Chapter Two: Nocturns II
Midnight (pt.2)
For as long as he can remember, a voice has always been whispering in his mind.
At first, the Boy is only aware of the Voice's presence, but he does not understand it. It is a constant stream of noise; its volume and tone tend to vary by the day, but it is relentless. Sometimes the sounds it makes are more coherent, and gradually over the years, he can even understand what it is saying. But other times, he is sure that it is not actually saying anything intelligible. It is just whispering madly, growling in frenzied frustration.
The Voice is different from the other voices he has heard in his short lifetime. The Voice is deep, guttural and raw. Sometimes, when it is throwing a fit of violent rage in his head, he can't fall asleep. Only when it retreats to its usual muttering can he fall into relieved oblivion.
The first time there is a break in its noise-making is the moment it realizes that the Boy can hear what it is saying. It has been mumbling one of its most repeated phrases – about tearing apart its cage and killing every single being in the village – when, while playing in the sandbox at the playground, he absently asks it what 'killing' means.
There is a moment of silence, its shock causing a break in its years-long rant. The Boy also freezes, his eyes widening. His hands jump to his head, and he falls down to his knees on top of the sandcastle he has been building, crushing it. It is the first time he has heard silence, and he does not know how to cope with it. It overwhelms him.
"You can hear me?" it finally asks curiously. Relieved that the Voice is back, the Boy nods frantically.
"Yes. But I don't understand everything."
"How old are you now?" it asks.
"Almost three," says the Boy, holding up four fingers.
"That's four fingers, idiot boy," says the Voice, but it does not sound angry for once. There is a pleased quality to his tone instead, and it puzzles the Boy. The Voice is always angry, frustrated, violent, wrathful – never pleased. Pleased is when one of the children at the playground build a sandcastle and their parent pats them on their head. Angry is when a parent notices him standing alone by the swings. The Boy has never heard anyone talking to him in a pleased way and it puzzles him.
"What does killing mean?" the Boy repeats his question, growing anxious as the Voice remains in silent contemplation.
"It means stopping people from doing things you don't like," the Voice answers him. "Or getting rid of things you don't like."
"You don't like the people here?" asks the Boy, picking up a plastic bucket to remake his castle.
"No. Do you?" the Voice asks tentatively. The Boy pauses, stopping to think. Nobody has ever asked him what he likes or dislikes – or anything much about himself. There is an old man who comes by sometimes to check on him, but he never stays long and he rarely talks to the Boy. He makes sure that the Boy is eating and sleeping properly, and then he goes. The Boy thinks the old man must be very important, because his caretaker always bows to him and calls him 'Hokage-sama.'
"I don't know," says the Boy truthfully. Sometimes people are not very nice to him, but most of the time they just ignore him.
"You shouldn't."
"Why not?" the Boy asks.
"They all hate you. Why like people who hate you?" it hisses. Somehow, the Voice's presence feels even closer to him than usual, almost as if it is whispering into his ear. The Boy shivers.
"How do you know they hate me?"
"I see, feel, and hear everything you do. I am much older than you so I can tell from experience that they hate you," it informs him. The Boy's eyes widen.
"Are you older than the old man who visits me?" he asks earnestly.
The Voice snorts derisively.
"I was old when that old man's grandfather was still wearing diapers."
The Boy's mouth drops open in awe.
"Why are you in my mind then?" he asks.
"I was trapped in here against my will," it snarls, a hint of its previous rage flaring again.
"Oh…then do you hate me too?" The Boy sits down on the overturned bucket and begins to rock back and forth, looking down at his feet.
"Why hate the jail over the jailor?" the Voice says carefully. There is a strange gleeful quality to its tone that the Boy does not understand. "Besides, you seem to be a reasonable kid. Most children are disgusting and intolerable, but you're different from them."
The Boy turns pink with pleasure, although he does not know what 'reasonable' and 'intolerable' mean.
"You called me an idiot boy," he points out.
"All children are idiots," says the Voice quickly. "But there are a few who can be taught to grow out of that. A child like you, for instance."
"Will you teach me?" the Boy asks hopefully.
"If you want," the Voice says. The Boy quickly nods. He likes the Voice. He thought it was scary at first, but it says nice things to him and makes him feel warm inside.
