.
The entire movement of history, as simply
communism's actual act of genesis—the birth
act of its empirical existence—is, therefore,
for its thinking consciousness the comprehended
and known process of its becoming.
On her first day in Kiri, Akari notices two things: it's very wet and the people are ripe for revolution.
All she sees are oppressed people. Shops with broken windows and busted doors. Homeless people in the alleyways huddled around fires. Skin-and-bones children running free. Air thick with booze and cigarette smoke. Disenchanted ninja, moping around, shoulders hunched and a leer on their face for anybody who so much as looks at them.
She sees civilians left under the foot of ninja, and ninja under the foot of a tyrant Mizukage. The whole place reeks of a rigid caste system that ignites an indescribable glee in Akari's heart.
She learns quickly that those sitting on the lowest caste, whose lineage drew back to civilians and ninja alike that were defeated in battle and annexed into the village, are also the most populous. As one expects. Most of their work revolved around the most dangerous jobs. For civilians, that included mostly hard labour, and for ninja, they were war fodder, left on the frontlines or sent into enemy territory. Scattered and constantly occupied, it kept the undesirables from revolting.
That is, until Akari gets there.
"My people," she murmurs to herself, standing in the streets, a thick fog around her. "My comrades."
This is where she'll start.
.
.
She sidles up to a couple of ninja at a bar in the outer ring of the village. They eye her warily, their hands already hovering over their weapons.
"Hello future comrades," she says. "Might I interest you in a wonderful thing known as communism?"
"The fuck are you on about?" one asks.
"Your freedom."
The other one squints at her. "What?"
She pulls out a couple of pamphlets, passing one to each of them. "Think unionization. Think economic equality. Think having clothes on your back, a roof over your house, and food on your table, all without having to be the wealthy's bitch." At their skeptical—and borderline hostile—expressions, she shrugs. "You'll also get to kill anybody and everybody who's oppressed you in violent revolution as we overthrow the Mizukage."
The first man throws his drink onto the ground. The glass smashes against the scuffed, rotten wooden floors, and what was left of the sake filters into the grains. "Sign me the fuck up."
Her power grows like this. She hits bar after bar, skeevy black market after skeevy black market, and while not everybody is amenable to her advances, enough are that she feels the thrill of success burn in her veins as she amasses her comrade army.
After a few months, when the lower class ninja populations have grown to trust her, brought in by her promises of equality and retribution, she starts to secure the allegiance of those left in the village with blood limits.
It's not a clean transition.
Some within the movement already disagree with her choice to allow bloodlimit users into the revolution. She lets them. If they want to doubt her, they're welcome to. And so some of them leave.
Not all of the clans with blood limits are willing to trust her, nor have anything to do with non-blood limit users. That many who do join are treated warily doesn't help the situation any. But, with time, she's able to get the groups to unite under a common cause, and while there's no erasing a history like that, eventually she talks them into coexisting peacefully.
Her comrade army grows stronger.
Long live the revolution.
"Take back what is yours!" she shouts.
"Yeah!", "Woo!", "That's right!" the crowd cries back to her.
"No more going on the suicide missions!"
"No more!"
"No more breaking your back for labour you don't benefit from!"
"No more!"
"No more empty plates, as the rich civilians and the upper echelon of ninja feast!"
"No more!"
She can see other ninja leering on the rooftops and the sidelines, but they dare not take a step forward, now with the ring of ninja surrounding the crowd and Akari herself in a Kiri-style jonin vest that'd been donated to her.
"You got something to say, you bougie cunt buckets?" she calls to them.
The crowd rustles at this. People turn and shout, scream, and throw their fists up in the air.
From their place on the outside, the ninja sneer.
"Fight the power!" Akari shouts.
The crowd echoes back, "Fight the power!"
And at that, the ninja scatter. The crowd roars their approval.
Akari prepares to go on with the speech when she hears the thwip of a kunai heading towards her head and she ducks.
"Getting spicy, are we?" she asks.
She gets no reply, and she can see her ninja ready themselves for a fight, but she holds up her hand.
"Let me," she says. "Don't get hurt fighting my battle."
Because as much as she loves, adores, and values her little red rebels, they're mostly genin and chunin level, with only a couple of jonin sprinkled in. And she sees no reason for them to be involved in a fight she's more likely to win.
Akari cracks her knuckles and squares her stance.
A mist settles over the stage.
