My name is Sawada Tobi, and I can see the future. Oh, I'm not omniscient or anything. I can't see everything that's going to happen, just bits and pieces. And I can't control what I see. I can't say, "Show me what's going to happen in Konoha at 10am next Wednesday." I see what the universe wants me to see, not what I want to see. Usually the things I see are somehow related to me or to other people I know, though. Also, the visions I have aren't very long—they usually last only a few seconds or minutes—and I can't see very far into the future. A few months ahead is about my limit.
I've had this ability for as long as I can remember. It's an advanced bloodline. When I was born, my left eye was blind and covered by a cataract. It stayed that way until I was about three. Then I started seeing things through that eye. At first, I was really confused, because what I saw through the left eye didn't match what I saw through the right eye. When I told my parents about this, they explained about the bloodline limit—they told me I was seeing the future.
Everything went along fine until I was about five. I was planning to enter the Shinobi Academy in my village—the Hidden Village of Grass, if you really want to know—when it happened. Grass had been fighting with Rain for a long time, and the war was going badly for us. The members of my family, having the same ability as I did, predicted each one of the defeats we suffered. The other villagers blamed my family for what they saw—they assumed that because the Sawada Clan had predicted the defeats, it had somehow caused them. One night, they came to the Sawada compound bearing weapons, determined to eradicate our clan. My mother grabbed me and fled our home. A few of the shinobi of the Grass spotted her leaving, and followed. I felt three shuriken hit her in the back, and she dropped me. I ran like hell, but I wasn't fast enough. I stumbled and fell, and saw a man looming over me with a long, thin sword. He swept the sword down and I closed my eyes…and nothing happened.
I looked up to see why I wasn't dead, and saw…something…standing between me and my assailant. It looked generally man-like, except that it had a Venus flytrap growing out of its shoulders. Half of its body was black, and the other half was white. It wore a long cloak patterned in black and red. One of its hands was holding the Grass-nin's wrist, keeping his sword at bay. The other hand was wrapped around the man's throat. It squeezed, tightening its grip until the man's windpipe was crushed. It dropped the corpse unceremoniously to the ground and then turned to me.
I think I felt, at that time, the most complex mix of emotions I have ever felt. There was obviously sorrow for my murdered clan, and anger at the men who had killed them. I was happy to have escaped, but also somewhat afraid of the strange being who had saved me. Who was he? What was he?
"Hey kid, are you all right?"
I only nodded, not trusting myself to speak. The man—as he turned to face me I saw that he did indeed have a man's face--had a soft, calm voice that seemed designed to put people at ease. It contrasted greatly with his appearance.
"What's your name?"
"S-Sawada Tobi, sir."
"Tobi-kun, you have a very special and unique ability. Would you like to meet people who see that ability as something to be valued instead of something to be feared?"
It is a terrible thing to know, at the age of five, that your clan is dead and you are alone in the world. My clan was dead, but this man was offering hope that I might not be alone.
"Very much, sir."
The man bent down and scooped me up in his arms. "What's your name, sir?"
"Zetsu."
As the leaves of the flytrap closed protectively over me, another voice issued from the man's mouth. This second voice was much harsher than the one I had heard earlier. "Hey, that guy's not getting up again, and I'm hungry."
The first voice sounded annoyed. "We can eat later. Right now, let's just leave before we end up having to fight a whole town."
"Okay, okay. But once we get the kid back to headquarters, I want to eat."
On the way back to "headquarters," I learned a lot about my rescuer. His clan name is Taenaka, and he was also originally from the Grass Village. Like me, he was born with an advanced bloodline. Like me, he lost his clan when they were attacked by townsfolk who were frightened of their abilities—and in this case, also frightened of their strange appearances. The Venus-flytrap-growing-out-of-the-shoulders thing is a normal manifestation of the Taenaka bloodline. The black-and-white-body-and-two-voices thing is not. Apparently, the same mutation that causes the advanced bloodline screws up the development process of twins born into the clan. Instead of having two separate bodies, the twins share one. Traditionally, they also share a single name.