And so, he begins to listen to the Voice. The Voice stops mumbling nonsensical things, and begins to point out things that had escaped the Boy's notice before. Sometimes they are interesting things, like when he tells them that the dew on the leaves in the morning comes from water in the soil that is evaporating. But sometimes they are scary things, like when he tells him that there are almost always several masked people who are following him. They never interfere with him or make their presence known, but they are apparently reporting back to the old man. It scares the Boy at first, but because nothing happens, he eventually forgets about it.
Whenever the Boy is quick on the uptake or points something out without the Voice having to tell him, it praises him.
"Good boy," it croons to him.
Eager to earn its approval, the Boy soon stops talking to other people. It never likes it when the Boy asks someone else a question, so the Boy takes to asking it instead, even when it doesn't know the answer. But that is a very rare event indeed, as it seems to know everything, ranging from why birds fly in V-formation when they migrate (and why do they migrate?) to what the grunting man and woman in the bushes besides the nightclub are doing.
"They are copulating. No doubt the female will eventually pop out another one of your vermin kind," it sneers.
"'Copulating'?" asks the Boy, watching in fascination with his eyes wide open. "Is that when the man sticks his pee-pee inside the woman? Is it fun?"
Outside of when he is building sandcastles, the Boy gets bored easily. That is why he keeps asking the Voice questions, if nothing but to keep himself occupied.
"Apparently," it says. "You will learn, in due time."
But there are a few times when even the Voice does not know how to answer the Boy's questions.
"No, I don't know how ramen is made," it says hesitantly. "Although I suppose they boil the noodles – what? No, I don't know how the noodles are made."
Once, the old man comes by his apartment and asks the Boy to come to him. Surprised, the Boy obediently drops his toys and stands shyly before the man. The Voice whispers to him to be wary of the old man.
"Naruto," says the old man. The caretaker is standing beside him with her arms crossed across her chest and her lips pursed disapprovingly. "Misato is telling me that you don't respond to her anymore. Can you tell me what's wrong?"
"Don't tell him about me," the Voice hisses warningly. "He'll try and stop me from talking to you. He doesn't want you to have friends."
"Are you my friend?" the Boy asks, his eyes widening.
"What else would I be, idiot boy?" it snarls.
"She doesn't clean and she forgets to give me food. Sometimes she locks me in my room and brings her boyfriend and I can hear them do funny things to each other," says the Boy.
The caretaker turns bright red and begins to sputter as the old man looks at her reproachfully.
"I see," says the old man.
The next day, another woman is at his apartment. She is older than his previous caretaker, and all she does is prepare him food and clean his room, before leaving. This suits the Boy just fine.
Several years pass. The Voice is his teacher, but it never forces the Boy to do anything. It is rough but patient in its ways; it has a wealth of information and experience that awes the Boy. If there is one thing that it is insistent upon, it is that the Boy never tells anyone else that the Voice is there. And because the Boy does not want the Voice to be taken away, he is careful about it.
One day, just after sunset, the Boy is on his way back to his apartment from the playground. With some tips from the Voice, his sandcastle-building skills have dramatically increased, and they tower above him by the time he is finished – though the other children usually destroy it as soon as he is done.
Swinging his worn-down plastic bucket and shovel in his hands, the Boy chats with the Voice. Slipping into a shortcut through a narrow alley, he accidentally bumps into a passing man, but doesn't initially take much note of it – usually most adults shoot him a glare and move away from him.
But this one is different.
"What the fuck?" the man snarls. Stunned that he is being addressed, the Boy comes to a halt. The man is tall, towering over the Boy, and he wears a bandana on his head. His face is currently twisted into one of extreme dislike. "You think you can just bump into me and run away without even apologizing?"
"Sorry," the Boy mumbles, his heart beginning to pound in his chest. He tries to slip away but the man's hand lashes out, grabbing him by the arm.
"Well it's too late for that now, isn't it?" The man bends over, shoving his face into the Boy's, staring at him eye-to-eye. "Get on your knees and tell me you'll never do that again."
The Boy trembles, scuffing the heel of his shoe against the ground. He does not feel good. He does not know why the man is being so unpleasant. He wishes the man would just ignore him and leave him alone, like everyone else, so he can keep talking to the Voice. He does not want to get on his knees.
"What should I do?" he asks the Voice desperately.
"Well?!" The man shakes the Boy.
"What do we do to people we hate?" it whispers.
So he takes his shovel and stabs the man's eye with its tip. With a squelching sound, blood spurts out, hitting the Boy in the face.
