A/N: Goodness. Sorry about the lack of updating. I had my university entrance exams, got a scholarship to said university, found out my dad once nearly killed me when I was a kid, was generally lazy, and am busily pulling myself out of some stupid things.
Not that I'm making excuses or anything ;)
Influences include: The Doors, Asian religious traditions and stuff like that, Ruth Padel, Richard Loseby, Gregory David Roberts, Discovery Channel and Interpol :)
Yay for plot! :D at the very least ;) And it's nice and long for having taken so long. There are probably a few spellers typos but I can't be fecked running through this right now (and I have no faith in spelling checkers)
Have taken liberties and invented a random country for this chapter. Checked a map and there are heaps of unmarked blobs that can be whatever the hell I want until canon says otherwise :p Less forgivable is the messing with traditional martial arts, but whatever.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, nor do I want to. This story is for pure, unconcentrated escapism.
Vanishing Act
Chapter 7
Gare de Lyon
(non-perishable)
Let's go survive.
She looks lovely in this light, he thinks, and, self-consciously runs his fingers through his hair.
Tenten of the golden eyes with the curly smile. It's something he's only recently been able to recognise – that when Tenten is genuinely, bona fide happy, her mouth curls up, revealing dimples in her cheeks and wrinkles around her eyes. Just so is she smiling, now, going into the village with him, and not to train, or be shinobi, but to… just eat.
The something that stirs and flickers in his chest and at the edges of his consciousness when she is there makes him feel good, and as they walk over a rise in the ground towards the village, when she takes his hand over the broken ground, the feeling intensifies, and he wonders at how something as mundane as getting food can be so enjoyable.
The mud-packed walls of the village are splashed blue, and he recalls a story of blue being a colour used to ward off evil, and he wonders, smirking, just what these people have to fear. In the middle of nowhere, on the edge of the desert, what do they need protecting from?
"Happy, huh?" she says, and he realises she's been watching him.
"Well," he says stoically. "I suppose you're just infectious." Good-naturedly she punches his shoulder and he punches hers back, and then his stomach growls horribly loudly.
"Jeez Neji. Can you be a little louder? I don't think they quite heard you in the Land of Waves…"
"Very funny," he says dryly, hoping to god he doesn't blush, and she grins and says "Why don't you find us something to drink and I'll get food, yeah? Meet back here? Say, in 15 minutes?"
Nodding, he watches her melt away into the crowd, and when she is gone he turns and searches for a man selling sweet hot apple tea, and then he makes his way back to the street corner where they'd split up, and waits for her to return.
When the first stars begin to peek through the deep indigo sky, when he is the only one left on the street at all and the tea has long since gone cold, he makes his way back to camp.
She doesn't come back until dawn the next day, and he knows this because she crawls over to him in the tent and reaches forward to shake him awake.
"I'm awake," he says, eyes still closed, before she touches him and he feels her start back slightly, the gloom of his closed eyes alleviated to a redder colour as the space between them lets in the sun's rays.
Lee and Gai have already gone off to train, and they are the only two there and he opens his eyes, sits back so that they are facing each other, as she looks at him with guilt in her eyes, framed by the sun.
"About last night…"
"Don't worry about it." He says, light-hearted but cold. "I don't care." And the lie slides from his mouth as easily as warm honey.
And her hair is turning to that particular golden colour, and rosy, too, around her edges, the skin of her bare arms lit up, eyes glittering in a way he refuses to recognise.
"But I – "
"I don't want to hear, Tenten. What you do in your free-time really doesn't affect me. We're shinobi, right? And our lives and our selves are always separate."
The sun is rising in the desert and she has screwed him over. She nods, and he watches her eyes – still open – kind of close.
"Okay…" she whispers.
He pulls on his shirt and leaves her there before running into the desert until his lungs are aching and his bruised heart has no choice but to thrum in his body.
(salve)
He hadn't left her for long, but any point of time with man-eaters loose, is a bad time to leave a child alone, and when he returns with a mango, she is lying there, as still as stone, face down in her own blood.
