Chapter four: Calamity
Life is full of patterns.
She was born as two, they watched and watched and learned, they survived and then they died. Two became one, mend the crack with metal. She was born as one, she watched and watched and learned, she survived again and then somewhere down the line something died. Mend the crack with copper, stronger than gold, stronger than silver, and red like blood spilled.
She was born as three.
She was born as three, or perhaps something like it, and so she does as she always has done and watches and watches and learns once again. It wasn't different, wasn't a change from what she had always done. She ate with the boy without the eyes of his clan, who wore goggles to keep them protected in a desperate hope that maybe one-day, someday, sometime, life would pity him. She trailed after him heel to toe, toe to heel, listening to him speak of dreams and what she thinks life would be, should be. But, oh, since he was she and she was him she knew he was bitter under his naivety, bitter-sweet. She knew how it tasted so strangely like poison on her tongue, how it corroded away the edges of her teeth and burn a hole in her stomach so the acid and bile may mix; putrid.
She trained with the other, the boy-not-boy who claimed himself akin to ice, to something beyond. He was fast and smart, with wit and would-be-wolves snapping with too sharp teeth. She sat in silence beside him during storms, a canopy stretched above to shield them from the summer rains as she listened to his breathing between the tapping of droplets. Again, she was him like she was the other and so she knew how he hid behind his rules and regulations, clinging to what could only be right. If it wasn't right then what was the point? Sometimes she remembered phantom laughter, of eyes squinted happily, of a stitch in her side as she doubled over and the pleasant burn, but it left as quickly as it came.
They were three, not the same yet they were all part of the same whole, me, myself and I.
She stops thinking of the irony.
The last of their group, their sensei, was a man of infallibility. She was not him but knew as her gaze trailed after him that he could easily stand next to the man with dusted skin and watching eyes. He tapped her feet and arms, correcting stances and stopping failed Jutsu with a smile so bright it was like the sun that danced in the blue of his eyes. He hurt her every time he turned that smile on her, she knew he knew and he knew she knew. A memory of a blood-stained smile twisted up toward dark eyes glittering in pain, and another of eyes widened in amazement and shy smiles. Of trust and of the time two became one.
She felt that he was rather cruel.
"Do you have a dream?" She was there again, making Kintsugi in the dark under the Hashirama trees.
"What do you mean Sensei?" He rested beside her watching as they both remained seated in traditional Seiza. It was silent for some time, the quiet scrap of sandpaper and the chirps of crickets in the distance their symphony.
"What is your dream Kyoko?" He asked again without an explanation, up at the stars. Kyoko never had a dream, Roku never had a dream, she didn't know she needed one. He knew anyway, she didn't understand why he was even bothering to ask.
"Please," she dismissed him, "there is no real room for dreams here are there?"
"I have a dream, I actually have a few of them!" He laughed, "I don't think any of them are really unreasonable. I want to see my village prosper, I want to make a life with my cute girlfriend and," he paused again turning to look down at her, "I want to see my students live a long, happy, life."
A frog croaked loudly somewhere nearby.
"What does it mean to be happy?" She didn't mean to ask that, she didn't mean to say that. She watched his eyes narrow before she was released from his gaze as he cast them back up to the sky.
"It's different for everyone, and kind of hard to describe."
The silence between them was tense and heavy.
"I guess it's kind of bubbly," He continued after a moment, "that isn't really right either. You feel lighter when you are happy, truly happy."
"Are you happy Sensei?"
"I don't know but I would like to think I am."
They were a heavy assault team in the making, an Uchiha, the son of the White Fang, and a civilian not so civilian born. They learned formation after formation, a through z, one through twenty, always cover each other's backs you only have each other. It was a time of war and they were a genin team being trained to fight and kill and die.
Ninja lived short lives and fought even shorter battles, nothing but a burst of concentrated motion, keep the other side on the defense in any way you can. Severed heads and corpse piles, psychological ware-fare with wide eyed children and blank faces. With the whispers of death in the wind and a sickeningly sweet smile, cut off food and supplies, poison the rivers, salt the crops, flank from around the north while you attack in the west. Fight dirty, cover yourself in the blood of the enemy and walk into the fires of hell with your head high. They do not care how you win as long as you win.
