Nadezhda Maria Kostov

Nadezhda was an unusual child. Unnerving, some might say. She required far less supervision than her older brother and sister had needed, yet the house elf assigned to raise her, Fibsy, spent more time worrying over her and consulting child-rearing manuals than had ever been necessary for Vasilka or Stoyan. Nadezhda was also very bright – there was no question about that, and she was always in the middle of one book or another – but she had an uncanny manner and never really acted her age. One of her odd tendencies was to observe others for long periods in silence and then ask very disquieting questions.

For example, one Saturday during family dinner, a gap in conversation between her mother and father arose, and Stoyan was suddenly in the unfortunate position of being asked by a six-year-old girl whether he had ever killed anyone. There was a tense stillness in the air all at once, a heaviness that spoke of Grindelwald’s campaign and the strife slowly splitting the magical community further and further in half. Stoyan, though not unused to Nadezhda’s nature (they had lived together for eight years, after all), felt like he had been hit by a bludgeoning hex, and it took a moment for him to answer. Nadezhda assigned that silence her own mental interpretation.

“Of course not, Nadinka…You ask the silliest questions. It’s really not polite to bring up such matters at the dinner table.” Stoyan lifted another portion of ribena chorba to his mouth and grimaced around his soup spoon. Mother lifted her eyebrows at Father in an ambiguous manner, and Father’s lip twitched imperceptibly. The pair had been arguing with him recently over whether it was befitting a man of his station to be so involved, beyond being known to agree politically, with Grindelwald’s movement, and so they found his discomfort satisfying. Nadezhda, however, was not ready to give up on her objective.

“But if you did, would you feel sorry?” The intonation of her words was very flat, enough so that her words barely sounded like a question. Her brow was lightly furrowed in an expression that appeared on her face more than any other, a characteristic look of consideration and remote academic interest. She had already finished her ribena chorba – she always ate very swiftly, even when she wasn’t hungry. Her parents (and Fibsy) had never been able to train her out of it, so they had settled for hammering in excellent manners to make up for the boorishness.

Vasilka, meanwhile, scowled and appealed to Mother and Father. “You coddle her too much. Supper is for light conversation and nothing that will spoil the appetite. If I ever tried to talk about murder at the table, you would lob a stinging hex!” She had always been slightly bitter about Nadezhda’s existence, which had displaced hers as the baby of the family. It wasn’t uncommon for her to grow caustic over the smallest things, and whenever Nadezhda misbehaved, no matter what punishment was given, Vasilka invariably pronounced it as unfair and much too gentle. This wasn’t very often, though, as Nadezhda, though strange, was remarkably well behaved for a child her age.

“Now, now, Vaska. She is just asking her big brother a simple question. Not at all against the rules of the table,” Mother replied, chidingly. Vasilka, though, had a point. Mother was rather partial to Nadezhda – she found something about her, beyond just being a little girl and her own daughter, very cute; perhaps it was the sharp contrast between her young face and the sometimes downright frightening things that came out of her mouth. Vasilka glowered and sullenly drank the rest of her wine.

“If I did…” Stoyan waved his spoon vaguely, as if to affirm the dubiousness of such a thing ever happening. “Then I would get sent to prison, and I wouldn’t get to see you! And no practicing magic or riding abraxans ever again either. So of course, I would feel very sorry.” He attempted to return to his meal, feeling he had answered satisfactorily, but Nadezhda, as was often the case when she started on this course, stubbornly persisted on the topic.

“But you wouldn’t go to prison, because of our family’s political connections. But that’s not important.” Stoyan internally marveled at the spectacle of seeing a little girl matter-of-factly wave off the corruption of the penal system. “Would you feel sorry for killing them? Not for going to prison or not getting to do things you like anymore.” Everyone had reached the end of their meals, Stoyan having finally shoved his soup aside, appetite lost. The house elves silently popped up and disappeared with their dishes, before returning with dessert – coffee and baklavas. Once things had settled down again, Stoyan returned eye contact with Nadezhda, who was staring doggedly at him. He sighed.

