Everything was empty.
I sat, huddled.
I was alone for a month, a year, an eternity. I didn't know.
I was alone until the moment I wasn't.
I knew who it was.
"You never wrote back," I croaked, not looking up.
He didn't say anything.
"I wrote to you every week. You never wrote back."
"Ayae, who are you talking to?"
It was a voice different from the one I expected. That was when I noticed someone's hand in mine. I stared at the faded streak of red paint.
Slowly I remembered. I looked to my side.
Jii. He never left. He had been sitting next to me this whole time.
Then I looked up and saw Itachi. He knelt in front of me.
Itachi also spoke to me, but it wasn't what I wanted to hear. He never said what I wanted to hear, so cruel even when being so gentle. He had only become gentler and gentler with me since the first time he made me cry at seven years old, but he never did figure out how to make me stop crying.
"Ayae, please, you need to leave here. This place is hurting you."
"You're hurting me."
I regretted what I said immediately, screaming "No come back!" before Itachi could disappear.
I grabbed onto the fragments of him and hugged them greedily.
"Don't go, don't go."
I curled in.
When Jii opened my arms, there were a thousand shards piercing through me.
"I think we've found your greatest source of pain, Ayae," Jii whispered.
Jii tried to see who it was but couldn't. He only saw what I told him. Counseling was called a talking technique for a reason.
I didn't want to talk about it.
Jii watched me hug my memories possessively. Slowly his shoulders lowered.
"No, not the source," Jii corrected. "The conduit. It's their pain you're feeling."
I was holding two hands now, refusing to let either of them go. The three of us sat together, Itachi on my left and Jii on my right.
I knew I was being selfish, trapping them both here with me. Vaguely, I knew something in the counseling had gone wrong, that this was the sunken state that all my teachers had warned me of.
While meditation was meant to free you, the sunken state was a prison. It put people in comas for years and years without end. Usually you only entered it through genjutsu or a genjutsu backfire.
Jii kept calm. He tried to think of a way to free me.
At first, he tried pulling me out, but that was only sinking both of us deeper in. Trying to pull me closer to him was only pulling Itachi closer to me.
Soon it became clear that as long as I held onto Itachi, none of us were going anywhere.
I refused to leave this place without Itachi, but Itachi couldn't leave this place, because he was this place. He was the void. He was the hole in my world, the hole that I now cradled myself in, wrapping around me like a blanket.
So we sat.
Of the three of us, it was Itachi who finally spoke again.
"Can you break us apart?" he asked Jii.
He lifted our joined hands, showing Jii my grip on him.
I panicked. I realized too late that while Jii couldn't see Itachi, Itachi could see Jii. Had seen him this whole time.
Of course he could. He was a fragment of my mind. He saw everything I saw, knew everything I knew.
But Jii stayed where he was.
"Is that what you want, Ayae?" Jii asked me.
I furiously shook my head.
"Then no," Jii said simply.
And that was the end of that.
I slowly relaxed again.
Jii switched sitting positions to make himself comfy. He decided that since we were trapped here, possibly forever, we might as well get some answers.
"Why do you want to separate from Ayae?" he asked Itachi.
I flinched.
We waited.
Both of us were surprised when Itachi answered.
"I'm the conduit," Itachi repeated Jii's words back to him. "Her attachment to me is what keeps her trapped and in pain."
Jii took that in. "So… you trying to do her a favor?"
"You of all people must understand the value of severing the ties that bring you harm."
Jii wasn't expecting to be called out like that. He didn't seem offended, though, just impressed that I had been paying attention. He felt heard.
"That's different."
"How so?"
"I don't love them," Jii said bluntly. "It takes a real dumbass to stay with someone you don't love. But it takes a bigger dumbass to dump someone you do."
Jii held up his own hand, linked to mine. "And personally, I don't decide my company by convenience. Telling people to cut off those suffering around them seems like a good way to ensure we all suffer alone."
Itachi went quiet.
"And if they pull you down? Is it better we all drown?"
Jii shrugged. "That's never the only option."
"Never," Itachi echoed, "is a strong word."
"This is a bet I'm more confident on."
Itachi didn't trust him. Didn't trust me.
That was fine. Jii didn't need to earn his trust, only mine.
"Babe, I got some news that might blow your mind. What if I told you that in reality, there are infinite options. And that there can only be one, or that anything has to be one or the other, is a bullshit lie that's fed to us."
My eyes widened.
"Prove it," Itachi said.
"Prove…?"
"Break her free," Itachi challenged, unblinking. "Show us an alternative way out."
Jii was already on it. In talking to Itachi, he could see my mystery friend fully now, see him for who he was. And that was all he needed, as he flash-stepped before Itachi's face.
"This is what we call a pro dancer move."
Grinning, Jii grabbed Itachi's free hand with his, completing the triangle. And this time, when he pulled, we all unseated, the void around us shattering.
I landed on Jii's chest with an oomph, the bed bouncing under us.
"Oh thank the ancestors, they're back," Jei cried.
Groggy, I crawled up, only to see the hotel room was a wreck. And on fire.
Jei was stomping on a burning screen. Emu and En dumped water everywhere. In the bathroom, the sink was overflowing, flooding the floors.
Jii and I scrambled to help.
Once everything was under control, we all collapsed back on the beds.
