Chapter 5
There was a forest. At its lip was a loosely screwed metal flap swabbed in sand and rust, missing one of its two supports, thus spun like a ferris wheel by each gust. Once a sign board. Now a miniature auxiliary windmill, on which were scribbled these words: Forest of Death.
He'd last visited this place a while ago. A coiled serpent, wound whip of intricately patterned bronze, fell from a tree and lashed his shoulder; it threw up a clarion of hisses, reminding him why this was so. Mosquitoes the size of slingshot stones swarmed. Buzzed warnings. Wore on their translucent wings silver-white livery— lendings of the moon. They were chapped sentries to the wilderness within; his frame, blooded bourn, was the fount they sought to sup on.
He waved them away and hurried to the dusted arch that shook when touched and shed flakes of mud like soft spring rain. The disused doorway underneath was slate gray, and resembled a drawbridge barred.
He vaulted over the arch. At his landing, an assortment of yellowed eyes like searchlights gleamed, observed every motion yet kept their distance. There were rumbles emitted; these, kneading earth and air, resembled drum beats, were drawn out into the sense of thundering hooves.
A warning that he knew to heed.
All around him rose various willows, a phalanx upreared. Each tree billowed upwards, speared the sky with burnished boughs infinite; thus punctured, star-light in gules gushed through a mesh of reddish brown. The forest strummed the notes of autumn and rippled with the rumour of war while the world outside slept and celebrated spring.
Outlines of monstrous nests here and there dotted the dark; these, he knew, harboured blue-black eggs the shape of cannon shells and hatched and housed plumed predators unending that once alerted were as poisoned darts from a quiver inexhaustible. He moved forward, and spider web, resembling in texture and hue phlegm and spittle frozen, glistened. Chains for the unwary. They showered forth a runnel of sap that emitted a fragrant musk but blackened and deadened all it touched.
He stood for a minute in the midst of this armoury to all nightmares. Croaks suppurating like conches blown sent shivers down his spine. Yet he kept his eyes closed. Attempted to envision the path that he, when young, had followed; for the forest, he knew, ran labyrinthine, and could be traversed for days without end.
He'd explored it, after all.
To its western side were fens and bogs, where skeletons long forgotten were outposted; these, strung with rotted flesh, bloomed through the mire. A shattered rib cage decomposing would here often spread its calcified petals, the odour a warning against the carnivorous murk.
To the east the temperature rose with every step taken. Trees tiptoed, first to sparseness, then oblivion. One eventually reached a desert that inspired in the mouth an aridity. Breath became a burden, emerged in drowsed exhalations; the body in sluggish motions enacted a dehydration induced shrivelling. Sand gyres whirled, and so did the sky; and round and round the world went, till one sank into a lightheaded renunciation of thought and feeling, and let the sun-scavenged sky evaporate the last drops of life beading one's coil.
It was to the north that he intended to journey today; this direction, though fraught with peril too, was the mildest of the three.
There was a loamy strip of land not far from where he stood; it wore a necklace of reddish rocks, and was neighboured by a stream where shimmied a school of fish, utterly harmless, utterly ordinary. Conical trees, crenellations manned by a watch of red leaves that the seasons rotated, kept the location privy.
This place had been his secret spot for a year and a half, but that was a while ago.
It was this that he now sought.
And it was this that he found, though it took him an hour, and though by the time he found it his tracksuit bore the evidence of a scrape or three with forces predatory: namely, with a gigantic serpent, and a mutated bird with two heads and four pairs of wings. He felt a spark of life in dismembering both; his heart distended with a joy that for the last two years had lain forgotten. Yet he was huffing too. This'd once been easy.
Fucking Hell.
He shut his eyes. Went through the motions of the academy stance. Then substitution. Transformation. The clone technique. Graduated to all else that he first with desire and then in despair had learnt. Tree climbing. Water walking. Bisecting a leaf with a mote of wind. All these were dredged up from the pits of memory and re-lived. His heart leapt with remembered rhythms long forsaken. They were still a part of him. It was all still a part of him.
Naruto wreathed himself in wind chakra and pushed off, sped forth and split boulders, watched them disintegrate, spun their dust skyward with a flick; let the particles hover awhile, then spat wind bullets at them, and laughed, laughed long and hard at the facade of freedom brought by these actions in this void— here he could pretend that all this, all he did, meant nothing. It was not the thrum of power at his fingertips that he celebrated, nor the damage he caused, but the utter uselessness of it all; here in this quiet cove of his there was no one watching, no one to chronicle or censure what he did, or to decide where he be placed or what armies lead, how best brought to heel, how sacrificed.
There was one technique left. One still incomplete. The weightless freedom of this moment nudged an attempt. He grit his teeth. Shut his eyes. Extended an open palm. The seed of a vortex sprang forth, gyrated, gradually grew in size, first to that of a lemon, then to that of a jackfruit; all at once it exploded forth in a blue storm winching and whirled out of existence, leaving behind only a mangled hand.
He sank to his knees and tried quelling the tremors that shook his frame. Blood stippled the grass.
"Fuuuuuuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"
But he was laughing. Laughing through tears, and revelling in the torrent of curses that streamed forth. The clear rill that licked the periphery of this loamy land beckoned, and there he washed his hand. There freely wept, so that tears like raindrops rippled the rill. Each drop that hit the transparent surface marred his reflection, expanded outwards in concentric circles— a mirror fracturing. And the reflected network of trees behind shook free their reddened braids, their leaves strands of hair spilling loose, strands that with each swirl feathered his image in a mother's embrace.
He was late by a few minutes for training. It was dawn by the time he dragged himself home; then he overslept. So it was with some trepidation that he reached the training ground.
She was wearing a violet hakama, and her hair was a bun maintained by a russet ribbon and two needles. Her sword was out, the scabbard at her side empty; he watched her twirl through a set of routines with a grace utterly inhuman and mesmeric. There was something feline, something artistic about the economy of movement, the sudden sharp changes in direction. She dropped her shoulder one way then exploded the other, and in the same motion pivoted and drew—drew as though making a brush stroke on a canvas. There was a dignified beauty in her face that the daintiness of motion accentuated. Suppressed joy, too. Each elaborate thrust threw into relief her suppleness of form. A rosy hue dappled her cheeks. Satisfaction shimmered in her eyes, which with each shimmy brightened.
Uchiha Satsuki.
He did not know what to make of her. In moments like this he felt the first stirrings of something he'd never felt before: admiration. She was beautiful to watch. A mistress of her craft. And it felt nice to have someone to talk to, someone who did not care what he was, or what his father had done for the village; someone who took no shit and was scathing when necessary. But kind too. She sat and listened yesterday, when she did not have to. Argued with him, yes, but sat and let him talk. Then said to him she'd be there to see him through. He felt a queer joy when she said that, even though the rational part of him knew it was just her responsibility.
The click of her sheathing her sword broke him away from his contemplation.
"You are late."
He rubbed the back of his head.
"I kinda overslept."
"See that it does not happen again."
Straight to business, then. No mention of yesterday.
"Hokage sama told me that we are to start with D ranks," she said. "But before we do, I would like to assess your skill level."
"Fine by me."
He walked across and dropped into the academy stance. She, however, made no move. Just stood there and scrutinized him for a second, as though he were a puzzle that needed piecing together.
It irked him.
"Naruto," she said, as though come to a decision, "I need you to help me with something. I read your academy reports, and they are very odd."
He raised an eyebrow.
"Really?"
"Yes. Quite odd, indeed. You were top of the class for the first three years. No issues bar being a nuisance in the classroom. Tell me how someone like that goes from being a high flyer to dead last."
"I told ya. Didn't wanna be a Shinobi."
"Yes. But you excelled for the first three years anyway. What changed?"
He gave her a wry smile.
Then exploded into motion.
To her credit, bar a slight widening of eyes she did not react at all. Simply parried his strike. Then drifted backwards as he continued his surge. She did not bother defending— bobbed and weaved instead.
"Your speed is impressive for a genin." She ducked under a haymaker, then circled out of his pressure without a care in the world. "Very impressive," she amended, as he further upped the tempo, now frenzied in motion, his movements containing very little grace but compensating for it with the sheer power behind everything he threw.
Yet nothing connected. She was as flowing water, liquid in her movements; as the air itself, slipping out of the tightest spots with weightless ease, not even bothering with a defence, or the pretense of one.
What rankled a bit was that she looked almost bored.
And then mid movement, she switched.
He was half a head taller than her.
Probably had twenty kilograms on her.
He pressed her with the certitude of superior strength, with the belief that if he were to land a solid strike it'd be enough to bend her over, make her fold.
None of these inbuilt advantages made any fucking difference.
Her languid kick landed with a snap, sent him careening through grass. He dug up a smoking trench in his wake, cratered the soil, a comet fallen; streaked through the laketop, severed it in half for a second, left behind frothing eddies, and was brought to an abrupt halt by a stone face of solid rock, head hidden in the ground and limbs akimbo. A scarlet pain coruscated from his wrist and exploded outwards— rattled his ribcage, drove a serrated knife through his skull.
He groaned through a mouthful of mud.
In retrospect, she'd let him read her intentions, allowed him to see her maneuver from a mile away, so that he got his arms up in defence. If she hadn't done that, that kick would've probably broken him in half.
He'd broken something anyway.
There was someone next to him. Pulling him out. Turning him over. Tripping over words. Issuing forth apologies. He saw her for a second in blurred triplicate, her face twisted into a panicked blob.
There was a finger swimming at the edges of his vision. It moved across his eyeline. It was a fine fucking finger, snow white and dainty and...and where was he, again?
"...follow it," she was saying, her voice disembodied, an echo.
He shut his eyes for a moment and ignored the pain— the bludgeoning, burgeoning pain, which was nowhere and everywhere and muffled him up in its scarlet, star speckled mantle.
He opened his eyes. Her finger's motions across the eyeline were easier to follow.
"...was that...necessary?" His voice sounded hoarse, even to his ears.
"I did not put much into that." She nibbled at her lip, a child chastised. "I've never had a student before. I forgot how fragile genin fresh out of the academy are. And...and I do not think you have a concussion, for what it is worth."
