Knitting Fate (Canon Patchworking with Uchiha Ren Part II)

Seventy-Seventh Thread

This chapter has been beta'd for you by hestia8693 and MoonRaven1412

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...yeah. So you know how fun is it to have your hard drive die on you, having to rush your thesis after said death eats all you had written so far, catch the plague AND THEN barely a month later get your ass kicked by a common cold because said plague did a number on your lungs?

Not fun.

Hi. *slides chapter forward*

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"Life doesn't get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient."
― Steve Maraboli

0

Once Shisui calms down enough to talk, they talk for hours. He's not okay, that is clear to see, but he keeps drilling Ren about anything and everything. So she answers whatever questions she can. And even subdued, he's pretty energetic, reacting to everything of interest animatedly.

He learns that Ren adopted Sasuke, that Sasuke carted clan head responsibilities off to her, that she adopted Naruto and outed his parentage via utilizing the most basic deduction skills available through children. He pretty much gets the cliff notes of everything from Ren's awakening in the hospital after she was certain she was dead until their meeting now after she was certain that he was dead.

It's a rollercoaster, to be sure.

Shisui, for his part, also speaks. Mostly of his time in the falls. How the spiders found him, how he spent a good few months basically in a coma, sometimes coming in and out of consciousness, always blurred by the now-forever darkness. How he had freaked out when he realized that his eyes were gone, and then again when he realized that his caretakers were actual giant spiders. (Understandable, that freakout. Especially without sight. That meant he had to have discovered that by touch.) How those spiders had to pump him full of nature chakra to save his life and his spine in a way that would actually let him recover mobility below his neck.

Which in turn is what led to Ren sitting behind Shisui, staring wide-eyed at his now-bare back, a little fascinated and a little horrified, because now, after seeing the abominations at the edge of the realm, she knows that this could have gone so wrong. In a way, it very nearly has.

And by that she means an incomplete sage mode that, by necessity and its very nature, Shisui is now entirely unable to turn off. Because the mutations have progressed too far, and if he somehow managed to retract the mutations...

Ren winces, looking at the spine encased in chitin, in the telltale gloss of the skin on the entirety of Shisui's back that betrays the fact that it's no longer human skin, at its hardness and almost plasticky feel. At the way the flesh twisted to accomodate for the armor that kept his bones encased and whole and the delicate pathways of chakra and nerves underneath functioning.

"They found it broken in at least three places," Shisui explains. "They assumed it was worse, but with cracks like those, if they had done nothing, I'd just be a blinking vegetable. Well, 'broken' is a nice way of putting it, is what Inoue said."

"How did you even get those fractures?"

"Likely my fall into the Naka river. I went down back-first and it's pretty shallow in some places. Rocky, too," he says, patting his right shoulder blade for emphasis, and sure enough; what is a jagged, fully healed scar now must have once been a really gnarly wound. Too jagged for it to have been a weapon or animal, and just nasty enough for it to have been from a sharp rock. And with how weakened Shisui was from his preceding fight with Danzō, and having lost both eyes — one having been stolen and the other given to that man-baby, Itachi — it's no wonder that he had been too weak to cushion his fall in any way.