Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Alternatively (The five people Kaito loved, and the one he forgot)
"No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories."
― Haruki Murakami
There once was a boy who wrote journals, though now he doesn't know where his former journals are. They are...somewhere. He left them somewhere, but he's overturned much of the house in search of them and still not found them so he is resigned to the idea that they have been lost to time.
"I am faced with the idea that perhaps I do not know myself as well as I thought." He writes. He journals every night, back into infinity as a habit and a rule. So tonight he writes as well. December 12th. Konoha Era Year 48.
If he thinks too hard, there is a gap, a space, an emptiness that gnaws him and does not let him go.
The house is quiet behind him, softly peaceful. December brought snow with it, thick and fluffy for the first time in several years. Perhaps tomorrow he'll take Hana-chan out to see it. She's never seen the snowfall before, for it last snowed in Konoha the winter before she was born. She's a spring born child, his little blossom with her wide eyes and small hands.
He remembers snow in his childhood, Konoha turning white beneath it, remembers dark onion domes and a scorching noonday sun.
He remembers...remembers, remembers, but cannot place it.
He rubs his forehead with a hand. What is it that I'm forgetting now?
No his daily life has not suffered. He knows the face of each family member — there are only two, Hana-chan and Tsume-chan — and each friend — Kiho, Ensui, and Chobee — and each superior who greets him in the Tower and all his coworkers in RnD.
By all rights, he has forgotten nothing. Nothing at all.
Nothing's been forgotten, he's just...it's like seeing something out of the corner of his eye. Once he turns his head to confront the problem it's vanished to somewhere just slightly there on the edges of his vision.
The harder he tries to pick at the problem, the more he doesn't understand it. There is nothing he has forgotten about, certainly no person he's known who has died recently, so why does it feel like he's mourning a loss?
Something inside him seems to cry out as though a great weight has been placed on it and he cannot understand it. I have been so fortunate to never lose anyone, so why why does it feel like I am covered in grief?
The last mission went well besides Ensui ending up in a hospital bed. The war's over now — everyone is more or less safe now — so why do I feel like this?
"Have I always been like this?" He asks the darkened house. This covered in grief, this sick at heart though there is nothing for me to be sick over?
From behind him, Tsume snorts. "If you mean your journal writing habits, then yes. You've always done that." She clambers out of bed where she'd been restitching one of her ripped shirts and comes to loop her arms around his neck. "And if you're asking about how frequently you space out and stare off into the distance, then yes, you've always done that too." She laughs softly. "Overworking at RnD has made your brain all fuzzy, Kai-baka."
Kai. The word echoes.
His name is Inuzuka Kaito.
Everyone calls him Kai. Every single one of his friends calls him Kai like the last syllable of his name doesn't exist, so really, what's there so strange about this mention? It's not anything different than anything Tsume's ever said before.
He shakes his head and closes the journal, capping his pen carefully before deciding to turn in. "You're right."
"I'm always right." Tsume grins at him, sharp teeth flashing under the electric lights. "And I say that you ought to rest before you start to doubt your own existence."
"Alright, alright." He puts his hands up in surrender. "I yield. I yield. Have mercy." Give mercy only to your loved ones Kai, and sometimes not even then.
The thought echoes, something buried and lost resurfacing.
But who had once said that to him with such paternal fondness?
He doesn't know and can't explain it. And with the lights out the thought slips from his mind.
There once was a boy. There once was an orphan boy from a different country, who moved here to Konoha as a child.
There once was an orphan who…
There is a man who was an orphan boy once upon a time sitting at his desk during his lunch break fiddling with bits of clay completely lost in thought.
He remembers Iwa. Remembers scorching sun, remembers meat sizzling on heated stone, remembers onion domes and someone sighing next to him.
But there are no faces in these memories.
And what of when he arrived in Konoha? Landlords, late rent, thieving fingers, and then?
What then?
The Academy, Kiho-chan's dirty blonde hair, Ensui laughing in the background, Tsume's sharp grins…
What then?
The name Inuzuka, a rushed wedding, Kiho as godmother of his Hana-chan, a family of three…
What then?
As he is now, a researcher, one of many in RnD.
But there's something missing isn't there? A hollow echo somewhere where something's missing isn't there?
"Kai?" Ensui drawls from across the table. "The one day I'm joining you for lunch in your little underground lightless lab and you do this to me?" His best friend plucks the pen from his hand. "So diligent really. Why work so hard now? Enjoy yourself, you've got plenty of time."
"Those weren't my work notes."
His best friend picks up the sheet he's scribbled all over this lunch period. "What is it then?"