A lot of people who hear both halves of Zetsu speak assume that one twin is good and the other evil. In reality, it's more complicated than that. Zetsu's two halves just have completely different personalities. One is harsh and brutally honest. He is also the half that's in control during fights, because he's a ruthless and capable warrior. The other half is much kinder and gentler. He excels at stealth, but doesn't take much of an active role in fights, because he's too soft-hearted to ever actually hurt anybody.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention one other interesting fact about Zetsu: he eats corpses.
Considering his rather unique physiology, this actually isn't as strange as you might think. Lots of plants feed on decaying animal matter, and Zetsu is part plant. Since he's a ninja, whose job is essentially to go around killing people, the easiest source of sustenance for him is the body of a defeated enemy. This also has the added advantage of removing all evidence of the assassination.
"Headquarters" turned out to be a large compound set into a mountainside in the Mountain Country. (The people there are apparently not very creative when it comes to naming things.) Upon our arrival, I found myself being presented to the other members of an organization called "Akatsuki," to which Zetsu apparently belonged. The first member I met was Hoshigaki Kisame, a blue-skinned man who towered over me back then. (Actually, he still does—Kisame is so tall he towers over small trees.) Being a little kid, and having the same amount of tact as any other little kid, I promptly blurted out, "You look like a fish!"
Kisame is the most hot-headed of the Akatsuki, and the one who possesses the most raw physical strength. The last living member of the Hoshigaki clan of the Hidden Mist Village, he also possesses the Hoshigaki clan's ceremonial sword, the Samehada. The Samehada has been passed down from one generation of the clan to the next since the time of the Shodaime Mizukage.
I'll let you in on a little secret about the Samehada: it's alive. It's not even really a sword—at least, it wasn't originally. You see, the nine bijuu aren't the only demons who inhabit our world. There are a bunch of less powerful minor demons too, and Samehada is one of those. Legend has it that the minor demons were spawned when the bijuu took human form and produced children with humans. If that legend is true, Samehada is presumably the offspring of Isonade, the shark bijuu. Anyway, Samehada used to live in the waters around the Mist Village, and caused a lot of trouble back in the day when Shodaime was still around. It (no one knows if Samehada is male or female except Kisame, and he's not telling) caused storms, attracted sharks and kraken, and generally led to the deaths of a lot of fishermen and shinobi. So the Shodaime Mizukage issued a challenge: he would fight Samehada one-on-one. If he won, Samehada would serve him and his descendants for as long as their bloodline continued to exist. If Samehada won, the entire Mist Village would relocate away from Samehada's territory.
You've probably figured out by now that the Shodaime Mizukage was a Hoshigaki, and that he won. Now here's the really interesting part: Samehada, like most demons, has the ability to change its shape. In order to fulfill its part of the bargain, Samehada transformed into a sword, and has been fighting for the Hoshigaki clan ever since.
One of the things I've seen through my left eye is Kisame fighting a Leaf-nin with a weird bowl haircut and a green spandex jumpsuit. In that fight, Kisame gets pushed to his limits. The Leaf-nin is on the verge of defeating him, and he knows it. So he uses his last resort jutsu, a secret technique that not even his partner Itachi knows about. He throws Samehada at the Leaf-nin, and as it's spinning towards the guy, it changes. The Leaf-nin is very surprised to find himself being punched in the head by a blue-skinned humanoid figure covered in scales with fins on its back, legs, and forearms. For the first time in over 400 years, Samehada reverts to its true form and fights alongside its master.
Showing much more restraint than is typical for him, Kisame did not kill me for my perceptive comment about his appearance. In fact, he soon became one of my favorite members of the Akatsuki. He's boisterous, talkative, and always speaks his mind. He's a much less complicated person than the others, and as such is one of the easiest to be around. Why the Leader paired him with Itachi, who has all the emotion of a brick, I will never know.
