Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by Petrames, drowsyivy and UmbreonGurl.
"We're all killers.
We've all killed parts of ourselves to survive.
We've all got blood on our hands.
Something somewhere had to die so we could stay alive."
— if memories could bleed, if dreams could scream | m.a.w.
My tenth birthday comes and goes with no fanfare of any sort, just another day, another marker of how many years it's been since I've come into this world. Rather sadly, I wonder if anyone knows at all that the eighth of August is my birthday, or if I didn't have to fill it out on my Academy forms every year for three years and then my genin registration forms and every time I ran a mission by myself, if I would remember that I was born on eight-eight.
I sit on the porch with Kyogi, watching the rain impact the summer dust, each impact throwing up a tiny cloud of dust in its wake.
Rain is formed high up in the clouds but destined to fall, destined to land on a leaf, or the ground, the roof of the house, to join a million other drops and lose itself in the endless mass, without any distinction.
They say that rain cleanses, but I watch the dust turn to mud and wonder about that. Water can only cleanse when it picks up impurities, damaging itself for the sake of the cleanliness of other objects.
Sometimes, I wonder how long it would take for someone to realize that humans are the same way, formed with hope and grand promises, dreams and the bright mirage beckon of the future, only to realize that we are all the same, indistinguishable from the next one unless it's someone who cares for us.
That we stain our hands in order to clean something else — the idea of a perfect, peaceful world — futilely as the entire world is covered in a layer of mud.
I run a hand through my hair, holding my straw hat against my knees with the other hand. My hair's shoulder length again now and about to get shorter soon, if only because I'd no longer be able to deal with the hassle or the weight.
Or the fact that it's the wrong color if it's always in the edges of my vision.
I don't often look at myself in the mirror, not fully. Sure, I stood in front of it every morning and every night when I'm home to brush my teeth, wash my face, wrangle my hair into some sort of fit state for existence, but that comes down to parts — pieces of a whole, not the whole itself.
So I am aware of what Hatake Tsutako looks like. I am aware that I have white hair and black eyes, a scowl and a small mole by my left eyebrow, but I am supposed to have black hair, a round face, and lighter eyes, and even years cannot change that. In this life, I look a lot like my famous father.
Both Saku-nii and I do, especially in the color of our hair, the color of our eyes, for him, thicker, blocky fingers, for me, the width of my feet, and for both of us, the height.
Saku-nii soars gracefully over the rest of his squadmates, even his female sensei, who is in her late twenties as best, while I manage the grace of a half grown goose.
Neither of us really look like Mom.
It's a wonder what the mind can convince itself is true even given the empirical evidence that it's not. White can be black. Black can be white.
It's been nearly two more years now, since Saku-nii passed his first chunin exams in Grass Country and therefore more often out of the house. Meanwhile, Team Koharu still ran C-ranks, and the occasional D-rank, more often than not now, alone.
The borders have been fraught with tension, though there is still the hope with some that war will not come. But that is merely sticking one's head in the sand and hoping the coming flood wouldn't be true.
Knowing what I know, war will come.
It will come with blood, with death, and the screams of thousands.
And then it will come again.
And again.
And again.
Again.
A wheel spinning, crushing everyone in its wake.
What I've learned in this short second life so far is that there is no way for one person's hands to stop the wheel, much less smash it to bits.
Or at least, if this knowledge was meant to stop anything, it should've been given to someone with more strength and courage than me.
I can barely keep all the pieces of myself from spinning off into the orbits of disparate voids, much less a whole family, much less the whole future.
If there was ever any reason to feel empathy for Cassandra, now would be the time. A prophet with doom budding on her lips, but no ears to hear her, no one to tell.
Who could I tell who would believe me? War is coming, I'd say.
And the young man in his tower would look up from his reports with a wry expression. I know.
And that is all.
War does not come because no one can see it coming until it's too late. War comes because it is curated, because it is timed, because someone or something reaps a reward paid for with the blood of thousands.
And here I sit, ten years old, wondering if my death will be a mere footnote on a mission record. If I could ever hope to be something else.
Beside me, Kyogi whines and shoves his feet against my thighs, blunt nails digging into my skin, though I don't mind. He's gotten older now, and I've been home less to play with him, running courier missions in the north of Fire Country.
I never know what the message I'm carrying says, only that it needs to get to a certain guard station in a certain amount of time, and the fact that I'm a young genin getting sent on these sorts of missions only spells trouble and tension for the state of the village.
