A/N: I feel like, given the trend of juvenile humour, I should make a joke. And yet, I'm not going to. Shana got this back to me in record time! Probably to make me answer for the cliffhanger.


Raiku walked on.

She could feel the enormous, black-saturated mass that laced Konoha getting closer with every step she took through the forest. The Gairano generally had mixed feelings about coming home, and she'd always thought that she understood why. She thought that the mix of relief to be with those who understood you could only be matched by that sliding feeling of wrongness, of that building nausea and weight; could only be met by that perfect counterbalance.

Now she had to wonder whether the way she felt was shared by any of them at all.

Raiku walked on and the voices of her teammates sounded heavy and wrong, distorted and muffled around her.

It was funny, the way a single thought could shape the world around a person. It was almost physical.

Maybe it was.

Maybe the rules weren't the same for her.

There was a high buzz in her ears, like the noise that rang after an explosion. It was faint and piercing, and Raiku could hear it and her heart and almost nothing else. Her limbs were numb at the edges, replaced with thrumming electricity. She'd been walking through it for miles and her legs should have hurt, because Raiku wasn't built for stamina.

She wasn't built for many things, really.

Raiku walked and she walked and she walked until she found herself on familiar ground, until a hand brushed over her shoulder and the faces of her teammates moved in and out of the world in front of her, voices low and muffled still. Buildings that she knew, gates large and imposing and exactly the same as they always were. She pushed her way through hands and voices that had never felt so insubstantial and through paved streets, through black Plot that dragged and stretched across the earth in front of her and twisted and bent in her wake, rippling against and then through the circle around her.

And she walked on. Raiku walked up the slope that she had fled and jumped down a thousand times, letting her feet take her there without thinking. She walked up the gravelled plane and through the compound gateway, walked through people and their muffled voices like a ghost. There was a sting, a removed sort of ache as she went in through the doors. Familiarity struck her low in the chest, but not hard enough to startle her. Not hard enough to really hurt.

And so she made her way along the path until she came to her front door and through it, taking off her shoes in the entry and moving to where she knew, somehow, he'd be.

He stood at the kitchen counter facing the door, head bent over an open scroll. He was there. He was there, and she'd known he would be, and the high, painful noise grew to fever pitch.

Her father looked up, a smile already forming on his face. When he saw her, it faded and died.

The static in her ears abruptly cut off, just leaving the silence.

'Dad,' Raiku said.

Her father looked at her, eyes dark and watchful. 'Raiku,' he said.

They stood and looked at each other silently for a long moment.

Raiku felt the world still bending and curving around her, making space for her in its great and terrible way. There was something too quiet, too deep to be a coherent thought and it was seeping through the silence that she'd found herself in, it was starting to take shape through the perfect, invisible bubble around her.

In front of her, her father raised his hand. 'It's going to be okay,' he said quietly, eyes wide. 'Walk towards me. Slowly.'

Raiku felt herself mechanically tilt her head to the side and she watched his figure swim in her vision; she realised she hadn't blinked since she saw him. Her eyes were burning, starting to water, but she couldn't take her eyes off him.

Her father took a cautious step forward and she felt it, she felt it resonate, like there were ripples coming from the impact, through the floor towards her. There was a haze shimmering around him, burning and alien and infringing on her, invading her space until she was breathing it in and suffocating—

Her father stopped, eyes sharply coming in to focus on her face. 'Raiku,' he said again, in a tone of revelation, and Raiku opened her mouth and screamed as her father lunged towards her. She screamed and electricity poured out of her mouth and from behind her eyes, surged from her skin where it had been held in by her ribs, turning everything to violence and brightness and noise. The world rippled and shook around her and she could feel it, suddenly, that great, invisible wall around her, pressing and then shooting towards her. The walls not closing in but collapsing, shoved inwards to shove her

down

into the dark.


'It's alright,' Tsuji sighed, eyes black and knowing and ageless, watching

watching

seeing, and he told her

'It's alright.'

There was a hand pressed to her shoulder, grounding her to the floor. The acrid smell of smoke, overpowering and unmistakable.

When she opened her eyes, her father looked down at her wearily. 'It's alright,' he said patiently, like he'd been saying it for some time.