He drops the fruit and rushes over to her. "No. God no. Don't do this to me. Please. No. Not her. Not her…" and he doesn't know whether he is speaking aloud or inside of himself, but he guesses in his head because when he gathers her up in his arms and says "Wake up Kayo. Wake up!" the smell of blood forces its way up his nostrils and he wants to be sick. Not because it's blood - because he is, after all, a shinobi, and first killed when he was 2 years older than she is now - but because it is hers, and she is meant to smell of leaf mould and sunlight, not… not…
He scrambles a few meters away from her and vomits up the sweet fruit he'd only eaten twenty minutes ago and he is 9 years old and trying-not-to-cry and he ran away before he ever learnt more than basic first aid and she is dying in his arms with her eyes all glazed over to the hazey colour of the sky in the polluted cities, and she has lost far, far too much blood, and all he can think to do is to… is to force the wounds to close.
He pulls her onto her side, gently, gently, and her clothes are in tatters, and when he feels a sob force its way out of his mouth, when he sees what has happened to her back and realises what would have happened, pieces together the bite marks and the craters in the earth, he realises that he has no choice but to try to save her. Because she is his soul. Because he is the one who left her out here when a tiger came calling, and she is all he has.
So he takes the earth from the ground at her feet, because he is quite sure that it will help staunch the flow of ferrous blood, and when it is hot in his hands, chakra laced and odd-feeling, he gently presses it onto the wounds in her back, and prays.
He falls asleep with his hands there, and when he wakes up 2 days later (or so she tells him) weaker than an overcooked noodle and she shows him her back, the wounds are already nearly closed.
Magic… he thinks, awed, and finds the fact that his chakra is a part of her to be the most incredible thing in the universe. Kayo-chan with chakra-shaped clay in her back. Marked out by the tigers but cleansed by the earth and his very own lifeforce.
Gloriously alive.
(deliverance)
Naruto does not strike the killing blow when he is betrayed, merely knocks his chunin instructor unconscious, and gives him a beating that would have been more savage had the boy not impeded his offence with the number of shadow clones he created to take down the older man.
Instead, in custody, Mizuki lingers in a dungeon, recovering from the beating that Ibiki's cronies have wreaked on his body, chained to a wall, feeling the blood drip down the back of his throat from somewhere inside of him that hasn't stopped in three days.
But even so, in the midst of his pain and helplessness, he finds a way out, an escape from this, the world he had wanted to leave forever. A bolt-hole where they cannot touch him.
Tenten.
She is his mantra, his bright spark, and he wonders if she will ever understand why he named her that.
For the sky.
He had been a refugee, during the Iwa-Konoha war, brought in from a people who lived as close as they could to the sky, in the mountains, where the air was thin and prayer flags fluttered on the breeze, in a place where you had no choice but to believe in something, for the wonder of the world spread out beneath your feet.
The sky was the most sacred, precious thing he could give her. The only thing he could give to the child who had stared up at him with the setting sun shining from her eyes.
Tenten, because he had loved her so much that he had named her for the thing he had treasured, most in the world. It was the one allowance Konohagakure no Sato had made him when he carried her back that day, (ten whole years ago…)
Kneeling, bound, in the dungeon (and his execution is a mercifully closed affair, due to the near-success of his treason, so that the greater public won't get any ideas), with loathsome Sarutobi staring at him beyond the glitter of the executioner's sword, Mizuki closes the eyes which are already nearly swollen shut from the black-ops beating.
"What do you fear, Mizuki?" says the Sandaime Hokage, but Mizuki isn't into playing these little psychological games, so instead, he thinks of the sky.
Tenten… he wants to say, wants to be able to see her face a final time, wishes to god that he had won that long-ago custody battle (but orphans belong to the state. No exceptions). Blue is the colour of heaven.
(And let me marvel at it all)
Not a heroic way out, by seppuku, though he wouldn't have chosen that path anyway. Instead, there are two porcelain-masked jonin standing above him, katanas at the ready.
But amber will save you in this world.
It is over instantaneously, and then his body is burned, ashes scattered to the four winds.