Older and more experienced chunin than Saku-nii and most all the jounin had all been called out to man the borders, leaving new chunin like my elder brother to man the mission desks and run in-country missions to keep the economy afloat.
Dad's mission rate has spiked through the roof, enough that I haven't seen him in over six months running now, what with the way that I, too, am often out of the house.
Whatever new project Mom is working on, it's made her frustrated enough to take it out on the coffee pot, because the last time I'd seen that, the handle had come off and been glued back on by someone with very shaky hands.
And then there's me, a three year genin, running messages to and from the border.
But I'm home enough that I can still stake and trellis my bean plants, pick the profusion of tomatoes from my three tomato plants and figure out what to do with the zucchini that now no one not even Saku-nii seemed to be eating before they rotted away into slushy messes in the bottom of the fridge.
Which is all I can ask for, I suppose.
It's a good enough life, all told.
It's not that bad.
Dad's sitting in the kitchen when I arrive home after a grueling trek through the north of Fire a few months later, bandaging up his arm with a roll of white tape, his grungy pack at his feet, humming some sort of tune I'd never heard of before.
"O-oh out there's a land that time don't command, wanna be the first to arrive, no time for ponderin', why, I'm a-wanderin', not while we're both still alive." There's blood matted in his hair, but it doesn't look like his own, so it's nothing a shower or a quick dunk in the sink wouldn't fix.
"To the ends of the earth, would you follow me?" his mellow baritone rings out over the shabbiness of our kitchen, giving it gold when everything is gray. "There's a world that was meant for our eyes to see…"
Not for the first time, I wonder what country he's picked this song up in, and how far 'to the ends of the earth' he's gone, because this tune has an indie folk air to it, and heavens knows that one can't find that sort of music in Fire Country, much less Konoha, which is a distilled microcosm of the larger society of Fire.
"Dad?" I ask, because it doesn't seem like he's heard me come in. "You're home."
"Goose!" He looks up at me with that same fond, boyish smile, though he's now forty-four, hardly a young man by the standards of the company he keeps and the occupation he's still working. "I heard you'd been up to the seventeenth outpost!"
Funny how he always knew where his children were, but we had no idea where to even begin to find him or even if he's still alive.
"I didn't expect you back so soon." He opens his arm to me, the half bandaged one still resting on the table, burn wounds up the inner forearm from the heel of his palm to the elbow like a nasty tattoo sleeve.
I drop my own pack by the door, and go to hug him. "What can I say," I shrug, still somewhat sweaty as he rubs my back. "Your daughter runs pretty fast."
"Just like her old man," he jokes. "I can run pretty fast too, even though the years are catching up a bit."
I want to ask why he's still out wandering the ends of the earth when he's got a home right here he could always come back to, but I don't.
There's never a point in asking, especially since I don't think I'd get a proper answer out of him. It's buried in some half distinct past that he's never talked about, as though he only sprung into existence as my father and some hero of a half described campaign during the last war, fully formed.
Instead, all I offer him is a "take care of yourself, Dad."
He ruffles my hair before rising to head to the shower. "You got it, Goose." He pauses for a moment by the door jamb, looks back at me, a shock of white hair falling into his eyes. "Your present's at the bottom of my pack, I nearly lost it while—" he cuts himself off there before he can tell me what he was actually doing and where. "Anyhow," he shrugs, easy sinew and muscle moving under his mostly destroyed shirt, old scars across his back still visible. "Happy Tenth, my best girl."
I want to hug him again, but all I think to offer before he trudges off down the hall is a semi-watery smile and a croak of "Thanks, Dad."
Someone had remembered, even if my birthday was eight-eight and outside in North Fire, it's already starting to snow.
I'm sent up north again later that springtime, a pair of light, deerskin boots on my feet instead of the standard issue shinobi sandals — the present from Dad that I'd found at the bottom of his pack still fit me even months on — to an outpost much further north than I'd ever been before, with the task of carrying both a message there and a message back.
The timeframe is a two week trip, and I only pack two changes of clothes, the sword at my side and a survival kit complete with soldier pills. Edible food can be foraged, and I can always catch up on nutrients whenever I ended up back in Konoha, because while the mission scroll said a two week trip up to the outpost and then back down, that assumes that I'd be running nearly a full week there and full week back with a few stops to sleep and eat.
And while I could do that, it's implied by the ramped up presence on our northern borders that Konoha had reason to be concerned with Iwa and Kumo to the northwest and northeast respectively.
