Fanfic alert
Luck
Higa Naomi was born in the slums of Kirigakure no Sato to a whore and a bored shinobi. Nine months after their initial meeting, he consented to let Naomi take his name after her babbling mother tracked him down. Thirty years and ninety days later she will be strangled to death a few meters away from the ramshackle house she was born in. She does not know this now. Now she is ten and almost a genin, almost a shinobi like her father, almost a step above her mother. One thing stands in the way, and it is a boy Naomi doesn’t know. He has a kunai and the stance to say he knows it.
The field is surrounded by trees and broken rocks, salt caking over everything. An hour ago, it rained, and the mud sticks to their sandals, their gloves, their faces. It coats them all like the war paint the jounin wear when they go off to fight. An hour ago, the teachers lined them all up and marched them outside the village. Ten minutes ago, they were given kunai and the instructions to pair up and kill each other if they want to become soldiers.
Naomi wants to become a shinobi. There is no other option she will accept while she is still alive.
Rising up to cut the sky, the trees are blackened where they aren’t dead, or just plain dead. Some stand and others don’t have the strength anymore. There was drought and an attack from Kumogakure this year, and the land has suffered along with the civilians. The land always suffers. Civilians are expendable, she knows. Civilians are nothing.
The shinobi are still strong, despite it all. Shinobi endure. It is what they are trained to do.
Naomi wonders if her father died in one of the attacks, or if he just kept walking after all the missions. She knows he’s a jounin and knows she doesn’t have the right to know more. The whore’s daughter doesn’t have a place in the world until she overcomes her mother, and that chance is right before her, a trembling boy just her age and a little under her height.
“We train only the best,” Ryuusuke-sensei told them a little ago, when they were all shivering in the mud and holding their kunai the way they had learned and trying so hard not to forget. “And now we decide who can become shinobi. If you can’t survive this, you’ve got no right to that name.”
The weapon in her hand is cold, like the mud. Naomi can see herself reflected in the gray steel, the girl with the thin face and red tattoos that might mean something-she’s asked and nobody knows but her stupid mother, who won’t say a thing-a skinny little kid with her father’s name who might be a shinobi. If she kills the boy, the title is hers.
She has never killed a person before. There have been fights, but Naomi has never gone that far.
Looking at the mud, the dead trees, and the ground blackened by salt and the old relics of a ninjutsu fight from a war nobody wants to remember, Naomi thinks she can. She knows all about sacrifice, all about going without meals and watching herself get thin. Naomi knows all about losing when the only real course is to win. She knows all about being a civilian, and knows she won’t survive that life.
Only shinobi can rise above their parents in the Bloody Mist. Everyone else lives and dies by the two people who made them.
Naomi looks at the shaking boy opposite her, and then back at the kunai.
“Y-you could give up,” he whispers. “It wouldn’t be so b-bad.”
“No,” she says, and throws the kunai just the way she’s been taught, stance loose and low to the ground, digging her feet in for extra traction. “It would.”
For a single moment, a single heartbeat echoing inside her bones, Naomi closes her eyes. When she recognizes her own foolishness, and it does not take long, she opens them again. Then she breathes deep, in and out.
It doesn’t surprise her as much as she thought it would to discover that the blade went into his throat. It doesn’t surprise her when she kneels down and pulls it out, and the blood catches on her hands.
Naomi presents her bloody kunai to the teachers watching from the tree line. She sits in the mud to await their blessing, and isn’t disappointed when they name her a shinobi. Briefly, she wonders if her father would care.
--
Her first jounin sensei was a teenager who had barely earned the rank. It took him four days to die after being assigned to team three. Naomi didn’t attend his funeral. A few older shinobi did. The first jounin-sensei of team three was not long lived or missed.
The second is both, though he would share the same fate of the unfortunate young jounin who had been named their first teacher. Of course, they do not know it then. The only name he allows them to call him is Taku-sensei.
“I’m not here to be your friend,” he tells them, staring down his crooked nose at the three genin who met his glare with anticipation of what he will teach them. “I’m here to make you three brats into proper shinobi, gods willing.”
Naomi does not care for her squad-mates. They are stupid, weak boys who survived the graduation exam by luck and nothing else. They do not matter.
Taku-sensei shares her sentiments. She is the only one he does not break within the year. She is the only one who makes it to chuunin.
She is also the only one who comes to visit Taku-sensei when he is in the hospital, dying of blood poisoning. He looks at her tattooed face and smiles bitterly as he laments the loss of his arm. This is the first time Naomi has seen him smile in anything that is not bloodlust.
“Am I a shinobi now?” she asks, sitting down at his side. She brings him no gifts, as he neither desires nor expects any.
He snorts, propping himself up against the pillows. Outside, the rain comes down and splatters against the dirty hospital window, illuminating the great city of Kirigakure they have come to serve and defend. Under the many bandages, he is thin and heavily scarred. Taku-sensei has survived nine major conflicts and two incarnations of the Meizukage. It is ironic that he will not survive this, an attack on a border patrol by Leaf ninja.
They were chuunin with aspirations of becoming something more, much like Higa Naomi. The only difference is that she knows better than to leave survivors, even survivors with missing limbs.
Naomi watches her sensei and wonders how long he will take to die.
Eventually, Taku-sensei looks at her again. Lightning flashes through the window, a soundless boom because the thunder is not strong enough to come inside. “You’ve been a shinobi for a long time, girly,” he says.
She nods. The silence is unbroken for a long time. The sky is still dark when the rain finally stops.
Taku-sensei flexes his remaining hand. “I would ask something of you.”
“Of me?” Naomi wonders, for Taku-sensei has never asked her anything profound before, and his tone implies that intention now.
He sneers, belaying the seriousness of the request, but there is nothing to be done for it. Those who are dying are granted allowances they would not have otherwise, though Naomi has never had a mind to call him on his rudeness. It was a casual discovery that had brought to her attention the fact that he was born lower than she was.
Higa Naomi is not the only product of whores serving the Bloody Mist. Taku-sensei’s parentage is slightly darker, involving an ambitious thief, a daughter of a councilman, and a case of mistaken identity that was taken advantage of. There was bloodshed over the fact, and then there was Taku-sensei, who has never spoken of his family and never will. When he dies, only Naomi and a few select teammates of his will attend the funeral.
In that way, Taku-sensei never had a family. In that way, he proved to Naomi there were worse ways to come into the world.
“I have trained six shinobi,” Taku-sensei coughs, covering his mouth with a bandaged hand. His eyes are the color of granite with darker lines bleeding out at the edges, and cold with the ramifications of all his missions, and their endings. “You are the only one still alive.”
“Your actions?”
He snorts. “Their own shortcomings. The only Mist-ninja I killed was at the Academy, like you. That is unimportant. It’s an ending I prefer to avoid.”
There is a purpose to his words, but she cannot see it yet. Naomi folds her hands in her lap and waits.
“Of all my students, I think only you would understand my reason for asking,” Taku said after a moment.
Naomi frowns at him.
He laughs a little at her quiet confusion. “Kill me, apprentice.”
It is instinct to ask why first, and then deny second, but Naomi has learned to think about orders silently instead of out loud. Words have consequences if heard by the wrong person, or, depending on the words, if anyone hears them at all. She has learned this by the fists of her superiors, the older, taller jounin who do not give reasons like Taku-sensei does. He always has a reason, a method to the means in which he goes about them, and so Naomi looks for the reason before asking why.
While she thinks, Taku-sensei watches her. The bandages on his face cover up the crossed scars on his forehead from a bar fight over a woman when he was younger. The scars are worn and pale against his skin, old marks. He has not been young for a very long time.
Shinobi do not age well even with the aid of illusions, and he has never cared for the art of genjutsu.
Comprehension comes to her slowly, but it does come. She raises her chin up to look him in the eye, just as she did when he declared his intention to make her a shinobi or else break her in the attempt.
Taku-sensei did not break her with his training. Naomi knows that this last mission has broken him, though.
A shinobi cannot serve with one arm, not with the extent of damage that the enemy’s attack dealt. And Taku-sensei cannot live as anything but a shinobi.
“Come to your conclusion?” he asks lightly. Again, he smiles and makes her wonder. Perhaps it should be odd that a man who hates excessive displays of emotion would smile at the prospect of his quiet death. Somehow it is not. Somehow it fits what she knows of Taku-sensei, and the many things that she will never understand about her teacher.
“Yes,” Naomi says.
He nods, and looks out the window again. Nothing greets him but the black sky. There are no stars, even though there are usually hundreds at this time of year. A civilian would say their absence is a bad omen, but neither of them have been civilians for a very long time.
If superstitions ruled, all shinobi would be damned. Most of them are anyways, but not all of them. Not all of them are deserving of that fate after death. There are minorities, even in the Hidden Mist, exceptions to the rule of cruelty the leaders have fashioned for a hundred years and then a few more no one thought to record. Not all actions committed are worthy of punishment. Not all souls are worthy of hell.
Naomi wonders where she will go for doing this. She wonders if it makes a difference.
“I wish you luck,” Taku-sensei says suddenly, turning away from the window to face her with his intense gray eyes. “In all that you do.”
“Shinobi don’t need luck,” she says, standing up and pushing the chair back quietly. Naomi moves forward and places her hands on his face.
