Chapter 5 Meeting The Mental Breakdown

I do not own Naruto

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Madam Kagami, Matron of the Kagami brothel, ex-chuunin and possibly one of the best honeypots Kiri had ever produced, had been waiting for a sign from the moment Keiko's pregnancy had failed to terminate. She was a superstitious woman, and so the moment the black root tea had been reported to fail, she had looked closer at the young whore and took notice. It was a subtle sign, but a sign nonetheless. The second time, she watched the woman drink the brew herself to make sure that it wasn't a ruse. It failed. Together they tried one final time, brewing the tea so strong it made Keiko sick for days afterwards. Still, the woman's belly grew.

(She should have read the signs better.)

So Madam Kagami allowed the child to be born, taking it as a sign from the heavens that this child was meant to be. She attended the birth herself, watching the struggling woman push and bleed and sweat to bring forth the baby which had refused to die. When it came out with one final heave and a scream, she was the one to catch it in her hands, to see it blink its dark eyes. She was the first one to see the mark on its back. A clever depiction of the yin and yang taking the form of a white fox chasing a sleek black feline inked into between the babe's shoulders. The figures were encircled by a skeletal body of a great serpent, whose body curled around her tan skin, its skull resting on her spine with its fangs bare. She was the first to witness its utter abnormality.

A shiver had run down her spine at the sight, and she had fled to her rooms, searching for portents and omens among the scrolls in her office, hoping for a sign. She searched shelf after shelf, surrounded by the smell of dust and accompanied only by the passing light of the days. The scrolls only confirmed what she knew: The fox for an opportunity, the cat for wealth, and the snake for good fortune. Although the signs pointed to a great future, Kagami had been uneasy. The child was unnatural, and her gut said that it was not meant to be there.

Looking at the figure before her, she knew it to be true.

Little Ryuishi had been missing since morning since Kagami had discovered her climbing the sleek Okiya walls in a masterful display of chakra control. They had been worried as the time began to pass. The worry had turned frantic when the sun began to set. The akasen was no place for a young child. Things would happen, unpleasant things. So when the night had truly begun to darken, a chosen few were sent to find the girl, but they were not expecting to find her like this. Assaulted, abused, or violated, these were things she could deal with, things that would happen eventually in most cases. They would help the child cope, teach her how to not let it happen again, support her inside the Okiya and nurture her back. Kagami had done it for many girls before, she would probably do it for many more.

She had expected not this.

"What happened?" she asks sharply, catching the young girl's eyes.

"There was a man." The girl pauses, hesitant. "I… I told him I was not for sale. He did not listen. He is dead," Ryuishi replied, eyes holding hers, looking for something. For what, Madam Kagami did not know.

She did know the girl was covered in blood and chunks of gore, the likes of which many in the brothel had not seen since their times on the streets. Her hair was wild and her eyes were flinty and cold. Kagami knew that look, she had been a kunoichi once, long ago. The juxtaposition of a regret-less killer's looks on the face of an infant was not one she was comfortable with, but she knew what her gut had been telling her now.

(She should have read the signs better.)

With a tired sigh, the girl's shoulder slumped and she rubbed her eyes with a dirty hand. She must have found what she was looking for. Kagami still did not know what it was.

"I didn't wanna, Okaa-sama. He wouldn't let me go and… and it just happened. I don't even feel bad, I just want a hot bath and to go to sleep." She looks back up then, black eyes begging. "Please?"

Kagami nods and sends her on her way, letting Keiko comfort her while she went back to her office to send a letter to an old acquaintance.

(She should have read the signs better.)

The girl was never meant to be an entertainer, she thought to herself, pulling a book out of the hidden bottom of her drawer. A book she hadn't used since she had been forcibly retired from the kunoichi forces.

No, she thought, opening its pages and skimming through a list of old contacts. There is only one path for her.

Watanabe Ryuishi wakes up one morning, and when she looks around her room, she feels like smashing everything. The grey of the concrete is too bland, too toneless. The paper screen that divides the room into halves (one for her, one for her mother) is too delicate, too foreign. The futon she is lying in scratches against her skin and is too firm for comfort. The weather outside is not the hot, humid temperature of her home. The watery sukiyaki she had last night was not her mother's temper or her father's smoked brisket. The prostitute on the other side of the screen is not her parent.

Her world is one of savage cunning and advanced tech, not of totalitarian dictatorships and superpowered murderers. Her name isn't even Ryuishi, for Christ's sake. She doesn't belong, and she doesn't mean that like an angsty teen. She means it in the way that she is dead, like, super dead. She remembers the foggy nothingness, the eternal Void. She remembers falling forever in the space between stars. She means that she does not belong here because she is not supposed to be alive, she is an unnatural occurrence.

She is an abomination.

(A month ago she killed a man. She ripped out his throat with her teeth. She doesn't regret it.)

She is physically five years old, and she is losing her mind. She feels it in her heart, right down to her soul.

When she shuffles silently out of her bed and stands, she stares at her tiny feet for several drawn-out minutes, and something nameless and raw stirs in her gut. She cannot name it, but it feels familiar to her. Her mind is blank, but she knows the sensation well, the feel of several forces warring inside of her, churning inside her, those nameless facets of her personality.

(In another world—her world, hers—she hears whispers of symptoms behind closed doors. She hears them spoken in offices painted in carefully neutral earth tones filled with overstuffed chairs and saccharine smiles.)