Outpost North 49 is tucked up in a mountain pass, on the border of Fire and Waterfall country, and it's cold as winter frost even despite the springtime coming to the rest of Fire.
Waterfall Country, honestly, though I've never been, seems like an ass of a place to go to, considering that the map said it was full of cliffs, broken mountainsides, shale and of course, as its namesake, waterfalls.
And with how cold it still was in the last week of March — wind rushing by while I lope up the mountainside to the outpost rubbing my ears and nose raw and leaving an ever present chill on my forehead protector — I don't envy any poor fool who had to live in this outpost and I envy even less anyone who has to live in that country.
It is probably cold as Russia, if we really got down to it.
I haul myself up to the level of the outpost built into the lower branches of a Hashirama Tree (though I doubt it had been planted by the Shodai) and knock on the front door. "Message from the Tower."
The man who opens the door is probably in his late twenties, which would've been young for someone in my last world, but absolutely normal here.
It is after all, the early to late twenties crew that faced the highest rate of mission casualty deaths during wartime, which is not altogether unexpected.
The youngest of the genin, even elite ones trained by jounin-sensei are generally kept from the frontlines. Konoha doesn't want her soldiers dead before they hit double digits since she's invested enough into us that it wouldn't be cost effective otherwise.
So yeah, a lot of the death toll during wartime comes from those in their late teens to mid twenties — Konoha's orphanages are always hungry and her funeral parlors always full — hence, half of us will be dead by thirty if we're lucky.
This man wears the chunin flak jacket, though he could also be a jounin — it's hard to tell these days — with a few scars peppered over his hands, and the blond hair and teal eyes of a Yamanaka. "You're a bit small to be a message runner," he comments, mild and clipped.
And you're a bit old to be still alive by the end of the war.
But I don't say that. Instead, I twitch. "What's on the street by the Tower two blocks west of the Academy?" There's never a good way to determine who's who, since I'm not a chakra sensor and it's always possible that some foreign shinobi had ended up masquerading as whoever is supposed to be stationed here.
"Ichiraku Ramen." He steps aside to let me in. "Oi, Kotone, the messenger's here."
A Nara woman with a high tail looks up from her slouched sitting position. She looks, at best, a year or two older than the man who'd opened the door. "Really, I couldn't tell."
I expect to see an Akimichi too, just because the clans often get sent out together even if they weren't an InoShikaCho team, since there's no beating genetic teambuilding powers, but instead, there's another clearly non-Akimichi woman lounging in the chair opposite Nara Kotone.
Her long purple braid drapes over the back of the chair, and it looks like she's filing her nails.
I can safely say that I have no idea what family she's from, or what her rank is.
"Mitsuaki," she waves a hand at the man who let me in. "Come back over, we're going to have to draft a reply to this if the Tower sent us a baby genin instead of a bird." She smiles at me, canines a little bit too sharp to be anything except at least part Inuzuka.
Given that she doesn't have their tattoos and her hair, her mother's probably the Inuzuka and her father might have once been a Rain Country native.
"I'm Murasaki Rei. You've probably guessed the identities of the other two here, though I suppose that still bears repeating." She waves a hand at the man, "Yamanaka Mitsuaki," and then at the woman, who waves. "Nara Kotone."
I give them all a short nod. "Hatake Tsutako, delivering a message from the Tower that needs an immediate response, reporting to Outpost North 49."
I hand over the message, divested from the inside sole of my left boot through a very handy storage seal that no one would think to look for there.
Which is, of course, exactly why Dad had gotten me this pair of boots from god knows where. He's a traveler, I know that much, so he's got plenty of places he could've picked up a present.
The Yamanaka whistles, "handy."
The three of them huddle around the table for a whispered message after the wax seal on the scroll is broken, and the Nara reads it over.
I don't bother listening to their conversation. The less I know about what the Tower wants with them, the better, since they're all clan or clan adjacent.
And Outpost North 49 is a chokepoint on the Waterfall border, barely two hard days of travel from the southwest border of Earth Country.
So really, the less I know about what they're talking about, the better.
Instead, as they conference and draft a response for me to take back to the Tower, I busy myself with examining their living space. It's hollowed out of the inside of a Hashirama tree, probably not an Original since the Shodai had died in far north of Iron, in the place known as "the Mountain's Graveyard" from a cheap shot in the back, betrayed by what he thought were allies.