(slipping)
Although Tenten works, harder than any of the other kunoichi her age, harder than Neji (though not Lee, perhaps,) she still finds her days stretching out like they're made of glue sometimes, and so, because she has never cared for television, and knows (mostly) when to give in to the fatigue of her body, she reads at night.
And because Tenten is alone and there is no one to ask about books or genre or blurbs or tastes, she trips into the library at the Hokage Tower and it is there that she finds the scroll on Pencak Silat one day. It is written by the First, an account of the customs and cultures of other people in the Elemental Countries, during the time he spent on diplomatic trips to meet with the other Kage and Daimyo of the lands of the EC and the sentence that captures her imagination is at the very bottom of a paragraph concerning the Land of Shining Light, (an island kingdom in the Eastern Ocean), added on as an afterthought. And Tenten, thirteen years old, and strung between a natural born genius and a genius of hard work, stops. Reads it again.
The disciples of this martial art call upon the spirit of their tiger gods to endow them with power.
She is only thirteen, but she thinks she understands power. Not merely strength, (which she doesn't have in spades anyway) and not merely control. Energy, focused by intention. Not the razor sharp edge of her weapon nor it's shape or form. The way it has been forged, steel folded and refolded over and over to make sure it will never, ever break.
And so she does a bit of reasearch, and she tells the chunin librarian that her sensei has asked her to research Karambit for an upcoming mission (and he doesn't look past her curling brown lashes, her creamy skin and innocent plump cheeks) and she visits the blacksmith who usually tends to her weapons, and request a very specific kind of knife. During the day (with the technique that Gai provides for her, because even if she can't move as quickly as Neji and Lee she can jump higher and longer than both of them) she throws herself into training and hugs her growing prowess with the tiger-claw dagger close, admiring it as a secret to show the others one day, when she can wow them.
She doesn't think about the scars at first. It is the fact that she can bleed and not hurt which is astounding to her, proven one mission when she falls and breaks her wrist but continues to fight. It is power, she thinks as Neji gently holds her wrist in his hand, cool blue chakra prickling down into her skin, knitting bones back together as he remonstrates with her for letting herself do this. To continue, disregarding pain completely.
"I mean… what the hell were you thinking?" he demands, and she looks at him, shrugs, looks away again.
And it is mine.
It isn't that she is greedy, or gluttonous, because she isn't. Not for glory or wealth or fame, not for blood or skill or recognition, but… she's the only person she knows who has had time itself stolen off of her.
And having such control of her body, of the one thing that is hers, beyond any shadow of a doubt, makes it feel like she is gaining it back.
Giving the universe in general a hearty "fuck you" at the very least.
(veritas)
The truth is a shiny thing, and this is perhaps why people are so reluctant to look at it, in the light of day.
They are 12 years old, and the training grounds are cold and Tenten is feeling shinier than usual, and, heads together, she and Lee and Neji watch the way the the light shafts down on them through the leaves in splinters, the brightness of the sun rendered managable by the cool green leaves, and she reaches her hands up to brush the the golden beams and says "Truth?" to no one in particular.
"Aren't we meant to play with Dares as well Tenten? I do not understand!" says Lee, put out.
"Well, yes," she says, adolescent limbs heavy with exhaustion. "But I figured… do you really have enough energy left to be all daring right now?"
"Of course I do!" he shouts, the flames of youth flickering through his voice. "If I do not complete the dare then I – "
"Have to 'Truth'." Neji interjects, rolling onto his side. "This is a stupid game."
For a moment the silence is thick, but after a pause, Tenten sits up. "Okay then, Neji. I dare you to play."
"That's a stupid thing to say." Tenten watches the leaves eddying down from the autumn trees to wash away the bitter waspy sting of his current mood, and when she next speaks, her voice is serpentine hard. "But Neji, if you don't, then won't it be your fate to fail at absolutely everything forever and ever?"
