Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by Petrames, drowsyivy, and UmbreonGurl.
"I feel so lonely, like childhood again."
— Anne Carson, Plainwater, The Anthropology of Water: Kinds of Water
"Wenqing!" Mama calls. "If you don't get up soon, you'll be late for school."
But my bed is comfortable, and the blankets are heavy, warm, weighing me down all around. If I get up, it will be cold.
"Wenqing," Mama calls, more insistent this time, slightly frazzled. Somewhere in the distance, my younger sister wails. "You're going to be late! Get out of bed!"
I make a motion to, still groggy enough that my eyes are closed.
But everything grows heavier around me, a gathering dark so deep I couldn't get up even if I wanted to.
Has my sister always been this prone to screaming?
Surely not.
No, I am too old for Mama to be calling for me to get out of bed for school.
She'd stopped doing that after…
Elementary? Was it elementary? Was it before her sickness or after?
Water weighs in, all around, and on the back of my eyelids burns the image of my childhood bedroom — yellow walls, daisy and bee printed curtains, a little wooden desk that I'd outgrown and always had to pull my knees up and hunch over, a chair of cherry wood.
And in the roar of the water, Mama's voice sounds through, clear, but soft. "Wenqing, be brave. If heaven has eyes—"
We'll meet again in the next life.
The world slams back into focus, and I sit up, gasping for air though I choke on it. Somewhere, an infant is wailing.
Pain races up my side with the motion, my vision swimming as though my head had expanded, ready to burst like the fireworks going off in my ears.
My hair flutters, on the edge of my vision.
The wrong color.
White.
And the ache of twenty years rushes back to me.
I'd spent ten years living in this world like a ghost, ten years old again, like I'd been once upon a time. Ten years old with black hair and two thick braids, a little red coat, and a bunny of white jade hanging about my neck.
Ten years old with short white hair, a metal hitai-ate, and no protective talismans anymore.
Twenty years between them, and the world blurring as though they were a haze, the first life more present than the second.
I am sitting on a dirt floor, a window directly across from me, the white light of morning a weak thing like a baby bird streaming in from it.
It is cold.
My boots are gone.
I leap to my feet despite the pain radiating from my sides, the way it makes the edges of the room spin out, almost off putting enough to make me collapse back down, but I force myself upright.
There's someone watching me from the doorway, a human figure that I can't make out the features of, but the posture reminds me of the way that men watch feral animals, as if frightened of the approaching predator and yet too frozen to do anything about it. As if deciding whether or not to put it down.
"Ni xing le?"
A woman's voice, loud to my ears.
Too loud. The room spins again.
Ni xing le?
你 醒 了?
醒 了?
You awake le?
You're awake now?
Ni xing le?
I almost turn to look at her, in the doorway, but I only manage a half turn, the lights too bright, the motion jolting my head as I fight with the urge to throw up. "Wo…"
My tongue trips. I'd never grown up speaking my mother tongue.
Mandarin is a foreign world to me. I, who had grown up speaking Cantonese, born to expat parents living in—
"Ah," the woman comes closer, speaking more haltingly now in the native tongue of Fire Country. "You speak, speak guoyu?"
Ngo mm zi dou. I not know.
Guoyu, such an old country word. The way Baba would say Mandarin.
I shake my head, though this only makes the aching worse. "I don't know what you're talking about."
What a fool I am to have believed Mama. There is a next life, but we are never fated to meet again.
The young couple who had dragged me out of their field and called the village doctor to look after my wounds are from Iron Country, immigrants who'd come to Fire because it has been too cold for oil flower production these past few years in the land where their ancestors had lived for centuries.
And yet once here, they'd suffered the age old story of immigrants everywhere — a child born to expat parents living in — couldn't connect to the culture, couldn't speak the language, couldn't imagine why they sold everything to buy land in this country that didn't want them.
I wish I could tell them the pain that comes from being born of two lands, that they probably shouldn't've come here if they wanted their child to have any sense of belonging, that this, this I have experience in, but I don't.
I don't have the words to communicate this to them, because the young woman, barely in her mid twenties — she'd told me her name was Tian Meijin — had smiled at me, petting my white hair, and told me that she is surprised to see hair of this color "here this country."
