Pain, Made To Order

Cold water cascaded onto the steel like musculature of the redhead, washing away the sweat and dust of another day. Eyes closed, he allowed the water to vitalize him with its frigid embrace, reminding him he had sensation, that he was indeed alive. His hair stuck against his face, covering the tattoos on his forehead, and against his neck and shoulders, streaming down to the middle of his back. He took a deep breath, allowing his lungs to expand while flexing his muscles against the biting sensation of the shower. He then relaxed, opened his eyes, cut off the water, and stepped outside, grabbing a towel and drying himself slowly, eyes gazing into a horizon seemingly unimpeded by the wall before him.

The events of the day were bland, but the events of the night were something else. A child attacking the Kumogakure -- if one could even call that an attack. An affront, maybe, sword drawn and ready to draw blood, but not a challenge in the slightest. Perhaps suicide by ninja was a more accurate description of what had gone through the mind of the child, however that had not been ascertained. The only information available via the intrusive investigation of Maximillian was that the child was of Konohagakurian origins, but little more than that was made apparent to the mind probing. It still troubled Kaito that someone could’ve done something so stupid, so shortsighted -- he might’ve said “even a child could see that was stupid”, but then, he’d be wrong.

He took special care when drying his hair, long as it were it was wont to stay cold and wet closer to his scalp, which would then seep away the heat from his head and give him a headache. He didn’t understand why that happened, it just did, and was annoying as hell. He put some shorts on, and went for some orange juice from his fridge, then leaning against a counter as he drank directly from the bottle. The apartment itself was dark, as he could manage to move around well enough in complete darkness; he knew every nook and cranny this place had, having lived here for over twenty years. The same shitty apartment as when he first graduated as a genin and started being able to afford the place. The same shitty apartment he managed to keep when he quit the ninja life to run a restaurant. The same shitty apartment the landlord allowed him to rent at a discounted rate when he returned after his hiatus. The same shitty apartment he somehow kept coming back to, in spite of it being naught but a sink of happiness and money. He might as well just rent a single room at a local inn and have someone keep it clean for him; at least that might be less bleak that this fucking shithole.

He put the juice back into the fridge, and made way towards his bed. Usually he might have a harder drink, but today, all he needed was another dreamless slumber, as he had been having for the last few months.

That night, he dreamt.

He stood atop a hill, higher than all the hills around it, and he had the perspective of an eagle, soaring high over the terrain. Behind him there was a clearing, surrounded by other hills, and a deep forest with pitch black trees created a wall that extended for miles. The trees were uncharacteristically motionless, and had no leaves at all, looking as though they had been burnt to a crisp and stood as the testament of the will of raging fires. They stood only because the fire decided not to turn them to ash, but kept on as hollow husks.

Kaito turned around, and he was in the center of the clearing, surrounded by Kumogakurians, one and all sporting dark clothes, with the exception of  the  bright Kumogakure flak vests, and the metallic piece of their headbands which reflected light. He walked forward and the swarm seemed to give his step some berth, allowing him to move through the sea of faces he had seen in the past, even if he didn’t recognize them. They spoke with voices he could not hear, or rather, could not decipher the messages they spoke.

He came across Zento Yuki, Rayul Tenuchi, and Hikaru Renkaio stood around a smoldering pyre. They looked at Kaito in silence, mourning, but said nothing. Zento was soaking wet. Hikaru’s white coat was stained in blood, his belly open and bleeding. Rayul looked at Kaito with slashed eyes, blood streaming steadily from the gashed eyeballs of the young prodigy. Why, they asked. Kaito didn’t know how to answer them, but he felt a deep pang of pain within his heart, and his stomach sank in sadness.

He melded inwards, and started walking forwards in the opposite direction from whence he came, the people talking in agitated voices. He had tried his hardest to bring reason and sense to each of their arguments, desperately trying to find some common ground he could hold with his fellow soldiers in order to start establishing some cohesion within the ranks. The voices grew louder and harsher, and Kaito’s own being began to convulse at lower and lower vibrations, all the while having violenter spikes of energy as he communicated with the people surrounding him. Perhaps you should be the one to have died, a voice echoed. Kaito turned around.

The burnt corpse of his former student rose from the pile of ashes, and stood among his former students. After all, what wrong did I do? None. I was just playing. But you killed me. You were the jury, the judge, and the executioner.

No, he could hear himself say, even if the rest he communicated without speaking. I was the long arm of the law, and the law won. You acted of your own volition, and the price could only be paid by you. Why me, he retorted? You were the captain of the squad. It seems you were the one who should be responsible, isn’t that how responsibility works?

Kaito’s low vibrational energies shifted from fear and anguish, slowly becoming anger and frustration. I took responsibility the only way that I knew how to.

I saw a mad dog, and I put it down.

The charred remains of his student lifted his arms to chest level, palms aiming at the heavens above in open challenge of his former captain. Ambling slowly towards the arisen visage, onlookers burst into dust and were swept away by unfelt winds, while his former teammates melded into mud and disappeared into the ground, seemingly phasing through the floor and out of sight. The vast green fields held only the burnt challenging shape of his charge. The incinerated carcass of Ghost stepped forward, and Kaito engaged in a rush; even though most of the skin and muscle had burned off, Kaito was still able to tell it had a cocky smile on his face, borne out of ignorance at just how out of depth they were, confidence that was in no way earned or warranted.

The first strike came from the toasted swinging arm of his student, a trail of dark smoke left behind its path; Kaito ducked under it while delivering a liver shot: the burnt flesh burst open and spewed lumps of coal and dust all over Kaito, causing him to stagger backwards. It was followed by a spinning jump through the air by his student, and as the darkened figure approached, Kaito lifted his own leg high into the sky and brought it down in a clean arc, intercepting the soon to be delivered spinning kick from his student.

