I do not own Naruto. TW death in detail.
Tenzo doesn't really know anything about the small woman he whisks off the battlefield.
He can't be sure the body she's in is her own, or that she isn't a ninja. He can't really tell her age accurately, or her occupation. He isn't sure if she has family, other than the wolves she's claimed as kin. Tenzo doesn't know if her name is actually real, what Elemental nation she hailed from, or what she likes to do in her spare time.
He can say with absolute certainty that she has been poisoned. Her and the red wolf both.
Kakashi-senpai paces behind him, the dark wolf snarling anytime he comes close to the other two. It didn't take long for them to get rid of their pursuers, barely any time at all, really. But the few minutes it took was enough for the signs to begin appearing in the small female, and it's only gotten worse since then. It started with an accelerated heart-rate, and then the sweating set in. Now she's shaking like a leaf on a tree, panting for breath, still impossibly calm.
The red wolf is better off, most likely because the entrance point is much further away from her central nervous system, and it's larger in size. It's only beginning to pant, but there are no medic nin here, let alone veterinarians.
Tenzo is a trained operative. He's seen death plenty of times before, and this is no different. The girl's skin is turning sallow and waxen, her eyes starting to gloss. In an hour, she'll have faded completely, and that's a very optimistic estimate. The wolf maybe has two or three, if it remains calm.
The operative inside him says that's more than enough time to get information out of her. It also says that, in a few hours, that information will be useless anyway.
"The grass is w-wrong," Lien comments, her voice shaking as much as her hands. She drags her palm through the tall stalks, only coming to rest when it slides up the leg of the red wolf bedded down by her side. They all must make quite a picture, two Anbu, a dying girl and wolf, and their dark guardian in between, all squirreled away in the great hollow of a tree in Grass Country. Like the opening to a very strange joke.
"The grass?" he asks calmly.
"It was shorter. E-even," she responds. She has to pause as her chest seizes in what looks like a painful manner, the muscles near her neck spasming.
Tenzo blinks, realizing that she's referring to the dream they shared. It's so vague to him now, half forgotten at best. He can't remember that place exactly, only the words they said, and the offer she gave him.
"Lien," he asks quietly. "Where is nowhere?"
"Not here, and n-not there," she tells him in a labored gasp. "It's not real. I'm g-going to make it real when we go."
Tenzo looks behind him, making eye contact with his senpai. It's fairly obvious she's not going to be going anywhere ever again to them. The only question that remains is if she should be told that.
"The senbon was poisoned. You're not gonna make it far before you die," Senpai announces briskly, taking the lead on this. It's a bit callous, but honest.
To his surprise, she lets out a breathless laugh, soft as curling smoke. Her tired expression looks serene, and that half smile plays at her lips.
"It's n-not the first time."
"Usually when someone dies, they stay dead. You must not have really died before," Kakashi comments, and Tenzo really appreciates his senpai, he does, but he's not sure Kakashi knows the meaning of tact.
She breathes in, despite how exhausted the effort that it seems to make her. The red wolf keens as she strokes the puncture in its flank.
"M-maybe n-not," she allows. "Depending on your p-perspective of death."
Tenzo doesn't know what to say to that. He simply watches her, his face blank as she rolls her head back to look at the sky.
"And what's your perspective?" Kakashi asks her levelly.
She pauses for a long moment, struggling for air. Her arm twitches violently, jerking at her shoulder as she lies in the grass.
"Death is an exp-perience," she whispers, unafraid.
The dark wolf whines at her words, tearing it's menacing yellow eyes away from the ninja to cast a pitiful look at the two it's protecting.
"You're using a lot of energy up to speak," Tenzo tells her, not quite sure what to make of her words, or the maybe-summon. "The more you talk, the faster you will die."
She goes to open her mouth anyway, continuing the arduous task of stuttering nonsense at them, as if she's eager to make the time pass faster. She chokes out reassurances to her lupine relations, and to the two ninja. At some point the dark wolf gives up guarding against them, shifting to paw at its companions and whine.
It eventually gets hard to make out actual words because of the tremors in her voice. Her whole body is shaking now, beginning to convulse. The wolves become manic as she begins seizing, vocalizing their distress, shuffling to her side as she mouths at them.
Tenzo watches, unable to turn away as the thrashing turns to spasms, and labored breath turns to rattles. He isn't quite sure why he makes himself watch her passing, or what he feels. He's not even sure what she is to him.