“Alright. I’ll play along with your little thought experiment. Well, the first thing I must know is why did I kill this person? Is he innocent? Then we can proceed from there.” To an outside observer, it might have seemed strange that Stoyan didn’t ask his sister why she wanted to know such a thing, but the entire family was used to her asking similar questions. There didn’t seem to be any concrete reason for her morbid curiosity, and it hadn’t formed out of a traumatic experience or ordeal. She had been like this since she had started to talk. When she was three years old, one of Nadezhda’s favorite things had been to ask all their houseguests where they thought the soul went when a person died. She had only given it up when she had asked all their regular guests and run out of new victims. Indeed, it was simply a part of her strange, malformed personality.

“They’re innocent.” Nadezhda answered instantly, like she had been expecting this question and had already prepared her answer. There was some honey on the corner of her lip from the baklava, which she had wolfed down immediately upon receiving, but her eyes were as grave and still as deep water. “They didn’t do anything to you, they don’t know you, and the reason you’re killing them is because someone else told you to.” Stoyan made a pained smile and felt as if this hypothetical situation was getting a bit too specific for his taste.

He hesitated, a premonition rising in his heart, then asked, “Who told me to?”

Nadezhda picked at the sleeve of her dress and thought a moment before replying. “Someone…very powerful. Your leader. Your…commander.” Mother and Father exchanged glances, and even Vasilka had a faint look of surprise on her face, as it seemed Nadezhda was blatantly talking about Grindelwald now. Who else could she be speaking of? Stoyan, meanwhile, was hoping desperately for the end of the conversation to come sooner. His friends would laugh at him if they knew his little sister was able to make him this uncomfortable with just a few questions.

“In such a situation…” The entire table seemed to be holding its breath, as if the answer to Nadezhda’s question was of vital importance. She had a way of bringing gravity to a conversation with only her presence and the sober look of her coal black eyes. “…Yes, I would feel guilty.” Stoyan didn’t elaborate. He sipped at his coffee a bit louder than perhaps necessary and hoped he had finally satisfied her curiosity. Nadezhda, in response, frowned faintly and nodded. She broke eye contact and picked up her coffee mug, clutching the warm ceramic with both pale, faintly purple-tinged hands. Then she raised it to her lips and drank the entire thing in one swoop as if it were milk, her face unchanging even though the temperature was hot enough to scald the tongue. Her mind looked like it was elsewhere, though only she could answer where, and her face, matching Stoyan’s, remained vaguely troubled the rest of dessert, leaving behind with her when she was excused from the table.

Such is the entire account of one incident. Nadezhda was a very solitary, private girl, and try as they might, her family was never certain what deliberating was going on inside her flaxen head.

Several months later, something occurred that helped begin to bring clarity to some of the confusion that, unbeknownst to others, had strongly characterized her early life in this world.

Freshly seven years old, Nadezhda’s mind wandered aimlessly as she copied phrases during French lessons with her private tutor, Monsieur Guillaume. She was fluent in both Bulgarian, her mother tongue, and English, a language her father spoke frequently enough it might as well be native to her, and she had passing fluency in Russian from diligent lessons since she was three. Two months ago, however, her parents had decided to add French to the assortment. The lessons had been a birthday gift, one of countless she had received on her seventh birthday, a grand celebration befitting the Sabashtina of a daughter of the Kostov family. She had a thirst for knowledge that no number of books could sate, so a fresh tutor with a fresh language was one of the better ones, even if her head felt over-clogged with languages sometimes. Lessons were every day of the week except for Sunday, and unlike Vasilka, she never hid in the back gardens to skip. As such, most of the time her mind overflowed with foreign phrases and vocabulary, her daydreams a jumbled mishmash of French and Russian.