"Don't be ridiculous." He says, but there is a barb in his voice and she is both angry-glad and distressed at having gotten under his skin. They are newly minted genin, and at the academy, he was always this… boy the other girls mooned over, who removed himself from any and all social situations, and she has kind of been dying to have a go at him for years, and now, when he's being such a twat (and Gai isn't there to see) she lets go.
"Well, logically," voice laced with affected confusion. "If you quit now, aren't you a quitter forever? Isn't that what you always say?"
"Don't try to get under my skin, it won't work," he says, and the condescension in his voice makes her sit up.
"Okay then, Hyuga-kun," she says, throwing as much disgust into the name – commonly spoken with tones of utter adoration back at the academy by the stupider girls – as she can. "I suppose I'd better tell Gai that you'd better go back to the academy, because even though you passed the test, you can't play a game of truth or dare, and this means that, well, you're going to fail at li – "
"You're just a stupid little girl," He spits out. "You have NO IDEA what my life is like. How dare you judge me."
After his outburst, breathing heavily, while the silence continues to fall down from the golden afternoon trees, Neji registers that Tenten has gone, as silently and stealthily as any shinobi, and he turns to meet only Lee's accusatory eyes.
"We weren't even playing properly," he says, and Lee says nothing, stares at him.
All his life, people (teachers, his friends at the academy, strangers) have told him that his eyes, (opaque as milk, pearly as the delicate inside of a seashell) are disconcerting, but only for the way they look, not for what they hold. Lee's eyes are deep and dark and the most disconcerting thing he's ever been forced to meet.
Hours later, he realises that it was his own self reflected in those sloe black eyes.
It is late now, past midnight, but in a hidden village the streets are never quiet, however much they appear to be to the dozy civilian population. But Neji is a Hyuga, and with his Byakugan activated there is very little he can't see. And she is there, and he isn't surprised, and even though he has come here just for that girl in the moonlight, he is reluctant about doing this. Not because he doesn't want to apologise, but because he has no prior experience doing so.
And so he watches her, throwing flickers of steel so small and fast that were it not for his technique he wouldn't be able to follow them.
"I know you're there," she says after a while, stalking over to the target she's been aiming at to pull out a handful of knives, and Neji briefly imagines where on a person's body they would have struck, the way Gai has taught them to, and sees she is aiming for the nerve ends and pressure points that cause pain and paralysis and cripple even the strongest warriors. He moves out into the moonlight and there she is, only 12 years old and the same height as he is – both short at this stage, although if he is anything like his father (and people tell him so all the time) he will grow into a giant one day.
He isn't sure about her, though. Beyond the academy, he doesn't really know that much about Tenten at all… and can barely remember her there to begin with.
They stare at each other for a long time, and he isn't sure why there's so much tension in the night-time air, but it's there, filling up all the space between them so that he finds he just can't say the words he's been rehearsing in his head for so long.
So instead of apologising, he settles into his stance, his eyes flickering into the technique which is the one thing he treasures, and she pulls out her three kunai, and that night, they spar until the trees stand out against the sky again, and they know that dawn is close.
Exhausted, pumping with adrenaline, they lie down in the unevenly shaped crater that his almost-perfected technique has wrought on the training ground, as they did the afternoon that feels so terribly long ago, and into the dawning un-darkness, Tenten says, quietly, "Truth, Neji? I'm… sorry for what I said," her breathing ragged and heavy and reminding him of just how alive he is.
"I was being a jerk… truthfully," he replies, adding the last word on with a wry grin-grimace that she, in the dark, can't see. But he feels her reach out and take his hand in hers, and knows he is forgiven.
"I didn't mean it," she murmurs, and for some reason, the tightness in her voice matches the tightness in his chest. "You make me…" She falls silent, casting around for the right word, while his mind supplies random (insane) ones into her silence.
Angry? Happy? Sad?
…
Love?
She rolls her eyes, a grin playing at the edges of her mouth, and the sun is rising now, and he can see the expression without his clan technique. "Believe, I guess," says Tenten.
And for those words, Neji stops disappearing as soon as training and missions are over. And resolves to know her until the day he dies.
End Chapter…
Cheers for reading
Happy New Year