Chapter six: Familiarity
There is very little Kyoko has and even less that she can claim.
It's easier to exist outside your own actions, she wished she had the forethought to begin the separation early like she knows so many others did. Existence in and of itself was questionable and in it they all survived differently, they found their own niches with their own caveats, made their deals and lived their lives. They signed their contract and didn't look back.
That's the problem, though. Kyoko always looked back.
Their fingers were intertwined, they were four or three or five and their fingers were intertwined. They couldn't tell who was who as they stared down at their hands, it didn't really matter, they were the same after all.
The air in-between them was cold.
From the beginning they were together, until they weren't. Born together, mirror images of one another, tiny hands held and eyes unfocused, then one died. Two fell apart, one prevailed, and then there was one. In the shadows one festered, in the shadows one fell, and in the shadows one was picked up and placed among two others. One became three, awkward and precarious they lived. The three listened and in the silence between them they heard a cry one remembered, the sort of a desperate scream you hear from the mouths of dying men. And then three became two and the two pieces stared blankly at one another, neither together nor apart.
The words unspoken were deafening, the words unspoken would never leave their mouths, their throats, they would be pushed and pushed and pushed until they no longer existed at all.
They didn't mind.
Sometimes, in Kintsugi, the break is a bit too large. Sometimes you can't fix the bowl with just a little bit of lacquer and some gold. Originally, they were all scattered pieces, each a different piece of pottery, each another lost. They fit together strangely, but still, they fit and the bowl became a cup or plate or something no one had ever seen before. And then they broke again.
They say that in those gaps and holes where the lacquer just isn't enough, light rushes in to fill you. Enlightenment, they call it. There is a hole now, in-between them, inside of them. Where is their enlightenment? What good is the optimism of imperfection when all they could feel was the absence of fire in their life.
Dukkha.
There was a monk once, maybe before, maybe after, maybe he didn't exist at all. He spoke of the three marks of existence; Anicca, Dukkha, Anattā. Anicca, impermanence, the constant change and movement of life. She didn't pretend to understand them, to comprehend the beliefs of others when a belief in anything was not something she had ever had.
Dukkha is suffering, it is everything that can and will go wrong, it is grief and pain and everything unpleasant in life.
Kyoko had been tired for such a long time.
"Promise me something?"
"What?" Ku asked, tilting her head back to look at her sister.
Ro placed the severed head of their target down onto the scroll and sealed it safely inside the matrix for identification later. "Never leave me alone."
"And if I do?" Ku rolled onto her stomach precariously, as to right the world, her gaze remaining steadily on her sister.
"I don't know."
"Yeah, okay." They both knew what Ro really meant, neither could really fathom a world without the other but knew it would eventually come.
"Do you promise?" Ro broke the silence, insisting on an answer.
"No."
They both knew why.
'Anattā' the monk probably said with a voice she thought she might have remembered once, 'there is, in us, no permanence. There is no underlying substance that you can call a soul.'
In its own way, it was comforting.
Shi dug his fingers into the sides of her neck, his eyes narrowed, face blank. She knew what she had been trying to accomplish with their spar, she knew and yet wasn't surprised to be faced with disappointment.
"Hate seems like a rather weak emotion, doesn't it?" Her words startled Shi, his hands jerking back as if her skin had burned him, she slid down the wall without his support.
"As compared to what, indifference?"
"And yet it is you who hesitates."
She was there again beneath the Hashirama trees, she was always there somehow, hiding away like a coward. It was never claimed that she was anything but one, a coward, a fake, a doll and really it didn't matter. There was so very little that mattered anymore, after all.
Water fell from the leaves above her, dripping and dropping onto the same spot on her head it had been for the last hour as she rested on her knees among the roots.
They say that the world is filled with music and that every person who has ever lived dances to that music. They say that there are some who are just a bit off, that these people can't hear the music. They can hear and see everyone dancing and talking, and they can mimic the moves at the right time, say all the right things but it isn't real. They can pretend, but they will never be able to hear the music and so when it stops they will be the only ones left dancing.
Roku never stopped dancing, Kyoko has always stopped a beat too late, and now there was just a confused little girl alone in a forest.
"Do you know why the cricket sings?"
Sometimes, most of the time, everyone else who could hear the music thought those who kept dancing were special. They thought that those who could hear the music were somehow wrong, that they were the ones missing something. Sometimes they see the others still dancing and think that they are amazing to be so off script, so strange and foreign, so wrong.
And those that think this praise the others for it, they call them geniuses, brilliant, but that doesn't change that these dancers are broken.
They were broken, they were a gaping hole that nothing can fill, a void larger than the universe, polite smiles and small talk in the market place where no one cares but everyone still goes through the motions anyways. They dance and they smile, the edges of their sight fading and their body moving on its own as they stare baffled from behind their own eyes.
"Crickets chirp."
"Oh, come on, I'm trying to be all metaphorical and mysterious like you always are."
They could use all the lacquer they wanted, gold and silver and copper. They could find all the people, the art, the blood, the war, and try to make themselves whole but they would always be empty. Empty and ugly and wrong. There was no changing it, there was simply nothing to fix, nothing to heal or put right because these people were born defective.
She was born defective.
And what is there to fix when this is all they have ever been?
"Fine."
"Wait, what? Really?"
"Why does a cricket sing, Obito?"
She wished she wasn't, that there was just something a little bit more she could do. God, she was trying so hard, and yet all she did was dig up more failure. All she did was make the hole a little deeper. So, standing at the bottom of her own desolation she danced.
