The Decemberist : Part II [YonShi, KushiMina, KyuuYon, KyuuOC; R]
Title: The Decemberist: Part Two ∙∙∙ Lookingglass
Author: the_lady_lamb
Genre: Naruto
Sub-genre: Angst/Romance
Summary: (Part II: Chapters XXVI-XXX) Namikaze Minato is nothing other than what he makes himself, but he knows that the war that makes itself affront him is not the war he sould really worry about. He just doesn't know how much until he meets Her.
Rated: R for semi-gratuitous violence and sexually suggestive themes.
Author's Notes: What started out small has blown into something I never expected. (For you guys, yukari_rin and fujiwara_san.)
CHAPTERS XXI-XXV
The Decemberist
PART TWO ∙∙∙ LOOKINGGLASS
xxvi.
Minato steadfastly refuses to believe in fate, of course, but he doesn’t say anything about it because he knows that he and Hizashi would have to debate it for hours, and that isn’t the best stealth tactic in the world; either way, it does seem that it is with rather loaded dice that they both are assigned to report to Kushina. It’s a cruel deity that watches Minato, it seems - or rather, Kushina is cruel, most especially when she is frustrated or angry, and between the war and her siblings, Kushina is frustrated and angry virtually all the time. He isn’t sure she means anything that comes out of her mouth, most at all when it’s said to him because they really don’t know each other at all, but Kushina has a way of saying things with such incredible conviction that he’s apt to believe her even when he knows she speaks false.
”You know, you can’t do shit correctly. You do know that, right?”
”Yeah, yeah, your motherfucking lineage. Your lineage has about the average worth of a snail crushed underneath its own shell. You can see things. Yeah, whoop-the-fuckin’-do, Hyuuga. I see things too. And my face? Stays exactly the same when I’m doin’ it. And I don’t give myself hemorrhoids.”
”You have about the average worth of a train wreck, Namikaze. The average worth of a trainwreck. Take that home, won’tcha? Choke the damn chicken with it.”
”Fuck your sensei. Your sensei? Was a dickwad.”
”You know what I would just love right now, Namikaze? I would love if you dropped dead. I would just love it. It would make my whole godfucking day if you just dropped dead of a heart attack right now. It really would.”
It comes to a point where every single thing that comes out of her mouth in their general direction is somehow twisted into a violent insult, and the reason for it is very clear, most especially when the dark bruise on Keisui’s cheek seems to be the only thing involved in the sibling’s feud that fades with time. At every available opportunity the issue is rehashed anew, and the two attack one another with bitter criticisms and wounding gibes, and both come out considerably worse for wear afterwards. It becomes a constant ritual, one that usually results in the repeated verbal abuse of at least five Leaf-nin.
Kushina and Keisui are hardly the only ones to pin the visitors from Konoha as scapegoats for the world’s problems, either; the inhabitants of Uzugakure are infamous for their hostility towards any and all outsiders, and the ANBU serve as the perfect targets for a constant volley of antagonism from the very people they strive to help. It isn’t fair, and so the troops are divided sharply in a moral schism, one half beside the warriors of Konoha, the other half serving beside the two feuding Uzumaki siblings. It’s wearing, certainly - Minato finds himself more tired because of the arguing than the actual fighting itself which, despite their initial assessment, is not going well. Neither army moves forward or gains ground, and the dead on either side only increase, which is very worrisome for those in Uzugakure’s army, which is the much, much smaller of the two. So it is that the battle seems to grow endlessly on all fronts: Uzumaki vs Uzumaki; Cloud vs Whirlpool; Whirlpool vs ANBU; and it wears heavily on Minato’s ability to function.
It also becomes increasingly evident that Kushina is singling him out, that she must like berating him for simply existing more than she likes berating anyone else because she does it even when she’s in a relatively decent mood, which is not often. For every failure, every difficulty, he is somehow to blame, or at the very least the best person to take her frustration out on, and he struggles to bear it, most desperately when she starts to figure out how much the girlfriend-oriented comments torture him. She actually has an amazing propensity to instill self doubt in him, something he isn’t particularly grateful for, and it starts to gradually inhibit his usefulness. He’s distracted both by her and by the distractions he gifts himself with so that it won’t sting quite as badly, distractions that he dares not mention in public. (Distractions that send him into the barracks early and keep him tossing awake at night, because he swore one day when he was young that he would maim anyone that might paint their eyes over Shisui’s body so boldly and yet the lines of it plague him. Her voice plagues him. Her being. Her heart. Love and lust intertwine themselves and he gasps between the breaks of it.) There are few.
And the days wear onward.
They go everywhere - the land is shrinking for its invasion, or atleast that’s the way it seems. The territory becomes strikingly familiar to him, so quickly that it’s frightening, and every day they battle for it, battle for a country that will not have them, under commanders that do not like them or even one another. It tears at him so ungently that he starts to have physical maladies resulting from it; an increasing shortness in breath, an incredible tiredness that seeps into his every action. He stumbles, makes more mistakes, gets slower at recovering, and Hizashi is the first person to comment, but certainly not the last.
”You’re making yourself sick. You have to stop listening to her. You’ll die if you keep this up.”
And Minato kneads his temples with his fingers. “I know. I know.”
It is hard to do or say anything about it. Kushina loves to pick fights, start fires, and when she cannot she loves to see the people she dislikes break under her scrutiny. And Minato is, unmistakably, a person she greatly dislikes. There is nothing he can say against her without completely losing all dignity and exploding in her face and so he carefully keeps himself from it, does everything in his power not to cause her any more distress than is absolutely necessary. He does everything he can to be understanding, to behave himself, does everything in his power not to snap at her. There is only so much he can handle - he knows this - but he can’t afford to snap at her. For one thing, she is his commander, and for another thing, he really doesn’t want to. He really doesn’t. Every time he sees her fighting with her brother it saddens him, and so he tries to take on her frustration so that it will burden her less. It isn’t that he knows her well, or that he even likes her that much, but Minato’s compassion for others is nothing but if not painfully enduring. He really doesn’t want to retaliate just because of the angry red marks her comments leave on the back of his composure.
But just because he tries to stay collected, does not mean they work any better together. Minato’s specialty and fighting style rests entirely on the basis of knowing everything that he will do, planning for everything that will happen before it actually does. Kushina’s rests entirely on the basis of being prepared for everything by not being prepared for anything - it is a style that relies on its own complete tactlessness, and so it is difficult to work with in any regard, but even more so when it is with a style that is its complete opposite. On missions, they plague one another; for every plan Minato makes, he somehow intrudes on Kushina’s lackthereof. For every situation Kushina runs into with no plan at all, she somehow completely counteracts Minato’s ability to foresee and react accordingly. In all the ways Minato and Hizashi (Minato and Shisui) work together flawlessly, Minato and Kushina work together with about the same consistency of choked roots. They tumble over one another’s strategies and become so quickly irritated by the notion that she takes to berating him nonstop (even when she isn’t angry) and he takes to avoiding her at virtually all costs. It’s really not a very good system, but he’s trying. He really is.
(And at night he follows the path of his descent, runs with his imagination to a Shisui he conjures out of darkness and tiredness and frustration, one he prays the true Shisui might never see or know about. His fingers become his disgrace and he unties knots that aren’t there and recounts all the ways in which he does not love himself, recounts all the ways he disgusts himself. It is the nights that truly make his stomach turn but he can’t help it, cannot help the desperation with which he wishes she were beside him, he wishes he could see her, he wishes so badly he could touch her, she could tell him the way out of his constant state of misery. And he is miserable, in short order. Quite miserable, in fact, to the point where the nights do nothing to cheer him whatsoever, not that they did much to begin with. He is incensed by his own vulgarity, his own uselessness, and the pool of self doubt he is bogged in becomes a lake, becomes more and more inescapable with each torturous comment that falls from Kushina’s mouth.)