Raiku stared at him for a moment, and then shoved him harshly away, scrambling awkwardly to the opposing corner. Her fingers sunk into the burnt, splintering wood to get her away faster and they immediately started to sting and throb. In a way, it was a relief to have something as familiar as pain.

'Easy!' her father said, hands splayed in front of him. 'It's okay, Raiku!' He was burnt but not nearly as much as he should have been, based on the blackened, devastated scene that was their ground floor.

Jounin, she remembered,

Gairano, something echoed.

It was all she could do not to laugh hysterically, but the words turned into a shout. 'It's not okay!' Raiku cried. 'How can you say it's okay?!'

'So you know,' he said instead of answering.

'You knew!' Raiku balled her hands into fists, another wave of electricity surging out before she could help herself, before she could drag it back to just crackling along her skin. The air hummed threateningly, but her father didn't seem phased.

Of course not. He'd seen this all along. All along.

'You knew and you didn't tell me!'

'Raiku, you were caught in a Device,' he said loudly, 'you need to take a breath, you need to stop for a moment and—'

'I am a Device, what difference does it make!' she shouted.

The words hung between them like a physical barrier. She'd said it. It was real then, the way an unspoken thing just wasn't.

He watched her, breathing heavily. He didn't say she was wrong. He didn't say anything.

'I am a Device!' she repeated, voice cracking.

He took a few deep breaths, looking at her unblinkingly. 'There was a secondary Device attached to you, Raiku,' he said firmly. 'Latched on to magnify itself. Try to think of how you got here, everyone you spoke to.'

Raiku could have slapped him. She could have sunk her teeth into him and bitten down to feel skin rip and she could have torn him to pieces. 'Try focusing on this Device!' she spat, gesturing sharply at herself.

Annoyance flashed over his face—annoyance, like he had the right to be frustrated. 'I can't help you if I don't know what's happening,' he started evenly, and Raiku slashed her hand through the air to cut him off.

'Just listen to me, I am what's happening!' She sounded like she was pleading and she hated it, she didn't want to beg, she wanted to take, she wanted to pull the information out of him.

'Raiku, I am not having this conversation with you and every Device in Konoha!' he snapped, composure starting to crack around the edges. 'I am trying my best!'

'How could you not tell me?!' The circle, that space around her feet was gone. It was another Device and it had felt natural, it had felt fine when every part of her should have been screaming against it. Worse yet, its absence left her feeling naked, like the twisted solidarity had been a form of support instead of the parasitic, world-bending force she knew objectively it was.

That she knew objectively she was. The thought came to her like a hot spike in the back of her mind, another surge of self-loathing that erupted out of her in accusations. 'Who else knew?!' she demanded. 'Did Mura know?! How many people have you taken care of just because they knew about me, when you're supposed to protect us! All of us! Not just me! You're our leader!'

'I am your father!' he shouted back, a sudden escalation that startled her into taking a step back. He seemed bigger, suddenly, bare of the pretensions that he adopted to make himself seem smaller, to seem milder, to seem less… aware. 'Before I am a Gairano, before I am a shinobi, I am your father! There is nothing I would not do for you!'

Raiku flinched, struggling not to back away further in the face of her usually measured father's rage. She'd known that her father's anger could suck all the air out of a room, but never had she felt it so physically before.

Had she just not realised? Had she been so oblivious to that great, aching force, pressing against some invisible barrier of her own? It had always been comforting, that great wall around her father; it had always been reassuring to know his reach was so great that she and the others could be shielded under it. Before. But then, she had always assumed it included her.

'How?!' her voice was cracking. She hated herself for it, but it cracked anyway. 'How can you say that when I'm, I'm part of it and it's hurt us all so much—'

'Stop!' he snapped, crossing the space between them quickly, too quickly for her and grabbing her by the shoulders. 'Don't! Don't you dare! Listen to me very carefully.' He looked into her eyes. Really looked, not through her or at some distant point, and Raiku suddenly felt like a child again, too uncertain and small to meet his gaze. 'I know the Genematrix better than anyone. I know what it does. And you are the only good thing to ever come out of it, do you understand?' He shook her. 'Listen to me, I had to decide!'

