I do not own Naruto.
The art of being does not get a proper noun. It is not an actual style, or a path. It's not even a true direction.
It just is, and that's the point.
The art is something Lien has yet to manage, let alone master. It's not a simple thing, the art.
(Actually, art is seldom simple at all, proper noun or not.)
Back on track though, existing, or just being, is hard. Her mind, as all human minds, tends to wander about, following plot lines and patterns, attempting to find correlations and data sets inside everything that will assist her in managing a thousand hypothetical situations. It likes to worry about the future a lot, then set out goals and directives, as if there is a set formula to something as esoteric and specialized as success.
That's another problem; the fundamental definition of success. Many will equate it with financial prosperity and wealth, others with the propagation of the line, and others still with attempt to correlate it with completion duty. It's forever intertwined with culture and societal standards, which are whimsical and ever-changing. One may say that Kublai Khan, leader of the Mongolian huns and conquer of vast swaths of China, is successful. The same person will say that the Gautama Buddha, an ascetic and sage, is also successful, despite their life quite possibly being the antithesis of Khan's. Many more examples could be used, and then graded on some non-existent scale, hung up alongside the lines of relative morality.
Lien wants to define success as a happy, fulfilling life where she continues to learn up until her death, gaining wisdom, intellect, and joy. This is, of course, is allowing for adventure and goodwill as well, leaving the world just slightly more accepting and understanding than she found it. Possibly kinder too, if she can manage.
Unfortunately she's also biased by her culture, and her families viewpoints. She has been ingrained with the desire to gain some renown and wealth, perhaps elevate her family's standing in the eyes of society, and also be widely loved and accepted. But these are earthly ties, which should be unfavorable to some extent, because those are not being. Standing among people is fickle and ever changing, and wealth, while extremely helpful, does not actually equate satisfaction. But they are attributes she would like to assemble, has been told to strive for, as if she's filing some heavenly resume, or filling out a recipe for a happy life.
She's not. The equation for fulfillment and happiness is much more abstract than that, and yet part of her insist that she should just buckle down and do as the world tells her.
The point is -the point is- just being is hard. Everyday she has desires, wants and demands that distract her from what she already has. It is difficult to gain satisfaction from the moment, because she worries. She worries about the future, and how she will live. She has concerns about her desirability as a partner and a friend. She distresses over her emotions, her poor grip on reality, her standing in the eyes of others, and so many other things.
She wants to transcend those things, to overcome the forces acting on her, but that too is a desire. She is not focused on existing if she is yearning for a possible, (kinda improbable) future where she ascends above mortal concerns.
Also, it sounds kinda pretentious. 'Not focusing on desires' and 'transcending outside forces'. It just feels kinda arrogant, which is off putting.
Liens phone buzzes, dragging her out of her quiet contemplation. She can already hazard a guess to what it says, but she reads it anyway, just to be safe.
'Take me back. That chainsaw was a month's paycheck'
Outwardly, she doesn't do much, but inside, she slips right out of the now and into uncomfortable guesswork, reacting to the forces her environment has provided as stimuli. This event is unprecedented in so many ways, and it makes her anxious, makes her gut roil and churn inside of her.
The dream share is a problem in and of itself, but not the biggest. Sure, her cousins might need a little time to adjust, considering the blurry line between both worlds, but they would get there. It would happen, and then they could go around gallivanting together. It could even be nice, having a group to explore the dream worlds with, and then when situations became scary, at least Lien could say that she wasn't alone. She would help them like they helped her, calmly reminding them which world was which, and the first time one of them was mortally injured in the dream world, yet woke up fine here, she could soothe them with tea and distract them with comfort a cheesy movies, the same way they did for her.