He frowns, suddenly not sure he wants Ensui to read everything. It's nothing but the nonsensical musings of a man with too much time on his hands and too many hollow echoes in his head. "A bedtime story I was writing for Sprout." That's a lie but it rolls smoothly off of his tongue.
He's not going to tell his cute three year old daughter the story of how her father fears he is losing his mind thank you very much. It has been months now, and there's still a wordless grief thick on his tongue, he can't quite explain.
Ensui hands him back the sheet of paper wordlessly. "You've only gotten stranger recently, Kai."
He raises an eyebrow. "Says the man who started wearing green face paint, and occasionally gets shitfaced in bars because according to you, Kiho-chan is jerking your chain."
"Look, she's convinced that I am not serious."
Ensui's defensiveness just makes his eyebrow rise higher. "Perhaps not getting drunk and confessing your love in bars might, might, do the trick? She might be more inclined to believe you then."
Ensui shoots him a baleful look. "Yes, well for some of us feelings are hard, alright?"
And he laughs, hollow echoes and memories with fuzzy edges forgotten. "And yet you can tell me that you love her, but one look at Kiho-chan and you're tongue tied."
It would serve Ensui right, a dish of karmic justice, just for that sharp tongue and slow drawl his best friend has.
Nara Ensui has a mind like a whip and an eye for social connections like no one else Kaito's ever known. Not even his best friend's second cousin, the Nara Clan Head really comes close to Ensui's feel for personal connections and deductions in that vein.
The irony of Nara Ensui losing his entire brain the moment he's confronted by feelings for their mutual friend is just too good. You can look at everyone else and see their social secrets, tease them about their feelings, but just as soon as you caught feelings of your own you're just as bad as the rest of us.
Oh sweet sweet justice.
"I did not come to lunch to have you ignore me in favor of writing a bedtime story for your sprout and then to have you laugh at me." Ensui frowns at him, but his eyes are laughing.
"Rich coming from you." Kai counters. "I distinctly recall someone laughing himself silly when I told him I was planning to elope."
"No one plans to elope, Kai." Ensui drawls, lazily tapping his fingers against the armrest of his chair. "They are by nature, unplanned. You're the only person I know who would plan to elope."
"Well, I didn't want my elopement to go wrong." In some ways it had, in some ways it had, but the ceremony was small, and filled with only family and close friends, and it had been one of the happiest days of his life…Congratulations, my boy.
And if he feels a hollow pang at not remembering parts of it, now's not the time to think of that. Who? Who has ever called me 'my boy' with such fondness?
He doesn't know who. There's no one in his life.
There once was an orphaned boy who grew up to become a man alone.
There now is a man who fears he is slowly slipping into madness.
Ensui rises to return to Crypt. They trade a few good natured jibes back and forth.
He puts his head back down in his small and cramped lab and goes back to work.
There once was a man who felt ghostly in his own life, as though there's something funny he can't place, like there's something important no one else bothered to tell him.
"Do you think this color suits me?" Kiho-chan waves a hand in front of his face.
"Pastel pink?" He considers it, considers Kiho's personality and the pale pink shade of the sundress she's chosen. "I would say that the green one you looked at earlier might be nicer."
It's not a bad color on her, because Kiho wears both pastels and jewel tones well. It's just, he hasn't seen her wearing any form of pink since the Academy and honestly the thought of his friend in a pink sundress seems...out of place somehow.
Kiho stares at the dress for a moment. "You might be right. I'm not particularly fond of the frills on the sleeves of this one either." She puts it back, frowning all the while.
"Kiho?" He asks, because soon they will miss their lunch reservation at Sadako's. "We were planning on going to lunch still, right?"
"Oh yes." She brightens. "You did always love the yakitori at Sadako's. We wouldn't want to miss that."
But how did he ever learn about Sadako's again?
He...doesn't remember the first time he went to Sadako's.
The thought is fuzzy around the edges, he's just always known of it that's all. "Hey, Kiho-chan, do you remember the first time we went to Sadako's?"
She blinks at him once. "Right after we graduated academy you invited us out remember? You said it was your favorite yakitori place."
Yes, that had to have been true, but —
If I was an orphan, how did I pay the bill after inviting them out? There's no way I could've…
Perhaps Kiho is only being gentle about it. They'd all gone out together, and then they'd split the bill. That he would've been able to afford on an orphan's budget.
"Well, we still have some time. Did you want to try on the green dress again?"
There once was a man who forgot who he was.
Sure the image was there, he still wore the same face, but all the echoes rang hollow. His actions are still his own but the meaning behind them is lost.
He didn't know who he was. He didn't know what made him this way.
