rewritten in 2020. tw: death mention + vague passive suicidal thoughts

Prologue — I

Death is unknowable. If I could tell you about it ... I'd be lying. You can't tell someone about death, about what comes after. Death is unknowable. That's the whole point. That's why it's terrifying, that's why people flock to religion, that's why it's a relief.

So it's pretty understandable when I say that I don't remember my death. Sure, I knew the how of it. Didn't care so much about the why. Took me fifteen years, give or take, to remember the whole thing, but, here's the moving parts:

Me, on a bike. Them, in a truck. On a highway at night, going five below the speed limit. I shouldn't have taken that turn so fast, they should've been more aware of the road.

I braked. They honked. We crashed anyway.

Get it? Moving parts? Heh.

I wasn't sorry I left the other life behind. There was nothing waiting for me. So, when I opened my eyes to a strange world, I let myself forget. Twenty-odd years later, when I cared again, there would be nothing to remember.

As for the process that got me into a swaddle of baby blankets in a cottage in the middle of a bamboo forest? I have no idea.

Haiko. Grey-child. It was as simple a name as they came, and though it sat wrong, I soon grew used to it. I'd never been called anything with that amount of affection; it was nice.

For the first year or so, unwelcome memories crowded my head. They were heavy, smeared with overwhelming color and emotion and information. I ignored them. They weren't real to me anymore: my reality was clean air, birdsong, a warm embrace. Someone wanted me here, if her laughter and chatter was any indication, so I left the broken remains of myself in the wreck where they belonged.

This world was monochrome. It proved to not be a problem.

Sure, I missed the sky and the sunrises and sunsets, but I could still see the stars. It was the most dazzling, most breathtaking carpet of lights in the sky I'd ever seen. Living where we were, I had that gorgeous view every night.

My new mother didn't exactly approve of my nightly, noisy insistence to go into the yard, but she humored me. We lived alone, just the two of us, so the only person I had to convince to get my way was my mother.

Mother was young and pretty: long black hair, sharp chin, nice smile, bright eyes. Her eyes were exceptionally captivating. They were a pearly grey and had a weird reflective sheen to them, some sort of film. She must've thought they were distinctive too, because her eyes were decorated with an intricate, looping tattoo, like a mask.

One time I touched the print, thinking it might be raised or there might be a texture… but it was exactly like a tattoo. She just laughed and pinched my nose, calling me a troublemaker.

I spent all my time in the little cottage with its creaking floorboards and slightly leaky roof and too-tall counters. Outside the windows, the seasons whirled by.

I wasn't allowed onto the porch until the first winter had passed and she was sure I had enough depth perception to not fall off a ledge. As more time went by and I re-learned language and motor function and started to poke around the cottage, she put me to work.

I'd help her with the garden in the morning and the cleaning in the afternoon, and the rest of the day was for me to goof off. If I was good, she'd reward me with extra stories before bedtime. If I'd been especially good that day, she'd even let me into her study, where the walls were denser and the floorboards were waxed and the roof didn't leak and the shelves were floor-to-ceiling with jars and jars of dried herbs and the whole space smelled bright and clean and medicinal.

And then she'd pull open a drawer in her cabinet to fetch a stick of darkness with the same reflective sheen as her eyes, and she'd make ink.

Even though I'd grow up to not remember any of the words or the paintings she drew for me, that brilliantly clean smell of ink (menthol-but-not-quite) would stay with me.

I learned very fast. By the second autumn, I was reading off the shelves in her study. The books were hand-bound, the script hand-written. Clearly these were transcripts, perhaps made illegally, and I could never tell if they were fictional or factual except for the medicinal texts, which I couldn't understand anyway. Undaunted by fact nor fiction, my mother drew her story material from these books.

Wild stories they were, filled with heroes and magic and tragedy. Animals were a highlight: wily foxes and lazy toads and traitorous snakes and sagely slugs. Lush forests, towering trees, deadly swamps, and world-mountains. Abandoned temples and age-old ruins and towers in the mist. Her stories didn't focus on the people — I remember next to nothing about these stories, told to me as they were in my earliest days — but I remember the lack of a good ending.