"Joy," he whispered. "Always been durable."
She took his hand and turned it over. Pain lanced through his wrist. He inhaled sharply. A balmy green coated her palm; this she applied to his wrist, and slowly, ever so slowly, the pain trickled away into nothingness. Broken bone readjusted itself.
She held onto his hand longer than was necessary, staring at his calloused palm. Her eyes narrowed.
He wondered wh-
"Those scars." The apologetic note from before was scrubbed out, and there was now a note of authority in her words. "I know of only one technique that leaves them."
Oh, crap.
He weighed his options. But the bottomline was that she knew, and that any denial would only sever the tentative trust they'd built the day before.
He decided to make a clean breast of it.
"That's your answer," he said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"The one to your question from a while ago. How someone tops the academy three years, then drops off a cliff. When I was six, I was naive. Wanted to win everyone over...wanted them to respect me—love me, perhaps. I spent days and days in the library, and picked up little snippets. Studied scrolls. Created a base. Practised all day long. Excellence became an obsession. My role model, of course, was the fourth Hokage."
He let out a hollow laugh. Her face, it seemed to him, had decked itself in the trappings of sympathy.
"Who didn't love the man? He was so far above us all, a God in a way. He gave himself up so we could live; and I—I wanted that. I wanted to be just like that. I read everything I could about him, obsessed over him. Sought to re-create his techniques, for which I found hints in speculative papers. The academy was easy. Boring. This is where I spent the entirety of my time. He was my hero. My sensei in spirit. I wasn't Uzumaki Naruto— I was Namikaze Minato. That's the life I lived daily."
He grinned.
"Then I found out the truth. And my love for the man turned into hate—I was no longer obsessed with saving the village, but with surpassing that man, so I could spit in his face. I'd never be him. I'd surmount him, be his better in every regard. Take his techniques to heights he never could—not for him or the village, but to show him how all his talent was worth no more than ash at the end. How his sacrifice meant nothing. How his son, whom he sentenced to a lifetime in penury, would store and hoard knowledge far beyond his wildest imaginings, but never use it in defence of what he loved.
"And that's how we reach the point I told ya about yesterday. That's when I decided to run. I spent two years stitching together odds and ends, gathering power to the extent I could, and training— training like a maniac, like my life depended on it. Because to me, it did. I forsook the academy. It was worthless to me. Didn't even attend most of the time."
"What changed?" She asked.
"I remember being frustrated over my lack of progress. I dunno if you remember, but we held the chunin exam three years ago. I went and watched. And all I saw was killing and dying refined into art. I saw people who'd given up a decade and all the little things in life. Who'd never noticed the song of birds or sat and watched the snow fall or discarded an umbrella and danced in heavy rain, who knew the price of life but not its value; who'd let military discipline govern all, censure all— who'd given up all they could be, only to lie there at the end like a broken stalk with a kunai in their throat, wondering what could've been, lamenting the life unlived.
"I saw life wasted. Life subjugated. Mindless drones who killed or were killed in bouts of madness. And I saw in all this a mirror held up to me— this is what I was becoming. In attempting to spite my father I'd lost myself, become the very thing I hated. Even in death he held power over me, twisting and corrupting."
He paused. Closed his eyes. Smiled in rapture.
"But he only held power over me till I let him. I saw the hopelessness in my trying to run. These Shinobi at the exam, they weren't even the cream of the crop. But some of them were stronger than me. To surpass them would mean another year or three. To surpass those who sent them? That was a lifetime's work. A lifetime not just unlived, but spent in bitterness. Wasted. And I didn't want to be that. I never fucking wanted that.
"Living the way I do, I might be dead by sixteen. But at least it's a life I live for myself, and not in competition with a ghost. I make my own choices. I'm free. As figuratively free as I let myself be, though you and your kind may enslave me, or condemn me to a quick grave. Because, as I said yesterday, I'll never be one of you. And that's enough for me."
He opened his eyes, and saw the girl lost for words. Thought he saw traces of pity in her eyes.
He grinned.
"And now as a thank you for patching me up and listening to all that, how 'bout a cup of ramen? My treat." He laughed. "For real this time."
A/N: To everybody who reviews and has reviewed so far, a heartfelt thank you. I absolutely would not be able to write this without you. I know I do not respond often (because when you have a hectic schedule and your choices are between 2 hours of writing or 2 hours spent responding to reviews, you reluctantly pick the former), but please know that I read and cherish every single one of them (even the critiques). Once again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. You keep this work going.
On Naruto's being too chatty and so willing to share, I think a life spent in isolation can oscillate between two extremes: either an antisocial nature that trusts nothing and no one, and sees conspiracies in the wind, and is thus unwilling to divulge a name, let alone such detail; or, as this is an approximation of (and as canon Naruto was), a desperate desire to hold the stage and share everything with anyone who shows even an iota of interest in your life. Naruto here walks around with the iron clad certainty that people cannot hurt him till he lets them (it remains to be seen how valid this is); to top it off Satsuki is the first person that he thinks sees him for him. Hence his behaviour.
Reviews absolutely make my day, so would be grateful if you took the time to leave one.