Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by petrames, drowsyivy and UmbreonGurl.
"Experience taught her.
Hurt raised her.
Neither defined her."
— Adrian Michael
Since I'd promised Mom I'd try fitting in the last time we spoke, I end up at the barbeque place that Koharu-sensei tells us to be at a little bit earlier than I usually do, mud still clinging to my standard issue blue sandals and my straw hat still clinging to my neck bouncing up and down as I walk.
I'd brought another basket of zucchini too, because the sheer number of them overflowed my ability to shove them off on my neighbors and Kobayashi — this is the last, the very last time I plant seven zucchini plants for the sake of 'making Saku-nii happy' — so here we are, take two on trying to get to know this team and seem personable. Friendly.
Like a friend.
Like a human. A person you could talk to, never mind that I had no interest in trading small talk with Dan, Shinku or Koharu-sensei.
Never mind that it's been nearly a year now since this team began. It'd crossed through a mild winter and straight into a muggy spring. And now it is summer again, and I still barely cared about either of these two boys, and I doubt they care about me.
I didn't need any more friends, and I didn't want them either.
Look at what friendship got me in my last life.
I'd lost and I'd lost and I kept right on losing right up until the world went mad, and I lost my life. I'd thought I had nothing else left to lose. After all, there wasn't anything after life I had left to lose.
Except…
My new world was even worse than the last. This world didn't go mad the year I turned twenty, a sophomore in college with dreams of my own just out of reach. No, quite frankly, this world went mad the first time its cruel god picked up a pen and started putting together concept sketches, which means that the world is built on a foundation of sheer madness starting with the alien bunny goddess in the moon and ending with me, Hatake Tsutako, who shouldn't even exist except perhaps as an unsung line of tragedy in my future-nephew's life.
And even though I know that my tragedy has been prewritten, fated like nothing else because the god in the machine has determined anyone connected to Hatake Kakashi (yet to exist) is to end in burning flames or worse, I am still determined to claw a path out of it alive anyway, even if I don't know what the price is for living.
But how sane is sane in a world built on madness and a need for profit? Sanity in an insane world is just insanity itself.
So no, I don't want any friends. I barely want my own name.
But it's not a choice about what I want right now.
I promised Mom I'd try to fit in, and if I didn't even give it my best effort then I'd be a liar. Whatever else I've been lately — a murderer, a thief, a trespasser — I'm not a liar.
Not yet, anyway.
I plunk the basket of zucchini down on the table. "Help yourself."
I do not sound as convincing as I think I do, because everyone around the table looks at me for a moment, my mud bedraggled pant hems, the angry red scratches on my arms since I'd foregone a long sleeved shirt, due to the murky late August heat.
"Cucumber?" Dan says, almost hesitantly reaching towards the basket.
How had he survived until age nine by — "Zucchini," I snap at him. That's a zucchini, the bane of my existence and—
Oh, but what did it matter?
"Why did you bring us zucchini?" Shinku blinks at me slowly from his place across the table.
For the love of—
I turn around, hands balled into fists at my side, and suddenly I possess no appetite and no desire to see either of these two idiots again.
If we washed out before making chunin as a team, then I could live with that.
There's always field promotions. There's always something. Anything else that isn't this hell pit of a team and hell of this existence.
Koharu-sensei hasn't arrived yet, which is just as well. "Have a nice life." I toss over my shoulder as I walk off.
"Tsutako-chan?" Dan calls from behind me. "Tsutako-chan, where are you going?"
I make no attempt to answer, because that works just as well.
I find myself almost crying, even though the tears are more in anger than any form of real hurt while ripping the weeds out from around my tomato plants.
At least I liked tomatoes, and at least tomatoes cared enough to like me, more or less well as I could possibly be liked by anything.
Despite the change of worlds, despite the change of family, despite the change in language, change in culture, and change in how I looked, despite everything being mad and becoming a trained killer at age eight or so, the plants are still the same.
Even if I couldn't possibly call them the names I am used to calling them.
There's no Latin in this world either. Solanum lycopersicum does not exist. But a tomato is a tomato, and I know one when I see one, even if I can't put it under a slide or extract its DNA to confirm that it is in fact, a tomato as I remember it.
I have no way to confirm if any of the plants I see in this hell world are like the plants I remember, but the feeling of dirt underneath my fingernails is the same.
I still recognize clover and lambsquarter and thistle and henbit, and I take great delight in ripping it all up and away from plants that I actually do enjoy.