Taku-sensei looks at her face and somehow beyond it. Naomi envies his serenity, however he came to possess it. “Perhaps not,” he says, “but it would be a worthy gift, wouldn’t it?”
Naomi touches her forehead to his. Under the bandages, she can feel the heavy burden of the scars that have been twisting across his skin for a long time. She snaps his neck with the quick, sharp motion learned by hours of practice and three counts of experience, breathing though her mouth when it becomes too much to hold in. Taku-sensei falls back from her grip without a sound.
Fifteen years old and six months a chuunin, Higa Naomi attended the funeral of her jounin-sensei. She stood alone at the services, and all those who knew what she had done observed her with cool eyes. They did not approach her or attempt to understand her reasoning, and she did not try to explain it to them.
--
Six years a jounin and nine months out of the hospital after her last mission with the Hunters, the brass gives her a genin team and doesn’t allow her to return them. The boys are twins with a reputation of fighting and stealing from the local merchants when their mother forgets they exist and doesn’t feed them. The girl comes with the warped gift of sociopathic tendencies and a prodigal talent for doing unrepeatable things to people with knives. Born shinobi, all three of then, and try as she might, Naomi can’t break them.
She tries her damndest, but they just keep showing up every day for training. Eventually she gives up the hope that they’ll die in their sleep or otherwise quit, and comes to enjoy their company.
Well, almost all their company.
The girl’s name is Kinu, and if she says anything at all, it’s creepy and unwanted, even from a jounin’s perspective. Naomi considers herself to be tough, knows she’s a good shinobi and a survivor, but Kinu scares the fuck out of her. She’s a pretty little girl, with a pointed chin and curly black hair, but the way her eyes light up, and the things she can do with a kunai make Naomi wonder if she’s tough enough to survive torture.
She’s never thought about it before, never had a reason to and never been drunk enough to make one up. A pretty little genin named Kinu changed that just by existing, and looking at things the way she does, like nothing matters at all. Like it’s all a game and the rules are made for the very purpose of being shattered.
It is unthinkable that a child should be able to shake her, but Naomi can’t deny the truth to herself. She’s a good liar to the world, but not to herself. There are lines that even murderers can’t cross.
Kinu just smiles at her teacher like she knows all of the jounin’s fears, and goes back to playing with her blades, dissecting frogs and laying their organs out in rows. Naomi is neither surprised nor disappointed when the Hunters come to claim the girl. Though she would never admit it, Naomi breathed easier when the girl was no longer under her watch. She never could forget what Kinu did to the Cloud ninja three months back.
If the girl left any survivors, Naomi doubts they lasted long that way. There are situations in which suicide becomes a valid option, and Kinu is oh so good at creating them.
Listening to the whispers, Naomi learns that Kinu has been taken in by one of the top interrogators in the Mist. She learns that her former student has a real talent, a gift from the shinobi gods of a bloodier age. She learns that Kinu has a reputation, that Kinu likes hurting people, and wonders when sociopathic tendencies started to become a desirable trait in shinobi.
She thinks it always has been, and then turns back to the boys to yell at them some more.
It is easier if Naomi does not think of the pretty genin named Kinu who likes to tear things apart.
The boys are Meizu and Gouzu, twins in more than just the name. Small, gangly boys from a mother who Naomi never attempts to meet and her students never mention. It didn’t surprise her when she learned they were twins. They cannot finish each others sentences, but it is more from a lack of trying than any lack of coordination.
They are coordinated, alright. Naomi teaches them to fight as a team, and they become good at it. Two years into their training under her, she presents them with a barbed chain and poisoned claws, and they master their new toys in less than six weeks. Neither of them are geniuses, and Naomi doubts they will ever become jounin, but they are good, capable chuunin, boons to the village that created them.
It shouldn’t come as a shock when the village begins to demand things that Naomi refuses for them, but she is nonetheless.
--
“No.”
The chuunin manning the desk raises an eyebrow at her. Half of his face is covered in thick burn scars; the other side is painfully handsome and his quiet half-smile says he knows it. “It’s an order, Naomi-sensei.”
“It’s been refused,” she informs him quietly, the dangerous tone she learned from the sensei she murdered seven years ago.
The chuunin with the ruined face doesn’t appear impressed. He inspects his nails with a trained lack of empathy, a great pile of mission scrolls piled next to his elbow awaiting further inspection. His name isn’t known to her, just another chuunin assigned desk-duty for either punishment or medical leave for an unknown period of time until another replaces him.
Naomi decides she will remember him, not for his face, but for the fact that he has found a way to remain completely impassive to everything the Bloody Mist has shoved into his face.
“It’s not even for you,” he says.
“I’m their teacher.”
He shrugs, uncaring.
She leans forward until their noses are inches apart. His eyes are black and untouched by shadows. The shinobi life is his because it is the easiest. “My students kill people. Sometimes they steal things. And that is the extent of their talents because I say it is.”
The chuunin meets her stare and holds it. “Your students go where the missions take them, just like we all do.”
Half of his face is ruined, yet he is still handsome. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is. Some things can’t be explained through logic. Naomi wonders where his missions have taken him, and if he regrets the outcomes. Perhaps he does, under his mask of apathy.
Perhaps the mask isn’t one at all. Perhaps his blank face is just a mirror to a shinobi who feels absolutely nothing.
Even Kinu, the sociopath who will become one of the most feared torturers in the history of the Hidden Mist, had her emotions. They were twisted and warped to gain new definitions, new directions to take, but they were there.
The chuunin manning the mission-desk has no name Naomi wants to know, and apparently no emotions, just his training and his scars.
“I refuse this mission,” Naomi tells him, knowing even as she does it that he will not care, and it will change nothing.
“The orders aren’t for you,” the chuunin says, holding up the mission summons. “Your students will present themselves for duty at eleven-hundred hours for further instructions. Good day, Naomi-sensei.”
She swings at him, intending to break his nose. Predictably, he dodges.
--
Shinobi do most of their profession in shadows, realized or created through one kind or illusion or another, and Naomi is a very good shinobi. She was promoted young and stayed tough enough to survive Black Ops, tough enough to survive two crazy students and a month dealing with a psychopathic one. She knows all the rules to their game, and knows how to break them cleanly.
Right now, the break isn’t clean. Right now, the break has a hundred nicks and burs waiting to catch on something that can bleed. Naomi eyes the yellow liquor inside the glass that hasn’t seen a rag in a good week, and wonders when she’s going to stop caring. This is the fifth time she’s intended to get so drunk she won’t want to be alive in the morning, and the seventh time she’s actually done it.
Alcohol has a way of creeping up on a person and hissing sweet things about numbness and the sort of apathy that the scarred chuunin from the mission desk had down to the last dot. Naomi doesn’t like it much, but when she drinks, she drinks for the dead, with all their insatiable hungers, and in the morning, she knows she’s going to hurt.
The bar is for shinobi, though the fact isn’t advertised out loud. It works through gestures, through glares coming from battle-hardened soldiers with fraying nerves and vicious tempers. The Bloody Mist needs its civilians, but it doesn’t like them very much. Naomi sits in a corner with a dead rat and her miseries, though she wouldn’t call them that.
Above her, electrical cable snakes across the ceiling, occasionally sparking. The place is big, once upon a time a grain warehouse that a war got a hold of and nearly killed. She can still see the scorch marks on the walls if she cares to look. The whole place smells of blood and booze, and the sawdust covering the ground.
It’s a firetrap now just like it was back in the wartime that Naomi was a part of, but that’s part of the attraction. Shinobi come here when they’re thinking about dying and need alcohol bad enough to rid them of the notion.
She grips the shot glass and tries to remember what the drink was called. It had a name and it wasn’t whiskey, though Naomi thinks it might be a distant cousin.
A rat scuttles under the table and pauses a few inches away from her sandals, whiskers twitching. It squeals when Naomi smashes her heel into its back and snaps its spine. She watches it thrash and try to run away, nerves firing bad signals into its brain until the animal finally dies, eyes rolled up.
“Stupid thing,” Naomi mutters, downing her drink and shouting for another. “Stupid dead thing.”
“You didn’t strike me as the type,” a light voice comments.
Naomi blinks through the haze of bad alcohol, and nearly chokes when she recognizes the girl talking to her.
“But shinobi do the strangest things under pressure,” Kinu finishes, sliding a glass across the table to her half-drunk former teacher. “I never did think very much of you.”
She takes a seat without asking and clasps her hands on the edge of the table. Two years haven’t made her anything but prettier, Naomi notes with drunken scorn. The lovely assistant to the torture masters of Kirigakure, with her pouting mouth and curly black hair soft enough to break hearts even as her hands break souls, stands before her. There are no scars marring her pale face, and a light dusting of blue powder on her eyelids to make her seem kind.
“You want something?” Naomi asks. She manages through a feat of great personal control to stop her voice from cracking.
Kinu smiles, and for a moment, Naomi forgets just how fucking crazy she is. “I suppose you don’t think I have the right to ask.”
“You don’t,” she mutters sullenly, toeing the dead rat with her sandal.