He chides himself for his passiveness, for his neglect, for his imagination, for his shamefulness, for everything he needs to be chided for and several things he does not. Minato is not an optimist but he is not weak either, and so it becomes less that Kushina is berating him and more that he is berating himself, and it all persists until just the time when he knows that he won’t be able to stand it much longer.
And that is when Keisui dies.
xxvii.
There is no one who knows what happens, exactly - it looks like a massacre, but no one can be entirely sure. No one who was there survives to give a detailed report, afterall, and so the events are shrouded in the same low clouds that hang dangerous in the sky on the day it occurs.
It is a long superstition in the Land of the Whirlpool that clouds bring bad luck. The origins of it aren’t mysterious, either; with its low, level lands and many inland seas, the people of the Whirlpool are in constant fear of flooding. Everything is centered around those floods that happen annually, naturally, and so to be unprepared is to have a death wish of some sort. They move out as an army, move out early in the morning when the sun is just silhouetting the rims of the clouds that bode so ominous, that make all their commanders look to one another nervously. (Except Kushina and Keisui, of course. They don’t look at one another for a long time, and when they do, they’re glaring so hard it makes Minato wonder, idly, if their eyes are going to fall out of their heads, or if burn marks are going to appear on their cheeks.)
Theirs is a simple mission, one of guerrilla tactics; there is a recent group of bolder Cloud-nin who have seen fit to settle down on the edge of the Whirlpool’s center-most front to the east, only about ten kilometers from Uzugakure no Sato. Each commander’s group is to be split into groups of ten, one of which will stay with the commander him- (or her-) self. They move together like a small ocean of small shinobi (for the people of the Land of the Whirlpool are small - Kushina herself towers over quite a few of her lieutenants, and Amenbou is simply a giant, atleast two heads above almost half of his soldiers and all of his siblings) until splitting off into groups. Kushina goes to the northwest, Amenbou to the northeast, and Kaigyo and Keisui go on paths between the two of them. They flow through the forest like water, the plan being for the eldest and youngest Uzumaki to circle around the back and for the middle siblings to attack from the front.
They do this. Everything is simple: the tactics are effective and the band of Clouds is small, defenseless, unsuspecting. They are done within an hour of beginning. The sun breaks jaggedly through the clouds for a second, everything seems to have gone as planned.
But Keisui and his soldiers do not aid them. Somewhere between the village and the campsite, they vanish - it is such a sudden and unprecedented occurrence that no one notices until about forty-five minutes into the cleanup; it is Kaigyo who looks around him, brow creasing in confusion.
”…hey, Amenbou, where’s Keisui?”
Minato sees Kushina’s head whip around towards the question, but she scowls when Amenbou glances her way. She feigns disinterest, turns back to pilfering through the enemies’ belongings with the rest of her squadron. Minato, though, pays close attention, stopping his movement completely, and later on he is glad that he does so, because it means he sees Yuugaki Arisa’s last moments.
Yuugaki Arisa is a young soldier, rumored to be Keisui’s love interest of several years - she has long, pale curls of hair waterfalling to her waist which is thickened with muscle and muddy brown eyes that are sometimes green and sometimes black and sometimes in between. Shortly after Kaigyo and Amenbou begin conversing on what to do in the mysterious absence of their brother, she stumbles through the trees, her body in tatters, her face only still half on. It is hard to see through the surrounding trees, but somehow her movement catches the shadows - she’s obviously fought everything, fought bravely and endlessly to get here. (And her last words are-)
”Commander…we were…” She stumbles and there is an eerie silence, as if the world has stilled completely to watch her very last performance. Everyone is as still as the quiet itself, as still as stone and quieter, riveted to the tears streaking from her one remaining eye. She is a human crater, bleeding and disfigured, still almost-pretty in her terminal desperation. “Keisui-sama was…so…oh…oh, God…everyone…everyone is…they were…I’m…oh God.”
She drops into the water, her charka control giving way with her breath, and the world explodes.
xxviii.
Almost two kilometers from the campsite, straight along the path Keisui’s squadron was designated to take, there is something like a huge basin that seems to have been freshly gauged from the earth. It is impossible to tell what did it - something huge and tragic, a catastrophe of some sort - and the only thing more obvious than the damage it has inflicted upon the land is the damage it has inflicted on everything else. It is as if something arose from the water and had a temper tantrum on the spot, but that does not seem a dramatic enough interpretation of the way the land is devastated. They land together, a large group, and stare about incredulously, and Minato swears he can hear someone crying until he looks up and realizes that it is Kushina screaming, her voice torn and coarse, breaking like glass or metal. Amenbou is holding her away from something, but Kaigyo is on the ground - the boys wear the same expression, one of complete, semi-emotionless disbelief. Kushina screams and the world seems to break in sorrow around her, and after a while Kaigyo sags, slowly curling down into a ball over something he holds tightly to his chest, shaking with repressed grief. Amenbou stays completely still, cemented in place, arms twined restrictively around his sister who never turns her back to the scene. (It would be too effeminate.) Everything is very, very quiet for a long time around them.
It takes Minato a long time of looking at Kaigyo to realize that he is knelt over his brother’s severed hand.
(They find a few body halves, later on, but Arisa seems to have been the farthest from whatever blast it was that did it. Keisui’s hand is the most respectably intact human limb they find, and they don’t find many.)
Kushina screams herself hoarse and exhausts herself so thoroughly that Amenbou carries her home, and she falls fitfully asleep against him. They walk slowly, the whole group of them, solemn and quiet. Kaigyo walks at the very back of the procession, holding his brother’s hand like it’s an infant, and Minato feels incredibly dazed throughout the whole three-hour walk home, so much so that it takes him almost two of those hours to realize that the heaviness in the air is born of his own heart, and that the erratic breathing around him is caused by the fact that over four-fifths of the mourners are crying, silently. He watches a woman beside him, Seiseki Ayu-san who he’s met before, reach up to wipe tears from her face noiselessly, even as they pour down like rain, and he finds himself so awed with respect that he is speechless.
When they enter the streets of Uzugakure, the group separates, walking slowly to the houses Minato has never seen them go to before. Doors open and nameless men and women, families of soldiers, open their arms and embrace the homecoming, faces painted with sadness, with expectation of terrible news. He sees wives, husbands, before the doors close in some instance; he is struck through (as if by a chord) when an old man, come to welcome back his son and grandson, lifts a hand to his mouth, face twisted in grief at the news, moisture springing in his old, gray eyes. Minato has never seen a people like this, so uniformly affected by a single person’s death, and in many ways it both amazes and depresses him. He can both understand it, and yet knows that he cannot possibly understand it. It’s so strange and yet so incredibly deep that he cannot bring himself to be unappreciative, but the tragedy is done, and he and the other ANBU simply follow the Uzumaki siblings until they are alone with them, until they are back inside the shinobi barracks and they are parting simply because it is only right to let the family mourn as they will. It seems wrong to follow them any further, but it seems just as wrong to break the silence, and so when Hizashi hands him a handkerchief, it shocks him, and he puts a hand up to his own cheeks.
(Shinobi Precept #25: A true shinobi must never show his emotions.)
Hizashi’s voice is gentle. “So it goes.”
The ANBU echo him thoughtlessly. “So it goes.”
Minato is silent.
And that is simply the way of it.
xxix.