Do I even know who I am anymore? Have I ever known who I am, or am I always just guessing, habits formed without understanding where they came from?
When he dreams, the world is dark and he is falling down an endless abyss of shadows and formless shapes. Lost. Lost. Lost.
You are lost. You can't be found.
And when he wakes it feels like there is something trying to crawl up his throat.
"Hey, Kai?" He looks up from where he'd fallen asleep against a tree next to an old training ground. He'd come here because it was habitual.
He doesn't remember having a genin team.
He only remembers the team he was friends with.
How did I make chunin? If I had no team, how did I make chunin?
Chobee has said something, but he hasn't been able to recall it properly so much he's been dwelling on the state of emptiness inside him.
He offers his friend a thin smile. "I'm sorry, Chobee. I didn't catch that."
Chobee's face falls, concern creasing lines around his eyes and mouth like hairline cracks deepening on a shattered piece of pottery. "Kai, are you sure you're alright?"
He — pauses.
No one has asked him that in — it feels like ages, but it cannot be that can it? It cannot be because while this village may not love the foreign look of him, his pale blond hair and blue gray eyes, cannot love his differing reactions, his strange little traditions, his small joys over seeing a building with a roof of a darker hue, his friends and family love him well — in a very long time.
"I-I'm not sure." The admission is soft. "I must've forgotten something. It's been bothering me." An understatement, but it's all he knows how to explain this as.
How could he describe these hollow impressions?
How does he explain this choking grief, this steady weight of you are lost you are lost you are lost?
"Have you been by to see Inoichi?" Chobee offers him a hand to pull him up. "Or if you're not comfortable with Inoichi, perhaps talk to Kiho?"
His friends are embroiled in their own issues with each other.
Ensui and Kiho-chan are determined to take the long way to their paradise it seems.
His smile turns more genuine. "I'll go to see Inoichi later this week."
There once was a boy, who is now a man, still grieving for no good reason despite having lost nothing.
"Tou-san, can you tell me a story tonight?" Hana-chan tugs at his sleeve before he can sit down to write, two bare feet peeking out from beneath the hems of her pant legs, her short hair messy from the tumbling she'd done with her puppies earlier that evening.
The floor is too cold for bare feet, even with it being nearly spring.
He scoops her up balancing his four year old daughter on one hip. "Of course. What sort of story would you like to hear?"
Tonight it's just the two of them.
Tsume is out on a mission that takes her further than she's been in a while.
"Mmmm." Hana-chan sighs softly, hands sticky with something he's uncertain about, so they make a detour towards the kitchen sink before bed. "I want to hear about the faces on the cliff."
"The stories of all the Hokage are far too much for one night, Sprout!" He laughing tucks her into bed, arranging the soft child sized blanket that she's had since birth around her.
She'll outgrow it soon.
Who was this a present from again? He feels a tinge haunted thinking about it. It was someone important to him, wasn't it?
Ensui? Kiho? Chobee? Who'd sent his Hana-chan this blanket? Why can't he recall where they got it from?
"So you'll have to just pick one, and I'll see what I can tell you about them." As a child in the academy, he'd soaked in all the knowledge he could get about the Hokage.
Every child goes through a time where they want to be Hokage, to be important and adored, but as he is right now, all he wants is to be adored by his daughter, to be loved by friends and family, to reconcile his wife and his sister-in-law.
Inuzuka Kosshi-san still does not like him much.
He is resigned to that fact. Despite planning and successfully eloping, actually perhaps because of that, the rest of his extended family turned cool towards him.
And as a result, Tsume had taken to spurning her sister's invitations and inquiries as well.
Perhaps when she returns home once more, they'd have to discuss it, to go over the wrongs on both sides — for he is not arrogant enough to believe that he has done no wrong — and to begin to mend bridges.
"Mmm." Hana-chan sleepily thinks it over. "Tou-san, can you tell me about the Nidaime today then?"
She's halfway to sweet dreams already.
Unconsciously, his lips turn up in a fond smile as he smooths down her hair and organizes his thoughts. "Well, as you already know, Nidaime-sama was the second Hokage, and younger brother of the Shodaime. In his youth, he was known for being brilliant. He created the Academy, the shinobi ranking system, and the current divisions of labor at the Tower. But perhaps what he was best known for were the jutsu he created and the sword he wielded. Today I will tell you about how the Nidaime became the wielder of the Raijin no Ken…"
Ever since age eight, when he arrived at the Shimura Residence, Iwa no Kaito had kept journals.
Inuzuka Kaito was no different.
This is what his journal doesn't say.
They are in his childhood home, sitting on opposite sides of the kitchen table, going over plans for the next few months as both he and his father prepare to leave.
