[fic] The Great Pantomime
I was trying to figure out what Shisui could have been doing for Madara in The Burning of Paper Instead of Children. Anyway, this story isn’t it, but it was way more fun to write. It should either make you laugh or creep you out - if it does both, I'd be very chuffed.
Title: The Great Pantomime
Fandom: Naruto
Pairing: Madara/Shisui
Summary: A ( Read more... )
Title: The Great Pantomime
Fandom: Naruto
Pairing: Madara/Shisui
Summary: A ( Read more... )
This is not a single star, but a cluster of them, fragile and flickering.
-
He was young, then, already jaded, his naivete already blunted on the cold certainties of war. They both were; they had been born into an endless conflict, and it was as unnatural to them as flying fish to think of sparing a little of themselves for human frivolity. But.
“Madara,” Izuna says, sipping tea in their tent at midnight, “the man who sold us dried herring said there are flying fish in the Land of Water.”
And it's late winter, anyway - humans everywhere too busy starving to tear strips out of each other - so Madara follows his little brother to Water, where the frost has already begun to melt. They camp in a small clearing beneath a tree in the foothills of the mountains, and while Izuna takes a boat out to look for the fish, Madara watches the construction of a village in the nearest valley and thinks he'd like to conquer it someday.
At night Izuna pins him down in their tent by stark lamplight, and tries, in his own way, to conquer Madara with kindness, pressing desperate kisses to the nape of Madara's neck. For a while Madara indulges him, lets himself be fucked on hands and knees while contemplating the many ways this dalliance will be useful; however, he is still quite young, and his rapacious mind soon wanders.
When Izuna realizes, mid-coitus, that Madara has grabbed a scroll and begun to read, Madara can hear/feel him shake with muffled laughter, and feel the hot tears falling on his back.
It is a year to the day after that failed bid for intimacy that Madara demands Izuna's eyes, and his brother offers them up with no complaint. Useful, indeed.
-
Port villages are ripe with riots and gang wars born from the melting pot of cultures, opportunities for entertainment, and although acting as Mizukage is certainly entertaining, Madara is still only biding his time. He has grown rather accustomed to having a lot of time to bide, and it bores him, bores him terribly, so he scours the countryside for more tops to spin, more pawns to set in motion.
(Within the next ten years he hopes that the seeds of insanity he has bred into the Kaguya clan will bear fruit. Their kekkei genkai is enviable, and Madara does not enjoy being made to feel envy.)
In the clearing where he once conquered his brother there is a miserable hovel of a house, and he slithers into the skin of a commoner to inspect it. He finds an unattended child in the yard, prodding a filthy dog with a stick - it snaps at the boy, whining and whimpering, at the end of its short tether.
“Good afternoon,” he says, and the boy continues to jab at the animal with the dull, humorless precision of a saint or sociopath. Madara smiles indulgently, a thin mask stretched thinner. “What's your name?”
He receives a calculating stare, senses the uneasiness: that of a predator meeting, and recognizing, a fellow predator. (This is Kirigakure - shark meets shark? Quite droll.) “Yagura.”
“How would you like to be a jinchuuriki?” Madara asks, the Mangekyou spinning.
(Years later when Yagura has murdered and fucked his way into the position of Mizukage at the ripe old age of thirteen, Madara is long gone, but he is, in a detached way, quite appreciative. He'd never have thought of turning shinobi graduation into a death match, but human cruelty is its own form of genius, and while Madara cannot take credit for the results, he can congratulate himself as a patron of the arts.)
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“You can't be everywhere at once,” he's heard people say, and he thinks well, no, but I can be everywhere that matters.
The house, when it occurs to him to look, is to his irritation currently inhabited by frightened runaways of the Kaguya raids, thin and pale and desperate to trust someone. He picks the first face that comes to mind, a rail-thin girl with flaxen hair whom he buried in Iga, and assumes it with the ease of a lifetime of practice. They let him in with abominably little fuss, cooing and fussing over his crocodile tears, and Madara is too world-weary to marvel at their stupidity.
One stray in particular catches his eye - a girl with two kekkei genkai, a mutt that could only survive in a city like Kirigakure, where such indiscretions between clans can live in the shadows of the port city's overall tumult. Terumi Mei is her name - a bauble, a novelty. After offering to take first watch, Madara messily disposes of all of her sleeping friends and flits away like a nightmare, leaving her to shake, mindless, among the corpses.
He returns later on the same day, this time disguised as a stern Kirigakure ANBU, and holds her, clucking his tongue, as she sobs. Before anyone really knows what is happening he has enrolled her in Yagura's brutal slaughterhouse of a genin academy; it is easy to infiltrate the systems he himself created, easy to slip her into the matrix, easy to disappear again. The whole experience, he assumes, is very traumatic for her.
As a means to ensure that she never returns to the house in the clearing (which, over the slow roll of decades, Madara has come to think of as his own) it is, he admits, a touch farcial, but for the time being it will prevent future inconveniences - and this particular pawn, if it reaches the end of the board, may very well turn into a queen.
-
Eating has beome something he only does when he remembers he ought to.
On his way to divest Yagura of his tailed beast (for this design is no longer serviceable to his purpose, and he has grown sick of prodigies), he stops by the clearing, and is unsettled to discover that someone has been attempting to repair it, has gone to the trouble of planting a vegetable garden. Clearly, like roaches, they are settling in for the long haul. Madara is weary of such infestations. As with his clan, and as with the earth itself, he is a jealous master.
It is a father and daughter pair, clearly outcasts from the village - a gaunt, threadbare man with a limp, and a girl that is brain-damaged enough that she is incapable of articulating herself, sitting unmoving for hours at the window. He dispatches of the father quite simply, tilling his flesh into the earth while she watches unblinking; she is still there on his way back, and so he takes her by the hand and walks her into the middle of the closest forest, where it is his slow amusement to observe her dying of thirst.
Upon the eve of his departure, he briefly entertains the notion of burning the place to the ground, but demurs. It may be useful; and Madara prefers to orchestrate far more subtle demolitions.
-
When a setting for Shisui's gradual deconstruction becomes necessary, Madara thinks of the house in the clearing by the mountains, and wonders whether dry rot has set into the walls yet. Upon inspection, the only life to be cleared out this time is a small family of mice - who are, after all, too stupid to realize they are in the way.
He also discovers that the man with the limp had left a cane and a few old, worn yukata neatly folded in the wood shed - a joke, that these things should be so well preserved, when their owner's skeleton has long since weathered into dirt.
Madara weighs these props for admission into the constellation of his scheme, and decides, shrugging into a new skin as he pulls on a yukata, that they will do.
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I really like this idea that all the ills in the Naruto universe could be traced back to one point of origin. Like Madara is the Original Evil that plagues the world or something. He's almost elemental that way, beyond man to comprehend.
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So - so Madara is the ANBU that "rescues" Terumi, and then, years later, Madara puts on the same ANBU appearance to tip her off about Shisui, which is why she trusts him, and - /babbles on and on, ad infinitum
Yeah, I like the idea that Madara turns into a living personification of war/turmoil/Badness. It's very... Princess Mononoke style demonification. Aaaand I have stopped making sense so I will go to sleep now.
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Makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah. Like after Shodai killed him he was sort of reborn as this entity that's lost all humanity and only retains the shadows of it.
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