There is a moment, a split second, when she turns to face him. Her eyes land on his as the wolves keen, and she smiles at him like she has a secret.
Her heart stops, and the secret reveals itself as her consciousness flees her shell. He feels something inside of his head pull taut, and suddenly it's like his body weighs as much as a mountain. A ribbon wrapped around his mind unfurls, stretched tight, and he's pulled free from his flesh, into the cosmos.
He feels another string, another bond, fluttering behind him as he passes between things he cannot comprehend, until it goes rigid as well. It snaps into place, and he can feel the weight of something else being dragged with him, fluttering in the wake of whatever is pulling them along.
There is no fight, no struggle. He has no hands or feet to fight with. He is simply chakra, directed and pulled, pushed upon by the forces of the universe as he gets towed. He is water, as fluid and malleable as a thought, and suddenly he understands what could not be put into words all that time ago. This is ineffable. Indescribable.
He passes through eternity and everywhere all at once, until he coalesces back again, like liquid being poured into shape. Sensation trickles into him; soft blankets against his hands, the smell of tea, herbs, and wood. He hears the soft rush of air being exhaled, and tastes the inside of his own mouth.
Tenzo opens his eyes to soft sunlight, and an older version of Lien smiling tranquilly down at him, looking for all the world like she hasn't just died a horrible death. It's not real, he tells himself. It can't be real.
"Kai," he whispers.
The room remains, strange and alien to him, as does the ghost.
Theresa wakes, sobbing out Lien's name in a mournful howl, her heart racing from the phantom poison in her veins.
For a long moment, she doesn't know where she is. She thrashes in her bed, the sheets tangling around her limbs. Tears streak down her face as she recalls her cousin seizing in the grass, her breaths choked out of her by the force of them. She forgets everything except Lien's glassy eyes, and the shaking of her own limbs that heralded the same thing for her.
She comes back slowly, her environment slowly bringing her down. The sheets are not grass, and they are soft instead of scratchy. She cannot smell the sickness and poison lingering in the air, or the wet earth beneath her paws. In fact, she doesn't have paws, or fur, or ears on top of her head, just her own body. Her body which is human and whole, not shaking apart.
She breathes in, holds it until her lungs feel fit to burst, and then breathes out.
Footsteps patter up the steep stairs of their old home. She knows the pattern of the gait intimately, has heard them for years and years, through thick and thin. Theresa breathes in again, and feels her stomach fill with lead.
She breathes out as the door creaks open -no knocks, they're family- and Lien peeks around the doorway, stupid half-smile in place. She's so alive, her hair mussed up from the pillows, and her sleeping clothes wrinkled and stretched. She looks nothing like the sallow skinned, ashen mess that Theresa howled for, and seeing her cousin healthy and whole makes her want to start crying again.
Theresa doesn't burst into tears though, because as the door swings open, it reveals the man -boy?- standing behind Lien.
"We did it," Lien informs Theresa happily, tugging on the masked man's wrist. He's stiff and wary, staring at Lien as if he cannot comprehend the situation."We made the world more real."
Theresa feels so many conflicting emotions in that moment, it briefly feels like her mind is going to tear itself apart. She's can taste the fear and grief lingering on the back of her tongue. (She was dieing, somebody attacked her, attacked her family.) There's impotent rage at the situation, and at Lien, tinged by grief and sorrow. (Oh god, how many times has she died like that? How many gruesome deaths did she wake up from? Would they even be in this mess if it wasn't for Lien? ) Yet happiness and relief fill her heart. (They aren't dead, but alive and well, and gone from that place.) There's shock, and amazement (He's here, that's irrefutable proof, that place is real, real, real.)
"Rules," Theresa croaks, with all the grace of somebody who just woke crying. "There's new rules. The old ones are wrong. I have to find the new ones."
"Make the new ones," Lien adds, but Theresa shoots her a quelling look. That isn't helpful.
The masked male looks between them, and Theresa catches his eyes sparking with recognition at the sight of her auburn hair. He glances again at Lien, almost defensive.
"赤い狼... あなたは何者ですか," he breathes, but her head jumbles the words around without her permission, tracing the ghosts of neural pathways she never had, only borrowed.
'Red wolf...What are you?'
Theresa doesn't know. She doesn't know anymore, but she's going to figure it out. The world doesn't just do this, it's not supposed to be this way. Lien is at the heart of an anomaly, and she's dragging everyone else in with her.