A gift she had been less inclined to like had been the oil painting her parents had commissioned of her, which now hung in one of the entrance halls. She had been forced to sit for hours every other day for three weeks, wearing an expensive satin dress, silk gloves, and a matching hat, all of which were far more charming to others than to her. The outfit felt stifling in comparison to her normal, comfortable cotton dresses. And as staid and still as Nadezhda was for her age, even she had limits to her patience. She was allowed a book during these long sessions, but she wasn’t allowed to read it – instead she was ordered to hold it closed on her lap and gaze calmly forward. Infuriating!

When the artist had completed the oil painting, Nadezhda had had to wait another week before the proper enchantments were cast to imbibe life into it. Upon receiving the finished product, she had observed that there was something very unnerving about seeing a live version of herself stuck in a picture frame. Though the portrait version of her didn’t speak often, and when it did, did so in a very bad temper (fitting her mood during those long hours of sitting motionlessly, her bottom growing numb), it was undoubtedly herself, and a version of herself with a spirit. How sentient was hard to tell – it was something philosophers had squabbled over for centuries, and the family library had a dozen or so stuffy ponderous volumes contemplating the nature of magic portraits. Even so, Nadezhda found it hard to meet her own eyes when she passed by it as it stonily stared after her, so unstirring, except for occasional blinks, that it was as if it were a normal painting. Vasilka confessed an edginess regarding the portrait, too – her exact words were, “There’s something freaky about it. Freakier than the real you.”

The rest of the gifts she had received hadn’t warranted any strong positive or negative emotions. The enameled dragon-hide notebook she was translating simple French phrases into was one of them – from Mother. “Use it for lessons. French is a beautiful, sophisticated language. And very appropriate, too. No child of the Kostov family with any shame would be found unable to speak French.” Here she had piercingly glanced at Vasilka, who was watching bitterly as Nadezhda opened presents. Mother was referring to Vasilka’s persistent habit of skiving off during French lessons. In response, Vasilka merely smiled sourly.

Nadezhda’s thoughts drifted, and after finishing the last stroke of J’aime le chocolat her quill slowly slid over to the corner of the page and, moving smoothly, wrote four characters that were just as familiar to her as the characters that comprised “Nadezhda Maria Kostov”. Written in a vertical fashion, they were: 青山文子. It was a name, and she knew it was a name, despite the fact she had never learned the script or language in this lifetime. She also knew what the name was – Aoyama Fumiko. And regardless of her certainty that she had never, in this life, gone by that name, Nadezhda knew, just as her name was Nadezhda Kostov, that Aoyama Fumiko was her name. There was another lone character that also sometimes spilled stumblingly from her hand, simpler, shorter, and yet somehow more complete than the other: 死. Shi. Nadezhda had once been – and somehow still was, to the core of her being – Shi, and a part of her rebelled at being called Nadezhda Maria Kostov, at having such an elaborate, embellished name. This primal discomfort hadn’t ever gone anywhere, but she had grown used to it. As she had grown used to the other set of memories.

…The other set of memories. Indeed, none of this, in fact, was anything new. Nadezhda’s life, though not an unpleasant one in the strict definition of the word, was one of complete, thorough confusion, most of the time. Almost every action she had completed as she grew from a toddler to a young child had been paired with an intense feeling of déjà vu, and each night, without exception, her dreams were filled with a troupe of players that were both entirely familiar and entirely foreign to her. Oftentimes she absentmindedly recalled something that had happened in the past, before realizing with a stricken feeling that it never had, and it made absolutely no sense in the context of her life. There was a hazy curtain separating her life as Nadezhda from her life as Fumiko, or Shi, a curtain so hazy it might as well not exist. The only thing that leant a small element of lucidity to everything was that she knew her life as Nadezhda was in the present, and her life as Shi had been in the past. She might have gone insane otherwise.

