disclaimer: naruto © masashi kishimoto.

notes:
1. this was written originally for my trope bingo card, last year, and it's - very quick and rough but i somehow like it.
2. there won't be a continuation. please don't ask.
3. enjoy! feel free to review telling me what you liked.

YOU SEE YOUR FORTUNE (AND YOU'RE AFRAID)

Picture this:

Sunset. Above the clouds the sky looks pink and red and lavender all at once, melting into a dark plum colour – the shade of a bruise at its worst. There's a field, sprawling green grass and tiny white flowers that bloom all year round, in this land where spring is a silvery breeze. A young woman, golden-haired and golden-eyed, punches a man on the chest and her fist breaks through him: a shower of blood and bone splinters.

War.

When he blinks all the wars blur together. This is the sort of callous thought he couldn't imagine thinking three lives ago, back when he was female and younger and kinder, but he's been fighting for years – all his life – and it blunts the bits of him that are sweet.

The first time he is a woman. Her parents are farmers and they live in the sort of tiny village where everybody knows each other since birth, and so did their parents and their parents' parents. She's a small thing as a child but she grows up to have the body of a milkmaid: an oval face, dreamy eyes and heavy breasts underlined by wide hips. Her days go by so slowly she's terribly surprised when a young man passes by and their eyes meet – the flash of heat low in her belly is familiar, but her body is new and unsure and it flushes in a slow blaze of desire and shame.

He smiles at her.

He leaves the village three days later but he takes her with him. He's attractive in a non-conventional way, as these things go – lean-hipped and tanned, but with narrow eyes and a sharp nose. She likes to hold his arm and feel the shift of muscle under skin, likes the sharp hollow of his throat and the way he goes so carefully still when she kisses him there. His family is huge and sprawling and mostly mild-mannered, except for those like her who marry in. Their wedding is a quiet affair and she's steadily happy. Sometimes he's absent for a long time – months on end. She mostly doesn't mind it, because she's terrified she'll fall out of love with him if they spend too much time together, but this time she grows fat with child, puts a hand on her belly and exhales. Thinks: what if he doesn't come back?

But he does come back. She watches him watch her – his pupils dilating – and the way his shadow shivers once, abruptly, before stilling. Your child, she says, your heir.

They poison her in that life. She's old by then – old by the standards of this world – in her midforties. Her milkmaid's body softens with age but doesn't break apart like a tired song: her husband still places a hand on her hip and kisses the dimple of her knees, when they're naked and laughing late at night. She puts her mouth on his cheek and he turns his head and they stare at each other for a long moment before she spreads her legs and he sinks in – and he's holding her hand as she dies, still tasting the poisoned tea in her mouth. He looks lost and forlorn and she smiles a little, even laugh.

My love, don't despair, she says. We will meet again.

(Shinobi do not believe in gods.)

The next time she is an Uzumaki, born at the edge of the sea. Her mother is a fisherman's wife, too busy to spare a free day even heavily pregnant, and in the end her water breaks and she bleeds and the baby feels the heartbeat of the ocean as soon as she comes back into the world. It's the first time she becomes a ninja, and it's a happy life. They only rarely leave their beloved island, but they're easy to recognise – red-haired, bright-eyed, and unfailingly loud. In one occasion she accompanies her teacher to negotiate a merchant trade with the Nara and the Head himself welcomes them: a lean-hipped man with a spare face and a heavily lined face. She feels the echo of fondness, half-faded from death, but still smiles a secret smile at him and for a moment that lasts forever he stares. One of her teammates dies when they're attacked by an enemy clan and she's remarkably unconcerned, even when he asks her if they hadn't got along well – for her to show such little sorrow.

Do you really believe those we lose are gone forever? she replies, and pretends she doesn't notice his hand reaching out when everyone says their goodbyes.

She doesn't ever have a partner or children in that life. Instead she discovers herself, wholly lovely and alive. She's only thirty when she dies, but she thinks it was a good life: save a few lives, plant a few trees, hold hands with your family. Her mother outlives her, which is her one true regret, because she imagines her at the edge of the sea, barefoot and with the splash of water dampening the edge of her kimono, and her sadness wells.

Again.