“Maybe not, but rights don’t have much to do with it. I outrank you now, did you know that?” Kinu cocks her head, curls bouncing with the motion. There are six pear studs in each of her ears, and a simple gold chain around her neck, gifts from her mentors and coworkers who think it’s cute to dress her up like a civilian. “So by rights I could just order you to do whatever the hell I want, and if you think you mean a thing to me, then wake the fuck up, old teacher.”
Naomi takes the glass Kinu brought for her, sparing one thought for poison and then downing the greatest half of it. She doesn’t wince at the sour taste blooming at the back of her throat. “I’m not your sensei.”
The girl snorts, and the innocent air is gone, and the sociopath that Naomi has come to fear is back in full force. Kinu has learned to act, Naomi sees, and act well. She will become a powerful leader in their military.
The thought scares her more than the alcohol can account for.
“Of course not,” Kinu says matter-of-factly. “I just like remind you that you almost got stuck with training me.”
Naomi swirls the remaining alcohol around in the glass. “You’re one sick fuck, Kinu.”
“Take comfort in the fact that you helped make me.”
“What do you want?” she asks again, wondering if she could kill one of the village’s top interrogators and get away with it. It would be like a mercy killing, because women like Kinu are dangerous and will lead the village to glory and ruin in the same breathe.
Mercy should still count for something in this age.
Kinu leans back in her chair, tapping her chin lightly. “I’ve been a jounin for six months now. They call me a prodigy, you know? It’s a lie, of course. I stole something very important from the Meizukage, and they gave me the rank in exchange for its safe return. Our village is very pragmatic. I know a great deal that cannot be repeated, and who knows, I might have written it down somewhere.”
The light above their heads flickers out for a moment, and then goes back on again, buzzing faintly. Kinu’s gaze slides up to it, and then back to her former teacher again. She smiles, showing off pointed teeth. “The Hidden Mist lets me be because I am the fucking best at what I do, and because I might have done some things to my current teacher, Naomi, things I will do to you if you don’t do what I ask.”
“You would say that,” she mutters.
Kinu just shrugs. “You respond to threats, and so I threaten you before I bribe you. The combination’s going to work wonders, you’ll see.”
“What do you want?”
The alcohol no longer seems like a good idea.
“I want your Bloodline Limit, Naomi-sensei.”
She gives Kinu a long look before saying something stupid. “I don’t have one.”
The girl smiles again. She smiles a great deal, and it doesn’t make Naomi feel any better about the situation. It makes her feel worse, if anything at all, and wondering if she’s going to die in a bad way. “You’re not good enough to use it, but you’ve got it. Your whore mother was almost fortunate when she had you.”
“Every woman’s a whore in this village,” Naomi snaps, not really angry. The insult is an old one.
“The legacy of our founders, I don’t doubt. Your father gave you those tattoos to cover his own ass,” Kinu says, jerking her head and indicating the thick red marks covering Naomi’s face and arms. “He was probably a jounin who knew his seals. It would take me a day to break them.”
“I don’t know my father.”
Kinu laughs. “You’ll find him, old teacher. You’re quite good at that.”
Naomi tries to figure out what the punishment will be if she refuses, for surely Kinu will provide one. It won’t be pleasant, but she might survive it. She’s survived a whole lot of things. “And I should do this for you, why?”
Why the hell do you care?
“Because I know a secret,” Kinu murmurs, leaning forward to share it or just pretending that she will to raise the suspense. “You’ll want in on it.”
“Will I now?”
“Meizu and Gouzu were ordered to report for intelligence training, weren’t they?”
The question is asked innocently, though Kinu is anything but. Naomi’s mind sputters; trying to find a way to answer the statement, for it’s not really a question coming from a woman like Kinu, and failing to find the words to phrase it. She keeps catching on the fact that Kinu knows, that she fucking knows about the mission summons when the boys don’t.
It occurs to her a moment too late that the girl with pearl earrings sitting across from her is in Interrogation, and it’s her trade to know things she isn’t supposed to. Of course Kinu knows. She probably knows who issued the orders as well, and why, and for how much the client is paying for two chuunin to play at being whores. Of course Kinu knows. The only question now is what she’ll do with it; how far she’s going to play the game she’s started. The pieces have been laid and they’re a few rounds into the game.
There are no rules, of course. Shinobi make it their business to avoid the rules whenever they can get away from it, and Kinu has proven that she can.
“You can stop it?” Naomi asks warily, the nameless alcohol forgotten. She wishes that she was sober, but there aren’t enough blessings or luck in the world to see that one through.
“Maybe.” The girl shrugs. “But not for free.”
Naomi shakes her head. “Of course not,” she mutters.
“Don’t be mad. We’re both kunoichi, aren’t we? You understand how it works.”
“You’ll stop their orders if I tell you who my father was?” Naomi asks, more to process it over in her own head than to gain clarification from the smiling sociopath across the table from her.
“What I really want is a shinobi who can utilize Quicksilver, but I keep my expectations realistic,” Kinu says briskly, slapping the table with her palm and making the rats scuttle away squealing. Even after their fellow’s death by way of Naomi’s sandal, they come out from the cracks, noising around for crumbs. They are starving; she can see their ribs. It makes them stupid. “You’ll find him, sensei, and you’ll show me where he is.”
Naomi spends a little time thinking it over, but just a little. There really isn’t any other option. Even if she didn’t care about her sane students, the crazy one would take this as an excuse to murder her, and shinobi don’t survive by letting that possibility stay one for long. She does care about the boys, though, and someone with information knows it.
Meizu and Gouzu are fighters. They have neither the will nor the temperament to go into intelligence. Naomi will kill to keep them out of it, to keep the Bloody Mist from breaking their spirits.
And, damn the girl to hell, Kinu knows it.
Shinobi with Bloodline Limits are either killed or enlisted into the Meizukage’s private guard, his personal assassins with his express permission to break each and every single one of their village’s laws to do his bidding. Never once has a shinobi left their leader’s private guard, alive or otherwise. The interrogators cut their bodies up when they no longer function. Naomi’s father is either one of them, dead, or just very good at hiding himself. If he’s still alive, he won’t want to stay that way for too long if she tells Kinu who he is.
There are things worse than dying, and interrogators know them all. Naomi spares a single thought for regret before deciding she doesn’t care about the man who paid her mother for a good, cheap fuck.
“Meizu and Gouzu never see an Intel mission, ‘long as they’re shinobi,” Naomi says suddenly.
Kinu’s smile says she she’s won. “You’ll find yourself dying in a bad way if you betray me.”
“Just hold up your part, girl.”
Kinu bares pointed teeth, and leaves as quickly as she came. Naomi returns to her alcohol and the rats return to her shadows, darting around her deadly sandals, whiskers trembling.
“Quicksilver,” Naomi muses. She throws the glass and watches as it shatters against the concrete and sawdust.
--
The name surname Higa gets her no where. Naomi supposes she knew it wasn’t real for a long time. Her father never did give her anything worth a damn.
--
“Sensei?”
Through the haze of a migraine and painkillers that don’t work, Naomi hears her students and tries to ignore them. It’s an exercise in futility, but such is the story of her life, always denying the inevitable.
She’s been drinking too much lately, and can’t find an excuse good enough to stop.
“Is she dead?” Meizu asks his brother.
“Don’t get stupider than you already are,” Gouzu snaps. He pokes her foot with the business end of a kunai. “Sensei? We’re supposed to train.”
Naomi pulls the pillow over her face, screwing her eyes closed against the frail light coming from the door they entered from. All around her, the apartment is falling to pieces like the old wallpaper, plaster playing peek-a-boo through the failings of the architecture. A sour green rug is caught around her coffee table in an apparent attempt to strangle the wood to death. There should be food in the small kitchenette, but Naomi can’t remember the last time she ate, or if her groceries haven’t started to rot.
There are a lot of things she doesn’t remember about the past few days. Like how long she’s been asleep, or if she really wants to contemplate whom she spent the night with. The answer’s probably no, since they left a long time ago, leaving only a forgotten senbon as evidence of their passage. It might be romantic if she thought about it hard enough, but Naomi decides she needs to get drunk to go down that road, and she’s reeling in the aftermath too hard to contemplate more.
Alcohol’s gotten her into trouble, but at least when she’s numb she doesn’t give a shit. Naomi removes the pillow from her face, groaning. She looks for the clock over the window and discovers it’s broken.
She can’t remember when that happened, either.
“Sensei?” Gouzu asks again, frowning through his bangs down at her.
“What time is it?” she rasps.
His frown deepens. For a teenager, Gouzu takes on more responsibility than he should have to. Sometimes Naomi forgets that he’s a shinobi and thinks him to be kind. “It’s ten, Naomi-sensei. You need a medic?”
“Should we beat anybody up?” Meizu inquires hopefully, shoving his brother out of the way so as to command the attention of their barely-coherent teacher. “Naomi-sensei! Should we be hitting anyone?”
“No!” she hisses, before he gets excited enough to invent answers for her, the answers he wants to hear. “Fuck no. Just hush for a minute.”
Meizu’s sudden deflation almost makes her feel bad. Almost. She forgets the thought when he starts talking again. His eyes take on a distant sort of gleam as he shivers with the bloodlust his body remembers from their last mission. “We’ve got a mission today. B-rank. I want to use the new poison. Teach me the antidote,” he demands. “Sensei! Teach it to me before we go!”