Raiku shook her head, pulling away weakly, but both of them knew her heart wasn't in it and his grip just tightened.

'I had to decide,' he pressed on relentlessly, 'whether or not every cruel, senseless thing the Genematrix did, whether watching all those people die again and seeing it all play out, every day of my entire life—whether I could accept it was worth it for you, and I chose yes; I chose you!'

Raiku hung her head but he shook her again, clearly not willing to take her avoidance for an answer.

'I will always choose you, and don't try and tell yourself that I don't understand what I'm saying, that I don't understand the consequences,' he snapped, 'because I don't care where the universe pulled you out from, there's not a person on earth who understands better than I do, I was born understanding that!'

'Then why didn't you know before?!' she cried, fisting her hands in her hair. 'Why didn't you say anything?!'

He exhaled roughly, almost strongly enough for it to be a curse. 'I had no idea what would happen, what the rules are! Whether knowing would be enough to, to snap you out of it, like being a person was something you could wake up from!'

'But I'm not a person!' Don't you dare cry, Raiku, she thought savagely, feeling the burn; don't you dare.

Her father tensed, going still. Raiku found herself stopping as well, breath caught on an inhale.

'Don't you ever,' he said slowly, 'ever… say that again, don't you—' his hands tightened on her shoulders again, convulsively. 'You,' he ground out, 'are Gairano Raiku, you are my daughter and you are a person no matter where you came from.'

Raiku started shaking her head again, every fibre of her being protesting. 'No, no, this can't have happened, I'm not even meant to be possible, how is this possible?!' His face, when she looked up, was ashen. Stricken, but that hard look was still in his eyes. Like she'd flayed him open and just found steel when she'd expected flesh. 'How could you not have known?' she asked, and he pressed his lips together so hard that they went white as she closed her eyes just for a moment, unable to look at him.

'The fail-field keeps things out, Raiku, I didn't think it would trap you in.'

Her eyes shot open. 'Is that what happened?!' she demanded, looking up at him. 'Am I just a Device that got… stuck in here?!' She paled, hands suddenly coming to fist in her shirt. Bloody fingers starting to claw at herself. 'Is the real Gairano trapped in here!?' she asked, perilously close to another scream. 'Are they just, just stuck in here while I walk around, while I—'

'No no no, Raiku, no, breathe!'

She was getting lightheaded, and her knees suddenly felt less sure of themselves than they had moments before. 'I can't be in here,' she gasped, somehow too short of air. 'I need to, I need fresh air, I have to—' she jerked out of his grip and stumbled towards the door. He let her go and she staggered out to their blackened porch, shoving aside their crumbling door on her way and then sitting heavily down on the top step, gripping her chest still and taking great, gulping gasps of air that burnt all the way down.

The air outside was cold and still smelt strongly of smoke, of the smouldering embers left of the bottom floor, but it was better than being inside. It was better than being suffocated by the enclosed space, of feeling like she was too big for the walls.

He was learning. Or he had to have been, over the years, because her dad let her sit and gasp, and clutch at herself until her breathing started to slow, until her limbs weren't so hot that she couldn't feel how they were shaking, until she started to draw back in inside her skin like she belonged there. He must have learnt something after all because it was only after all that that she heard his quiet footsteps pass the doorway, saw him step down next to her and sit. He was close enough to reach out and touch, if she wanted to, but not so close she could do it before then.

Then, to her profound shock, he pulled out a cigarette and lighter.

Her dad had quit smoking years and years ago, she remembered. Her mother had told him that he had to before they got married or she'd call the whole thing off. And he had, but Raiku had caught him at it maybe once, twice before, when things were truly bad. When the Plots were darker than usual, when they were more silence than screams. He'd smelt like smoke just one day that she could recall, hard and distinct in her memory. He'd sat in the dark on their porch, staring at nothing through the smoke in the air and Sasuke hadn't been at school the day after.

No Uchiha had been.

He lit a cigarette now, the tip of it glowing bright in the darkness as he inhaled. 'I'm sorry,' he said after a long exhale. 'I should have told you and I'm so sorry, Raiku.'