But just as she's getting ready to nab her laptop and spend the day pouring over physics, shouting erupts from the room across the hall from hers, accompanied by barrious thumps and thuds.
"Ain't no lean little fuck like you gonna do me in in my own home!" Comes Franky's startling declaration, shortly followed by what sounds like shattering glass. "You done picked the wrong house, you white haired edge-lord!"
Theresa begins scrambling out of her sheets, eager to assist her sibling, when the door breaks open and a silver haired blur streams out of it, right into Lien and her guest. The hall is too narrow to fit three, and the ceiling too, leaving one result.
The silver boy collides directly with Lien, who is knocked back into the masked stranger by the other masked stranger -she's gotta get names, this shit is confusing- and they all tumble back down the steep steps, crashing down in a jumble of limbs.
Theresa stares at where they all just were, astounded, but a soft cry catches her attention. Franky crosses the hall, stumbling into her room, her eyes swollen and puffy from tears, and she yanks her sister out of the bed and into a hug. Theresa ignores the glittering shards of glass in her elder sibling's short, curly hair, and returns the embrace eagerly.
" 'Resa, that was a bad trip," Franky murmurs, and for the life of her Theresa cannot tell if Franky is just referencing the dream, or purposefully making a horrible pun about what just occurred. "A bad, bad trip."
She slaps her shoulder, just in case. The chuckle her sister gives her, startled and a little wet, means it was probably a bit of both.
Their hold on each other doesn't last long though, no more than a few need to break apart in order to appraise the situation, in case their cousin needs aid.
But Lien is calm as can be, tangled with the invaders at the bottom of the steps. She looks up at the sound of their entrance, her eyes a little dazed, and a bruise beginning to form on her shin.
"朝ごはん?" she queries, the words sliding of her tongue like she was born speaking them. It takes only a second to realize that she's switched languages so everybody can understand what she is saying, because Lien is under the assumption it would be rude to the others or something.
Theresa sighs, defeated and tired despite her sleep. It's too much. Too much nonsense after such a tragedy.
"Breakfast," she agrees.
This is the best constructed, yet most terribly obvious genjutsu Kakashi has ever been caught in, and it's making him wary.
The environment is a big, gaping void all around them, lacking almost any chakra at all. The people in the room are producing it, because they have signatures, but everything else is….not. It should be a dead giveaway that something is wrong, making it easier to dispel the illusion, but it doesn't. It just makes the place feel foreign and strange, adding in a psychological component to the whole thing.
Nothing smells right either. Smell can be one of the hardest components of an illusion, and to the casters credit there are scents, but alien ones. Ones that even he cannot name, despite being one of the best trackers in the history of Konoha.
The tactile, audio, and visual components of the illusion are hyper realistic. There's no awkwardly bending shadows, or sudden numbness when he goes to touch things. The sounds are natural and layered, the eggs in the pan sizzling louder than the chirping birds outside.
The Copy nin watches with dead eyes as the plump woman -who was a red wolf not even an hour ago- calmly make breakfast. The one who attacked him sits across the table drinking coffee without a care in the world, and the last of them sits at the end of the table with all the serenity of a Buddha.
Everything about the group shouts civilian, from the state of their rooms, to the way they move. His attacker seems to be the biggest threat, and she's….negligible. She's athletic, but untrained , and the cook seems to be much of the same. They are strong and healthy, with above civilian level chakra networks, but ultimately easily dispatched.
Yet, here they are, in a genjutsu that even his Sharingan can't break.
His attacker (Ranki? Sankei?) coughs into her mug awkwardly before setting it down on the table.
"So," she begins, looking up to meet his eye. "Sorry for freaking out on you upstairs. I was maybe emotionally compromised, and that probably wasn't the best way to introduce you to our world."
Kakashi's brain shorts out, but he manages to nod along with her statement. Another world fits the explanation better, but it's also incredibly unbelievable. People just don't travel dimensions, just like imaginary friends don't turn out to be real, wolves don't turn into women, and people don't return to life after dying of poison.
To be honest, everything has taken a turn for the surreal. The genjutsu theory is paper thin, but it's all he's got, and he's doubting everything -enviroment, strangers, Tenzo, himself- as it is.
"Nowhere is another world?" Tenzo asks haltingly, not looking at the speaker, but the woman who Kakashi was fairly certain died as a teenager about an hour ago.