His enthusiasm grates, but only for a moment. Naomi finds it in herself to smile at them both, the two brothers she has started to think of as family. “Sure,” she says, trying not to frown through her migraine, “I’ll teach it to you.”
“Before we leave?”
“Before you leave.”
“Now?”
“No. Before you go.”
Meizu pouts, but only for a moment. His brother only glares at him.
Naomi props herself up on her elbows, blinking at them. They’re about the same height now, and so similar from the neck down that they might as well be doppelgangers. The same build, the same twitches and nervous habits. It’s their faces that are different, though. Meizu is the one with the rough face, with the stubborn mouth and wide black eyes, always darting around to take the world in. His hair is as wild as it comes, coal-black and the consistency of wires-easy to get things tangled in. If he’s ever combed it, Naomi couldn’t tell the difference.
Gouzu is the handsome one, dark hair long and messy in the way Naomi supposes is memorable. His eyes are as black as his brother’s, but calmer. He takes things in at his own pace-the buffer to Meizu’s wilder notions. No members of their team sleep very much, and the shadows show, but somehow it’s a kindness to Gouzu. He looks nothing but handsome, young and deceptively innocent. Despite all the things he has done, Gouzu has no scars on his face, just a hesitant smile and a tan line from the filter mask he wears on missions.
Naomi understands then why Intel wants her boys. Without their masks, without the twisting damages of bloodlust, they are pretty things to be seen, images to be admired and then taken by clients until the scars become noticeable. That ending will most certainly break them, and silently she renews her vow to finish the mission Kinu gave her.
“Sensei?” Gouzu asks, reaching a hand out tentatively. His mother hits him when she’s sober and ignores him when she’s drunk, and does the same to Meizu. They are used to rejection, and Naomi supposes she should expect caution from them. She taught them to be smart, after all. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be good in a minute.”
Meizu hops up on her futon without permission and attaches himself to her waist. His hold is tightening-Naomi can feel the strength in his arms, and the little flash of pride that she made him that way. After a pause, Gouzu follows suit, setting a gloved hand lightly down on her shoulder, still so afraid of being slapped.
She has hit them before, to prove points and to discipline them. Their mother, a whore Naomi does not care to know more than she already does, hits them whenever she can work up the strength for the blow.
“It’s okay,” Naomi tells them, pulling them close. “It’s okay.”
--
The aftermath of their mission sends them to the hospital, hooked up to machinery that gives them jutsu-enhanced medicine. Infections are the threat of the hour, a song of nasty death that changes with the hour. Naomi stands guard over them and remembers the teacher she killed.
Outside the window, a falcon with bright yellow eyes taps on the glass until she lets it in. It extends its leg with an air of practice, clicking its beak when she pulls the slip of paper free. Message delivered, it bobs its head at her, bright eyes like lamplights in the dark, and flies back out. Naomi closes the window after it. She leans against the cool glass and unrolls the little coil of paper.
A short message, written in viciously elegant kanji: You’re running out of time.
She can hear Kinu’s soft voice twisting itself around the ugly words, a proper threat for Kirigakure’s pet monster. The girl’s pretty eyes narrowing and her small hands promising violence, she can see it all in her head, the scenario playing itself out like a broken tape, catching on the nicks and giving meaning to the thoughtless gestures of their shared profession. The image is enough to make Naomi shiver.
It stands as evidence of how far she’s fallen, to shake over the imagination of a threat that hasn’t been said yet.
“Fuck,” she breaths. “Fuck.”
Her boys say nothing, breathing quietly through the death-like imitation of unconsciousness. Naomi makes a decision then, too quickly to regret, and its already gone too far even if she took a full year to map it all out. Quietly, she dips her hand into her kunai holster and comes up with a blade, dark metal flashing as her fingers curl around it.
She goes to Gouzu first, kind little Gouzu who doesn’t know how handsome he is, and what damages his face has caused. The blade is heavy in her hand, the ramifications of all she has ever done, and this stubborn kind of love, another of her many shortcomings.
Taku-sensei was right. Shinobi die because of their inadequacies, not because of other ninja. There is a bite to the truth she can only accept, flinching slightly when she is dealt the blow of Kinu’s imagined threat.
This is her fault.
“I’m sorry,” Naomi said, and cuts a swift line across his cheek before she can change her mind.
When she is done, her hands are bloody and no one will think Gouzu handsome anymore. Quiet tears making lines down her face, Naomi turned to his brother and the consequences of her many failures.
--
Naomi finds her father two days later. She doesn’t ask his name and he does not offer. There is no fight, and no words are exchanged between them, only a single long look that might not have held any importance at all. Naomi walks with her father and gives him to Kinu, who smiles in a way that is meant to be disarming.
She watches them leave and wonders what she has given up.
--
In the years that pass, the ghost of an old threat hanging over her head, Naomi watches her boys become good. They don’t become jounin, but she didn’t expect them to. They don’t have quite the amount of skill. What they do have, however, is style, and a reputation of violence earned through one of the highest kill-scores of any one team in the history of the Bloody Mist.
Sometimes they ask her if she is pleased, if she approves, and Naomi tells them she is.
It is only in her darker, alcohol-induced moments that she wonders if that isn’t a lie like so many others she has told them.
They become known as the Demon Brothers and no longer need her. And secretly, Naomi is happy. It isn’t the same as pride, just a jounin’s acceptance that her students are not so ambitious as to want a reputation of murdering their teacher. She knows very well what the village gossip says about her, about how she killed her teacher. The quiet glances and raised eyebrows that they think she doesn’t notice, and of course Naomi knows they admire her in the dark way benefitting of shinobi. She knows they think her a legend.
When she was younger, she had aspired to gain one. Notoriety is a bitter thing, though, she has discovered that now, and one better left alone. She has taken her poison, though. There really isn’t a chance to turn back, and maybe this is how it was all meant to happen. Perhaps Taku’s death occurred exactly when it was supposed to. Perhaps the gods really do play a hand in things.
Perhaps she has become aware of her own mortality, and her fear of what she can’t begin to understand.
She becomes pregnant on a mission and nine months later she has another student, a boy who doesn’t like her anymore than she likes him. Naomi calls him Ryuusuke after a teacher in the Academy who taught her how to kill the weaker half of his class. She does not introduce her son to his grandmother, doesn’t see the use in giving the old whore something to hold over Naomi’s head.
In the years until Ryuusuke can join the Academy, Naomi watches him for signs of a Bloodline Limit, a sign that her damaged heritage somehow got passed on stronger in her son. Nothing appears in him but a talent for kenjutsu and falling out of trees. By the time he first starts his official training-one year early because Naomi grew tried of coming home from missions to find him destroying their apartment-Ryuusuke has broken ten bones.
Naomi does not consider herself to be a good mother, but then, no one ever taught her how. Ryuusuke watches her with his father’s poison-green eyes, any love he might have once had for her buried deep, another scar to fade away over time. Six years old, he declares his ambition to become a jounin. The coldness in his face is his second desire, the unspoken drive to overcome his apathetic mother. Naomi does not doubt that he will try to kill her once he deems himself strong enough.
Part of her wonders if she will survive him, if she could bring herself to kill her son. The answer makes her realize how very far she has fallen. Ryuusuke might beat her, but only if he kills his mother. The only thing they share is the name Higa, the lie given by the last wielder of Quicksilver. She has given her son no reason to love her, no reason to spare her life if he gets to the point where taking it is no longer an unrealized ambition.
When he is ten, almost a genin and almost a shinobi, one of his teachers tells Naomi that he has inherited her quiet brutality. Naomi nods politely, as is expected. There is little pride in the action, but the teacher knows better than to question her. Higa Naomi has her legend, of course. It protects and excuses her from so many things.
Afterwards she finds a bottle of whisky lying among her kunai and drinks herself into oblivion.
--
Eventually Kinu’s old threat catches up with her. Eventually Higa Naomi dies, and eventually, when it is too late to do anything about it, she regrets not living for as long as she did. Eventually she regrets making her students into killers.
Eventually she regrets not knowing her son.
“I always hated you,” Kinu tells her, no longer smiling. “And look at what it’s come to. You never could stop anything.”
Inside the alleyway full of trash and dead rats, bones and shit, lust and rage, Naomi scrapes her nails against the bricks and doesn’t fight against the shinobi who strangles her. She does not know him and he does not know anything but Kinu’s genjutsu. His face is barren, a cold nothingness. This is not personal to him. He doesn’t know a damn thing about her.
It’s not personal, his hands say, so tight around her throat, cutting off her air. It’s not about me.
Of course, Naomi supposes it was always personal for Kinu. One grudge after another, another challenge overcome until there’s nothing but a ghost, a threat she never acted on. Kinu has become more than a legend now, and the children of the village whisper about the woman their parents fear, the kunoichi who never learned mercy.
When the instinct finally overtakes her resignation, brought out at the last moment by her trained fear, Naomi grabs at his wrist, digging her nails in. Blood comes freely, but it never stops.
Kinu was right about one thing, Naomi supposed. She never could stop the endings from coming.
Eventually her luck runs out, if it was there at all, and Higa Naomi drops into the dust and into a far greater legacy in death than she ever had in life.