Over the years, Nadezhda had been able, somewhat, to disjointedly piece together the narrative of this other life of hers. Every other waking or sleeping moment, she would recall a new piece of knowledge, a new series of images, but she was convinced she finally had the bare bones of it figured out. But the world she had lived in as Shi was very different from this world, and she had been growing frustrated, searching dismally through the family library for geography and foreign language books and finding nothing that matched what was in her mind. The Kostov library, though extensive, had no organizational sense whatsoever, and the overwhelming majority of its books were philosophy, science, the dark arts, magical theory, and fiction. Her frustration had mounted, and her compulsive need to know the truth had slowly made way upon her sense of privacy and caution.

Nadezhda scribbled out 青山文子, leaving it a messy, unreadable blob of ink. Then she returned to the space below J’aime le chocolat and started copying more phrases, mind whirring. J’aime le livres. J’aime les chats. Monsieur Guillaume was a polyglot – he was famous in her parents’ circles for being an intellectual of the highest sorts, who had traveled to many different countries. Though his family name wasn’t anything special, and some of the more essentialist families looked down their noses at him, he was generally quite well respected, and Father had once said that there wasn’t a single country he hadn’t visited, a single language he hadn’t heard of. She hadn’t ever told anyone about her other life, nor did she plan on doing so – she knew it was abnormal and it was nobody’s business but her own – but it would be plausible, perhaps, if she had come upon a word or two from a foreign language in a library book. Fibsy escorted her to the Vasil Levski Library twice a month, and she always returned with a dozen eclectic volumes to hungrily consume. Many times, she had asked her tutors about topics from library books she’d read. This would be no different. She scratched the back of her neck with her quill and moved onto the next exercise.

La maison est bleue. La maison est blanche. Le maison est rouge. La maison est noir. La maison est sanglante. Nadezhda looked at the last sentence grimly. Sanglante…She was intimately acquainted with the reality of that word. If she wanted to learn more about Shi, she would have to consult someone else. She looked up at her tutor.

“Monsieur Guillaume,” she said. He glanced up from the sheet of parchment he was grading, which contained her previous assignment. He was using red ink, and glancing over the sheet, Nadezhda noted with satisfaction that she saw only checkmarks, with an absence of any crosses.

“Yes, Mademoiselle Nadezhda?” Monsieur Guillaume smiled ingratiatingly. His face was narrow and sharp from the deep contours of his bones, his eye sockets cavernous, and the expression didn’t suit him. A modest, thin mustache grew on his upper lip, and on his chin was a patchy brown goatee. Whenever Nadezhda was particularly irritated, she felt like ripping it off. He always seemed as if he were contemplating a very important issue, and though he wasn’t a year past forty, not even a fourth of the average wizard’s lifespan, there were already lines in between his eyebrows from constant rumination.

“This character…What language is it?” Nadezhda neatly wrote 死and pointed to it with her peacock feather quill.  Monsieur Guillaume hummed and leaned over to peer at it. He set down his quill in its ink pot and scratched his chin.

“Euh…Unfortunately this letter does not belong to a language I ever reached fluency in…However, I do recognize it…It seems to be a Chinese character. Interesting language, Chinese…very complex…I tried my hand at it, oh, fifteen years ago and swiftly switched over to Swedish instead…Swedish, ah, what a lovely language…Chinese, however…” He made a face. “It has thousands of letters, and I recall a colleague of mine despairing over the negligible differences between tones. Of course, this character could also be Japanese; they share the same alphabet, although the latter language has two others in addition…” He paused, and Nadezhda nodded perfunctorily to keep him rambling once she realized that was what he was waiting for. She didn’t recognize either name, but then, they likely called the language a different thing in Bulgarian than in the language itself. “I am uncertain what it says…I still remember all fifteen characters I learned in Chinese, after all, I never forget a thing,” he chuckled in a particularly self-satisfied manner, “and none of them were this one…Where did you find this, Mademoiselle? Has learning Chinese stricken your curiosity?” He stopped for a split second and affected a concerned look, stroking his goatee with nimble fingers. Before she could answer, he continued speaking. “I can only encourage such enthusiasm in my pupils, but you should understand learning it wouldn’t be useful.” He clicked his tongue. “No, no. Your family doesn’t have contacts in Asia…All your father’s business deals are conducted on European soils. It would serve you better to learn German, Mademoiselle.”

