“-. November 1, 5 ANB .-“
The first thing I did when I got home was grab my van de Graaff generator.
And I mean that literally. I turned it on, grabbed the dome and just sat there holding it, hoping my little hunch, the only thing left over from my trip down DNA lane, wasn’t just wishful thinking.
It wasn’t.
As the tingle of static electricity began filling me, I could literally feel the cells in my right hand become more alive again, more aware with every second that passed. The plasma bodies were absorbing the energy. Practically feeding on it. Though maybe ‘feel’ wasn’t the right word, I just knew. Knew more and more of what was going on at cellular level and further until I could actually distinguish between what I knew and what I was feeling again. I hadn’t imagined it. Not what happened, and not what happened in response to what happened.
My cells had gained their own souls.
And my chakra circulatory system proceeded to eat them.
Was still eating them.
Really slowly, though, thankfully. My chakra pathway system was apparently complete shit, even now that my chakra capacity was nearly half again as large as it used to be. Since chakra did follow something resembling the law of conservation, this did not fill me with elation. Now that I had something to compare against my steady decline in biological self-awareness of the past few days, my lack of elation was rapidly shifting into worry. Increasingly so as my subconscious biological processes became more and more known to my conscious mind again, the more the cells in my hand regained their subtler bodies. It was… a lot for a single train of thought to handle. But my hand seemed to do a lot of the self-assessment thinking all by itself. My cells too, as if they suddenly had their own information processing capability. Beyond just the automated metabolic processes anyway. It was strange.
I wonder if that's what having Naruto’s brain would feel like. Naruto’s mind probably worked by simultaneous multi-threaded problem-solving. But since nobody got around to teaching him problem-solving, all those thoughts were idle. And idle hands are the devil’s playground, and all that. His own mind was wearing him out. Like my own body almost wore me out.
First, take stock.
I’d been brought home at mid-day. All my neighbours had seen. I had to be carted over again, so everyone knew I’d suffered some new sort of health problem. Mercifully, Kakashi had pulled his own ‘I’m a civilian nobody’ henge like Shisui had before him. Not so mercifully, this still left a lot of leeway for wagging tongues.
“Hey, Hatake.”
“Hmm.”
“How do you feel about D-rank missions?”
“Hmm?” Kakashi asked from where he was slouched against my wall reading porn. “You said something?”
Who the hell do you think I am, Gai? “Either that or our difficulty in finding common ground might force me to throw Naruto at you.”
“Now now, no need to do anything rash. What did you need, oh honourable host?”
“I want to know how far you’re willing to go to accomplish your mission. Are you here to satisfy the letter of your orders, or their spirit?”
Kakashi tucked his book away. “Well, it’s as you said. We live in a shinobi village.”
Don’t complain about trading my freedom for my safety, is that it? That I had no say in this was what stung the most. “Am I your mark here or your client?”
“Well, it’s an unusual situation.” Translation, that’s not up to you. “But by the spirit of the mission, you’re the client.”
“Then we have terms to discuss.”
“I suppose so.”
It turned out that the Third gave me pretty much complete leeway on how I wanted this handled, in the same way as a high-profile client would have on mission terms. Of course, he also gave Kakashi full permission not to volunteer this information, or any information I didn’t ask about, which was the kind of rules lawyering I’d come to expect from ninja. Fortunately, the man didn’t seem to consider my terms too egregious. He understood that I didn’t have the sort of reputation or lifestyle that would justify him playing the role of random renter or visiting family (of which I had none). Conversely, his priority was my continued and unspoiled survival, so he was against anything that jeopardised that, like having too many walls between us. That said, he didn’t argue as hard as I feared when I pointed out that I was fairly well known in my neighbourhood for my disdain of freeloaders. Something that would be doubly true now that I was under doctor orders to take it easy.
“I do see what you’re saying,” Kakashi said mildly. “Still, I won’t be able to protect you properly if I’m distracted with menial tasks.”
I looked at the medium. It was silent now, the Tesla coils and electrodes inactive, the dust long since settled. But the sealant had held well and none of the argon had escaped, or been diluted with ingoing air. The lack of plasma life made me feel a pang of sadness, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that most of them had left the medium when they entered me, and no new ones would have been created afterward, even before the Anbu shut everything down out of consideration for my power bill. I could still feel the plasma bodies, even individually if I focused, more and more as the plasma cell bodies replenished. I could even feel Yemo again now, though his presence was less a ball and more a long thread linking my brain to my palm, like the branch of a tree unable to produce its own sap. He was completely fused to the nerve now, the semblance of autonomy he’d exhibited in the medium was gone. Maybe it was never there and I really was just projecting. Or maybe it was just sleeping. I did fancy I could still find its potential there, somewhere.