He wakes in the middle of the early morning hours without letting them pass - he opens his eyes and stares into the ceiling and is quiet for a long, long time. His jaw aches from clenching his teeth so hard for so long, and so he releases them, tries to relax himself. (It’s no use - he can’t sleep any longer. His own mouth tastes sour.) His skin is dry, itchy around his face, and he is quiet in it, he is docile for second before he follows his eyes, pushing himself up. His mind tells him it is too early for such things. (He wishes he could obey it.)
But it is as if there is wire through his hands. Now that he is arisen he can’t force himself back down. The coldness of the morning is like icy water thrown on him, biting and unfriendly, and he shivers in it. He childishly thinks to drag his blankets along with him (no one could notice, where is he possibly going to go?) and so he uproots the quilt from the sheets and carries it to the ground and once he is on two feet solidly, he throws it around his shoulders and burrows further into it, so that only his hands and face show above it, and only his feet in pajama pants below. It’s so childish, but so is the weather childishly cold; two wrongs do not make a right, but being less childish than the weather does not make a person smart, either.
He walks softly, aimlessly, and he wonders if he is dreaming or if he is awake. It seems too cold for him to be still inside of a dream, but the hall seems to stretch before him in silent abstraction, and he wanders as if he both knows and does not know where he is going. He breathes out, steams the air, and feels that all he would have to do is hold his breath in and he would be a ghost. He keeps his blanket close, disliking even the feel of the cold morning outside of it, keeps his blanket close and thinks that if he were simply going to disappear, his blanket would fall through him, and that would be the way he would know. (Needless to say, he is still mostly asleep.)
He walks into the showers for no reason except that they are at the end of the hall, and he cannot seem to turn himself. He walks slowly and without apparent purpose; he wanders aimlessly across the tile and makes turns for no apparent reason and in moments he is standing in front of Kushina, who looks as blank as he does. He doesn’t really think about it; he only thinks that she looks incredibly small. (She is crouched low against the walls of one of the showers, staring out at the wall of the room, unmoving, expressionless. Her hair hangs around her face, and Minato can’t tell if she is wet or not.)
He speaks softly. “You look very cold, Commander.”
She sighs softly back at him. “Shut up, Namikaze.”
He stands very still, watching her for what seems like a very long time and must span at least seven minutes, and she finally moves her face to gaze up at him. He finds the coarse mixture of war and peace in her eyes to be strangely soothing, an oceanic lullaby of sorts, but he says nothing. He simply watches them.
”…sit down.”
He obeys her, pulling his blanket around him and seating himself at her side, legs folded in a tired, business-like fashion. He looks down at them. They remind him of the legs of a bronze Buddha statue he once saw at a temple his mother took him to for New Year’s (he had been very young at the time) and he wonders if his legs could ever really look the way they do now? Maybe they are someone else’s. He can’t understand it. She stays still next to him for a long time, and then she starts talking and he simply listens, because that is what Shisui does and it usually helps.
”I should’ve just let it go. He was right and I should’ve just let go.” She lets her head drop back and stairs up at the ceiling as if there’s a chance it might be the early morning sky instead. “I should’ve just accepted that…that I…” She stares for a long time and their breathing is the conversation between them. He wonders if she wants to cry and is refraining because he is there. Kushina strikes him as the type of woman who would hate to cry in front of her peons. (Hate to cry in front of anyone.)
”I was wrong. That…I have been somehow thinking of this as…as a game. To get through it. Because…because if this isn’t a game, then Keisui is-Then…Keisui…is…”
He lowers his head, turns slightly away from her. That way he will not see it. She is very, very quiet and he respects that. (Ghost-like. He watches the design of the tile shift. He’s very tired, but not enough to sleep. His brain is silent and inactive, but he cannot leave her like this, for some reason. He doesn’t understand it, but maybe he doesn’t need to. Maybe he simply needs to-)
It’s a long time before she speaks to him, but when she does he doesn’t look at her face for a small moment, but he knows to when she takes his left hand between two of hers. She doesn’t look at his face, but at the lines of his palm, and her eyes are rimmed with exhaustion, and he studies the curves of her face before looking back down at her fingers. She slowly traces a spiral into his palm.
”You asked Amenbou about it before. This symbol. What it means to our village?”
He does not correct her. She finishes at the center of his hand.
”Uzumaki. The whirlpool.”
She is quiet.
”A sacrifice.”
And he knows that she is apologizing to him.
(And he accepts it with dignity.)
After the sun rises (and they have parted hours earlier, gone back to sleep and bid one another awkward but almost kind farewells) there is a funeral held out on the water. It is unlike any funeral Minato has ever attended, and they all stand in a circle around fifty-one wreaths cast in the water, the Uzumaki siblings and everyone else from their village dressed in white exotic robes of mourning, the ANBU dressed in corresponding black. The entire village is there, and every remaining ANBU, (there were three killed who were of their ranks, afterall) and there is a strange, unprecedented brotherhood to it, and when Kushina leads the singing of the dirge, she does not cry at all. Her voice is strong, her notes are beautiful, and everyone choruses around it, as a human might the wind itself.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night.
It’s perfectly wonderful, in the way only a tragedy possibly can be.
And Minato keeps his hands to himself that night.
xxx.
The days wear on. (War stops for nothing - death is nothing if not a perpetuator, even in cases such as this.) The Uzumaki siblings withdraw into their militaristic seriousness, keeping a thick wall between them and their soldiers, respectful but no longer quite as fun-loving, no longer quite as optimistic. In the day, they give orders and hardly speak to do anything else; in the evening, they retire to their own home together, and if not there, they sleep together in a room separate from the rest of the barracks. The rest of the village keeps a distance in respect for their mourning.
And the night after the funeral, the first letter arrives.
Minato;
(To what wind will the child blow?) I thought that I would write to you. Knowing this, I wonder what has kept me from it? The battle here is monotonous. Uninteresting. But perhaps that is better, since it means that I am as safe as I know you should want me to be.
They say letters of war often have a historical significance to those that study such things. (But I wonder if studying us two would be folly, perhaps?) If there be ink for you to do so, I would bid you to do as you please with this.
That I might reciprocate that love which you have bestowed unto me.
- Shisui
His mood is so heightened that he is halfway ashamed of himself, but not ashamed enough to keep from being ecstatic for atleast four hours about it, reading it over and over and over, so many times that he could recite it if he wanted to. (He dares not. He knows that there’s no way he can possibly emulate Shisui’s beautifully poetic prose in the way it ought to be emulated; his voice is not enough. The very voice of gods wouldn’t be enough.) He half dances his way into the evening, so enthused he is by it, and he stutters his way through at least three pages of jittery electric sentences tinged different colors by his love until he finally compiles something that he deems appropriate to even think of sending. Even then he revises it for nearly two days afterwards, tearing it limb from limb until it can boast, in his mind, atleast part of the perfection that Shisui’s does.
Shisui,
To think that you should compare yourself to any folly whatsoever is inconceivable. You must be descended of some Heaven-your letter reached me when I most needed it. You cannot possibly imagine my gratefulness. That you might give me thought enough to write me such things…I really am so grateful. Thank you Shisui. I think that I am desperately lonely without you.
The land and customs here estrange me a little but death feels the same. War is the same as it has always been - we recently lost fifty of our comrades to something unidentifiable almost a week ago. My commander has taken the loss very hard. Now that I sit here thinking of her I realize that the two of you might greatly dislike one another… To be truthful I am not certain she likes me very much either. But it is hard to see this village so distressed. The people here are usually so high-spirited but this seems to have crushed the majority of them. I have not heard laughter among them for a long time now.
