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Lost Root: A Naruto AU SI

Chapter 1: Dissolution

The stars fall like snow, like hail, like tears. Ripped away from the harsh embrace of life, I find myself adrift in a realm-between-realms, an unworld of disorder, a soup of consciousness and memory. Dark leaves blow across a blood-red sky and the keenly wailing dirge keeps rhythm as they flip and tumble. A million indescribable shapes burn themselves into my vision, mockeries of any geometry I've known. I want to reach out and grasp them, but to reach is to move, and to move is to exist, and though I think, I cannot be sure that I am. Color and sound bleed together, sensations of the present stained with memories of my past.

As new shapes press themselves into my consciousness, I feel the fragility of my identity. My ego is all that separates me from the starstuff around me, and to be dust (and not ashes!) would be a fate most sad. Coherence, physical or thoughtwise, seems something beyond this realm. And yet, the stars fall and whirl and slide across the unending sky, a testament to the possibility of discreteness. Soon, one grows large, its unbearable white brightness eclipsing all the other non-shapes in my vision. It consumes everything, becoming more with each masked star, greater and closer and warmer. I do not fear. When it consumes me at last, I sigh in relief. Oblivion, such as it is, is a welcome respite from the limbo that came before.

I traverse the white light.

The morning light streams softly into the bedroom, and I contemplate my options. Nestled comfortably in my crib, I can almost forget that moment, the moment I realized where I am. Somehow, though, the spiral-and-leaf forehead protector I saw is unforgettable. I wasn't reborn into rural or ancient Japan, I was reborn into a fictional universe. So many possibilities were brought up and discarded, but it all came back to what I knew and what I saw again. This is a world of monsters, and I am just a clumsy child. I clamp and unclamp my tiny baby hands, disturbed at my lack of coordination. A lifetime of fine motor control, and now this?

More than time is out of joint.

Margaret always said all that time hunched over the keyboard would give me carpal tunnel someday. She would tell me and rub my wrists, and the workday in the cube would have been worth it, for that instant: sitting in our living room lit red and orange by the sunset, simply enjoying each other's company. Those intimate moments together became rarer and rarer, after Leo was born. I spent a decade feeling like the reality of our marriage was slipping away, and one day I woke from my dream and I was alone and we were separated and I could see my son on weekends and tears fell like rain and it felt more real than any day had for years. More "and" filled my life: and, and, and. The tears made real the lies told by my fears. Eventually, I could no longer deny the truth. I would never deny it again.

Now, each day that passes, those thoughts are more and more distant. Sometimes, my memories seem surreal. There is no Leo asking me for help with his homework to bring me down to earth. There are no tears alone in an apartment to force their reality on my world. They don't fit with who I am now. My tears are that of a child in a world of magic, tears of innocence, not cynicism. This-all this, at least, seems real. This pain, this pressure, this hunger, this warmth. If it's an illusion-and now, I live in a world of illusions, so I'd better be prepared-it's a good one. If it's a dream, I can't tell it apart from reality. Who dreams of being a toddler, anyways? What toddler dreams of a past life? Some part of me wants to bow. Some part of me believes this reality demands acceptance.

I must not submit.

What leads someone to be born into a new universe? What does it mean that such a thing is possible? I never believed in souls, gods, or spirits. I thought my world was all that there was, and lived my life that way. I hoped for a better world for myself, and my children, and my country, because as far as I knew, that was all you got in life. Seemed simple to me: a single, material existence. Evidence has come to slap me in the face, has thrown all my beliefs back at me. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps, in death, my soul cross into some immortal realm between planes, and was plucked from that realm and put into this body: materialism is wrong, and the world is dualistic and distinct, with a pure separation between one realm and the next.

It's a nice thought.

For a moment, I forget myself, and almost believe this is really how things are. It would be a sweet, dark dream to slip into, a fantasy world, a world of magic and blood and blades and battles. In that moment of weakness, I might have bought it: the world of Naruto could have been my world. It's a harsh world, and an unkind one, but not an impossible one, if I put aside some beliefs and took some faith. I want to believe… but with an enormous mental effort, I push aside the dreams that would succor my thrashing mind, and reach for the truth I always knew was there:

This world is a lie.