Still, I’d come to reassess my assumptions about plasma cell autonomy and sentience in the past few days. That was why I wanted to keep away from the medium for my next experiment. “How about only seemingly menial tasks that actually need your personal touch?”
The man’s single eye studied me carefully. “For example?”
“For example, an experiment that might prove that I wasn’t, in fact, poisoned. Possibly.”
Kakashi’s lone eye was studying me very intensely now. “Yes. Yes, I think I and the Hokage might be very interested in such a thing.”
“Great. Well, I’ll need to keep my distance for this one. Go ahead and turn on those knobs there, will you? The one over there, and that one. ” My hand began to tingle. The cells whose plasma sheathes had been eaten for chakra were gaining new ones as the ones left multiplied once again. Regretfully, I could feel the effect of my chakra system as it began to gorge on them too, for lack of a better word. The replenishment vastly outpaced the drain though, for now at least. “Okay. Now. Pull that switch.”
Hatake Kakashi tolerantly pulled the switch. The Tesla coils came to life. Kakashi watched them with some surprise, perhaps they reminded him of the chidori? Then he switched them off when I said. Moved on to the other at my direction. The electrodes came active next. Step by step, my experiment was recreated until new plasma life began to take shape in the miniature superstorm.
Only this time I didn’t approach.
Instead… “Right. Now, please approach the glass as close as you can without touching it.”
“Well, if you say so.”
The man did so.
Nothing new happened. Actually, a lot less than before happened. There was no wonder child, no grandiose surge in autonomy, no anomalous behaviour emerging from the primordial soup, no prodigal son. Just… plasma cells. Small ones. Like floating blue sparks. Nothing special about them. Well, beyond the fact that they existed and therefore challenged all assumptions about the true nature of life and its origin in the universe.
“Alright,” I said, mentally bracing myself. “Now touch the glass.”
Kakashi glanced wryly at me and touched the glass.
Nothing happened. The plasma cells just… whirled through the medium like before, riding the electrical currents and argon winds. That was it.
“Are you concealing your presence? Or whatever it is you ninja do…”
“Somewhat, my sort tend to do it subconsciously. Should I not?”
Your sort being Anbu? “If you would?”
Kakashi relaxed his hold on himself, but still nothing happened. Except, maybe, those handful of plasma cells that were near his hand might have lingered there in spite of the argon currents, it was hard to tell from this distance. Okay. “Now flare your chakra.”
Kakashi flared his chakra.
The plasma cells cowered.
I knew I shouldn’t project sentience on unicellular life, but it was the first word that came to mind. The moment Kakashi flared his chakra, the plasma cells closest to his hand combusted and the rest shot away like...
I remembered one of those magic tricks that aired on TV after cartoon shows about magic. Someone would take a bowl of water and sprinkle pepper powder on it. Then they would rub their fingertip on a bar of soap under the table. When they stuck their finger in the water, the pepper would pull away as if running away all the way to the edges. The plasma cells reacted exactly like that.
Even as simple as they were, they reacted with something practically indistinguishable from fight or flight instinct. I winced in sympathy, but this was an important data point. “Right. You can stop now.”
Kakashi withdrew his chakra and pulled his hand away. The gaze in his eye seemed more thoughtful now.
“For the next part we’ll need-“ an animal test subject with enough genetic overlap with humans. “A toad.”
Kakashi’s eye was flat. “A toad.”
What, would you rather deal with a rat? Actually, best not to give him ideas. This man found delight in seeing pre-teens suffer Tora. “Yeah. Think you can find one? There should be some on the property.” I wasn’t even being facetious, I’d had a lot of time to think about this over the past few days. “I can’t go flailing after them, I gotta take it easy for the next couple of weeks, doctor’s orders you know.”
Kakashi blinked lazily at me, then made a hand sign and disappeared in a puff of smoke.
I reluctantly took my hand off the van de Graaff generator that was the only thing staving off the death of my subtle body and, very slowly, approached the medium. I wondered if Kakashi had a shadow clone hidden somewhere, watching me even now.
Nothing happened until I got within a meter and a half, then the plasma cells began to behave like proper Anami.
I backed off.
The plasma cells… didn’t regress, exactly, but their behaviour didn’t progress in complexity either.