Only, it wasn't just a dream share, because both Franky and Theresa adamantly deny falling asleep. It's hard to prove to one way or another, but the fact they protest resting at all is alarming, because that means it might just begin to happen at anytime, and Lien can't handle that. She has no idea how to go about sliding into the dream world, and then back again. The thought is so ominous, so fear inducing-
She switches tracks. The objects. Lien has never transferred anything in between worlds. True, she never fell asleep with things in her hand, but if they aren't sleeping, then it doesn't matter. The fact is the chainsaw and baking sheet are gone, nowhere to be found at all. Franky even filed a report on it, just in case the they turn up.
(True, it might seem a bit much, but good chainsaw's are very expensive, and Franky covets the good tools she has. She does hard work, and it becomes ten times harder without proper appliances to use. She's probably on her back up saw, a poor substitute with a faulty choke and a habit of throwing the chain.)
Her cousins are...angry, and Lien is bad at dealing with anger in the real world. She would solve it if she could, but she doesn't know how. It's not like they blame her, but she feels obligated to try something, anything at all. She's the one who has been dreaming for her whole life, she should have some modicum of control.
Something oblong and ugly twists, and she feels self-deprecation well up. She wants to live in the now, wants to just appreciate this day off and take life as it comes, but it whispers insidiously in her ear, dripping hate like venom.
'Useless,' it chirps, pretty as you please. ' Pathetic.'
The loathing is cruel and ugly. It doesn't take the variables into consideration, the weights of her wants or desires. It just hurts to hurt, as it always does.
Lien stills, trying to quiet herself, staring out the window listlessly. The weight of the phone is a soft reminder in her hand, the smooth plastic a strange comfort to her. The birds chirp, and the bugs hum cacophonously outside, and she tries to focus on that instead of the troubles in her mind.
There's no way to please this feeling, she's found. No way to make it go away. No matter how much she attempts to mold herself to its wants, it is never enough. No grade, no job, no conversation or journey is ever enough. It demands she be prettier, be smarter, be better than who she is. It rots inside of her, ugly and cold, stating cut downs as if they are facts.
(And they might be. She holds no illusions. In the great scheme of things, Lien is small. Very small, and she has little ambition to become bigger in ways that are supposed to matter. She has no longing for a career as it is conventionally defined, no thirst for a partner or family. She simply wants to live her days, savoring the satisfaction of a laugh, and learning. She always wants to learn.)
She does not know why the feeling still lingers, festering inside. Why does it spew hate when she already come to terms with her mediocrity, and accepted her own sub-par existence? Why does it cloud her mind with discontentment when she only wishes to accept?
Focus on the now, she reminds herself, her fingers running along the edges of her screen. Colors burst into existence, a tranquil scene of a river boat resting on a gravel embankment, and the times shines out in solid white text. She unlocks her phone idly, re-reading the text message staring back, her thumb hovering on the edge of the text box.
Carefully, she presses down, her digit picking out the characters with practiced ease.
'Want to have a sleepover?'
Lien goes to their house. It's not that far away, because their parents wanted to live close to each other after they all moved. Something about familiar faces in strange places.
Their families used to live in a much more populated area, closer to the coast, and closer to the rest of the clans.
(And some people may think those things are dead; that a clan is something from olden times, but Lien will tell them they are wrong. There's still a neighborhood overrun by her mother's sisters and their children, and she can trace her family tree all the way back to the fourteenth century. The clan lives, on her mother's and father's side, and she can find it's branches all over the world these days. She's related to people in Brazil, in the Netherlands, China and Papua.
No, clans aren't dead, they've just changed to fit the times.)
Now though, Lien and her cousins (her closest cousins, quite possibly her favorites) live far away from where they used to. It's not completely rural, but not urbanized either. It's something stuck in between, with bustling business and crowded streets in the center, and twenty minute out from desolate woods and isolated farmland.
She ventures somewhere in this juxtaposition of development and wilderness to find the house they own, and the sleepover goes a this reality demands. Which is to say they go about their normally scheduled business with a tense air of anticipation. Franky spends most of her time ruminating on something, and typing increasingly vague questions about quantum physics into search engines, hoping to somehow learn centuries worth of material in a few days time.