I also remember wondering, just before everything went to shit, about her own story.

Winters were spent indoors, and as I grew, her study became a classroom instead of a treat. She made brushes for me, from bamboo and animal hair, and taught me my words.

I could already read, and writing came surprisingly easy, once I got past the cramping in my hands. If it cramped, she told me, it was the wrong position.

There was something timeless to being snowed in and spending all day focused on a craft. The frozen silence outside and the patient silence inside created the illusion of stability; I knew that, logically, but I still hoped for time to stop so the tranquility will stay with me.

I don't think I truly believed she'll stay with me for long, even then.

I think I pestered her to show me her paintings because I wanted to spend more time with her. There were a few abstract ones hanging on the study's walls, so I got it into my head that she had more of them. I pushed and whined and begged until she, laughing, rapped me on the head in reprimand, then dug out sheaves of paper from the bottom of the cabinet.

"This one's called 'A Fox's Wedding'," she'd said, shuffling through them. She was pointing to one of a mountain with a winding path, with no foxes in it. "This one is 'Leaves'." She pointed to a landscape with a village nestled in the center. "This one I drew from imagination, and I think it's gone now, but it's called 'Whirlpool'."

I'd been bouncing on the balls of my foot, thinking metaphor and saying, "How come they mean different things?"

I remember the sound of shuffling washi, the smell of ink, and the cold winter day, but not the paintings. When I found the cottage again, twenty years later, the study was destroyed and burnt, and then garden sported a carpet of new growth.

Back then I still looked to someone else for approval. My mother often had that smile parents make at their children: crinkly, exasperated, proud, and it felt good when she directed it at me, which was often.

I don't remember my old parents, but there wasn't a void where their memories should've been. At night, when I dug deeper, buoyed by the warmth of my new mother, the first things I came across were fragments of fear and disappointment and the nettle-sting of rejection. I didn't bother checking if those emotions were imagined or real; I never looked again.

So when she stopped meeting my gaze, I didn't let myself feel resigned, and I didn't panic. I didn't acknowledge the sinking realization of anything, didn't pry, just took it in stride.

Here's what happened:

The spring after my third winter, I started to see green things. Just green. I think…I think back then I thought this world was just Like That, like colors were something you grew into?

I was picking weeds in the garden, and some were flowering. Deep green flickers were poking out of the soil and the snow and I mistook a lot of them for weeds, but when I dug through the melting slush to the soil, some licks of color wriggled back into the ground like worms, or they floated away in the air, or they disappeared. Of course some weeds were green, too, and I picked those, thinking they were special.

My mother called for me from inside the house, and I scrambled up, a handful of bright green weeds clutched in my fist with bobbing grey flowers and trailing roots.

"What've you got there, Haii-chan? Oh, are you pulling weeds?" She took a few from my hands to inspect them. "You better not be pulling up my sprouts. Where did you find these—oh!" She'd looked at me for an opinion, presumably to tease, when she gasped and quickly averted her eyes.

That night, I couldn't find her. Resolutely not thinking about it, I climbed into her bed and fell back asleep. She would continue these disappearances, always at night.

Summer was fading. My mother celebrated my fourth birthday with stew.

Those days were bright. I hadn't started seeing any other colors, but the list of things that were green had grew to include baffling things like air, and tree trunks. My mother had started spending more and more time in the study, leaving me to do the morning gardening — there wasn't much heavy-lifting to do in summer for our little vegetable garden except upkeep, and she knew that, so I spent a lot of daylight venturing into the bamboo forest, exploring my newly colored world.

That day, dinner was rabbit-and-carrot stew. My mother hummed as she stirred, a book in one hand, ladle in the other, while I sat on the tall kitchen chair and kicked my legs, tracing the wood grain of the table and trying to remember if pheasant had a kanji.

All of a sudden she stopped humming. I looked up, hungry, hoping food was ready.