I was more literal about projecting sentience than I knew. Yemo’s development, it turned out, had not been completely spontaneous. I went through several theories, but the only explanation was that it had borrowed the cognitive processing capability from something else. Or, rather someone. Me. The aura body is real. I then thought of the complete lack of reaction to Kakashi, until chakra got involved. The aura body is real, except in ninja. But Kakashi wasn’t my only data point here either. I was even farther away when things started last time, but I still got Yemo. For a moment, I was very conscious of the nerve in my arm. For nothing to happen even when Kakashi was right there with his hand on the glass…
The idea that I was some kind of super special snowflake was considered and immediately discarded.
Did that mean Kakashi was the anomaly? Or maybe ninja in general had no aura at all? Well, for a given value of absence. Hiruzen and Orochimaru had a literal aura duel, or whatever it was called when you flared your chakra that way. And the Rinnegan could apparently pull out people’s ‘souls’, which were shaped like their bodies. For a little while there anyway. That all probably meant something more than artistic license.
Chakra is made of physical and spiritual energy, I thought. Supposedly. And what was spiritual energy? Experience? Clearly it wasn’t just a conceptual abstraction if it was material enough for chakra to literally feed on. Add to that how ninja stealth didn’t just mean being unseen and quiet…
I backed off until I could put my hand on the generator again. I thought I’d felt a very slight drop in my awareness of my hand in the short time I was separated from it, but I’d need to stay separate from it longer to be sure. For now, though, I was going to regenerate my Anami until I didn’t feel the difference in diminishing returns anymore. Or until I began to feel them spread beyond my hand, whichever came first. Wouldn’t want to have another bunch of cells be purified to perfection at the expense of everything else. I didn’t fancy going through kidney failure again.
Never mind what else might happen. My circulatory system had coped, but my lymphatic system had been well overtaxed. I was already making sacrifices on that front, the lymphatic system didn’t have a pump of its own, it only moved if you moved. Every moment spent sitting around waiting for my weird cell spirits to recharge was time I didn’t spend on ‘light physical activity.’
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Kakashi reappeared with a small paper bag containing a tiny toad, a small toad, a not so small toad, an average toad, and under his arm there was a toad almost as big as my kitchen table.
“… Did you seriously go to the Forest of Death just to make fun of me?”
“You really take the fun out of life, sir.” A puff of smoke revealed the big ‘toad’ to in fact be a transformed tatami set, oh, I’d completely forgotten about that overdue delivery. “What’s the use of trying to make jokes when you just come up with even better ones on the fly?”
“Your pathos is noted,” I said dryly. “Next time, ask Naruto for pointers.”
“Ma, you like to live dangerously, don’t you Masanari?”
“Hardly. Naruto likes me.” Not that it had made a difference so far, but at least the kid couldn’t put me through anything worse than he already had. Much. “You can drop thee toads in the terrarium, except for that smallest one. Just drop that one on top of the medium over there.”
Kakashi did so.
Nothing happened.
Not until I stood up from my chair and got in range again.
The plasma cells became more coordinated immediately. I didn’t know if this was just a passive effect from being within a sapient’s aura, or if my expectations were exerting some sort of influence, like the quantum observer effect. Either way, the plasma cells evolved into Anami in the space of ten minutes until, finally, they began to gather beneath the toad. They didn’t form a mirror image like before, instead streaming up through the glass in fits and starts. All the while, the little toad remained unnaturally docile.
“Hatake, is that thing under genjutsu?”
“Yes.”
Well, at least this was one variable that wouldn’t taint the experiment overmuch. “Brace yourself.”
The flesh and blood toad suddenly burped a croak.
Kakashi twitched. “What was that?” The ninja walked closer and bent forward for a better look. “My genjutsu was dispelled.” He made a hand sign.
“Ribbit.” The toad hopped off.
“Genjutsu doesn’t work?” Kakashi was in a different place between blinks, the toad pinched between two fingers. His other hand made the handsign again. “Genjutsu really doesn’t – no, not just that, my chakra can’t get in, I wonder…” He flared his chakra. Hard.
“Croaaaakk…”
The tiny toad died.
“Good job,” I said dryly, because that was such a Naruto thing to do. “You scorched its insides, didn’t you?”
“I guess so. My apologies.” Hatake, morbidly, came forward to drop the dead toad in my hand. “I’ll use a lighter hand for the next one.”
“Your passion for the scientific method is appreciated,” I said in the same tone. “But maybe we can do my very time-sensitive and actually actionable experiment before we move on to others?”
“Ah, right. My bad.” Kakashi walked over to the terrarium. “Next smallest then?”