I don't know if it's because she thinks I am from Iron, but we communicate best through writing, so I've switched to sketching characters in the dust. Ten years of speaking no proper Cantonese has worn away even the trace semblance of good language or grammar, but I remember a little bit of how to speak, even though she'd shaken her head and told me through writing that "that's coastal talk, muimui."
Somehow, even though no language sits easily on my tongue anymore, and Mandarin doesn't even sound that much like Canto, I feel more comfortable here.
I miss it.
I miss the sea breeze and the Bay.
I miss the food and the electric lights and the garden.
And by the time I leave that little nondescript village, the burs of language I'd nearly forgotten clinging to my tongue, I feel the ache of both home and not home and all the things I'd wished to bury roar back to life in my chest.
There are some ghosts we can never fully kill, and where we come from is one of them.
Where do I come from?
Somewhere no one will ever believe.
Somewhere I will never go again.
I notice the crushed leaves as I come up the walk, the hint of boot marks on the leaves of my cucumber plants.
Closer inspection of the plants hanging off of the trellis reveals ripped tendrils and broken tips.
Someone had damaged them by being careless, either when picking the fruits or attempting to hang them on the trellis.
Standing there, in the garden, looking at the destruction, I feel my breathing shorten.
It hadn't even been half an hour since they fixed my concussion and my sides and forced me on leave for two weeks — and I already have started the grim realization that I have no desire to live at home for two weeks that somehow, like Dad, I've started feeling the burning in my feet, the all consuming desire to leave this house in the dust.
Out there at the ends of Fire Country, the stars above me do not judge.
It hasn't been even half an hour since I crossed the gates back into the city, and I am already burning with anger.
Couldn't've been the old lady next door, who only comes by to water and prune a little bit. She could help herself to the garden vegetables, given how negligent I've become about really eating.
Only left someone who lived in this house full time, didn't it?
But then, it could also be someone else, completely unconnected to my family. I let the anger simmer, if only because I have no proof. Anger without any place to go turns within.
I clatter up the steps, pull open the screen door with a pop, and pull my boots off in the foyer.
"Tsuta?" Saku-nii pokes his head out of the kitchen. "Oh! You're home."
I straighten up, bare feet on the wooden floor. "Yeah," I agree, suddenly tired. "Last mission was a real mood killer."
How many had I killed while coming back?
The memories blur a bit. I'm not certain.
Not to mention, I'd made myself late and had to report bad news to the chunin at the gate, one of which had immediately scrammed across the rooftops to report intruders in Fire to the Hokage, and then I'd been dragged up to see the Hokage himself to deliver an oral report.
And then off I'd been shoved, down two flights of stairs and up three others to the concussion ward to get my head screwed back on right.
And then I'd come home and—
"Hey, Nii-san," I stand in the kitchen.
There's a plate of crushed cucumber on the table. Cucumber salad probably, he's added vinegar and salt.
"Were you in my garden?"
He turns to me, beaming. "Yeah, I trellised your cucumbers for you and picked the bigger ones."
The anger that'd been simmering in my bones bursts straight to the surface. "By killing them?"
Saku-nii blinks at me. "What?"
"It looks like a boar went through and stepped on everything." The words crack like a whip across his face, because I see the muted hurt run across it before he attempts to smooth it away.
It doesn't quite work.
"I was only trying to help."
And the ugly, angry part of me cannot be appeased with 'I was only trying to help' roars, its bloody maw open.
"Help?" There's an angry ringing in my ears. "Help? I don't need your help."
Would wonders never cease.
He bristles. "Well, they would've burned to death on the black plastic you put down after the last time you weeded the things."
"And you purposefully killing them all makes it any better?" I shake myself, too angry to stay. "Forget about it. I can't talk to you."
I slam the door behind me on my way out.
"It's been a while." Kobayashi-san nods to me when I come in. "The first time your brother came here, he didn't know what to do with himself."
He uses a bit of an odd word for 'your brother,' archaic almost. Aniue.
Not oniisan or niisan or anija or even aniki, but aniue. A foreign lilt to the way he pronounces it too, as if he's a little used to saying it some other way.
I notice it more, now that I've been out of the village more often.
He doesn't talk like a ninja of the general forces, or even one of Fire's many civilian farmers or traders.
For one, he talks like he has education, unlike most civilians I've had the chance to speak to. For another...the hint of an old accent.
