buh-bump, buh-bump
They're in the trees, somewhere here. He just knows it.
buh-bump, buh-bump
They're Leaf-nin, after all. Waiting in scrub brush and bushes for their enemy is what they do.
buh-bump, buh-bump
But... where?
buh-bump, buh-bump
Save for the rattling of raindrops sloughing off the canopy of leaves hanging above him and the low, deep rumbling of thunder on the inky, midnight horizon, the only sounds that are keeping Shirong anchored to the present is the rhythmic drumbeat of his own heartbeat in his ears and the crude cracking of wet branches beneath his boots as he and Chūnin Aslani skulk their way through the underbrush lining the floor of a densely packed, old growth forest of oak trees.
Sickly, pale rays of silver moonlight beam down from between the gaps in the coverage of stormy clouds blanketing the sky, and the ones that manage to penetrate the overhang of blooming fronds and tree branches cast the woodland thicket the two of them are crossing in deep, oppressive shades of stark black and bleak gray. If it weren't for the sparing snapshots of still scenery provided by the bright glare of lightning bolts as they arc across the sky in the time it takes a person to snap their fingers, Shirong doesn't think he'd have even a bare hint of where he was going. He can barely see beyond his arm's length in front of him, and has had to stop himself from getting clotheslined by a branch or walking face-first into a tree trunk more times than he wants to admit.
At the very least, though, it means that Shriong is aware. Aware of his surroundings, as far as he can see into the pitch darkness. Aware of the path Chūnin Aslani is leading the two of them on, by the sound of branches snapping and bushes rustling underfoot similar to his own. Aware of how the rain has let up, leading to only a tap-tap-tap that allows for calm to swallow the world. Aware of the void of noise beyond those sounds, and the still, yawning silence that fills the hole located in nature where the ambience of wildlife should be. Aware of his own thoughts, and how they creep in out of said silence to nibble and gnaw at the corner of Shirong's mind like starving rats during the quiet moments.
It's easy sometimes, to keep them out. That's what the noise, the din of battle, is for, after all. It keeps them out and keeps Shirong in the present, where there is no room for missteps and mistakes. He's only survived as long as he has here because of the noise, letting him know what's around every other corner. It's a partner. It's an ally. But sometimes, there are places where even the noise cannot go, and Shirong is marching straight through one of them.
So Shirong has to create his own. He has to focus on something else, anything else, other than his thoughts. If he doesn't, there's room for mistakes, no matter how small, and mistakes get people killed. Killed once, killed twice, killed again. They could be around anywhere here, and he won't be able to do a thing to stop them. Throat slit, eyes gouged, intestines gored. Dead, dead, dead.
But Shirong knows them. He knows them like the back of his hand. He knows them like the wind-bitten maps they give him to memorize by firelight.
Shirong knows them better than he knows himself, in all honesty. At least, it feels that way. The memories of them are seared in thick outlines into the back of his eyelids like the pattern of a hot cattle brand. When Shirong closes his eyes, they are there, in both the waking world and in the one of dreams. The spiraling symbol of the leaf, stamped into the metal headbands of the dead. A massive, burnt-orange fox with many tails, laying waste to an entire city. A man who is more of a folklore monster than a human being, hiding beneath rippling, torn skin. Blood on the streets, the same shade as their eyes, and on the edge of his blade as he drags them out of their hiding spots and cuts them down like wheat in a thresher. Poisonous, winding roots stretching throughout the entirety of the rotting foundation. Cracking ice and the sound of waves. A red-head standing in the center of a roaring sandstorm. Crimson thunderheads billowing on the horizon as the masked man pulls his puppet's strings, unaware of his own.
And at the center of it all is a pair of bright blue eyes that burn with indomitable will.
So while it is sometimes easy for Shirong to keep the feeling of dread from entering his mind, it is always there, seeping into every facet of everything Shirong lays his eyes upon, and in the quiet moments, it is there, whispering over his shoulder their platitudes and declarations and denunciations into his ear with the hot breath of fire in the form of a sapphire-eyed monster. He feels out of place, like a square peg being pounded into a round hole by a toddler playing with toys, but shouldn't.