--
3/8/09
Higa Naomi was born in the slums of Kirigakure no Sato to a whore and a bored shinobi. Nine months after their initial meeting, he consented to let Naomi take his name after her babbling mother tracked him down. Thirty years and ninety days later she will be strangled to death a few meters away from the ramshackle house she was born in. She does not know this now. Now she is ten and almost a genin, almost a shinobi like her father, almost a step above her mother. One thing stands in the way, and it is a boy Naomi doesn’t know. He has a kunai and the stance to say he knows it.
The field is surrounded by trees and broken rocks, salt caking over everything. An hour ago, it rained, and the mud sticks to their sandals, their gloves, their faces. It coats them all like the war paint the jounin wear when they go off to fight. An hour ago, the teachers lined them all up and marched them outside the village. Ten minutes ago, they were given kunai and the instructions to pair up and kill each other if they want to become soldiers.
Naomi wants to become a shinobi. There is no other option she will accept while she is still alive.
Rising up to cut the sky, the trees are blackened where they aren’t dead, or just plain dead. Some stand and others don’t have the strength anymore. There was drought and an attack from Kumogakure this year, and the land has suffered along with the civilians. The land always suffers. Civilians are expendable, she knows. Civilians are nothing.
The shinobi are still strong, despite it all. Shinobi endure. It is what they are trained to do.
Naomi wonders if her father died in one of the attacks, or if he just kept walking after all the missions. She knows he’s a jounin and knows she doesn’t have the right to know more. The whore’s daughter doesn’t have a place in the world until she overcomes her mother, and that chance is right before her, a trembling boy just her age and a little under her height.
“We train only the best,” Ryuusuke-sensei told them a little ago, when they were all shivering in the mud and holding their kunai the way they had learned and trying so hard not to forget. “And now we decide who can become shinobi. If you can’t survive this, you’ve got no right to that name.”
The weapon in her hand is cold, like the mud. Naomi can see herself reflected in the gray steel, the girl with the thin face and red tattoos that might mean something-she’s asked and nobody knows but her stupid mother, who won’t say a thing-a skinny little kid with her father’s name who might be a shinobi. If she kills the boy, the title is hers.
She has never killed a person before. There have been fights, but Naomi has never gone that far.
Looking at the mud, the dead trees, and the ground blackened by salt and the old relics of a ninjutsu fight from a war nobody wants to remember, Naomi thinks she can. She knows all about sacrifice, all about going without meals and watching herself get thin. Naomi knows all about losing when the only real course is to win. She knows all about being a civilian, and knows she won’t survive that life.
Only shinobi can rise above their parents in the Bloody Mist. Everyone else lives and dies by the two people who made them.
Naomi looks at the shaking boy opposite her, and then back at the kunai.
“Y-you could give up,” he whispers. “It wouldn’t be so b-bad.”
“No,” she says, and throws the kunai just the way she’s been taught, stance loose and low to the ground, digging her feet in for extra traction. “It would.”
For a single moment, a single heartbeat echoing inside her bones, Naomi closes her eyes. When she recognizes her own foolishness, and it does not take long, she opens them again. Then she breathes deep, in and out.
It doesn’t surprise her as much as she thought it would to discover that the blade went into his throat. It doesn’t surprise her when she kneels down and pulls it out, and the blood catches on her hands.
Naomi presents her bloody kunai to the teachers watching from the tree line. She sits in the mud to await their blessing, and isn’t disappointed when they name her a shinobi. Briefly, she wonders if her father would care.
--
Her first jounin sensei was a teenager who had barely earned the rank. It took him four days to die after being assigned to team three. Naomi didn’t attend his funeral. A few older shinobi did. The first jounin-sensei of team three was not long lived or missed.
The second is both, though he would share the same fate of the unfortunate young jounin who had been named their first teacher. Of course, they do not know it then. The only name he allows them to call him is Taku-sensei.
“I’m not here to be your friend,” he tells them, staring down his crooked nose at the three genin who met his glare with anticipation of what he will teach them. “I’m here to make you three brats into proper shinobi, gods willing.”
Naomi does not care for her squad-mates. They are stupid, weak boys who survived the graduation exam by luck and nothing else. They do not matter.
Taku-sensei shares her sentiments. She is the only one he does not break within the year. She is the only one who makes it to chuunin.
She is also the only one who comes to visit Taku-sensei when he is in the hospital, dying of blood poisoning. He looks at her tattooed face and smiles bitterly as he laments the loss of his arm. This is the first time Naomi has seen him smile in anything that is not bloodlust.
“Am I a shinobi now?” she asks, sitting down at his side. She brings him no gifts, as he neither desires nor expects any.
He snorts, propping himself up against the pillows. Outside, the rain comes down and splatters against the dirty hospital window, illuminating the great city of Kirigakure they have come to serve and defend. Under the many bandages, he is thin and heavily scarred. Taku-sensei has survived nine major conflicts and two incarnations of the Meizukage. It is ironic that he will not survive this, an attack on a border patrol by Leaf ninja.
They were chuunin with aspirations of becoming something more, much like Higa Naomi. The only difference is that she knows better than to leave survivors, even survivors with missing limbs.
Naomi watches her sensei and wonders how long he will take to die.
Eventually, Taku-sensei looks at her again. Lightning flashes through the window, a soundless boom because the thunder is not strong enough to come inside. “You’ve been a shinobi for a long time, girly,” he says.
She nods. The silence is unbroken for a long time. The sky is still dark when the rain finally stops.
Taku-sensei flexes his remaining hand. “I would ask something of you.”
“Of me?” Naomi wonders, for Taku-sensei has never asked her anything profound before, and his tone implies that intention now.
He sneers, belaying the seriousness of the request, but there is nothing to be done for it. Those who are dying are granted allowances they would not have otherwise, though Naomi has never had a mind to call him on his rudeness. It was a casual discovery that had brought to her attention the fact that he was born lower than she was.
Higa Naomi is not the only product of whores serving the Bloody Mist. Taku-sensei’s parentage is slightly darker, involving an ambitious thief, a daughter of a councilman, and a case of mistaken identity that was taken advantage of. There was bloodshed over the fact, and then there was Taku-sensei, who has never spoken of his family and never will. When he dies, only Naomi and a few select teammates of his will attend the funeral.
In that way, Taku-sensei never had a family. In that way, he proved to Naomi there were worse ways to come into the world.
“I have trained six shinobi,” Taku-sensei coughs, covering his mouth with a bandaged hand. His eyes are the color of granite with darker lines bleeding out at the edges, and cold with the ramifications of all his missions, and their endings. “You are the only one still alive.”
“Your actions?”
He snorts. “Their own shortcomings. The only Mist-ninja I killed was at the Academy, like you. That is unimportant. It’s an ending I prefer to avoid.”
There is a purpose to his words, but she cannot see it yet. Naomi folds her hands in her lap and waits.
“Of all my students, I think only you would understand my reason for asking,” Taku said after a moment.
Naomi frowns at him.
He laughs a little at her quiet confusion. “Kill me, apprentice.”
It is instinct to ask why first, and then deny second, but Naomi has learned to think about orders silently instead of out loud. Words have consequences if heard by the wrong person, or, depending on the words, if anyone hears them at all. She has learned this by the fists of her superiors, the older, taller jounin who do not give reasons like Taku-sensei does. He always has a reason, a method to the means in which he goes about them, and so Naomi looks for the reason before asking why.
While she thinks, Taku-sensei watches her. The bandages on his face cover up the crossed scars on his forehead from a bar fight over a woman when he was younger. The scars are worn and pale against his skin, old marks. He has not been young for a very long time.
Shinobi do not age well even with the aid of illusions, and he has never cared for the art of genjutsu.
Comprehension comes to her slowly, but it does come. She raises her chin up to look him in the eye, just as she did when he declared his intention to make her a shinobi or else break her in the attempt.
Taku-sensei did not break her with his training. Naomi knows that this last mission has broken him, though.
A shinobi cannot serve with one arm, not with the extent of damage that the enemy’s attack dealt. And Taku-sensei cannot live as anything but a shinobi.
“Come to your conclusion?” he asks lightly. Again, he smiles and makes her wonder. Perhaps it should be odd that a man who hates excessive displays of emotion would smile at the prospect of his quiet death. Somehow it is not. Somehow it fits what she knows of Taku-sensei, and the many things that she will never understand about her teacher.
“Yes,” Naomi says.
He nods, and looks out the window again. Nothing greets him but the black sky. There are no stars, even though there are usually hundreds at this time of year. A civilian would say their absence is a bad omen, but neither of them have been civilians for a very long time.
If superstitions ruled, all shinobi would be damned. Most of them are anyways, but not all of them. Not all of them are deserving of that fate after death. There are minorities, even in the Hidden Mist, exceptions to the rule of cruelty the leaders have fashioned for a hundred years and then a few more no one thought to record. Not all actions committed are worthy of punishment. Not all souls are worthy of hell.
Naomi wonders where she will go for doing this. She wonders if it makes a difference.
“I wish you luck,” Taku-sensei says suddenly, turning away from the window to face her with his intense gray eyes. “In all that you do.”
“Shinobi don’t need luck,” she says, standing up and pushing the chair back quietly. Naomi moves forward and places her hands on his face.