"Oh!" His smile was blinding, "Hope! Every night the crickets gather and sing for the sun they know had fallen, they hope their songs will be enough to bring it back every morning."
They were silent, they had decided to get dinner that night after returning from training. It was something of a tradition for the two of them to eat out at least once a week together, each time at a different restaurant, missions permitting of course.
"What do you sing for Kyoko?"
She didn't particularly know how long she sat there, maybe it was all day, maybe a few days, maybe an hour or two. Her legs were numb, she couldn't convince her body to move. And she knew, she knew what role she now played and she couldn't find it in her to care. For if it were true, and she knew it was, her use would soon come to an end.
She had chosen something reminiscent of spicy curry, she always seemed to get something similar every place they went. Obito used to tease her about it, saying there was no point to be going to so many different places when she was just going to get the same thing.
"To drink tea."
Obito always got something different and this time he had chosen something their serve swore was from Wind country even if out of all the times she had been there she had never seen anything like that. He waved her off when she pointed it out.
"What? That doesn't make any sense."
"I sing to be able to sit down when I'm old and decrepit, with you and Kakashi and talk about simple things like the weather and the woman down the street that keeps overpricing her cabbage."
"That's oddly specific."
He pushed his barely eaten food away and started stealing from hers like he always did.
"Still," she sighed in defeat as he ate over half her bowl, "it is why I sing."
She didn't have her own marks of existence like the monk that she may or may not have met, and maybe that is why Kyoko struggled to justify herself. Not her actions, she understood those well enough, but the fact that she was living. That everything was real and not just someone else's fever dream.
It didn't really matter.
There is, after all, very little use for a broken bowl, even less for that which was unfinished and half made. She was a shard of what she could have been, it was over and little else anyone did would fix that. There was simply nothing left to justify.
She could only be used as a crude weapon at best.
It's was fine. She was tired, after all, and all weapon eventually break.
She wasn't sure when she ended up here, one moment she was in Konoha's forest, the next she was surrounded by mist shinobi.
Kyoko had next to no recollection of the two very distinct seals on her, one over her heart the other over the chakra gate at her naval. It was easy to understand what they did, how they manipulated her, how unstable they were by the way the foreign charka wavered on her skin. It was nothing new to bear the weight of a seal.
It was nothing new but, oh, how it burned.
It was easy to feel the acrid burn of a tailed beast waiting behind the script on her skin, an ache of emptiness, of starvation and rage. It was so loud and demanding she almost didn't notice when he came. And he had come, he had come to try and save her when there was nothing left to save.
She already knew what to do.
"Come now, it is time," She could almost laugh, he rather looked like a cloud bearing too much in that moment, "look away."
He knew what had to be done, she could never let him dirty his hand like that. Like her.
"What? What are you doing?" Kakashi had always been smarter than this, she knew he knew, he knew she knew. They were silent, they were silent and the eye that was not his own spin.
"Ah, before I go please do one thing for me."
The others around them were restless. Was it raining? Her face was wet.
In that moment, she could remember a room, she could taste the dust in the air and feel the dirt in her hair. She could remember standing opposite one, a reflection of another with dark eyes, pale face, and hair the color dried blood. One was so very sweet, soft, kind the other sharp, cold, refined.
One was already ruined.
It has always been a marvel; how easy it is to kill.
It could never be said for sure who died in that room. Did the survivor grieve for her own death or the death of another? Who knows, who knows, but what she wouldn't give to be among the crowds again.
For once the silence was deafening.
"Roku?" Shi was confused, the rock with a carved frog bounced lightly on his chest.
"It's only right for the scorpion to carry the frog, even if it's only this once, don't you think?" She wasn't sure if she wanted to laugh, she felt like she should, "One scorpion to another, of course."
It didn't really matter in the end. The test was over, two had become one and it was time again for a future to be retold.
"Ro?" a voice whispered in the dark, a hum responded.
"Are you scared yet?" there was a click and the shadows retreaded to the edge of the room, alone Kyoko stared at her own hand in her apartment.
"I wish I knew how to be."
"Would it change anything if you were?"
"I don't know."
Those under the never changing Hashirama trees taught her humility, elegance. They taught her how to lie, to break, to poison and kill and endure. They watched on as she armed herself with Senbon, in precision and stealth, in the way the metal gleamed before it slid into another's throat. She was taught how to poison in every way, how to move and dance her way beside death moving to a song everyone but her could hear.
The roots taught her everything that made her Roku, but it was the leaves that taught her how to live. The leaves were the ones who taught her about others, the ones who showed her love and understanding even when she had none to offer. They taught her how to breathe, what it felt like to turn your face to the sun, what it was like to fail. The leaves taught her how to be Kyoko.
"Live for us, we know there is more than this." She murmured to the boy with silver hair, repeating to words once said to her. Words she failed to complete, words she had never planned to even try to complete.
"I promise."
Her chakra flared, the first level of the seal on her tongue activating, then the second closed her throat, then with the third she smiled for the first time without the looming chill that seemed to have always been a part of her and two became one.
Two became one and I became We once again.
Notes:
The end. If you guys want I can write some side stories from other POV or add an extra bit where Kyoko is summoned/reincarnated in the fourth shinobi war and she gets to meet the gang but without you guys asking for it I'm not going to do it.
Poll is still up.
Thank you for reading, I adore you all and hope you enjoyed the story.