But whatever his past is, it's no reason to pry.
He's never tried to ask why sometimes I hum tunes in a language that a child native to Fire has no business knowing either.
I sigh, running a hand through my newly shortened hair. "Saku-nii would." He's never, in the eleven years since I was born, been in charge of the grocery shopping. "Was he at least polite about it?"
Kobayashi-san shrugs. "Good enough. I overlooked it because he was your brother." He reaches behind the glass case and unhooks a pair of chickens. "You look beat, Hatake-chan."
I shrug back at him. "Newest mission kicked my ass all the way from Frost back here. I flop over the glass of his display case. "Why does the Fire-Frost border have to be so damned cold? It's already April."
He laughs, shaking a plastic bag open for the chickens, the two held firmly in one hand.
Despite my recent growth spurt, turning into a long and spindly beanpole, 5'4'' and counting, Kobayashi-san's got a fair few inches on me yet, and his stocky build and large hands make him seem taller still.
"Say, Hatake-chan," he says, "why don't you stick 'round? I was just about to cook."
And it isn't like there's anyone waiting for me at home anyway.
"I can help cook," I protest weakly, still leaning against the glass. It is cool to the touch, a comforting bite of freezer chill against the already rapidly warming April air.
He tsks at me. "Guests have no business cooking, Hatake-chan. All they're supposed to do is eat and be merry."
I make a face. "I don't know if I have it in me to be merry, Kobayashi-san."
He throws the bagged chickens back in the display case and closes the back. "Well, I'm merry enough for both of us, Hatake-chan. You're welcome in my backroom any time."
Kobayashi-san hums while he cooks, a pot something bubbling on the stove as he slices, knife blurring in his hands, as all I hear is the thunk thunk thunk of it hitting his wooden cutting board.
It's a comforting noise, given that it has no anger in it, unlike when Mom is in the kitchen.
It's got no annoyance, no sense of obligation, just the background sound of a baritone voice humming, and the light thunk of a knife hitting the cutting board.
"Oh, look how the lights of the town, the lights of the town are shining now." It sounds like a fiddle tune, the way he sings, upbeat and bouncy.
He starts fishing meat from the pot with a pair of chopsticks straight onto his massive cutting board, switching the now simmering pot to another burner, before flipping a pan onto the now recently vacated burner.
A liberal dose of oil later, he starts throwing newly chopped meat into the pain, the scent of it thick in the air, a sizzling heat rising.
With an apologetic glance at me, he laughs, a little upward nod as he does so. "Might get a little too spicy in here for your central Fire tastebuds, Hatake-chan."
I make another face at him. "I can handle pepper."
Or well, I could. Back then, when I'd been an undergraduate sitting down to dinner with a rowdy group of friends, the soups and stir fries had been red with it.
Baba had been a Hong Kong native, but Mama had come from Sichuan — the land of pepper, where once, a famous singer had a whole song comparing the girls there to the infamous Sichuan spice.
I hadn't been a Sichuan spice girl, but friends did tell me that I had a tongue tart as pepper and a fiery temper to match.
He shrugs, "if you say so," and tosses the pile of red pepper into the pan.
Instantly, the room is filled with heat, as if lit up with red.
The scene aches with memories that cling like ghosts. Without words to describe and without form, like the hollow echo of a bow hitting the cello strings.
A lifetime ago.
Half a minute into this, I'm hacking while crumpled over his table.
He doesn't comment upon it too much, just ruffles my hair with a hand that reeks of pepper and laughs a little when I start crying due to the spices and the heat, and offers a hand for my shoulder when I start crying in earnest, over the mission, over the concussion, over the loss of my mother tongue, and over the relationship I'd broken.
Shinku had ended up taking up a desk job at the Tower while his busted leg healed. I hadn't even realized there was something wrong with his leg, but then, we didn't really talk.
"The medics don't have time for shit like this, Hatake," Shinku mutters as he shoves another stack of paper towards me for me to sign. "These days, they got better things to worry about than some fucking genin's stress fracture."
He'd been sent off to run messages too, and I guess he'd pushed himself too hard.
For what reason, hard to say.
I don't mention that the medics had bothered with my concussion and battered sides, fixing me up pretty much as good as new even though the Tian couple had found me the best doctor they knew.