Sorry.

Raiku nodded, letting that sink in. Sorry. And he meant it, she could hear it—he was sorry, and she should still have been angry, but her shoulders slumped. The anger had drained out and left her feeling empty and deflated; quietened, on the inside. He was sorry.

Raiku made mistakes. She made them all the time. People did.

She had to be fair. She had to be fair because she loved him and he was her dad, and people made mistakes.

People got angry, too, she knew. People got angry and held grudges, but it was hard. It was an exhausting thought, and maybe she wasn't a person all the way through, because she could kill a thing without ever hating them, and she didn't want to hate her dad.

'Just… what can you tell me?' she asked quietly. 'I barely… I'm this thing and I don't even know what it means.'

He rubbed his jaw with his free hand, looking briefly down at the ground. 'I'll tell you everything I know, but the reality is that we don't know that much about them,' he said, smoke streaming out between his lips. 'They're hard

to see,' she heard Tsuji's voice slide over her father's, a temporary flanging as his words echoed in her mind.

They bend things. Change shapes.

She shook her head and her father came back into focus. 'We know they tend to correspond with Narrative elements, like tragedy, or love,' he said, and his lips quirked but he didn't seem amused. 'We can read their path along certain thematic lines, but where multiple Devices exist along the same theme, we can't see them well enough to differentiate until after the fact.'

'That's why we keep them in broad categories,' she murmured. Tragedy. Romance. Revelation. Melodrama.

He nodded, taking another long drag off his cigarette, taking a moment to tap some ash out on the ground. 'Some are more obvious, and we can narrow it down. We had a pretty good fix on Amnesia for a while, but it's been a few years since that was highly active.'

She knew. She knew.

But she asked. 'What category am I?'

'There's only one of you,' he said instead of answering plainly. The words by themselves could have been another reassurance, but he just said it like a fact. As an answer rather than a placation. He stared out into nothing. 'So there's no category, there's just you.'

'But what am I?' she asked again.

She needed him to say it.

He had to say it.

He didn't look at her. He didn't speak for a long time.

'I think you know,' he said finally. 'I think after whatever or whoever made you realise this, you already know.'

'What am I?' she asked again, wanting somehow for him to look at her and also for him not to, to not see his eyes as he said it.

'You're Destruction,' he said at last.

She had expected it to hurt, she realised only when it didn't. She had expected the words to hurt in some way, to be a sort of mental stripping back of a protective layer, like it had been with Tsuji. But in the dark, in her father's voice, it just quietly resonated somewhere deep down. Like a small thing falling from a ledge it had teetered on, finally succumbing to gravity.

He continued after a moment, after another inhalation of the acrid smoke. 'You've always been here. We've called you many things.'

'Catastrophe,' she said quietly, because she knew this one. She'd read about it, had seen it written across the history of Konoha. 'Disaster, calamity—'

'A sudden and violent change of circumstances, status or narrative equilibrium, physical or otherwise,' he corrected, with the air of a man reciting a familiar script. He shook his head, tapping ash onto their ruined porch step. 'We should have known. I should have known. It was one of the only Devices that was just… always here. Of course it was the one your mother got too close to. Of course it was.'

Raiku could feel her body getting heavy with fatigue, was becoming more and more conscious of the throbbing pain in her fingertips. Every second that passed made her more aware of her own physicality, that grounded space that she'd felt so removed from until she crossed the compound boundary. Until she'd set foot back home, and reality had started seeping back in and broken through that perfect circle.

'And things always escalated that way when you were nearby, like you just couldn't escape from it,' he continued. 'It had never been so hard for one of us to stay out of things before, but it was actively trying to find you. Obvious, in retrospect.'

Obvious. Yeah, she thought. Obvious, right.

'… Is it my fault?' she asked. 'All of it? The demon attacking, my mother dying, Sasuke—'

'No,' he denied, without the knee-jerk vehemence that would have made it easy to doubt him. 'It's not the sea's fault people drown. There's no fault there, not for you.'

'Not for me, but… someone.'

He snorted lightly through his nose, expression tainted with bitterness. 'Oh, yes.'