Next time she's a merchant's daughter. She's his oldest child, and his only daughter – a good trade for marriage, certainly, but he loves her helplessly, so he educates her all the same. She's sixteen when they hear rumours about some shinobi clans banding together to found a village, sprawling and evergreen and safe, and she gets to accompany her father on the negotiations. It's been a while since she's been around so many shinobi, but her worry for her father far overwhelms her nervousness and she's right at his side all the time, bickering for better prices and snapping back whenever one of those dorks reaches for their weapon.

If it works out, we'll be village-kin, she says once, sharp. Her voice only trembles a little. Respect me as you would your equal.

She gets to meet Uzumaki Mito and can't stop staring at her hair.

Her hand gets bought by a Hyuuga woman. She can't say she'd noticed her particularly before, but it seems her unsteady bravery made an impression, because her father gets a very good offer. She's only Branch House, but she's aware of the rise in status it will give her father, and after thinking it over for a while she accepts, blushing a little when her bride-to-be stares at her with those lovely eyes, pale as the wings of a morning bird. They do not touch at their wedding, and yet she's so aware of her wife's presence, her warmth, her clothes, her gaze – when they finally lock eyes it's a relief, like breaking out of the water and releasing your breath.

Her warm mouth. Her silent kisses. It's not the bolt of lightning she recalls feeling once, but it spreads inside her like the branches of a tree.

Her wife dies six years later, and she gets to miss her deeply every day for ten years – visits her grave and makes herself useful in the hospital, where she mixes herbs and hides seals into her patients for fast recovery – she says they're good-luck charms and they find her quaint. Outside, faraway and impossibly close, war roars on.

She dies when a Kumo shinobi sneaks into the tent where she is helping out. The Hyuuga begin to nurse an old, old shade of hate.

There's another war that feels like the first continued (interrupted by a little hitch of breath) and she decides she's fighting in this one. It's the first time she's had to kill so, so many people – she remembers one time she had to wade through a pond so soaked in blood the water felt thick like jelly and syrup. It caked her hair and underneath her nails and every step she took made her toes squish unpleasantly. After it's over she finds a nice civilian boy, with warm dark eyes and a quiet disposition, but she never quickens.

(This one doesn't fade. This feeling. A tired, tired, tired body – aching with its own loneliness and no child to prop on her hip.)

It's also the first time she kills herself.

The next one she dies young, because she's born in Kiri. They're not as careful about how they sharpen their tools, over here. She doesn't mind it much because it's a terrible life from beginning to end: born to a prostitute too hungry to care she has to search for something edible in the trashcan, perpetually pregnant because they give her money every time she signs up one of her children for shinobi training. She's small and huge-eyed and so deeply sad even her instructors hesitate sometimes – and these are men who have been sharpened on the edge of the world's most cutting knife. It wells up on her like sticky candy, makes her jaw heavy, obligates her to stop talking.

The next time, she's a man. And she knows his name, and his blood, and his family.

Kato Dan is a clever child, if deeply melancholic. His father signs him up for the Academy despite the fact they're a small shinobi clan who only sporadically participate in warfare because his chakra is unbelievable strong. It sometimes feels like he's not there when I'm talking to him, his mother whispers to her sister once, when she thinks her child's asleep. Like he leans out of his body and floats away where I can't reach him.

He's tired of mothers.

He's a good soldier. No problem following orders, but hardly anybody requests him because it makes them feel like shit to see his mournful face – the old sorrow in the shade of his lashes, as if he's too tired to fight back instead of comforted by the fact he's doing his duty. He's a skinny teenager, quick-witted enough to make it to adulthood, but he does not touch anybody at all – would rather be alone now, he thinks. Would rather―

He meets Tsunade in a war council. They're arguing about the cost of training good medics, about the possibility of lowering once again the age of graduation from the Academy, and he can't stop himself from speaking out:

Keep them alive longer, he says. More experience.

The utilitarianism appeals, it seems, because he wins and Tsunade turns to look at him over her shoulder.

He feels the gaze of God on him for the first time. It must be, this awful soul-crushing weight that says: you know what you've got to do, don't you? He lives only because she needs him to grow into the kind of woman who will one day rule a whole sprawling village, wear a hat with the old dignity of her family. He lives only because Death does not want to keep him. He lives only because he's afraid killing himself will end with him ending up somewhere worse.