Soon, they will both be called away.
Konoha is in the middle of a war — the third great war they've started to call it, the third war in less than fifty years, no children grow up free of war — and in a week's time he will be sent to the Kusa-Iwa border to hold the line.
As a Konoha Shinobi, even though he has not had the chance to take the jounin exams ever since the war began, it is his duty to go.
Still, before he goes, he ought to at least ask his father what is going on in the newly formed ROOT.
The reports he'd heard, the nasty whispers of children leaving the orphanage and never returning, of child soldiers with hands barely big enough to grip a kunai smacks too much of slander to him for it to sit comfortable on his shoulders.
The look Uchiha Fugaku had cast him the last time the Military Police Captain passed him in the street had raised all the hairs on the back of his neck. He'd never gotten along entirely with Uchiha Fugaku since even before he'd eloped with Tsume, but it had been a dull sort of 'I do not approve' rather than the full on critical judgement in the older man's eyes this Tuesday just past.
And he just knows this new judgement is because of the rumors.
His father is harsh yes, never entirely approving, never entirely fond and more often than not critical, but he is not a child torturer.
He is not a child kidnapper either.
You took me in and raised me when I had nowhere to go. I'd trust you with my life, the lives of my entire family and all of my friends.
So why, why do they say you have not done the same for your new branch of ANBU?
I know that your heart is kind when you want to be, even if your hands are stained and you have done terrible things in the name of loyalty.
The first lesson his father had taught him is that traitors ought to hang. Shimura Danzo has never betrayed Konoha and never will.
Iwa no Kaito would never.
"Shishou, there was something I wanted to ask you before I have to report for border duty." The man sitting across from him with a sake cup is Shishou no longer, given that his apprenticeship is officially over. Has been over for a good three years now, but it's a force of habit more than anything else.
One day, one day, his father had said he'd retire and leave his tasks in the Tower to him.
Kaito's not entirely sure he looks forward to the day, so many bloody choices await him when it arrives, but his father is older now, older than most fathers are when their son turns twenty four given that he'd been close to forty when he'd taken in a frightened child refugee from Iwa.
You deserve a good last decade of your life at least, Father. Yes, Shimura Danzo deserves a decade where he does not have to sit at a table and make hard diplomatic choices, where he can visit Hana-chan whenever he would like, drink sake, offer council when it's needed, read and play Go when it's not...his father deserves a retirement.
Free of stress and worry, free of anger at incompetency, free to be optimistic about the future.
"What was that, my boy?"
The house has lost its well preserved newness over the years he stopped living in it. Everything seems a little dustier now, even if it looks like someone had attempted to clean a little bit at least before his arrival.
At least the floor's been swept if not mopped.
"I heard some unpleasant rumors recently." About you, he wants to say, but he does not because well, his father knows what he means.
"Unpleasant how?" Shishou rumbles.
"They say that your new branch of ANBU doesn't have a child over age ten." This is the mildest of them, the mildest of all the things he's heard — of torture and interrogation, of training so difficult it could make a jounin cringe, of secrecy seals and missions so seeped in blood it ought to be left to the most experienced of the dark ops.
"You were my apprentice by age ten." So that was true then, that rumor was true. "And an academy student long before that."
"Do they have to be so young?" He asks. He'd thought himself wordly at age ten, had thought he's endured enough pain to become an adult, but now from the other side, now age twenty four he can only see children too small to be soldiers.
His daughter is only three years old.
"If they don't start young they won't learn properly." The statement seems too cold to be right, too chilled and hard even coming from his father's mouth.
"I learned." He'd started out late.
"You learned sensitivity." His father raises black eyes to pin him with a heavy look, no disapproval, merely resignment. "But there is no need for sensitivity in those who follow orders, only those who give them."
Does he stop this line of questioning now? Does he let it go and let them celebrate this night in peace? He turns twenty four tonight, and it is the only reason they are now in his childhood home, sharing sake and laughing over old stories.
Does he choose the easier path while turning his back on what's right?
His daughter is three years old, a child with big eyes and small hands who loves him utterly and who he adores.
He does not let the matter lie.
And that is when things fall apart.
"I wonder which will get you killed faster—
Your loyalty or your stubbornness?"
— Unknown
A.N. There's a reason this chapter's called "The Redacted Journals." After 16 chapters, we finally revisit the most mysterious dead man in Bloodless. Here, I went for a focus on his various issues, unlike in "The Happiest Days of His Life" where I went for more of a focus on perchance the things that brought him joy.
Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed, followed, and favorited recently. You guys keep me excited to keep writing.
~Tavina.