"No, but also yes," Lien responds.
"Lien," grits out the woman at the stove, sounding terribly aggravated. "I can't speak for Franky, but I know that if you say any more wise old master, pseudo-riddle bullshit, I will lose it."
"Theresa, I'm not sure Lien is capable of doing that," The newly-dubbed Franky says. "Besides, she's got the most experience with this out of all of us. Let her talk."
Theresa huffs, obviously upset, her footsteps heavier as she clicks off the stove and stomps over to the table with at least a dozen eggs spread over some sort of flatbread, smothered in a dangerous looking red sauce. Miniaturized pitchforks of incredible craftsmanship are handed out beside the meal, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. He is baffled by the instrument until Franky uses it like a knife and spoon combined.
Somehow, everything becomes even more surreal.
"Lien thinks that nothing is real, and that she can define reality by making more people believe in a subject," Theresa (still a terrible, terrible name) grouses as she seats herself. "I'm looking for something more concrete that that."
"I believe that reality is relative to individual experience, and as such, the more people agree on something existing, the more credit there is behind it's possible existence, but it's still entirely relative to the individual, and ultimately unprovable" Lien corrects gently.
"Individual opinion doesn't have much standing in the scope of things," Kakashi says before he stop himself, because this is philosophy, and it's useless. It's unprofessional, and not what an Anbu should do, but he thinks he's holding together much better than some would in the same circumstance.
"You say that, but Lien's individual opinion used to be that she was dreaming of your world, and it didn't actually exist. Yet here you are, in our world, because somehow her perspective changed and she broke the laws of reality to bring you here," Franky rebuttals.
"I changed my mind. This isn't a genjutsu. This is the Yamanaka mind-shatter technique, trying to make us go mad," he tells them all coolly. That's… that's about the closest answer he can get to right now.
"Yamanaka?" Lien asks. "Like Ino?"
Two sets of eyes slide to the tranquil figure, suspicious and wary. Interest in a young clan heiresses from a stranger is never anything good. Ever.
"How do you know that name?" Kakashi demands.
Lien blinks, unbothered by his looming presence. She turns to his kohai, curious.
"Ino and I shared pieces of our consciousness. You were there, right? In the cell, when we were tied up?"
Tenzo obviously has no idea what she's talking about, his body both stiff and relaxed. His confusion seems to have reached new heights, which only seems to trigger some vague, strange understanding in the girl.
"It hasn't happened yet, then," she says casually. "But safe to say, when Ino comes in wreathed in a cloak of pure energy, I am inside her mind with her. That's where everything starts changing, and reality breaks apart."
With that ominous statement, the woman turns back to her breakfast, as if she didn't just deliver a possible threat. The rest of the gathered stare on as she uses her mini-pitchfork to spear a piece of her flatbread and egg.
"No. No, this is absolutely what I didn't want. No more nonsense babble, I need facts. I love you Lien, but I'm not letting this dimension jumping do to me what it did to you," Theresa states, her chair causing an awful groaning noise as she scoots it back from the table. She stands stiffly, and walks away from them all.
Kakashi watches Franky frown, following the other woman with her eyes. He can see the understanding there, but also the disapproval. She turns her gaze to the smaller woman at the table, who is still eating placidly.
"I get it," Lien soothes without looking up. "I destabilized Theresa's previous worldview, and she's lashing out."
"That's..."
"She thinks my cognitive state is less than desirable. Everyone at this table does to some degree. I accept that."
"Maybe if you could explain clearly, that might change," Kakashi half lies. The women don't seem particularly aggressive, and behave somewhat amicably, but he wants to be as far from them as possible. Even if he had a solid foundation, he wouldn't want to mess with this, and he definitely wouldn't 'desire her cognitive state.'
Lien looks up, and peers around the table calmly. She chews the food in her mouth, considering something in her head carefully.
"Ask Ino, when the time comes. Skuld would know how."
Kakashi stare onwards unblinkingly, beginning to empathize with Theresa. He's known this woman less than a collective four hours, and he's already tired of listening to her speak.
An:I didn't mean for Kakashi to show. He's just an asshole scene-hog who keeps coming up. Nor do I know any of the japanese alphabets, so if that's fucked up, my bad. You can send me a correction, and I'll put it up. I am giving you the power to send me many dick jokes in japanese. Also, sorry for the strange language jumping. As of the second line break, they are speaking the same language, which is like japanese, but not.