Weeding is an oddly therapeutic action, more so than running through a sword kata or practicing a fist fight against a wooden training dummy. It's more tangible, easy to see the hurts inflicted by cucumber beetles and aphids and see the growth the plants make in the areas that I've weeded and the areas I haven't.
There's a satisfaction to be found in picking vegetables that I'd grown myself and using them in cooking, stopping only by Kobayashi's butcher shop to pick up meat.
A feeling of accomplishment.
Something I've built rather than something I've broken. A reminder that life and death hang on the same frail thread, that the hands that kill are also the same as the hands that nurture.
Sometimes it's good to remember that I am good for something other than killing.
Not a good daughter, or a good sister, or a good teammate, or a good student, or a good friend, and somewhere down the line I might fail these plants too by forgetting to tell the old lady next door that I'd be out, so please water my plants, but I haven't yet.
Unlike the other things.
I don't want friends, and I don't need more people in my life to care about and lose, but in the end, that doesn't matter. A good person would do her right duty and make a friend or two, do normal child things that would make her parents proud instead of confused, be just outgoing enough that it would make her brother happy, and somehow manage to get along with Thing One and Thing Two on her team.
That's what good people do to get by and live happily.
That's what good people do, but I am not good.
"Tsutako?"
I don't bother to look up. There's Shinku's feet in standard issue blue shinobi sandals that come in all sizes but never fit exactly right and a splatter of mud on his closer pant leg. "What?"
It's less a question, really. Just tell me what you want so we can get this over with.
"Are you okay?"
Whatever I'd been expecting, it wasn't that.
"What?"
For one, I didn't expect Shinku to ask me anything remotely like that. For another, I'm just fine. Peachy even.
"Y'know," he says, because he won't shut up — why won't you just shut up — "you really act like you're going to die before you turn thirty."
"Statistically speaking, half of our graduating class will die before turning thirty." That's why there are four graduating classes every year after all, one for each season, churning out soldiers for Konoha even as she denies that she is preparing for a new war.
Some of our graduating class has died already. Missions gone wrong, bad intel, lack of competence because they were just children, accidents, and other mundane tragedies.
By the time we're thirty, only half of us will remain. Some of us will be encouraged to start a family, get a kid, or two, or three, or seven. And the cogs in this machine grinds us all to dust and nothing more.
"That's a wartime average." Shinku scuffs his toe against the ground, kicking up dust into my face, making my nose sting and smart.
"What makes you think we won't see a war?" I rip up another handful of lambsquarter and try not to scream with the irony of it all.
"God," he says. "You're so weird, Hatake. I came here to ask if you were coming back, not to talk about the death rate. You're depressing as fuck."
"Then you can fuck right off." I don't regret that I say this. "I'm just peachy, and you've already ascertained that I'm not going to come back, so fuck off and leave me alone, Yuuhi."
He kicks up another cloud of dust. "Wow, there's no need to—"
"Just leave me the fuck alone." I finally turn my face up to him, teeth ground tight together, lips drawn back. I can feel whatever thought of a pleasant facade start to crack over the sheer rage.
How dare. How fucking dare he come to my garden. How dare he tell me I'm a weird depressing bitch when he was the one to bring up the fact that I didn't have a hope of living past thirty anyway.
How dare he keep kicking dirt into my face.
He holds up his hands in surrender, but I am seeing white around the edges of my vision, and I rise to my feet, dirt and plant stains clinging to my knees and hands. "Get out."
He scrams.
I go back to the next team meeting with nothing, no basket, no zucchini, not even a pretense at being a functional talkative human being.
I go back, but I know I've broken it. I've broken everything, and nothing about these jagged puzzle pieces will fit back together right even if I try glueing it back together with bloody hands.
After all, my tongue and teeth have already torn a chunk out of the center, and that wasn't going to get put back right, because it's settled into a deep pit in my stomach instead, and it wouldn't be coming up any time soon.
Utatane-sensei pins us all with a look that can only mean nothing good. It's the 'I expect you all to be on your best behavior, so don't disappoint me' look, the one that Dan always wilts under, except this time Shinku wilts too. Given our current behavior, we are disappointing.
Unfortunately, the field in which I grow my fucks is barren, and I've none to give the situation.
"I've arranged a meeting for lunch today with another team. Hopefully, it will be an educational and informative experience for the three of you."
Great. More people to put on a face for.