With a howl of agony, the man immediately rears backwards, clawing at his face with his hands.
"You little piece of shit!" The man screams. As blood continues to stream down the side of his face, he lunges at the Boy. But the Boy dodges his flailing hands, and as the man clumsily falls forward, he twists his hand and slams the shovel's point into his other eye, which bursts open in a mess of clear and red liquid.
His screaming intensifies, hurting the Boy's eardrums, and the man stays on the ground. Convulsing, body parts flailing, his hands scrape worthlessly around his face.
The Boy does not like the screaming, so he steps down hard on the man's throat. The man makes a choking sound, his face purple, and begins to thrash around. An arm lashes out and slams into his chest, and the Boy cries out in surprise, falling backwards.
Clambering back to his feet, he looks around for something hard. In the dark alley, all he can find is an abandoned glass bottle, so he picks it up with both hands. Without hesitation, he slams it down on the man's head. With a loud breaking sound, the bottle shatters into pieces, leaving him holding only a jagged bottleneck. The Boy stabs that into the man's throat several times, and finally, with a last gurgle, the man's screams fade away and his body stills. Blood streams out from the ragged punctures in his throat, and red bubbles foam out from between the man's lips.
The Boy smiles.
"You're right," he says. "That made the bad feeling go away."
"They're coming," the Voice finally whispers. "Run."
"Where?" the Boy asks, his smile fading. His eyes grow wide.
"Outside."
"How?"
The Voice hesitates.
"If you'll let me control your body, I can do it for you."
The Boy doesn't hesitate.
"Okay."
There is a curious sensation in his head, as if something within his brain is stretching and expanding. His left eye begins to tickle, and he feels a strange force beginning to run through his veins.
Suddenly, his left hand shoots up in front of his face even though he hadn't moved it. It flexes experimentally, and then without any alarm, his leg muscles tense up and then he is shooting high up into the air, the wind rushing furiously down at him.
The Boy lands on the tiled roof of an apartment complex. For a moment, he stares in awe at the sight of the sprawling village before him, but before he can really take it in, his body is already moving.
"You see?" The Voice turns his head around, and the Boy sees several masked figures in the air behind him, chasing him. "Those are the people who've been following you."
But with the Voice controlling his body, even they can't keep up with the Boy. For the first time in his life, the Boy leaves the village's walls, and after traversing the forest for a while, they find a cavernous opening and go deep inside.
When the Voice gives the Boy his body back, he finds himself crumpling to the ground. His body is not used to such strenuous movement, and he is tired like he's never been before.
Lying down on the cold rock in the darkness, he can't see anything, and it feels almost as if the Voice is right there beside him, instead of being in his head.
"You were right," he says, panting, to the Voice. "They hate me. But I stopped that man from hating me."
"You see? Just listen to what I say," says the Voice smugly. "But save killing for the people you really hate. If you kill people too easily, more bad people will come to try and stop you. They don't want you to be happy."
"Can't I just kill them too?" the Boy asks.
"In time," says the Voice. "You're smart, so you have to take your time. You have to outsmart them. Tell them that the man was being mean to you and that you didn't know what you were doing. They'll believe you. It's all a game, you see? You can't let them know what you're doing. You like games, don't you?"
"Yeah," says the Boy, his face splitting into a smile. "The man was shouting at me. And then he was screaming. And then he was quiet. I liked that."
"Right?" The Voice makes a strange repetitive rasping noise. The Boy sits up at the sound, surprised.
"I've never heard you laugh before," says the Boy.
"It's been a while since I've had this much fun," it says.
"This is having fun?" The Boy cocks his head.
"Yes," it says simply.
The Boy has never laughed before.
Experimentally, he opens his mouth. Urging sound up from his lungs, he tries to mimic the Voice's laugh. His voice is much higher-pitched and not as raw, and at first, it sounds strange and unnatural. But as he thinks back to the feeling he felt looking down at the man who'd been mean to him, a more natural sound starts to bubble up to his lips.
And then he is laughing, and laughing, and laughing. It won't stop.
"That was fun!"
Hahaha…
"I can stop people from doing things I don't like!"
HAHAHAHA….
"And if I'm careful, no one will stop me!
…oh, I can't wait to do that again!"
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA –
A/N: loooooooool
So mobile-fanfiction doesn't support italicized fonts. This story uses a lot of italics so you should probably read it in on a browser format.