She falls in love quickly, like downing a shot of vodka. He answers as best he can, resigned, but she dislikes his pretence – says it makes her feel cheap, stupid and bothersome. It makes him laugh for the first time in forever.

You're none of that, Tsunade. Looking at her right in the eye. Don't even think it, all right?

For all her talk, it wears on her and he can see it – the slow grinding despair of loving someone who cannot love you at all, not the way you need it. If he gave in theirs would be the kind of love story young women wish for, breathless and listless, burning with the sunlit cheerfulness proper of the innocent, and yet―he buries himself into her body and kisses her jaw, her ear, her mouth―her eyes are wide open and so he keeps his open too―

There is fondness there. He just can't fall in love because there's not enough of him to give her.

They go to war, again. He doesn't have the breath to sigh.

There's a sunset one day, and it's the loveliest he's ever seen it. It reminds him of long ago, the farming village and his mother's worried face as she held hands with a man who would love her until she died – and she did die, and she kept dying, and now all she has is a field soaked in blood and tiny flowers dripping sticky-hot and the lavender sky, the fat sleepy clouds, and Tsunade watching him as he sits wearily on his heels.

"I love you," she says.

And here's the thing: if he'd been whole he would've loved her like crazy. Tsunade likes dumplings and chicken breast and she drinks irregularly but without care, with the easy trust that she can cure herself. When they kiss she tastes like lipstick and heat, and her hair smells of grass and wind. The look on her face when she sits on him and rocks back and forth deserves to have its own epic.

But he's a fire only barely lit, and she gets to keep her necklace.

Even so, his face softens with affection – he doesn't love her but he feels more for her than anybody else in the world, which right now is muffled behind clear glass. So of course that's the moment a pale-faced woman chooses to drop from the trees and slice Tsunade's throat open like she's drawing a smile.

He thinks: No.

He thinks: Stop the world, please, I want to get off.

He thinks: (white noise).

He kills the woman unthinkingly and hates himself for it – for the fact killing has become a reflex, a chore. He wants to be that farmer's daughter again, and yet whenever he looks at the others – with their obvious weapons, half-lidded eyes and dangerous smiles – there's still the foolhardy spark of fascination. He kneels at Tsunade's side and puts his hand over her throat, kisses her trembling mouth the way her wife did so long ago, when she was afraid and―

And―

Rage.

"How could you just watch? How could you just watch?"

He's talking to you, you know.

"I hate this! I'm so sick of it already―make me forget or, or stop it because I can't―"

Dan sits back and screams. It's a long drawn-out wail, the sort that makes your throat ache for days, and it scares off the trilling birds. Tsunade's dead by then, but her eyes are open and he holds her close and rocks her, unwillingly remembering the days and nights when she would sit on him and take her pleasure, what she wanted―she'd never minded the fact he couldn't answer her feelings properly, was too much herself to lose it all to―

"Stop it!" Dan screams. "STOP IT! GET OUT."

I can't.

"Why?! Why do you keep doing this? It's your fault, isn't it?"

It's my duty.

He stares blindly into nothing, panting. "Your duty?"

It's what I exist for. My purpose. You're the story, and I must tell the story. The readers wish to know what happens next.

He doesn't blink.

If you try to stop the story, I'll hurt you worse. You know that, right? You just have to keep as you have been, and everything will be fine. Don't you know if I stop telling the story you'll die?

His pulse beats so sluggishly it looks painful – his joints are tired, his muscles are tired, his heart is tired. He wants to sleep and not dream, not about her husband, and her wife, and her children, and Tsunade, not about anything – he wants clean fields, not bloody, and he wants to be worthy of Tsunade's necklace and she's dead what is going to happen to the story now―

He takes out a knife. Looks at the dull shine. Gets up.

Isn't this his purpose―exist for Tsunade's sake, so she can love him and ache and grow? If she's gone, what's the point of existing? Sometimes when we have so little it's better to cut what you do have from the root, to stop the rot from setting in. Sometimes a sluggish heartbeat is best―

Dan looks at me.

"I don't forgive you," he says, and raises the kni―