“If you please.”
Grab next smallest toad. Genjutsu. Drop animal on top of the medium. The Anami came together into a plasma funnel even faster than before, despite needing to multiply first. They were adapting to my aura faster? Or my aura was? Soon, they were streaming up through the glass into the little creature, just like before. And when Kakashi’s genjutsu broke again, the man was able to refrain from snatching it out of the air to do who knew what.
“So,” Kakashi said idly as we watched the little toad hop all over my workshop. “What now?”
“Wait for it.”
We waited for it.
Until, almost drunkenly, the little toad missed a landing, wobbled to its feet, blinked, opened it mouth and screamed.
“Uuuaaaaaaaaah!”
Kakashi twitched. I flinched. Grit my teeth. Oh god, it sounds like a baby.
Mercifully, the toad ran out of breath. But it only gurgled something and then screamed even louder. “Uuuaaaaaaaaah!”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I let go of the generator and hurried over to pick it up… I didn’t know what I would even do but I just-
The animal flinched when I touched it, writing away on its belly, then on its side as it kicked its little legs in desperation, opening its maw wide to “Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!” The shriek was painful to my soul and my ears, holy shit, I knew frogs and toads screamed in self-defense, but I didn’t-
CRASH
My tiny window shattered as Uzumaki Naruto smashed right through feet-first. “Cease and desist, evildoaAAAYE!” The kid belatedly realized just how high he was and shrieked all the way to being caught by the seat of his pants just inches away from the floor. “Yikes! That was close – hey wait! Put me down, put me down you villain – ack! A SCARECROW! MUST BURN!” Naruto produced a matchbox out of nowhere and started throwing fire at Kakashi. “BURN, BURN YOU WRETCHED FIEND, BU-ungh!”
Kakashi dropped the kid on his face.
What the hell just happened? I thought dazedly. “… Naruto?” Where did he come from, how did he even aim that crash, my window was tiny, what, what’s with him and scarecrows – no, doesn’t matter, why was he here? “Naruto, what the heck are you doing here?”
“Mister! I’m not stalking! I wasn’t, I was just passing through and I heard screams and came as soon as I could, I couldn’t do nothing, you just came out of the hospital again, I’ll protect you, believe it!”
What?
“Rrryyyeeeeeeaaaaghhhhh…!”
Naruto gasped. “What’s that, where-FROGGY!”
I watched numbly as Uzumaki Naruto completely forgot where and why he was in favour of running over to pick up the shrieking animal.
“What’s wrong, what’s wrong little guy, don’t worry, it’s gonna be okay, you’re just being stupid, what did you do to it, you Scarecrow!? No wait, I didn’t meant it little guy, I wasn’t yelling at you, there’s nothing to be afraid of, Mister Hanzo’s going to fix you right up, he’s great! He’s the smartest and kindest person in the world, you’ll see, he’ll make everything bett-“
That was when the black sludge began to seep out of its skin.
“Eh? Ew, EW, that’s gross!” Naruto held the still shrieking toad as far away from his face as he could. He didn’t drop it though.
I got up from my crouch. I watched Naruto helplessly. I felt at once frustrated and ashamed at his inadvertent condemnation of my character.
Kakashi was standing right next to me now, rigid. He hesitated. He showed no visible sign of it so I don’t know how I knew, I just did.
Then the man reached up and uncovered his sharingan, what the hell?
“I can’t see any chakra.” He muttered. “As admirable and attention-grabbing as it would be to find a way to give chakra to others, sir, I’m afraid it didn’t work. Of course, you might want to hire a ninja to have on hand next time you create a device that causes excruciating death to everyone not a ninja because they don’t have chakra to protect them.”
… That’s so far off base I can’t even-
“No, no, Froggy, what’s wrong, what’s wrong!? Mister Hanzo, Froggy’s sick, what should I do, what should I do?”
What should he do? What about the big fat ‘no idea’ I was trying to do just before he showed up out of nowehere – wait. “Naruto… What the heck are you doing here?”
“UUUAAAAAAAAA!”
“FROGGY! NO, FROGGY, DON”T DIE, YOU CAN’T DIE, Mister Hanzo help, help!”
Right.
Well.
“UUUAAAAAAAAA!”
In the end, I went with my mainstay. Straightforward honesty. “It’s my fault, kid. I gave it a cure that’s a lot more painful than the disease.” Namely life.
But of course Naruto couldn’t do the sane thing upon seeing me inflict torturous agony on another living being and instead looked at me trustingly. “But you can make it better, right? You make everything better, that’s what you do!”