Taku-sensei looks at her face and somehow beyond it. Naomi envies his serenity, however he came to possess it. “Perhaps not,” he says, “but it would be a worthy gift, wouldn’t it?”
Naomi touches her forehead to his. Under the bandages, she can feel the heavy burden of the scars that have been twisting across his skin for a long time. She snaps his neck with the quick, sharp motion learned by hours of practice and three counts of experience, breathing though her mouth when it becomes too much to hold in. Taku-sensei falls back from her grip without a sound.
Fifteen years old and six months a chuunin, Higa Naomi attended the funeral of her jounin-sensei. She stood alone at the services, and all those who knew what she had done observed her with cool eyes. They did not approach her or attempt to understand her reasoning, and she did not try to explain it to them.
--
Six years a jounin and nine months out of the hospital after her last mission with the Hunters, the brass gives her a genin team and doesn’t allow her to return them. The boys are twins with a reputation of fighting and stealing from the local merchants when their mother forgets they exist and doesn’t feed them. The girl comes with the warped gift of sociopathic tendencies and a prodigal talent for doing unrepeatable things to people with knives. Born shinobi, all three of then, and try as she might, Naomi can’t break them.
She tries her damndest, but they just keep showing up every day for training. Eventually she gives up the hope that they’ll die in their sleep or otherwise quit, and comes to enjoy their company.
Well, almost all their company.
The girl’s name is Kinu, and if she says anything at all, it’s creepy and unwanted, even from a jounin’s perspective. Naomi considers herself to be tough, knows she’s a good shinobi and a survivor, but Kinu scares the fuck out of her. She’s a pretty little girl, with a pointed chin and curly black hair, but the way her eyes light up, and the things she can do with a kunai make Naomi wonder if she’s tough enough to survive torture.
She’s never thought about it before, never had a reason to and never been drunk enough to make one up. A pretty little genin named Kinu changed that just by existing, and looking at things the way she does, like nothing matters at all. Like it’s all a game and the rules are made for the very purpose of being shattered.
It is unthinkable that a child should be able to shake her, but Naomi can’t deny the truth to herself. She’s a good liar to the world, but not to herself. There are lines that even murderers can’t cross.
Kinu just smiles at her teacher like she knows all of the jounin’s fears, and goes back to playing with her blades, dissecting frogs and laying their organs out in rows. Naomi is neither surprised nor disappointed when the Hunters come to claim the girl. Though she would never admit it, Naomi breathed easier when the girl was no longer under her watch. She never could forget what Kinu did to the Cloud ninja three months back.
If the girl left any survivors, Naomi doubts they lasted long that way. There are situations in which suicide becomes a valid option, and Kinu is oh so good at creating them.
Listening to the whispers, Naomi learns that Kinu has been taken in by one of the top interrogators in the Mist. She learns that her former student has a real talent, a gift from the shinobi gods of a bloodier age. She learns that Kinu has a reputation, that Kinu likes hurting people, and wonders when sociopathic tendencies started to become a desirable trait in shinobi.
She thinks it always has been, and then turns back to the boys to yell at them some more.
It is easier if Naomi does not think of the pretty genin named Kinu who likes to tear things apart.
The boys are Meizu and Gouzu, twins in more than just the name. Small, gangly boys from a mother who Naomi never attempts to meet and her students never mention. It didn’t surprise her when she learned they were twins. They cannot finish each others sentences, but it is more from a lack of trying than any lack of coordination.
They are coordinated, alright. Naomi teaches them to fight as a team, and they become good at it. Two years into their training under her, she presents them with a barbed chain and poisoned claws, and they master their new toys in less than six weeks. Neither of them are geniuses, and Naomi doubts they will ever become jounin, but they are good, capable chuunin, boons to the village that created them.
It shouldn’t come as a shock when the village begins to demand things that Naomi refuses for them, but she is nonetheless.
--
“No.”
The chuunin manning the desk raises an eyebrow at her. Half of his face is covered in thick burn scars; the other side is painfully handsome and his quiet half-smile says he knows it. “It’s an order, Naomi-sensei.”
“It’s been refused,” she informs him quietly, the dangerous tone she learned from the sensei she murdered seven years ago.
The chuunin with the ruined face doesn’t appear impressed. He inspects his nails with a trained lack of empathy, a great pile of mission scrolls piled next to his elbow awaiting further inspection. His name isn’t known to her, just another chuunin assigned desk-duty for either punishment or medical leave for an unknown period of time until another replaces him.
Naomi decides she will remember him, not for his face, but for the fact that he has found a way to remain completely impassive to everything the Bloody Mist has shoved into his face.
“It’s not even for you,” he says.
“I’m their teacher.”
He shrugs, uncaring.
She leans forward until their noses are inches apart. His eyes are black and untouched by shadows. The shinobi life is his because it is the easiest. “My students kill people. Sometimes they steal things. And that is the extent of their talents because I say it is.”
The chuunin meets her stare and holds it. “Your students go where the missions take them, just like we all do.”
Half of his face is ruined, yet he is still handsome. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is. Some things can’t be explained through logic. Naomi wonders where his missions have taken him, and if he regrets the outcomes. Perhaps he does, under his mask of apathy.
Perhaps the mask isn’t one at all. Perhaps his blank face is just a mirror to a shinobi who feels absolutely nothing.
Even Kinu, the sociopath who will become one of the most feared torturers in the history of the Hidden Mist, had her emotions. They were twisted and warped to gain new definitions, new directions to take, but they were there.
The chuunin manning the mission-desk has no name Naomi wants to know, and apparently no emotions, just his training and his scars.
“I refuse this mission,” Naomi tells him, knowing even as she does it that he will not care, and it will change nothing.
“The orders aren’t for you,” the chuunin says, holding up the mission summons. “Your students will present themselves for duty at eleven-hundred hours for further instructions. Good day, Naomi-sensei.”
She swings at him, intending to break his nose. Predictably, he dodges.
--
Shinobi do most of their profession in shadows, realized or created through one kind or illusion or another, and Naomi is a very good shinobi. She was promoted young and stayed tough enough to survive Black Ops, tough enough to survive two crazy students and a month dealing with a psychopathic one. She knows all the rules to their game, and knows how to break them cleanly.
Right now, the break isn’t clean. Right now, the break has a hundred nicks and burs waiting to catch on something that can bleed. Naomi eyes the yellow liquor inside the glass that hasn’t seen a rag in a good week, and wonders when she’s going to stop caring. This is the fifth time she’s intended to get so drunk she won’t want to be alive in the morning, and the seventh time she’s actually done it.
Alcohol has a way of creeping up on a person and hissing sweet things about numbness and the sort of apathy that the scarred chuunin from the mission desk had down to the last dot. Naomi doesn’t like it much, but when she drinks, she drinks for the dead, with all their insatiable hungers, and in the morning, she knows she’s going to hurt.
The bar is for shinobi, though the fact isn’t advertised out loud. It works through gestures, through glares coming from battle-hardened soldiers with fraying nerves and vicious tempers. The Bloody Mist needs its civilians, but it doesn’t like them very much. Naomi sits in a corner with a dead rat and her miseries, though she wouldn’t call them that.
Above her, electrical cable snakes across the ceiling, occasionally sparking. The place is big, once upon a time a grain warehouse that a war got a hold of and nearly killed. She can still see the scorch marks on the walls if she cares to look. The whole place smells of blood and booze, and the sawdust covering the ground.
It’s a firetrap now just like it was back in the wartime that Naomi was a part of, but that’s part of the attraction. Shinobi come here when they’re thinking about dying and need alcohol bad enough to rid them of the notion.
She grips the shot glass and tries to remember what the drink was called. It had a name and it wasn’t whiskey, though Naomi thinks it might be a distant cousin.
A rat scuttles under the table and pauses a few inches away from her sandals, whiskers twitching. It squeals when Naomi smashes her heel into its back and snaps its spine. She watches it thrash and try to run away, nerves firing bad signals into its brain until the animal finally dies, eyes rolled up.
“Stupid thing,” Naomi mutters, downing her drink and shouting for another. “Stupid dead thing.”
“You didn’t strike me as the type,” a light voice comments.
Naomi blinks through the haze of bad alcohol, and nearly chokes when she recognizes the girl talking to her.
“But shinobi do the strangest things under pressure,” Kinu finishes, sliding a glass across the table to her half-drunk former teacher. “I never did think very much of you.”
She takes a seat without asking and clasps her hands on the edge of the table. Two years haven’t made her anything but prettier, Naomi notes with drunken scorn. The lovely assistant to the torture masters of Kirigakure, with her pouting mouth and curly black hair soft enough to break hearts even as her hands break souls, stands before her. There are no scars marring her pale face, and a light dusting of blue powder on her eyelids to make her seem kind.
“You want something?” Naomi asks. She manages through a feat of great personal control to stop her voice from cracking.
Kinu smiles, and for a moment, Naomi forgets just how fucking crazy she is. “I suppose you don’t think I have the right to ask.”
“You don’t,” she mutters sullenly, toeing the dead rat with her sandal.