I think that I greatly dislike our circumstances. I wish so badly that I could see you if only for a short while. There is nothing that calms me like thoughts of you but I have so little time to think that even then I can do nothing but long to return to you as soon as it might be possible.
I love you dearly, and pray that this might find you safe and in as good of health as this war might permit.
Everything,
Minato
The Clouds press in on all sides-the slaughter of Keisui and his troops has left the Uzugakure troops a mere seventy five percent of their original size, and the difference is catastrophic in a battle where they were already vastly outnumbered. The situation’s hopelessness is slowly being impressed upon all of them, and they fight hard, but their losses become larger. Keisui’s band was the only one remaining with its exact numbers; the other siblings have already been cut down into the forties, and as the weeks progress, Kushina loses almost seven men, Amenbou almost ten, and Kaigyo as many as twenty. The latter’s frustration and depression is even deeper than that of his other two siblings, and they try their best to take on his sorrow as well as their own, but Kushina and Kaigyo do not have Amenbou and Keisui’s grace under pressure. Kushina presses forward in her own guilt, her own grieving, and tries so hard to act as Kaigyo’s support, but she is rough-edged and stubborn, and while she tries never to have enduring arguments with either brother (presumably due to the hard lesson she’s learned from Keisui) she and Kaigyo have so much difficulty getting along that Amenbou stops allowing them to dine together. All three suffer together and apart, and the troops look on sadly, unable to aid them.
Minato;
Such things to say. I wonder, do you listen to yourself? Such words~ (And that I might know how they should look upon your lips. Upon your mouth. You say ridiculous things sometimes. Most times. Do you know it? Or do you simply disregard? I never know.) But perhaps since there is love in your heart to serve its basis. (The moon will not set? I wonder.)
In reference to the heavens, I might entail that here we are recumbent, dependent upon stars rather than charts, than maps, and so the moonrise is more balanced upon the cusp of my mind than the sun. My sleep, it is now the opposite of yours I think. I am awake when you are not awake. (And so are you awake when I am to be sleeping? How odd, then, that I cannot bring myself to it, of late.) The air is so thick with smoke and the sound of the battlements that I think that we will all be painted by it - I know not my comrades. The majority of those who graced my arrival have gone, and are replaced by younger and younger versions of one another. A children’s war? (So it would seem.)
One of them reminded me of Obito-kun, recently. I thought I might not tell you, since he was killed recently. But, it occurred that the whole of war might be tragic. So it goes. Do you think that migratory birds fly at night, even when they cannot see one another? I think they must, for we can all hear one another here, but not well. It is dark, always.
Perhaps for you as well? But, then, does the sun hear the moon?
That I might deserve your giving nature.
- Shisui
There are times when Minato feels he might be part of the scenery, that he might be as useless as the trees around him. The days wear on endlessly; there is no word from Konoha, even though Umino sends home more and more disparaging weekly reports. There is no backup coming, and Minato knows it is not because they do not want to send it, but because it cannot be afforded. The Uzugakure’s case is to be a sad one, it seems already decided, and every day morale sinks further. The air around his head buzzes and hums with tension, and he tries all he can to be something those around him can depend on.
Shisui,
I feel like I’m going crazy. I don’t know that I am of course. I hope I’m not. But there is no way I could possibly know. I would ask if you could describe the sensation for me but I think the implications of it would be needlessly cruel. I think there is enough needless cruelty in both of our lives without us turning it on one another. I desperately hope that I am not crazy. But it’s all so desperately sad, Shisui. I don’t know how much more of it I can take. I don’t know if I can keep bringing myself to the threshold of insanity without falling in myself. One doesn’t simply commit murder after murder day in and day out, doesn’t simply weather such injustices, doesn’t commit them knowingly over and over without somehow being affected.
I love you so much. Please get some sleep before you send your next letter. If I could only feel your heartbeat in my dreams I might not feel so…
I hate dwelling on this…
Everything,
Minato
He tries his hardest, and eventually it is Kushina who comes to him. She does so with suddenness, and it startles him backwards when she bursts in on him on a walk around the barracks, ranting, ordering him only to stay quiet and still until she finishes and then simply barreling through every emotion she’s felt that day. He stands frozen before her as she recounts every small detail, angry and raving, mouth moving so much faster than he could ever move his own and hands whipping around to emulate her rocket-fast words. At long last she winds downward and finishes succinctly and he stares at her for a very long time before she starts to laugh.
”You look constipated.”
And the irony of her laughter is almost as depressing as the things she’s decided to unload on him. But he almost laughs about it himself. It’s simply too overwhelming to do anything else. If one doesn’t laugh about it, they’ll probably cry. Minato does his best to avoid doing either, and Kushina does quite a bit of both. And so, slowly, they begin to form relaxed kind of bonds based simply on the fact that they complement one another. She stops insulting him seriously, stops giving him migraines. And he listens to her, stays respectful.
And so it works.
Minato;
Insanity in the face of insanity is sanity still. (Do not doubt yourself so.) Do you think that it is right, in such a situation as in one of sleep, to feel cheated if the dreams are not as you wished they might be? A disappointment in a world as such. How mild. How precociously unfair.
Did you know that your Hatake-kun was deployed here recently? He is not grouped with me and so I am unsure of his condition and circumstances, but he was oriented a few days ago. He seems to be fairing relatively well, but (as I’ve said) I cannot relay to you details that I do not know. For the security of your mind, I will investigate it at times when it is possible to do so. (Though, I think that this perhaps proves my assumption correct? The youth of infertile territory.)
We are not winning. (But is it bad luck to say so, truly? When there is nothing to truly be won.) Perhaps we are not losing. (Or perhaps it is that all is lost.) Overwhelming sadness that you might speak of, I believe I have seen it too. Like white walls.
That we might be younger (older?) than we are. That we might be closer than circumstances allow, at time present.
-Shisui
It is an odd friendship that blooms between them, creeping bonds that twist like ivy around their wrists. Kushina and Minato are joined in the brotherhood of war, in the sisterhood of feeling, and he becomes one with her issues of family. A month passes and still Kaigyo is reeling from the loss, out of control and still losing soldiers. Each one that falls sends him further into the recesses of his mind, and that only makes him more distant, a worse commander, more likely to lose soldiers. Amenbou slowly tries to take on his burdens but there is no way to do it, since he is burdened himself. The frustration between all three of them mounts.
Shisui,
The attacks by the Clouds have increased. Our numbers are dwindling. We began this with just over two-hundred soldiers. Now we are a force of less than one-hundred-and-twenty. Our borders are so nebulous nowadays that I fear that there will be an attack on the Whirlpool village itself any day now. The civilians are getting more and more agitated by it. Every omen that blesses our presence seems ominous and I cannot see this getting any better. The situation itself is so hopeless that it pains me. Everyone feels it too-that we could all die soon. That the cause itself might as well be lost for the chances we have.
This is no longer the battle of an underdog. It is the battle of a group of demented suicidals. Even our commanders cannot fight the feeling that even if we do overcome this it will not have been worth it in the end. And it does not even look like we shall overcome it.
Shisui if we do not send for backup or if none comes, I fear for our comrades and myself. I could never bring myself to turn away from the people of this land - they are far too good a people for that. They are hard-working kindly people who want only to preserve themselves and the lives that they have always led. They started this battle to stay as they are. I have come to appreciate that about them. I have come to appreciate everything about this place.
But I do not want anyone else to die have to die here.
Everything,
Minato
P.S. Please let Kakashi read this if he so desires. It grieves me that I am so caught up in the goings on here that I might disregard either of your own for any reason. The pettiness that war might breed in men is so atrocious. It turns my stomach.
(P.P.S. Please stay safe.)
