violence to be expected. It wasn't until he saw the grown up civilian man starting to rip Hai's clothing that he finally realized what was going on and snapped.
The training grown became flooded by a veritable hurricane destroying everything in its path. Hai was the only other living being in that room that was spared, due to the fact that he'd placed his cloak on her shoulders to cover her before he went to town on the adult man, the root trainers on site, being taken as collateral damage of his rage.
Harry wasn't there, he only had the mutterings of the higher ups to go by and the destruction left behind as evidence. He still didn't know why he was put down. Danzou like powerful things and Tori had just proven how powerful he could be. Danzou even conveniently had his trigger right there. He could have used Hai to control him. Be that as it may, he gave order for Tori to be put down and that's what happened.
Tori was killed right in front of Hai. By the time Harry had seen Hai, she had blood splattered on her and was huddled under Tori's cloak in her cot. He only found out that Tori was gone after that.
Yon and Go were his Family, Niji his Heart, Shirayuki his Mind, Kyoukan his Sanity and Tori his Sunshine. He'd refused to acknowledge, even to himself, that he had any special regard towards any of them. He didn't want to see. He gave a pass to his sisters because they were his family, but it felt traitorous to replace Ron and Hermione with anyone else, so he'd refused to see. He'd gritted his teeth and focused on getting everyone out of there and simply not thought about it.
But with one of his anchors gone, he couldn't deny it anymore.
His first reaction was anguish so deep he'd felt his wind and fire elements wanting to rebel out of his body and it was hard, but he repressed them even in his pain.
Then he felt determination burning in his veins as he vowed to himself never to let anyone else he cared about perish in this hellhole. His magic and chakra were barely reigned in, tearing at his insides, but he was well aware that the real culprits were no where near for him to redirect the violence towards to, only innocent children. At this moment discretion and caution were foreign to him as he raged on.
Desperate to ger rid of the extra magic, he casted his strongest spell, the Patronus, with only a thought.
This wasn't like he his usual casting of the spell where he needed positive memories. This was like the very first time he casted his corporeal Patronus. He didn't have any happy thoughts in his mind back then either. He'd thought he'd seen his father before and, after going back in time, he'd been trying to see him only to realize he'd never actually seen his father at all, only himself.
Back then he'd casted a Patronus capable of defeating hundreds of Dementors with the realization that all of his biggest hopes weren't real. His father wasn't there, Sirius wouldn't be able to take custody of him and he was going back to the Dursleys again as an innocent man was chased down like the worst sort of criminal while the real culprit walked free.
Back then he'd told Hermione that the reason he could do the Patronus was because he'd seen himself do it in the past, so he knew he would be capable of it right then. That was a rather simplistic way of putting it. Why belief that he could do it was part of it, it had also been the same determination he was feeling now that helped it along.
And so Ginkiba burst forth out of him. But it wasn't a normal Patronus. It was pulling at his chakra too, and he struggled with it for a bit until he left go of his Lightening nature in order to keep his fire-wind mix contained.
This time Ginkiba was different. He still glowed silver, bot now he had bolts of electricity running through his body in whites, purples and blues. Ginkiba howled, expressing his caster's anger and pain, and ran against a wall, causing a massive short circuit in the whole building.
Harry barely paid attention to the fact that he'd just weaponized his Patronus. Instead, he climbed up onto Hai's cot and curled up against her, trying to offer comfort as well as getting some back.
It was lying there that he quickly took a headcount of all the other kids that had found a way into his heart to make sure they were ok.
Later Yon joined him, dragging Go behind her, and they all laid there curled up for the whole night, too shocked to do anything other than blankly stare at the walls.
Once morning came Harry forcefully snapped himself out of it. Hai started moving again… but she no longer talked.
At first Harry thought she must have screamed herself raw at seeing Tori getting killed, since the one time she tried to talk her voice sounded hoarse. But then he figured if must have been psychological as well since she kept quiet after all of that, even in battles. Shinku, the only other person who was mostly non-verbal, helped along with acclimatizing everyone to her new way of communicating.
She kept Tori's cloak and used it often. It helped her jump higher than before and being capable of gliding down despite her earth affinity. She kept using her stone cube as a shield… but she never again sang for anything.
Harry didn't blame her. Danzou wasn't too concerned with it either since that power wasn't particularly strong.
Things went downhill from there. Tori hadn't just been Harry's sun, after all. He'd been everyone's. So, there was a huge drop in everyone's mood after his death. This gradually lead to more fights breaking out between everyone and Harry was being run ragged trying to keep everyone from tearing each other's heads off while also continuing his construction work and keeping up with his training.
His only luck was that, because of Tori's outburst having been felt in all of Konoha, Danzou decided to keep a low profile until the danger was over, so they only had training without the threat of death or rape to deal with for the moment. Well, that and no root member had seen his Patronus despite his outburst.