Why should he? After all, he is Meng Shirong, newly minted Genin of Amegakure no Sato; he wears the typical headband with four straight, vertical lines meant to represent the raindrops of the village upon his forehead, and wears a black jumpsuit beneath his black cloak with a kunai pouch tied to his thigh. He has auburn hair that likes to stick up rebelliously, a set of silver-rimmed glasses because his vision has always been poor and a pair of sharp, opal-green eyes. He's always enjoyed reading and writing, although his handwriting is rather shaky, and tries to get his hands on scrolls and books at any opportunity. Alas, his family could never afford them when Shirong was young and his glasses were worth more than a year's savings. He is, and always has, been this way; Meng Shirong, civilian son of a tailor and a bricklayer who died during a flash flood.
...And that's exactly why the sensation of being misplaced is so strong; he simply is. He has always been Meng Shirong, for as long as he can remember, but is that really his only name? Some of the village elders, the few who still clung to the old ways, spoke of called "Saṃsāra", the cosmic wheel of death and rebirth, but that's all it is; a superstition, not founded in any sound reasoning or believed by anyone beyond a couple of senile bags of bones... but at the same time, Shirong remembers.
He remembers, at the very least, an entire lifetime's worth of information, no matter how short. Nineteen years is a mere drop in the vast ocean when compared to the farthest endpoint of a human lifespan, and nineteen years is the breadth of an eternity, yawning on into the distance, as you stand on the apex of life itself. Locations, dates, people, morality, stories and philosophy; most of it is dusty, useless crap sitting in a disorganized filing cabinet that is Shirong's mind, for what practical use does Shirong have for the teachings of gray-bearded old men when he's trying to navigate his path to the designated outpost, or for the lore of a world war when he's living through one himself? What use does he have for an encyclopedic knowledge of statutes and sub-sections of law in a world that has none?
Some memories, though, Shirong clings closer to than others. Hugs them close to his chest, as close to his heart as Shirong can without ripping out his guts again. That horrible feeling of needing to be something, anything greater than what he was, and that damnable compulsion to help every poor, unfortunate soul that crossed his path. All the hours spent breaking himself down and then building himself back up, brick by brick. How his heart burned with fear, moments before he decided to die for a stranger, and how it burned with fury when seconds before everything went pitch dark.
And now, every frigid, winter afternoon Shirong spent in his dorm pouring over and picking apart a manga about a boy named Naruto.
Now look at him; reduced to the mere sum of his parts, reduced to just... a side-character! Everything Shirong might have ever worked for, everything Shirong might have ever had, is gone. An entire life, one greater than his own down here in the dirt, torched to the ground, and for what?! So he could be another brick of bone and blood that went into making the road to power that naive pissant will walk upon? So he could be cut down by a sword and die choking on his blood face down in the mud as an example of how gritty and serious this story is? So that at the very end of it all, the peace that is built off of a foundation of an uncountable number of corpses would be worth every sacrifice?
Hah. Like the editors would dedicate even a sliver of panel space to a side-character like him. They, or God, or Masashi Kishimoto, or whoever the hell decided to dump Shirong here, were cruel; that's why he's here, as Meng Shirong, newly minted Genin of Amegakure no Sato. One death is a tragedy, but one million is a statistic. It is his destiny to fight and die for the sake of the future. To them, it's just pages in a story, but to him, it's not. Shirong lives it every day, every hour, every minute, every second.
The pages are ink black and stark white; they don't detail how the smell of acrid gunpowder and tangy blood taints Shirong's clothes, forcing him to get used to the smell, or how it's hard to sleep at night when he's forced to wonder if the booming on the horizon is mere thunder or a battle between shinobi. How a man doesn't have any time to scream in the split second where death approach's to take him in the form of an errant kunai. What the moaning of the sick and dying sounds like. The feeling of shutting off his brain and following orders to the letter. How it feels like Shirong hasn't seen the sun in ages, and how the cold and freezing rain obscures his vision.
