JosephIMA12

This chapter is written after the initial spree.  Half of the original burst has been released by now.  If chapters start to slow, it is because I'm low on momentum.  I'll do what I can to keep them coming, but the truth is I've never been able to complete a novel length story on my own.  Only time will tell how much inspiration it will draw.

Step back and ponder

Danzo was wary.  Before him lie a series of reports.  Key among them were the summary reports and a rather unfortunate damage report.

The perimeter seals had been destroyed.  Unlike the Leaf village, outposts could not afford to be staffed nor equipped with an active sensor barrier.  Even if he could get access to the technology, soft targets like the onboarding black sites were too exposed.

They could however afford to train a specialist and place filtering seals in secret.

The few who knew of them were kept on a short leash.  Only deployed in crisis such as these to cooperate with the resident sealmaster.  Chakra signatures were logged and recorded throughout the base.  Ephemeral though they were, they were effective enough on a tight ship to stamp out any rogue elements.

Unless they were tampered with or destroyed.  Secrecy should have made that much impossible, but the relevant seal had been annihilated from the inside out.  Its nearest peer rendered useless.

No defense was perfect, and the technique which destroyed them was unprecedented.  Worse still, the hunters had reported the blue flames of the body elimination technique.  An excessive amount.   Few outside of the Anbu black ops had enough conviction to train that particular skill.

For Danzo, that potentially meant snuffing out political fires.

Despite the sunk cost fallacy, he deemed the systems useless.  The neighboring seals may have been compromised as well and, though the sealmaster was hard at work repairing and replacing them, a precedent had been made.

Failure of this sort could not be tolerated.  He would be far less gentle the second time around.

---

Needless to say, when I woke up, I was suffering from severe chakra exhaustion.  My sleep had been a tormented one, chock full of phantom pains, burns and sores.  My vision flashed with fragmented memories of the base, burned into my mind's eye while force feeding chakra through my body.

Movement drew my attention to the ninja responsible for disassembling the seal.  The unleashed portions of my chakra network spasmed, sending painful flares along my nerves.  I'd rather have been pummeled.  At least then bracing myself and nursing injuries would help.

It took me a few minutes and a slap to the face to realize the ninja before me were speaking, and a little while longer to get my lip reading up to par.  I could detect sound just fine, but my brain had a list of checks to fill a mile long and was not sharing with the rest of the class.

I was made to go through a debriefing, and there was pressure despite my addled self.  The atmosphere shifted, laden with intent.  Where I could not speak or listen, I could still reflect and put on a face.  Walking on eggshells, one step at a time, I made it through the interview.

---

My schedules changed.  The daily company I had was reshuffled, and a sense of familiarity removed.  Unsettling, but it didn’t really change anything.  I hadn’t the courage to form acquaintances, let alone close ties.

~You need help Joseph~

I blinked.  The voice in my head is rather crisp.

~Aren’t you helping me?~

My belly rumbles with discontent.

~I can gather and I can guide.  I cannot change what is at your disposal.  For that, you need friends.  You need voices you can rely on to nurse you when you’re down, and to share your experiences with.  Shame is a poison and it will weaken you by the day.  Fear can drive your strengths, but it will not open your mind.~

~Aftercare.  Time vault.  Familiar rite.~

I take a breath and look around.

~Landscape of fear.  Silhouette of trust…Where do the stories of my people lie?~

I reflected on those thoughts as I ate.  The sky sent a shiver through my chest as I left the bunker.  The path felt empty despite the people I marched with.  The pond began to ripple as I took the forms of martial arts.

I felt my strength waning like a crescent moon, and then I saw a flicker in the darkness I felt.

I blinked and steadied myself, my focus finding upon a sunny blond haired boy.  Purpose in his shoulders and animation in his arms.  My brow furrowed as my gaze fuzzed over his hands, and I turned away to check myself.

~Is this really how it goes?  Staring?~

I pour my attention back into my stances, but my heart is not in it and my focus wavers.  I find myself distracted.  I finish my exercises, but before I can come back to myself my feet are moving.

I arrest my stride, and look up to see I’ve all but walked up to the specialist class.  The envy of the newbies.  Each morning spent training with kunai, tonfa and sparring together.  It’s the dream of every initiate to join that group, if not the vitriol of envy.

~Don’t stop.  Did I tell you to stop?~

Doubt manifests, and I can feel her fussing in the background.  Suddenly a force wells up and pushes me forward.  It’s all I can do to put one foot in front of me, and compose myself.

~Good boy.  That’s the way.~

My face tingles and I quickly shuck the cobwebs from my mind, lest they draw more pressure to my cheeks.  I’m a whole two steps further and I’ve neither convinced my heart to slow nor asserted my bearings.

The bodies part, opening a path and to my awe the sunny boy is right there.  I’d reach him effortlessly.

“Hey now~” Someone said.  Their tone was teasing, but that didn’t matter to me.  The sudden pressure on my shoulder bearing down on my center of mass did, however, disrupt my rhythm.

~What has gotten into me?  This is the same guy from yesterday.  I thought I had a plan.~

~. . .~

My eyes narrowed.  This wasn’t her doing.  My arm swept forward, my shoulder clenched and my knees bent.  I turned to my left, sweeping free of the grip.  Another persisted, wrapping around my bicep and clawing at my shoulder.

I glanced back, a promise of ire.  That hand continued to pull me back until I was back in the sea of bodies.  A gruff voice added, “If you’re going to insist on starting trouble, you’ll spend a day in solitary.”