CHAPTERS XXXI-XXXV
CHAPTERS XXXVI-XXXX
Author: the_lady_lamb
Genre: Naruto
Sub-genre: Angst/Romance
Summary: (Part II: Chapters XXVI-XXX) Namikaze Minato is nothing other than what he makes himself, but he knows that the war that makes itself affront him is not the war he sould really worry about. He just doesn't know how much until he meets Her.
Rated: R for semi-gratuitous violence and sexually suggestive themes.
Author's Notes: What started out small has blown into something I never expected. (For you guys, yukari_rin and fujiwara_san.)
CHAPTERS XXI-XXV
The Decemberist
PART TWO ∙∙∙ LOOKINGGLASS
xxvi.
Minato steadfastly refuses to believe in fate, of course, but he doesn’t say anything about it because he knows that he and Hizashi would have to debate it for hours, and that isn’t the best stealth tactic in the world; either way, it does seem that it is with rather loaded dice that they both are assigned to report to Kushina. It’s a cruel deity that watches Minato, it seems - or rather, Kushina is cruel, most especially when she is frustrated or angry, and between the war and her siblings, Kushina is frustrated and angry virtually all the time. He isn’t sure she means anything that comes out of her mouth, most at all when it’s said to him because they really don’t know each other at all, but Kushina has a way of saying things with such incredible conviction that he’s apt to believe her even when he knows she speaks false.
”You know, you can’t do shit correctly. You do know that, right?”
”Yeah, yeah, your motherfucking lineage. Your lineage has about the average worth of a snail crushed underneath its own shell. You can see things. Yeah, whoop-the-fuckin’-do, Hyuuga. I see things too. And my face? Stays exactly the same when I’m doin’ it. And I don’t give myself hemorrhoids.”
”You have about the average worth of a train wreck, Namikaze. The average worth of a trainwreck. Take that home, won’tcha? Choke the damn chicken with it.”
”Fuck your sensei. Your sensei? Was a dickwad.”
”You know what I would just love right now, Namikaze? I would love if you dropped dead. I would just love it. It would make my whole godfucking day if you just dropped dead of a heart attack right now. It really would.”
It comes to a point where every single thing that comes out of her mouth in their general direction is somehow twisted into a violent insult, and the reason for it is very clear, most especially when the dark bruise on Keisui’s cheek seems to be the only thing involved in the sibling’s feud that fades with time. At every available opportunity the issue is rehashed anew, and the two attack one another with bitter criticisms and wounding gibes, and both come out considerably worse for wear afterwards. It becomes a constant ritual, one that usually results in the repeated verbal abuse of at least five Leaf-nin.
Kushina and Keisui are hardly the only ones to pin the visitors from Konoha as scapegoats for the world’s problems, either; the inhabitants of Uzugakure are infamous for their hostility towards any and all outsiders, and the ANBU serve as the perfect targets for a constant volley of antagonism from the very people they strive to help. It isn’t fair, and so the troops are divided sharply in a moral schism, one half beside the warriors of Konoha, the other half serving beside the two feuding Uzumaki siblings. It’s wearing, certainly - Minato finds himself more tired because of the arguing than the actual fighting itself which, despite their initial assessment, is not going well. Neither army moves forward or gains ground, and the dead on either side only increase, which is very worrisome for those in Uzugakure’s army, which is the much, much smaller of the two. So it is that the battle seems to grow endlessly on all fronts: Uzumaki vs Uzumaki; Cloud vs Whirlpool; Whirlpool vs ANBU; and it wears heavily on Minato’s ability to function.
It also becomes increasingly evident that Kushina is singling him out, that she must like berating him for simply existing more than she likes berating anyone else because she does it even when she’s in a relatively decent mood, which is not often. For every failure, every difficulty, he is somehow to blame, or at the very least the best person to take her frustration out on, and he struggles to bear it, most desperately when she starts to figure out how much the girlfriend-oriented comments torture him. She actually has an amazing propensity to instill self doubt in him, something he isn’t particularly grateful for, and it starts to gradually inhibit his usefulness. He’s distracted both by her and by the distractions he gifts himself with so that it won’t sting quite as badly, distractions that he dares not mention in public. (Distractions that send him into the barracks early and keep him tossing awake at night, because he swore one day when he was young that he would maim anyone that might paint their eyes over Shisui’s body so boldly and yet the lines of it plague him. Her voice plagues him. Her being. Her heart. Love and lust intertwine themselves and he gasps between the breaks of it.) There are few.
And the days wear onward.
They go everywhere - the land is shrinking for its invasion, or atleast that’s the way it seems. The territory becomes strikingly familiar to him, so quickly that it’s frightening, and every day they battle for it, battle for a country that will not have them, under commanders that do not like them or even one another. It tears at him so ungently that he starts to have physical maladies resulting from it; an increasing shortness in breath, an incredible tiredness that seeps into his every action. He stumbles, makes more mistakes, gets slower at recovering, and Hizashi is the first person to comment, but certainly not the last.
”You’re making yourself sick. You have to stop listening to her. You’ll die if you keep this up.”
And Minato kneads his temples with his fingers. “I know. I know.”
It is hard to do or say anything about it. Kushina loves to pick fights, start fires, and when she cannot she loves to see the people she dislikes break under her scrutiny. And Minato is, unmistakably, a person she greatly dislikes. There is nothing he can say against her without completely losing all dignity and exploding in her face and so he carefully keeps himself from it, does everything in his power not to cause her any more distress than is absolutely necessary. He does everything he can to be understanding, to behave himself, does everything in his power not to snap at her. There is only so much he can handle - he knows this - but he can’t afford to snap at her. For one thing, she is his commander, and for another thing, he really doesn’t want to. He really doesn’t. Every time he sees her fighting with her brother it saddens him, and so he tries to take on her frustration so that it will burden her less. It isn’t that he knows her well, or that he even likes her that much, but Minato’s compassion for others is nothing but if not painfully enduring. He really doesn’t want to retaliate just because of the angry red marks her comments leave on the back of his composure.
But just because he tries to stay collected, does not mean they work any better together. Minato’s specialty and fighting style rests entirely on the basis of knowing everything that he will do, planning for everything that will happen before it actually does. Kushina’s rests entirely on the basis of being prepared for everything by not being prepared for anything - it is a style that relies on its own complete tactlessness, and so it is difficult to work with in any regard, but even more so when it is with a style that is its complete opposite. On missions, they plague one another; for every plan Minato makes, he somehow intrudes on Kushina’s lackthereof. For every situation Kushina runs into with no plan at all, she somehow completely counteracts Minato’s ability to foresee and react accordingly. In all the ways Minato and Hizashi (Minato and Shisui) work together flawlessly, Minato and Kushina work together with about the same consistency of choked roots. They tumble over one another’s strategies and become so quickly irritated by the notion that she takes to berating him nonstop (even when she isn’t angry) and he takes to avoiding her at virtually all costs. It’s really not a very good system, but he’s trying. He really is.
(And at night he follows the path of his descent, runs with his imagination to a Shisui he conjures out of darkness and tiredness and frustration, one he prays the true Shisui might never see or know about. His fingers become his disgrace and he unties knots that aren’t there and recounts all the ways in which he does not love himself, recounts all the ways he disgusts himself. It is the nights that truly make his stomach turn but he can’t help it, cannot help the desperation with which he wishes she were beside him, he wishes he could see her, he wishes so badly he could touch her, she could tell him the way out of his constant state of misery. And he is miserable, in short order. Quite miserable, in fact, to the point where the nights do nothing to cheer him whatsoever, not that they did much to begin with. He is incensed by his own vulgarity, his own uselessness, and the pool of self doubt he is bogged in becomes a lake, becomes more and more inescapable with each torturous comment that falls from Kushina’s mouth.)
