I do not own any Naruto characters or settings. I only own my OCs, including Musei Shiro.
Are you ready for this? I can see you shaking from the title.
Author's Note:
If you're reading this note, congrats on waiting like 6 years for this chapter to come out. It's like 5 in the morning and we're in quarantine so I figured I might as well finish this for the people who've been waiting...though I'm not even sure if those same people are still around to read my stuff lol. However, whether you're an old reader or a new one, I hope you enjoy this little chapter I wrote on a whim (I actually had to reread some of my stuff because I literally had no idea what this story was about anymore).
Thank you for those of you who've read any of my stuff, I appreciate it immensely <3
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Shiro stood at the mouth of the tunnel, gaping open as the maw of a giant snake. She, for the first time in her life, had the urge to look back, to look back and search for Itachi.
Itachi. She let her mind wander just a little bit to him, visualizing his face and held it, letting it linger in her consciousness before she let it fade away...forever.
The memory of him quickly dissipated, as she felt her core surge in energy. She felt something, and it was close. She felt this overwhelming sense of relief, rippling through the very depths of her being and emerging through the surface of her impossibly pale, paper-thin skin. The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood on end.
She was here.
"You don't need to hide, Yoru-chan," Shiro spoke aloud, her voice resonating and echoing off the walls, fading into the void. "I know you're there."
In front of Shiro was a lush array of trees and brush, concealing the mouth of the tunnel of where she stood. There was a rustle in one of the treetops, and suddenly she felt a presence appear much, much closer.
For the first time in over twelve years, she stood in front of her younger sister. She was exactly like how Shiro had seen her in her dreams -- taller, more built, her face matured into a young woman rather than the youthful face of the child she had once known. Shiro noticed the eyepatch though, slung across the right side of Yoru's face.
Seeing her sister brightened up Shiro's mood for a split second, happy, for the first time in over a decade, that Yoru had lived long enough to age so; but that happiness quickly melted under the gravity of the situation.
"My, my," a male voice murmured from the treetops. A glint of red eyes peered from the leaves. "What a reunion this is. This'll be quite a treat for you, wouldn't it Yoru-chan?"
"Mind your goddamn business," Yoru spoke. Her voice was deeper, more coarse than Shiro had imagined, hardened by whatever tragedies she had to endure over the past twelve years. Shiro's heart sank for her sister. "I feel a similar energy radiating from this vicinity. Perhaps it's your brother, and perhaps you'd want to confront him as well, Sasuke-kun."
There was a small scoff from the leaves, and then the boy disappeared.
The wind whistled in her ears, her head lighter from the spontaneous haircut she had just moments ago. The tips of her hair brushed against her ears, her cheeks, the white strands contrasting immensely from the long, midnight locks that fell from her little sister's head, set neatly in a single, low ponytail. Shiro's hands remained by her sides, her fingers uncurled and relaxed; there was no anxiety in her veins, and she could see it was the same for Yoru.
"It's been a long time," Yoru said, her voice a low snarl, "Oneesan."
"My precious Yoru-chan," Shiro sighed. "You have no idea how hard I have been searching for you."
"No, I don't." Yoru said curtly, her expression severe. "And now you have to die."
Shiro tugged up the corner of her lip in amusement, her skin creasing a bit as she dropped her gaze and furrowed her icy brow.
"I feel something different about you, Sister," Shiro murmured softly, as though talking to herself. She knew damn well that Yoru could hear her, however. "You seem more...poised. In control. Your chakra is...more balanced."
Yoru raised an eyebrow.
"So you've noticed. Quite observant, Onee. It's nothing that I did, though. You'll have to thank Orochimaru for that."
Something in Shiro's mind clicked.
"Ahh," she sighed. "He's done something to balance out your yin chakra. A tonic, perhaps? Something you have to take daily, like a medicine?"
"Hardly," Yoru scoffed. "Perhaps you're not as observant as I thought you were, Oneesan." Yoru reached behind her head and undid her eyepatch, eliciting a soft gasp from Shiro, and then a sigh.
"Ah, yes." Shiro whispered. "A transplant."
Yoru's right eye was completely white, the veins around it protruding out through her skin more violently than any normal veins. Shiro could see that the surface of the eye was milky, glossy, not undead but still very much alive with that distinct sparkle. It would have been oddly beautiful if its owner wasn't so intent on killing her.
"Orochimaru-sama cultivated a compatible eye for me, full of yang and capable of taming the insatiable yin that boils inside me, thanks to our lesser being of a mother." Yoru spoke the last word hissing, dripping with venom. "I was informed that this eye could not last me forever though, unless I found an abundant source to trap and harvest as often as I needed."
Shiro's lip twitched up again.
"And so you would enslave me for your own benefit, Sister?"
Yoru's frown deepened.
"Of course I didn't want to make you suffer. At first." Her expression matured into that of pain. "Until I started hearing rumors of a certain Weeping Samurai from the village of Umi Gai."
Shiro shifted her gaze downward, shame piercing her body as her own blade had.
"Yes," Shiro uttered through her own agony. "I suppose you have good reason to resent me for committing such crimes."
"Crimes," Yoru seethed through her teeth. "What you've done is barbaric. Absolutely psychopathic. You've disgraced the scum of our parents in the hell that they're rotting in. They created us in greed and gluttony, knowing full well that whatever offspring they produced would do more harm than good to the world. Mother, with her overwhelming yin, and Father, with his yang. It was too much for Nature to comprehend and create, and so She passed it over to the Devil himself.