It was their first time out of the village as a team. They edged around the perimeter of the battle field, forcing themselves to keep pace with their sensei, they were just to deliver supplies, they were noncombatants this time. They were careful, Minato was careful, but sometimes you just cannot prevent the inevitable.
It was war and they were fighting in it.
She had to admit it was rather impressive, she didn't even sense the enemy approach and she was the best out of the roots to taste blood in the air. On that mission all three little soldiers killed, one cried, one smiled and another turned away. It started with a kunai, it ended with a kunai.
As was their life.
There was nothing particularly interesting about the mission, the complications aside they completed it without a hitch and returned to the village within their allotted time, clothing dotted with blood, first blood for one. It was, however, apparent that their sensei didn't hold the same sentiment, He certainly was not pleased with a prominent frown pulling at his face as he regarded them.
They had done everything they possibly could have done. Minato watched, Obito and Kakashi argued and bickered. One screamed himself hoarse the other walked away. They had been gathered standing in the clearing they used for training, a minor debriefing the chill of winter clouding the air around them. Konaha's trees were another thing she didn't understand. They never turned color, evergreens, but they held none of the trademark evergreen leaves.
And now they were alone.
Obito was breaking his hands on a training-post and the leaves refused to change with the seasons. She should say something.
"There is a turtle drowning in a well somewhere." Kyoko began, watching his body heave with each strike he made. "This metaphoric turtle is yelling in its little turtle voice 'Please someone, anyone, save me! I don't want to die." She pitched her voice higher, ignoring the break it caused as she held up a finger, "There is no one there to help the turtle."
He paused a moment in confusion, stopping long enough to glance over his shoulder. "Why not?"
"Because he needs to save himself." She tugged on a leaf, yanking it from a branch and twisting it between her fingers by the stem absently.
"If someone is calling out for help, why wouldn't someone help them?"
"What does a human care for the single life of a Turtle."
"It's cruel!" He snapped his red eyes, not red enough, gleaming with unshed tears behind tinted goggles, "Besides what is the point of all of this? It's stupid."
"Ah," She blinked absently at him, unimpressed as she closed one eye and used her perspective to cover his face with the leaf, "What is the point of crying over the turtle? It got itself in the situation it was in and saving it would only endanger you."
She knew what it meant and so should he.
"You're just like Kakashi! People aren't like this, people don't just stand by and let things die." He shouted, turning to walk away from her.
She turned her hand and crushed the leaf.
"Don't they?" She asked as she lifted her gaze to count the clouds there, feeling the chill creep in around her without his chakra near, "Who ever said we were ever human anyway."
The Turtle will die, it is inevitable. He will drown in the well exhausted beyond belief and no one will know.
No one will know but Obito, the never changing and ever so bitter Hashirama leaf.
"I wish I didn't understand you." The whisper was hot on her cheek like her breath was hot on the others. They knew what she really meant, they knew what was unsaid like they knew everything about each other. It wasn't hard, it wasn't strange, it was damning and brilliant and home.
"Wishing gets us nothing." She sighed rolling to lay on her back and away from the stare she could feel even in the dark. "We are stuck here, that is that and now we just live."
"Is that living?"
"We live a life, one of suffering yes but that does not make it any less ours."
"I don't want it."
"And yet here we are."
"I want someone to remember our name." she paused a moment reaching out to her sister to trace the face partially turned away from her, "what is our name?"
"Roku?"
"No, no, that sounds wrong, doesn't it?"
"It is what it is."
"It doesn't make it any less wrong."
"We are Roku now, you are Ku and I am Ro. That is all that matters, all that we have."
"People don't live like this, humans can't live like this."
"Who ever said we were human?"
It kept happening, over and over again they sharpened their blades on the bones of those who stood before them, blood pooling at their feet equally that of their enemies and that of their own. Obito cried and cried, kicked and screamed and she watched as he died a little every day with each voice he silences. Kakashi stood unflinching, unmoving, almost perfect and yet nowhere near perfection for she saw each misstep he made. And Kyoko? She lived and lived and all at once never truly did. After all, she had only ever known silence, so in it she stayed.
Someone was screaming in her silence, it was deafening.
She could feel herself unraveling.
And so, she stood toe to toe with a clone, her eyes wide and unblinking, their eyes wide and unblinking.
"Have you gotten everything you needed, Kyoko?"
"Of course, you are a very good teacher."
"You and I both know what I mean."