He chides himself for his passiveness, for his neglect, for his imagination, for his shamefulness, for everything he needs to be chided for and several things he does not. Minato is not an optimist but he is not weak either, and so it becomes less that Kushina is berating him and more that he is berating himself, and it all persists until just the time when he knows that he won’t be able to stand it much longer.
And that is when Keisui dies.
xxvii.
There is no one who knows what happens, exactly - it looks like a massacre, but no one can be entirely sure. No one who was there survives to give a detailed report, afterall, and so the events are shrouded in the same low clouds that hang dangerous in the sky on the day it occurs.
It is a long superstition in the Land of the Whirlpool that clouds bring bad luck. The origins of it aren’t mysterious, either; with its low, level lands and many inland seas, the people of the Whirlpool are in constant fear of flooding. Everything is centered around those floods that happen annually, naturally, and so to be unprepared is to have a death wish of some sort. They move out as an army, move out early in the morning when the sun is just silhouetting the rims of the clouds that bode so ominous, that make all their commanders look to one another nervously. (Except Kushina and Keisui, of course. They don’t look at one another for a long time, and when they do, they’re glaring so hard it makes Minato wonder, idly, if their eyes are going to fall out of their heads, or if burn marks are going to appear on their cheeks.)
Theirs is a simple mission, one of guerrilla tactics; there is a recent group of bolder Cloud-nin who have seen fit to settle down on the edge of the Whirlpool’s center-most front to the east, only about ten kilometers from Uzugakure no Sato. Each commander’s group is to be split into groups of ten, one of which will stay with the commander him- (or her-) self. They move together like a small ocean of small shinobi (for the people of the Land of the Whirlpool are small - Kushina herself towers over quite a few of her lieutenants, and Amenbou is simply a giant, atleast two heads above almost half of his soldiers and all of his siblings) until splitting off into groups. Kushina goes to the northwest, Amenbou to the northeast, and Kaigyo and Keisui go on paths between the two of them. They flow through the forest like water, the plan being for the eldest and youngest Uzumaki to circle around the back and for the middle siblings to attack from the front.
They do this. Everything is simple: the tactics are effective and the band of Clouds is small, defenseless, unsuspecting. They are done within an hour of beginning. The sun breaks jaggedly through the clouds for a second, everything seems to have gone as planned.
But Keisui and his soldiers do not aid them. Somewhere between the village and the campsite, they vanish - it is such a sudden and unprecedented occurrence that no one notices until about forty-five minutes into the cleanup; it is Kaigyo who looks around him, brow creasing in confusion.
”…hey, Amenbou, where’s Keisui?”
Minato sees Kushina’s head whip around towards the question, but she scowls when Amenbou glances her way. She feigns disinterest, turns back to pilfering through the enemies’ belongings with the rest of her squadron. Minato, though, pays close attention, stopping his movement completely, and later on he is glad that he does so, because it means he sees Yuugaki Arisa’s last moments.
Yuugaki Arisa is a young soldier, rumored to be Keisui’s love interest of several years - she has long, pale curls of hair waterfalling to her waist which is thickened with muscle and muddy brown eyes that are sometimes green and sometimes black and sometimes in between. Shortly after Kaigyo and Amenbou begin conversing on what to do in the mysterious absence of their brother, she stumbles through the trees, her body in tatters, her face only still half on. It is hard to see through the surrounding trees, but somehow her movement catches the shadows - she’s obviously fought everything, fought bravely and endlessly to get here. (And her last words are-)
”Commander…we were…” She stumbles and there is an eerie silence, as if the world has stilled completely to watch her very last performance. Everyone is as still as the quiet itself, as still as stone and quieter, riveted to the tears streaking from her one remaining eye. She is a human crater, bleeding and disfigured, still almost-pretty in her terminal desperation. “Keisui-sama was…so…oh…oh, God…everyone…everyone is…they were…I’m…oh God.”
She drops into the water, her charka control giving way with her breath, and the world explodes.
xxviii.
Almost two kilometers from the campsite, straight along the path Keisui’s squadron was designated to take, there is something like a huge basin that seems to have been freshly gauged from the earth. It is impossible to tell what did it - something huge and tragic, a catastrophe of some sort - and the only thing more obvious than the damage it has inflicted upon the land is the damage it has inflicted on everything else. It is as if something arose from the water and had a temper tantrum on the spot, but that does not seem a dramatic enough interpretation of the way the land is devastated. They land together, a large group, and stare about incredulously, and Minato swears he can hear someone crying until he looks up and realizes that it is Kushina screaming, her voice torn and coarse, breaking like glass or metal. Amenbou is holding her away from something, but Kaigyo is on the ground - the boys wear the same expression, one of complete, semi-emotionless disbelief. Kushina screams and the world seems to break in sorrow around her, and after a while Kaigyo sags, slowly curling down into a ball over something he holds tightly to his chest, shaking with repressed grief. Amenbou stays completely still, cemented in place, arms twined restrictively around his sister who never turns her back to the scene. (It would be too effeminate.) Everything is very, very quiet for a long time around them.
It takes Minato a long time of looking at Kaigyo to realize that he is knelt over his brother’s severed hand.
(They find a few body halves, later on, but Arisa seems to have been the farthest from whatever blast it was that did it. Keisui’s hand is the most respectably intact human limb they find, and they don’t find many.)
Kushina screams herself hoarse and exhausts herself so thoroughly that Amenbou carries her home, and she falls fitfully asleep against him. They walk slowly, the whole group of them, solemn and quiet. Kaigyo walks at the very back of the procession, holding his brother’s hand like it’s an infant, and Minato feels incredibly dazed throughout the whole three-hour walk home, so much so that it takes him almost two of those hours to realize that the heaviness in the air is born of his own heart, and that the erratic breathing around him is caused by the fact that over four-fifths of the mourners are crying, silently. He watches a woman beside him, Seiseki Ayu-san who he’s met before, reach up to wipe tears from her face noiselessly, even as they pour down like rain, and he finds himself so awed with respect that he is speechless.
When they enter the streets of Uzugakure, the group separates, walking slowly to the houses Minato has never seen them go to before. Doors open and nameless men and women, families of soldiers, open their arms and embrace the homecoming, faces painted with sadness, with expectation of terrible news. He sees wives, husbands, before the doors close in some instance; he is struck through (as if by a chord) when an old man, come to welcome back his son and grandson, lifts a hand to his mouth, face twisted in grief at the news, moisture springing in his old, gray eyes. Minato has never seen a people like this, so uniformly affected by a single person’s death, and in many ways it both amazes and depresses him. He can both understand it, and yet knows that he cannot possibly understand it. It’s so strange and yet so incredibly deep that he cannot bring himself to be unappreciative, but the tragedy is done, and he and the other ANBU simply follow the Uzumaki siblings until they are alone with them, until they are back inside the shinobi barracks and they are parting simply because it is only right to let the family mourn as they will. It seems wrong to follow them any further, but it seems just as wrong to break the silence, and so when Hizashi hands him a handkerchief, it shocks him, and he puts a hand up to his own cheeks.
(Shinobi Precept #25: A true shinobi must never show his emotions.)
Hizashi’s voice is gentle. “So it goes.”
The ANBU echo him thoughtlessly. “So it goes.”
Minato is silent.
And that is simply the way of it.
xxix.