Nadezhda nodded, mind elsewhere. “Father wants me to learn German next. He thinks I would appreciate its deep literary tradition.” Monsieur Guillaume opened his mouth readily to reply, likely to expound eagerly upon that deep literary tradition, but Nadezhda continued before he could start another extended soliloquy. “Please show me where on the map it is.” She recognized the names from her own private studies, but she hadn’t started geography lessons yet. Those were to start when she was eight, considered less essential in comparison to her other lessons, which were literature, mathematics, science, piano, etiquette, French, Russian, and history. (And of course, the history she learned was very Eurocentric, with a lot more time spent learning about the rice and fall of various conquerors and dark lords than about anything going on in foreign countries.)

“Of course, Mademoiselle Nadezhda, of course.” Monsieur Guillaume reached into his robe and pulled out several dozen scrolls, which he glanced through one by one before returning them to his expanded pocket. Then, he reached into a different pocket in his robe and repeated the same process. This continued for a few minutes of silent searching, the parchment rustling in the silence of the library, when, finally, he whipped out a scroll slightly larger and more worn than the others and unrolled it upon the mahogany table with an “aha!” of triumph. “Here is my trusty world map.” He flicked his wrist, and his wand popped into his hand. Chattering all the while, he tapped on the ink depiction of Asia, and it expanded to fit the whole page. “Here is the continent of Asia, and here,” he tapped again with his wand, “is China.” The map zoomed in to show various mountain ranges and cities. He glanced at Nadezhda and, seeing she wasn’t responding but only watching intently, tapped on the page twice, whereupon the map zoomed out to show the whole continent again. “And this, this little island over here, is Japan,” he tapped the page, “and, scooting over a bit, on this little peninsula, here are its colonies.”

“I see.” Her eyes examined it minutely. She hadn’t paid much attention to maps before this, as she had written them off as a source of information when she realized they didn’t at all match the maps from her memory of her other life. But perhaps there was something to be learned. The continents were far too different in their formations, but perhaps after a millennium…But no. She rejected that idea internally. It didn’t fit, either. Well, at least she knew that the same alphabet existed – it wasn’t gibberish.

“Is there anything else you would like to see, while I have the map out, Mademoiselle?” He stroked the map’s compass rose fondly, which, in response to his touch, magnified in size and grew gaudier. “…What a charming little piece of magic,” Monsieur Guillaume sighed appreciatively under his breath.

“No, Monsieur Guillaume. Thank you.” Nadezhda returned to her dragonhide notebook with its dull French phrases and wrote the simple sentences she could, translating off the top of her head. Thankfully her memory was very good, so she would soon be able to move onto more complex things. J’ai six ans. Je m’appelle Nadezhda. Je lis “Critique of Pure Reason”. The exercise was to write as many possible things as she could remember in French. She estimated she had at least a hundred more simple sentences left.

Nadezhda had considered asking Monsieur Guillaume more questions about China and Japan but had decided against it. There was no necessity; she now had two names she could search for at the library, and she could do the research on her own. Relying unnecessarily on others was foolish.

The rest of the lesson passed by normally, with no extra diversions, and after the three hour-long lesson was completed, she headed out to the courtyard, book in hand, Fibsy trailing behind her at a consistent distance of two meters. She had an hour of free time before piano lessons, and, besides the back gardens, the courtyard was one of the loveliest areas of the property. The fresh air was reinvigorating after studying in the stuffy, claustrophobic library (no matter how spacious its ceilings were), and the trees, shrubs, and flowers artfully arranged around the fountain in the center of the courtyard provided a pleasant sight. Nadezhda sat down on a stone bench and listened attentively to the sound of the water running. Sometimes she marveled at how utterly still, how peaceful, this life was.

She had existed here for six years, and she hadn’t yet seen bloodshed.