"Don't be a pussy, you pussy!" she shouts. "Get your ass out here and fight me!"
She senses it rather than sees it—the flash of movement within the fog, the way it starts to shift as somebody approaches, and she dodges. A katana blade slices through the air where she previously stood.
Akari scoffs. "You're one of those? One of those boring-ass weeb bitches, with the power of God and anime on your side?"
She hears a smattering of confused mutters from the crowd.
She loves them, she does, but sometimes it pains her how uncultured people in this world are.
The ninja takes another shot at her, and Akari rolls her eyes. "Fine, asshole."
She pushes her fingers through Snake, Ox, Dragon, Snake, and then the Ram seal, and says, "Lightning Release: Lightning Amour."
It's one of Ay's techniques. She siphoned it because knowledge should be shared equally, and holding your techniques under lock and key is stupid and he can suck her dick.
She can't hold it as long as him, nor can she utilize it as well as he can, but it's generally visually intimidating enough that it works as a nice "fuck off" technique when the need arises. Like right now.
Akari pulses her chakra, and the air around her electrifies. The mist quivers. It tries to hold, but another pulse of her chakra and the mist falls apart, leaving a thirty-something boring-ass dude with long black hair standing across from her on the stage.
She waves. "Hey, there you are. Ready to stop playing hide and seek so I can mow your ass like grass, baby boy?"
She can see the very second the Mist nin realizes what he's gotten himself into and goes to flee.
"Not so fast!"
She pushes her fingers through another set of seals, and says, "Lightning Release: Shock Whip!"
A whip made of lightning chakra materializes in her grip and she cracks the thing, the sound like the rumbling of an oncoming storm. The ninja freezes.
Akari might be a pretty run of the mill Kumo jonin, but she's still a jonin. She earned her stripes just like everybody else, a more difficult feat in Kumo than in most other ninja villages. And that means when push comes to shove, she's not above a good ass-kicking, especially if she's taking out a swine like this.
Kids? Off-limits.
But grown-ass adults are well within her jurisdiction, especially when they've taken the first swing.
"I know what you're thinking." She deepens her voice and says, "Oh, yes, whip me, mommy!" She tilts her head. "Or daddy. I'm okay with either. Gender is a construct, after all, and I'm all for equal opportunity kinks, shame them as I might."
The ninja turns on his heel to run.
Akari flicks the whip out before he can get far, an easy feat thanks to the enhanced reaction time from the lightning armour. The whip catches him on the ankle and she sends a shock through it. The ninja seizes up as the current tears through his body.
She reels him in, crying, "We caught a live one, boys!"
The ninja thrashes. He tries to flick senbon at her as she drags him across the stage, and she flicks the whip again to send another round of electricity through him. He screams, loud and sharp, and Akari pulls him the rest of the way over.
"You stupid bitch," he says, breathing heavy. "You're dead, you and all these stupid, naive fucks."
"Aw, sweetie." She leans in close enough to pat him on the cheek and he turns his head to try and bite her. "That's not very nice."
She flicks her whip. The electricity surges. "This one's for Lenin!"
Flick. "For Marx!"
Flick. "For Engels, who deserved better than what he got! Everybody else might forget you, but I swear I never will!"
Flick. "For Wallerstein!"
Flick. "Hans Singer, Raúl Prebisch, the beautiful bastards who graced us with dependency theory!"
Flick. "Not for you, Stalin, you gnarly ass dick baby!"
Flick. "Not you, either, Kim Il-sung!"
Flick. "Or Kim Jong-il or Kim Jong-un, you ass backwards troglodytes!"
Her chakra reserves having taken enough of a hit that she's feeling a bit light-headed, Akari lets the chakra whip dissipate, and after that, she lets go of the lightning armour.
The Kiri nin is nothing but a blackened crisp at her feet. For good measure, she kicks the body, and her foot crunches as it makes contact.
There's dead silence.
Then, the crowd roars their approval.
Akari knocks the body off her make-shift stage. It rolls into the waiting crowd, where people take turns kicking it, as well.
She gives the crowd a chance to die back down before she finishes off her speech. With that accomplished, Akari retreats away from the crowd, knowing that they'll try and swamp her if she stays around too long. She can hear the sounds of people shouting and cheering amidst the steady pitter-patter of rain, and as she gets undercover, the sound of water as it pings off the tin roof.