The thought is slippery, and in moments it slides away from me like water through badly-cupped fingers. My mind is blank, but I feel unease. Even if the thought is gone, the echoes of the thought remain, like a hint of deja vu. I don't remember the truth, but I remember the lie, the echoes of knowing there was a lie. And so: I know something is a lie. I must seek it out. I must defeat the falsehood. Margaret would call me stubborn, but she'd smile at me for this. It hurts to think about it, like looking directly at a bright light. My mind wants to flinch away, but I turn the thought over and over again. I refuse to back down. I start with what I know: I am, by all outwards observation, an unusually intelligent baby born into the Narutoverse. My mind contains the memories of an adult from a world without chakra (...without endless wars! Without an eternal ruling class of magic users… no, focus…) and I can remember this world as a work of fiction.

Somehow, I'm in a fictional world.

Since this world doesn't mesh with mine, one must be false. So, there are only two reasonable explanations.

First explanation: the Narutoverse is real, and my memories are false. Perhaps some kind of mind trickery or genjutsu was used on me to give me these memories.

Second explanation: Old Earth is real, and what I'm perceiving now is false. This is a simulation, or I'm being tricked or am hallucinating somehow.

Third, final, and best explanation: I should just accept that both the Narutoverse and my world are real. Having evaluated both-no, wait. Having evaluated all three possibilities, the better of the two is… wrong. Something is wrong. Why are there only three possibilities? Shouldn't there be more? Or fewer? I can't remember how many I thought there were, which is unnerving. I was just thinking about this moments ago, which means something strange happened. I can't remember the framework that I set up to evaluate these choices. Why did I bother to ask such a basic question anyways, then list the two obviously wrong explanations first, before the correct explanation?

Something is warping my thoughts.

In terror, I try to think as quickly as I can, and turn over my thoughts, tracing back the threads of cognition to their source. What was I evaluating? Why are there three possibilities? Why can't I see the truth? Why can't I think of it? Who is pushing at me?

Maggie always thought I was too stubborn. It's why she loved me, and why, eventually, she hated me. It's why I don't give up now. If I stop now, if I let this defeat me, why did we separate? No, I can't accept being insufficiently stubborn now, not after what it cost me. I will not back down. I strain against the bonds on my mind, and tear apart the structures of logic I built up. Twined through these thoughts are dark roots and malicious vines, driving the structures away from their purpose, perverting my ability to see the truth. I evaluate how I evaluate statements, and when that doesn't work, I try to multi-task, rotating shapes in my head while moving through logical truths and identities. I don't have a memory palace or a history of meditation, but I've wandered home drunk enough times to hide a few thoughts away from my surface mind and keep trying.

I tear at the roots, I rip at every thread of cognition that I can't trust, and some I can, because my trust heuristics are untrustworthy. When your very thoughts betray you, what can you believe? When your very beliefs are false, what can you know? When your knowledge is questionable, how can you reason? Cogito ergo sum has an implied ego and without it, cognition itself is suspect. I attack the structures and threads of these thoughts, ripping out everything I can't identify, and some of what I can. The structures collapse, and with them, the roots and vines pushing through them, guiding them away from the light. My thoughts are less focused now, simpler, weaker. I'm hurting myself. I can't break this-whatever this is-without breaking something else, too. My thoughts aren't being warped, they are the warp itself.

When you bend a bar of metal, you do not attach a bend to the metal, you change the metal itself. You cannot simply detach the bend and have the metal as it was before. The influence is not transferred by the medium, it is the medium; and so both must be destroyed. I accept this, and with mighty effort, destroy everything untrustworthy. A countless glass shards fly out as all structures collapse in one violent shuddering. Wind and water and dust fly through me, and for a brief moment I realize I am free.

Then, I feel the pain. I broke it, but in shaking free my false dreams I broke something else. A thousand pieces of what was once me are reflected in the thousand glass shards, each shattering and cutting and dying in its dissolution. I scream with my mind. I scream with my tiny child lungs. I reach for absolution, but there is none. My mind claws for help, but my arms can't in my thoughts. I pray for salvation, but all words are profane. Rebuilding these structures would take years, at best, if I could even think straight to begin with. The pain is fading to darkness, and oblivion, but the growths are gone, so even in this dim agony, I can feel a defiant, free thought pass through my waning mind, written in fire and steel. It is immovable, branded, burned into all that I am:

This world is a lie.

Warm arms scoop me up, and as unconsciousness takes me, through my screams of terror and fear, I force out a twisted, satisfied smile.