A kunai and a cloud of smoke, she could feel her self-flaking, breaking.
Batrachotoxin, Ricin, and Strychnine.
The ink on her tongue burned.
It was always cold under Konoha's trees, after all under the earth the sun could never touch them, the chill seeped through the dirt and into the skin of those who dwelled here. She never got used to the cold. It was manageable, before everything fell apart, and now she often felt like she was frozen still in the face of it all. An ice sculpture made by a careless artist, one day she too would melt away.
"Have you gained his trust?" and that was all artists were, careless and mindless with no regard to who they hurt, sacrificing everything for their art.
"I am unsure." All of the military heads here were artists in their own right, "he has confided to me on occasion, however, I believe he is aware of my hand in the death of the girl."
The Hokage was a builder, walls and soldiers and civilians spiraling outward with the sort of hopeless abandoned you find in the half-starved and mad. He turned to his own artists as a means to protect what he built. The director of T&I sculpted minds making art with shattered edges, the Jonin commander took his men and set them up like shogi pieces full of molded bodies and domino pieces, and ANBU turned out painted faces, smiling masks full of bravado in the shadows. She had been watching and watching and watching for so long she failed to see the difference between those above her and the Kintsugi man before her, failed to see the point when they were all the same.
"He may very well suspect you of something," He paused flipping absently through the folder in his hands "however, it is apparent that you have done well in hiding any evidence that may lead him to me." The folder snapped closed, the white of his bandages stark against his skin, a single blank eye staring, "I expect to see a drastic improvement in the amount of information I receive."
"Of course, Danzō-sama."
The trainers within Root were really no different either, each one was a tool used to create a manufactured masterpiece from an assembly line made by machines. Water and flour evenly mixed, flat eyes and masks for faces.
"Finish Agent Shi's infiltration training."
It was the first time she was used as a trainer, it wasn't a surprise, it was bound to happen eventually. They were small, and they were alone. They stared, they dare not breathe, her eyes wide as the two children stood before her shoulder to shoulder, hands intertwined, their broken bodies held together with bandages and haphazard stitching.
And so, she taught them how to pretend. In the same voice she remembered, with the same words said to her, she taught and taught and the longer she spoke the less it hurt.
"Roku," The shorter Shi called out to her, "where is the other?"
"Specify." She carefully folded their kimono, meant for when they had to infiltrate the upper-class.
"The other Roku." He sighed as if she should have already known.
She felt her lacquer shift, weakening.
"There was never another Roku."
"Oh."
There had only ever been Ro and Ku anyways.
The winds from beyond the northeast border dragged blunted nails along their skin as they leaped through the thinning trees. They were to offer relief for a watch team, it was an easy mission, everything always went wrong on the easy missions. And predictably it seemed that the battle field had moved without Konoha being informed and instead of a semi-calm forest they were traipsing through a war zone.
Minato lifted a fist for us to halt and quickly signed for us to return to the edge of the battle field. We turned, a group of our shinobi intertwining Justus to release a water dragon strong enough to raze a mountain when a shadow passed over us.
Kyoko wasn't sure what happened in between the shadow and her face grinding into the grass, she could see the feet of the shinobi from before, it was like slow motion as she watched a boulder crush them with a deep bass-like boom that rattled her teeth, left her disoriented and deaf.
The new mountain gave birth to a river of blood, someone was screaming, she couldn't stop staring.
It wasn't the worst death she had ever seen, wasn't the best either, but still, she stared and stared and when another shadow passed over them, eclipsing the sun for a moment, she continued to stare. She stayed like that, unmoving until the breath was knocked out of her lungs and all she could see was the green of a Jonin vest. She remained still, unblinking, barely breathing, like a corpse. Minato placed her down, his mouth was moving, she tried to say something and gave up rather quickly when nothing came.
He tried to sign something to her, she still didn't understand.
It was all rather like snapshots really, her sensei's yellow hair, the tree branches below them, a line of ants, a bird, and then everything snapped back to her. She screamed and screamed and screamed, listening to her own voice and the surprised shouts of others near her. She could hear her teacher say something and then everything was dark.
"What do you think the best way to die is?" Ku asked her fingers intertwining with her sister's as the other continued her surveillance.
"Probably in our sleep," Ro responded absentmindedly, "decapitation or old age."
"That's boring, isn't it?" Ku sighed, throwing her head back to shift her balance and sit precariously on the tree branch.