The little girl steps forward, still staring at her impossibly small feet, shifting closer to the small chest in the corner of her room. She ignores the lip stains and kohl liners and digs around for a set of clean clothes to wear after her morning bath before a pair of onyx eyes catch hers.

She sees her reflection in one of the mirrors leaning against the wall. The wavy black hair that falls between her shoulders and the chubby, childish cheeks and she wants to laugh and laugh until she is crying because that is not her, that is not her body. These tiny, pudgy hands are not hers, and neither is the worn robe she is clasping. The eyes are too sharp, too dark. The flesh is too soft, too unblemished. That girl in the mirror is not her.

(Thatsnotherthatsnotherthatsnother—)

Her breathing quickens, and this time, she is laughing. A hysterical, choking, hacking sound. She is laughing so hard tears condense in the corners of her eyes and fall on her face. There is snot flooding her nostrils and she feels uncomfortably warm. Her heart stutters painfully inside her chest and she knows, she fucking knows what is coming. She's laughing so loud it hurts her throat. She feels something in her neck stretch to the point of pain.

(A month ago she killed a man. She ripped out his throat with her teeth. She doesn't regret it. She would do it again.)

She hears Keiko on the other side of the room startling awake over her laughter. She hears her fake mother's feet on the ground and a scream for help, before she feels arms around the body that is not hers, a body that hasn't been hers for years and years and years.

What has she been thinking? Has she forgotten who she was, what she was?

She wasn't some little fucking Mist brat, some child soldier. She was a grown woman with nigh on two decades of education under her belt, and at least five years of work experience and knowledge. She was a responsibility dodging, lazy, apathetic, grade-A douche. She wasn't cunning or smart. She couldn't save a fake world, she wasn't even stable enough to save herself. What kind of sick fever dream has she been loping through? Naruto is just a book, it's just a show. It's a story, just a fucking story. She's crazy, and she knows it.

She knew it back then, too. It had only taken five years for her to remember.

Five years to remember that she had a family, a loving, caring, fucked up family. That she had cousins with artistic skills that blew her away, whose cooking talent could put chefs across the globe to shame. She remembers that she has parents, real parents, not just a pseudo older sibling figure like Keiko. She had a mom with intensely short black hair (her hair) and dark almond eyes (her eyes). A mom who liked insanely graphic medical documentaries and could arrange flowers into breathtaking works of art. A dad who was a giant of a man who could turn scrap wood into furniture that would last years, who could argue all day long, and who taught every one of his children how to survive by tooth and wit and claw. She remembers a best friend, a completion to her soul, her platonic another half. She remembers a pile of brothers, all laughing and smirking and wrestling. She remembers a baby sister.

Her laughter turns into screaming.

She screams and screams and screams, just to get it out, the awful things inside of her. The tangible heartache that rips across her chest. She screams until it sounds more like a howl until that howl turns into the warbling screech of a demon. She screams until the stretching feeling in the back of her throat turns into a shredding one, and she can taste blood on the back of her tongue.

She can't fucking breathe, it hurts so bad. She has broken bones and they have hurt less. There are fat, ugly drops of salty water running down her face, and her nose is filled and dripping. There is tearing inside of her, next to the fluttering staccato beat of her heart.

Her baby, her baby girl. Her anchor, her everything. Her baby sister.

She cries out until she can't hear her voice until she can't feel the arms around the body that is not hers. She weeps and she wails until the dysphoria fills her, and the tiny, chubby hands in front of her face don't matter anymore, because everything is so very far away. It's not real, not real at all.

(She's still screaming.)

She will fully admit that she kinda lost her shit at that point. It wasn't pretty, nice, fun, or dramatic. It was awful. The world took on an almost forgotten, dreamlike quality, and the sense of out of the body, loose floating spirit sensation smothered her senses. It felt like lying beneath the surface of a lake. She could see things, and she could hear them, but those things were distant. She could move and react, but it was more like moving a puppet than living.

Ryuishi was… submerged.

It hurt her so much to face the world right now, hurt her deep inside her soul, a solid ache inside the substance that was her. She didn't want to act, to be, so she swam inside herself and forced something else to take her place. She didn't care what came up or how bad she acted at the time, she only knew that she couldn't deal with it right now. She wanted to sleep for eternity, to nurse the ache, to clean the wound inside the quiet of her mind. So she swam to the deepest, most hidden part of herself and wrapped herself inside the muted haze of not-reality, trusting that one of them would take her place.

They did not fail.

She knows, detachedly, that the whole Okiya seemed to wake at her screams. She feels it from somewhere far away, a set of arms unwinding from around her, being dragged away, and the soreness of her own bleeding throat.

For a while, she stops caring.

The feeling doesn't go away for a while. Days. When she comes back to herself, the hurt isn't gone and she knows in her heart that this isn't going to be her last episode. She can read these signs, and she is intimately familiar with the symptoms. What she gains from the whole thing is the exhausted realization that the ache will never go away.

Well, that and permanent damage to her vocal cords that will forever make her voice sound oddly husky, which might become attractive later in life, but sounds God fucking awful on a child. Wonderful.

She understands that she has done something horrible, something terrible to see. She has taken a life, but that is okay. It is okay not to regret that pitiful creature's passing. She understands she is far away from where she was and that things are different here, and that morals won't remain the same. She accepts that part of her relished in that creature's destruction. That it is okay, that she can use that part of her in a world like this.

Ryuishi (and Cat, and the others inside her soul) will just have to cope with it and learn to live with it. Just like they did in the last life.