Theresa is a deathly sort of quiet, her face determined and stony. The baker pours them all tea in silence after they eat.
It tastes like Marshmallow root, valerian, and diphenhydramine.
Within thirty minutes of brushing her teeth, Franky is out like a light, snoring away, and Theresa is tumbling after. Lien can feel her cousins brew bubbling away in her veins, and she wonders why she knows the taste of over the counter sleep aids so well when she hasn't taken them in years. It's a lingering bitterness that hangs on her tongue, a heaviness in her limbs, pulling her to the ground, then through it, into the dream world.
She tumbles through the cosmos, and her body is pulled by the forces of all universes combined. It cannot stand such things, and it melts away, ripped to shreds so fast her brain can't even register pain. She becomes little more than a thoughtform, a fluttering collection of impressions and ideas that contorts into light, and flickers through the cracks of creation, carrying the history of creation in her oscillating wavelength of electromagnetic forces. She is a beam of light, transcending space as a universe simultaneously combines and separates.
And she it seems to her she travels forever and no time at all, little more than a concept, because that's the only way one can travel through universes. The physical form is left behind, and only the conceptual self may go.
(It's the same as dreaming, where the body rests, but the mind always wanders.)
She lands in the new reality, the dream world, and flesh molds itself to conceptual form, cradling it inside. Physics contain universal forces, binding them to biological form, and her travel ends.
In between one breath and another, she's reborn as a ghost.
And….that's strange, because she has a body, she has a form that isn't quite her own. It has two legs and two arms; ten fingers and ten toes. Eyes, lips, and a petal soft mouth too, but she's a ghost. She is Ne, without name, without family or home. She is nothing, and she knows this like she knew the numbers on the outside of her test tube.
Only, she's not nothing and this head-space is familiar, even though the body has grown.
'Are we nowhere yet?' she asks, and the body jolts, as if noticing her for the very first time. She feels neurons fire and hormones release, and she listens to his thoughts whir.
'Not real,' whispers one, while another screams for the tool to empty it's head, and a third, nearly silent, speaks in the language of rustling tree leaves.
'Always real, never real. Doesn't matter,' she replies, curiously lifting and arm to look at it.
The boy with a forest stretching forever inside his dreams jerks the arm back down in alarm. She didn't mean to scare him, she just wanted to see how big his hands are now, but he's panicking. His thoughts race, and their heart picks up speed.
'Compromised,' he diagnosis. 'Have to tell Danzo, accept elimination as an operative. Can't compromise the rest of Ne-'
'Is Danzo the name of the one from before?' she asks, and this time he flinches with his whole body. She can feel it, because she's sharing his body, and together they tumble off the bed they were resting on.
"Operative!" barks a voice as they struggle.
Lien lets him have control of all the limbs, because he's had them the longest, and should know how they work. She doesn't want to fall again.
He stands straight, his spine stiff and his arms by his side as a figure in a blank mask glides closer with all the unearthly grace of the hiveminded. Lien is surprised to see them, and she realizes that this is a nest. A hive of tree-walkers and their counterparts, all in varying stages of change.
Which means that little boy she met, all human and afraid, underwent some sort of metamorphosis. Now he's one of them.
Only… not really, because she's part of him right now, and he feels human. He's confused and agitated, tinged with fear and defaulting to trained responses, but human. There's no hivemind connection, no great shared consciousness. It's just him and her inside here.
"Report," barks the taller, fully grown masked shade. The boy acquiesces without pause.
"I-" he starts, confused, because there hasn't been an 'I' in so long. It's always been 'this operative' or his assigned number. Sometimes, he'll take on an animal name to match his ever changing mask, but never 'I'. Not since….since before the labs, maybe.