The pages are simply that; pages that contain the story of one childish brat of a boy who will grow into an idealistic terror of a man, and the people who surround him within the walls of Konohagakure no Sato. Everything revolves around him. Everything that happened, is happening and will happen occurs for his pleasure.
Outside of the pages, there's nothing there; only a bombastic outline of a young boy on a sheet, along with all his dearest friends and hated enemies, lovers and rivals, saints and sinners one and all.
Outside of the pages, there's nothing there; only thick darkness, like the one surrounding Shirong as he wades deeper and deeper into the shadow of the dream.
Outside of the pages, there's nothing there; only an entire reality trapped in his path, existing in a constant state of hate and bloodshed that has no meaning unless that boy can be bothered to show up and save the day.
crunch
Another branch snaps beneath Shirong's boot heel, and he stares into the darkness with wind, unblinking eyes as he stops in his tracks. A radiant flash of lightning blazes across the sky, illuminating the entirety of Shirong's surroundings in crystal-clear detail for just a second. That's still enough time for Shirong to get a good look at his current location in the moist, crowded boscage lurking beneath the forest's dense canopy. Chūnin Aslani is relatively far ahead of him, and has become merely a black outline only visible by how he clashes with the greens and browns of the underbrush and how the buzzing in the back of Shirong's head slowly increases in volume when he stares in the man's direction. The forest is deep and dark, and in the moment, it feels like it's the entirety of the world. No destroyed, skeletal cities, no flooded, lifeless villages, no overcrowded, labyrinthine camps. Just Shirong, the darkness of the night and a vague sense of longing.
He tilts his head up, and gazes at the sky. The impenetrable coverage of thick tree branches and leaves blocks out almost all of the moonlight, but in the minute cracks between the branches shines a dusky silver glow. Though it sparkles softly to the naked eye, it is by no measure soothing. The light is sickly and strange, and if Shirong stares long enough, begins to glow deep yellow in the pitch, inky darkness. Instead, it is a reminder of days long past and days yet to come.
This is... a strange game. The only winning move is not to play. Someday, all of this will end. Shirong knows how it will end. This is not his fight.
(and then what, coward? a life of hiding?)
It is Uzumaki Naruto's.
Shirong moves forwards, and begins to walk. Right-left, right-left. The only way out of the garden of beasts is through
When the two of them arrive at Command, the first light of dawn is cresting over the horizon and washing the wet landscape of trees and hills out in shades of maroon red and rose pinks from between the gaps in the parting cloud coverage, and for the first time in a while, falling face first into bed and sleeping like the dead is the furthest thing from the front of Shirong's mind.
The soldier pills, as they are called, they took before leaving Outpost A have done their job more than adequately; Shirong has been awake for well over twenty-four hours and still hasn't seen any signs of exhaustion creeping in at the edges of his senses. In fact, he feels completely fine. Actually, more than completely fine. It feels like every inch of Shirong's body, from the tips of his fingers to the ends of his toes, is vibrating with energy, enough that he could run for an entire day without stopping, and the constant, low humming that seems to permeate Shirong's mind is nothing more than ambient background noise at the moment. Now that it's gathered into a clear, congealed mass, it's as if Shirong can see... things flickering in and out at the very edge of his vision.
The outlines of people, mostly. A person singular, at first. When Shirong had seen him for the first time, there was only a split second between thinking that it was just the light, opaque shadows of the early hours before dawn playing tricks on him and thinking that an enemy was standing right in their path. Shirong's mind has always been a hair faster than his body, though, and it was when he had a kunai clutched in the palm of his shaking fist that Shirong realized it wasn't an enemy... it was Chūnin Aslani. Or perhaps his shadow. Not one of darkness cast by the sun, no...
...But an imprint of an entire human nervous system in the receding twilight of morning, made up of zipping bolts of static electricity.
Now, standing next to Chūnin Aslani at the crest of a rocky hillside and looking down upon the bright, fuzzy shapes that mill about the vast, tent-filled expanse of Command, Shirong remembers. Remembers the dull sting of a pulsing current on the very tip of his tongue as he stood in the corpse-filled courtyard of the warehouse, waiting for Chūnin Aslani to retrieve him under the rain.