I learned that sometime during the counseling, all the candles in the room had gone wild. From me came a burst of wind that knocked all my friends back into the walls. Before they knew it, I was hitting myself and screaming like a crazy person.
"And then both of you went blank! What on earth happened?!" Jei asked, hysterical.
"We ended up in the sunken state," Jii explained.
Jii was a little too calm about it, even for his friends.
"The sunken state?! Are you–?"
"I'll be fine," Jii said tightly. "Someone pass me my water?"
En tossed him his water bottle from his bag.
Jii caught it. He took a sip, then another, before capping his bottle. Taking a deep breath, he looked at me and smiled. "Are you going to be okay, babe?"
I paused. Then I nodded. "I think so."
"Good."
Jii dropped like a puppet cut of its strings. The water bottle slipped from his grip and rolled off the edge of the bed.
Jei yelped.
"Jii?!" I scrambled over to him.
The twins helped me flip him to his back.
"...fine." Jii folded an arm over his stomach. "Just… quick nap."
Jii was out cold.
We realized too late that Jii had been holding himself together by willpower. He had just been dragged into the sunken state, a place even genjutsu experts would struggle with. It didn't matter how good he was, he was still a normal kid. He never had the physical and mental training that I did.
Yet, he stayed inside there with me. He held onto me until he could drag both of us out.
We tucked him in. I watched him some more before deflating. We let him rest.
"How did you guys end up in the sunken state?" Emu asked me, voice low.
"Counseling shouldn't be able to do that," En said grimly.
"Genjutsu would," I mumbled.
"Genjutsu?!"
I nodded. "Someone from back home had put a memory blocker on me before I left. I thought I could break it but…" I hunched. "I guess I broke myself instead."
I had a lot of angry questions for when I got back home. Tomoe would have gotten away with it too. Only by accident did I find out.
The thought left a pit in my stomach. What else could be missing from me? Tomoe wasn't the only genjutsu user in my clan.
I couldn't blame my friends for being freaked out by all of this.
I inhaled deeply.
"So what's next?" I asked, putting up a brave face, pretending everything I said was no biggie. That I wasn't screaming on the inside.
We all winced when a curtain fell in the background.
My friends exchanged looks with each other.
Jei looked like he had words.
He changed his mind.
"Oh screw it, we've seen weirder."
And so, despite the disaster around us, we decided to see the counseling to its end.
Thankfully, I didn't need to go back into any more terrible memories. They had heard more than enough. The twins showed me their notebook, where they wrote down everything I had said aloud during the session.
"Now the real part begins," they said.
.
If you had asked me twenty four hours ago where I thought the safest place in the world was, I would have said, without a doubt, Konoha.
Maybe we weren't the biggest or the richest or even the happiest, but… safest? Do you know how many ninjas we have? Have you seen our walls?
So many people with money and connections hope to get in, to get protection, only to get turned away. My dad and I would have never stood a chance, if not for our name.
The outside world was miserable and poor and dangerous, filled with rogue-nin and bandits and starvation and disease. I had been told this story over and over again. I had been told this story so many times, I had gone from wanting adventures around the world to being happy staying at home for the rest of my life, growing imaginary pineapples in Aunt Mikoto's backyard.
When I confessed to my new friends that I was from Konoha, I expected many reactions. Surprise, awe, fear… even hate.
I did not expect them to look at me with such pity, like I was some piglet that had miraculously escaped from the slaughterhouse.
In their mind, the walls around my village weren't there to keep people out. It was to keep people in. In their mind, Konoha was the place where children were raised to die.
My friends liked to be dramatic, I had thought. I had found their fears cute and silly.
Now…
I felt like a piglet.
As my friends listed out everything I had said, hearing it all repeated back to me, I could see now how bad things were. Even the stories we tell were all terrible.
Tenchi and Yamatai.
Shiragi Ryuu and her eyes.
Uchiha Masako and her husband.
How could the safest place in the world…?
"So my home is filled with tragedy," I whispered to my friends. "What do I do?"
The twins looked up at me.
"You can start…"
"... by not using that word."
My friends came from Kurohyou, where everything was bright and everything was clear. They knew who they were fighting at all times and why.
But I came from the military. I came from the land of the ninja, where everything was dark and hidden. Even our evils are masked behind a single name.
Tragedy.
But you can't fight "tragedy". You can't get angry at "tragedy". You can't learn from it. You can't defeat it, only feel hopeless and move on.
"Tragedy" is a word that makes your enemy invulnerable.
My friends spent the rest of the day teaching me all the words that I had lost. They stressed it was important to always call an evil by its real name. Because once you do…
The power returns to your hand. You realize you are not facing the inevitabilities of fate, but an opponent like any other, weaknesses and all.
Imprisonment… torture… poverty… rape… even war… everything could be traced back to a cause. And once you find the root, you begin to realize…
These are problems that can be solved.
These are illnesses that can be cured.
These are wrongs that can be righted.
These are crimes that must be brought to justice.
By the end of their lessons, they could tell I had changed.
"Emu, En…"
The twins looked up at me. I stared at our notebook, where one word remained circled, quietly away from the others but threaded to them all.
Genocide.
"If it's okay, can you tell me again why your government wants to kill you?"
And this time when they explained, I understood.