One of the ninja waiting there for her—a man named Shinji, one of her own, one of her trusted—approaches her.
"Hey, got somebody here you might want to meet," he says.
He steps aside to reveal a young woman, maybe a year or two younger than Akari, with bright red hair and wide eyes.
"Hi!" the girl says.
Akari raises an eyebrow. "Hi."
"I'm Terumi Mei, and I've got a group of ninja that want to join the cause."
She skews her gaze towards Shinji. He nods.
"Cool," Akari says. "Welcome to the revolution, comrade."
Mei gives Akari a wide, toothy smile, and Akari returns it with a sharp one of her own.
.
.
Akari doesn't regret bringing Mei and her ninja in, not for a second.
Mei quickly establishes herself as the second in command within the operation, calling the shots and giving impassioned speeches of her own. She's a quick study, drinking all of the knowledge Akari can pass onto her through her pamphlets, her Marx Gramsci essays, and general ideological word-vomit.
And Mei brings something to the table that Akari could never—the first-person experience of Kirigakure. She spent her life in the carnage. She went through the graduation test. She was sent to the front lines, expected to die, and lived by sheer force of will.
So, Akari adjusts her plan.
From his office seated high in the village, the one place in which, through the fog, every inch of the village can be seen, the Third Mizukage stares down at the interaction.
"So that is her?" he asks, face stoic.
"Yes, sir," the hunter-nin kneeled before him answers. "That's believed to be the Kumogakure agent."
"And she is talking to my jinchuuriki."
"... yes, sir."
"What is she saying?"
The hunter-nin falls silent for a few moments. Then, they say, "She appears to be telling him that he is oppressed and that he… should throw off the chains of the bourgeoisie and embrace the role of the proletariat. She is…" The hunter-nin stiffens and makes a choked noise. "She is promising that if he joins her cause, she will grant him to be the one to… uh. To uh, end your life."
The Mizukage snaps his gaze downwards. "Were those her exact words?"
"Ah, no. Sir. Her exact words were…" The hunter-nin swallows. "'You can use your massive slug-chakra cock—if the Rokubi consents—to slap that asshat of a Mizukage into a well deserved, watery grave.'"
His face tightens. "And what, per se, did my jinchuuriki say in response?"
"He hasn't—" The hunter-nin cuts off. They wait. And then they sputter. "It—it sounds like he agreed!"
The Mizukage steps forward and presses his hand against the glass.
She glances up, right at him, and smiles a smile that he will see in his wildest nightmares.
.
.
The hunter-nin stationed twenty feet away sends Akari a thumbs up. A novel thing, having agents on the inside who can set things like this up.
She pats Utakata, the lanky noodle of a teenager with the Rokubi sealed in him, and says, "Welcome to the cause, comrade."
He grins. "Can't wait."
Satisfied, she turns towards the office, where she knows that the Mizukage is watching her, and lifts both of her hands towards him. Her middle fingers rise.
Utakata snickers. "Shit," he says over his laughter, eyes wide and thrilled. "You really are nuts."
"The only nuts here are my massive stainless steel ones, which the Mizukage will be sucking like a newborn baby in about a month."
"Kami."
"We don't believe in Kami, here—strictly secular."
His eyes grow wide like a kid who's gotten the first eyeful of his Christmas haul and is ready to rip open the mountain of boxes under the tree.
She grabs him by the wrist and leads him off towards what she has affectionately nicknamed her lair, the underground tunnel system where her little rag-tag revolution has been building its weapons and conducting its business.
"Come on," she says. "There's socialism to be had."
"You're leaving?"
Situated on her bedroom in the lair, a drab thing made of concrete walls and plain white furniture, Akari looks up from her book. "Yep."
"But you—we're almost—what?" she screeches. "You can't!"
"You guys don't need me anymore."
"You're the one who started all of this! You gathered us, you taught us, you led us. You can't just leave when we're a week away from throwing a coup d'etat!"
"And now my adorable commies are going to slice off your idiot of a Mizukage's head and then you're going to take over."
Mei freezes. "... me?"
"You."
"But I—I don't…" She shakes her head. "Are you sure?"
It's funny—Akari hadn't been tempted to stick around before now. She never even considered it.
The situation had always been clear cut, to her. Run in. Mobilize the people. Give them the tools to unshackle themselves. And then let them work it out on their own while she heads back to Kumo, her mission accomplished in more ways than one. She was Marx, in this situation, not Lenin—she was just here to be the ideological backbone and to give them a push, not to see the damn thing through.