When the heel made contact, it broke through his shoulder and down all the way to part his student in half.

Kaito stuck the landing, a reverberating stomp that shook the land. As the cloud of ash dissipated, a figure appeared to be laying on the floor, bisected at the waist, clad in dark clothing with a pool of blood gathering between his severed body. Shoulder length hair, dark as a starless night, and eyes matched in color, although as Kaito looked, he could see a flood of oxygenated blood fill out the eyes with the exception of the pupils and two other spots; no, not blood, but rather a sharingan pattern. I just wanted to be free, he said, as he struggled to set his upper half up by leaning on his elbow. But you couldn’t see beyond your blind allegiance to the village, you couldn’t see me as a person, as a frightened kid, and you just cut me down without mercy or a second thought.

Kaito looked a little bewildered at the scene, but he did in fact remember it. The body had laid on the dirt, though, not on a grassy field. The recollection brought another pang of sadness within him. Thems the rules, kid. You knew I had to do it.

The kid laughed, heartedly so. You and your rules… what good did they do for you? You’re ruled by a foreign monster who knows nothing of the Kumogakure, facing threats you don’t even understand… I hope you enjoy the gift of my sight while you can, because it will never let you see what is coming down the road. And when the day comes when you finally see, you will have someone just like you waiting at the gates to cut you down.

Looking on to the kid, he was no longer a kid, but an older man, and while now he was connected at the waist, a gaping wound on his chest identified him as the bum he had killed not too long ago under the porticus of the village gates. Much like the other kid, he had been laying on the dirt, face down, not chilling in a grassy field where Kaito could see the hole he had punched into the chest of the old man. From the looks of it, it had been a quick death: immediately on impact his heart had pulverized inside his chest. No time for fear. No time for regrets. But you are full of fear and regrets, are you not?

An intriguing question. Sadness now competed with confusion and wonder within the chunnin, wondering what the question from this visage might mean. Your fear allowed you to kill a man you did not know or had ever met until the date. And you try to reason as to why you did, and why it was the right thing to do, because you know deep down that there was another way. Why else would you need to argue it, especially with yourself?

Your new power hasn’t answered your need for power, it just stoked your nightmare. And you will forever live under that shadow, unable to escape. I hope you find the answers you were looking for, lest you become an old man, walking the earth in hopes of finding a welcoming new place, only to be butchered like an animal at the gates by a power hungry lunatic.

In blades of grass the old man did disperse at the lightest breeze that coursed through the field. The breeze brought along his fellow Kumogakurian ninja. Faces covered in shadow, yet the judgement was somewhere underneath that shade. He turned around to face them, and could barely recognize the people underneath by posture alone, but the clues were all around. They were all dressed in dark clothes, with the one exception of their brighter colored flak vests. By contrast, one among them had bright white robes, with a yellow hat on his head and pieces of cloth covering the sides and back of his head. The Raikage stood among them in the field, in formal clothing.

Why are you killing my ninjas, Kaito? A fierce flame of jealousy ignited within the redhead; how could this foreigner claim these were his ninja? Maybe the old man might’ve been his ninja, but Ghost Hyuuga and Volt Uchiha were Kumogakurian ninja. They were not the Raikage’s people, they were Kaito’s people. Kaito stared down the Raikage with the white eye of the Hyuuga and the crimson tomoed eye of the Uchiha.

What is it, Kaito? You have a quip you wanna share with us? The air grew cold, a feeling reminiscent of their encounter in the hospital room, where Kaito had had the unfortunate idea of questioning the legitimacy of Gidyne’s claim to the title. Kaito didn’t answer, but kept the intense stare down of the man in the Raikage’s clothes. Fine, said the Raikage. He removed the kage robes and hat, revealing the Young Conqueror he remembered from the fateful night. Let’s resolve this once and for all.

The Young Conqueror was not as he remembered him, for his belly was cut wide open, and forth from this gash bled a waterfall of acid, pouring onto the earth and melting it away. Kaito was caught off guard, and stumbled back, but the acid chased him. Tentacles slipped from within the conqueror, and soon they revealed themselves to be the five tails of the tailed beast from that fateful night. The beast expanded to its full height, and once again Kaito felt terror as he had felt on that night. As the acid burned through the terrain, Kaito backed up in quick steps backwards, feeling the burning stench of boiling liquid. The beast roared mightily, blasting air pressure so harsh Kaito could feel it pulling at his skin.

Skin started flaking off of him, pain jolting through every one of his nerves, and now his muscles were exposed. Kaito was unable to confront this new terror, this old terror, the past and the future. He could no longer take it.

Summoning a great force from within himself, he released a scream from the depths of his belly as he charged the beast through the boiling ocean of acid on the battlefield…

...only to sit up in his bed screaming.

He looked around his room, dark and gloomy, and he could feel himself covered in cold sweat as if he had just gotten out of the shower but didn’t dry himself off. Looking outside, it seemed like it was still the middle of the night. A dream. All a dream.

He pushed himself only his pillow, and closed his eyes. For a few minutes, it seemed like he wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep… however, when he did fall asleep, it was dreamless. Again.

/exit
TWC: 2429x2 = 4858
Claiming 96AP
Claiming 2,993 towards  Hoárr's Spear, previously worked on here, bringing new total to 5000, unlocking the technique as Noboru Kaito's C-Rank Mangekyou Sharingan Slotless Technique.
Claiming 1,865 towards Tank