Sometimes, all my thoughts about a character end up coalescing into a single image. It can feel random, because it often is, but they always feel right when I find them.
When it comes to Noa Kaiba, when I think of him, I think of a tree.
This is why.
.
There was an old mulberry tree in the Kaiba Estate's back gardens where Noa liked to sit. Sometimes he would read; sometimes he would listen to music; sometimes, he would just sit there in silence and watch the clouds drift by. He wasn't particular about it. Noa just liked that tree, and he liked having its bracing weight behind his back.
Whenever anyone was looking for Noa and couldn't find him, the first place to look was always that tree. Nine times out of ten, if he wasn't in his bedroom or one of the open spaces in the house, he was there.
"Back in that . . . place," Noa said once, "I never really felt much of anything. When I moved, it was less like I was moving, and more like I was pulling the world toward me. It always felt like I was standing still. Cold, confined. I was. All I was, was a brain trapped in a metal cage, and everything I saw, everything I did, everything around and about me . . . it was just points of data being filtered into the cage."
Sometimes, Noa would struggle to differentiate between his life in that place and his life now; whenever he did, he would make for the mulberry tree.
"This is a good way to remind myself," he said, "what the difference is. How I can feel the grass under me, the trunk behind me, the breeze all around. I can see birds, and bugs, and flowers. They're doing things that I can't predict. That . . . that's the most important part, I think. After a while, I got to where I could predict everything that would happen in that place, even though it was supposed to be random. There's only so much randomness we can inject into something, wired for patterns as we are. It just doesn't measure up to reality. There's no chaos we could ever build that will ever hold a candle to this."
He'd never liked being outside as a child. He'd always thought it was pointless to go out of one's way to be out in nature. Civilization, he would say, was defined by walls and roofs. Even when he went out to perform, or play games, or do anything outside, he'd always been quite sure the activity could be made better if it was inside.
After so much confinement, after eleven years of stasis, of stagnation, Noa understood just how wrong he'd been. He could appreciate, now, just how sheltered—literally and figuratively—he'd been. He began to associate these thoughts, this sense of growth and understanding, with the old tree.
The tree, in its way, felt like an altar.
Not to a god. Noa was no more spiritual now than he'd ever been. But to the world itself. That, he thought, was enough. He didn't need to personify the divine. It was enough to sit there, seeing things he hadn't seen, feeling things he hadn't felt, hearing things he hadn't heard, knowing things he hadn't known, for half a lifetime.
There was plenty of divinity in that.
"Chichiue thought we would live forever. He was so sure of it. Now, all I can hope is that this tree stands watch over my funeral. Put my ashes here. Let me nourish this tree. That's immortality enough for me."