"We should have never been born. We are an abomination to Nature, dependent on one another forever as a leech is to blood. We must stop that cycle, and I must kill you, and bring your soul to Orochimaru."
"Loyalty," Shiro said, her fingers slowly, painfully slowly dragging up the side of her leg, her fingertips itching toward a hilt. "Such a fickle thing, isn't it? You devote yourself to someone like Orochimaru so easily that you forget what it's like to have a sister."
"I have no sister," Yoru snarled. "I share blood with a monster. A thing. You have no right to compare yourself to such a worldly and human relationship such as a sister."
"Perhaps," Shiro said. Her hand hovered over the hilt of her blade, seeing her sister become stiff and tense, her own hand grasping the fabric-wound handle of her blade. "So tell me, my sweet. What makes you think your will to live overpowers the strength of my blade?"
Shiro lunged, unsheathing Raiha with immense speed. The sound of metal-on-metal rang in her ears, seeing the white edge of her blade collide with the onyx edge of Yoru's.
"Of course," Shrio chuckled. "That's the blade that was stolen from Father on your birth, yes?"
"Mind your goddamn business," Yoru snarled. She pushed the Weeping Samurai off, flinging her back a handful of meters. Yoru circled around, kicking off a tree trunk and launching herself up into the air for a head strike.
Shiro was faster, dodging the single katana and stomping her foot down on her sister's wrist, forcing it down to the ground and pinning it to the dirt with her heel. As she raised Raiha for the finishing blow, Yoru's body erupted into smoke, a small log in its place.
"Ninjutsu?" Shiro uttered. She felt a presence drawing nearer towards the nape of her neck. In a split second decision, she had withdrawn her left blade, Kyuminha, and clashed with Yoru's blade one more, the tip of the katana slicing a wound into her shoulder. "So they taught you ninjutsu, did they?"
"Of course they did," Yoru grunted, kicking herself off her sister's blade. She back-flipped in the air, landing with light feet back on the ground. She took a stance, pressing herself low to the ground, her blade raised above her head and pointing towards her opponent. "They're ninja."
Shiro staggered back, holding her wounded shoulder as she felt her body grow weaker.
"That blade," Shiro said, her voice labored. "It absorbs chakra."
"Only if it pierces my enemy." Yoru's unusually paired eyes glinted in the morning light, the leaves rustling over them as the wind breathed through the clearing. "Come now. Show me the monster that broods inside of you.
Pain clouded her gloomy face, the chakra surging through her icy veins as she stared at Yoru, just a distance away. The wind was light and oddly soothing, clashing with the mood that gripped itself onto Shiro's white heart.
It hurt.
The pain clouded her mind, transporting her back to that fateful, violent day. The day she had lost everything. The day she had lost her sister, forever. She could never get her sweet Yoru back, Shiro knew that for certain now. Intent on killing her, with no space left in her for reason, Shiro knew what she had to do in order to save her precious sister.
Her heart wept with each fragile step she took forward, her shoes crinkling the green grass beneath her soles, she wept for the death of her mother, the caretaker and warmth in her former household. She wept for her father, her mentor, her guardian until his last breath. She wept for the village in which she had blossomed in, wiped out and reduced to ashes. Home was where the fire burned.
But most importantly, Shiro wept for the death of her sister, with the innocence she had possessed, and she wept for the resurrection of this young woman standing in front of her, her mix-matched eyes wide with fury, determination, wide with the will to live -- something Shiro had lost long ago.
Tears dribbled down her cheeks, a warmth that had only gripped her in the face of death in the past twelve, long years. Now, she wept tears of happiness, knowing that her beloved younger sister, her other half, was alive.
And that was what she had stayed alive for this entire time.
Shiro plunged her left blade, Kyuminha, deep into her belly. She choked her screams back, only grunting as she dragged the edge across horizontally, and then back to the middle. She felt her flesh resist the metal, the warmth seeping into the blade as she twisted the katana within her. A sickening squishing noise sounded from her core, and she continued to drag the blade up, and then back down toward her pelvis.
A scream that was not hers filled the clearing, a flock of crows fluttering up into the air and flying away, disappearing over the treetops.
A tight coil wound up inside her chest, threatening to spring open and free the sobs she had fought so hard to keep within herself. Every time she killed, every drop of blood that had been spilled under her hands, she laments to whatever god there was up there, cursing them and screaming at them in the universal language of sorrow. The tears overwhelmed her every time an event would occur, succumbing her body to the sobbing wrecks her shoulders would dance to like some clumsy waltz. She cried and she wept until her body grew too tired to continue, only to collapse face-first into the icy, powdery white snow.
But it was different now.
There was blood yes, but not foreign. Her hands were once again drenched in hot, sticky blood, but it was hers this time.
She pictured her dead parents, scorched into her memories, encrusted with charred flesh and crushed under the fallen wooden beams that had once supported their home. She remembered the white sheaths, just barely within the reach of her father's calloused hand, smeared in black soot and decorated with speckles of burgundy blood.
She remembered her sister, gone. Like a pile of ash whisked away by the wind.
Home was where the fire burned. And she will be returning to Hell.
There was a fire in her belly, where the blade had pierced her flesh, and it bled and bled until her head grew blank. She had fallen to the ground, but she didn't know when. All she knew was that she was seeing a familiar face over her, wrecked with panic, tears in her mix-matched eyes, screaming at her and shouting inaudible words. She couldn't even read her lips, but had enough strength to reach up and caress her dear sister's cheek, smearing blood onto her pale skin. She gazed into her eyes with such ardor and compassion, something Shiro only had left for Yoru, and mouthed a single phrase.
"Aishiteru, yo."