“Maybe not, but rights don’t have much to do with it. I outrank you now, did you know that?” Kinu cocks her head, curls bouncing with the motion. There are six pear studs in each of her ears, and a simple gold chain around her neck, gifts from her mentors and coworkers who think it’s cute to dress her up like a civilian. “So by rights I could just order you to do whatever the hell I want, and if you think you mean a thing to me, then wake the fuck up, old teacher.”
Naomi takes the glass Kinu brought for her, sparing one thought for poison and then downing the greatest half of it. She doesn’t wince at the sour taste blooming at the back of her throat. “I’m not your sensei.”
The girl snorts, and the innocent air is gone, and the sociopath that Naomi has come to fear is back in full force. Kinu has learned to act, Naomi sees, and act well. She will become a powerful leader in their military.
The thought scares her more than the alcohol can account for.
“Of course not,” Kinu says matter-of-factly. “I just like remind you that you almost got stuck with training me.”
Naomi swirls the remaining alcohol around in the glass. “You’re one sick fuck, Kinu.”
“Take comfort in the fact that you helped make me.”
“What do you want?” she asks again, wondering if she could kill one of the village’s top interrogators and get away with it. It would be like a mercy killing, because women like Kinu are dangerous and will lead the village to glory and ruin in the same breathe.
Mercy should still count for something in this age.
Kinu leans back in her chair, tapping her chin lightly. “I’ve been a jounin for six months now. They call me a prodigy, you know? It’s a lie, of course. I stole something very important from the Meizukage, and they gave me the rank in exchange for its safe return. Our village is very pragmatic. I know a great deal that cannot be repeated, and who knows, I might have written it down somewhere.”
The light above their heads flickers out for a moment, and then goes back on again, buzzing faintly. Kinu’s gaze slides up to it, and then back to her former teacher again. She smiles, showing off pointed teeth. “The Hidden Mist lets me be because I am the fucking best at what I do, and because I might have done some things to my current teacher, Naomi, things I will do to you if you don’t do what I ask.”
“You would say that,” she mutters.
Kinu just shrugs. “You respond to threats, and so I threaten you before I bribe you. The combination’s going to work wonders, you’ll see.”
“What do you want?”
The alcohol no longer seems like a good idea.
“I want your Bloodline Limit, Naomi-sensei.”
She gives Kinu a long look before saying something stupid. “I don’t have one.”
The girl smiles again. She smiles a great deal, and it doesn’t make Naomi feel any better about the situation. It makes her feel worse, if anything at all, and wondering if she’s going to die in a bad way. “You’re not good enough to use it, but you’ve got it. Your whore mother was almost fortunate when she had you.”
“Every woman’s a whore in this village,” Naomi snaps, not really angry. The insult is an old one.
“The legacy of our founders, I don’t doubt. Your father gave you those tattoos to cover his own ass,” Kinu says, jerking her head and indicating the thick red marks covering Naomi’s face and arms. “He was probably a jounin who knew his seals. It would take me a day to break them.”
“I don’t know my father.”
Kinu laughs. “You’ll find him, old teacher. You’re quite good at that.”
Naomi tries to figure out what the punishment will be if she refuses, for surely Kinu will provide one. It won’t be pleasant, but she might survive it. She’s survived a whole lot of things. “And I should do this for you, why?”
Why the hell do you care?
“Because I know a secret,” Kinu murmurs, leaning forward to share it or just pretending that she will to raise the suspense. “You’ll want in on it.”
“Will I now?”
“Meizu and Gouzu were ordered to report for intelligence training, weren’t they?”
The question is asked innocently, though Kinu is anything but. Naomi’s mind sputters; trying to find a way to answer the statement, for it’s not really a question coming from a woman like Kinu, and failing to find the words to phrase it. She keeps catching on the fact that Kinu knows, that she fucking knows about the mission summons when the boys don’t.
It occurs to her a moment too late that the girl with pearl earrings sitting across from her is in Interrogation, and it’s her trade to know things she isn’t supposed to. Of course Kinu knows. She probably knows who issued the orders as well, and why, and for how much the client is paying for two chuunin to play at being whores. Of course Kinu knows. The only question now is what she’ll do with it; how far she’s going to play the game she’s started. The pieces have been laid and they’re a few rounds into the game.
There are no rules, of course. Shinobi make it their business to avoid the rules whenever they can get away from it, and Kinu has proven that she can.
“You can stop it?” Naomi asks warily, the nameless alcohol forgotten. She wishes that she was sober, but there aren’t enough blessings or luck in the world to see that one through.
“Maybe.” The girl shrugs. “But not for free.”
Naomi shakes her head. “Of course not,” she mutters.
“Don’t be mad. We’re both kunoichi, aren’t we? You understand how it works.”
“You’ll stop their orders if I tell you who my father was?” Naomi asks, more to process it over in her own head than to gain clarification from the smiling sociopath across the table from her.
“What I really want is a shinobi who can utilize Quicksilver, but I keep my expectations realistic,” Kinu says briskly, slapping the table with her palm and making the rats scuttle away squealing. Even after their fellow’s death by way of Naomi’s sandal, they come out from the cracks, noising around for crumbs. They are starving; she can see their ribs. It makes them stupid. “You’ll find him, sensei, and you’ll show me where he is.”
Naomi spends a little time thinking it over, but just a little. There really isn’t any other option. Even if she didn’t care about her sane students, the crazy one would take this as an excuse to murder her, and shinobi don’t survive by letting that possibility stay one for long. She does care about the boys, though, and someone with information knows it.
Meizu and Gouzu are fighters. They have neither the will nor the temperament to go into intelligence. Naomi will kill to keep them out of it, to keep the Bloody Mist from breaking their spirits.
And, damn the girl to hell, Kinu knows it.
Shinobi with Bloodline Limits are either killed or enlisted into the Meizukage’s private guard, his personal assassins with his express permission to break each and every single one of their village’s laws to do his bidding. Never once has a shinobi left their leader’s private guard, alive or otherwise. The interrogators cut their bodies up when they no longer function. Naomi’s father is either one of them, dead, or just very good at hiding himself. If he’s still alive, he won’t want to stay that way for too long if she tells Kinu who he is.
There are things worse than dying, and interrogators know them all. Naomi spares a single thought for regret before deciding she doesn’t care about the man who paid her mother for a good, cheap fuck.
“Meizu and Gouzu never see an Intel mission, ‘long as they’re shinobi,” Naomi says suddenly.
Kinu’s smile says she she’s won. “You’ll find yourself dying in a bad way if you betray me.”
“Just hold up your part, girl.”
Kinu bares pointed teeth, and leaves as quickly as she came. Naomi returns to her alcohol and the rats return to her shadows, darting around her deadly sandals, whiskers trembling.
“Quicksilver,” Naomi muses. She throws the glass and watches as it shatters against the concrete and sawdust.
--
The name surname Higa gets her no where. Naomi supposes she knew it wasn’t real for a long time. Her father never did give her anything worth a damn.
--
“Sensei?”
Through the haze of a migraine and painkillers that don’t work, Naomi hears her students and tries to ignore them. It’s an exercise in futility, but such is the story of her life, always denying the inevitable.
She’s been drinking too much lately, and can’t find an excuse good enough to stop.
“Is she dead?” Meizu asks his brother.
“Don’t get stupider than you already are,” Gouzu snaps. He pokes her foot with the business end of a kunai. “Sensei? We’re supposed to train.”
Naomi pulls the pillow over her face, screwing her eyes closed against the frail light coming from the door they entered from. All around her, the apartment is falling to pieces like the old wallpaper, plaster playing peek-a-boo through the failings of the architecture. A sour green rug is caught around her coffee table in an apparent attempt to strangle the wood to death. There should be food in the small kitchenette, but Naomi can’t remember the last time she ate, or if her groceries haven’t started to rot.
There are a lot of things she doesn’t remember about the past few days. Like how long she’s been asleep, or if she really wants to contemplate whom she spent the night with. The answer’s probably no, since they left a long time ago, leaving only a forgotten senbon as evidence of their passage. It might be romantic if she thought about it hard enough, but Naomi decides she needs to get drunk to go down that road, and she’s reeling in the aftermath too hard to contemplate more.
Alcohol’s gotten her into trouble, but at least when she’s numb she doesn’t give a shit. Naomi removes the pillow from her face, groaning. She looks for the clock over the window and discovers it’s broken.
She can’t remember when that happened, either.
“Sensei?” Gouzu asks again, frowning through his bangs down at her.
“What time is it?” she rasps.
His frown deepens. For a teenager, Gouzu takes on more responsibility than he should have to. Sometimes Naomi forgets that he’s a shinobi and thinks him to be kind. “It’s ten, Naomi-sensei. You need a medic?”
“Should we beat anybody up?” Meizu inquires hopefully, shoving his brother out of the way so as to command the attention of their barely-coherent teacher. “Naomi-sensei! Should we be hitting anyone?”
“No!” she hisses, before he gets excited enough to invent answers for her, the answers he wants to hear. “Fuck no. Just hush for a minute.”
Meizu’s sudden deflation almost makes her feel bad. Almost. She forgets the thought when he starts talking again. His eyes take on a distant sort of gleam as he shivers with the bloodlust his body remembers from their last mission. “We’ve got a mission today. B-rank. I want to use the new poison. Teach me the antidote,” he demands. “Sensei! Teach it to me before we go!”