The tall one stares down, silent and looming. After a moment they sign for him to follow, and he suddenly understands that he has messed up. He used the wrong term, out loud, in front of a commanding officer.
Lien is starting to be confused as well, but then she realizes that this is the dreamworld, and it doesn't make sense. It just is, and trying to instill order on it never works.
So she lets the boy control everything, remaining quiet but observant as the tall one leads listens, and then begins to lead them out of the sleeping barracks into a grand underground network of tunnels and caves. She watches and listen through his eyes and ears, using his senses to experience the world.
And that's how she knows it isn't real, because you can only ever experience reality through your own perception. Here, she's sharing his, feeling the quiet hum in his thoughts and riding the need to fulfill orders he has.
It's strange, so very strange, to be two people at once, and nobody at all. She's lien, and she is dreaming. She is him, and he's reporting a defect and possible information leak. They are nobody, a quiet ghost that exists only to support the hive as a whole.
And they are looking for a chainsaw. Or, well, she is keeping an eye out for a chainsaw, but the colony structure is huge. It's vast and complex, with all the levels of a termite mound, and all the order of a beehive. She's more and more impressed with the masked shadows every second. She thought, originally, that they simply existed like bugs, thriving off a hivemind and living in harmony. But now she's learning that they can take human children and turn them into tree walkers, and there's some sort of hierarchy at play. The tall one is obviously higher ranking than the boy, and according to his thoughts they are going to see the queen.
'We're all human,' the boy snaps at her inside his head. 'There is no queen.'
She doesn't contradict him, but Lien does doubt. They may be human for the given definition in the dreamworld, but they aren't human like she knows the term. Human is a species of West African apes that evolved from their primate ancestors and spread across the globe. They are adaptable, resourceful, and endlessly wonderful creatures, but she's yet to see an unassisted human walk perpendicular to the ground for longer than a few seconds, and these guys do it all the time.
'It's chakra,' he tries to explain before reprimanding himself and trying to isolate himself from her, focusing on the number of steps they are taking. It's not going to work, and also, that's another term that's incompatible, because what he knows of chakra and what she knows are two vastly different things.
Their musings come to an end when the tall one directs them through a doorway, waiting till they pass to shuts it closed behind them.
Inside, a man with a bandaged face stares forward, his single visible eye seeming to know all. He's not quite that old, merely sixty or seventy, and beside all the bandages, he seems to be in good health. Somewhat of a dour mood, judging by the look on his face, but healthy. He's probably a very respectable queen of the hive, inspiring absolute order from the boy she resides in.
He opens his mouth to speak, and the boys braces himself, but the words that tumble out make little sense to him.
However, they make lots of sense to Lien.
"Have you seen any granola bars?" he demands in a heavily accented voice, as if something is rooting around in his mind, trying to learn the language by copying the patterns in his brain.
"Sir?" the boy asks, stunned.
"Not on your life" he retorts disdainfully, "Just have a penis at the moment. Not for long, I hope."
The boy fails to comprehend that statement in any shape or form. In fact, it sends him retreating into the depths of his mind in confusion and fear, giving Lien the chance to take the reins for a moment.
"Franky?" she asks through the boy's mouth, and the man's eyes flash. He gives her a reassuring grin that reminds her of clever words and the taste of drugged tea. Belatedly she realizes that she was too fixated on the chainsaw, and she forgot the other thing they left behind. She was out of harmony with the now, so focused on finding one thing that was lost, she forgot the other one.
It's not Franky exerting control over that body, but Theresa.
"Lien," her cousin sighs through the old man's dry lips, sounding relieved. "Thank god. Maybe now you can explain some of this."
The boy sinks further into himself, and Lien wishes she could follow. She can try, but she doesn't know how successful that endeavor will end up. After all, the dream world never made much sense.
(And if the task takes all her attention, drawing her away from her worries and fears, throwing her into the present, than at least she is being. At least, for the moment, she is embodying the art, if only in a dream.)