I was frustrated, embarrassed.  Furious beyond reason.  Appetite eyed this instructor with a vengeful hunger, and I was willing to challenge them for my needs.

A crystal swept across my mind's eye and landed squarely in the jaws of a feral beast.  I blinked as I felt fangs sink into something juicy.  Banking my anger.

~Shhhh, relax.  There is no danger here, and no threat to yours.  Remember where you are and what you seek.  Fear will not open your mind.~

A drop of water fell to the lake, the surface shored up.  A glimpse of a complex reef hidden beneath the silt.

I looked up.  Hurt was ever present on my face, but without heat behind it.  I felt tired.  Windswept and dragged around by the nose.  I was tired of it.

I scanned the crowd.  Few wore mean looks, but as many were taken aback.  That curbed the anger further and a long pensive rolled across my face.  I could still catch glimpses of blond through the shifting bodies, and inhaled.  Allowing other colored chakras to settle around it.

As though closing my eyes, pathways wrapped over him and the demon fell asleep.

I took a deep breath and turned to the side, Raising my hand for a gentle if curt wave and strode away.

In my mind’s eye, I watched years pass with each step.  As present equipment and exercises surfaced to memory.  Greed promised to bring me back, and proven hope would see me standing there, waiting patiently.  I had days to follow my heart, not seconds.  The only person who would hold me back was me.

~I will not give up on you~
~I will not give up on you~

---

Days later, I heard a thud and found a blade dart embedded in the dirt road.  A note tied around the handle.

“Hold your own against me in a spar, then we’ll talk.”

I rolled the note back around the knife and gripped both of them in hand.  So I had a penpal.

---

Provided I had the breath to spare, or the energy to burn, I started spending my spare time training.  Pushing myself when training became difficult, and meditating on the spirit of the exercise.

There were exercises I forgot more often than not, as some habits come by harder than others.  I grew to love the exertion.  The burning and spirit that followed.

And I was never hauled out of the ‘special’ training area again.  We weren’t allowed to bring trinkets into the bunker, nor were we allowed to sleep closer to the equipment.

I half expected it, but when I woke up raving mad one morning I was mortified.  I wasn’t wired to sleep consistently, and I decided then and there that no matter what the instructors wanted, I wouldn’t be spending a minute longer than I had to inside the base.

I started camping out between rolecall and the initial exercises.  I had to learn to keep track of time for various tasks, but the access was well worth it.  I had a very difficult time negotiating with the cooks, and then the dean about bringing food outside the base.  Mealtime wasn’t all that flexible to begin with, and they weren’t having slops.

I had to figure out the hard way that leaving a trail was a good way to get hunted down.  Ironically, the only lessons that stuck were learned in what others called ‘the hard way’.

The trick was finding the middle ground between my needs and the skills that the instructors wanted us to learn.  Even with my inner nomad taken care of, I still ran afoul of standards.  At least I didn’t disturb as many people those days, however I nearly lost my agency over a scrap of cloth.  Fresh eyes turned the camp into a machine.

I began to understand that some scars wouldn’t fade so long as I stayed in the system.  I identify too closely with the woes of management, and my role means that a lot of the solutions are out of reach.  Whenever the standards of camp shifted even a little bit, it grated on my nerves.

Secrets are slow killers, and I don’t ignore them as they lie.

Certain avenues were cut off, and some were outright forbidden.  I suffered a panic attack when I realized what it meant to be cut off from civilization, and spent the whole night asking myself what I was being turned into.  I came to realize I wasn’t okay with where some walls were being built, and that there would come a time where I’d be forced to make a choice.

More than that.  If I refused to decide, even once, and let them walk over me, that was it.  I’d lose ground that I wasn't going to get back.  I needed people to reach out to, and role models to follow.  The clouds of root training began to claim portions of the sky where valuable stars reside.  Stars that I knew served a purpose.  If not for me, for the ones that come after.  The ones that came before, for history.

And for history, the only resource I had came from other people.  With each person I crossed paths with, those impressions grew stronger.  Forming shapes and letters in my mind that taught me how to read people.

But it wasn’t just my thoughts that changed.  My transformations became more than just a disguise.  They became assets.

My legs would extend.  My joints would shift.  What was once torturous became a distinct advantage.  To an extent, I recognized that body mass would sometimes come to bear, but I didn’t realize how so.

That was… Until my upper body started batting for the other team.  It happened in the middle of a spar.  My chest expanded, and my midriff started arguing.  My hormones skewed and by extension my values.

It wasn’t like reigning in a cough either.  For the rest of the match, I had to work with the form of a girl, even partially.  I felt vividly self-conscious.  Aware of what they might see.  Unsure of what looks meant and how they might see.

The flush and disquiet clouded my senses, and I took hits I mightn’t have given the opportunity.

The instructor called the match without batting an eye or a change in tone.  I’d shifted back after the match ended but I was despondent, giving weight to what my peers saw and what they thought they saw.  I almost fainted when I noticed that the same girl I’d taken after was part of the group.

It opened a new brand of bullying, but it wasn’t her I needed to worry about.

---

I had a nightmare that same night.  Two mutating versions of myself fought.  One of sorrow and hope, the other of grief and anger.  The more I watched, the more a shadow spread throughout myself.  Eventually the vitriol between them felt too much, and I suppressed the dream.  Raising myself from a bed of glass I looked down and saw a reflection of myself… and something beyond me.

“We are the same.”  “You felt the same things, didn’t you?”

Sleep fell away a moment later, tearing the illusion aside in a lopsided affair.

I felt like I was waking up on the wrong side of the bed, but the bad was still ahead of me.