The Genematrix hung between them, before them, everywhere around them, like a curse.

'Has this happened before?' she asked, and her voice cracked. 'Did you know there were others like me and say nothing?'

Her dad flinched like she'd struck him.

'There was one, that I know of,' he said eventually. 'But I didn't know until they were already gone.' She heard a click as he swallowed. 'They're still not like you, Raiku. You could never be like that.'

'Like what?'

'There are some things worse than destruction,' he told her with distant eyes, looking at something faded into the past. 'There are worse things to have than an end.'

Raiku's bloodied fingers curled in the long end of her sleeves, just to have something to hold on to.

After a long, long silence, her father lifted his arm, opening his side to her. She looked at him askance but he kept looking forward, the cigarette burning down to a stub between the fingers of his other hand.

Raiku hesitated for a bare second, then shuffled over and leaned heavily into his side with a heavy sigh. He felt cool through the fabric, like most people did, but the space between them wasn't pushing her out anymore.

Maybe it had been anger, she reflected; anger, rather than the fail-field, which had never rejected her before. He hadn't rejected her even once he'd known. It would have made no sense for the fail-field to expel her now.

A change of circumstances, the thought drifted across her mind; the sort of thing that could change a Gairano but had never bothered before. But no. Not her father. Not Gairano Chitose, whom Plot fled from.

He sighed. 'It was almost a relief, eventually,' he said. 'Finding out that you weren't disposable like the rest of us, that you mattered more than just to me.'

Raiku hummed, but was too tired to make it a truly curious sound.

'I learnt so early,' he murmured, 'that what you want doesn't matter when someone has the power to take it away, but you were—I couldn't…'

She felt him sigh heavily again where she was leaning against him, sheltered under the arm around her shoulders. She could smell smoke and ink, the mix of smells that made up her father and coloured her childhood.

'I love you,' he said simply. 'So much.'

Raiku swallowed, testing for a moment. But it wasn't hard to say; she didn't have to force it out like she'd feared. 'I love you too, dad,' she replied.

He nodded, and she felt a shudder pass through him, just once. It was familiar to her enough by that point that she felt it resonate and could only hope it was from relief. He nodded again, clearing his throat.

'Honestly,' he said, injecting some cheer into his voice, but not enough to make it less rough, 'with you right there, it explained a lot about the Uchiha.'

Raiku paused. 'What?' she asked, certain she'd misheard him.

He coughed and raised his voice. 'It's okay!' he called. 'We're fine, you can come out!'

Confused, she quickly looked out over their singed yard. Curious faces peered out at her from around the various houses, her cousin Senta already carrying wooden planks towards them, braced over a broad shoulder. His mother was holding a toolkit, and the emerging construction tools of the Gairano were starting to congregate in front of their damaged house.

'Oh Raiku!' her cousin Izai said cheerfully, already coming up the stairs with a tape measure in one hand and a pencil tucked behind her ear. 'Welcome home, I thought I saw you coming in.' Chatter started rising amongst her family as assessing gazes were cast over their home, tools being organised into various piles in their front yard.

Raiku found a wobbly smile coming across her face just moments before someone swiftly smacked her in the side of the head.

'You idiot!' Mayuko scolded, already lifting Raiku's hands to look at the blood on her fingers. 'What were you thinking, coming straight home instead of going to hospital?' She was in scrubs and slightly out of breath and Raiku felt the strangest surge of affection rising up in her at the sight of her familiar, harassed-looking relative.

'I just wanted to come home,' Raiku said, and realised for the first time it was true.

Mayuko looked inches from smacking her again before, to both of their profound shock, Raiku lunged forward from her sitting position and hugged her awkwardly around her waist. After a moment of tension, Raiku felt Mayuko slowly relax. 'Teenagers,' she heard her mutter. 'So emotional.' But her hand settled on Raiku's head anyway.

There was a moment of serenity before Mayuko spoke again from overhead.

'Chitose,' she said icily, 'have you been smoking?'

And Raiku could finally laugh, just a weak and quiet thing, as she heard her father hastily scramble to escape.


A/N: Smoking is bad for you, Chitose. Kids. Don't be like him. For so many reasons.