Fuck my life. “Sometimes you can do everything you think is right and only end up breaking things more.”
“Like me and the urns?”
… Actually no, not this time. “Like a part of me healing too fast for the body to cope with all the bad stuff in need of throwing out.”
“Oh, so that’s what this is! It’s like when you had to make me sad to make my life better, I knew it!”
Go ahead and brutalize all my feelings at once, kid, why not?
“UUUAAAAAAAAA!”
Beside me, Kakashi had covered his Sharingan again at some point and was now watching me expectantly.
Just for that I’ll make him your problem whenever I get the chance. “Right,” I sighed and scooped Naruto up, sitting on my chair with him in my lap. The kid froze. Froggy kept screaming though, so Naruto promptly began to fuss over it again, uncaring of the black sludge smearing his hands and sleeves. “All we can do for now is wait. We can go forward from there.”
The screaming and writhing lasted for another ten minutes or so. But at the end of it, the toad was still alive. Breathing. Croaking. Blinking at us.
Not even five minutes later, it was eating.
“Ribbit.”
“Here, Froggy, here, eat a bit more,” Naruto urged the little animal as he used the tweezers I scavenged out of my dead wife’s makeup kit to feed it spiders one by one. Why Naruto even had live spiders in a can on him I didn’t want to know, just so long as he kept his pranks out of my neighbourhood. “It ate it! Good Froggy, good boy, or girl or whatever you are, here, have another one, you’ll be alright, you’ll see, you’ll get your strength back and grow big and strong and we’re gonna have lots of fun together, it’s gonna be great!”
It’s already a full grown adult, but why should that matter? I huffed. I seriously needed something to distract me from the lingering memory of the horrible screams of agony I myself inflicted. “Naruto, what are you doing here?”
Naruto clamped his mouth shut and hunched around Froggy, all but vibrating in indecision. I ruffled his head. “Say it, kid.”
‘It’ turned out to be a veritable deluge of words and more words and Naruto repeatedly vowing that “I really wasn’t stalking this time, honest!” that I needed the kid to break down and repeat in bits and pieces before I finally understood just what he was trying to say.
When it was done, I was… surprised. Naruto had been ‘in the neighbourhood’ because he’d taken to passing through at least once a day to check on me. Apparently, seeing me end up in the hospital (again) had him convinced I was a fragile glass sculpture that needed care and protection. Sigh. I couldn’t even hold it against him, he really wasn’t stalking me anymore, and checking up on a loved one – fuck my life, the sequel – was the done thing after you nearly died on the operating table – and fuck Sarutobi Hiruzen too for patient confidentiality not being a thing. Naruto was worried about me, doing all he could to look out for me. But at the same time, he was actually living up to my hopes that he’d kept falling short of before. So now, when he finally didn’t fall short, when he finally showed all that consideration and restraint that the village people had bullied out of him… I looked at my shattered window. Well, a given value of restraint.
Baby steps?
I don’t want to do this, I thought despairingly. But I have to. “Good job, Naruto. I’m proud of you.”
There was a pause. An aborted sound. A hitch in the kid’s breath. Then I was holding a clingy pile of tearful child and frog that went from screaming in pain to screaming for air.
“Ob no, Fwoggy!” Blubbered the very literal snot-nosed brat in my lap. “I’b zorry, here, hab adother sbider.”
I rolled my eyes, pulled out my handkerchief and wiped his face of tears before holding it over his nose. “Blow that snot, you brat, you sound absolutely retarded.”
“Hey! Dat’s rude!” But the kid did as I said and smiled happily up at me when it was done.
“Uuaaaaaaaaah!”
“Ack! Oh no, Froggy’s sick again!”
No, it’s just pissed off. I thought dryly. But if it still has that much energy, I probably don’t need to worry about it dying anymore. It quieted fast this time though, and even accepted more of Naruto’s food until he was all out of spiders and asking me for the bugs I surely had ready because I apparently thought about everything.
Believe it.
“Scarecrow over there can help you,” I said instead. “He’s really an elite ninja you know.”
And just like that, it was now Hatake Kakashi’s turn to turn wide-eyed and panicked in the face of the star-struck enthusiasm of his tragically dead sensei’s legacy.
One down, a dozen more to go, I thought grimly as I absentmindedly stroked the toad that Naruto had abandoned in my lap. It didn’t scream or squirm, just stayed there docilely. Sorry little creature, but the scientific method must go on. I promise to treat you and any of your surviving future brothers and sisters in suffering as well as I can.