What I saw surprised me. The markings on her eyes — even though she was facing away they were visible from the side — had come alive, crawling down her cheekbones and up to her temples and into her hair. And her eyes were bright, too, brightly green, end to end, with that same mother-of-pearl sheen.

I felt weird, too, like someone had plucked a string and listed the world sideways.

She blinked, and it was like shades slammed down. The world dimmed, and her eyes returned to their usual pearl-grey. The markings were still, looping harmlessly around her eyes. She still wasn't looking at me, but she dropped the book and abandoned the stove and scooped me up all in the same breath and — I blinked — we were in the bedroom.

"What's wrong?" I'd asked, instead of what did you do?

She shushed me. From the wardrobe, she pulled out a bulky, sleeveless jacket and shrugged it on. She took off her waist sash and put on pants underneath her robes. She wrapped down the loose pant material with elastic bandages, tucked it into rough-terrain sandals she pulled from deep inside the wardrobe, and bent her legs, stretching, testing the give, then in neat, efficient moves, began going around the corners of the room, pulling down false walls to reveal hidden compartments. From them, she drew out small objects and tucked them into various pockets on her person. By then, the tense atmosphere had fully settled, and I knew something big was going to happen. Something shattering.

"What's going on?" I'd asked, instead of are you leaving me?

She pulled out a small shoulder pack from yet another corner I didn't know existed before that night. She gave it to me; I put it on. She knelt down in the bedroom that suddenly seemed cramped and stifling, and unlocked the brilliant green of her eyes. This time, she met my gaze full on. She didn't look like my mother anymore. I couldn't move; I was a mouse caught in a snake's gaze.

"We have to go away, Haii-chan. I don't know how long it will take, or if we can come back. But trust in me. I'll keep you safe."

I squeezed my eyes shut and believed her.

When we left the cottage, the moon was just rising. We did not stop until the moon was halfway up the sky.

The journey was fast and silent. I did not ask why my mother was able to leap through the branches, nor how she managed it so quietly. I just clung to her shoulders and closed my eyes against the forest floor flashing by beneath us.

The bamboo thinned, replaced by trees. I heard the gurgle of a creek, and as we moved, it grew to the rushing of a river. At some point, my mother stopped on a branch, head tilted like she was listening to something. All I heard was the water below us, then— a rumble, like distant thunder.

But the sky was clear.

Her head snapped to the direction we came from, green eyes narrowed. I followed her gaze, but my eyes couldn't cut through the nighttime gloom. My mother adjusted the pack on my back, brushed a hand over my head in comfort (for her or for me, I didn't know), then took off, faster than before.

The moon dipped back into the branches.

When she drew to a sudden stop, I came awake instantly. The dawn was watery, weak and pale. The forest was silent.

She dropped to the forest floor. Rifling through her many pockets, she drew out a scroll and stuffed it into my pack. She fixed me with her brilliant eyes and said, slowly and carefully, "Go east." She pointed. "The shadows will lead you wrong, so follow the sun. There are food and water in your bag, and if you go quickly and quietly they won't find you. It's a straight path from here to the safe house I've prepared. I will join you there after nightfall. Stay there, and don't open the door."

"Not even for you?" I whispered back.

She shook her head, then managed a smile. It wasn't anything like her usual ones. "If you have to open the door, it's not me."

I nodded.

She hugged me, tightly. "I love you. I'll join you soon. Now go!" She gave me a small shove, but I didn't move. I was just starting to process what she wanted me to do. Walk through the forest? Alone? But—

"Why can't you come with me?" I asked, small and quiet.

She smiled, and this was a little more herself, a little crooked. "There's so much I want to tell you, but there's no time. Remember that I love you, baby girl." She kissed my forehead, then pushed me away again. "Go, quickly!"

I looked in the direction she wanted me to go.

"Yes, that's right," she said encouragingly.

I started slow, just walking away.

"That's good, you're doing well."

I pushed through the undergrowth, and the leaf of a fern fell behind my back. Her voice faded. Heart suddenly in my mouth, I pushed the fern aside and looked back at the spot my mother had been a second ago. She wasn't there anymore.

disclaimer naruto is the IP of kishimoto blah blah