There were few expectations placed on her by her parents, and they certainly didn’t expect her to become a soldier. Because she was the youngest daughter, there wasn’t very much pressure on her, beyond the obligatory pressure of not shaming her family. Stoyan was the male heir of the noble house of Kostov, and he would be expected to marry a respectable woman and have at least one child. Vasilka was the next in the line, and she would likely be married off to a man of a good family to solidify a political connection. Nadezhda, however, as the third child – something rather rare for pureblood families, as they tended to have only one or two children – was, so to speak, “off the hook”. Her parents would no doubt still find some wealthy man of good connections with a celebrated surname and attempt to wrangle her into marrying him, but she wouldn’t be under enormous pressure; it wouldn’t be a stain upon the family if she remained a spinster aunt instead.

For the first time ever, Nadezhda found herself in the position of wondering what she should do with her life. Her future hadn’t been decided for her ahead of time. Doing what she had previously done wouldn’t work; the world was set up very differently, and while if she wanted to pursue a similar path, she could, things wouldn’t be the same. If she wanted to be a career assassin, she wouldn’t be able to start before she was an adult, and even then, she thought it was dubious that she could find someone to hire her without putting a lot of effort into searching. (Her parents probably wouldn’t approve of such a career for a young lady, either.) And there was no question that she couldn’t start when she was nine, as she had as Fumiko. She had started training using her memories from Shi as soon as she was able to, even before she had made sense of what was going on, but she wasn’t sure they would ever be put to the same use as they had when she was Shi. It was also harder to get the right instincts ingrained without having someone to spar with.

Perhaps she could be an academic. That had been the one desire she had never discarded, despite the brutal training she had undergone to reduce herself from a person to a weapon with neither soul nor conscience. Knowledge had forever been something she strove to acquire. Sometimes she had stolen books or scrolls from the houses of her targets. Her commander had probably known, but he had never cared, or said anything if he did. Good weapons were allowed their quirks, as long as it didn’t interfere with the mission.

Nadezhda turned around, sensing Fibsy silently approaching. Fibsy, rather than Mother, had been the one to raise her, as had been the case with Vasilka and Stoyan with their respective nursemaid house elves. Fibsy had changed her diapers, bottle-fed her, and played with her when she was an infant. Mother and Father had, of course, been present, and Stoyan especially had doted on her, but it was considered contemptible for a pureblood woman to engage in the coarse act of taking care of a baby. Though Nadezhda had spent plenty of time with her blood family, Fibsy had been the one to physically tend to her necessities and had always shown her more sincere, heartfelt warmth than Mother or Father.

Because of this, Nadezhda felt a certain degree of attachment to Fibsy. Love…Care…Those words didn’t make sense to her, but if she felt such things for anyone, it would be Fibsy. It was hard not to appreciate Fibsy’s single-minded devotion; Nadezhda was positive Fibsy’s loyalty was to her, not Mother or Father or the family as a whole, and if it came to it, she was fairly confident Fibsy would give her life for Nadezhda. Not that Nadezhda had any desire for it to come to that.

“Would Miss like an afternoon snack?” Fibsy asked, her wide blue eyes peering earnestly up at Nadezhda. “Fibsy has prepared chamomile tea and Ravanijas.”

Nadezhda nodded after a second of consideration. She was fond of the sweet cake. The first time she had eaten a dessert as a toddler, something inside of her had been profoundly surprised; she hadn’t known eating food could be so pleasurable. Dimly, she remembered that in her previous life, she had never eaten such luxuries; instead, the staple and sole items of her meals had been rations and tough, stale protein bars that tasted like cardboard. She could vaguely recall one memory in which she had to pour water from her waterskin onto her protein bar and hack at it with the tail-end of her knife to break it up so that it was soft enough to eat. The protein bars had been healthy and perfectly balanced for her body and metabolism, but eating had never been something to be enjoyed – just something to get over with, to keep herself running.