"It is practical."
"I think it would be fun to go out with style." She tilted her head as she studied her sister, "Like a paper bomb or something."
"You want us to be pink mist?"
"I don't want to be anything, I just think it would be more interesting."
"Death isn't supposed to be interesting."
"Says who?"
She had been in shock, the chakra backlash of the boulder hitting the ground and the fact her face was against said ground was enough to give her the equivalent of a chakra concussion. They were now in a clearing while Minato attempted to identify how far the new war zone covered. They had all just managed to change their clothing, the old sets soaked through with blood making them far too easy to track.
"Rule #25: A shinobi must never show their tears." Kakashi snapped at a sniffling Obito as the boy attempted to wrap the edges of his pants down.
"Shut up! Just do us all a favor and shut up about your stupid shinobi rules Kakashi!" Obito yelled, throwing the roll of bandages he had in his hand to the ground, "Even Kyoko was affected! We just watched twenty of our comrades die to a single attack, I have every right to be upset!"
He was searing, his chakra boiling under his skin scorching her still raw senses.
"This," Kakashi waved his hand in-between them, "This is why you will never be Hokage," he continued with a growl as his own chakra rose instinctually to meet Obito's, the static buzz right before a lightning strike, "You are so emotionally caught up in your own stupid ideas and expectations you can't complete a mission. We are Shinobi, we kill the enemy, we do not to feel sad and cry about someone who was too slow to dodge."
A crack rang out as Kakashi's face whipped to the side, Obito's knuckles were bleeding.
Mend it with gold, a good conductor.
She wished she could say something, that she could make them see reason, whatever that was. Everything was still for a moment, shock and awe, then there was an explosion of movement, the blade of Kakashi's sword flashing as he made a wild swipe at Obito only to be blocked by their teacher.
"I think," He sounded tired and old, so very wary, "that is enough from both of you. We are on a mission, argue when we are home." They stared and stared and then Kakashi vanished in a puff of smoke. Minato followed like he always does.
They were alone like they always tended to be.
"Kyoko," Obito called out suddenly as he stared down at his hands, "are you afraid?"
"Of what?" She could feel her skin crawling, she remembered how this went once, she knew, she knew.
"Are you afraid of dying?" He asked and she could almost taste her disappointment, her tongue running over the backs of her teeth as she remembered the quiet voice of another.
You know how all of this will end.
"No."
"What, why not?"
"It is the only thing we know for sure, isn't it?" She doesn't really know when Roku became Kyoko, or was it that Kyoko became Roku? She wasn't sure, she wasn't sure where the edges of the mask were or if it was Roku that was the mask now but she knew one of them died at some point.
Don't be coy
"We have no idea what will happen when we die, it literally is one of the biggest mysteries."
"That is irrelevant, what happens after death is simply semantics. What matters is that we all will die one day, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a month, or maybe it will be years from now." She sighed watching his brow pinched in confusion, "You are born, you live, then you die. Every living thing adheres to it, as shinobi we witness it more often than not."
"I don't want to die."
"Is that what your little temper tantrum was about?" she asked as she cleared the distance between them, "Silly, silly Obito, as long as I live I will do what I can to make sure you don't die." She reached forward to force his cheeks upward into a smile, "Problem solved."
His eyes were wide and searching as tears began to fill them once again and the smile she imposed onto him no longer was forced. He laughed as he darted forward crushing her in a tight hug that lifted her off the ground, "As long as I live I will not let you die either Kyoko!"
"And Kakashi, we are a team and he is ours to protect." She huffed against his shoulder, her eyes closing involuntarily.
"Oh fine, and Kakashi."
"It's a promise then."
"You are the one that gets to tell him."
Notes:
Oh look they are bonding, how cute.
If anything feels forced let me know and I will see if I can smooth it over, I've read this like ten times trying to make sure I didn't screw up and everything is right. If you see anything wrong, let me know so I can beat myself up about it. The poll is still up if any of you are interested.
Did you know that there is a Japanese superstition that the number, nine ku (九/く), is unlucky? It is primarily because it sounds similar to the word for pain and suffering, ku (苦/く). It is the same for the number four, shi (四/し), since it closely resembles the word for death, shi (死/し). Also a fun fact, I write these chapters separately from each other on my computer and name each document "sobbing in tandem" with their chapter number.