It'd been enough to get me back home to where I was going, and such kindness is few and far between.
In all the corners of the world I'd been to, in this life and the last, kindness is few and far between, from people not of blood especially.
"Yeah, yeah, you believe me now about the war?"
Two years in the field, and I think even Dan's grown a few sharp edges under his trembling.
Not that I talk much to Dan these days either. The boys bother me less now that I didn't see them every day, and I guess I bother them less, too.
"I believe you're some sort of seer," he grumbles, shifting his splinted right leg into a new, dubiously better position. "Did your old man tell you? There's lots of talk about him these days."
I roll my eyes.
"There's always talk about him."
And indeed, there always is.
Whispers and praise.
Glances and speculation.
For my dad is a man without origin.
He'd been adopted by Sarutobi Sasuke once upon a time, named a little brother.
But who he was before that?
No one who bothered to talk about it knows.
No one who whispered even knew his parents' names.
Hatake didn't have any meaning as a name until one lone man had stalled an invading army in the Badlands for days.
Sarutobi Sasuke's dead, and unlikely to spill any secrets from beyond his war hero grave.
And Dad's own lips are sealed with something stickier than gorilla glue.
A group of seven strides in, all tall and proud and fair, long red hair ranging from copper to auburn, the young man at their center wearing an elaborate pattern of braids, bloody red hair falling to his waist.
They walked with swagger and grace, and even though I haven't ever met an Uzumaki in my life, I could guess who they were and where they were from.
Uzushio has yet to fall.
I expect to feel more about this, but I don't.
Whatever led to their destruction, whatever ends up happening, I have no control over it.
Like I have no control over the coming war, the destruction of my family, or the death of my brother.
Only at the moment of crossroads could one hope to do anything.
And sitting here at age ten, filling out paperwork I have nothing to do with Uzushio.
Ninja registration number. Date of birth. Rank. Mission type. Geographic location. On. Every. Damned. Page.
Whatever else the late Nidaime had been, he was fucking thorough.
It's years before the destruction.
The seven pass us by, tall and proud, silver lapel pins and ink stained hands, red spirals on navy blue jackets.
Shinku glances at their back as they disappear off up the stairs, likely to the Hokage's own office, and mutters a "good riddance," as he does so.
"What?" I mutter as I scratch another vicious line of registration number, date of birth, rank, mission type, geographic location, on the fifteenth sheet of this particular set of forms. "The Uzumaki got you down?"
"Buncha stuck up bastards." The statement is filled with so much loathing that I almost blink in surprise. But no, onto the seventeenth sheet of these gods be damned forms. Shinku doesn't even have this much vitriol towards me, so whatever the Uzumaki have done must've been worse than the argument we had over the war. "Yapping about this, that, or the other house, as though I fucking give a shit about 'House of the King' or not."
Fair point, that sounded like it would push Shinku's triggers more than anything I could say to him. He hates anything that tries to pull arbitrary rank on him.
I imagine whatever monarchy the Uzumaki've got, it's completely arbitrary, at least from the outside. Which means that it blows Shinku's top off like nothing else.
"Anyway, our team got disbanded while you were gone."
A loaded bombshell.
I'm probably supposed to care more about it.
But I don't. "Sensei finally gave up on us?"
No skin off my nose. I've still got work either way, and it's not like Utatane Koharu taught any one of us anything.
Shinku snorts. "Something like that. No energy for us, now that war's coming."
I shrug. "Dan must've been distraught."
Shinku shifts his leg, wincing as he does so, and shoves another stack of paper into one of his millions of filing cabinets. "Cried about it for a week, but he found something in the hospital scrubbing bedpans."
"I don't envy him." That sounds fucking disgusting. Scrubbing urine and fecal matter out of pans while dodging whatever issues existed in the hospital doesn't sound like my idea of a fun time.
Shinku shrugs again. "Who the fuck knows what goes on between his ears?"
And I'd raise a glass to that.
Nothing else is heard except the scritch scritch of my pen pressing deep into the paper.
A.N. The vagaries of language, the desolation of being part of the diaspora, everything that happened in the last life is still, being carried with Tsutako as she attempts to make her way through this one. Because culture and all it entail is my passion.
Thank you so much everyone. Y'all make my day, and I've always been humbled by how much enthusiasm and support there is.
~Tav (Leaf)