Fibsy disapparated away, then apparated back promptly, returning with a small fold-out table covered with a luxurious, vine-patterned tablecloth floating in the air beside her. On top of the table was a be-jeweled silver tray containing a dish of two Ravanijas and a delicate, gold-lined porcelain teacup filled with chamomile tea. She snapped her fingers, and the table set itself down in front of Nadezhda so gently that the water in the teacup didn’t wobble.

“Thank you, Fibsy,” Nadezhda said. She drank the entire cup of tea and noted that the temperature was cooler than the other house elves usually prepared her hot drinks. Fibsy had likely observed that Nadezhda drank all hot drinks the same way, no matter the temperature, and adjusted it so that she wouldn’t burn her tongue.

“Miss is very welcome!” Fibsy replied, her ears twitching back as her lips curved into a wide, adoring smile. “Is there anything else Miss is being liking?”

“No,” Nadezhda said, “this is it.” Fibsy nodded in response and retreated, leaving her to her snack and book. She ate the Ravanijas, picked the crumbs off the plate and ate them, then cracked open her book, Critique of Pure Reason by Emmanuel Kant. She watched out of the corner of her eye as Fibsy popped away with the table and dishes before retreating to the shadows but continued to read. No matter what she decided to do with her future, there was always this: eating something tasty and reading a fascinating book. There were elements of life as Shi that she missed, but the peace and free time she now had had its perks.

That night, she slept fitfully.

Nadezhda shuddered. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t tell what. Her thoughts were dull and leaden, and she had no control over her body – it was moving on its own. It didn’t feel quite right either; she was used to taking up less space. What was…Her thoughts drifted away from her.

Surrounding her was a leaky darkness. All traces of light quickly disappeared as she sank deeper into the black. Her eyes stung from the salt water, and her reserves were gradually running out of energy. She wasn’t sure where her mask had gone – hopefully it was dark enough the man couldn’t see her face. And if he could…He would soon be dead, so it didn’t matter. The technique circulating oxygen in her lungs was growing sluggish. If she didn’t finish this soon…A numb feeling radiated from her side, where inertia moved against the blade jutting out from the flesh. But despite everything, she felt intoxicated by her imminent victory. Weary as she was, her opponent was wearier. They wrestled together in the water, movements slow as molasses. They’d both lost their weapons sometime during the struggle, and the time spent reaching to her pack would cede the battle in the other’s favor. She cursed herself for allowing it to come to this – it had been supposed to be a quick, merciless end. He hadn’t been to realize she was even there. Yet there was something thrilling about this, coming so close to the edge of life and death.

Somehow, she found her hands around her opponent’s neck. Yes! Her fingers clenched, and she ignored the deep scratches the other left as he clawed at her hands and wrists. She couldn’t feel it anyway. Her short hair streamed around her head, wet, silky strands brushing against her jaw. She and her opponent had both sunk to such ghostly depths that she couldn’t see a thing; the other was nothing but a shadowy, struggling silhouette. Her heart thudded steadily beneath her chest as she crushed her opponent’s neck. She wasn’t sure how long it took for him to finally still. Time had no place here, in these deep, murky waters.

When it was done, she felt entirely drained. A headache was pounding against her skull, and she knew she’d be out like a light if she allowed herself a single moment of rest. Swimming to the surface was hard, dragging a corpse as dead weight. She surfaced and arduously channeled chakra to her feet, stumbling as she dragged herself onto the top of the water. With a grunt, she hefted the corpse over her shoulders and, wavering unsteadily, started walking back towards the shore. The sun was setting at her back, but it provided no warmth. Every so often her whole body was racked by an intense shiver.