He was close to done with the safe house, despite the perpetual state of exhaustion he was in. He'd give it at least three months before it was over. Those three months couldn't come soon enough, in his opinion.
He began avoiding moments when he was alone with his thoughts as the presence of Ginkiba alone was no longer capable of keeping him from his nightmares at night.
Every time he had time to ponder on what had happened, he couldn't help but blame himself for not getting them all out of this mess quicker. And the fact that the general bad mood was also making the other kids become gradually more reckless and temperamental only increased the deaths happening. Whereas before, at most, a kid was dying once every two months, aside from that initial reaping due to Gensui's power, not it wasn't unusual for one to die every two weeks.
From the initial 63 kids, they had been reduced to around 45 by the time Tori died and that number was now rapidly declining, mostly due to Chiame and her bloodlust and Datenshi and her sadism and Kyoukan was too busy keeping Gensui stable enough to be able to help on that front.
So, he doubled down on the stasis spell because, at this point, it would be the only thing keeping many of them alive. He even started practicing on the few perverts that were sent his way, as rare as they were, once Danzou felt reassured enough to start the battles again. I was during one of those battles that he was finally successful with his new spell.
He was battling a pedophile, but it wasn't a civilian. In fact, none of the ones directed his way were. They were all ninja and made it harder to hold back when he fought them. He's taken to using his lowest raiton techniques because these were the sort of people he didn't mind torturing a bit. It was only when he felt they were injured enough that he used the spell.
Usually, he only managed to put the spell on a few of the body's systems, which ended up with the opponent dead not long after depending on what got shut down. Harry didn't known how he would identify when the body left behind was truly a body or not without undoing the technique. He'd put a stasis on the nervous system once and had thought he'd managed it since the person was immediately slumped down. It was a bit horrifying when he later came to retrieve the body from where Root had left it to dispose of later and unmade the stasis. A living person experiencing rigor mortis is not something pretty to see at all and he could only feel thankful that they'd died fast, thought he'd always have nightmares about it for life.
It didn't help that it was a particularly scared recent chuunin-graduate.
So, when he managed to hit this disgrace of a person and she'd immediately slumped down like a puppet that hat it's strings cut, he'd expected more of the same and, considering the dirty things she'd kept saying during their battle, he didn't actually feel too bad about a potential rigor mortis induced death coming her way.
So, he was quite surprised when he gasped awake, though not enough so as to forget to stupefy her. After checking that she was perfectly fine, he put her again in stasis to test how long she could stay in stasis and still be alive. Usually he wouldn't have done something so sadistic, but this place was getting to him some too. And it couldn't have happened to a better person, to be honest. He just needed to know how long he could keep someone alive to get them the help they needed.
He began putting his next 'live prey' opponents in Stasis as soon as he could so as not to harm them too much. It wouldn't be much longer now before he could set them free too. It was nothing compared to how long the he had stayed stuck in this hell. They would be fine.
He stashed them in the safe house in one of the empty chambers that had yet to be remodeled.
He felt accomplished to have finally done something right.
He thought on what to call the spell. Most of the spells he knew had some latin origin and rarely did they come from English, but he wasn't about to call it something pretentious like the Hibernitus Charm like some pureblood ponce. Honestly, he didn't know what to call it. He wasn't in a naming mood and the only reason he even thought of it was because he needed to have a way to refer to it when he finally explained to the kids what he'd done. For now he simply called it the Night-night Tap in his head.
He tried to do the same for the other kids too, but he wasn't always on site when they fought so he still missed plenty of them. Kyoukan, who was one of the few studying medicine, was the only person aside from Shirayuki, who was just too smart to be deceived, that knew what he was doing and healed the 'bodies' up as much as he could after they were put in stasis.
He said it felt weird being able to heal something that should, by all means be dead. They felt dead to all of his senses, yet somehow he could coax chakra out of their 'deadness' into helping him heal all the gashes, bruises and fractures they had. He said it felt wrong just because of how dead they felt up until the moment his chakra touched theirs.
He also made sure to go to the safe house every night just to check on everyone's vitals while Harry worked on making the place habitable.
Still, none of his small victories were enough to make him forget how bad things were getting. Kids were dying, some were killing and some hallucinating.
Genkaku used to be the only one who hallucinated when they first came here. He understood why she did. She used to be a civilian. With trace amounts of a natural aptitude for senjutsu, sure, but a civilian all the same. Then she became a lab experiment and then, when she was deemed 'not enough' she was sent here. Whatever the 'Prince of Darkness' had done to her had left her out of touch with reality somewhat.
Now she wasn't the only one hallucinating. The one thing that could be said of her, however, was that while her hallucinations had gotten more frequent, at least hers weren't the violent kind that left her attacking others because of what she was seeing, like how Datenshi would attack things that weren't there.