He wakes in the middle of the early morning hours without letting them pass - he opens his eyes and stares into the ceiling and is quiet for a long, long time. His jaw aches from clenching his teeth so hard for so long, and so he releases them, tries to relax himself. (It’s no use - he can’t sleep any longer. His own mouth tastes sour.) His skin is dry, itchy around his face, and he is quiet in it, he is docile for second before he follows his eyes, pushing himself up. His mind tells him it is too early for such things. (He wishes he could obey it.)
But it is as if there is wire through his hands. Now that he is arisen he can’t force himself back down. The coldness of the morning is like icy water thrown on him, biting and unfriendly, and he shivers in it. He childishly thinks to drag his blankets along with him (no one could notice, where is he possibly going to go?) and so he uproots the quilt from the sheets and carries it to the ground and once he is on two feet solidly, he throws it around his shoulders and burrows further into it, so that only his hands and face show above it, and only his feet in pajama pants below. It’s so childish, but so is the weather childishly cold; two wrongs do not make a right, but being less childish than the weather does not make a person smart, either.
He walks softly, aimlessly, and he wonders if he is dreaming or if he is awake. It seems too cold for him to be still inside of a dream, but the hall seems to stretch before him in silent abstraction, and he wanders as if he both knows and does not know where he is going. He breathes out, steams the air, and feels that all he would have to do is hold his breath in and he would be a ghost. He keeps his blanket close, disliking even the feel of the cold morning outside of it, keeps his blanket close and thinks that if he were simply going to disappear, his blanket would fall through him, and that would be the way he would know. (Needless to say, he is still mostly asleep.)
He walks into the showers for no reason except that they are at the end of the hall, and he cannot seem to turn himself. He walks slowly and without apparent purpose; he wanders aimlessly across the tile and makes turns for no apparent reason and in moments he is standing in front of Kushina, who looks as blank as he does. He doesn’t really think about it; he only thinks that she looks incredibly small. (She is crouched low against the walls of one of the showers, staring out at the wall of the room, unmoving, expressionless. Her hair hangs around her face, and Minato can’t tell if she is wet or not.)
He speaks softly. “You look very cold, Commander.”
She sighs softly back at him. “Shut up, Namikaze.”
He stands very still, watching her for what seems like a very long time and must span at least seven minutes, and she finally moves her face to gaze up at him. He finds the coarse mixture of war and peace in her eyes to be strangely soothing, an oceanic lullaby of sorts, but he says nothing. He simply watches them.
”…sit down.”
He obeys her, pulling his blanket around him and seating himself at her side, legs folded in a tired, business-like fashion. He looks down at them. They remind him of the legs of a bronze Buddha statue he once saw at a temple his mother took him to for New Year’s (he had been very young at the time) and he wonders if his legs could ever really look the way they do now? Maybe they are someone else’s. He can’t understand it. She stays still next to him for a long time, and then she starts talking and he simply listens, because that is what Shisui does and it usually helps.
”I should’ve just let it go. He was right and I should’ve just let go.” She lets her head drop back and stairs up at the ceiling as if there’s a chance it might be the early morning sky instead. “I should’ve just accepted that…that I…” She stares for a long time and their breathing is the conversation between them. He wonders if she wants to cry and is refraining because he is there. Kushina strikes him as the type of woman who would hate to cry in front of her peons. (Hate to cry in front of anyone.)
”I was wrong. That…I have been somehow thinking of this as…as a game. To get through it. Because…because if this isn’t a game, then Keisui is-Then…Keisui…is…”
He lowers his head, turns slightly away from her. That way he will not see it. She is very, very quiet and he respects that. (Ghost-like. He watches the design of the tile shift. He’s very tired, but not enough to sleep. His brain is silent and inactive, but he cannot leave her like this, for some reason. He doesn’t understand it, but maybe he doesn’t need to. Maybe he simply needs to-)
It’s a long time before she speaks to him, but when she does he doesn’t look at her face for a small moment, but he knows to when she takes his left hand between two of hers. She doesn’t look at his face, but at the lines of his palm, and her eyes are rimmed with exhaustion, and he studies the curves of her face before looking back down at her fingers. She slowly traces a spiral into his palm.
”You asked Amenbou about it before. This symbol. What it means to our village?”
He does not correct her. She finishes at the center of his hand.
”Uzumaki. The whirlpool.”
She is quiet.
”A sacrifice.”
And he knows that she is apologizing to him.
(And he accepts it with dignity.)
After the sun rises (and they have parted hours earlier, gone back to sleep and bid one another awkward but almost kind farewells) there is a funeral held out on the water. It is unlike any funeral Minato has ever attended, and they all stand in a circle around fifty-one wreaths cast in the water, the Uzumaki siblings and everyone else from their village dressed in white exotic robes of mourning, the ANBU dressed in corresponding black. The entire village is there, and every remaining ANBU, (there were three killed who were of their ranks, afterall) and there is a strange, unprecedented brotherhood to it, and when Kushina leads the singing of the dirge, she does not cry at all. Her voice is strong, her notes are beautiful, and everyone choruses around it, as a human might the wind itself.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night.
It’s perfectly wonderful, in the way only a tragedy possibly can be.
And Minato keeps his hands to himself that night.
xxx.
The days wear on. (War stops for nothing - death is nothing if not a perpetuator, even in cases such as this.) The Uzumaki siblings withdraw into their militaristic seriousness, keeping a thick wall between them and their soldiers, respectful but no longer quite as fun-loving, no longer quite as optimistic. In the day, they give orders and hardly speak to do anything else; in the evening, they retire to their own home together, and if not there, they sleep together in a room separate from the rest of the barracks. The rest of the village keeps a distance in respect for their mourning.
And the night after the funeral, the first letter arrives.
Minato;
(To what wind will the child blow?) I thought that I would write to you. Knowing this, I wonder what has kept me from it? The battle here is monotonous. Uninteresting. But perhaps that is better, since it means that I am as safe as I know you should want me to be.
They say letters of war often have a historical significance to those that study such things. (But I wonder if studying us two would be folly, perhaps?) If there be ink for you to do so, I would bid you to do as you please with this.
That I might reciprocate that love which you have bestowed unto me.
- Shisui
His mood is so heightened that he is halfway ashamed of himself, but not ashamed enough to keep from being ecstatic for atleast four hours about it, reading it over and over and over, so many times that he could recite it if he wanted to. (He dares not. He knows that there’s no way he can possibly emulate Shisui’s beautifully poetic prose in the way it ought to be emulated; his voice is not enough. The very voice of gods wouldn’t be enough.) He half dances his way into the evening, so enthused he is by it, and he stutters his way through at least three pages of jittery electric sentences tinged different colors by his love until he finally compiles something that he deems appropriate to even think of sending. Even then he revises it for nearly two days afterwards, tearing it limb from limb until it can boast, in his mind, atleast part of the perfection that Shisui’s does.
Shisui,
To think that you should compare yourself to any folly whatsoever is inconceivable. You must be descended of some Heaven-your letter reached me when I most needed it. You cannot possibly imagine my gratefulness. That you might give me thought enough to write me such things…I really am so grateful. Thank you Shisui. I think that I am desperately lonely without you.
The land and customs here estrange me a little but death feels the same. War is the same as it has always been - we recently lost fifty of our comrades to something unidentifiable almost a week ago. My commander has taken the loss very hard. Now that I sit here thinking of her I realize that the two of you might greatly dislike one another… To be truthful I am not certain she likes me very much either. But it is hard to see this village so distressed. The people here are usually so high-spirited but this seems to have crushed the majority of them. I have not heard laughter among them for a long time now.
I think that I greatly dislike our circumstances. I wish so badly that I could see you if only for a short while. There is nothing that calms me like thoughts of you but I have so little time to think that even then I can do nothing but long to return to you as soon as it might be possible.