"Why would I stick around?" she asks.
"Well, I… who else is going to take over as Mizukage?"
So this is what true power feels like.
She always derided Stalin and Kim Jong Il and every other fuck who took the power the people placed in their hands and twisted it. But for the first time, she really sees it. How easy it would be to get drunk on the power.
And that maybe she's already a little tipsy, herself.
Akari braces her hands on Mei's shoulders and grins. "You're the most zealous little fuck I've got here. Of course, I'm sure. You'll do great. Besides, you'll still be able to contact me if you want. And there's always Gramsci." Akari pokes her in the chest. "But… you've got a red heart."
Mei furrows her brows. "Everybody's heart is—"
"Shhh," Akari says, placing a finger on her lips. "Red heart."
"Red heart," Mei mumbles around her finger.
"Good girl."
"She did it."
"Told you she'd do it, she's the kind to get through shit."
The Third smiles at the intelligence report. He casts his gaze up to Ay, who looks equal parts relieved and terrified. "She did, in fact, do it," he says. "The Third Mizukage is dead, and Terumi Mei is the new Mizukage. She was given the hat after about a third of the village's ninja population was killed in the uprising. A good chunk of those ninja were jonin, taken out by the jinchuuriki." He settles back in his chair, hands folded. "Regardless of whether Terumi allies with us, they've removed themselves as a potential enemy by crippling their fighting force. They've now formally ceded from the war."
"Damn," B says.
The Third and Ay look at him, waiting for a rhyme, but B just shrugs.
Ay frowns. "So this is what a violent revolution actually looks like."
"It is."
Akari picks this moment to kick down the office door and march in, an attendant stumbling along behind her, crying something that dies in his throat when the door swings open.
"Sir, I'm so sorry, I—"
The Third waves a hand. The attendant bows deeply and hurries off back down the hall.
"How are my favourite bougie scum?" she asks, her hands on her hips and a wide grin on her face.
B grins. "We're great, now that you're back to set us straight."
Ay rolls his eyes, his previous reaction well hidden. "Six months to spearhead a revolution?" he asks. "You're losing your touch."
"Trial run. Baby's first violent revolution. When I dig in my heels and really go at it here, I'm sure it'll only be four."
Her grin is razor-sharp, and Ay suppresses a shudder as pinpricks run up and down his spine.
"Will it?" the Third asks.
"You bet, daddy," she says. "Just you wait."
The Third gives her a faint smile. "I'm not the one that's going to be dealing with your bullshit."
"Oh?"
He sends a pointed glance at Ay and looks back at Akari. The look on her face is downright delighted as she turns to Ay, and she bounces on the tips of her toes, looking like a child waiting for candy with her wide eyes and her hands clasped in front of her.
"Oh, Ay," she sings. "Hear that?"
He grimaces. "Unfortunately."
She leans forward to whisper in his ear, "Better prepare your asshole for my monster cock, big boy, because I plan on going in dry."
Ay steps back, eyes narrowed. "You're disgusting."
"You know what's really disgusting? The exploitation of the worker by the bourgeoisie. The worker isn't equipped with the economic tools to defend themselves, and without any labour laws or unionization," she throws a sarcastic look over her shoulder at the Third, then to Ay, "they're left out to dry by the government. They're at the mercy of bougie scum like you three."
"No," Ay says. "I'm not listening to this."
He bows to the Third and then turns on his heels, intent on leaving the room.
On his way out, he hears B say, "So who is the worker, anyways? You say it a lot, but you've never actually explained that phrase."
Ay whips around faster than he's ever done anything in his life. "B."
B shrugs, unperturbed. "Hey, man, I'm just wondering. Ain't nothing wrong with a little bit of studying."
"Don't listen to him," Akari says. "He's a worthless capitalist swine." She pokes B on the nose. "You, on the other hand, have the right spirit. When you ask questions you can learn new things and when you learn new things you can—"
"Shut up," Ay says.
"You can't shut up—"
"The raging cry of the revolutionary," Ay says, voice as dead as the Third Mizukage. "I know. You've said it a million times."
"And yet, here we are. Having this back and forth because you can't seem to get it through your thick fucking skull."