Zetsu left to find something to eat (at the time, I didn't know what he ate), leaving me in Kisame's care. Kisame, who is about as well-suited to childcare as Jirayia is to celibacy, seemed at a loss as to what to do, so I helpfully told him, "I'm hungry." While he went into the kitchen to find something for me to eat, I wandered around the room we had been sitting in. It seemed to be a common area, with a few armchairs, a couch, a coffee table, and a television. Sitting on top of the television was a small bird, which was currently engaged in preening its feathers. Walking over to it, I saw that it was not a flesh-and-blood bird, but rather was made of clay. I was astounded. Every detail, every feather, was perfect. The bird was even moving. I did what any child will do when confronted by something he finds fascinating—I reached out to touch it.
"Don't touch that!"
The voice that admonished me was neither Kisame's nor Zetsu's. I turned around to find another member standing in the entrance to the room. He had long blond hair tied up in a ponytail at the top of his head, with some of his hair falling over one eye. He was shorter and of a more slender build than either Zetsu or Kisame. "Who are you?" I asked.
"My name is Deidara, yeah. Who are you?"
"I'm Sawada Tobi, sir. Zetsu-san brought me here."
Briefly, I told Deidara how Zetsu had saved me, and why I had needed saving in the first place.
"So you have a bloodline limit, yeah. That explains why he brought you here, yeah."
"Did you make that?" I pointed to the bird.
"Yeah. It's part of my bloodline limit, yeah." He held up one hand, and I saw that there was a mouth sitting in the center of the palm. This didn't shock me as much as you might expect—after all, I had already met a man with a plant growing out of his shoulders and another with blue skin and gills.
At that point, Kisame returned with some ramen, and Deidara told me a little about himself while we shared a meal. He was currently the youngest member of the Akatsuki, having been born in the Stone Village only 15 years before. Unlike myself and Zetsu, his bloodline was not an established one. It was new, something that had never occurred before. At first, his parents thought the mouths on his hands were just a birth defect, and forced him to wear gloves all the time to cover them. One day, when he was about five years old, Deidara was playing with some clay, and one of the mouths ate some. At first, Deidara was in a panic: he knew you weren't supposed to eat clay, and was afraid he would get sick. To his surprise, the hand-mouth spit the clay back out in the shape of a perfectly formed bird. That was the day Deidara became an artist.
He entered Stone's Ninja Academy, and continued making clay sculptures as a hobby. Throughout this whole time, he kept his hands covered when in public, taking a secret pride in the ability that his parents thought was a defect. He usually carried one of his sculptures with him, pretending that he had made it the normal way and delighting in his friends' praise of it. As a young genin, he had been sent on a mission that went terribly awry. With his sensei and one of his teammates dead, the other badly injured, and himself being attacked by three enemy ninja, he called up his last reserves of chakra. It flooded through his body, and he felt something stirring in the pocket of his vest. He was just as surprised as anyone else when his sculpture flew out of his pocket, landed on the lead enemy ninja—and blew itself to kingdom come.
His remaining teammate looked at him in a bemused sort of way. "I didn't know your sculptures were weapons."
"Neither did I, yeah."
Deidara soon became known as a demolitions expert, and was quickly promoted to Chuunin. When he was 12, a civil war broke out in the Earth Country…and Deidara and his parents ended up on opposite sides. One night, his parents tried to kill him while he slept. Unfortunately for them, he had anticipated an assassination attempt, and set traps. His parents were powerful shinobi, but they were no match for their son's specially-made weapons.
If Deidara's side had won the civil war, he would have been hailed as a hero. Unfortunately, it did not, so Deidara was instead vilified as a traitor. He was sentenced to death and imprisoned to await execution. His captors were apparently not the brightest people in the world, because they imprisoned him in a cell with the plain ground for a floor, and most of the ground in the Earth Country is clay. Needless to say, Deidara had no difficulty in escaping, and he fled the Stone Village. Eventually, he found his way to the Akatsuki.
"Hey, want to see what I was telling you about, with my sculptures?"
"Sure." I thought Deidara was going to take me outside to stage his demonstration. Instead, he simply dragged me and Kisame to the opposite end of the room, and activated the chakra trapped in the bird I had noticed earlier. The bird exploded, taking the television with it.
"Dammit, Deidara, what did you blow up now?" Zetsu had returned. A few minutes later, I was assigned my very first mission as a subordinate of the Akatsuki: Help Deidara Shop for a New Television.