Though there was a time she was absolutely convinced that she'd been the one to kill her parents, he seriously doubted it. He'd seen her react to her hallucinations. She wasn't violent. Weird maybe, but not violent.
She called Datenshi and her alter ego, the ladies or Mia and Kurara, Kyoukan was renamed Parontorasu at times, and others just the Doctor and the one time she had access to drawing paper that wasn't being hoarded by Sai, she drew Harry as having a skull face with a top hat perched on top, for some reason (Harry still kept the drawing).
At least she was still in high spirits, even if it was just because she wasn't fully immersed in reality most of the time.
It was better than how everyone else was doing.
'Only three months.' He thought to himself.
A/N:
So, I don't expect this sudden inspiration to write this fic to last long but, while it lasts, I'm gonna squeeze out to the very last drop of writing that I can! On another note, want to see what the characters look like?
Here's the link to the Silver Gen as babies(take out the spaces): sta. sh/ 07wwyb98beb
Here's the link to the Silver Gen root members that I'd drawn so far(take out the spaces): sta. sh/ 06ifzvfe6i
And now you know why I have so much trouble trying to introduce all the characters. There's too many of them and they are all so interesting ;_; Also, I felt so tempted to just having to find a way to give Tori a chance to be alive again, but ultimately went with my original idea. Being an author means being able to kill characters you like, not just the ones you didn't like.
Gensui (final look inspired in Hela from Norse Mythology, has power of Nuclear Radiation and controls it with her feelings, gets paired up with an empath for obvious reasons);
Shin (you know him, he's Sai's first and best friend,, this time his sickness correlates to radiation sickness that wasn't properly healed both due to lack of knowledge and, more importantly, lack of care for what repercussions he might have, gets paired up with Sai);
Yon (One of Harry's sisters, mother unknown, definitely has a bloodline but... could she have two!? who knows! Gets paired up with her sister;)
Go (One of Harry's sisters, mother unknown, definitely has a bloodline but... could she have two!? who knows! Gets paired up with her sister;)
Sai (You defenitely know him, he joins team seven in shippuden, he isn't yet as socially retarded as he is in shippuden, but he still has a bit of it, gets paired with Shin);
Kyoukan (I didn't inspire his looks on anyone in particular, I just wanted and empath on the team for reasons and after I developed Gensui I had even more reasons to have him here, gets paired up with Radiation girl);
Kutsuu (well, I think it's pretty obvious in whom I was inspired by for this one, and her power is definitely the shinobi equivalent of the cruciatus curse, fortunatly it's still just a fraction of a real cruciatus or Harry wouldn't handle any sort of sparring with her. despite her resemblances she isn't, in fact, Bellatrix's reincarnation); Status: dead
Negai (someone once told me it would be a good idea to inspire my OCs inalready existing characters, well, here you have one inspired by Dreaming Mary, both in looks as well as powers, her back story isn't the same, though; she's partnered with unintroduced character with a canon kekkei genkai);
Shirayuki (Mentioned only, but she is the girl that screamed back at Harry last chapter, she has a canon kekkei genkai and gets paired up Niji);
Niji (has chakra chains, his looks and some of his powers were inspired in a free online platform game named Rainbow, gets pai, red up with Shirayuki);
Datenshi (Inspired in Twisted Angel/Allison Angel from Bendy's ink machine, Sai sort of becomes her 'Bendy' in a way, gets paired up with Chiame);
Chiame (inspired by Sachiko from Corpse Party, gets paired up with Datenshi, has Stokolm syndrome with one of the instructors and calls her mom);
Shinku (based on Frisk from Undertale; mute; gender neutral but biologically male; seems to have precog abilities and doesn't like fighting);
Kyara (based on Chara from Undertale, still good with knives, still messed up from their death, even if this time is the methaforical death of their innocence rather than a literal one);
Tori (based on John Egbert from Homestuck);
Hebi (Heat vision, inspired on how people used to think, and still do, snake's saw this way. And, because of the way genjutsu works, basically imune to visual genjutsu because he doesn't see things the same way as normal people.);
Ningyou (Inspired on a ceramic doll looks-wise, with pheromones her power. She is more efficient against people with sensitive noses and animals);
Hitori (bloodline still a secret, has problems with his immune system and is sickly because of it, yet Danzou still finds him highly useful)
Hai (inspired by the girl from Gris) - Main powers must be centered on singing, perhaps using the vibrations to stimulate chakra in the ambient around her (mostly small plants and boulders). Add abilities of turning into a square cube of stone or something, capability of holding her breath for a long time.
Genkaku (inspired by Fran Bow) - civilian and a natural user of senjutsu, though sometimes has a hard time controling it and starts to turn into a tree because of it, because of several experiments preformed on her, she sometimes hallucinates. Her cat, Mayonaka, is a special type of summon that helps drain away the excess of natural chakra.
Jyuu San (Harry's codename, paired up with Kutsuu).