As it turns out, we're getting lunch with the pre-legendary Sannin and the Sandaime in one of their more beloved haunts — the gyudon place off of the main road bisecting the city and running straight to the Tower.
I avoid the place like the plague for a reason. And now, here I sit, caged in between Dan and Shinku on a tacky red and white striped plastic bench in a fast food place, although Dan was stuck between me and the aisle so I am fairly certain that I could just simply crush him on my way out.
Across from me is…
A younger version of Orochimaru, complete with the deathly pallor, long hair and slit pupiled eyes.
To be perfectly fair to him, he wasn't evil yet. Not even barely pushing it. He's nine years old, for crying out loud. Wasn't like he tortured cats in a back alley or anything.
I'd heard he lost both his parents in quick succession this past spring, sometime while this team was still trudging through the Land of Rivers.
To be absolutely honest to myself, though, I hated him regardless, mostly because he was across from me so I had to at some points meet his gaze, which is politely curious, and I don't even want to be here.
"You're Hatake Tsutako." Tsunade says, staring at me with a slight frown. "Your dad's the big war hero of the Great War."
We'd learned about that bit from history books, scant as they were. Hatake Hayashi, war hero and patriot, in the service of the Tower.
What a find, what a find, that a young man from such a small shinobi family could be such a larger than life figure, famous for the way he'd taken out entire squads by himself with his knowledge of the badlands.
"You got it in one. Have a gold star," I mutter into my beef over rice.
"You're so lucky," she says, a faint tinge of bitterness covering her words. "I bet you get all the good memories with your dad. Most of the time war heroes don't get to make it home alive."
True enough in a sense. She'd lost her grandfather, her great uncle and her father in the Great War, so it's not like she didn't have cause to complain.
Each of them had been enshrined as a great war hero too — Senju Hashirama, Senju Tobirama, Senju Yanema.
I grunt. "Haven't seen him in seven weeks."
That seems to throw her for a loop. Enough that she mutters something I don't entirely catch that sounds remarkably like pity while continuing to shovel beef into my mouth.
On the end of the table close to the window, Jiraiya and Shinku have gotten into some argument over, of all things, bees.
Or, I suppose, Jiraiya is arguing very spiritedly for the side of wasps being superior to bees. Either way, I couldn't really tell. I could only tell that the situation is getting dire because Orochimaru is, one, leaning rather close to Tsunade to avoid Jiraiya's flailing arms, and two, Shinku is turning an odd red color.
Dan whimpers.
This place is a lost cause. I don't know what Utatane-sensei wanted from us, but it probably wasn't this, even though it does seem like she and the Hokage aren't having a good time either, engaged as they are in a hushed conversation in the booth across the way.
"Do you like gyudon?" The soft voice cuts through the noise effectively and easily, and it could've only come from the person across the table.
Slowly, I raise my eyes to Orochimaru's. He's watching me from over the rim of his plastic bowl, chopsticks clutched loosely in his left hand.
He still looks politely curious, as though trying to be outgoing and friendly.
"Haven't had it before." Before his gold eyed gaze, I feel my unkemptness even more than usual. It isn't even that I dressed oddly this morning or that I looked physically like I'd taken a muddy route next to an ox cart into town this morning, but rather I'd gotten used to angrily snapping at nearly everyone I talked to because they irritated me.
My tongue is a weapon, and it is bladed on both sides, sharp like a dagger to slip between the ribs.
Somehow, though, this softly spoken question provoked a sense of shame at my current train of thought and conduct, and that stung far more than anything anyone else has said to me all week.
"I see," he muses, but offers nothing more.
Eventually, he seems to lose interest, gaze shifting to where his sensei still sat, deep in conversation with mine.
I mark the passing of time with the ticking of the wall clock, and try to ignore the fact that Tsunade's joined the argument on bees vs wasps somehow on neither side and instead is advocating for...slugs.
Which I hate anyway and salt whenever I find another infestation in my garden, but that's besides the point.
If this lunch is supposed to make us friends, it hasn't done its job properly.
I've grown out of my old clothes, so it's time for the twice yearly clothes shopping expedition, where I go to the tailor and order several sets of the same things preferably an inch or two longer at the arms and legs so I didn't have to come back for another half a year.
Throwing my rather dubious purchases of more green and brown clothing bagged in plastic over my shoulder, I make my way down the street to Kobayashi-san's butcher shop.