I love you dearly, and pray that this might find you safe and in as good of health as this war might permit.
Everything,
Minato
The Clouds press in on all sides-the slaughter of Keisui and his troops has left the Uzugakure troops a mere seventy five percent of their original size, and the difference is catastrophic in a battle where they were already vastly outnumbered. The situation’s hopelessness is slowly being impressed upon all of them, and they fight hard, but their losses become larger. Keisui’s band was the only one remaining with its exact numbers; the other siblings have already been cut down into the forties, and as the weeks progress, Kushina loses almost seven men, Amenbou almost ten, and Kaigyo as many as twenty. The latter’s frustration and depression is even deeper than that of his other two siblings, and they try their best to take on his sorrow as well as their own, but Kushina and Kaigyo do not have Amenbou and Keisui’s grace under pressure. Kushina presses forward in her own guilt, her own grieving, and tries so hard to act as Kaigyo’s support, but she is rough-edged and stubborn, and while she tries never to have enduring arguments with either brother (presumably due to the hard lesson she’s learned from Keisui) she and Kaigyo have so much difficulty getting along that Amenbou stops allowing them to dine together. All three suffer together and apart, and the troops look on sadly, unable to aid them.
Minato;
Such things to say. I wonder, do you listen to yourself? Such words~ (And that I might know how they should look upon your lips. Upon your mouth. You say ridiculous things sometimes. Most times. Do you know it? Or do you simply disregard? I never know.) But perhaps since there is love in your heart to serve its basis. (The moon will not set? I wonder.)
In reference to the heavens, I might entail that here we are recumbent, dependent upon stars rather than charts, than maps, and so the moonrise is more balanced upon the cusp of my mind than the sun. My sleep, it is now the opposite of yours I think. I am awake when you are not awake. (And so are you awake when I am to be sleeping? How odd, then, that I cannot bring myself to it, of late.) The air is so thick with smoke and the sound of the battlements that I think that we will all be painted by it - I know not my comrades. The majority of those who graced my arrival have gone, and are replaced by younger and younger versions of one another. A children’s war? (So it would seem.)
One of them reminded me of Obito-kun, recently. I thought I might not tell you, since he was killed recently. But, it occurred that the whole of war might be tragic. So it goes. Do you think that migratory birds fly at night, even when they cannot see one another? I think they must, for we can all hear one another here, but not well. It is dark, always.
Perhaps for you as well? But, then, does the sun hear the moon?
That I might deserve your giving nature.
- Shisui
There are times when Minato feels he might be part of the scenery, that he might be as useless as the trees around him. The days wear on endlessly; there is no word from Konoha, even though Umino sends home more and more disparaging weekly reports. There is no backup coming, and Minato knows it is not because they do not want to send it, but because it cannot be afforded. The Uzugakure’s case is to be a sad one, it seems already decided, and every day morale sinks further. The air around his head buzzes and hums with tension, and he tries all he can to be something those around him can depend on.
Shisui,
I feel like I’m going crazy. I don’t know that I am of course. I hope I’m not. But there is no way I could possibly know. I would ask if you could describe the sensation for me but I think the implications of it would be needlessly cruel. I think there is enough needless cruelty in both of our lives without us turning it on one another. I desperately hope that I am not crazy. But it’s all so desperately sad, Shisui. I don’t know how much more of it I can take. I don’t know if I can keep bringing myself to the threshold of insanity without falling in myself. One doesn’t simply commit murder after murder day in and day out, doesn’t simply weather such injustices, doesn’t commit them knowingly over and over without somehow being affected.
I love you so much. Please get some sleep before you send your next letter. If I could only feel your heartbeat in my dreams I might not feel so…
I hate dwelling on this…
Everything,
Minato
He tries his hardest, and eventually it is Kushina who comes to him. She does so with suddenness, and it startles him backwards when she bursts in on him on a walk around the barracks, ranting, ordering him only to stay quiet and still until she finishes and then simply barreling through every emotion she’s felt that day. He stands frozen before her as she recounts every small detail, angry and raving, mouth moving so much faster than he could ever move his own and hands whipping around to emulate her rocket-fast words. At long last she winds downward and finishes succinctly and he stares at her for a very long time before she starts to laugh.
”You look constipated.”
And the irony of her laughter is almost as depressing as the things she’s decided to unload on him. But he almost laughs about it himself. It’s simply too overwhelming to do anything else. If one doesn’t laugh about it, they’ll probably cry. Minato does his best to avoid doing either, and Kushina does quite a bit of both. And so, slowly, they begin to form relaxed kind of bonds based simply on the fact that they complement one another. She stops insulting him seriously, stops giving him migraines. And he listens to her, stays respectful.
And so it works.
Minato;
Insanity in the face of insanity is sanity still. (Do not doubt yourself so.) Do you think that it is right, in such a situation as in one of sleep, to feel cheated if the dreams are not as you wished they might be? A disappointment in a world as such. How mild. How precociously unfair.
Did you know that your Hatake-kun was deployed here recently? He is not grouped with me and so I am unsure of his condition and circumstances, but he was oriented a few days ago. He seems to be fairing relatively well, but (as I’ve said) I cannot relay to you details that I do not know. For the security of your mind, I will investigate it at times when it is possible to do so. (Though, I think that this perhaps proves my assumption correct? The youth of infertile territory.)
We are not winning. (But is it bad luck to say so, truly? When there is nothing to truly be won.) Perhaps we are not losing. (Or perhaps it is that all is lost.) Overwhelming sadness that you might speak of, I believe I have seen it too. Like white walls.
That we might be younger (older?) than we are. That we might be closer than circumstances allow, at time present.
-Shisui
It is an odd friendship that blooms between them, creeping bonds that twist like ivy around their wrists. Kushina and Minato are joined in the brotherhood of war, in the sisterhood of feeling, and he becomes one with her issues of family. A month passes and still Kaigyo is reeling from the loss, out of control and still losing soldiers. Each one that falls sends him further into the recesses of his mind, and that only makes him more distant, a worse commander, more likely to lose soldiers. Amenbou slowly tries to take on his burdens but there is no way to do it, since he is burdened himself. The frustration between all three of them mounts.
Shisui,
The attacks by the Clouds have increased. Our numbers are dwindling. We began this with just over two-hundred soldiers. Now we are a force of less than one-hundred-and-twenty. Our borders are so nebulous nowadays that I fear that there will be an attack on the Whirlpool village itself any day now. The civilians are getting more and more agitated by it. Every omen that blesses our presence seems ominous and I cannot see this getting any better. The situation itself is so hopeless that it pains me. Everyone feels it too-that we could all die soon. That the cause itself might as well be lost for the chances we have.
This is no longer the battle of an underdog. It is the battle of a group of demented suicidals. Even our commanders cannot fight the feeling that even if we do overcome this it will not have been worth it in the end. And it does not even look like we shall overcome it.
Shisui if we do not send for backup or if none comes, I fear for our comrades and myself. I could never bring myself to turn away from the people of this land - they are far too good a people for that. They are hard-working kindly people who want only to preserve themselves and the lives that they have always led. They started this battle to stay as they are. I have come to appreciate that about them. I have come to appreciate everything about this place.
But I do not want anyone else to die have to die here.
Everything,
Minato
P.S. Please let Kakashi read this if he so desires. It grieves me that I am so caught up in the goings on here that I might disregard either of your own for any reason. The pettiness that war might breed in men is so atrocious. It turns my stomach.
(P.P.S. Please stay safe.)
CHAPTERS XXXI-XXXV
CHAPTERS XXXVI-XXXX