So it's one of the saplings planted and propagated by his wife, Uzumaki Mito, because only Uzumaki sealing would be able to make the inside of the tree bigger than the outside.
Even so, the outpost is roughly three rooms big, with a tiny thing that could pass for a studio apartment kitchen, a sink and a counter, a stove with two burners in the room I'm standing in, all the light coming from seals fixed to the ceiling.
I observe, if only because it's a very likely fate that someday I'll be living in a place like this one, waiting on the brewing war.
Finished with their huddle, Nara Kotone scrawls a few words on a scroll that she pulls from her belt pouch and seals it up again with a flick of her chakra while the Yamanaka lights a candle stub and drips a few drops of hot wax on the scroll to make absolutely sure it would be obvious if someone had opened it before it got to the Tower.
It's dropped into my hands, still slightly warm, and I seal it back up again inside my boot before pulling on my shoes and heading out the door.
I'd been at Outpost North 49 for no longer than half an hour.
I'd pushed too hard to get out of the north of Fire, away from the cold biting at my nose, ears, and fingers, which is why I lose control of the situation and end up running from foreign nin, somehow already deep in Fire.
Which means at least one outpost in the west has been breached, which though, is unclear.
What matters more is getting the message I'd been running from Outpost North 49 back to the village and sounding the alarm. If there's foreign shinobi this far inside Fire, it might as well be a declaration of open warfare.
However, I'm still at least two days and nights out from the village, and they're closing in fast.
Earth shinobi, I'd guess from the direction they'd come from, though they wear nothing that identifies them as such.
Three to five of them, from the glimpses I'd been able to catch.
I'm on the river when the first kunai sings past my ear, through the space where my head had been just a moment before.
I turn, drawing my sword in one motion, and the first of them is upon me.
One block.
One parry.
I use the forward momentum of the water, and my smaller size to duck under their longer reach.
One slash and I am racing forward once again, through the sudden spray of blood.
One down.
Two to four to go.
Night is falling, and despite the few furious battles I'd had both on and off of the river in the brush, there is still someone chasing me.
Whatever had happened to the other three, I doubt they were all dead.
I'd cut arteries, so perhaps those were dead.
I'd cut tendons and muscle too, in my desperation to get away, trailing blood in my wake as I head further and further south, so those were most likely still alive.
Whoever was still following me despite me covering fifty miles and counting since they'd started tailing me deeper into Fire Country is most certainly still alive.
Like a game of cat and mouse, sometimes closer, sometimes further away, as if waiting for me to make a move, or a mistake so then they could butcher me from behind.
I slow, trailing blood from where my arms had been scraped by tree branches, a throbbing bruise on my right temple where a much larger man had smashed my head against a rock before I'd managed to stab him through the gut.
I stumble, moving much slower after the encounter with the explosion release user, their kekkei genkai scorching my arm and side before sheer desperation had forced me to take a bite of their arm.
There are lacerations and burns all over my sides, and I'd ripped at least one thumbnail, thoughts coming slower through the fog.
There's dew on the ground, in the morning light, shining like crystals, the fog hanging in the air, a thousand points of light, bright and searing, cutting into my brain.
A sea of yellow greets me, the warmth of south fire.
It takes a moment to realize that they are flowers, the yellow of rapeseed coming up through the wilting greenery, smelling of oil.
Oil flower. I think. They used to be called oil flower.
My knees buckle under the weight of my pack, crashing through the greenery and crushed scent of flowers before the darkness on the edge of my vision creeps up to swallow me whole.
"It's only a child." A woman's voice, from far above me, quiet with worry, sharp with fear. "We should do something. It's only a child."
Sluggishly, I hear the conversation as though from under water, bright lights bursting under my eyelids, the rasp of my throat as I draw breath, dry and hurt.
Everything is heavy. Everything is faint.
I breathe, but only just.
"A shinobi." A man's voice, murmuring. "A killer."
Something in my mind laughs at this. I didn't want this, oyaji. Not this world, not this life, not this death, not like this.
But I am tired, and the lights against my eyelids are blinding, sharper than flame.
I sink.
A.N. I've been really inspired to write stuff lately! So here's the next chapter of Prophet, we've time skipped roughly two years ahead from chapter six and this chapter covers roughly four to five months. I'll be headed back to in person learning in mid August or so, so I have no idea how long this inspired streak will keep up, but I'm hoping it'll hang in here for the time being.
Thank you so much for your support everyone. It truly makes me the happiest.
~Tav (Leaf)