He's wrapping cuts of pork belly in wax paper for a rare other customer when I arrive. The elderly woman thanks him in a creaky voice, calling him a "good boy" which doesn't seem to faze him too much.
Not for the first time, I wonder how he manages to keep the lights on and all the meat bought if he's sustained by like, five customers, because that is all I've ever seen visit his shop.
But he's a civilian butcher living in a ninja village, and he probably has a family and friends somewhere, so the store's probably not as empty as I think it is.
"If it isn't Hatake-chan," he says, wiping down part of the counter with a rag that looks like it's made of an old shirt.
"Yeah," I sigh, a lock of white hair fluttering in the edges of my vision. I should get it cut, it's choppily shoulder length already. "I might have to be by more often, but with less to buy all the time."
At this point in time, I really don't dictate my own schedule.
The half pound of pork that I'd stashed in the fridge, meaning to cook when I had the time and was less exhausted had gone bad while I was stuck in the Land of Tea, and I still had to clean it out and toss it into the garbage can out front on the curb.
"Change in work schedule?" he asks, leaning his elbows on his counter.
For the first time, I'm struck by the hair line scars on his hands that seemed to speak of kunai practice.
He'd always been so nonchalant about shinobi as well, but then, it's not my place to pry about his past.
"Yeah." I rub a hand over my face, and try and fail to not sigh again. "It's exhausting, Kobayashi-san."
"Mmm, imagine so. Death'll do that to ya." He gestures for me to come around the counter, and takes me instead, into the back of his shop. "Still, you gotta do something to keep from going under, Hatake-chan."
The back of his shop is more personal than the front and the counter. Besides the concrete floor and the hoses, and the door into what I assume is his walk in freezer, there's a rickety set of stairs to the upper floor, where I only assume he lived, and another door into what looks like a kitchen.
He flicks the whetstone on, and gets the water running before sitting me down on his stool and passing me a knife. It's an old one, not too bad of a make but not great either. "When I get too deep in my head I clear it by focusing on something else."
I look at the whetstone running for a moment. "Wouldn't something not electric test someone's integrity more?"
At least, that's what all the moral sayings seem to imply.
He laughs. "Hatake-chan, we're not here to test your moral integrity."
I look for another moment at the dull knife and get to sharpening. The whir of the whetstone and the shriek of metal on stone even against the water does comfort me, the racket outside driving away the din in my mind.
I'm halfway through mopping up the watery blood from the spoiled half pound of pork I'd tossed when Mom comes home.
She sits down at the kitchen table without a word to me, and instead, pours herself a cup of water from the half water filter, shaking it slightly, seemingly waiting for something.
I haven't the faintest idea what she could be waiting for, because she certainly doesn't wait for whenever Dad gets back.
"I'm home!" Saku-nii's cracking pre-teen voice sounds in the front entry hall, a scuffle as he slips off his sandals.
Oh. So that's what Mom is waiting for. From the corner of my eye, I see her smile.
Kyogi's toenails clatter loudly on the floor, and his barks of joy upon discovering Saku-nii's return brings another emotion to my chest.
Jealousy maybe, that my dog is so excited to see him again, and jealousy that Mom would pause whatever work she has to do to be here for his coming home.
But then, this isn't some sort of sick crabs in a bucket game. I don't have to feel like this or drag him down to my level. I do this to my own self.
"Welcome home, Sakumo-kun." Mom drains her glass of water, just as Saku-nii steps into the kitchen.
"Mom!" He throws open his arms. "Mom, look!"
Ah, he's been away for the Chunin Exams in Grass Country, and now he's back, plus one green vest, on his very first try.
Mom must've heard about his promotion through the grapevine and come home to congratulate him.
"Congratulations on the promotion." She ruffles his hair, squeezes his shoulder. "I'm planning to cook something tonight, your favorite?"
He visibly brightens, "thanks, Mom," and comes around to attempt to hug me.
I hold up my hands, rotting pig blood and other horrid half rotted scents — like that one zucchini I'd found that I'd forgotten to give away two weeks ago — sliding messily down my arms. "I'm cleaning the fridge, Nii-san."
He backs away.
A.N. Wow yea, Tsutako's not in a happy headspace right now. But such things are as they are, and this story moves along.
It's been a bit guys! I'm halfway through chapter seven, so hopefully the next update won't be as far away, though as always, I can't really predict when the muse will cough up the next chapter of anything, so here's to hoping.
Stay well and thank you all for the support.
~Tavina