His enthusiasm grates, but only for a moment. Naomi finds it in herself to smile at them both, the two brothers she has started to think of as family. “Sure,” she says, trying not to frown through her migraine, “I’ll teach it to you.”
“Before we leave?”
“Before you leave.”
“Now?”
“No. Before you go.”
Meizu pouts, but only for a moment. His brother only glares at him.
Naomi props herself up on her elbows, blinking at them. They’re about the same height now, and so similar from the neck down that they might as well be doppelgangers. The same build, the same twitches and nervous habits. It’s their faces that are different, though. Meizu is the one with the rough face, with the stubborn mouth and wide black eyes, always darting around to take the world in. His hair is as wild as it comes, coal-black and the consistency of wires-easy to get things tangled in. If he’s ever combed it, Naomi couldn’t tell the difference.
Gouzu is the handsome one, dark hair long and messy in the way Naomi supposes is memorable. His eyes are as black as his brother’s, but calmer. He takes things in at his own pace-the buffer to Meizu’s wilder notions. No members of their team sleep very much, and the shadows show, but somehow it’s a kindness to Gouzu. He looks nothing but handsome, young and deceptively innocent. Despite all the things he has done, Gouzu has no scars on his face, just a hesitant smile and a tan line from the filter mask he wears on missions.
Naomi understands then why Intel wants her boys. Without their masks, without the twisting damages of bloodlust, they are pretty things to be seen, images to be admired and then taken by clients until the scars become noticeable. That ending will most certainly break them, and silently she renews her vow to finish the mission Kinu gave her.
“Sensei?” Gouzu asks, reaching a hand out tentatively. His mother hits him when she’s sober and ignores him when she’s drunk, and does the same to Meizu. They are used to rejection, and Naomi supposes she should expect caution from them. She taught them to be smart, after all. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be good in a minute.”
Meizu hops up on her futon without permission and attaches himself to her waist. His hold is tightening-Naomi can feel the strength in his arms, and the little flash of pride that she made him that way. After a pause, Gouzu follows suit, setting a gloved hand lightly down on her shoulder, still so afraid of being slapped.
She has hit them before, to prove points and to discipline them. Their mother, a whore Naomi does not care to know more than she already does, hits them whenever she can work up the strength for the blow.
“It’s okay,” Naomi tells them, pulling them close. “It’s okay.”
--
The aftermath of their mission sends them to the hospital, hooked up to machinery that gives them jutsu-enhanced medicine. Infections are the threat of the hour, a song of nasty death that changes with the hour. Naomi stands guard over them and remembers the teacher she killed.
Outside the window, a falcon with bright yellow eyes taps on the glass until she lets it in. It extends its leg with an air of practice, clicking its beak when she pulls the slip of paper free. Message delivered, it bobs its head at her, bright eyes like lamplights in the dark, and flies back out. Naomi closes the window after it. She leans against the cool glass and unrolls the little coil of paper.
A short message, written in viciously elegant kanji: You’re running out of time.
She can hear Kinu’s soft voice twisting itself around the ugly words, a proper threat for Kirigakure’s pet monster. The girl’s pretty eyes narrowing and her small hands promising violence, she can see it all in her head, the scenario playing itself out like a broken tape, catching on the nicks and giving meaning to the thoughtless gestures of their shared profession. The image is enough to make Naomi shiver.
It stands as evidence of how far she’s fallen, to shake over the imagination of a threat that hasn’t been said yet.
“Fuck,” she breaths. “Fuck.”
Her boys say nothing, breathing quietly through the death-like imitation of unconsciousness. Naomi makes a decision then, too quickly to regret, and its already gone too far even if she took a full year to map it all out. Quietly, she dips her hand into her kunai holster and comes up with a blade, dark metal flashing as her fingers curl around it.
She goes to Gouzu first, kind little Gouzu who doesn’t know how handsome he is, and what damages his face has caused. The blade is heavy in her hand, the ramifications of all she has ever done, and this stubborn kind of love, another of her many shortcomings.
Taku-sensei was right. Shinobi die because of their inadequacies, not because of other ninja. There is a bite to the truth she can only accept, flinching slightly when she is dealt the blow of Kinu’s imagined threat.
This is her fault.
“I’m sorry,” Naomi said, and cuts a swift line across his cheek before she can change her mind.
When she is done, her hands are bloody and no one will think Gouzu handsome anymore. Quiet tears making lines down her face, Naomi turned to his brother and the consequences of her many failures.
--
Naomi finds her father two days later. She doesn’t ask his name and he does not offer. There is no fight, and no words are exchanged between them, only a single long look that might not have held any importance at all. Naomi walks with her father and gives him to Kinu, who smiles in a way that is meant to be disarming.
She watches them leave and wonders what she has given up.
--
In the years that pass, the ghost of an old threat hanging over her head, Naomi watches her boys become good. They don’t become jounin, but she didn’t expect them to. They don’t have quite the amount of skill. What they do have, however, is style, and a reputation of violence earned through one of the highest kill-scores of any one team in the history of the Bloody Mist.
Sometimes they ask her if she is pleased, if she approves, and Naomi tells them she is.
It is only in her darker, alcohol-induced moments that she wonders if that isn’t a lie like so many others she has told them.
They become known as the Demon Brothers and no longer need her. And secretly, Naomi is happy. It isn’t the same as pride, just a jounin’s acceptance that her students are not so ambitious as to want a reputation of murdering their teacher. She knows very well what the village gossip says about her, about how she killed her teacher. The quiet glances and raised eyebrows that they think she doesn’t notice, and of course Naomi knows they admire her in the dark way benefitting of shinobi. She knows they think her a legend.
When she was younger, she had aspired to gain one. Notoriety is a bitter thing, though, she has discovered that now, and one better left alone. She has taken her poison, though. There really isn’t a chance to turn back, and maybe this is how it was all meant to happen. Perhaps Taku’s death occurred exactly when it was supposed to. Perhaps the gods really do play a hand in things.
Perhaps she has become aware of her own mortality, and her fear of what she can’t begin to understand.
She becomes pregnant on a mission and nine months later she has another student, a boy who doesn’t like her anymore than she likes him. Naomi calls him Ryuusuke after a teacher in the Academy who taught her how to kill the weaker half of his class. She does not introduce her son to his grandmother, doesn’t see the use in giving the old whore something to hold over Naomi’s head.
In the years until Ryuusuke can join the Academy, Naomi watches him for signs of a Bloodline Limit, a sign that her damaged heritage somehow got passed on stronger in her son. Nothing appears in him but a talent for kenjutsu and falling out of trees. By the time he first starts his official training-one year early because Naomi grew tried of coming home from missions to find him destroying their apartment-Ryuusuke has broken ten bones.
Naomi does not consider herself to be a good mother, but then, no one ever taught her how. Ryuusuke watches her with his father’s poison-green eyes, any love he might have once had for her buried deep, another scar to fade away over time. Six years old, he declares his ambition to become a jounin. The coldness in his face is his second desire, the unspoken drive to overcome his apathetic mother. Naomi does not doubt that he will try to kill her once he deems himself strong enough.
Part of her wonders if she will survive him, if she could bring herself to kill her son. The answer makes her realize how very far she has fallen. Ryuusuke might beat her, but only if he kills his mother. The only thing they share is the name Higa, the lie given by the last wielder of Quicksilver. She has given her son no reason to love her, no reason to spare her life if he gets to the point where taking it is no longer an unrealized ambition.
When he is ten, almost a genin and almost a shinobi, one of his teachers tells Naomi that he has inherited her quiet brutality. Naomi nods politely, as is expected. There is little pride in the action, but the teacher knows better than to question her. Higa Naomi has her legend, of course. It protects and excuses her from so many things.
Afterwards she finds a bottle of whisky lying among her kunai and drinks herself into oblivion.
--
Eventually Kinu’s old threat catches up with her. Eventually Higa Naomi dies, and eventually, when it is too late to do anything about it, she regrets not living for as long as she did. Eventually she regrets making her students into killers.
Eventually she regrets not knowing her son.
“I always hated you,” Kinu tells her, no longer smiling. “And look at what it’s come to. You never could stop anything.”
Inside the alleyway full of trash and dead rats, bones and shit, lust and rage, Naomi scrapes her nails against the bricks and doesn’t fight against the shinobi who strangles her. She does not know him and he does not know anything but Kinu’s genjutsu. His face is barren, a cold nothingness. This is not personal to him. He doesn’t know a damn thing about her.
It’s not personal, his hands say, so tight around her throat, cutting off her air. It’s not about me.
Of course, Naomi supposes it was always personal for Kinu. One grudge after another, another challenge overcome until there’s nothing but a ghost, a threat she never acted on. Kinu has become more than a legend now, and the children of the village whisper about the woman their parents fear, the kunoichi who never learned mercy.
When the instinct finally overtakes her resignation, brought out at the last moment by her trained fear, Naomi grabs at his wrist, digging her nails in. Blood comes freely, but it never stops.
Kinu was right about one thing, Naomi supposed. She never could stop the endings from coming.
Eventually her luck runs out, if it was there at all, and Higa Naomi drops into the dust and into a far greater legacy in death than she ever had in life.
--
3/8/09