Is that... chakra?
"-Say something?"
Chūnin Aslani's voice sounds like it's coming from underwater, muffled and faint against the hum of Shirong's senses, even though the man is standing right next to him, and Shirong's eyes stay locked onto the distant mass of teeming shapes as his voice comes creaking out of his throat on it's own accord.
"...I can see them. All of them."
And then, snapping. Right in front of Shirong's face. He let's out a startled yelp and jolts back, stumbling over the small pieces of gravel and rocks that line the hillsides, before Chūnin Aslani's hand snaps forward and takes hold of Shirong's own. An exasperated expression, with maybe a bare hint of amusement, is painted across the man's face as he hauls Shirong forward and back into a steady posture.
"No wonder you've been out of it since the moment I met you," Chūnin Aslani snorts, "You're a sensor-type."
Shirong's eyes narrow, and the words linger on the tip of his tongue for longer than they should before they come out of Shirong's mouth dripping with confusion; " 'Sensor-type' ?"
" 'Said you were a civvy before getting a headband, yeah? I'll bet you don't know what that means..." Chūnin Aslani states while fixing Shirong with an appraising look that quickly morphs into one of incredulous vexation, "...Or that you even know how to use your chakra right. Indra's Eyes, how are you still alive?"
There are a hundred and one ways Shirong could answer that questions, most of them not even related to what Chūnin Aslani's actual question is, and the one that he wants to say the most is hell if I know. He's always known that you don't talk back to your "superiors", though, so Shirong bites it back and merely states dryly; "I couldn't say, sir."
"It's probably the only reason a kid like you is standing next to me right now," Chūnin Aslani grumbles, more to himself than anyone else, "What were they thinking, making someone like you a runner with no training?"
"I couldn't say, sir." Shirong mutters, entirely out of the habit of acknowledging orders at the bottom of the chain of command every day, and Chūnin Aslani shoots him a glare that makes Shirong realize what just came out of his mouth.
"You're a real smartass when you're not being quiet, aren't you?" Internally, Shirong let's out a sigh of relief that he's just getting banter back instead of corporal punishment.
Externally, though, Shirong can't help the ghost of a smirk that twitches at the corners of his lips as he says; "I couldn't say, sir."
"Whatever," Chūnin Aslani huffs, "I guess I'll have to tell the brass what they missed and get you some proper training. Come on, then."
The dusky-skinned man breaks out into a jog and begins to make his way down to the rocky hillside, and the moment... ends.
Shirong is alone again at the crest of the hill, alone again in the quiet of the early morning sunrise and alone again with the flat drone at the edge of his senses, and... he is himself.
He is Meng Shirong, newly minted Genin of Amegakure, and there is a strange feeling wrapping it's tight grip around his heart and squeezing till he can't breath. He is Meng Shirong, newly minted Genin of Amegakure, and for a few seconds just now, that's all he was. Although Shirong has talked like he has for his entire life, the words flowed out of his mouth naturally, and there was nothing else. Only him; Meng Shirong, newly minted Genin of Amegakure, a boy with green eyes, silver glasses, a sharp nose and hair that is colored something close to red who likes to read whatever scrolls he can find and is apparently both a smart ass and a sensor type, as so dutifully explained by his senior.
And now, there's only Meng Shirong, the boy who knows because he does and notices because he can.
...There's a sour taste on his tongue; Shirong can practically taste the imprints that the words he said left on his tongue, and can tell that the only thing that will wash it out knowing, knowing and watching the seconds crawl past into the passage of days with his own two, watchful eyes.
How disgusting.
This was more of a shorter, character-centric chapter, since building the MC up is equally as important as detailing their journey. I feel that a lot of SI's, or the ones that try to be serious, don't have their MC ask a lot of important questions to themselves, so in addition to regular character development, there will be a lot of pondering what it means to be an SI, for lack of a better way of explaining it.