Ay glares at B. "We're leaving," he says. "All three of us, so that Lord Third can go back to doing something useful instead of wasting it on this dumbass conversation. B and I are going to go one way, you're going to go the other."
"I'll go whichever way I want."
"You might want to head towards your home," the Third says. "I'm sending you back out to the frontlines tomorrow night."
"And why would I do that?" she asks. "I should be given at least two weeks' worth of downtime following a mission that long."
"You've made… friends, let's say, with Namikaze Minato. I've on good authority that the part of the frontlines I'm sending you to is the one in which he's currently stationed."
"Sold."
.
.
Akari steps to the side as a couple of kids sprint past her full tilt, screaming and laughing as they play in the packed streets. On either side of her, she can hear stall sellers announcing their wares, many of them waving to her and calling her name as she goes by.
She remembers these days. Her memories of growing up in this world are fresh in her mind, even with a decade's worth of years weighing them down.
Coming from her backwater village, with parents who thought her equal parts too smart and too mouthy, villagers who snuffed her, nobody who would take her seriously. It was just like her last life. A dead end. A worthless expenditure. She had believed this go-around would be yet another journey of mundanity, and she did it with a bitter sort of resignation.
The second she saw those Kumo nin walk in and heard the whispers of them stealing children, she didn't hesitate to grab one by the sleeve and demand they take her with them. And they did.
Kumo has been home to her ever since. It was the people of Kumo who raised her, with open doors and tables full of food. Kumo who embodied the idea that it takes a village to raise a child, and put it into practice with more success than she ever imagined it could be.
The adults who heard her arguments against corporal punishment and listened. Who may have rolled their eyes at her and decried mouthy young kids, but who respected the backbone she showed by standing up for herself and backed off. Not all of them, no, but enough to matter.
The Kumo children who listened to her ideas, acted on them, and gave her her first taste of victory at the ripe old age of ten years.
And the Third who first cemented the idea that her desire for change maybe wasn't so crazy after all when he plucked her from relative obscurity and treated her ideas with respect.
"You're a fiery one," he had said. "A big head on those small shoulders, with a big ass mouth to match."
She'd bristled, initially. Thought he was blowing her off.
Until he'd added, "And some dangerous things coming out of it. Guess I better watch myself, hmm? Don't think I'll be taking my eyes off of you anytime soon, you brat."
And he was true to his word. The Third tried to keep her quiet. He tried to put a leash on her. For years, now, he's done everything he could to suppress her from creating chaos in his serene little kingdom.
But never once did he tell her she was wrong, and never once did he dismiss her out of hand.
She'll never forget that.
Because at the end of the day, she knows he understood as well as she did that above everything else, Akari loves this village. She loves these people. Even the shitty ass bougie scum like Ay and B, or the ones who laugh and sneer at her for being some batshit insane asshat who raves the day away.
These are her people, and she pushes forward because she wants the village to be better. She wants her people to be happy and successful and she knows that she can give that to them. And what she wants for them? Freedom? Equality? A real chance at life? For the better.
And through violent revolution, they can have it. She knows that first hand—Kirigakure was her test case. It worked. Her ideas? Put into practice. Her methods? Tried and true.
Kirigakure was burned to the ground, and from its ashes, the phoenix will rise.
Akari looks around her. The smiling faces, the happy children, the peace, even where prosperity is missing.
She wants better for them, more than anything; she doesn't know if she can watch it all go up in flames. It was easy for her in Kiri because those weren't her people, not really. They were her people in spirit. Their thirst for equality and revolution quenched her soul. But she didn't grow up around those faces and she didn't experience those hardships.
There are serious problems with how Kumo runs their village. People profiting who shouldn't, and more people than Akari can count being relentlessly exploited.
Civilians who can't make it in mining, weaponsmithing, armouring, or any of the other handful of trades that the village values, and are left destitute as a result, homeless skeletons that haunt the alleyways. Genin and chunin being worked to the bone for barely enough to scratch by, if even that, and told that their only option is to toil away at menial labour that will never sustain them financially or head to the frontlines to die for their village. She refuses to let that go unacknowledged. And she doesn't think she's on the completely wrong track, with that.
But there's so much that's not awful. So many sights before her eyes that aren't rotten.
It makes her wonder.
If Kumo is Ay's asshole, is she prepared to demolish it? Can she really go in dry?
A/N: if ffn let me do the less than sign, i'd put a heart here. but i can't. so use your imagination because i love all of you.