Nonetheless, she had accomplished her mission. She hadn’t had such a close call for several years now…It was shameful. The information she had received had been at fault – the man had not been a civilian, as the contract had said – but it was her mistake, for growing complacent and letting down her guard. She and the man had held a merry chase around his seaside villa, which had finally ended after their plunge into the water. Doubtlessly, she would be punished when she returned, but she had succeeded, so it wouldn’t be too harsh. And nothing was ever permanent or disabling, as they couldn’t risk handicapping one of their best weapons; nor could they torture her, due to her special condition, so they tended to go with the psychological route, which she was gradually growing hardened to. She smiled slightly, though the gesture didn’t correspond to any feeling of joy. Those had, as she well knew, been conditioned out of her. But she knew if she could have felt happy, she would have been feeling so then. So, the smile felt fitting, though no one was watching.

After all, the man – a righteous, wealthy politician who had been looking too closely into certain matters – was dead.

Lord Danzo would be pleased.

Nadezhda’s fingers twitched, and suddenly she was blinking awake, her eyes sharp and bereft of grogginess. She stared up at the velvet canopy above her bed, a small jar of undying flames flickering, making the shadows dance, on her bedside table. Another memory. She wasn’t sure how to feel. Living a second life had given her some perspective on the first, and she knew, by this point, that there had probably been something wrong with the way she had been treated, the things that she had been made to do. She had never even gotten to that point in her first life, so much was she entrenched in it all. But knowing it theoretically was one thing, and feeling and accepting it was another. She didn’t feel like she had been made to do anything. Maybe during the first couple of years…But she had spent over two decades killing for Lord Danzo, and she hadn’t needed any encouragement after the adjustment period upon entering Root had ended. It would have been simple to put all the blame on others, but she didn’t think it was that straightforward.

She was a different person now, and yet, at the core of it at all, she was the same. She didn’t think even a fraction of her would feel guilt if she were to kill someone again. She wasn’t sure if, by other people’s standards of morality, she was a good person or a bad person, but she knew, whatever the answer, that she wouldn’t care. Perhaps a normal person would have blamed her superiors, blamed Lord Danzo, but weapons felt no anger; weapons only did as they were ordered, and even with six years as Nadezhda, she was still what Lord Danzo had made her.

She lifted her hands above her face and gazed at the smooth white palms. These hands weren’t stained with blood. This body was innocent. But her soul was as blackened as could be. Blackened, according to conventional philosophy. This new world she lived in had far superior philosophy than her previous. Probably because the world was so much more peaceful, and people spent the time they would’ve spent fighting for their lives writing books. Nadezhda found these books fascinating. One day, maybe she would find a book that would help her finally understand it all. Not every philosopher spoke of murder as pure evil; some were more ambiguous. Whether she was “pure evil” or not, she felt apathetic. Living life as Nadezhda had, however, changed her, even if only infinitesimally. There was no longer an obedience seal tattooed on her tongue, and her actions were no longer constrained. It felt…freeing. She didn’t feel much of anything, but a few times, she had even felt what must be joy. Simple happiness. It was an overwhelming, confusing feeling, but she liked it. Eating a Ravanija for the first time had precipitated it for the first time.

Most of the memories that came to her in her dreams were of deaths, swift kills as Shi, that same white mask on her face. The amount had far surpassed one she could count. She had spent a long time trying to make sense of it in her early childhood once she had realized she could ask the people around her, and she hadn’t stopped trying. None of her questions had been answered satisfactorily, no matter how many people she asked. Mother and Father’s friends were intelligent people, but even they had no answers. Where does the soul go when you die? Does murder stain one’s soul? What makes someone a bad person?

Some of their answers were interesting, but none were illuminating. Nadezhda wasn’t completely sure why it felt so important to know. As Shi, she had never questioned anything. And now, she was questioning everything. Perhaps, in its essence, it was simply her perennial thirst for understanding.

Nadezhda let her hands drop back down to her sides and closed her eyes. Tomorrow morning, she was meeting two children of Mother and Father’s friends. They were to be her playmates. Of course, it was much more complicated than that – the cementing of some alliance between the three families – but she would still have to “play” with them, so it was all the same to her. She ordered herself to fall back asleep, setting her mental alarm clock to six the next morning, and did.